Acquiring Stuff

So we had a showing yesterday, and they want to come back tomorrow for a second look.  Fingers crossed!  It would be so much easier to go house hunting in the next little bit than it would be after the summer. Of course I just bought new curtains for the newly painted room that we would have to leave behind, probably to be immediately replaced  by the new owners.  Ah well. I can live with that.  I will probably need to buy new stuff for wherever we wind up anyway.

On an only vaguely related note, shopping is exhausting! I don't know how women do it for hours for fun!  I was in a mall for 3 hours shopping for chairs, so lots of sitting, and I need a nap SO badly right now.  And making decisions is stressful, and all those people, and the lineups and gaaah. Probably the completely packed highway to and from the store also didn't help with the tired.

I mean, I like having nice things and I like looking at pretty stuff, but that actual time and effort spend finding  stuff that is just right and deciding what is worth spending money on is tiresome.  I have the same problem with clothes shopping, and I hate shoe shopping more than anything. Of course, that is because I have stupid sized feet and no one reliably carries my size.  But the pleasant results of today's trip are that I have a super comfy rocking/glider chair on order, and a little place for baby to sleep when she gets here.   However,  Gord has to come with me next time. Things go much faster and are less stressful when I have a second opinion on stuff.  Also, he can carry the heavy things.

The Phoenix is Dead

Seriously.  For real this time. There are no ashes left to rise from!


Okay, Background!


(Short version:  Phoenix was the name of my temperamental and highly abused computer.  It is irrecoverably dead now.  The story below is for my own amusement, so if this synopsis sounds unbelievably boring to you feel free to stop here and roll your eyes at my nerdyness.  Also, Gimlix!)

The Saga of Phoenix: A memorial

About 6 years ago, just after I got married, I bought a new computer.  Within the first year it had failed at least twice and needed several replacement parts and just caused general panic for a 3rd year English student with many many papers to write.  Hard drive, RAM, blah blah blah... Normal computer shenanigans.  My wonderful husband fixed it several times, and it eventually became a fairly stable machine which he took the liberty of naming Phoenix for obvious reasons.

A couple of years later, it started turning itself off randomly and we couldn't figure out why.  Everything we looked at was working just fine.  It didn't happen very often, and I no longer needed the computer for school work, so we decided it was just living up to its name and left it alone for the next year or so.  It would often hang in the boot up process, so I became reluctant to turn it off for fear that it would never come back on again.  Although I usually left it on for other reasons anyway.  Like not wanting to wait for it to boot in the morning, or waiting for a file to download.

Then the dining room lights started to flicker.  One professional friend's visit later, and we found out that we had a few minor electrical problems involving a couple of arcing sockets.  Including the one my computer was plugged into.  Note:  If something is having trouble getting enough power to work consistently, check the fracking electrical system it is hooked up to!  Ever since then I have had the funds set aside for a new desktop, and I have been putting it off until Phoenix was unusable.  Then my cheap hand me down laptop died so I got a new one of those instead, since I use it for work and you can get laptops with enough oomph to play most computer games.

For the last year or so, Phoenix has been hooked up to my Television as a TV/YouTube box and doing okay.  It's been SUPER sluggish to boot up and refused to open programs sometimes, but it was fine for what we needed it to do,  ie: download stuff and play DVDs.  Then we moved it. Apparently all that unplugging and moving and re plugging was too much for its delicate and tortured systems.  There is now a 1 in 3 chance of it booting (at at least 5 minutes a try to find out) , and a 1 in 4 chance that opening a program will not cause a system crash.  Yeah.  I'm not going to play at those odds. I'm calling it!

Time to pull the good parts into an unholy union with Gord's old computer, Gimli, and remake a new undead TV Box! What would we call that?  Phoemli? Gimlix?  Gimlix.  Totally that one.

Okay, that last bit may have ruined the memorial feeling a little bit.  But then, its just an old, always unstable computer.

Phoenix is dead, Long live Gimlix!

My Life in Games

I bought a new game to play with the hubband.  It's a cute little 2d side scroller game called Terraria. He has been playing it for awhile and wanted to try multiplayer.  Essentially, it's Minecraft with more scary monsters and rocket boots.  I don't know if I will play it much on my own, but it's fun to have a game we can do together.  We haven't done that much since we stopped playing City of Heroes.  Correction, since HE stopped playing City of Heroes.  I still do occasionally.

Speaking of my games,  Here they are!  (at least the ones I am playing at the moment.  There are a few on my old computer that I have been neglecting.)

Yes, that is Warcraft II.  Blizzard being evil made me sad last week, and I installed it to remember more awesome times.  Zug Zug!  It's not a huge impressive list I know, but I don't actually like to keep games installed when I am not playing them at least occasionally.  I'm probably going to replace Sims Medieval with Assassin's Creed sometime in here.

So the top row is the first person/graphically intense awesome games.  Guild Wars 2 comes out in a couple of months still, but the betas have been SO much fun.  They pretty much took everything I hated about playing WoW (which to be honest was a LOT)  and ground it to paste when they designed the game play on this one.  My favorite part?  You aren't competing with your fellow gamers for loot, resources or mobs. Your loot and resources is rendered specifically for you, and because of this, if you happen upon someone in a fight the polite thing to do is help out.  Or at the very least revive any downed players you come across.  Also, any fights will scale to challenge however many people are actively participating!  They tried really hard to make a friendly gaming atmosphere in this game, and it really shows.  The second best part? No monthly subscription fees!

Skyrim was a blast for awhile.  I played it to death though, and it got kind of repetitive so I am kind of over it.  Although I never did get to much into the magic trees, so I may have to go back eventually and try doing that part.

Second row is all the little arcade games that I play when I don't really want to think about what I am doing.  And Dream Chronicles.  That one is a story puzzle game that's kind of cool.  I'm slowly working away at that one.

Ah row 3.  They have actually been my staples lately.  Minecraft in particular.  It's like lego.  With lava.  that burns up all your awesome stuff when you fall in it aaaaaaaahhhhhh.    Okay,  I may not have been playing that one this week.  But I'll get over it and back to building my snow city on a big ass frozen lake.

Magicka is fun, if only because it pokes fun at every adventure game you have ever played.  The Magic system is hard to co-ordinate at first, but I am getting used to it.  I've only recently started using WASD controls for movement in my games (I was strictly an arrow keys kinda girl until I got my new laptop and they were WAAAY away from where my hand likes to be) and this game uses them for magic casting, so I tend to fire off clouds of steam whenever I want to move forward.

And I just got Civ V, so I dunno where it is going to go yet.  I just got this urge to play a turn based strategy, and since I have played Alpha Centauri to DEATH, and AC2 is not forthcoming, the latest Civ won. Cuz it was on sale at Steam.

And that's it!  For now.  I think I will go start up Civ.

On an unrelated note,  left over doughnut and real fruit gummy bears are a good breakfast, right?  Long Weekend food!

Domestic-ness

I don't live here anymore.  Seriously.  All my cool stuff is in storage, we have pulled the computer room apart to paint it an inoffensive color that I don't really like, we don't have enough seating for company, and we can't leave Magic cards all over the living room like we used to.  Eventually we will move and everything will be worth it, but the last year of this has kinda killed the buzz around here.  I'm dealing okay, but Gord is particularly buzz-less.

In related news, I think I need to make a chocolate cake.  A sugar buzz makes everything better, right?
I took the rest of the week off to coincide with Gord's holiday which has now been cancelled due to flooding, so it looks like I have time to bake all kinds of things.  And do laundry.  Wheeeee.   Yup, it's going to be that kind of week(end).

My books! Mine!

So I spend most of yesterday afternoon stripping the DRM from my purchased eBooks. Which is not yet illegal, no matter what Adobe and Amazon would like you to think. Although if this stupid C-11 bill passes it would be. But that is a totally different rant.

I have no intention of uploading, distributing or otherwise violating copyright on any of these files (That's the illegal part). I just want to guarantee that should Kobo or Adobe or Sony go out of business, or change their policy or hardware, or get bored with this eBook business, I will still be able to read the items that I have paid good money for. I refuse to rent books under the guise of "purchasing".   I feel the same way about music or movies or video games (ummm, what do you mean I can't play single player Diablo 3 if Blizzard's servers go down? I don't THINK so!). The main difference is that I actually get really attached to my books, and I read them over and over and over. Heck, I just finished my sixth time through the entire Dresden Files series, although I also own that series in dead tree format just to make sure it is 100% safe from apocalyptic hard drive/technology failure. I may own the audio books as well. I REALLY like that series.

On a related note, Tor books, the Science Fiction/Fantasy imprint of Macmillian, will soon be releasing all of their books DRM free and selling through their website. I am so excited about this step that I can barely type straight! They had some issues with the big distributors adding DRM to the first book they tried this with,(Redshirts by John Scalzi) but they were really great about getting people the file they had promised. I only bought this book to support the decision to let me own it, but it was very funny and totally worth it!

I hope it goes well and that all the other big publishers are forced to admit that people are capable of supporting an industry without being treated like criminals in waiting. I still think the difficulty and limitations of DRM'd material, combined with the philosophical opposition to not being allowed to actually OWN your media causes more people to turn to digital piracy than the idea of free books. Free books from libraries didn't kill the publishing market. Only the publishers can do that.

I found this point of view on piracy in an old blog post from Charles Stross, and I love it, so I am going to use it here to finish this up.

"In the pre-internet dark age, there was a subculture of folks who would get their hands on books and pass them around and encourage people to read them for free, rather than buying their own copies. Much like today's ebook pirates, in terms of the what they did (with one or two minor differences). There was a closely-related subculture who would actually sell copies of books without paying the authors a penny in royalties, too.
We have a technical term for such people: we call them 'librarians' and 'second-hand bookstore owners'."