Earlier this afternoon, I received an email from Site5 (shameless plug, my hosting company for this blog) saying that my server would be down for a period of up to four hours between 12 AM and 4 AM CST on Wednesday morning. Well, as it turns out, that happens to be 10 PM – 2 AM for me and would greatly impact my ability to make a post. In reality, the server should maybe be offline for 30 minutes max since all they’re doing is replacing the memory, but I’ll stay safe and just make a far earlier than normal post tomorrow. After all, with multiple computers and at least two internet connections through which to make a post, the last thing I’m going to let break my streak is someone else’s problem.
As if I needed more 360 games to play, I ordered four today off of Amazon. The first (and originally only planned one) was Bioshock 2 which comes out tomorrow, and I opted for Amazon as my source because of a $10 credit for a future purchase (higher than the $5 discount Steam had) and not caring about the exclusive multiplayer characters that Gamestop was offering with a preorder. The other three came from a “buy two, get one free” deal on Platinum Hits games, so I picked up Fallout 3, Star Wars: The Force Unleashed, and Oblivion since I owned none but all had various amount of praise heaped on them. What can I say, I’m a sucker for sales, but then again, this shouldn’t be news to anyone by this point in my life.
Personal - Seattle
Super Bowl XLIV (44 for those of your who are roman numeral challenged), you’re now over and done with. Aside from the Saints winning their first one ever, there wasn’t anything too memorable about it for me. I’m sure everyone in Louisiana will disagree, but I’m looking forward to 364 days from today. You know what that date is? Well, it would just so happen to be February 6th, 2011, the date that Dallas hosts its first ever Super Bowl.
Compared to last week, this week I barely have anything before about 10:30 in the morning, and my afternoons are, at the present time, not looking like a Tetris board (my term for what a calendar looks like in Outlook when multiple overlapping meetings are scheduled in a condensed time block). One unique thing about this week is that it will actually be two mini two-day weeks for me, because I’m going downtown on Wednesday for the “Microsoft Game Technology Conference” being held at the convention center. Sure, I’ll have to take a vacation day, but I have to use up some amount of them by the end of the year anyway, and I figure it can’t hurt to begin doing my research on all the stuff that E&D is up to. :)
Personal - Seattle
Well, Netflix, it seems we’ve come to an impasse in our relationship of Watch Instantly. I want to keep watching Dexter as I am utterly addicted to it, but you don’t want to offer me Season 3 as streaming video to watch. I guess I could send you back the disc I have and put the Season 3 DVDs at the top of my queue, or I could recognize that this probably isn’t your fault, but it is in fact CBS/Showtime who is saying you can’t offer it to me for streaming purposes. If only there was some other way for me to get videos via the internet…
My time tomorrow will be split between two parties, one here at my apartment complex and another at a friend’s apartment in Seattle. Both parties, of course, are Super Bowl related, and while neither will probably be as fun as being over at Andrew’s (for the house factor alone), I’ll make do with what I have available to me. Then again, with the option of hosting a party or going somewhere else, I’ll gladly let other people handle the majority of the work.
Personal - Seattle
Full. This week has been the first one I can recall where every day I really felt like my calendar as full of stuff to do, and I was never just sitting around my office for long periods of time. The benefit of this is that time goes much faster (as has been mentioned on numerous occasions before), so even though it’s the weekend, I still feel like I’d be good for another day or two at the office. Granted, I will happily take the weekend without complaint, but I guess it’s always better to be left willing to have more than utterly ready to spend the next 48 hours resting as much as possible.
I’m really, really enjoying Dexter as I’m watching through it, and when it gets to the point when I’m caught up with the “live” episodes, it’s going to be a very sad day. The thing I loved the most about my Alias watching was that the entire series was over, so I could watch as much or little as I wanted at a time, knowing that the ultimate end would come on my schedule, not anyone else’s. Of course, Alias was so into the cliffhanger ending, if I had tried to watch it as it aired, it would have just been way too suspenseful for my own good.
Personal - Seattle
Another week almost down, yet it doesn’t feel like it’s been that long since the last one. Sure, it doesn’t seem like today is Tuesday or anything, but when you consider that I’ve already been to work four days this week, I’d call that pretty impressive. There’s way too much stuff to get done this weekend (mainly game related), and the fact that the Super Bowl is on Sunday doesn’t help matters at all. Saints? Colts? Honestly, I don’t really care one way or the other (although I’d probably pick Indy), but I’ll of course be watching it anyway.
In what probably qualifies as one of the slowest methods of multiplayer gaming ever, Alexander and I have a “play by email” game of Civ 4 going on where one person takes a turn, emails the save file to the other person, they take a turn, send it back, etc. Considering single player games can take 2-3 hours to play (the shorter ones), a single game like this could potentially last a year, but on the other hand it doesn’t mean that you have to try to find a continuous block of time to play with someone else (and since moves aren’t simultaneous, there would still be some waiting for each person). Ask me in six months where we are, and maybe one of us will have discovered guns by then to replace our archers.
Personal - Seattle
It was about 48 hours ago that I was lamenting the fact that my printer/scanner/copier(/fax) couldn’t scan duplex from its document feeder, and that I would have some merging by hand to do if I needed to scan two-sided documents. Well, I encountered that situation today, and call my crazy, but I felt like paying $50 for a piece of software to do this was just a little excessive (and the only free options just seems to be trial copies of said expensive software). So, what’s a person to do? Well, if they went to school for four years to get a degree in Computer Science, what they do is write their own app to do whatever is it they want to. As it turns out, 20 minutes later (which includes the time it took to install VS C# 2008 Express), I had a program that met my needs perfectly. What honestly shocked me even more was the fact that the first time I ran it, it worked perfectly. That’s not to say that there aren’t bugs somewhere, but the first run was smooth sailing.
So, now that I have this app created, what else do I do with it? It’s UI is admittedly pretty sparse (I even prepopulate the two path fields with what I expect my files to be 99% of the time), but there are a lot of directions I could take it. Expand the format support, add in something liek a preview window so that I can see exactly what I’m getting into ahead of time, and this could be a semi-decent program. Apparently I could even charge up to $50 for it, but for some reason I just don’t see people paying that.
Personal - Seattle
My Kindle has been having some random, intermittent issues since Christmas, and since I has having issues transferring files to it from my computer, I called up Amazon to see if they could help. First, I noticed that it was a dedicated Kindle support line to a help center somewhere in the US (either that, or they’ve gotten really good at outsourcing to people with American accents elsewhere in the world). Then, I explained the problem, how long it had been going on, and the steps I had taken to troubleshoot it. The person on the other end didn’t try to walk me through some script, didn’t try to “verify” I was having the issue by making me retry what I had already done 5-6 times. They simply went, “Ok, we’ll ship you a replacement. Do you want it sent to your address on file?” That was it. No hassles, no waiting on hold, just an instant replacement being shipped. Amazon, not only do you make my shopping life so much easier than it would be otherwise, but you also really, really know how to take care of your customers well.
My mental calendar isn’t screwed up this week, so tomorrow really is (and feels like) Wednesday. It should be another day with just the right amount of stuff to do (at least in the afternoon, the morning might be a tiny bit boring), dependent on new meetings and cancellations, of course. I’ve learned that you can go into a day thinking it has the best schedule ever, and then by the time it’s done, you’re left wondering where that perfect schedule went.
Personal - Seattle
The tax documents just keep coming in the mail (and I’m going to get another batch sent to me from Dallas once my dad is pretty sure that all of them have arrived there), but with the document feeder on my printer/scanner/copier(/fax, but I don’t use that part), scanning them into my computer isn’t nearly the effort that it would otherwise be. In fact, if I didn’t have the document feeder, I’d likely just give up on the whole scanning push since it would be too painful to do. I remember having to scan in all the pages of our house contracts for my parents page after page after page after page by hand, and I think I was happy to finally move just because it meant I was free of that job. The one downside to my printer is that it only scans one side at a time (not duplex), so if I have anything two-sided, I have to do some merging by hand. Still, a small price to pay for the convenience.
My next near-term project is getting a slightly better system set up for my backups (especially offsite) as having my WHS as my central storage for everything does no good if it dies. I do have my 1 TB external drive that I’m likely to set up soon (once I’m sure that I don’t need any of the non-restored files from it, or I back those up to the WHS also), but then maybe I’ll look into Amazon S3? I mean, I don’t have anything that would be an absolutely devastating loss in a catastrophe (and it isn’t like I need S3 for remote access either), but backups really are the one area that I could stand to have a little bit of improvement in my technology ecosystem.
Personal - Seattle