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Looking For Quacks In The Pavement

Month: May 2008

  • Planning And Pondering A Project

    I came up with a crazy idea, something that would run on Fridays here every week for an extended (but finite) period. It’s not a meme (the PPF project taught me better), and it may not be everyone’s cuppa. Hell, it may not be anyone’s cuppa. It would, however, get me posting regularly again as well as giving me some practice with advance preparation and scheduling. To pull it off I’ll need to assemble notes, plan things in advance, and maybe even work up a buffer of completed material before launch.

    I might even dig up a microphone for this one. Scary, wot?

    If I can accomplish this, then I’ll consider something really ambitious. We’ll see.

  • Quick Vista Tech Tip

    If you’re trying to install Windows Vista’s service pack number one, you absolutely positively must have the prerequisite little patches installed first.

    Mind you, it’s impossible to tell from the Windows Update display which of the little patches are the prerequisites. They all talk about “performance improvement” and “stability enhancement” and blah blah blee, but none of them say, “Oh by the way, if you don’t install this update then your Vista SP1 installer will simply fail. Silently. Leaving you wondering what the hell you did wrong.”

    Cute, Microsoft. Very cute.

    Of course, once the 16 little updates are installed and you reboot… then SP1 actually appears in the updater display. Gee. I’m sure glad that I downloaded the standalone installer, all 450 megabytes of it.

    The kicker? “Service Pack 1 includes all previously released Windows Vista updates.” So… I had to install all of those updates even though I’m getting all of those updates all over again? Stellar.

    I’d better be able to get my games working once this is all over or else I’m going to be a cranky little grey duck.

  • No, in fact, I am NOT a girl.

    I spent most of five minutes this morning convincing one of our clients that we do not, in fact, have an engineer on staff named “Karen.”

    We can’t all be 100% detail-oriented all of the time. I know this. The process of reading comprehension involves a lot of mental streamlining, the eye pulling in patterns and the brain supplying meaning of some sort as the reader goes along. Thus, when people read my name in print their brains often fill in the meaning for what looks like a familiar pattern. And so, the myth of “Karen” perpetuates.

    I shrug this off most of the time, but this particular client isn’t brand new and has dealt with me several times in recent weeks. And yet:

    “Yeah, some gal there set up this new account…”

    “Actually, that was me.”

    “Huh? Sez here it was this Karen person.”

    “Check again.”

    “Huh?”

    “Look at the email again. Are you certain it says ‘Karen’ at the bottom?”

    “Uh.”

    Eventually he saw the light of day.

    I’ve noted before that we moved quite often when I was a youngster. Every few months it was a new set of teachers, new people at the church on Sunday (during Mom’s religious-leaning stretches) and so forth. Every few months I suffered a barrage of “Karen” and “Carol” and “Kara” miscues. Lots of teeth grinding on my part, as you can imagine. Add this to my scrawny physique and unstable home life and it’s a wonder I grew up reasonably sane at all given what a natural bully-magnet I was.

    I still have to grit my teeth on occasion. Today was one of them. Normally, though, I can just laugh it off and forget about it, so it’s not like I’m constantly hung up about this.

    Even so, I’m probably going to punch my father in the arm the next time I see him. Just on general principle.

  • New Gear, Unexpectedly

    Factor The First: Lil’ & Geoffrey’s computer DFO‘d in a bizarre and decidedly terminal fashion. Their budget wasn’t ideal for a full replacement rig, but there was no guarantee that going on a part-by-part replacement binge would solve the problem.

    Factor The Second: My “stimulus” check from Uncle Dubya, however misguided a gesture it may be, is still money in my pocket. It’s hard to turn down money in my pocket.

    Factor The Third: The so-called “gaming computer” was getting a bit long in the tooth, though with upgrades over the years I’ve kept it nearly up to the desired spec. (Basically: “Can it play City of Heroes and Heroes of Might and Magic?”)

    Throw these three factors together with a flash of inspiration on the part of your humble journal writer and you end up with a solution which everybody can more-or-less afford. They get my old gaming rig, and I use the (quite reasonable) money I charged for it and some of the “stimulus” money to buy parts for a whole new gaming rig. Mind you, it’s not as powerful or neat-o-keen as the big HP workstation that I picked up last year… but it’s not meant to be. Its job is to play a couple of games when I have company over. With its Core 2 Duo and the 2 GB of RAM and the modest (but modern) video card, I’m quite certain that it’ll do the job nicely.

    Amusing side note: I walked out the door early Sunday afternoon with a black Antec Sonata case in my arms. I walked back in the door Sunday evening with the newer version black Antec Sonata case in my arms. Hopefully I won’t have any annoying problems with this Antec purchase…

    Now all I have to do is finish putting the thing together and slap an operating system on it. Well, I have ’til the weekend. Plenty of time.

  • Wrath of a Mad God, by Raymond E. Feist

    I’m not going to bore you with a lengthy review. If you’re a Feist fan, you’re going to read this book. If you’re not familiar with his work or not a fan, there’s very little chance that you’ll make it far enough through his written output to end up at this book.

    I just want to say two quick things about “Wrath of a Mad God.”

    One: This is the first time that I’ve spotted glaring, huge continuity problems in one of Ray’s books. Erik von Darkmoor never married? Are you kidding me? A major part of the last two Serpentwar books just gets thrown away like that, eh? That’s not the only continuity error, but it’s the one which sticks out most in my mind. There are several others that even I was able to spot. And I’m not good at that sort of thing!

    Two: I’m glad it’s over. (No, I don’t care if he’s intending to write more books in this setting. Really, it’s over.) Enough of the questions are answered. Kind of. I mean, let’s count how many times have we seen Feist use a variant of this line: “Okay, the truth this time. I mean it.” Right. Sure. Whatever. But that’s not really my point. It’s just gotten to the point where the levels of threat and destruction and mayhem and sacrifice have gotten out of hand. There’s always going to be one more bigger badder threat which requires a total rewrite of the series’ mythology (how many versions of “the nature of the gods” have we been subjected to?) and a higher body count and… let it go already. There are only so many times you can crank up the threat levels before your story becomes… well… Dragonball Z. You don’t want your story to be compared to DBZ, do you?

    I consider this book to be closure on the Pug-And-Thomas storyline. I’m not even that curious about the Quor (who, of course, it is now revealed in the very book in which they’re introduced that they were native to Midkemia from before the Chaos Wars or some-such and the Valheru respected them (what??) and blah blah blah) since it’s actually kind of obvious what they’re meant to be (if the Dreadcritters are from a lower plane, where do you suppose the shiny Quor come from, duh) and… I’m tired of mythology rewrites.

    I still count the Riftwar through the end of the Serpentwar as my favorite storyline ever. This is much the same way that I still love (most of) Anne McCaffrey’s Pern books up to All The Weyrs, and the same way I (against all logic or decency) love the Eddings’ Belgariad and Elenium. It’s just that after a certain point all of these writers seem to have lost their sense of perspective and common sense. Sad, really, but apparently also inevitable. So be it.

  • First Weekend Of May 2008

    Hey, it’s a weekend catch-up post! We haven’t done one of these in a while…

    Friday: Lil’ shouldn’t be allowed into Best Buy unsupervised. I don’t count, as I’m not a very good supervisor. Then again, I did get the BSG miniseries DVD out of it (since she doesn’t need it anymore). I’m also a couple of books into the Eric Flint “1632” franchise; it’s not too shabby, all things considered, though I imagine that my interest will wane after another massive volume or so.

    Saturday (daytime): Erica and I watched Alex do improv theater games in a park in the rain for an hour or so. Amusing it was, but eventually it got cold and we got bored so off to Burgerville we went. It’s appalling how much BV charges for a “large” cup of orange juice. Oy.

    Saturday (night IRON MAN): Kyla and I decided to do the dinner-and-a-movie thing. Oh, what an excellent movie! I’ll spare you the full review (since, let’s see, nearly everyone on the Internet has reviewed the thing already) but suffice to say that it’s a solid, entertaining, surprisingly restrained, well acted, beautifully produced superhero movie which benefits from a touch of gritty realism but without the bloody mayhem or out-of-place sex scenes (the only one in the movie is very short and played entirely for laughs). Even the scenery chewing is kept to reasonable limits. The funny bits were genuinely funny! I know, I’m as amazed as you are. Robert Downey, Jr completely owns the role of Tony Stark. The other actors range from “quite good” to “better than expected,” though it’s not a movie with a large main cast. I think the worst special effect in the movie is Jeff Bridges’ skullcap. (Turns out that it wasn’t a skullcap after all; his head somehow managed to look wrong nonetheless. Oh well, minor quibble.) In short: Unless you hate action movies, you should see Iron Man. (As for the “after-credits” thing… all I can say is, better Sam The Man than David Hasselhoff.)

    Saturday (late night): “Doctor Who,” end of the first two-parter in the 4th series of the “new Who.” We love Donna, we love Martha Version 2.0, we don’t necessarily love setting the atmosphere on fire, and the next-episode preview left me wondering what new kinds of drugs the “Who” producers have got their grubby hands on now. The love child of a Timelord and Baby Spice? Really, now.

    Sunday: Game day. Well, after we foraged for grub, anyway. In the “City Of” world, my lead villain dinged 40 and opened up her patron powers while my top Defender finally became a “real” Kin by acquiring Fulcrum Shift. Hellooooo, massive buff/debuff! Later, with “the boys,” I snuck in a win at Power Grid followed by a modest but respectable showing at Quiddler. Not bad for competing against five smart blokes, wot?

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