| Continuity |
[Thursday, December 10th, 2009|6:28 PM] |
This is a rather interesting game. |
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| Temperature |
[Wednesday, December 9th, 2009|7:16 PM] |
It actually made it up to freezing today, which is the first time it has done so this week. Needless to say, it certainly isn't that high right now. |
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| ORCA Card |
[Tuesday, December 8th, 2009|9:12 AM] |
Remember when I was complaining about having to get an ORCA Card before?
Yeah. Let me tell a (somewhat) short story.
I got my card. I put money on the card. I tried to use the card. The card reader told me I had insufficient funds. Well, okay, they said it would take 24 hours or so before it actually activates after the first tap, or whatever. However, I got to looking at my card last night, and found out that the card number on my online account profile was actually different, by a single digit, than the number on the actual physical card itself. I used the card again this morning and again it told me insufficient funds. I called ORCA when I got to work and explained the situation as described above. The guy's initial reaction was, verbatim, "Well, that sucks."
The solution was to completely cancel the incorrect card as it showed online (that hypothetical card is now marked as "Blocked - Lost or Stolen"), refund the money I had put on that card (which had still been showing as "Pending" and was apparently not on the card yet) and then add the existing card to my account using the real, not incorrect number on that card, and then add money to that one. This will, of course, take another day or so before it actually goes through, after I tap it to a card reader on a bus, before the card becomes active.
Yay. |
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| Linguistic Pet Peeve. |
[Monday, December 7th, 2009|12:41 PM] |
Prolly.
The word being horribly mangled in this case is "probably" and it makes my skin crawl. Please don't ever write or type or, especially, say "prolly" if you can at all avoid it, at least not during any sort of communication with me, either direct or indirect. I would very much appreciate it. Thanks a bunch. |
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| Star Trek, come on. |
[Sunday, December 6th, 2009|8:28 PM] |
They had a U.S. flag. They had a Bible. They had a perfect copy of the U.S. Constitution. They were called "Yangs" aka Yankees (the white people) and they were fighting the "Kohms" aka Communists (the Asian people, or "yellows" as Kirk himself called them).
Really, Star Trek? I mean, just come on. I'm still trying to apply the MST3K Mantra here, I really am, and I know this was the sixties, back when television was just... different or whatever. And I totally get that these were just thinly veiled commentaries on the society at the time and all that good stuff. But even so, Star Trek, for me to seriously attempt to maintain a suspension of disbelief, it requires that you at least try, okay?
If it were just this one episode in isolation it would be one thing, but this one was only a few episodes after the one with the Nazis, which was itself only a few episodes after the one with the Chicago Mobsters, and before that came the one with the Roman Empire. I swallowed things like that because you at least tried to explain that the craziness in those was the result of contamination by Earth-men a hundred years in the past (or, you know, just six years in the case of the Nazi thing, which is itself kind of hard to swallow). But in this case, with the flag and the Constitution and all, you don't even do that much. It's just there. For no reason at all. Actually, come to think of it, you similarly didn't explain away the whole Roman thing either. Huh. I guess I bought that one simply because it was the modern Roman Empire (modern as of the sixties, anyway), and the novelty of Roman soldiers carrying machine guns or them doing their gladiatorial combat on a TV sound stage rather than in an actual arena. Or something. Well, whatever, I will give you this much though, Star Trek. All of that still isn't quite as bad as the first season episode I mentioned previously where you had that planet that was physically exactly like Earth.
I'm going to keep going, Star Trek, because I like you. I really do. It's still fun, despite the crazy nonsensical stuff like this. But even so, you've still gotta at least try. I have to say that I like you much better when you're defeating computers with illogic or fighting giant space amoebas, rather than when you're philosophizing about the Cold War and wars-by-proxy and stuff like that. |
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| Blah. |
[Monday, November 30th, 2009|7:48 AM] |
This has to have been one of the shortest four-day weekends ever. Did we skip a day in there somewhere? |
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| You know what makes me never want to play The Sims 3 ever again? |
[Sunday, November 22nd, 2009|1:08 AM] |
This is what makes me never want to play The Sims 3 ever again: Playing it most of the day, with a Sim family that I have been playing off and on for the past few months now, and then, when I'm ready to quit and save the game I get "Error Code 12: World file save failure." So, I tried to leave the game running, alt+tab out, and search around Google and thesims3.com forums, but had no luck finding a solution. I did, however, find a lot of other people complaining about this same issue. One of the so-called "solutions" put forward, supposedly by EA support, was to delete the save files. I.e. start over. Screw. That. After a while, and after getting increasingly frustrated by the whole thing, I just gave up, shut it down, and pretty much lost at the very least everything I've done since the last time I quit (several hours worth). Perhaps I've lost everything ever if the save files are completely broken (several months worth). I think there are some auto-backups in there somewhere, so maybe it's not all completely gone. But even so...
Well, okay, that tears it. I most likely won't be playing this game again for a very, very long time, if ever. Now that I know that there is the very real potential for it to not properly save after playing it for several hours, that makes me gun shy, even if this problem were to never happen again. It really sucks, because up until it stopped letting me save, the game was pretty awesome, especially with the new World Adventures expansion, which I'd been playing for a couple days now. Now, however, when I look at it, all I will be able to think about is "Error Code 12".
*bone-weary sigh* |
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| Twilight. |
[Saturday, November 21st, 2009|1:33 PM] |
This post has been a long time in coming, but I just haven't really... well... cared enough to post it before now. I still don't, really, but I figured I'd go ahead and get it out of the way while I happen to be thinking about it at the moment.
I've read the books. All four of them. They were okay. Even pretty good, for what they were. I have not seen the movie. I'm not ruling out the possibility of doing so at some point in the future, but I don't have all that much interest in doing so at present.
Now here's the deal. I don't get it. I just don't.
First of all, what's with all of the love for this series? I don't see it as the life-altering phenomenon that some seem to. I really don't even see it as the next Harry Potter or anything like that. Granted, I'm not a teenage girl, so that might be part of it. It's decent, and about as good as anything Anne Rice ever wrote. (Concerning vampires, anyway. I haven't read any of Rice's more recent stuff.) But it's not the be-all, end-all of vampire stories.
Second of all, and more importantly, what's with all of the hate for this series? Seriously, I am surrounded by people who, for some reason, seem to be defiantly proud of their burning hatred for this series, even (especially) those who haven't bothered to actually read it or see the movie for themselves. Everything they know about this series is based almost entirely on hearsay from like-minded people. And yet, they still loathe it, despise it. Beyond that, anything and everything that mocks it is something that they will gluttonously eat up and then try to foist onto anyone else who will listen (and also those who won't).
So, yeah, I really don't get it. What is it about this series that is so polarizing? |
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| "A Message from Senator Richard Burr" |
[Friday, November 20th, 2009|9:42 PM] |
Got this in email from my sister earlier. I'm not going to comment on it. Just going to post it as is. I leave it as an optional exercise to the reader to guess what I may think about this. (Also, Richard Burr, for anyone unfamiliar with him.)
( Read more... ) |
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| I'm finally starting to wish I had a car again. |
[Monday, November 16th, 2009|6:07 PM] |
Saw a sign on the bus, and just doubled checked it with the Metro website.
1) They're raising the fare yet again. *sigh*
2) They're doing away with the PugetPasses, meaning I now have to get an ORCA card. *double sigh*
I didn't want to have to get an ORCA card. With that, I now have to worry about making sure the bus driver has the fare set to one-zone every time I get on/off the bus, so that I don't get overcharged for a two-zone fare (which is a very real possibility since the 266 going into Seattle in the morning and coming out of Seattle in the evening is a two-zone fare if you ride the whole trip, but I only ride it from Redmond to Bellevue in the morning and back again in the evening, which is just one-zone). Very annoying. But if I'm going to get an ORCA card, I'd better do it now while it's free, because as of Feb 1, 2010, they're going to start charging $5 for them (apparently in addition to whatever value you put on the card itself). Also, another reason I need to go ahead and do it now is because they won't be selling any more PugetPasses after Dec. 14 at all. The only bright side, I guess, is that I won't have to buy a new PugetPass every month anymore, for what it's worth. I just have to keep this ORCA thing charged up with credit or whatever. *weary sigh*
So, yeah, they're once again charging even more for inversely proportionally crappier service.
Oh, and while I'm ranting about the buses and crappy service... they put up a new time table on the pole at the stop where I get on the bus on the way home from work. They've never had a time table there before recently. And, of course, the times on this time table are completely different than the times that the Trip Planner gives for that same stop and those same buses. The times on the new time table on the pole are far more inconvenient for me than the previous Trip Planner times (which I'm guessing are now out of date). Actually, I got to looking at the time table on the sign again, and it just says "Bus So and So departs from Blah stop at these times", not that it was to arrive at that particular stop at those times, so it's not as bad as I thought. (But I had made a point to look explicitly for something like that before and didn't see it, or at least just didn't notice it. Oh well.) Not, of course, that this really matters, given that the buses never show up at the correct time for either of those time tablesthe Trip Planner schedule, at least in the evening. *deep inhale* *huge sigh* |
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| Oh, EA. |
[Wednesday, November 11th, 2009|8:51 AM] |
It looks like EA is burying Pandemic, as well as whatever remains of the decrepit, shambling corpses that used to be Maxis (good thing Will Wright jumped ship when he did and on his own terms, I guess) and Westwood Studiosthe Command and Conquer team, among several others.
All I can say is that I wish this were a startling thing that was completely out of the blue, shocking due to its rarity. However, this is Electronic Arts here, after all. I'm not in the least bit surprised by this news, because, hey, this stuff happens all the time with them. Mostly, I'm just annoyed and saddened by it.
Count your days, Bioware. It's only a matter of time. |
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| This whole Modern Warfare 2 thing. |
[Tuesday, November 10th, 2009|12:51 PM] |
Apparently, this is the big thing in gaming right now and has been anticipated for months? I don't know. I haven't really been following this game. It doesn't interest me much at all.
However, I have to say I was amused by these related things put out by Mega64 and The Onion.
And.... yeah. That's about it. |
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| Headphones died. :( |
[Sunday, November 8th, 2009|12:58 AM] |
My good headphones died on me just now, after a little over a year of being awesome. The left side went out. For now, I'm forced to use some crappy ones that came with a pack of AA batteries. It sounds like listening to stuff through a tin can, in comparison. As such, I just ordered three pairs of these. Why three? Well, I was going to just get two pairs, because I wanted to have a spare for when this situation comes up again in the future. And it will come up again eventually, as it always does. However, ordering two pairs from Amazon without the super saver (free) shipping, for which only two were not eligible, being less than $25, cost only $4 or so less total than buying three pairs with super saver shipping. Also, I got the JBuds instead of the Coby this time because those are still sold through Amazon directly rather than some crap third party. I figure that if there is a difference in quality between the two brands, it'll hopefully be fairly unnoticable (or maybe even the JBuds will actually be better, who knows). At least, relative to the difference in quality between the Coby and the tin can Duracell headphones, anyway. >_>
In fact, rather than using these tin can headphones at all, I think I'm just going to bring my speakers back to the computer from the bedroom tomorrow. I'd previously moved the speakers into the bedroom a few months ago, so as to try to play music and such during the night, but that didn't really work out too well, so they've mostly just been sitting unused. |
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| URGH. |
[Friday, November 6th, 2009|8:08 PM] |
| [ | Tags | | | music, phone, rant | ] |
| [ | Current Location |
| | Redmond, WA | ] |
| [ | Current Mood |
| |  annoyed | ] |
| [ | Current Music |
| | Vivaldi's Concerto no. 1 Spring | ] |
Since I got home at around 6:00pm, I have received a phone call pretty much every 30 minutes, almost to the second. Same old song and dance: answering machine picks up and they immediately hang up. I just reduced the time until the answering machine picks up to 2 rings instead of the previous 4. I also changed the ringtone as well, because as much as I like Vivaldi's Concerto no. 1 Spring, it was driving me absolutely bonkers repeatedly hearing the first bit of it in that relatively crappy ring tone format over and over and over and over and over and over. |
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