WHY YOU SHOULD BUY A MAC: Long time, no type
Well, last week was St. Patick's day, and I imported my very own genuine Irish person, Sarashay, for the event. Lucky me! :)
My token Irish person arrived on Friday and we ate crab rangoons and talked a lot and enjoyed the fact that it wasn't costing us a long distance mobile charge. The usual subjects were covered, which included Eddie Izzard (we like, ended up watching a re-broadcast of The Riche$ premiere) and family and music and life and stuff and 42.
Oh, I revved up The Sims 2, something I hadn't been able to do for weeks, and created a Sarashay Sim and moved her into a pimp-ass lot that was occupied by a Sim that almost looks like me. Virtual roommates. It was a lot of larfs. With Sims 2, you can bend and tweak the facial characteristics of Sims to look like real folks, and I think I did a decent job. For a couple of hours we let the Sims do stupid Sim things. Sarashay's Sim almost spontaneously combusted in hot tubs multiple times. Sim me developed an unnatural affection for fishin'. As if! The two Sims then adopted a cat, which went well. The cat and Sims were still alive when we last logged off. That's success, given that the hacks and mods I usually use to avoid Sims stupidity haden't loaded up. Then the Sims went Downtown and did more stupid things, interacted with creepy Townies (water balloon fights for no apparent reason), and got bored and went 'home'. Oh, there was a fire. The hot tub caught on fire. The hot tub, full of water, caught fire. For no apparent reason. No one died. Fortunately.
If and when I get my laptop back, I may post some screenshots to amuse you all. More on that in a second.
We were told at one point that we might be able to ride on the Crabettes float. I did it two years ago, it was a groovy time. My mother, being weird, at first claimed that it was supposed to rain (it didn't)and then changed the permission status from riding on the float the wholeway, to riding on it when we got tired, to following behind the float but in the parade, and so on, until our only option was to elbow our way through the crowds along the sidewalk for seven miles. We opted out.
Togetherness with my mom isn't usually sunshine and roses anyway, so it's no huge loss.
Saturday also marked The Day Of Electronic Death, wherein my TV and farking expensive laptop both crapped out within hours of each other. When we did get a TV from upstairs (you can imagine how fun this was, given that both TVs are huge and weigh about 250 pounds each), we attempted to record the parade for my mom, per her request (she has refused to learn how to work her own VCR for 20 years now), only to find that thanks to weird peripherals like picture-in-picture, normal hook-up techniques did not work. Bugger. We were also able to see the float go by with tons of non-Crabettes piled onto it, implying that my mom was lying to us about us not being allowed to participate. We speculated that she was trying to let us down easy because Sarashay is not actually related to a Crabette. Hmm. Still not thrilled, especially when mom attempted to guilt trip us for not braving the record-breaking throngs.
We did see the trash and stomped bushes in several squares Saturday evening while tooling around. The postmortem in the newspaper noted that the crowds were exceptionally dense this year. More arrests, more roads closing, more aggravation all around. I have limited patience for drunks in small numbers. 150,000 or more of them all in a small space would probably be my version of hell. Still, we would have gone to the parade if my mom hadn't acted so freaky. And there was all the Technodeath to fuss with, to boot.
So, one $600 TV corpse and one $3500 computer zombie (still pretending to be alive, but not quite being convincing about it) put me in a Poor Girl Funk, which was not ameliorated when I took the laptop to Geek Squad for a memory chip upgrade. They got it working, as a kind of free geek bonus, but as I was testing the new speedy response the extra RAM provided, my laptop claimed that one of the two hard disks were crapping out. So they sold me a $300 external hard drive, so my data could be backed up. This turned out to be a lie after the geeks tested things...neither drive was dead. But then they said Windows would have to be re-installed. Joy! Another couple hundred bucks. Restore disks. Backup. Geek technoshamanism. My laptop is still in Geekland. It was supposed to be back Monday. Then today. Now maybe Thursday. ARGH!
All that drama was seriously harshing our mellow. We hadn't expected the memory chip upgrade to take four farking hours. We celebrated this total waste of our day by ravenously wolfing down the best goddamed sandwiches in the universe. With soup. And cheesecake. And I got to see Second Life "live", as opposed to still images. It's a lot more interesting live, actually, not that I wasn't intrigued by the still screenshots. Sarashay discovered a crystal art gallery, a waterfall / park / bonfire space, and so forth. Pretty neat stuff. Actually, The Sims tried to go interactive, but failed to do it well, and should have taken a leaf from Second Life and other successful interactive 3d online sims.
No more expensive stuff broke, thankfully, for the rest of the weekend. Yay! However, my window unit air conditioner and standing fan both died Monday. The dishwasher tried to break, but I thwarted it by jerryrigging a latch-puller with twist-ties. No lie. This is getting ridiculous. Ugh.
This week I have to mail some stuff. A Region 2 DVD that won't play on my supposedly all-region DVD players (any of the three). Baby stuff.
I'm not a babyphile by nature, not that I dislike them or vice versa. Babies and I get on well, actually, but I don't feel a maternal yearning or anything to have any of my own. So I'm glad my SIL is babybreeding instead. A new niece is due May 8th. The first grandchild, my first niece. Cool. Spent way too much on wee baby things. Cute leetle booties, wee onesies, pacies, wipies, a grooming kit, mini washcloths, burp cloths, spill shields, pretty much anything that looked useful. I got a mess of stuff on the registry, then kind of went nuts getting other things. Auntie indulgence, starting early. I can't afford this stuff, especially with all the computer crap I'm having to shell out for. Guh.
Am using my old craptop with sticky keys and borked screen to access the 'net. Apparently I can only go four days without the Internet without feeling disconnected and out of the loop.
It's a bummer that my spifftop is being bad, given that I have a few free days this week and was hoping to do something brain-numbing and non-grad-school-related for once. *sigh* Please send "get well" vibes to Jarvis Mach II.
Oh, another spot of good news: Woozle the Ferret didn't bite anyone. Hoorah!
My token Irish person arrived on Friday and we ate crab rangoons and talked a lot and enjoyed the fact that it wasn't costing us a long distance mobile charge. The usual subjects were covered, which included Eddie Izzard (we like, ended up watching a re-broadcast of The Riche$ premiere) and family and music and life and stuff and 42.
Oh, I revved up The Sims 2, something I hadn't been able to do for weeks, and created a Sarashay Sim and moved her into a pimp-ass lot that was occupied by a Sim that almost looks like me. Virtual roommates. It was a lot of larfs. With Sims 2, you can bend and tweak the facial characteristics of Sims to look like real folks, and I think I did a decent job. For a couple of hours we let the Sims do stupid Sim things. Sarashay's Sim almost spontaneously combusted in hot tubs multiple times. Sim me developed an unnatural affection for fishin'. As if! The two Sims then adopted a cat, which went well. The cat and Sims were still alive when we last logged off. That's success, given that the hacks and mods I usually use to avoid Sims stupidity haden't loaded up. Then the Sims went Downtown and did more stupid things, interacted with creepy Townies (water balloon fights for no apparent reason), and got bored and went 'home'. Oh, there was a fire. The hot tub caught on fire. The hot tub, full of water, caught fire. For no apparent reason. No one died. Fortunately.
If and when I get my laptop back, I may post some screenshots to amuse you all. More on that in a second.
We were told at one point that we might be able to ride on the Crabettes float. I did it two years ago, it was a groovy time. My mother, being weird, at first claimed that it was supposed to rain (it didn't)and then changed the permission status from riding on the float the wholeway, to riding on it when we got tired, to following behind the float but in the parade, and so on, until our only option was to elbow our way through the crowds along the sidewalk for seven miles. We opted out.
Togetherness with my mom isn't usually sunshine and roses anyway, so it's no huge loss.
Saturday also marked The Day Of Electronic Death, wherein my TV and farking expensive laptop both crapped out within hours of each other. When we did get a TV from upstairs (you can imagine how fun this was, given that both TVs are huge and weigh about 250 pounds each), we attempted to record the parade for my mom, per her request (she has refused to learn how to work her own VCR for 20 years now), only to find that thanks to weird peripherals like picture-in-picture, normal hook-up techniques did not work. Bugger. We were also able to see the float go by with tons of non-Crabettes piled onto it, implying that my mom was lying to us about us not being allowed to participate. We speculated that she was trying to let us down easy because Sarashay is not actually related to a Crabette. Hmm. Still not thrilled, especially when mom attempted to guilt trip us for not braving the record-breaking throngs.
We did see the trash and stomped bushes in several squares Saturday evening while tooling around. The postmortem in the newspaper noted that the crowds were exceptionally dense this year. More arrests, more roads closing, more aggravation all around. I have limited patience for drunks in small numbers. 150,000 or more of them all in a small space would probably be my version of hell. Still, we would have gone to the parade if my mom hadn't acted so freaky. And there was all the Technodeath to fuss with, to boot.
So, one $600 TV corpse and one $3500 computer zombie (still pretending to be alive, but not quite being convincing about it) put me in a Poor Girl Funk, which was not ameliorated when I took the laptop to Geek Squad for a memory chip upgrade. They got it working, as a kind of free geek bonus, but as I was testing the new speedy response the extra RAM provided, my laptop claimed that one of the two hard disks were crapping out. So they sold me a $300 external hard drive, so my data could be backed up. This turned out to be a lie after the geeks tested things...neither drive was dead. But then they said Windows would have to be re-installed. Joy! Another couple hundred bucks. Restore disks. Backup. Geek technoshamanism. My laptop is still in Geekland. It was supposed to be back Monday. Then today. Now maybe Thursday. ARGH!
All that drama was seriously harshing our mellow. We hadn't expected the memory chip upgrade to take four farking hours. We celebrated this total waste of our day by ravenously wolfing down the best goddamed sandwiches in the universe. With soup. And cheesecake. And I got to see Second Life "live", as opposed to still images. It's a lot more interesting live, actually, not that I wasn't intrigued by the still screenshots. Sarashay discovered a crystal art gallery, a waterfall / park / bonfire space, and so forth. Pretty neat stuff. Actually, The Sims tried to go interactive, but failed to do it well, and should have taken a leaf from Second Life and other successful interactive 3d online sims.
No more expensive stuff broke, thankfully, for the rest of the weekend. Yay! However, my window unit air conditioner and standing fan both died Monday. The dishwasher tried to break, but I thwarted it by jerryrigging a latch-puller with twist-ties. No lie. This is getting ridiculous. Ugh.
This week I have to mail some stuff. A Region 2 DVD that won't play on my supposedly all-region DVD players (any of the three). Baby stuff.
I'm not a babyphile by nature, not that I dislike them or vice versa. Babies and I get on well, actually, but I don't feel a maternal yearning or anything to have any of my own. So I'm glad my SIL is babybreeding instead. A new niece is due May 8th. The first grandchild, my first niece. Cool. Spent way too much on wee baby things. Cute leetle booties, wee onesies, pacies, wipies, a grooming kit, mini washcloths, burp cloths, spill shields, pretty much anything that looked useful. I got a mess of stuff on the registry, then kind of went nuts getting other things. Auntie indulgence, starting early. I can't afford this stuff, especially with all the computer crap I'm having to shell out for. Guh.
Am using my old craptop with sticky keys and borked screen to access the 'net. Apparently I can only go four days without the Internet without feeling disconnected and out of the loop.
It's a bummer that my spifftop is being bad, given that I have a few free days this week and was hoping to do something brain-numbing and non-grad-school-related for once. *sigh* Please send "get well" vibes to Jarvis Mach II.
Oh, another spot of good news: Woozle the Ferret didn't bite anyone. Hoorah!