Iraq shows progressive side - first nation in the Middle East to offer gay marriages


Okay, not really.  But I like my tagline for this photo better than CNN's.

I've been so busy I can barely think straight.  We're still on heavy overtime at work.  I even put in some hours this past Friday, which was technically a paid holiday.  Outside of work, I've also been a fair number of hours helping a friend expand their online store in the world of "Second Life".  Thanksgiving came and went way too quickly and now Christmas is looming.  I have to decorate at home.  I have to send out cards and a few gifts to friends.  I have to shop for gifts for my family.  I need to get to work on a story for the Gathering 2008 Anthology.  :: flails ::

Two highlights of the holiday weekend:  I had ordered CD recordings of the two Genesis concerts that I'd attended, and those arrived on Friday.  They sound fantastic, and I've already stored the Cleveland show as MP3s on my home PC.   The other happy moment was getting new artwork from cinsangel on Sunday night.  If you're reading this, thanks again for the sketch of my favorite fanfic character. :)

Speaking of fandom stuff... I heard that the first issue of the "Gargoyles: Bad Guys" comic book is due to be on the shelves this Thursday.  So I need to make plans to get hold of that.  And I still haven't gotten the corrected reprint of the last issue of the "Gargoyles" comic.  I'll probably have to order that from Amazon.com or SLG. 

Anyway... back to the grind now.

P.S. - Is there a way to convince Windows XP that I really, really do NOT want Internet Exploder 8 installed as an automatic update, so do NOT "ask me again later" plzkthxbai?

Tags: computer, gargoyles, genesis, news, second life, work

Got a new water heater installed last night. The HVAC company that serviced the furnace last year also does plumbing and has after-hours service. The new unit is warranted for 6 years. The old one had an energy guide sticker from 1992 on it, so it had gone about twice the normal expected life. The bottom was rusted away and ready to fall out. I don't even want to think about the mess that would have made.

In other news... my laptop boots up and shuts down a lot faster now that I've figured out how to disable the buggy, auto-loading bloatware that HP installed with my printer drivers.  I don't know what "HP Digital Imaging Monitor" was intended to do, but all it ever really does is randomly crash and/or refuse to terminate on system shutdown.

Tags: computer, house

Can anyone translate this from techmonkey to English:

Second Life is experiencing issues related to network connectivity at one of our co-location facilities. Our Operations team is hard at work in resolving the issues. If you are not able to log in, please try another region to log into.

Thank you for your patience and we apologize for any inconvenience.

What is a co-location facility? Do they mean that servers are down? Why don't they just say "some of the servers are down"? And why do they lie and say that a "team" is hard at work when the post is timestamped at 2 A.M. Pacific time? Ninja, please... we all know there's only one guy in the office until 7 A.M.

...

Yeah, I'm just annoyed that once again I couldn't log in to one of my favorite online places for a few minutes this morning before I left the house.

In other news... I discovered that AT&T has been charging me too much for my high-speed internet service. They changed their DSL speed and price tier structure a few months ago but kept billing me at my original rate. So I'm getting a credit, a new combination router/modem for free, and my connection speed will double from 3.0 Mbps to 6.0 Mbps, which is the speed that I should have been getting for what I am paying.

Tags: computer, gaming

FYI... Best Buy has a sale going on right now on the SanDisk USB flash drives. I picked up a 4 GB one for $40. The 2 GB flash drives were $20. Both of these prices are nearly half what they normally are.

4 GB... that's more storage space than I had on the hard drives of my first two desktop PCs combined.

Tags: computer

I want to get something for my PC that will allow me to capture video and sound from a TV, VCR, DVD player, or camcorder using dubbing cables. I had a Hauppauge WIN-TV PCI card many years ago and I see they still make stuff. There's also Pinnacle Systems and ATI. I'm looking for recommendations and/or warnings about what to stay away from. I'm not planning to be George Lucas... I mostly just want to import recordings from VHS tape.

Tags: computer