CSSquirrel

I’ve spent the past two weeks being either sick with the flu (in the middle of summer, which makes it twice as fun!) or recovering from said flu thanks to my sickly asthmatic lungs. Woo hoo!

As I survived, expect rants and comics to occur in the near future, in particular related to AEA: Boston. Which I did not attend, but wish I had. What I find really cool about these sort of conferences is how much data from them gets out to the web thanks to the type of participants present. It allows for vicarious learning, which is a neat sort of thing.

More incremental updates. Tossed up the cartoon squirrel into the header. Soon he’ll have a branch to stand on which will be part of the menu system. I also replaced the Twitter RSS feed on the sidebar with a badge in the header. Expect that to change in appearance in the fullness of time.

Now I need to jump out of the house to go check out the Dirty Dan Harris Days event down in Fairhaven. (Yes, that linked site has a hideous design). Spring’s finally warming up in town, so time to taste the local culture.

Two things are not helping my sleep right now.

The first is the newly released Super Smash Bros Brawl, which I was so anxious for that I woke up three hours earlier than necessary to obsess over whether any stores would still have it Sunday despite not being at any of the midnight releases (it was  found in Target, where they had many copies and no lines). I then followed that up with twelve straight hours of bashing in the heads of Mario, Kirby, and a couple dozen other Nintendo characters.

The second is the “Spring Back” clock reset of this weekend, part of our lovely Daylight Savings system. I don’t really mind the “Fall Forward” part, where I gain an hour of sleep. But just when I’m beginning to enjoy the fact that the sun is up when I am, it’s time to practice some masochism and force myself to wake up early.

This is not beneficial to my mood.

It doesn’t help that my cats have a poor concept of time to begin with, and usually start bothering me around 7:00 for affection, playtime, food, or just attention (I’m talking to you Fez, you evil if adorable cat).  But now I’m being bothered around 6:00… which is crossing a metaphorical line in the sand.

Hooray sleep.

I can’t really think of anything witty to say in response. This guy essentially co-created the entire RPG hobby with Dave Arneson when they made Dungeons & Dragons in 1974. As a thoroughly unrepentant gamer geek, I owe most of the thousands of hours I’ve spent in various games from paper to computer to this guy’s wacky idea involving weird dice and paper.

Rest well, Gary.

Spending a few hours in a raid in World of Warcraft with friends? Good.

Spending the two hours after that removing a power supply from Emily’s computer, installing a new one, and then installing a high-end graphics card? Not good.

The last time I did any major hardware stuff with a computer I ended up blowing out an expensive processor in about two seconds due to the heat sink not being firmly attached. Since then I’ve made it a point to be as far from an opened up PC as possible. Being potentially responsible for destroying an expensive piece of equipment isn’t my idea of a good time.

On the plus side, everything turned on and nothing exploded.

When I finally get around to acquiring a new system, I think I’ll make sure it comes with all the pieces I want pre-installed.