Oh, by the way…
Posted on Monday, May 19, 2008 at 8:18 am
I think we’re having a baby.
No real details as of yet. Lisi is coming up on 2 weeks late, and a couple drugstore pee tests said she was preggers. Her lady doctor said they would do basically the same pee test to confirm it, so there was no reason to come in right now, but she’s got an appointment scheduled for late June which should be far enough along to see a sonogram.
So there’s that.
13 Comments
Well, that was fast.
Posted on Friday, May 16, 2008 at 7:27 pm
Praline: Never mind that my lad, I wish to complain about this parrot Xbox 360 what I purchased not half an hour ago from this very boutique.
Shopkeeper: Oh yes, the Norwegian Blue. What’s wrong with it?
Praline: I’ll tell you what’s wrong with it. It’s dead, that’s what’s wrong with it.
Shopkeeper: No, no it’s resting, look!
Praline: Look my lad, I know a dead parrot Xbox 360 when I see one and I’m looking at one right now.
Shopkeeper: No, no sir, it’s not dead. It’s resting.
Praline: Resting?
Shopkeeper: Yeah, remarkable bird the Norwegian Blue, beautiful plumage, isn’t it?
Praline: The plumage don’t enter into it : it’s stone dead.
Shopkeeper: No, no : it’s just resting.
Praline: All right then, if it’s resting I’ll wake it up. Hello Polly! I’ve got a nice cuttlefish for you when you wake up, Polly parrot Xbox 360!
Shopkeeper: There it moved.
Praline: No he didn’t. That was you pushing the cage.
Shopkeeper: I did not.
Praline: Yes, you did. Hello Polly, Polly (bangs it against counter) Polly parrot Xbox 360, wake up. Polly. Now that’s what I call a dead parrot Xbox 360.
Shopkeeper: No, no it’s stunned.
Praline: Look my lad, I’ve had just about enough of this. That parrot Xbox 360 is definitely deceased. And when I bought it not half an hour ago, you assured me that its lack of movement was due to it being tired and shagged out after a long squawk.
Shopkeeper: It’s probably pining for the fjords.
Praline: Pining for the fjords, what kind of talk is that? Look, why did it fall flat on its back the moment I got it home?
Shopkeeper: The Norwegian Blue prefers sleeping on its back. Beautiful bird, lovely plumage.
Praline: Look, I took the liberty of examining that parrot Xbox 360, and I discovered that the only reason that it had been sitting on its perch in the first place was that it had been nailed there.
Shopkeeper: Well of course it was nailed there. Otherwise it would muscle up to those bars and voom!
Praline: Look matey, this parrot Xbox 360 wouldn’t voom if I put four thousand volts through it. It’s bleeding demised.
Shopkeeper: It’s not, it’s pining.
Praline: It’s not pining, it’s passed on. This parrot Xbox 360 is no more. It has ceased to be. It’s expired and gone to meet its maker. This is a late parrot Xbox 360. It’s a stiff. Bereft of life, it rests in peace. If you hadn’t nailed it to the perch, it would be pushing up the daisies. It’s rung down the curtain and joined the choir invisible. This is an ex-parrot Xbox 360.
1 Comment
Seriously, just, yeah.
Posted on Wednesday, May 14, 2008 at 9:53 pm
No new posts in a good long while. Yeah. Sorry about that.
The new app at work, that I’ve been writing since October, has been winding to a close. And if you know anything about coding (and if you don’t, you’re about to), you know that the end is always harder than the beginning. It’s been hell. Working 12 hour days, working weekends, trying to fix random shit that pops up at the last minute, et cetera. It’s not necessarily that I don’t like this… I mean, finally seeing the end result of 7 months of non-stop work, and letting the end-users fawn over how utterly awesome it is compared to the previous app (not written by me, and therefore sucks large amounts of ass), is a pretty awesome pay-off. But at the end of the day, I’m just so entirely tired that the only thing I can do is sit on the couch and read Fark until I fall into a very short coma, then wake up to do it all over again.
So yeah, no new blog posts. I’ll try to be better about that. *cough*
In other news, I’m fairly certain my Xbox is dying again. This is the second Xbox 360 I’ve gone through – the first one started having issues with the DVD drive, so I sent it in for repair and got a refurb unit returned to me. My in-laws are visiting this week, so I took Monday and Tuesday off (Lord knows i needed the rest!). Given my long weekend, I bought GTA4 since I knew I’d have a bit of time to play it, and there’s nothing quite like beating virtual hookers to death with a baseball bat to relieve stress. And after I’d had a couple of play sessions with it, the console started acting up – it would completely lock up everything, with a red checkerboard pattern splashed on top of the last frame the game had displayed. This seemed to be completely random. A couple times it happened literally within minutes of cold-booting the console, and then I could play for 2-3 hours with no issues whatsoever. At first I thought this was because of the game – apparently GTA4 is causing a bunch of console freeze issues for both the 360 and PS3 versions. But then the same problem happened when I was playing a game of Tiger Woods 07 with my mother-in-law, which definitely means it’s not just a GTA4 problem.
Another quick Google search revealed that the red checkerboard freeze is almost certainly the precursor to the Red Ring of Death (RRoD). Apparently it’s because the older 360 motherboards tend to flex under heat, but the heatsinks on top of the CPU and GPU don’t flex with it, ergo after a good long while of playing, the heatsinks separate from the CPU/GPU and cause the chips to overheat. Based on the results of the Google serach, best as I can tell, the red checkerboard means “I was perfectly fine, and then I was in the middle of doing something, and I got so hot I had to stop,” which comes shortly before “I couldn’t even start myself because my innards were so massively fucked, so here’s 3 red lights because this is the absolute last failure mechanism I have.”
So yeah… now that my console is 1.5 years old, the only warranty I’ve got left is Microsoft’s extended 3-year warranty for the RRoD. So now, it’s kind of sad, but I’ve actually decided that my best course of action is to play the hell out of the game until I can force the RRoD to happen, which will mean my console can be repaired/replaced for free. Here’s hoping that if/when it finally gives up the ghost, and I send it into the warranty center, they send me back a console with the newer Falcon motherboard design that is significantly less prone to complete and utter hardware death.
Ok, I’m done typing now. You kids have fun.
P.S. If you couldn’t tell from the first couple of paragraphs, any and all coding which is not directly related to my employment (and thus amply compensated for) has pretty much stopped for the time being. So Autumn hasn’t really progressed much since the last update. Nor has the new revision to Se7enet. I’ve piddled around in Photoshop a little bit, but even after I’m done with the Photoshop part, there’s still code that must be written… and I’m just really not feeling it. Sorry.
