Blame Two Worlds

Blame Two Worlds for the late post. Got too into it and that messed up my schedule. At least I’m not working early tomorrow.

Finished up the sales training which was good. So now I can go back to the phones and stop almost falling asleep in class. Trainer almost threw a pen at me yesterday. I can’t help it though! Any meeting we have, I struggle to stay awake, days long training only makes it worse. I need to keep my mind busy or it wants to sleep I guess.

After work I went to my doctor’s and got the final bit of paperwork for getting my own desk, just as my manager goes on vacation. lol I talked with her today about it and she said that I should just email the ergonomics guy and get him to set everything up. So hopefully that gets done quickly, it will make my days far less painful. Sitting in a regular chair for hours on end just ends up hurting, so I need a desk that I can stand or sit with. Luckily I have a job where they actually do work with you to accommodate you.

Training

So I’ve been doing ‘consultative sales’ training. Basically how every call can be a sale, yet the company does not want to sell something the customer doesn’t need. Conflict much? Yes, yes indeed. Personally I hate ‘sales’ and ‘sales’ training even more.

Have I learned anything? Yeah, I’ve learned to ask a few more investigative questions, but that’s about it. I’m not going to change my basic approach in helping the customer. I’ve talked with a co-worker who is also in the training class, he’s really good with customer service skills and has been tapped to help out new hires when they first come on the floor, and he agrees with me in the way to help customers.

So while I have learned something from the class I am not going to use a lot of it. I have another half day of training and that’s it. Then its back on the phones. Yay!

I have a doctor’s appointment tomorrow which will hopefully get me the note I need so work will get me my own adjusted desk. This means no one else can use it, unless I am not working, and if they do they cannot adjust anything or the shitstorm will hit. So that will be nice.

Cop out

Going to sleep. Didn’t have much sleep last night and a full day at work learning things. Its tough to stay awake and learn things. More learning tomorrow too. Tough day ahead.

Went out for dinner too, brought back leftovers. Yummy.

Night.

Wow, I got nothing.

Yeah. Nothing interesting happened today, no game purchases, nothing major or interesting happened. Nothing even to piss me off so I can rant about it. *sigh*

I’m starting up a series of books I’ve read about 2-3 times already. Its by John Ringo and its the Posleen series he wrote. Its about a federation of aliens coming to the earth for help cause they need help fighting the Posleen, and of course we kick ass and take names, but the earth takes a huge hit too. All in all its good mindless reading.

I’m probably going on to read the Obsidian trilogy by Mercedes Lackey after. Another series I’ve read a number of times.

I tend to keep books I like. I’ll reread them a lot. I know that some people can’t do that, but I love rereading stuff I have enjoyed.

Full house again

So my brother called today to see if they could spend a few nights here, which of course they can. They are cleaning out the dorm apartment that the two oldest boys (Josh & Matt) were sharing during the summer and the middle one (Matt) is just moving to another dorm room for his school year, Josh is currently working as a landscaper.  So this sunday they are cleaning out the room and coming over here for dinner and staying a few days. Josh will stay till friday.

Another house on this street just went up for sale. The last three that were for sale all sold pretty quickly, one in just a few days. Since I’ve been here about 8 houses sold on this block. Every time one goes up for sale I tell my wife the same thing, ‘I wish I had the money cause I’d buy them all up as they went on sale’. Its true too, I’d love to own an entire street of houses. Fix them all up to be super energy efficient and rent em out. As we are right by the Assiniboine park, where a ton of things happen during the summer, it would be a great place for rentals. But ah well. Such is not the case.

I’m still wanting to buy a house, hopefully in the spring, but not sure yet. No word yet from my brother what his thoughts are with us going together to get a house. Maybe when they are here I can talk to them about it. He hasn’t said anything about it I think the answer is no, but since I haven’t heard back, I’m not going to dismiss it entirely.

I’m currently playing Pirates of Black Cove, a game I beta tested for Paradox, its even got my name in the credits. Plus there is a character in the game called Colonel QuickDraw, although I have no idea if that character is named after me, but it is kinda funny. I’m also playing Two Worlds which is an RPG game. Its pretty fun, and along the lines of Oblivion. I just bought Two Worlds 2 for $15 on a 70% of sale, so that will get played after Two Worlds.

I have kinda given up on Metro 2033 as I am stuck on one mission, and after 5 hours of playing that one mission I’m not going to keep banging my head against the wall. Graphics on the game are great, I like the weapons and the FPS part of it, but it is a console port and that is annoying me. Not being able to save at any point is very annoying, specially considering I’m stuck at a level. And that is what it feels like to me, just one level after another, not open world at all, or maybe its just I haven’t reached a stage where it is open world. I donno but I doubt its going to see much, if any gameplay.

Women should not rule the world

Why?

Have you ever seen what women do to their Sims when playing The Sims? They torture them. Make a really nice house, furnished with all the bells and whistles a little Sim could want, even a swimming pool. But, when they go for a nice leisurely swim they take the ladder out of the pool and watch in glee as their Sims tire  and drown. They even upload videos to share in their Sims torture and death.

Or how about the ability to phone out for that nice take out pizza, but unable to actually get it because women have taken the door away. No bathroom so they pee themselves as well. For some reason women seem to find this funny.

No. No woman should rule the world because I’ve seen how a nice seeming woman, who outwardly is very nice and cheery and helpful becomes this power mad, Sim torturing fanatic.

Then again… She is American. So maybe that’s par for the course.

I’ll amend my title…

No American woman should rule the world.

Requires a 3rd party download and account

How I hate those words.

A lot of new games say those words to me. Its very annoying. See those words mean that you can only play those games through Steam, even if I buy the game from someone else, I can only play the game through the Steam client.

Now there is nothing wrong with Steam, I think Valve is a good company, they have a sense of humour (unlike other companies), and for the most part they deal fairly with their customers. This, this is a good thing. However you HAVE to run the Steam client to play games. That’s what I don’t like. I don’t like it that a 3rd party is now between me and the publisher/developer.

For the first time in the history of the Civilization franchise I have not bought the newest one to come out because it has to be run through Steam. It was a disappointment, but one I can live with. Its not like I HAVE to play it or my life is ruined or anything. However more and more games I’d really like to play are on Steam client only: Deus Ex: Human Revolution, Red Orchestra 2: Heroes of Stalingrad, F.E.A.R 3, Call of Juarez: The Cartel. Well the last one has two strikes against it, its Ubisoft AND Steam (me no likey Ubisoft either, but they are a bastard company).

Right now I have two games on Steam that I’m actually going to play. Metro 2033 and Pirates of Black Cove. And actually the only reason I had Steam on my old system was to beta test Pirates of Black Cove and I found out today that they gave us beta testers the full version. Steam went on my new system because I wanted to try a game that pushed my new system a little bit so I picked up Metro 2033 for $5.

So now I have Steam on my system and it does bug me. But I already have 2 games I am playing would 3 or 4 make that much of a difference? And I can hear Cliff rubbing his hands together, with a gleam in his eye, a wide grin on his mouth and whispering in my ear, ‘Yes Brad, come to the dark side, you’ll like it, its not so bad, look at all the pretty games!’ Well fuck you Cliff! Stop with the peer pressure (no pun intended I assure you). I’m just going to crawl over here and cry at the eroding of my values, morals and stances on things.

 

 

 

 

Next thing you know I’ll be a Republican.

 

Nah…. THAT will never happen. I do have some standards. lol

Ah… GameStop there are reasons people hate you and don’t trust you.

So in my last rant I spoke up for what GameStop had said regarding used sales, now I’m going to rant about them.

Fair is fair right?

GameStop opening Deus Ex boxes, removing free game code

Yes, you read that right. In the link it mentions a Field Operations manager who sent out an email saying that for the new Deus Ex game to remove the coupon for On Live that gives them a free game on the service.

Why you ask?

Well that very question was asked of GameStop’s spokesperson (because the FO manager who sent the email was too chicken to do it himself) and she said that “Square Enix packed the competitor’s coupon with our DXHR product without our prior knowledge and we did pull these coupons.”

As of now a thread on Reddit has 2281 comments on this, and a lot of them saying how they hate GameStop, and that this is NOT a new practice with them. Some make a very good point that once they have opened those boxes they are no longer ‘new’. and how can they still sell those games as ‘new’?

I’ve hated GameStop for a long while now, mostly because I am a PC gamer and every time I have gone into their store and gone to their PC ‘wall’ not one person will say anything to me, even if I am the only person in the store. Oh and their PC ‘wall’? Yeah its maybe 4 games wide and 5 games down. The last time I went the vast majority of the games were from Blizzard. Multiple copies of WOW and Starcraft 2 taking up the majority of the space. The best place to buy a PC boxed copy of a game is Best Buy of all places. Its been that way for a few years now too. If its not console oriented it seems GameStop wants nothing to do with you.

So fuck you to GameStop for being the assholes everybody thinks you are.

Game publishers. My rant for today.

Gameindustry.biz put out an article today titled GameStop: Used sales benefit the whole industry. I’ll paste it here because you need to sign up to view it.

GameStop's executive vice president Michael Mauler believes that second hand sales benefit not only retailers such as his own company, but publishers and developers as well, driving sales and keeping customers engaged with yearly franchises.

Speaking to Edge, Mauler explained that without the opportunity to cash in on older titles, many gamers wouldn't be buying as many new ones.

"I can understand the feelings [but] we've sat down with developers and publishers and really gone through the data," Mauler told the magazine's website. "I personally think there's a lot of benefit to the publisher. "A great example is sequels, where there's a large percentage of people who are just not going to spend $60 every single year without being able to do something. They'll look at their shelf and see ten FIFAs, Pro Evos or Maddens.

"Being able to take the older one and do something with it in order to buy the next version is really important to consumers. That drives new sales quite a bit."

According to Mauler, getting new customers involved with a series which they may not have invested in at full price also pushes sales of DLC, but initiatives such as EA's Online Pass, which encourage direct payments to the publisher in return for access to online modes and features, aren't particularly effective.

"Our data says that used customers play a lot less online than new customers. The number's very low - like 15, 20 per cent."

The reason for that, Mauler feels, is the diminishing attractiveness of online offerings as time goes on and the users become more core, increasing the experience gulf for new adopters. Instead, he says, second-hand users will invest in DLC, extending their game experience.

Mauler's thoughts are unlikely to coincide too closely with those of publishers, given the vested interest he represents. However, he also makes a point about scheduling which may find more sympathy amongst industry figures, despite its stronger phrasing.

"We the industry have done it to ourselves," Mauler says of the second hand market. "We take all the great releases and put them all in a two-month period.

"If you're an FPS fan, you look at all the games that are coming out this fall, and you'd have to be pretty wealthy to buy all of them. There are going to be people who buy Battlefield 3, and they're not going to have €60 for at least another month or two...they're all coming out so close together."

A lot of comments on the article were related to not liking how a used copy of a brand new game could come in a day or two after launch and that the publisher sees none of that money. I don’t know about you, but if I see a used game for a few dollars cheaper I still buy new. I don’t know if some nutball has jerked off onto the disc. Now if that game was $20-30 cheaper I might risk it, but $5? Nope.

Some comments got me irked.

This is the same argument illegal music downloaders made/make right?

And.

Thanks for sharing Mike, and I wish you and your team luck since you seem to be sincere enthusiasts. However, I think that used sales can be molded to benefit the industry -- consumers, retailers, and developers/publishers alike -- but that they currently (Gamestop model) are abused in a way that undeniably benefits executives at Gamestop far more than they deserve while eating into potential profits that developers need to stop getting laid off so often in this industry. There are a lot of things that need to happen to make this industry healthy and ethical, but used game sales strategies and lack of regulations/norms that protect IP creators have allowed Gamestop to swoop in and profit significantly off of our work.
To others saying the consumer gets to decide: If we really let the consumer decide what price point they wanted to pay, then everyone would just pirate games. Maybe you think this is ok, maybe not -- just throwing out there what extremes can occur when free market justification is followed unwaveringly.

And.

Someone send this story to all of the studios that closed down last year....oh yeah they closed down last year because of people kept buying there games used and not new.

And.

http://www.PostalGamer.com: Used sales benefit the whole industry

Which is a site that is used to buy and sell used games to people, and they will pay the publisher a portion of the proceeds because: “PostalGamer understands how the current used game retail environment is damaging the industry”.

Really? Fuck you all. This is my response to the article I linked to above.

Where do people, and publishers, get the idea that they deserve money from used sales? Because they made the game and all of a sudden that means they deserve money in perpetuity? When was the last time you heard Ford or Honda whining they are losing money on used car sales and that used car lots are stealing their profits? What about Samsung or Sony complaining that people selling TVs in garage sales are no better than pirates? Oh yeah they're not.

Why is it that after more than 30 years of making video games, publishers are only now crying about used sales? The idea that its killing the industry is rather silly since used sales have been around since the beginning of video games, and since the video game industry is bloody huge and making in the billions every year their arguments are rather weak.

 
I can't tell you how many times I've bought a used game and then gone on to buy the next version new. I started Civilization that way and have bought every version, and expansion pack (sometimes multiple times) new, over the years. So while Gamestop's argument in this case is self serving, they are making a valid point. The thing about a brand new game being offered used so quickly after its released is that someone had to have bought it new, brought it in to Gamestop, taken either cash or store credit (which gives you more back), and if they are taking store credit there is a very good chance they are buying another new, just released title. Is Gamestop making profit? Yes they are. When is that a crime?

The next time you buy a used car, send a few thousand to the manufacturer for all the hard work, design, prototypes and manufacturing they had to go through to put that product out. Sometimes years in development. Do you feel that is fair? Because they can use the exact same argument as game publishers are using. It doesn't matter that the scale is different, the argument is the same.

I am sure someone would mention the, 'but you're just 'licencing' a video game, you don't own it' argument. If video game companies really believed this, why didn't they crack down on used sales 30 years ago? Why did it take lower profits for them to start making that argument? This is a money grab by publishers nothing more. Lower profits hit, not because of piracy or used sales, but because of a massive recession. If we ever get out of the recession then we'll see people with more disposable income and buying more games.

I’m not even going to go into how new games are the same price at retail as they are at digital stores, yet the costs are a fraction of what they are at retail. I believe I may have mentioned that at some point.

It really annoys me that more and more people are buying into the whole ‘licensing’ shtick. They didn’t stop it for man many years, so precedent has been set. I don’t think they should be able to claim ‘licensing’ now. Plus I do see a slippery slope with this, and I’d rather not start it off.

Another computer bought

No not for me I just bought a telephone jack splitter and some more telephone wire cable so that we can plug in our fax machine.

No my nephew who is starting college this year needs a laptop so my mother asked me to start looking at laptops and find the best deal. Of course it all boils down to price, so I had to find out what she wanted to spend on him. So she asked me for prices, cause she knows nothing about computers. So I quoted from $500-700 would get him a decent computer.

So off I go to start looking for computers, its got to be available right away so internet stores are out, looked at some smaller stores to see what they had available and nothing really that good, the big box stores had better deals. In the end it was between Best Buy and Futureshop. Not the greatest, but they did have the best deals. I did notice something though, both stores carry ‘slightly’ different computers. This way you can’t go to them with a flyer from the other store and look for a deal, they won’t match it because its not the same computer. I came across this in getting my mother a computer for christmas as well.

I finally chose a computer at Best Buy for a few reasons. The comparable computer at Futureshop had 2gig less ram and only an increase of processor speed by .2. Personally I’d rather have more ram.

Best Buy computer

Futureshop computer

It was a little more expensive than my mother wanted to spend, but when I asked my brother what he was looking to spend his top end was $800, which that falls in under. They went together to buy it for him.

The benefit with the Best buy one was also if you bought the Office 2010 student version you also got Outlook, Publisher and Access for free, which actually brings that Office suite up to the Professional level (a $500 value in total for $99). The Futureshop one was just the basic Office 2010.

Both places were that if you bought a HP computer you got a free Xbox 360 as well. My brother rolled his eyes when I said that, cause he doesn’t want his son playing games while at college, but I told him that its free, and he can keep it at his apt and watch dvds on it, now he doesn’t need a dvd player. Plus I said he could get some golf games and play those (he loves him some golf games).

Overall my nephew is happy, my brother is happy, my mother is happy, and the oldest nephew is a bit jealous cause his laptop is about half as powerful as his younger brother’s. lol But he is happy too. I’m happy because I was able to be around to help them out and make sure my nephew got a computer that should hold well hardware wise.

Not being around for most of their lives I am trying to be as helpful as I can. We’ve driven them around looking for jobs, had them over for dinner, helped them with their resumes, and in general just being around for them. My brother and sister-in-law have thanked us a number of times for all the help we have given them with stuff, but we’re family and this is what we do for family. Well I suppose if you like your family you help them out. lol

Do you like pop?

I do. I probably drink more than I should, but this guy takes the cake.

I do like how he shut the big cola rep down though.

The sad thing? I never knew about this place until I was leaving the LA area. I would have loved to try some of that stuff out.

There is a Manitoba brewer of pop that uses real cane sugar instead of the HFCS used in pepsi and coke. I forget the name though, but I’m going to track it down again and try them out.

Yeah, short and sweet tonight (no pun intended).

Pies

So my mom and Tom with my nephew Matt were coming into town today and I figured I’d make my nice burgers again. So on the way to Safeway to get some groceries I decide to stop in at Mr. D’s Tart and Pie and grab us some dessert. They make some nice 4” pies and that way we can all have something different. I grabbed:

• 2 Raisin
• 2 Pecan
• 2 Cherry
• 4 Apple
• 1 Blueberry
• 1 Strawberry

All put in a nice box and ready to go.  Awesome, Tom is going to be in heaven (that man loves him some pies).

We stop at Safeway and I wrap up the pies in a rug I have in the back of the car because we have Ares in the car with us, I don’t want him getting at them. So off we go to get what we need and we are only in there for about 15 minutes. On the way back I see Ares in the front seat waiting for us. "’Oh good’, I think ‘he hasn’t gotten to the pies. Good boy Ares!’. Open the back of the CRV and there is the box, torn up and 10 of the 12 pies eaten. *sigh*

There sits Ares…

With a look of innocence on his face. Uh huh. Yeah right. I mean I know he knows he’s done wrong, but I have to admire his balls for trying to pull it off. Like him sitting in the front seat is really going to fool us. Dog, I think we are smarter than you!

We get home and I ask Kathy to call the vet just in case. He’s had raisin and they are really bad for dogs. They said that we could just watch him and see if he gets lethargic, or we could get some hydrogen peroxide and dump it down his throat to induce vomiting. Which is really weird because we had seen this video earlier in the day (at 3:20 is the point where it becomes pertinentto my story).

(I swear he is talking about Cliff at 7:35)

Soooo…. We just went with the watching him to make sure he’s ok. So far no problems. This dog has a cast iron stomach I think. He’s eaten 4 Eatmore chocolate bars at one time before and he’s been fine. The dog is an eating machine.

The burning question I know you all have.

Does it work?

Yes. Yes it does. After uninstalling and reinstalling the PhysX file a few times, rebooting a few times, it suddenly seems to work. Why? I do not know. I’m still going to say fuck you Nvidia though. I shouldn’t had the problem in the first place. Yes I know Cliff, it may be misplaced anger, but just live with it. I’ve never claimed I was perfect. lol  

Grahpics set to high and runs fine. Less openworldy than I like, but its a console port so not bad for that. If I had paid $20 for it I’d be less happy, but for $5 its fine.

Now for something completely different…

Work is weird sometimes, some of the calls are uncomfortable. Ex boyfriends/husbands or ex girlfriends/wives stalking them  and them needing to change the number, a mother runs off with their child and the husband seeking text message files to give to the lawyer for the police investigation. I had one call where this girl says this guy is harassing her and is the guy that killed her daughter a few years ago and the police are not doing anything, and she is telling me all this and her only question is can she add time onto her pre-paid phone? Sometimes the calls are tough to take, specially when someone has lost someone and they are taking care of their accounts. I’ve seen some reps crying when they get off the phone because of the story they have just heard.

I didn’t get this call and its kind of sad/funny, this guy calls in to do a transfer of service from a phone in his name to his wife’s name, the rep tells him what needs to happen and that they will give his wife a call to finish it. He didn’t know that, and tells the rep that ‘I guess I should tell my wife we are separating before we do this then?’ Yeah. Nice eh?

One day I was on a late call, we close at 6pm and I finally got off the phone with him at 6:25. I was on the phone with him trying to help him understand his bill, and the hardest part of our billing system (which really does suck. The kicker, he could not see the bill at all, he was blind. At about 6:05 the supervisor came around to bug me into hurrying me up and get off the call, good naturedly harassing me. Well she was going to until I told her ‘outstanding balance credit, and he’s blind’. She winced, hung around for about 8 minutes listening to the call and then just waited till I was done. The next day I got a commendation from her for making the guy happy, understand what had happened and been so patient with the customer. My manager was really happy with that.

Overall I am enjoying my job, but there are days when you get those calls which can really impact you. And if you get a nasty customer your first call, the rest of your day is toast. Its hard to pull back from that.

(Yes I know this post is a little late, but I was responding to a post in one of Cliff’s topics, and I don’t pre-write my topics at all. So there.)

Fuck you Nvidia, fuck you with a fucking fuck stick!

Ok, so I have no games that can push my new system at all. Going from a 10 year old AGP system to a 6 core is a bit of a jump obviously. I had been looking at FPS games to see what would be nice, cheap and a good game. Well Metro 2033 was on sale yesterday for $5, so I picked it up. It was one I had looked at when it was $20 and thought that would be a fair price to pay for it too, and $5 was too good to pass up.

[sidebar] Metro 2033 needs to be played through the Steam client, of which I am not a fan of. Personally I just don’t think I should have to run a 3rd party software when I want to play my game. But, that’s just me. I don’t really have a problem with Steam, I think Valve is a great company, I just want my purchases to be between me and the company that made it. So me getting the game to be run through Steam is kind of a big deal for me, maybe not for others, but for me that is pretty big. [/sidebar]

So I install it overnight, cause it took forever to download, and an hour ago I tried to play it. I get this message:

The program can’t start because PhysXLoader.dll is missing from your computer. Try reinstalling the program to fix this problem.

So I search the net to find solutions. I uninstalled it and reinstalled it. Nope. Same error. Do more searching to find out Nvidia decided to fuck with anyone not owning an Nvidia card and make it so the game will not work with any other card but their own.

Fuck you you fucking bastards.

This is just pure fucking bullshit I cannot believe it. I just simply do not understand it at all. I can’t find a fix for it other than one that uses two separate video cards, one Nvidia, the other an ATI. Yeah, that’s not much of a help. I can’t find any other solutions either. So until then…

Fuck you Nvidia you fucking shitheels. You get no more money from this family ever again.

Bastards.

Work talk

I had a conversation the other day that went like this:

“Hi Jackie (supervisor), this guy wants FSB, but LDB won’t take it, he’s on PPI and it needs IPS to get FSB to work in LDB right? Now do I do the credits in SAP or OCC?”

FSB, LDB, PPI, IPS, SAP, OCC, MMCD, RD30, LD50, HIP2, C27, C26, C65, C61, S7, S2, CID, VMM, TT1, TTB, P5LD, DTL, etc, etc, etc.

So many codes, and we pretty much know them all by sight. Maybe not off the top of our heads, but when we see it we know. Its pretty amazing and a little freaky. I’m sure all of us have the same at our works and its just kind of funny how we can go from speaking one language to speaking another with hardly a thought about it.

Work talk vs home talk.

I wonder if multilingual people transition this easily?

Oh crap, today is almost tomorrow and no blog post yet.

I almost went to bed without writing about something. Again, I am at a loss about what to write about… Games! Games will do nicely.

I am currently playing Might and Magic VIII Day of the Destroyer, a huge graphic improvement over MM7, but nothing that even comes close to pushing my machine. I went through my fairly large Gamersgate account, and I have nothing that I could use to really push my new machine with. There are games I want that could (like FEAR 3), but I’m not willing to pay $50 for a game. That’s not to say I won’t pay for a game at brand new prices, because I have with Mount and Blade: Warband and with M&B Fire and Sword. Personally I think that games bought digitally should be cheaper than at the retailer.

See if you take  $60 game and sell it at the retail stores the publisher gets about $27 per game to split up with development, marketing, other expenses. The rest goes to retailers, distribution, royalties, etc. Now that’s a rough estimate, but pretty accurate. If you are wondering where I got that info its here.

Where does this tie in with digital distribution? Well on a $60 game the digital distributer takes a 30% cut which is $18, leaving $42 to the publisher. Which is $15 per game more than retail. It would be easy to drop the price of new digital releases by $5-10 and they would still make more money. Do I see this going to change? No not really. Even if retail is totally gone except for the special editions with their ‘special’ items in the box, the execs at game companies will just look at it and say that people are used to paying those prices already, so why lower them? More profits for them is good company policy. I honestly cannot fault them for it, but I can certainly not buy their brand new product. I’m not so insane I HAVE to have a game. But that’s just me.

I also downloaded Star Control 1 & 2. I haven’t played them yet, but they are installed. Also Mount and Blade Warband is installed and I am just grabbing the Floris Expanded Mod Pack right now. So that one I’ll see how well it will push my system (probably not that much), once it gets modded up with some better graphics, we’ll see how that looks.

Three days, three computers

In the last three days I’ve written three blog posts on three different computers. My original old one (which has died), my wife new one last night, and now my new one. I have to say working on my wife’s computer last night was the hardest. Not only was she hanging over my shoulder, pacing back and forth, sighs, and in general just the general angst you feel when someone is on your computer. The only thing missing was a whiney voice asking ‘are you done yet?’ every 30 seconds.

My computer I took back to Computer Trends today and we just did a straight swap and no problems at all. So I spent part of today working to put programs back on the computer. The other part of today was spent napping because I really should have been at work but woke up in a lot of pain, so I called in. Not great, but I do see my doctor again tomorrow so we’ll see what we can do.

I have two HDs in my old computer I need to swap into my new one, lucky they are SATA because the new one has no room for a IDE HD. I have an old video card that may work to slap in there to see if I can get it working enough get things off the one IDE I have.

Kathy spent her day moving stuff from her computer to her new one. We were able to get that one up and running to be able to move stuff, but it still needs more investigations as to what happened exactly. But as I said yesterday if I am comfortable with these old computers I’ll give em to my nephews.

Do you ever get an itch that cannot be scratched? Like the itch itself is under the skin? I get them in the area of my back that is mostly numb (from my surgeries). I have one now and its bloody driving me insane. Just so ya know.

So yeah. This is my blog post for tonight. More inane ramblings.

What a bloody day!

OK so the thousands of my loyal followers that were paying attention yesterday. Ok, maybe not thousands.

The hundreds of you.

Well ok. The two of you And, one of them is my wife, so does she even count? No no dear. Of course you count! Put down the knife... Just think calming thoughts. Think about invading other countries bringing 'democracy' and 'freedom'. That's a good girl.

Speaking of Americans...

This lady thinks she should be president.

I shit you not.

Anyway… So you might remember I was leading up to something yesterday and then backed away from it. What what I was going in to was going from this:

     

To this:

Much nicer yes?

The desks are pine, and are actually the very same desks I sold to a friend of mine 10 years ago when I moved down to the US to be with Kathy. At the time they were pretty much brand new and it really sucked having to give them up. Well my buddy and his wife are expecting a child soon, so his office is now going to be a baby room. He sold me back my old desk, which is a very nice thing for him to have done and since they are very nice its also great for our computers.

Well….

It would be great if our computers worked. Yes, you heard me. My computer, after a bios update a year ago has never been off because when I tried to it would just automatically reboot. Now it will turn on, but nothing shows up onscreen, monitor just goes to DVI power save mode. Kathy’s computer would not even turn on again. Both computers, if you read Cliffs blog and my cursing at him when he posted about his new computer specs, are 10 year old AGP systems that were pushed to about the limits they could go. 3.2ghz hyper-threaded Intel single core CPU, 2 gigs RAM, 512mb DDR3 video cards. Basically pretty good computers, even if they were 10 years old. If I can get them up and running again I’m giving them to my nephews to use.

So in a heat of panic, as my wife needs her computer to make a living (I might have mentioned she is a ghost writer at some point, we went out and bought some new computers. We went to Computer Trends and bought this computer x2.

Asus, AMD Phenom II x6 2.6ghz, 8gb RAM, 1TB HD, ATI HD 5750 1gb video card.

Not bad for a prebuilt system and once you get rid of Trend Micro’s really bloody annoying virus scanner that was blocking everything we tried to do, it worked out fine.

Fine did I say? Not quite. You see after setting up the computer for my wife, women come first, my computer doesn’t work. Nothing comes up on the monitor. Yes, the same problem as my old computer. However I also tried it over where my wife’s computer works fine, and still the same issue. So after work tomorrow I get to go in and see what went wrong.

So its been an interesting day. I don’t think we ate until 6pm, and that was with all the moving of stuff around. Hell as of now I’ve only had one half of my sub sammich, which will get eaten after tonight’s post.

Hopefully tomorrow will be better, although I doubt it. Mondays always suck. If people don’t get 24 hour cell customer service they are unhappy, and apparently its all my fault. Joyful.

WTF?

I donno what the heck to write about tonight. I’m not like Cliff that can write two days of posts in advance.

I could write about the game I am currently playing, Might and Magic VII: for Blood and Honor. Its pretty fun, I’ve played it before ages ago, and got a good deal on it at GOG.com, so I’m playing it again. On wait in MM8, which looks to have upgraded the graphics nicely.

I could write about the house I have no hope in hell of getting, but I’m still going to go see tomorrow anyway. It would be a perfect house for my brother & I to go in together with, but not enough time to do it. I love the garage though, perfect for a nice big workshop.

I could write about how I’m feeing better today after a bad few days. Thanks to the loving attention of my wife and some pills. I have to do a bit of lifting tomorrow, so we’ll see how the back holds out.

I could write about… No I’ll wait till tomorrow for that one… Yes I am going to keep you in suspense.

I could write about the Battletech League that I found out about today. So far I have zero information on it, but since I am a fan of the Battletech universe and the Mechwarrior games I’m going to take a look and see if its something I will start playing. If its still around. I don’t even know that much right now.

So yeah, I don’t really know what to write about today.

Decrepit

Yeah, that’s pretty much me in a nutshell. Kathy likes to joke that I am falling apart all the time. Of course she is not meaning it as hurtful or anything and I don’t take it like that. The truth is I am decrepit and falling apart. I’m getting shooting pain down my sciatic nerve again after around 3 years of it not being there. Some times its just so bad my whole body aches like I have a fever.

The last few weeks I have been in a good amount of pain. One day I even had to leave work early because I just could not handle the pain and trying to figure out people’s bills (for those that do not know I work for a cell phone company in their call centre billing). I have so many knots in my back I could be a massage school training dummy and keep going back every day for them to get more knots out. While that’s half in jest, I probably could do that.

Next week I’m supposed to meet with the ergonomic guy the company has and see what he can do for me. I’ve been using a stand up desk that is someone else’s desk while they are on vacation. My manager has been very supportive and I’ve been keeping her in the loop with my doctor’s appointments and such.

I do need to lose weight, and I have been eating healthier, the problem is that I also need to exercise and I need to use a pool to do it. I can’t walk very far anymore and even taking the dog out for a walk ends up hurting, so Kathy has been doing it. She’s been getting a little frustrated that she has had to do it all the time lately and I can understand that. I need to do the research to find out when I can get to a pool to do the exercise. What I’d really like is to work with a physical therapist who can guide me through getting back in shape without causing more problems. Problem is that costs money and my Blue Cross will not cover that at all.

This is what I’d really like. It would be perfect for me. I hear the Pan Am pool in Wpg has one, but I don’t think I can get access to it without a physical therapist. Figures.

Folklorama

I donno if you’ve ever heard of Folklorama, but my wife has been hearing about it for around 10 years from me. Its a really cool event, well multiple events really. It has around 40-45 different countries represented and its their food, music, dance and sometimes even their alcohol on display. I grew up going to this and its given me an appreciation for different cultures and different foods.

So my wife & I are going to go tomorrow (friday) to 3-4 pavilions. We are in week two now, so it will be the Africa/Caribbean, Ukraine-Kyiv, Paraguay and if we are still hungry the Hungaria pavilion as its right near our house.

Its stuff like this that makes me want to do culture weekends. I may have mentioned it last year but I think it would be great. Take a weekend and from breakfast on Saturday to dinner on Sunday we will pick one culture and make those meals. Some will be easy, some will be hard as special ingredients may be needed. Hell I wanted to make Arros Con Gandules (rice with pigeon peas) I had to search out where I could get pigeon peas (gandules) and found a Mexican specialty store. The owner of the store was very friendly when we told her what I was going to be making, and that Kathy was from California and could understand a bit of Spanish. But I know that we will run into this a good amount when we actually start our weekends, it will just have to be planned properly.

On a side note… This morning, before I go to work, I glance over at my wife’s computer and she’s looking at the picture from this link. So tell me ladies, how would this be even remotely comfortable? My wife said it was an oddity, so she had to look. Uh huh. That’s why she stared at it for so long.

*sigh*

Homes, apartments, condos oh my!

So yeah, another topic on homes. If you’re bored please move along… As I mentioned before rentals here are not exactly easy to get, my brother, the one who lives in Aaman Jordan, has been looking for an apartment to rent and hasn’t been finding any luck at all. He has been looking in a nicer area of town, but that’s because that is where their youngest son is going to go to school. He came by with his oldest son today for dinner, I invited them over for hamburgers on my new grill, and I finally got to make my nice hamburgers in Canada for the first time.

• Ground beef
• Diced red onion
• Grated carrot
• Oats
• Egg
• Lowry’s Seasoning Salt
• Pepper
• Liquid smoke
• Mix all above ingredients well and make into thin patties. Then sprinkle Gorgonzola cheese in the middle, place a second patty on top and make sure the edges are squeezed together as much as you can.
• Gorgonzola cheese

Its yummy. Although the cheese will run out the sides still, but you’ll still get a good enough blue cheese flavour for it to taste real good. I’m not a blue cheese fan, but I love this burger. My brother and nephew liked em a lot.

Anyway… my brother was pretty disappointed with looking for apartments. Places he had called last week to look at apts today were either not answering his call today, or said they had were gone already. So he’s kind of weary about that.

One thing my wife and I have been talking about is possibly going in with my brother on getting a house. Multiple times since they have been back  they have said they regretted selling their house here when they went to the Middle East as they could not afford the house now. So I talked with him a bit about this tonight to see what his thoughts were. It would take longer for him to be able to get into a place, unlike an apartment, but it would be an investment for both of us. I said that in 2-3 years we could look at if they wanted to buy us out, or us them, or just sell it on the market and come away with the increase in the market value including the upgrades we will have put in it. So he is going to take that to his wife to see what she says. They have a realtor, one of my sister-in-law’s friends, so that could be a good help.

I also showed him mls.ca and how to look for houses there. Gave him an idea of what a mortgage on a 200k house would be and how that could be divided into two to make it very easy. I also added that when they left their oldest will need a place to live and trying to find a place on his own will be pretty hard. I said if we went together after they left their oldest would pay their portion of the mortgage, which would be cheaper than rent he would pay, and we would also be there to help keep an eye on him. He seemed somewhat receptive, but we’ll have to to see how it goes. I’m not going to pin hopes on it. One thing for sure is to create a document where it clearly states where each of us stands on upgrades, repairs, etc… That way in 3 years time there is no fight over anything, its evenly split. Money is never a good thing to get in between family, so I want to head that off at the pass.

On another note.

My wife tried Lotsa Fizz candy for the first time tonight. I didn’t tell here what they were, or what they did, but I could sure tell when it finally fizzed in her mouth (Relax Cliff, not that kind of fizz… Dirty mind!) cause she was ‘Oh! Yup, its fizzing.’, it was pretty funny. That and I got her some gobstoppers too.

Basement dweller

No that’s not a picture of me (sorry ladies). But since that’s what I currently am (basement dweller) I figured I’d come up with nice imagery for you. You’re welcome.

Its been almost a year since we’ve moved back to Canada and we’ve been living in the basement of my mother’s house since then. Not the plan we had hoped for, but not overly bad. My mother and her husband Tom are up taking care of a camp, ordering the food and doing handiwork around the camp, so they haven’t been around for a few months and its been pretty nice for both of us. They may even stay the winter there if everything goes right.

Its pretty crazy with rentals here in Winnipeg, less than 1% vacancy rates. Hell its cheaper to pay a mortgage than rent. We almost were paying a mortgage too, our offer was accepted, but the last minute financing fell through. So that was pretty crappy. If you ever leave the country for 10 years, keep an active credit card here so that you can maintain a credit score. My number is good, but because there was no activity it means nothing. So be forewarned.

So we are on the hunt for a place to live, be it rentals or mortgage. Which will it be? I donno yet.

I might even blog about it (maybe).

Well colour me BBQ'd

I figured I'd just head over to Cliff's blog and see if he'd manned up and done the AAR he'd promised if I got him the game he wanted. Alas he has not, and will surely tell all and sundry that he needs a new 6-core, high end machine to play it on. Sure Cliff, sure. It's fukkin ponies man!

Better be careful or that 'other' game will look SOOOOOO nice next to all your war games... I'm just sayin.

But, I digress... I go over to Cliff's site and what do I see? My name up on the 'I will shame myself publicly (well as much 'public' as we can get) by writing a blog post a day challenge'. Well bloody hell I forgot about that. So I suppose here I am. I may do a lot of swearing at Cliff, so no surprise to any of Cliff's close friends who I am sure do a lot of that themselves.

Anyway... I finally bought a BBQ. Its been almost a year since we've moved back to Winnipeg and about a year since I have BBQ'd anything. So we saw a BBQ on sale at Canadian Tire for a decent price ($79.99) and figured we'd go ahead and finally buy one. Not the one we wanted but its a BBQ. So on our way home we stop and grab a few NY steaks, and after putting it together and firing it up for 20 minutes or so I took a break. I mean hell, the piece of shit was a pain to put together and I actually had to be outside! In the sun! Do you know what that does to my pale complexion? I might tan! How can I keep my basement dweller cred if I have a tan? So after a few hours, after its started to get dark, I decide I can venture outside and grill. A little bit of Montreal steak spice and pepper, and ohhh they cooked up perfect! A baked potato and some beer and its a perfect meal!

Until... Kathy after eating about half, and in her fervor to eat this deliciously cooked steak, breaks the plate and spills the steak onto the floor. So she sat there with this horrid, sad, look on her face, sort of in shock at losing this culinary masterpiece. So I did what any loving husband would do. I laughed at her.

*sigh*

No I didn't, I am a sad sad man, I just helped her clean it up and cut a hunk off of my steak and gave it to her. Now I have to say that I had barely touched my steak at this point. In eating I am very methodical and eat vegetables first (they cool fastest), then potatoes/rice/pasta, then meat. Its how I've always eaten and its just what I do. Now here comes this sad face of a wife who looks like a lost puppy in the rain, and I give her some of my barely touched steak. Personally I think she did it on purpose to get more steak than I did. She's American, she'd do things like that.