Ne-e-e-e-e-erd!

The three most frustrating words in the TV world…

Posted on by Patrick

…are to be con­tin­ued.

Watch­ing an episode of Bat­tlestar Galac­ti­ca, my one TV addic­tion, and all the play­ers are in place: The Cylons have arrived, the humans are on the ground, about to be over­run by the ene­my, and in orbit, Galac­ti­ca has six nuclear weapons aimed down at the planet.

And the screen goes black and those three lit­tle words appear at the bot­tom of the screen.

Gaah!

Thirteen irregular word uses

Posted on by Patrick

To quote Calvin (of Calvin and Hobbes fame): “Verb­ing weirds language”.

  1. Impact is not a verb, no mat­ter how often peo­ple say “the plane impact­ed into the mountainside”.
  2. Irre­gard­less is not a word. Regard­less of what you I might think. (How­ev­er, I still think it’s a point­less word mean­ing­less ver­bal bas­tard. (Thanks, Doug!))
  3. Unthawed means to freeze, not to make not frozen.

    4. Con­tin­ue read­ing “Thir­teen irreg­u­lar word uses” →

Update

Posted on by Patrick

It’s been a lit­tle while, has­n’t it?

Tonight I have judo. Next week­end I may be head­ing into the city for a coach­ing tech­ni­cal class. Yes, the two of them are related.

I’ve been work­ing on Every­thing that nev­er hap­pened, but not enough. I need to get some seri­ous writ­ing done tomorrow.

Face­book is, as I think I point­ed out ear­li­er, a bit like crack over DSL.

Xubun­tu still rules, and still runs my nerd-box upstairs. It’s even lost its WiFi net­work con­nec­tion less fre­quent­ly and less cat­a­stroph­i­cal­ly than the Win­dows box that it has replaced.

And that’s all I can think of now. More updates when I have some­thing to say.

yrs,
-pat

Nerd alert

Posted on by Patrick

I’m writ­ing this entry on my new nerd box.

The oth­er day I bought a sur­plus com­put­er from the local school divi­sion. It cost me all of $35. It’s a 1.1GHz machine with a 20-GB hard dri­ve and 128 MB of RAM. I brought it home, burned Xubun­tu to a CD, and slapped in an extra 256MB DIMM and a wire­less net­work card from my (dead) pre­vi­ous nerd box. My friend Kevin (who’s anoth­er com­put­er geek) came over, and we fired her up. After a cou­ple false starts (most­ly involv­ing the onboard video, which was­n’t capa­ble enough), we got Xubun­tu running.

Kevin had to leave, and I had some fid­dling left to do (most­ly with the wireless–I had to fig­ure out how to enable WEP so my neigh­bours can’t leech inter­net from me, not that they would), and by 9 PM tonight I had it hum­ming along just peachy freakin’ keen.

So the moral of the sto­ry? I’m awe­some. Maybe as awe­some as Xubun­tu, though that might be push­ing it.

The intent is to use the nerd box as a writ­ing and surf­ing machine. From what I’ve seen so far, it should be more than capa­ble in those roles.

Fun, but not productive

Posted on by Patrick

So my wife bought me Lego Star Wars II: The Orig­i­nal Tril­o­gy a month and a half ago, for my birth­day, and I’m addict­ed. I played tonight for a while (about an hour and a half, I think–time gets slip­pery when I’m in the throes of a nerd-game), and I man­aged to fin­ish the “Sto­ry” play of The Empire Strikes Back.

The neat thing about the game, though, is that once you’ve played a giv­en lev­el through in Sto­ry mode, you can re-enter the lev­el in Free Play mode, which allows you to take in any char­ac­ters or vehi­cles you’ve unlocked or “bought” in the Mos Eis­ley Can­ti­na (which serves as a home base). So I decid­ed to try the first chap­ter of Empire again, only this time with some dif­fer­ent vehi­cles: a TIE Inter­cep­tor and the Mil­le­ni­um Fal­con, among others.

Then, as I was cruis­ing along the icy wastes of Hoth, fir­ing tur­bo­laser can­nons with glee­ful aban­don, I thought, Hmm, I won­der if I can get a screen­shot. I pushed the Print Screen but­ton, and lo, I end­ed up with this:

What I did tonight

Awe­some, I thought.

Then: I am such a nerd.

And… I got near­ly zero writ­ing done tonight. Maybe I burned out the oth­er night when I did 3200 words in three hours, stay­ing up way past my bed­time to do it.

Lego Star Wars kept me up late

Posted on by Patrick

For my birth­day, my dar­ling wife bought me Lego Star Wars (the orig­i­nal series one) for our PC. She also bought a sec­ond joy­stick so we can play the game together.

Mmmm... Star Wars... Lego...

I tried it out last night. I sat down to play for 20 min­utes while I wait­ed for a TV show to start.

Two hours lat­er I kind of came up for air.

All I can say is: Awesome!