Sofas, SubSpace and SF

This space for rent – reasonable rates, plus cookies.

Feb 15 – Brian on StarShip

Right off the top, I have to mention that Brian’s cover painting for the February 24^th 2010 issue of StarShipSofa looks downright amazing. You can check it out on his website, though if you want to leave a comment, you’ll have to email him – for now. Go Brian; here’s to many more paintings to come!

If you missed it last week, here it is again: I’ve managed to fix my Vonage phone, so I can once again receive calls to my home phone instead of just being forwarded to my cell. I may even pick up a $10.00 answering machine this coming week to connect, for the times I’m at work and miss your call. Sweet.

Now here’s a crazy time-waster that I tried way back in 2001, and shockingly is still around: SubSpace. One of the first online multiplayer real-time shooters, this insane game has you jump into an arena with one of several kinds of space fighters and fight as part of a team. It’s fun for a while, but all too soon the skill levels of the other players makes you realize that they’ve all spent waaaay too much time playing it.

Feb 16 – The Glasses Games

For my day off today, I spent a good portion of the morning and afternoon driving around in Victoria, going to various eyeglasses places to get quotes. Overall I was unimpressed, as the prices ranged from the mid-300’s to over $600 – the priciest was Sears with a “2-for-1” special that wasn’t special in my eyes( pardon the pun )in any way. Though the frames there DID fit perfectly and the sunlgasses in particular( RayBans )fit me the best of any I had ever worn, I can’t justify that sort of massive outlay. So I’m still looking and calling around, as well as searching online at places like Goggles4u.com and ClearlyContacts.ca – the idea of glasses for $38.00 CAN intrigued me, but I am a firm believer in you get what you pay for... at least, that if you pay very little you usually get the same. Anyone can pay a LOT and still get crap; it’s the low end of the spectrum that offers the most challenge to navigate safely.

As for my laptop running WinXp virtually: I’ve given up on it for games use, as it’s just too slow to be worthwhile. Even an old game like Neverwinter Nights chugs along, so it looks like all I’ll be using it for is very old, very slow games that don’t rely on a good framerate to be fun. Darn it.

Are you an Olympic fan? What about a bacon fan? Care to combine the two at... BaconNinja.com?

Feb 17 – DaVinci Did It

Looking for a job? Have to update your resume? Well, we all do eventually... even Leonardo DaVinci had to put his out there to look for work, at the age of 30 in 1482... that’s over 500 years ago, folks. You can take a look at the beautiful original here, along with the translation. I have to say Leo really sells himself!

After work today I decided to head down to WalMart, as I remembered they have an optical department. While fairly small, within a minute of walking in I had spotted a great pair of frames... for half off a price that was already half that of other optical stores. A few minutes later I had placed an order for the glasses with those frames, for around $200.00 all told – 1/3 the cost of the ‘special’ at Sears Optical. I left with a smile on my face, and as a bonus the optician was going to try to patch up my broken frameless glasses at no charge as a backup for me.

Now I will sleep better at night, and not only for the lack of headaches in my near future. If you;re having trouble sleeping, for whatever reason, then you’ll want to check out the Top 10 Foods To Help You Sleep list – yes, warm milk is on there... as are bananas!

Feb 18 – Faugh on Win7

So far, my laptop and Windows7 are still unable to come to a compromise, forcing me to reboot the thing two or three times a day. I’ve taken to running a LOT of programs at once, so what when I return to use the laptop I can exit one... then another... and so on, until Win7 gets it into it’s brain that I want to DO something and lets me launch a new program of my choice, like a game or email client. Considering that I didn’t know about my 90-day technical support with Microsoft until AFTER it had passed, I still get steamed thinking about it.

In terms of software, I don’t usually plug this or that – save for the free stuff. One program I like to use once a month or so is WinDirStat, which gives you a visual image of all the crap that’s taking up space on your hard drive. So with one easy glance, you can see which hidden massive files that you’ve forgotten about are hogging precious room on your system... and delete them. Simple, and better yet: free!

A short blurb: my glasses were repaired by the Walmart optician... this is a Big Thing, as I’ve been unable to spend much time this week in front of the computer and type with contacts in; headache-inducing after a long day. While I wouldn’t want to test if the repairs are permanent, I’m treating them with kid gloves for now and thanking my lucky comets that I’ll have them as backup to the new pair on order!

Feb 19 – 4K In readers!

Today my blog passed the 4000-hit mark, which works out to roughly 6 visitors a day for the last two years or so. Not a ton of traffic by any stretch these days, but still, it’s traffic. ChurchOfTheBanana.com by comparison received over 36,000 unique visits in 2009, compared to less than 6000 in 2008 when it was created . That’s a 600% increase year- over- year, so I’m hoping that we can revive it in 2010 in some way. Those sort of traffic numbers mean that people are still hitting the site, regardless of the lack of updates it’s had.

Writing tips: One thing you can do with your original character you’ve so lovingly created is run it through the Mary-Sue Litmus test, which will give you a good idea if you’ve actually  created something original, or a horrifyingly derivative mishmash of parts. Kind of like a Frankenstein detector, if you think about it – apparently U2’s Bono scores a whopping 72 out of 100, but he’s real.

How’s this for combining creativity, an original idea and LEGO? It’s CrawlerTown... and it’s just amazing; when I think about the sheer amount of labour that has to have gone into the thing, my brow sweats.

Feb 20 – Taxing Weather

I follow quite a few online comics, as the best ones are those that I find rewarding to their readers with their continuous stories and character development. Plus humour. One of those is Looking For Group, which follows the trials and tumults of a really oddball group of adventurers; the humour glue of the bunch is Richard, an undead warlock. If you’ve never read it, pop on over, click on the first comic and give it a few minutes... your funny bone will thank you.

It was a gorgeous day outside: not a cloud in the sky, and not a flake of snow on the ground – hasn’t been for most of the winter here, in fact. While I was out earlier in the week, I saw flowers blooming all along the boulevards, though I still wonder how they survive the single-digit temperatures that are still the norm at night here. People in t-shirts were out all over today, with no wind to chill their pale arms. Which is why when I think of the snow that’s packed down on most of the rest of the country, I hearken back to the early 70’s, when you could buy a Flame Gun cheap, and remove pesky snow with ease!

After work I sat down after work and plugged in a few more numbers into my tax return online, having received the final few papers in the mail this week. To my immense relief the numbers are not nearly as horrible as I thought. I still get a twinge in my gut when I think about my reassessment that arrived this last summer for 2007 and 2008, but there’s nothing I can do about that – taxes are taxes, and you do the best you can to minimize their impact. Maybe in my old age, when I own a private island or two, I’ll drop in on my accounting department and see how things have changed in the last decade of not worrying.

Feb 21 – Authoring The Sky

Oh great... just when you think advertising can’t get more pervasive, some of the brains at MIT come up with something new. Having something like that hovering in the sky at night would be a hazard to air  traffic, and I can’t see it being approved over major cities.

I had a good conversation with Brian today about things relating to StarShipSofa.com, as a vehicle for both my writing and podcast work. I was reminded of a recent posting on io9.com, which takes a mathematical look at what age popular authors were first published at.

DejaVu: the lovely weather means my head is paining me something awful today, so I’ve spent most of the day NOT watching TV, but reading, napping and popping headache tablets. At least it was bearable by the time I had to head into Victoria for a work meeting around dinnertime, which was very positive: we’re looking to hire people. With the work outlook looking brighter, my stress levels will dim – I like.

Writing the blog this week was somewhat easier, as my eyes weren’t tired from the contacts being in for over 12 hours. This time next week I’ll have my new glasses with a new prescription, so that may mean the headaches will return – at least until I get used to them.