Christmas, Concepts and Crazy

The word of the week is tenuous.

Dec 20 – Wearing Presents

Only a few more days until Christmas and the feeding frenzy at retailers across the country is in full swing. I bowed out this year( and last year, and the year before )for as I mentioned I don’t shop in December. That still doesn’t stop me from surfing online for cool gift ideas, or just ideas for things to get for myself should the need( and cash )arise in sync. One area I’m keeping my eye on is wearable tech: Tom’s Hardware has a great list of Wearable Tech of the Future with some really cool things. I thought the eJOUX concept wristlet and the wearable suitcase were really cutting-edge, though again I would be hard-pressed to find a practical use for them when it comes time to pony up the asking price.

Dec 21 – Not Quite NWN

There’s a sale on this week on Xbox live, for a fair number of games. I already have quite a number of unfinished games( ie. most of my collection )so I’m more curious to see the discounts than the actual games themselves. Several of my friends have recommended Sacred 2 to me, as being very similar to NWN  - though this review states it’s more of a Diablo clone. I’m not one to spend hours a week running around trying to l00t and farm gold; I’d rather spend the time playing with my friends online and interacting with them than trying to get a Sword of Uber-Headsmacking. I think I’ll check out the trial later this week and see how it fares...

Dec 22 – Driving me Crazy( -er )

The Hard Drive Saga continues... but it’s getting better. I must have swapped out the drive at least a dozen times this past week, at one point sticking in the old drive from my parent’s laptop and installing Ubuntu 10.10 on it, just to see if there was a hardware issue with the laptop – nope. What I’ve discovered is that while the new drive goes into Sleep Mode and wakes up from such perfectly, it does NOT play well when it goes into Hibernation. So, I’ve set the laptop to ONLY go to Sleep and not Hibernate( save and shutdown, essentially )and that seems to have done the trick – for now. Some time with Seagate Tech Support next week might turn up a permanent solution, but for now I’m no longer faced with returning the drive under a warranty replacement. Unless it does turn out to be a defect...

Dec 23 – It’s an iPhone!

Telus and I kissed and made up today... or at least agreed not to sue each other. After a fair bit of wrangling on the phone, I activated a used iPhone 3G I purchased inexpensively from a co-worker. It’s under the 2-year contract that still remains in effect, with a decent data plan and features... plus a $100 credit towards a new phone up until the end of 2011. So in essence, I can use my ‘new’ iPhone for a year while I decide if I want to go Android or Apple, as well as what model of phone I eventually want... for less. Overall, I’m not really upset, except for the contractual hassles and hoops I went through to get to this point. I do not believe I will ever sign another contract again, with any cell company, for any reason – they make my head hurt. Better to go to another model of cell plan, like the Koodoo Tab( which is a Telus subsidiary, btw )and avoid contracts altogether.

Dec 24 – Merry Xmas Eve and All That

Not so busy a Christmas Eve today; I was out the door and home by 2pm, which I wasn’t expecting. It was the final of 11 days in a row of working, albeit with some of those days shorter than others. I spent a good part of the evening playing COD: Black Ops, which I admit isn’t the most peaceful way to spend the night before Christmas... but it WAS a fair bit of fun.  I also spent way too much time surfing the Apple AppStore, looking for cheap / free apps that would be useful to me while avoiding the thousands of CrapApps that clog the place. One I immediately installed is DropBox, which is a file-sharing app that lets me drop whatever files( docs / pics / etc )into a folder on my laptop and have it be sharable between all my tech gadgets, be they computer, iPhone or what-have-you. Much easier than trying to pick and choose things to carry with you; wireless connectivity at its finest. Not to be confused with FileFactory.com, which lets you host up to 500gigs of files to share with friends / family – free!

Dec 25 – Christmas, of course!

A very relaxing Christmas, spent at home with my family... well, unfortunately not my sister who is waaaay out in AB, but we talked for a while today – that was nice. We had a great turkey dinner early at 1pm( leftovers! )and ended up watching the first two Shrek movies – great family time today. While we didn’t do much at all in the way of presents, the highlight of the day was the Zhu Zhu Hamster pet that we picked up for the cat. Whoever thought up these kids toys should expand into the pet market; these electronic scamperers are the perfect distraction for cats. They make cute random noises, zoom around in random paths and have a faux-fur finish that just asks for a cat to bat at playfully. Very amusing.

Dec 26 – Boxed In

Boxing Day turned out to be a bust at work, which was fine: it was steady but not insanely busy as I had suspected it might have turned out to be. The day passed quickly enough but at no point was I overwhelmed with customers, despite news that it was fairly busy at retailers here in Victoria. I didn’t bother this year, as there’s nothing I really need / really want to spend the cash for... and certainly nothing I was going to line up overnight for, even if there’s no snow out this way. I spent the evening typing up my blog, losing it, then trying to recover it from drafts / saved caches – no luck there. I packed it in after midnight and slept, dreaming oddly of see-through high-end toilets with colourful logos... which probably meant I shouldn’t have gone to bed angry. Or ate all those cookies left out for Santa.

Yes, I’m annoyed at Windows LiveWriter, as it happily overwrote the blog entry for Dec. 13 for NO discernable reason – no setting or preference can explain why it picked the second-most-recent post to blast into nothingness. So I’m back to editing in Word until I figure out how to safeguard my blog’s contents from random deletion – another black mark for Windows and its ilk.