Guys, Green and Gaming

The word of the week is funtastic. Which isn't a word.

Jan 24 - Nice Guys and Gorillas

A few days ago Yahoo put up an article( via LavaLife )about Nice Guys Finishing Last. An alternate title might have been ‘Men With No Spine Don’t Score’ which may or may not be true. What are your thoughts on this? Seems to be several hundred comments on the article since it was posted; some poignant, some just poisonous. Being what I consider to be a Nice Guy myself, I have to wonder if perhaps some folk lack a life outside of looking for a life... for when you take away the daily details, is there anything to you, sometime defining, outside of your work and family? Or is it a blank? Maybe we should leave it up to the animals of the planet; they’re evolving faster than you think:

Jan 25 – It’s a Green Winter

All the snow’s gone here in Victoria, even here in the ‘northern’ climes outside of the city. Rain’s moved in, along with some fairly foggy days at times... but with the temperatures hovering in the high single-digits, it’s fairly bearable. Joggers are out in light jackets (or less in some cases) and people consider ‘bundled up’ to be wearing a scarf AND gloves with a fall jacket. The lack of snow and the tons of green plant life around (mosses and coniferous trees, mostly) means that it feels like fall here, not winter, though the short days and lack of sunlight do take their toll. Still, not shoveling the white stuff or slipping on ice every other step is something I’ve still got to get used to every year, compared to Ontario’s knee-deep brown-and-grey winters. I’ve even got the heat OFF in my room; it’s 25 degrees and being heated by the new PC – another bonus.

Jan 26 - Best Times to Buy Stuff

Every year, you see sales come and go for seasonal items. A lot of things are seasonal, when it comes down to it – prices vary over the course of a year. So when IS the best time of year to buy things, like winter clothes, TV’s or other things? LifeHacker has a great chart that spells out precisely that – go have a look and save yourself some dough by buying off-season... and if it’s on sale, even better!

Jan 27 – On Gaming

On my day off today, the first thing I did was sell my copy of COD: Black Ops. I’d noticed I was becoming more and more frustrated while playing it solo, which is the exact opposite concept behind playing games: they should be entertaining ways to relieve stress, not add to it. So I made the decision to can the game, as I came away from more sessions angry than not, which sucked after a long day. I think what’s so frustrating to me is that in certain games like COD, you’d think you’d get better with practice( and I did, to a point )but most every game has hardcore players in it that hand you your ass in a sling over and over. That gets old fast; nobody likes to lose or come in at the low end of the scoreboard too many times before tossing in the towel and trying something else. The rest of my day was a mix of things, mainly going through mountains of old bills and papers, something I’ve put off doing for a while. It was somewhat cathartic to shred piles of them; like removing old worries in a way.

Jan 28 – Humming Media

The new PC is humming along nicely, even with Windows Vista forced upon it... Win7 is still being reserved in case I can fix my laptop. Sadly, I’ve come to realize that if I go through with my plan to copy most of my DVD TV series onto the box, I’ll need about 15TB( Terabytes )of storage space. Yikes! There go my plans... the largest drives available right now are 2TB in size, and I can fit a max of 8 in my system if I condense things – and at $80.00 a pop for a ‘cheap’ drive of that size, we’re talking some serious cash outlay. So for now I’ll put on the series that I’m most likely to want to watch at the drop of a hat( Babylon 5, Stargate, Robotech )and leave the rest for when I can afford to expand. It’s a good setup though, routing things perfectly to the big screen – nice to have planned ahead and have it work out, for once.

Jan 29 - Robert Jordan and Beer

I zoomed through the first few chapters of The Towers Of Midnight today, the second-last book in the Wheel of Time series by the late Robert Jordan, being finished by Brandon Sanderson. A lot of loose ends are being tied up rather neatly, but I want to go back and re-read the entire series from the beginning before the final book comes out next year. There’s a few sites on the net( somewhere )that have threads following the dozen or so major plot-lines of the series - the details are foggy to me now after all these years, so I’d like to brush up on it to enhance my reading experience before the final book. It was a nice way to spend a Saturday night, as escapism really tucks you into those other worlds and insulates you( for a time )from the lackluster stress-filled days of one’s ugly reality some weeks. Well, so does beer, but a book is much more cost effective and far less likely to give you a hangover. Plus there’s a much faster way to pour beer that’s been developed: from the bottom UP!

Jan 30 – Numbed

Another busy, busy day at work, enough so that again I got little done except daily tasks. I like to keep track of the busier day’s numbers to put things in perspective – today, for example, I served 1 customer an average of every 6.5 minutes, for 7 hours. Not counting answering phones, of course. Anything more than 1 per 10 minutes is Busy in my book, as it leaves little time for aught else. I came home tired and in a crappy mood, despite my best efforts to stave it off. A good meal and some time spent online with an old friend gaming in NWN improved that mood, despite the fact that we both ended up dying stupidly in a random encounter – it happens when you’re tired and still angry. Making mistakes is apparently what I’m best at, which is a terrible skill to put on your resume` - and don’t give me that crap about you have to make a mistake in order to learn from it. If that were the case, I’d be the Albert Einstein of Mistakes already at my age. Good night.

Feels like Spring here and next week is all sunshine! Hope it helps to improve my mood...