Another trip to Peralta and another game from Uncle Keith’s case o’ games. It was Stone Age. It takes a while to learn and play the first time and we made a lot of mistakes, but it’s a good game. The most amusing part of the game was that it comes with a manly leather dice cup and many illustrations of large-bearded men. It changed us somehow.
Old 30 GB Zunes (mine included) are freezing on bootup today…probably something to do with this being the 366th day of the year. I’d pay $5 to see the Microsoft programmer feverishly looking through code right now to find the bug. As a programmer, it’s always so frustrating that there are many bugs for which we will never hear the technical details because it would be an embarassment to their company. Perish the thought that a company would reveal the details of a bug. I guess in these lawsuit-happy days, that would be akin to admitting liable fault of some kind. And beside all this, between the programmer and the user there is a great gulf fixed.
UPDATE: They said it was due to a driver for a piece of hardware that was only in the 30 GB Zunes. But I wanted to see the lines of code. Dream on. :) Anyway, it’s fixed itself today.
UPDATE: Michael from work points out that you can see the actual code from the bug! Amazing! I never thought I’d see this. Maybe I just don’t read the right blogs.
restaurant.com was offering $25 gift certificates for $2. We got a couple for Rancher’s Club in Albuquerque. We figured. Hey, $4 for a fancy restaurant sounds good. Only AFTER you purchase the certificates are the full terms and conditions revealed. You have to spend at least $35 and can only use one gift certificate at a time with at least 2 people in your party. So it’s more like a $25 coupon than a gift certificate. We thought it was pretty naughty of them to reveal the conditions only after the purchase.
I bought a pair of $17 glasses from zennioptical.com. The temple arm length is supposedly 140 mm, just like my old glasses, but they are simply too short to go over my ears all the way. (I must have had my old glasses adjusted.) Hopefully, the same can be done for these. Anyway, zennioptical.com seems a good deal if you’re willing to take a risk. Just don’t spend too much there in case it doesn’t work out. I hear their customer service is almost non-existent. (What do you expect when their prices are so low?)
We visited my grandparents in Peralta yesterday. My uncle brought his famed case o’ boardgames…obscure boardgames that are often pretty good. We picked Pandemic, which turned out to be a really good cooperative game. Four of us tried to find cures for four diseases around the world. It was good enough that we played it three or four times, even though we lost each time. The diseases suddenly outbreak and spread around the globe, so it’s very difficult to contain them before they’re out of control. It really got into our heads while we were trying to sleep, so we were having obsessive thoughts/dreams about it.
I was trying to bridge an Xbox 360 to the internet via a laptop at my grampa’s house and ended up losing a setting on his Qwest router that took hours to fix. After fixing the new problem I created, there was no way I was going to try to bridge the Xbox again.
Lesson learned: Qwest sets up their DSL modems via PPPoA with a username and password that you have to call them to get if you ever lose it. Also, those ACTIONTEC DSL modems can be flakey. Also, do not try to evade the CSR script by telling them you’ve tried all that basic stuff. The CSR doesn’t actually know the solution or how to solve it. They’re just going through a conditional script. The sooner you realize that, the sooner they can read off the actual solution to the problem.
Sean’s Lola gave him a boomerang from the dollar store, so we took it to the park. I was thinking of getting him a boomerang from boomerangs.com, but this one worked fine. By the way, they throw boomerangs the wrong way in cartoons (like a frisbee). You’re supposed to throw it with a fast-spinning overhand at about a 45 degree angle with the top side pointed toward you. I was only able to catch it once. As with many toys, it turns out to be too hard for a 4-year-old to use properly, but he still really liked it. (He pretended he was Link from Zelda.) We lost it for a little while in the dead grass of the park. He was crying, but we found it. Have I ever mentioned what a great guy Sean is? He makes us laugh all the time. He does this spazzing-out thing that always cracks me up.
Ah yes, back to boomerangs. I remembered hearing something about the aborigines hunting with them, but I can’t imagine them being accurate enough, so I looked it up. A net could be put up between trees or thrown by hunters. The boomerang thrower could throw it in such a way that it would come around and rustle the tree, scaring birds into the net. Then there is the heavier hunting boomerang, which doesn’t come back. It’s just a heavy shaped throwing stick that could break the neck of an emu or legs of a kangaroo.
And I said what about Breakfast at Tiffany’s?
She said I think I remember the song
And as I recall, I think we both disliked it
And I said, well that’s the one thing we’ve got
There are all those common abbreviations you see on the internet because the full phrases would be too long to type out all the time. LOL, BRB, AFK, ROFLDOG, etc. The likeliness that someone will use one of these abbreviations is inversely proportional to the likeliness that the recipient will understand it. Then you have to explain it, which takes longer than it would have to just type the phrase in the first place. I’ve come up with my own. GMSP. Give Me Some Pie. You are free to use it. Why do I get the feeling you’re not going to?
The recent Zune firmware updates have added some free new games. Unfortunately, they still haven’t gotten rid of one game every Zune owner hates. It’s dry winter time, so it’s time to play “Get the Zune out of your coat pocket without shocking and rebooting it”. It’s kinda like Operation. I can only guess that the Zune was released during the summer or tested in a humid climate. Lots of electronics have this problem. They failed to realize that people in super-dry climates would be shocking their equipment, so mp3 players reset and USB ports fry. I think Albuquerque would be a good place for electronics testing facilities.
