We need to cut some trees down…

I like having trees on the west side of our property, because it helps shade the place in summer. Unfortunately, however, these trees are all pretty sick and should probably come down as soon as possible.

The only problem? The neighbors erected a vinyl fence right next to the trees, and knowing the way that tree trunks like to jump when you drop them, I don’t really have the gear or the experience to drop these trees without damaging something. That’s even assuming I can put them down between all the sheds, metal buildings, and our house. Hopefully we can arrange to have someone come out and drop them (who’s insured if they damage something) in the spring.

Posted in House on September 28th, 2011 by fwaggle | No Comments »

Outside playtime is drawing to a close :(

My brother in law’s 4 wheeler has been down a while now – the starter motor got cooked and he’s not had the money to pick up a replacement. We still take Duncan outside to kick a soccer ball around or let him stomp around the grass, but the grass is fast reaching a point where it stays wet. He doesn’t need to be wet and muddy.

If the 4 wheeler is visible, he gets grumpy. He doesn’t understand “it doesn’t work” or indeed the concept of “can’t” at all yet. He’ll walk over and smack the ATV Tires or try climb on it or whatever, which is just really sad.

I do hope he stays somewhat fearless as he grows up – I’ve seen plenty of kids who love this or that (loud things, bugs, etc) and then they reach a certain age where a switch flips in their head and they’re suddenly terrified of ‘em.

Posted in Weather on September 25th, 2011 by fwaggle | No Comments »

My wife plays too much Sims

It seems like the last week or so, at any given moment you can look over at my wife’s PC and it’s either got “The Sims” up, or she’s looking at a Tumblr about “The Sims” or she’s editing screenshots photos of it. I think she may have an addiction or something.

She started getting upset the other day when it looked like her two favorite adults were about to get flattened by a large meteorite, in a panic about the children who are inside who would no longer have parents. Won’t someone think of the children!

Sabriena downloads all kinds of things for it as well – it’s not uncommon to see her dressing up sims in weird and wonderful outfits. Guys in assless chaps, girls in cupless corset. Weird stuff.

Then there’s the inevitable three-hour hunt for whatever item she downloaded that’s making her game crash. :(

Posted in Gaming on September 24th, 2011 by fwaggle | No Comments »

Laundry Day!

It struck me yesterday as I was putting on my last pair of boxers that we probably ought to do some laundry. Laundry is always such a huge pain in the arse because last winter our washing machine froze yet again, only this time it cracked the water pump in the bottom of it. So we can’t use the washing machine without it leaking everywhere, which basically means we need to hoof it down to the laundromat to get clean clothes.

On the bright side though, Sabriena made a little extra money through her blog so we treated ourselves to Subway – the only edible “fast food” in our tiny town. Who needs same day flowers delivered or chocolates and jewelry when there’s 12 inches of sandwiches to be had! Nothing’s too good for my special lady.

Posted in Uncategorized on September 23rd, 2011 by fwaggle | No Comments »

Crap, where has the year gone?

We’re well and truly through this year already, and that’s amazing. It’s almost time to start mailing out Christmas Cards (though I’m not sure which direction to send them yet) and to start thinking about what we’re going to pick up to spoil the crap out of Duncan.

I’ve got to look at covering up the windows and sweeping the chimney as well. Not looking forward to that. :(

Posted in Uncategorized on September 23rd, 2011 by fwaggle | No Comments »

Old addictions die hard…

Sabriena’s family used to play the shit out of Neopets back at the turn of the century (hahaha), and after resisting for the longest time I ended up making an account with a little “Kau” (a cow). I didn’t really play too many of the games, I mostly looked for scams where I could make a fast “NeoPoint” or a thousand – things like where back in the day people would buy up “Baby Food” and list it for next to nothing so that when people searched “Food” in the shop wizard, their shops would show up.

I’d buy up the baby food for next to nothing, list it in my shop for sometimes 50x what I’d paid for it, and they’d write me an angry NeoMail before buying it back from me. I also played the stock market over there, buying up stocks at 15NP (the lowest legal buy price) and sitting on them to make a nice fat profit.

It was such an activity that got me to log in today – I saw a post on Reddit about someone who had logged in after 8 years to find a 6000% return on one of their stocks. I’d bought that same stock for 2 points lower than they did, and netted a nice tidy return on it. Unfortunately though, I’m to understand that 1,000,000 NP is not very much money at all in the game anymore, but it’s still funny to think about.

I bought up another stock at 15NP, exhausting my limit of 1,000 shares per day, and took a look around a few places before signing out. Sabriena and I used to send each other crap back and forth, unique christmas gifts, anniversary presents, birthday gifts. Things like bottles of sand and fairy shit and so on. A few years back I logged in and found some crap in my safety deposit box and sent it to her, and she never signed in to pick it up. :(

Posted in Gaming on September 22nd, 2011 by fwaggle | No Comments »

Got my opt out letter ready to go

I’ve got my opt-out letter for the “arbitration clause” in PSN’s new EULA ready to go.

It’s not because I particularly want to sue them at all. I might have gotten an email or two from some raleigh nc lawyers about this class action or that. I don’t really even give a shit that I can’t put Linux on my PS3 (though in retrospect for Sony, pulling that functionality was a really bad decision) – in fact in the entire time I’ve had it, I’ve had no desire to put an alternate OS on it at all. Make no bones about it, it makes a really shitty Linux desktop with the hardware access you’ve got.

I don’t care too much that my details were exposed – pretty much everything that could get released on me is public knowledge already anyway. The cat’s out of the bag, man. I didn’t even use the identity theft protection coupon they gave out.

No, the only reason I’m bothering to fork over the stamp to send this letter is because I want Sony to know that I’m paying attention to their bullshit. If enough other people do it too, then hopefully they’ll pull their heads in. I know that personally, I am probably not going to buy another Sony console. PC gaming master race all the way now!

Posted in Gaming on September 22nd, 2011 by fwaggle | No Comments »

While we were down…

While our DSL was down I decided to go through and farm the easy achievements on Borderlands. I’ve picked up a good 15 or so in the last week, easily, and I’m not even done with the mainline campaign. According to Raptr, when you add in my “Xbox Live” (which is actually from GFW:L, but the profiles are merged) achievements and my PSN trophies, I’m at almost 1200 collectible events in games on all four systems.

What a loser I am.

Posted in Gaming on September 22nd, 2011 by fwaggle | No Comments »

Glorious, Glorious Internet

As mentioned in a Google Plus post: “I’ve come to realize the internet is like oxygen – you don’t realize how important it is until you don’t have access to it.”

Last night, after the DSL guy came out and ended up replacing a card in our DSLAM, our DSL blinked on and off for about a half hour, before finally going down completely for 10 minutes. This caused me no small amount of rage, but when it came back up we were back on “fast” data path, with our full 6mbps downstream rate. A quick speedtest confirms where we’re at workable speeds (though by no means “broadband”, but that’s a “#firstworldproblems” scenario), so I set about setting up our permanent rate-limiting/QoS stuff.

While the DSL guy was at the central office, I pulled all the crap out of our wiring closet (though in retrospect I should have swept or vacuumed it while I was in there). I pulled out three computer cabinets, two routers (which we’re using as switches and that’s it), five DSL modems, a fax machine, and an SGI Indigo2. When the poor guy got here it was a rabbit warren of cables and stuff that almost looked like a rat king if DSL modems were rats.

So anyway, so far so good – it looks like we’re back to having a reliable service and we’ve staved off the bandwidth goons for at least a few months.

Posted in Internet on September 22nd, 2011 by fwaggle | No Comments »

Ugh, our DSL’s been down

As you may not be aware, AT&T followed through with their (I was hoping empty) threat to charge users “overages” for “excess” bandwidth usage. Never mind the fact that their service doesn’t even qualify for the international definition of “broadband”, as far as they’re concerned users are soaking up too much bandwidth already.

Since I personally think it odd that the main companies “cracking down” on “bandwidth hogs” (read: habitual streaming video users) are the ones that also offer some type of TV service, we ended up going with EarthLink for DSL service instead. The EarthLink sales guy told me that the order for DSL couldn’t go through until after we’d cancelled with AT&T – so I decided to wait on doing that until after the modem got here (in case our AT&T modem was no good for it). Well, AT&T up and cancelled our old DSL sunday night, leaving us without internet access until Tuesday.

So not only were we unable to watch any streaming video, or do anything that might spend any more bandwidth so we’re charged to the tune of $10 for 50GB (which is rough on a rather large family that all but has engravable plaques that say “Netflix: most content consumed, 2010″), but now we’re dead in the water as far as working goes.

We finally got it up and running this morning, but unfortunately it’s going slow. Really slow. 1/4 to 1/3rd the speed it’s supposed to be slow – which is crap, because we’re only a few hundred feet wire-length from the CO according to AT&T. Oh, which brings me to my next point…

… I don’t think our stint on Earthlink will be very long, because if I’m not mistaken, it looks like they simply resell AT&T out here. So I can’t imagine AT&T are going to lose a bunch of “bandwidth hogs” from paying them directly, but still keep them on their network and take it laying down. So we’ll have to wait and see what happens.

Posted in Internet on September 21st, 2011 by fwaggle | No Comments »

« Older Entries
Newer Entries »