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Sabriena and I have been working our tails off lately, and it seems like we’re finally making headway. MumbleDog is finally climbing it’s way out of the hole that repeated server issues put us in, if things keep going right for us we should be able to build back up our savings too.

We still make time to goof around of course, just this morning we took Duncan on a walk to the playground and tired him out. I managed to squeeze in some Dirt 3 and Borderlands this week, while Sabriena’s been playing The Sims and keeping up on her celebrity wedding news and gossip and such.

I’ve gotten a ton of work done on Mumble itself, including wrapping my “mutter” utility into a branch of the proper Mumble distribution so that hopefully it will one day be included… so far none of my pull requests have been committed recently, but I’m working on it.

Since the amount of Bitcoins I can generate has tanked thanks to higher difficulty, and the amount they’re worth has tanked too, I haven’t bothered selling any Bitcoins in ages. Instead, I’ve concentrated on buying interesting things with it. I’ve scaled back the mining stuff – I never overclocked my card or anything (though I do underclock the vRAM when I’m not gaming so as to save even more heat) but now I have it set up really low so as not to waste much heat at all. I still generate enough to buy something stupid at least once a week or so.

I wrote a while back about how I picked up a redeemable coupon for S.T.A.L.K.E.R: Call of Pripyat, and I played it a little bit and promptly got lost in it. I googled it for a bit, and found a video that showed “co-op play” in it, and I thought well shit – maybe it’ll be like Borderlands. I summarily bought two more coupons for some friends, they installed it, then waited for it to download. We all got together, started it up and… no co-op. I apparently didn’t do due diligence, the game has absolutely no cooperative mode. Oh well.

I picked up some promo codes for the game “Eets” as well, which is not a terrible game, but I really wouldn’t pay money for it. Maybe $2~3, but definitely not the $9.95 it goes for on Steam at the moment. I paid next to nothing for it in Bitcoin, so I don’t feel buyer’s remorse (and Duncan really likes watching it, which makes it easily worth what I did pay for it), but yeah.

I’m still trying to find someone who wants to part with a trashed BitBill – even though I’m essentially buying their garbage, people still want $5 or so for ‘em. I just want them as a goofy keepsake. A 1BTC BitBill, it can go one of two ways: either I can say “See this son? Internet libertarians thought this was worth $30 at one point” or if Bitcoin blows up I can say “See this son? If the BTC wasn’t spent off it, this would be worth $10,000 now” (replacing $10k with whatever 1BTC is worth in the future).

I thought about taking people up on their offers to sell coins and shit… I mean precious metals are kind of cool and it’d be rad to have something like that for very little actual work. The problem with buying gold coins, silver morgan dollar coins, or gemstones with BTC is that they’re hideously marked up. The people who sell games, hardware on Newegg or elsewhere, and that sort of shit – most of them do it to avoid the transaction fees and wait associated with buying BTC on the open market, so typically there’s a discount for buying that way. Not so with precious metals and whatnot – even with the fact that gold and silver could very well be overpriced if you bought right now and hold it for 10 years (probably not, but still) the markup is just plain rape.

Trevor fired up his ATV, to stock it in the trailer and go ride somewhere in Wells county, and as soon as he heard that thing start up Duncan wanted outside.

After a few laps around the house, Duncan spied Colton and Nick playing soccer on the lawn and decided that looked more fun. So we got off the ATV and Trevor went on his way. Oh, speaking of Trevor, since my friend SouL didn’t want one of the Dirt3 coupon codes I got, I’m going to see if Trevor’s computer will run it – then if AMD4u ever gets their shit sorted out, I’ll set Trevor up with a Steam account and he can redeem a copy. He still needs a PSU and a graphics card, along with other assorted gifts for his office and “man cave”, but I’ll induct him into the PC gaming “master race” soon enough.

The temperature outside this afternoon was about perfect – slightly chilly in the shade, warm in the sun. By moving between the two, you’re neither hot or cold. Because we were on the four wheeler, I left Ruby inside, and she’s howling like her world is ending.

I got a cute picture, and a video of Duncan playing soccer.

So I guess the other day Australia announced that they now allow people to have an X on their passport for transgender people. Sabriena told me of this, and then said that next time we’re out there I could do it.

I’m not sure what she’s trying to imply – it’s not like there’s a search for Hormone replacement therapy in my browser history or anything.

Anyway, I have mixed feelings on this subject. At first I thought it was awesome that people are becoming more accepting of people who aren’t “the norm” as far as society goes, but then after reading about it and thinking for a bit I started to wonder if maybe they weren’t going about this the wrong way.

Why do we even have gender listed on our identification records? It’s so that people can identify you, without guessing what gender your name’s supposed to be (as a “Jamie”, I know full well how that can be if people don’t see me first). I feel like either abolishing having the gender field at all, or allowing transgender people to file with the gender role they are most likely to travel in, would be the better way of doing it.

There’s also the issue of having an “X” on your gender, and then possibly having to explain that somewhere, that doesn’t seem like it exactly helps people be comfortable in their own bodies.

So Iran tried to block ToR, presumably so people couldn’t use the internet to organize public water fights or any other such miscreant behavior. ToR responded with a same-day fix, the ball being back in the court of idiot regimes everywhere.

I’m so glad I’m not in a position to have to deal with crappy governments like this – demanding you do this or that so that evil people on the internet can’t speak their minds. It’d be like the bottom rung Podiatrist Jobs where you’re left excising fungus off stinky feet. Not fun.

I was awoken with a thump yesterday morning – somehow after answering a MumbleDog ticket at 5am or so, I’d managed to sleep in until about 9am when the city dropped a dumpster off at our house. Yup, it’s almost time for fall cleaning, when we throw away all the crap that’s accumulated from fixing the house and our various other projects.

We’re under strict orders not to start anything until the weekend, because that way no one’s stuck doing all the work. Even so, I started poking around the pile of junk that’s out the back of the house since I got rid of my Suburban. Trevor saved me the hassle of junking the radiator and such out of it (though he hasn’t yet coughed up the cash for it, the bastard), and there’s an old mower I want to take the motor off then junk, which I almost did this morning but playing with Duncan won out.

I found the chevy custom floor mats that I pulled out of the ‘burban before I junked it, and they’re pretty nice so I probably won’t throw them away – maybe I’ll stick them in the Oldsmobile or something.

I’m not looking forward to this weekend though.