fwaggle.org

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.

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.

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.