Hey, It's Me

WHAAAAAAAAA. Honestly, I'm a bit embarrassed how sad this is making me. And I knew it was coming too. But seriously. I have ridden Star Tours for the last time. :((((

I would embed this, but you really should go watch it on the Youtube site, since they have it in HD.

It is the most awesome thing.

Google Squared, the dadaist search engine.

Guster.
Toronto neighbourhoods.
Concert venues hamilton.

And even when most of the rows make sense, the columns are amusing. (Did you know that the Magic Kingdom is published by Capcom?)

Not that I normally care about this, but the design aspects are interesting here: Apple announced a new ipod shuffle today. Most of the discussion about it seems to be about how they've moved the controls off the shuffle itself and onto the earbuds. Which...okay, it doesn't bug me too much, but that's annoying for if they break or if you don't like the earbuds. I'm surprised people haven't started yelling about how they've changed the controls to ONLY HAVE ONE CONTROL BUTTON.

You can see the new control scheme here (go down to "Easy Access Controls" and click on the image). (ETA: Here's the official Apple documentation.)
You single click to play or pause a song. You double click to go forwards a song or triple click to go back a song. And if you hold down the button, it'll say the artist and track name. And if you hold down the button until you hear a tone, it'll cycle through your playlists.

Gee, it couldn't be simpler.

And somewhere in the future, a thousand people at the gym stab furiously at their goddamn piece of crap music players that don't fucking do what they want.

What have I been up to?

• Secret Project X has met its end. Final tally on the bus knitting is two pairs of socks, a cowl, and a hat. Not bad.
• I went to visit my parents for Thanksgiving, and got to hang out with my sister, and visit more briefly with other friends. It was very good times. There was quite a bit of consumption of the standard turkey, and also much consumption of enchiladas and a Freebirds burrito. Nom nom nom.
• We also performed our duty as Americans (and sort-of-Americans-by-marriage) and bought cheap things on Friday. I picked up a few games from Gamestop as they had a deal on used games: the first Phoenix Wright, Wind Waker, and Zack and Wiki (guess who is apparently in the mood for some point and click adventure?).
• Jerry was sick the whole time we were down there. So naturally what happens when we get back? He's better.... and I get sick. Thankfully it's a pretty minor thing. So I've been spending the past couple of days playing much Phoenix Wright and a bit having my mind blown by the Cat Bordhi and Elizabeth Zimmerman knitting books that I picked up in Texas (via a Knitpicks sale in October). I haven't gotten a chance to do much with them yet, but they certainly look like I'll have a lot of fun with them in the future.

Random blips:

Wall-E was amazing and wonderful and I want to see it again and I kind of really want the soundtrack also. I have a feeling I spent almost the entire movie making little "eee!" noises. And the random BNL all over the place was pretty hilarious.

The Amazon MP3 store is very nice and handy, and they have a Linux download client. Thumbs up to that! If you didn't know, they have a special every day where one album is cheap (usually $3), and they tend to be pretty decent with a varied selection. If you're on Twitter, so are they (also you can look there to get an idea of the kinds of things that go for cheap).

I read Boatmurdered recently, and despite being somewhat confused and terrified by the screenshots, I subsequently fell headfirst into Dwarf Fortress, which is... uh... a sim, sort of, I guess. The Boatmurdered link does a decent job of describing it. There's a wiki for the game that has a couple of good tutorials (and a lot of otherwise uber-handy information) if any of you get interested as well. Also, if you're afraid of trying to learn to understand the Matrix, there's a version of the game with more graphics prebuilt here. Also also, I apparently have good timing since there's going to be a new version of the game coming out tomorrow or the day after that. (Hey, it's a one-man dev team. What can you do?)

Here's the only really interesting story I have so far in my current fortress: A little while ago, I had a fisherdwarf, who was a fairly recent immigrant, be taken by a strange mood. She commandeered the craftsdwarf's workshop, and ended up building a scepter out of the local prevailing rock (the description is seriously something along the lines of "chert scepter with chert banding and an engraving of clouds in chert") and, in doing so, became a legendary engraver. Shortly afterwards, one of my nobles was unhappy with his quarters -- his office/dining room wasn't awesome enough. So I put my engraving team to work, getting rid of the boulders, and smoothing all the walls and floors, with the legendary engraver taking a last pass around a couple of the walls to engrave various things in them. She finishes and I take a peek around the walls, lots of dwarves traveling and dwarves surrounding a dwarf, some random nature scenes, but then there's one section of wall that has... a dwarf holding aloft a chert scepter. Classy, lady, name-checking yourself. ;)

Oh my god they're bringing back Colonization this is the best thing ever. (Probably Amy is the only other person on here that played it much, but I am so fucking geeked right now. I had Colonization still set up in Dosbox up until recently. I really ought to get it set up again.)

Also, The World Ends With You is weird and awesome and addictive. I picked it up when we stopped in Louisiana, and I've put in about a day of playtime so far (and I'm only about halfway through the storyline).

Things are maybe starting to finally get closer to normal here. Maybe. I hope. <crosses fingers>

In other news:
-- Holy balls, do I suck at Smash Bros. I've started to play through the Subspace Emissary, but after I fail each level (which I inevitably do), I have to go practice with the new characters for like 15-20 minutes so I can figure out what they *do* for the various attacks. The only one I really feel like I have down is Sheik.
-- I have an Eee PC now (a 4GB Surf model). It's so fucking awesome (and tiny and, most of all, cute like a basketful of puppies). Jerry bought it for me as a surprise (super early) birthday present a couple of weeks ago when we visited Windsor and he was terrified I was going to be bored. It is, at the moment, mostly just being used as a portable Chrono Trigger machine, of course....
--- I've heard a bit of complaining about the keyboard on it, but it doesn't really bother me at all (admittedly, I have skinny fingers). I have more trouble with the touchpad but that's mostly because a) I hate touchpads in general and b) no middle mouse button (I MUST HAVE TABS). We bought a little laptop mouse for it anyway, so that takes care of that problem!
--- I'm mildly surprised at myself, but I'm actually rather okay with the default easy interface. One of the first things I did was set it up so I can use the full KDE desktop, but... the easy mode boots up faster, and I can get to launchers for everything I'm usually looking at there anyway (or I can get a terminal with a single Ctrl+Alt+T, which will launch anything). I'm... not *super* happy with the underlying Xandros-proprietary mongrel that comes by default, just because it makes it more likely that someday I will break something important by accident, but at the moment, it's working okay for me.
--- Also, I even got the Slingbox Player working on the thing (through Wine with this script). The interface is stuttery, but being able to watch stuff off the Tivo at home from Windsor is awesome.
-- Homemade pseudo-chai is tasty.
-- The spring Knitty has a lot of awesome stuff in it. Not that I need any more projects, mind you, since I have 3 on the needles and semi-active, one of which has a time limit, (and at least that many sitting in my yarn bin at the moment).
-- A few days ago, I finally sat down and wrote out everything we did/saw on vacation, so that I'll have some hope in hell of being able to get any sort of detail when I eventually try to piece it all together.

Time for dinner. Mmm, burrito.

Item A: Got my invite today, and Ravelry is really very very shiny. There are lots of bits that I won't use at all, but there are also lots of bits that are immensely useful and (surprisingly given the relatively large internet knitting presence) aren't available elsewhere online. Now I have to input my stash so I can actually get a proper queue going, rather than my usual "oh hi let's cast this on today then". On the off chance any of you are over there already, you can probably make a wild guess as to my username.

Item B: Pushing Daisies is indeed twee as fuck and I love it. (Watched it yesterday on CTV. Hooray periodic Canadian scheduling oddities!)

Item C: Alton is correct as usual that popping corn in a steel bowl is awesome and much better than microwave popcorn. We have a bit of an issue, however, when we have the burner turned up a bit too high and get black popcorn residue pretty much welded to the bottom of the bowl. We've been trying to clean it off, but unless something changes, it looks like we may have a dedicated bowl for popcorn-making only now. But the popcorn is still awesome.

You know, I really ought to know that when a computer randomly repeatedly starts crashing and you trust the user when they say they haven't done anything, there's probably something physically wrong with it.

So yeah, the fan on my power supply went out. Fabulous timing, given that I've been planning on getting a new computer once I get up to Hamilton.
After spending most of the afternoon running around College Station wondering where I could buy a power supply, I discovered that I can't just use any power supply, because I have a Dell and they don't use just any off the shelf parts, no sir, they only use the highest quality parts selected especially for vendor lock-in!
...Thankfully, my parents had a couple of old computers lying around, and I had hard drives that I could just plop in. The newer of the computers is just a P3 with like 256 MB RAM, but hey, it runs Ubuntu well enough for me. So I spent Sunday afternoon hanging around with my parents, doing laundry, and popping up and down to get the computer set up.