Just another useless personal blog
I often run across URLs that I can’t check right away, or want to come back to later. Since I’m not necessarily at the same machine I want to check it from later on, I throw them into a file called ‘urls’ on my file server.
I just realized that that file is now over 1200 lines long.
I’ll be surprised if half of them are even still there…
I’m not particularly introspective, but as time goes on it’s harder to avoid thinking of most of the problems in my life, and the things I should do or have done but haven’t. Why not? The pat answer would be that I’d be afraid of failing, but I don’t think that’s quite right. I’ve already failed at them by not even trying for so long.
No, I’m starting to think that the answer may actually be that I’m afraid of success. Succeeding always sounds great, of course, but it always brings additional complications, responsibilities, and other unknown factors into your life, and I think that’s what scares me the most. I’ve gotten comfortable in my little life as it is, and become suspicious of any potential changes to it.
Damned if I know how to fix it, though.
The good news: Average house prices in Calgary actually fell by around $9,000 over the last month.
The bad news: The average price is still around $358,000, and the best I can do is *maybe* $280,000…
I’ve alluded to it, but for those of you who don’t already know, I got to spend a little time vacationing at the Foothills Medical Centre recently. Just in case you’re curious…
(Warning: long, boring, full of self-pity, and possibly TMI)
Continue reading “The First Thing I Remember Was The Belching”
If you want an idea as to how bad the housing market is in Alberta right now, you just have to ask my mother.
She’s been looking for a new place to live for a couple months now, but without any luck so far. Even if you ignore financing problems, she hasn’t even won a single one of the dozen or more bids she’s placed so far. People are bidding 30-40k over the list price, and there are enough bids on any single house that your options are limited. You can’t even ask for an official inspection; there’s enough competition that the sellers can go with a slightly lower bidder that doesn’t ask for an inspection than take your higher bid and risk having the inspection knock its value down.
Trying to find a rental unit hasn’t been any easier, either. She wants to keep her dogs, but very few places have any vacancies right now, and even fewer would allow her to keep two large dogs. Even townhouses are tending to prohibit pets nowadays, for some reason.
I really should be getting back to my own search now that I’ve recovered, but her stories aren’t filling me with confidence…
Last night I dreamed that I had somehow ruined the outcome of the World Cup because of the way I was sleeping in bed, and the proof was the second set of legs in the bed. Just legs.
I think I need to go back to the hospital, but to the mental ward this time…
Subject: Urgent: ISP detected!
Oh no! I bet I’m broadcasting an IP address, too!
Subject: Extra power. Don't think. Just act.
Sorry, I think you meant to send this to Tom Cruise.
Subject: Elvis asked me to send you this.
Well you certainly took your sweet time getting it to me, didn’t you?
Subject: Don't expose your intimate life!
Whew, thanks, I didn’t realize those blinds were wide open…
Subject: Break the work habit
Unfortunately that would just send me into the begging-for-change habit…
Subject: Please disregard this message
Okay.
It’s always nice to be offered money. And not from the widow of a dead Nigerian prince, for a change.
No, I just met with a mortgage specialist and nailed down some of the details for a pre-approved mortgage from my bank. Despite the current housing crisis, I should at least give the search a shot, so now things are finally in motion. The mortgage was the easy part, though — actually finding a decent house is going to be the painful part.
It’s not like the market is completely dry; there are still houses to be had, but I have to be careful. My somewhat limited mobility prevents me from rapidly running around from place to place. I need something with relatively good public transit connections. I don’t really know what a lot of neighbourhoods are like. I don’t want something that’s on the verge of falling apart, too small, too shoddily built, too heat-inefficient, too crime-infested, etc. But I can’t be too picky either, since my budget does put a limit on what I can look for.
Hopefully I won’t let desperation pressure me into making a bad choice now that I’m under a time limit. The pre-approval isn’t a commitment, but a current special discount rate will have expired by the time the pre-approval period ends, and house prices will have gone up even more (right now the average price is going up by something like $1,000 per day), so if I don’t get one within the next ninety days I may as well just wait until the cycle busts again. Considering the current furor over oil though, that could be a while…
I think I really need to do this, though. I’ve wasted too much of my life putting off plans and purchases for some future ‘settling down’ time that never seemed to come, so now’s the time.
We just had a fierce hailstorm here that left the area I live in slightly…wetter.
Ugh, I just did a search on homes in Calgary within my price range and only got seven hits, whereas I’ve seen dozens before.
I really should have bought something a year or two ago, but kept putting it off as I didn’t feel ready for such a huge committment. Now I’ll either just have to put up with staying in an apartment for the near future and hope for a bust, or spend extra on a good realtor who might do a better job of looking.
A new physics engine + modern processing power + way too much time on someone’s hands = this.
Tourist Trophy (PS2) – It’s basically Gran Turismo 4, just with motorcycles instead of cars. Same tracks, same basic goals, and even pretty much the same user interface. It’s a bit less meaty though, with fewer vehicles, slightly fewer tracks, and fewer total race events. It’s still fun though, and handling a motorcycle is different enough from the cars in GT4 to be interesting.
Brain Age (DS) – Some simple puzzles and challenges that are supposed to help ‘exercise’ your brain. The actual benefit of doing so is dubious, but it’s still kinda fun in small doses, so it makes a good diversion in the morning before heading to work. Its handwriting recognition is a bit lacking though.
New Super Mario Bros. (DS) – It’s a throwback to the original 2D Super Mario games, blending elements of them together, adding a few new ones, and giving it modern graphics. As a fan of those originals, that’s just fine with me, and it’s been great fun so far. Looks like it might be short though, and it hasn’t been very tough yet.
ToCA Race Driver 3 (PC) – It’s great for the sheer wide variety of different types of racing it has, with everything from dirt track sprinters to F1 to stock cars to shifter karts. It doesn’t feel nearly as realistic as other games though, and you don’t really get to keep and upgrade cars as you go along, which is half the fun of these “carpgs”.
Taking a quick look at what we know of the “next-gen” consoles now:
XBox 360: The hardware seems fine, but there’s still not enough titles out for it that appeal to me to get my interest high enough yet. MS is now just being boring instead of evil…
PlayStation 3: A number of important things were just revealed at the E3 conference: 1) They’ve ditched the ‘boomerang’ and the controller’s back to the old PS2 form, but the rumble has been replaced with gyroscopes, 2) it’ll be split into two separate versions like the 360, with the cheaper one being rather pointless and non-upgradeable (no HDMI video, wireless, or memory cards) and 3) the price is obscene, with the upper end model probably ending up around $650-700 CDN. It’s all somewhat underwhelming, so far.
Revolution: Well, it’s not the Revolution anymore. Now Nintendo is calling it the Wii, and I don’t think I’ve stopped snickering since the announcement. A stupid name won’t affect its capabilities or how fun the games are, but it’s still slightly embarrassing. The hardware is still much weaker compared to the others, but speculation is that it’ll probably at least be far cheaper. It’s also unclear if it’ll have enough interesting titles, since my DS already satisfies my Daily Recommended Allowance of Mario, but it’s supposed to be backwards compatible with the Gamecube and emulate even older systems, for a bigger library at least.
This morning I finally mailed off my taxes, and much to my surprise I’ll actually get a fairly decent refund this year.
This afternoon I got home and there was a notice on my door, explaining that my rent would be going up in a few months.
Oh well.
Sudoku is one of the latest crazes to hit the web (and newspapers, and airport bookstores…), and so far I’ve solved dozens of them.
Well, okay, I didn’t solve them myself…
Continue reading “Cuckoo For Sudoku”
It had been so long since I had received any spam over ICQ that I had forgotten how much of a problem it once was, but it appears to be back in full force. At least once a day or so I receive an authorization request from an unknown account and I have to look it up in the ICQ whitepages to see if it’s legitimate first. Usually there’s random junk in its profile, so I block it.
Except that’s not the end of it. They’ll continue sending authorization requests every few seconds, and although the client no longer prompts me once it’s blocked, it still fills up the activity log window. There’s often spam text in the authorization request message itself. They switch account numbers often, so you get reprompted and have to block the new accounts. And they keep sending the requests even when you’re offline. When I got up this morning, so many requests had been queued that Fire couldn’t handle it and I couldn’t even stay logged in; I had to log in at the office with a different client to clear them out, one at a time.
It’s almost enough to make me block *all* requests from non-buddies and make people contact me by other means first to be added. IMing is supposed to make communication *more* convenient though, not less…
I finally figured it was about time to upgrade to an 802.11g router now that I’m using the wireless on the iBook more and more, but it was with some hesitation. I wanted a nice, stable wireless router, but the impression I had been getting from some of the forums I visit is that none of the various consumer-level brands and models were really all that reliable. Some people had no problems at all, but many others had stories of lockups and other strange behaviours under load.
There was a recommendation that often came up when people had these complaints, though: try a third-party firmware. I managed to find a compatible Linksys model today (not all revisions will work) and immediately loaded DD-WRT onto it fairly painlessly, and now I just have to use it and see how well it works.
Besides the (hopeful) stability, it adds a few other features I’ll use:
– Static DHCP assignment, so I can use fixed IP addresses (which makes port forwarding a lot easier) without having to configure each system.
– Local DNS resolution for those DHCP assignments, so I can refer to each system by its name without having to set up the local ‘hosts’ table on each system.
– QoS features, so time-sensitive game data doesn’t get buried by other traffic.
I have a love/hate relationship with my main living room chair. It’s ugly as sin, but it’s really nice and comfy to sit in for long periods of time.
Unfortunately it’s also a black hole, whisking items dropped between the cracks off into a dimension that can only be reached by dismantling the whole chair. As my DS stylus just discovered…
Apparently there’s going to be a new Star Wars TV series that will “cover the 20 years in the life of Luke Skywalker growing up.”
Considering that supposedly all he did during this time was mope around a moisture farm, maybe this will be like Star-Wars-meets-Little-House-On-The-Prairie…
