wombat_socho

Doc says I don't have cataracts, glaucoma or macular degeneration and my vision is just as good as it was two years ago. Also, while waiting for the atropine to dilate my pupils, I wandered down to the PX in the basement of the VA medical center and found one of these Cuisinart ICE-21 Frozen Yogurt-Ice Cream & Sorbet Maker on sale for $29.99. Of course I bought it*. :) Unfortunately, the rain that's been dripping on Washington disappeared while I was having my eye exam and the sun emerged to fry my rods & cones on the drive home, since I hadn't brought my sunglasses; fortunately, for once the traffic on 395 South didn't suck and I was home quickly.

Other than that it's been a pretty dull week so far. I've been doing linkagery and smacking trolls at The Other McCain, successfully getting my diet and schedule back under control, and waiting for a job offer to come along.

While waiting, I have of course been playing EVE, and also rediscovering the dubious joys of Graduation, which I am every bit as bad at as I am at EVE. Actually, worse, since I haven't played Graduation in, what, ten years? Anyway, it's not a dating sim and not at all hentai, but it's pretty damn hard to figure out. It was on sale for $1.99, and I've already had at least that much fun out of it.

I've also been getting some reading done; nothing new except for Do the Work, which is available for free for your Kindle. This is a useful guide on how to kick your own ass and get it in gear, and if you're having problems getting a project done, maybe you should take the time to read this. It seems to me that the book is primarily aimed at writers, but I think the lessons it has to offer apply equally well to starting businesses and other, more small-scale things. Recommended.

Also recently acquired: Ladytron's Best Of 00-10, which is an excellent collection of music by one of the odder electronic/dance bands out there, and Wings Greatest, which I admit to buying just for "Jet", "Junior's Farm". and the original "Live And Let Die", which latter song I frankly like better than the Guns N' Roses remake.

Well, I apparently did quite well on the Intermediate Accounting final: there's a B posted for the course. :)

Don't expect to do that well on the Cost Accounting final tonight, but that's okay. I'll settle for a C in that one, and hope I never see any of that stuff ever again.

Another example of two things I don't care much for individually, but combined...well, I think I'd pay money to see The Brothers Mario.

UPDATE: They closed the college at 3 PM today, so no final exam tonight. WTF?
School closes out the fall term next Thursday, so I wonder when we're going to be able to take the final.

UPDATE UPDATE: All classes/tests scheduled for today rescheduled until tomorrow. Okay, then.

Made some Filboid Studge last night before I went to bed and had a piece for breakfast with coffee. Of course, since I'd slept for about ten hours to help rid myself of this cold/flu/plague/whatever, it was more like lunch, but either way it was pretty good.

Wasted most of the afternoon playing Organ Trail, an updated version of the old edutainment software classic Oregon Trail except with a station wagon and zombies. I am now confident in my ability to guide a small party of friends from DC to Portland without being eaten by the zombie hordes.

Spent the rest of the afternoon going to CVS and Harris-Teeter for the same stuff I could have gotten at Walmart for probably less money, but as it turned out I got some pretty good deals on drugs & tissues at CVS; saved about 50% off everything once sales discounts and various coupons were added. Wound u pblowing all that money and another $10 besides at H-T, which had exactly two steak knives for sale: an insanely expensive knife, and one whose expense was merely annoying. I added a small jar of Truvia, which is handy for cooking and other low-carb nonsense, a couple of pork butt steaks, and some cheap spices, and managed to escape only $20 lighter.

Tonight, Game 4 of the World Series, more studying, and not so much time-wasting silliness on the computer.

Finally finished the second unit in ACC212; going to try and get the third unit done later this week and (if at all possible) the last unit before classes start next week. I wanted to kick myself after finishing the unit; it's mostly about financial reports and various ratios used to estimate the health of a company, none of which are unfamiliar to me, and I really shouldn't have put it off so long.

Blood sugar and weight seem to be dropping off again, most likely because for the last few days I've been keeping the calories under 3000 and the (net) carbs under 50. I'm also trying the Greek yogurt again, this time not from Yoplait but from FAGE and Chobani. FAGE has a 2% lowfat yogurt with a lot more protein and way fewer carbs than the Yoplait version (WTF is the high fructose corn syrup in there for?) while the Chobani is nonfat but also has the higher protein. Looking forward to ordering some liquid sucralose (Splenda) so I can do some interesting high-fat/low-carb things with cream cheese, heavy cream, and maybe peanut butter, if I can find any peanut butter around here that isn't loaded with sugar and doesn't cost an arm and a leg.

I rewarded myself for finishing the second accounting unit by installing and playing some Bioshock. Couldn't play much of it; I don't do well with first-person shooters on the PC, and this game is no exception. The motion sickness gets aggravated by the fantastic art; the map is so detailed, it makes me wish there was a mode where you could just walk around Rapture as a tourist.

Last and almost certainly least, I've risen (if that's the word) to head of the nascent EW special interest group in Goonfleet. We haven't really had the opportunity to do much besides tag along on strategic ops, practice doing separate warpins, and make nuisances of ourselves by jamming friendlies, but it's good training. Something interesting may yet come of this.

Ganked from darksumomo
( Would you like to know more? )

...or blown offline, I guess. This new service seems to mix the worst aspects of camwhoring and online gaming. I'm sure not wasting any money on it.

(h/t cutelildrow)

Cho Aniki Zero to be released in America for the PSP.

Thank you, ADTRW. Thanks also to Winamp for hilariously inappropriate music.

First of all, since we don't get the National Post down here, you should go read beatonna's Canada History Debate comic.

Yesterday I got a fair amount done despite sitting on my butt for most of the day. Got my doctor's appointment scheduled for next month, got out and finished grocery shopping, and did some cleaning. Also got the date, time, and location of next month's DC Goonmeet nailed down. (How the hell did I wind up as social secretary for the DC goons?)

Also realized I'm missing a lot of the background stuff I had bashed out for Blood Red Skies, which I apparently left in my other pantscomputer along with the PDF files of my transcripts. Which latter makes applying for Federal jobs a pain in the ass since half the Civil Service jobs out there want a copy of one's transcripts along with the resume. brian_edminster thinks he may have the problem with the Failbox nailed down, which would be good; even if he hasn't, I'll be on the road to Frederick today since I need to have those files and would prefer to just pull them off onto the new thumb drive instead of having him burn them to CD, put CD in the mail, etc. Besides, it's a nice day for a drive and I need to get out of the apartment more often anyway.

Last night I learned Rail Baron at the hands of the Dunhams and therevdrnye. If you haven't played Rail Baron, it's sort of like Monopoly except instead of plodding around the board in a circle one does runs across the nation (for which one is paid, and has to pay track fees to the bank or to other players) to generate money. This money is spent on the aforementioned track fees and for buying railroads large & small; the railroads allow you to collect track fees much as one collects rents in Monopoly. As usual in Monopoly-style games, I got my head handed to me and finished fourth, but that was mainly due to bad luck in destinations: I was forever getting sent to Philadelphia and Sacramento, which couldn't be reached without going over other peoples' railroads. So it goes.

I also got patiently schooled in the ills of Metro, where Dutch is working as a consultant. The problem with Metro, dating back 40 years to when WMATA was formed out of what used to be DC Transit and the proposed Metrorail system, is that it relies for funding on DC, Maryland and Virginia; it has no revenue source to call its own except for the farebox, which never covers operating expenses (much less capital investments). From this all the other problems arise, and lord God, are there a lot of problems. :(

Man, I hate when I'm playing Civ 3 and I can't get at the damn iron. It's just a matter of time before you lose when that happens.

For the benefit of those folks on my f-list who likes them some reading, I submit a couple of reviews:
( Cut to spare those who don't )

I swear, the Moody Blues' adaptation of The War of the Worlds doth suck greatly. I don't think even acid would improve it; quite likely it would make matters worse. Thank goodness they're playing some Oingo Boingo to cleanse the aural palate.

BTW, I haven't forgotten that this is Pearl Harbor Day. I do have to say, though, all those deaths in 1941 matter less to me than one death eight years ago tomorrow.

( You don't want to read this. Go read something fun. )

Wasted half an hour of my life watching the HALO 3 rollout party on G4. The number of people to be sent to the Arctic death camps when I become Supreme Warlord has jumped by a couple of dozen. Yes, it was that bad. I learned absolutely nothing about the game that I han't read on Wikipedia. General consensus among reviewers is that the game itself is a dog, but all the deathmatch improvements are awesome. What say, stuckintraffik?

Other HALO-related stuff: Joe Staten is working on HALO: Contact Harvest, which looks good; this, on the other hand, sounds like crap. Did Brian Nylund get burned out or something?