So I finally managed to do it. I finally beat Guitar Hero II on Expert.
(As you can see here if you have an xbox.com account. Why they make you log in to see other people’s accounts, I have no idea.)
My hands hurt.
One Gallon = Eight Pints
As of today, I have donated a gallon of blood to the Red Cross.
Yay.
T-shirt
My the way, I saw this T-Shirt at AX and it’s been stuck in my head ever since.
I’d buy one but they appear to be sold out of most guy’s sizes at the moment.
Anime Expo is over, long live Anime Expo.
I am again at my mom’s house, after having been without Internet for five days. We were very close to having one of the most awesome things ever happen at AX.
I hear stuff happened, although I’m still catching up.
PINE is not ELM
So, for the longest time I’ve been using PINE for my email. And by the longest time I mean 14 years. It was originally the only option we had for checking email when we first got Internet access to the high school back in 1993 from PacBell, and when it was available when I went to Berkeley, I used it because I was familiar with the keystrokes and configuration stuff.
When I started working at Yahoo!, I set it up on my FreeBSD machine and used fetchmail to grab the mail from the POP server, a setup that more than a few Yahoo! engineers used at the time.
When I got my own personal email / vanity domain, I did the same setup for my local Linux machine and my personal POP account. I even tried setting my domain’s MX record to my Linux machine, but when the DSL went down people started getting undeliverable messages, so I stopped that.
I was mocked sometimes, but I never had to worry about clicking on a .SCR and getting a virus, and those annoying graphical spam messages simply appear as blank messages. Sure, it was a kind of a pain sometimes to get the URL clicking to work right, and if I ever wanted to view an attachment I had to save it to disk then FTP it off the server, but it was all fine and good.
Then my new job at Yahoo! required I use Outlook. So at this position I never used Pine for work email. Oh well, I could handle that.
Then I decided to migrate everything off my Linux machine and got my Dreamhost account. Hey, it’s shell access, and I can use PINE! Happy days! And it even had a webmail client I could use if I wanted to.
But after using it for a while, I realized something. I wasn’t really using PINE to view local mail like I was used to. I was using PINE to access my email via IMAP. Which is all well and good, but I was sshing into a shell to get at this email, when I could just get at it directly with a mail client. So I fired up Mail.app on my Powerbook and pointed it my account. And there everything was. I set up Thunderbird at work, and ditto.
Granted, I now have three mostly independent spam-filtering methods (spamassassin on the server, and Thunderbird and Mail.app have their own) that don’t agree on many things, but now I don’t have to deal with entering my password three times to check my email. (Once to log into the shell, once to access the IMAP inbox, once to access the IMAP other mailboxes.)
Good bye, PINE. It’s been a great 14 years.
You’re all fired.
Why did none of you mention that Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip had returned from hiatus to finish its season?
You’re all fired.
Oops, a month?
Okay, so yeah… almost a month let’s see if I can remember all the little things I kept thinking I’d blog, but then never got around to doing.
Updates to previous week
Yeah, I could have made this post a while ago, but it took a lull in my work to get me to post it.
Our second attempt at Karazhan was even more of a success than our first. We not only beat Moroes, but managed to down the Maiden of Virtue as well. And I got my first piece of epic lewtz, a.k.a. healing leather that I’ll rarely use.
I started consolidating Azalyn, the other FFXI account I own now, with my own. The first thing was taking his mule of random stacks of stuff that drops off monsters and sending the stuff to my own mule of random stacks of stuff that drops off monsters and taking anything that made a full stack of 12 and mailing it to the proper city’s mule to sell it on the auction house. I managed to actually fit almost everything from his mule into my own after sending the stacks to sell away, because we had mostly the same stuff. Second is going through his armor and finding anything he had that I didn’t (which there is some small amount, most of them on Azalyn proper) and selling/giving away the rest that’s duplicated. This is slower, as a lot of the gear is random stuff for low levels (sub-20) that doesn’t sell often.
I thought I had the bird outside the window problem licked. Then I was informed that there is a nest above my window that may be the reason why I’m having a problem. But then, yesterday morning I managed to actually catch the bird in the act. It’s not flying into the window and bumping it on the way to the nest like I might have thought. No, it’s just being a stupid bird and repeatedly running into the window. I can only imagine the thought process it goes through as it sees something interesting, flies into an INVISIBLE BARRIER *BONK* loses its bearings, flies back to the tree branch, blinks, then sees something interesting, flies into an INVISIBLE BARRIER *BONK*… etc. All the meantime, I’m inside wishing I had an exterior-mounted BB gun turret or something.
“Embed Media” weirdness
Am I the only one who’s seeing random videos that aren’t what the people intended in my friends list? People will post saying it’s one video, but it’s actually something else. I’m guessing it has to do with the new “Embed Media” button in the LJ update page.
Eventually it sorts itself out, but it’s very odd.
And now the gaming-type update
So I’m still barely playing FFXI. After following
Our WoW guild tried Karazhan for the first time last week. For a first attempt with a less than optimal setup (three rogues ftw) we managed to down Attumen on the first try. We wiped a few times on Moroes due to crowd control issues, and that was that. We all managed to get to Friendly with The Violet Eye, so yay to new tanking ring. My gear should still be in my tanking gear unless I log in tonight and forget to swap it back. Until 2.1 hits I’m actually close to optimal bear gear. Then all of a sudden the raiding gear gets a boost and there’s better gear that I’ll never see because we don’t have 25 people to raid with and all is back to normal in the MMO world.
The Xbox fairy delivered an Xbox 360 to the house. This confused us more than made us happy, as we weren’t really expecting it and now we have to get games for it or something. So I’ll likely be getting FFXI (just because I get free gamerpoints and I don’t have to activate the account on it) and Guitar Hero 2. ‘Cause Gears of War don’t interest me. Then again, someone else in the house might buy GoW…