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Sporewagon

September 7, 2008 11:29 pm, Tachevert — MMO Discussion

The first of my epic list of preorders has arrived!

Nobody is blogging about Spore yet. This probably means nobody has pulled themselves away from it.

Spore scored a strike almost instantly. Unless I somehow missed it, I wasn’t given the option to select the installation location. Being an ubergeek, I have a strange set of hard drives, and my C drive is decidedly small at 36GB. I’m not pleased at being more or less forced to discard 5GB of that. With the limited number of installations allowed, I’m not going to risk burning one on that. Laaaame.

OK, fine… at least it’s on my faster hard drive. From there, I began the saga of the mighty TACHEWIG.

Tachewig

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Utilities

September 6, 2008 10:43 pm, Tachevert — Rants

No, I don’t mean Paint.NET or SlickRun. I mean those magical things that are piped into and out of my home.

Cable and Internet

AT&T’s “U-verse” service just wired our area. They offered the same or better service than our old provider, and a much snazzier DVR unit, at a lower price, with no lock-in and really sharp 1-time incentives. Great! Sold!

Then they failed to install on time.

They called us half an hour after the scheduled install (AFTER written and telephone confirmations in the preceding days) to delay installation. Fortunately, the delay was only a week, and the installer was great.

The DVR / cablebox is far superior to our old cable-company-issued device, with picture-in-picture channel tuning (neat!), and 2 HD PLUS 2 standard DVR tuners. Yes, we have to get to FOUR shows before conflicts need resolution. Internet service has been great, and we get our advertised speeds. The service comes with a wireless router AS the cable modem, and that’s functioned great for us. (Retiring the sexy Apple Airport Extreme… *sigh*) So after the shaky start, everything has been pretty decent. I’d recommend it.

Power

Our power company also delayed scheduled maintenance, only to perform it last night. They gave a week or so of notice, then cut our power for “up to 7 hours,” which actually means 9 hours. So it was weird not to have power overnight. And it was out too long, so everything in the freezer melted. Dammit!

Transportation (my car)

OK, this isn’t technically a utility, but let’s pile it on. I brought my car in a few weeks ago for 20,000 mile maintenance and an oil change. It also, evidently, had a nail in a tire. Add $40 to the service charge, repaired tire. Well, it unrepaired itself this week. Fortunately, the dealer is taking care of everything, hooked me up with a rental, and all that. Unfortunately, since Emi isn’t actually my “spouse” yet, she can’t drive it, so I have no idea how we’ll work out the one-car-househould “drive to work” scenario for the first couple days of the week. What a fiasco.. but again, I’m very pleased with the dealership on this one.

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Really Tiny Adventures

September 2, 2008 10:07 pm, Tachevert — Chatter, Rants

I think I like D&D Tiny Adventures on Facebook. It seems really neat — low involvement, simulated dice rolls, vaguely amusing stories of fantasy, and I can manage my own inventory for casual interaction! Sounds fun! But as of now, I wouldn’t really know. I mean, I rolled a Human Cleric and installed Tiny Adventures. Then, it went something like this…

The Adventure Begins…
Tachevert headed into Facebook Land to try out this cool-sounding game.

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Tweak and Geek Podcast #11

September 2, 2008 12:05 am, Tachevert — Podcast

Tweak and Geek Episode Eleven has hit the Net. In this episode, we discuss the Wii and Virtual Console, some roadblocks that can impede the techie job search, the “final” Stargate SG1 movie, and… well, just listen!

Tweak & Geek

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I am a Consumer Whore

August 31, 2008 4:44 pm, Tachevert — Chatter

I had a consumer attack yesterday, and secured my fall season game preorders. Of course, I’ll inevitably supplement this with some more impulse-buy types like XBLA titles, but…

Preorders!

So to summarize, I dropped $40 for 7 preorders, and that total will escalate to $375 (not including subscriptions) as these babies trickle in through December. Yikes! As far as instant fulfillment goes, I’m actually finding the Fable 2 Pub Games pleasant, in that “I want a mindless game for 10 minutes, I know, how about some cards” sense.
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WTF, AIM is Weird

August 25, 2008 10:32 am, Tachevert — Rants

[09:35] DashedTrout: Do you have the characteristic Armenian nose?

Sometimes, I just… don’t know.

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Digital Immortality

August 24, 2008 11:31 pm, Tachevert — Chatter

Ancient people built enormous temples and engaged in elaborate rituals to preserve their bodies and guide themselves into epic, rock-star-like afterlives. An untold amount of effort and sacrifice (har har, pun intended) went into this search for immortality.

Poor misguided Pharaohs and their ilk! They built gigantic structures, targetting immortality through physical force — but alas, the world is unstoppable, and even gargantuan piles of stone break down over time. But today, we have a new phenomenon… the Internet! Rather than a massive, solid structure that tries in vain to withstand the assault of all time, we have a self-healing, copying, duplicating mass of all human information. Immortality, rather than something to be striven for, is now almost unavoidable!
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FotN: GodTube

August 20, 2008 10:21 am, Tachevert — Found on the Net

GodTube is “a dynamic community of people who are looking to connect, share, and belong. In its simplest form, GodTube is a video-driven social network where users can explore their faith and the tenets of Christianity.”

Even so, more than 50% of the frontpage videos are generic funny fare. The Skateboarding Dog! It’s too early in themorning for me to complete this thought, but it seems like there’s a statement there about the nature of the Internet.

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