2007/03/29

I Hate Moving

So Monday they came and took most of my stuff. That means I have no chairs or tables which means that I've been either sitting on the floor or standing for the last five days (ow). Even worse yet, today the carpet cleaner guys came and things won't be dry until sometime tomorrow. So now I can't even sit on the carpet anymore and I've had to relocate my sleeping accomodations to the kitchen (hey, it was either that or the bathroom).

Fun. And by that I mean "not".

I'm so buying furniture when I get the keys.

2007/03/25

Moving Miscalculation

Today the movers came and got all of the stuff that I won't be tossing, putting in storage, or taking in my tiny little car. The house is now mostly devoid of anything but dirt, spiders, and cobwebs--perfect for the kind of cleaning that I need to do (well, minus the spiders anyway). The bad part, the miscalculation from the title, is that I have neither a proper desk, nor a proper chair, and my microwave is now on a semi bound for Florida. I have no idea why Florida is on the way to Maryland but hey, I don't drive a truck either.

So I can't really warm things up to eat without firing up the stove and my back is rapidly cramping thanks to the contortion that I'm doing to type and see the screen.

I had a grand plan of cleaning and playing a few days of Supreme Commander. The cleaning part is sadly unavoidable, the last part I just don't see happening anymore.

2007/03/18

850 miles is a hella long way

It's 850ish miles from Madison WI to Towson MD for anyone who's interested. That's a long goddamn way. I managed to make it in roughly 13 hours including stops (tolls, food, etc). I've done this kind of driving before; it's about the same distance from Fairfax VA to Madison as well--yet another set of one day drives I don't recommend to anyone.

How did I make it so fast? Suffice to say that if I had gotten just one ticket for every state I travelled through today, that the total citation sum would be two to three times as much as I'm paying to stay at this crappy hotel for two nights. At least the hotel has wireless.

I think I'm going to pass out now.

2007/03/12

Daylight Savings Sucks

...and I get to do it again in another month when I move from CST to EST...again.

That is all.

2007/03/10

Moving

It occurs to me that I've neglected a couple of things. The first is that I'm switching jobs and moving cross country (again). The second is that this is the reason I've not finished February's game or done another thousander club update. This isn't probably news for the majority of people who read here, but for everyone else: now ya know.

The majority of February was spent studying, interviewing, making plans, and generally being very nervous about the whole thing. This is not conducive to getting any real work done. March is so far going about the same as February minus the studying and interviewing parts but with the addition of furious cleaning and fixing of my house to make it more marketable.

Selling my house is going to be a pain; I imagine that it always is. Dealing with the pile of crap that my dad made me take now that he's in his "get your shit out of my house" phase is also going to be a pain. Normally, I'd agree with him since it's my junk, after all. This is fine as long as there's space to put said shit, but moving from a 3 bedroom w/basement and garage house to a 1 or 2 bedroom apartment is already unfun. So I'm going through stuff and seeing what I can toss and otherwise get rid of as much as I can stand.

I will very likely need both storage here in Wisconsin for the stuff my dad can't pick up but still wants (my parents are in their Arizona home at the moment) and in Maryland where I'm landing because I'm going to have roughly 1/3 the space I currently do. Yay. House selling issues asside, I'd rather not be paying rent as well on storage space.

Probably the biggest difference than the last time I moved is that I'm probably going to go with movers this time. I just don't want to drive a big honkin' truck through Pennsylvania again. I'm hoping like hell that this is going to be within my budget and that they don't destroy my otherwise already destroyed stuff. Maybe I should hope that they don't destroy it any more than it's already destroyed.

2007/03/04

Total Annihi...er...Supreme Commander

Way back before the dawn of time (i.e., the year 2000) I played a mess of RTS games. One of the most notable of these was Starcraft which I played an undue amount of. What killed it for me was when I realized that I was losing matches because I didn't micromanage the first minute well enough. That sucks.

Enter Total Annihilation.

I dunno if the time was right or whatever but I ended up playing even more TA than I did Starcraft and I never really bored of it (just got distracted with other games, then jobs). In fact, from the time I started playing TA, I've upgraded my main machine in these denominations over the last decade or so: Celeron 300A, PIII 733, Athlon 1333, P4 2533. Each of these has subsequently been ground to a screeching halt by that one game released in 1997 and modded to the moon and back. And it's still fun. Lots of people didn't like TA, however, because it was less action, more strategy, and was 3D rendered in software right around the time that everything had to be 3D accelerated.

Enter Supreme Commander.

Supreme Commander (for those who have no idea what I'm talking about) is the spiritual successor to TA headed by the same dood (one Chris Taylor, not to be confused with my recent student of the same name) but at a different company and with uber modern requirements. I suppose that as a true spiritual successor, it will need to bring yet another three generations of machines to its knees and by all accounts it does so.

So after having pre-ordered it, I built a new machine. In fact, I got the game before I got the parts. The final upgrade straw was that my old machine wouldn't ever have enough video card to run the game (GeForce 6 minimum). This is the first reasonably cutting edge machine I've ever owned to the tune of about $2K (running Vista, but that's a rant for another day). I built it yesterday, got it all configured and downloaded and patched and almost usable and went to play Supreme Commander for the first time. After roughly ten years of antitipation I've now been stuck in the patching portion (done in the background) for, oh, the last two hours. On a blazingly fast machine. That was built specifically to play this game. On my extra premium 3Mbit connection that's normally really nice.

I'm convinced that the universe hates me.