The New Digs

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Last night I found in my e-mail in-box an invitation to join the Home Beta.  Home is essentially a free “Second Life” (read that, 3D chatroom, or socialware, if you prefer) service that will be releasing to all PS3 owners before the end of the year.  So far it looks good, but as a Beta, it’s still missing a lot of content.  I can see the potential here for some, but right now, it’s kind of not doing enough to pull in the socially motivated, Sims/Second Life crowd, and not offering enough to give gamers a reason to mess with it.

Fixed With New Digs

Hopefully this won't turn into a regular event of migrating from blog to blog.

Re-installation

The PC is slowly getting back up to speed after being replaced. This time it wasn’t anything quite as catastrophic as the hard disk suddenly dying. It was more like the gradual decay of the machine, specifically its power supply unit. For the last couple of weeks it’s been getting harder and harder to power up the machine. At first it manifested as pushing the power button and getting a flashing amber light instead of the usual whirs that signified booting up, but that was remedied by simply unplugging the USB external hard drive that was attached. Soon that work around failed to do it, and over the last few days, turning on the PC has been similar to trying to get an old car to work, with multiple pumps of the power button until grudgingly, it finally starts up. Since we were faced with blowing a couple of hundred dollars to fix it, or splurging a few hundred to just get a new PC, we opted for the latter. I can’t really blame the old PC for dying; it was two years old and actually survived being freighted to the other side of the planet, so it definitely has the mileage.

In other news… Canada losing to Singapore in Ping Pong? UN. AC. CEPTABLE.

Nerdgasm Of Epic Proportions

The Yin-Yang of nerd-dom is now complete. The first side was done online back in 2003. Now, the final side is sure to make the pants of Trekkies the world over explode with… enthusiasm now that their fantasies are about to come true.

Awards & Networking

Today we went down to the Toronto Reference Library to take in the 4th annual Doug Wright Awards, which is basically a new award given out to Canadian artists and cartoonists. The inductee into the “Giants of the North” hall o’ fame was Lynn Johnston, better known for her enduring news strip For Better or For Worse. It’s nice to be living in a country again where people have extraordinary talent and actually get recognized for it.

We also bought a new router for our home. I love this thing. It was actually cheaper than our old router, but is specifically built for wired internet connections. It seemed like our previous router was dying on us, as we were experiencing sporadic internet connections, and when we asked our service provider about it, according to their logs, the connection to our home was stable the entire time. When we got the new router up and running, it was like a revelation. The PS3, which previously kicked off every PC in the house off the internet anytime it tried to connect, suddenly did so without bullying the other computers. Moreover, it did not mysteriously disconnect every time I put in a new game, nor did it crap out on us just because we happened to move to new menu for selecting songs while playing online for games like Rock Band. In other words, it looks like most of our minor nitpicks with the PS3 and its voracious yet finicky appetite for the internet can be blamed on our router, which was actually a wireless router and seemed to object strongly to not being used in such a fashion.

I love our new router. It’s the Bees Knees.