The last few years I really slipped into night owl habits and certainly enjoyed it. Let’s see… great theatre takes place at night, all my friends are online at night, it’s much easier to get some co-op going on at night and these are all good things. I did all my writing and work at night and my daytime hours just kept getting shorter. There’s no one thing that made me want to flip those hours back to the very early ones of my childhood — 6 am hockey practice? Been there, done that! — but I knew I really wanted to make it happen. I thought this wake/sleep switch would be much harder than it was but I nailed it within a week. Go me.
I do miss the nightlife a little, since getting up before 6 am does mean I can’t stay up until 2 without seriously feeling it, but I am happier for it. It will be even better when the sun starts showing up nice and early, too! While waking up before the alarm is second nature the most difficult adjustment has been switching my productive hours to something resembling ‘normal’. Getting up and going to bed? No problem. Actually doing work before noon? Little harder though progress has been made. By the end of this week I hope all will be completely natural and my friends will stop calling it a miracle that I’m up before the sun ;)
I’ve discovered another perk with these new hours: gaming when it’s light out makes me feel like a little kid again! Remember back when you had a set bedtime? You absolutely had to get your gaming done before the parents went stomping on the floor to tell you brush your teeth and get upstairs and this was the LAST WARNING EVER. Or else. My parents used to take the controllers away if we played too much. Eventually they figured out that I had my own hidden set and would take the power cords instead. Those were much harder for wee ones to replace. Ahem. The games I play these days are quite different though. It just feels different to be assassinating people at noon as opposed to midnight. Ditto for sending out my direction-impaired acid bird out at not-terribly-worried bandits. Wii games, however, have always been a daytime thing for me so there’s no switch going on there. I guess the only thing left for me to do is make more friends in opposing time zones and start working on my foreign languages!
Nikki passed away on Monday. I don’t have dogs anymore. It was a bit of a surprise even though she was well over 12 years old. With Shadow we kinda knew it was coming, not that it made it any easier. I was over at my parents’ Monday morning, played with my dog, and she sat at my feet while I watched TSN. Then I went home and got a call not two hours later. I’m glad my brother was in town. To tell him over the phone, again, would have been brutal. It’s almost ridiculous how much dogs affect your life; their absence is so keenly felt instantly. The whole family has had trouble with old habits. I check the water dish, my brother closes the basement door so she doesn’t get into trouble. We all open the front door slowly since she likes to sleep at the base of it and we don’t want to hit her. It’s going to be hard. We decided to wait a few months and then revisit if we’re going to get another dog. This all sucks. I’m still trying to work towards OA but it’s been slow. I’m glad my nights and mornings are busy this week so I don’t have time to think too much. It’s the afternoons that have been so hard.
I reformatted my main pc and, just for the heck of it, redid my tablet. The behemoth is on Win7 Ultimate while the tablet makes due with Home Premium. It used to be on Vista which ran slow as molasses on there and took minutes to shut down. Now everything is nice and fast and still very pretty. I don’t need to worry about compatibility modes here and 7 plays very very nice with tablets :)
This week should be pretty crazy. I must setup something, anything, as a backdrop for OpenAlpha. Gotta hit Home Depot. I’ve been trying to shift my hours this year back to actual mornings. Not just the normal mornings but the early, up with the sun (or what would be sun were it not winter), mornings. This week will be a trial by fire since I’ve booked appointments shortly after ass o’clock allllllll the way on the other side of the city. Many alarms have been set to prepare for this occasion. I suspect much mumbling, grumbling and/or cursing will ensue when I drive out in the blackness of pre-5am.
In completely random news: I was at the shoot for Amber’s book cover last week and she’s released some behind the scenes shots for people to check out.
Something is rotten in the state of… my computer. I’d tell you her name but I’m a little embarrassed by it now. That and it’s going to change, anyway, since I have to wipe everything and start from scratch.
Format C:
Not quite the evening I had planned but this was on my list of things to do. See, I was checking my internet usage stats for this billing cycle, like I always do, and then dropped my monocle (had I been wearing one). In a busy month with lots of uploading I can top out around 40GB, up & down combined. My shock at seeing 80 gigs on my account, 40 of which were uploads, continues days later. Several calls to Rogers — and it is always Rogers — yielded no answers. I’m not wireless. I don’t torrent. I don’t play WoW. Anymore. Haven’t been able to jump on Xbox Live for a while. So, uh, what the hell? The CS agents refused to believe that I wasn’t running an open wifi access point at first. HahaNO. I prefer wired 100% of the time and that’s certainly the way I work at home. They said they couldn’t tell me exactly what was being uploaded since that was apparently a very expensive process that they couldn’t authorize. I said I’d reformat, they’d make a note of that, and if I still have this problem in a week they will escalate further. Ugh. The problem does appear to be with that system though. I plugged in my tablet for the second half of the day and I’ve only used 327MB. 150 of which were HD YouTube videos because Dave Carroll is wonderful. This is in stark contrast to my behemoth PC which was uploading 100MB a minute after a clean boot. Uh-huh. Not good. netstat wasn’t helping me too much and my google-fu failed me to find a free in-depth bandwidth monitor. If anyone has one that they couldn’t live without, do drop me a line!
So, uh, in an unrelated query would anyone care to recommend free ways to best secure your Windows 7 machine? Pretty please?? :)
Microsoft Security Essentials, Avast, Comodo Personal Security Free are the wonderful suggestions I’ve received so far. I find it very telling that no one talks about AVG anymore.
Jenn is probably best known for her regular appearances on Call For Help and OpenAlpha.tv. Presently Jenn is completely and totally thrilled that she has more time for all things gaming, geek, and hockey :)
You can follow her at twitter and last.fm if you are so inclined.
