I have been giving medication to my cat Isis. It had allowed her to be her normal self. After the meds ran out, however, Isis’ back became achey again. The bitter cold did not help. Isis made it onto the bed at first, but now she is under the bottom stair all day because that stair affords back support. I had no choice but to call the vet to arrange a visit to some other vet in Anderson who specializes in small-animal backs.
I got the folks’ wireless and Internet connections fixed in the end. Basically, I had to reset the router to its factory default settings, then to reconfigure the router. And I got my sister Vickie’s laptop connectable to my folks’ wireless. At least I thought I did. Anyway, it was too late to make any difference to Vickie, who found the driver for her laptop’s Ethernet port, which was enough to give the laptop fast enough Internet access to quickly download the remaining drivers.
All this trouble for Vickie came about because she insisted on Windows XP in place of Vista that came with the laptop. I don’t blame for not wanting Vista. Vista is the type of crap you use because you have to, not because you want to. I have already pondered over Vista’s unwieldiness, its paranoid security, and its Hollywood-mandated digital rights management. Vickie tried out Vista for an hour or two before deciding to switch over to Windows XP.
I think it is ironic of her choosing for her laptop a version of Windows (XP) that she had been avoiding like a disease. She had hung on to Windows 2000 on her main box for soooo long because she does not trust XP and its authentication scheme. Maybe she will give XP a shot on the main box when the unavoidable comes when she needs to reinstall Windows.
I watched as much as I could of Pitch Black on the Sci-Fi channel. I watched it because Vickie plans to watch it herself just to see how scary it is. I say as much as I could
not out of fright (although the movie did have its moments) but because of time: Sci-Fi would splice those stupid Battlestar Galactica webisodes
throughout the film, making it much longer than is. I had to miss the ending of the film because I needed to break off an hour before midnight to go to bed. I do work, you know. It looks I will have to rent the DVD to see how it ended.
For a comprehensive wiki on the video game Bioshock, the Bioshock Wiki is bare of some aspects of the game, like the maps for the last two levels. Either gamers never reached those levels, or got tired of them early and bugged out, or rushed through them too fast to think of copying maps and images of the levels. So I made an account on the wiki and uploaded a map of the Museum Gauntlet (also called the Proving Grounds).
In that level you play a heavily armed and armored Big Daddy to a Little Sister. The little girl leads you through the ruined museum, unlocking heavy metal doors as she goes. Along the way are three test subjects — corpses of businessmen — from which the Little Sister is compelled by operant conditioning to stop and extract a stem-cell slurry called Adam. In doing so she attracts splicers — insane citizens who need Adam to survive. And without the Adam-pumping slug inside her, the Little Sister is mortal. That is where you come in, Big Daddy: You protect her by beating the bejezus out of the splicers while she works. You also rig or blow up the security to keep it from attacking her. At the end of the level, near the elevator that takes you to your final enemy, the Little Sister crawls up into an air vent and hands you her syringe. You need that to defeat your enemy: He will be loaded with Adam, and you must drain him of it to defeat him.
You know, for all its faults and delusions of non-evil, Google is the best thing that ever happened to the Internet. Without Google and its ability to make searching the Web such an ease, the Internet would not have growth as much as it has, and the business monkeys would not have felt the least bit of interest in it. Yet the ungrateful apelings are trying to kill Google, at least according to this Wired article reported in Slashdot.
I have never watched inaugurations: not for Bush the Elder, not for the Glorified Redneck, not for Bush the Younger, and not for Barack Obama. Just be glad I did not think of an insulting epithet for Obama like I have the others. I am willing to give him the benefit of the doubt, even if his underlings will make a fool of him as underlings usually do.
It is evil to use the poor as a tool for one’s own selfish interest. The left has been doing it for a long time in pushing policies of ressentiment. Now the broadcasters are using the poor as an excuse to delay the transition to digital television less than a month from now. They have even gotten the new president and powerful congressmen on their side. But this pressure must not delay the transition to digital television and the freeing of valuable spectrum for wireless uses, just because the broadcasters do not want to give it up.