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The personal weblog of Andy West.
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01/25/10
Spring in January 2010
Filed under: General
Posted by: Andy @ 9:03 pm

the back roof leak

The weather outside is wet, but I am not complaining. It is warm … pleasant. I would walk about if it were not so rainy. This is a nice contrast to the weather during the past three or four weeks: Bitter, miserably cold, with icy roads that make you drive at 40 MPH tops if you did not want your car in a ditch.

During this weekend I decided to take out a scraper and dig into the dark, wet spot over the back door. I scaped out wet stucco and wallpaper and drywall to the wood underneath. The wood was wet — and crawling with ants! After fixing all that (detailed here), I planned to call a repairman this coming spring to see if I can get the leaks fixed once and for all.

The ultimate cause is that the house was built just after World War II, as anyone can tell by viewing the asbestos wall singles underneath the vinyl siding. The house was minimally remodeled in 2005 before it was sold to the guy who, two years later, sold it to me.

bioshock 2

I pulled my single Bioshock 2 page to pieces and turned the pieces into separate pages. The main page is now largely a bunch of link arrows to various aspects of the game: its marketing site, the characters, the weapons, the plasmids, provisioning, et alia.

For months I have been avidly following the marketing site Something In The Sea, although I have not had the patience to do the puzzles. I do not know why I am so excited about this game, except that I love the original Bioshock — but not its DRM, which kept me from installing it on my then-new computer back in the spring of 2008 [], [], [], []).

I do not intend to buy Bioshock 2 right away, but will wait until late February or early March. Partly I want to see how the fen react to it and its DRM, which this time has the miasma of Microsoft hanging over it. Evidently Bioshock maker 2K decided it did not want to mess with DRM customer support any more, so it gave the problem to Microsoft, which is far more difficult to deal with.

Also, I am trying to make time to study to take the ACSP Mac OS X Support Essentials 10.6 test next month, and the game will almost certainly interfere.

BTW, Jordan Thomas, the head of development for Bioshock 2, is evidently a Whovian. He admitted as much, although he seemed to be weaseling around it, during a Cult of Rapture podcast on the creation of psychiatrist Sofia Lamb, Rapture’s version of Mao Zedong and the game’s antagonist. He would have to have watched the series to have known about Fenella Woolgar, who played Agatha Cristie in the fourth-season episode The Unicorn and the Wasp. It is Ms. Woolgar who provides the voice for Dr. Lamb.

web site

Now that I have two years of blog entries under the Hostway version of the Dysmey Blog, I have created separate folders for each year’s group of entries, just like on the original Dysmey Post (which was not a blog, althrough it has been called one).

timmy has left

The folks no longer have Timmy the Duck and his chicken pal for company. Their presence was a mixed blessing. Timmy was a friendly duck and a likeable mallard. But he was most incontinent, and you had to be very careful walking the sidewalks and steps around the folks’ house.

Up until late last week the weather was bitterly, miserably cold. Normal ducks would fly south for warmer lands during the winter; but Timmy was too domesticated for that. The best he could manage was to fly to the nearby creek with its warmer water.

Anyway, my folks persuaded the next-door neighbor, who owns Timmy and his chicken pal but who was hardly at home enough to properly care for the birds, to find another home for them. So a poultry farmer got the birds. At last report, Timmy has become a chicken herder, keeping an eye on the farmers’ chickens and herding the flock like a sheepdog.

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