Something has finally happened with my Xbox 360 order, the estimated delivery date has changed to December 7th.
Now granted this is next Wednesday and a few days later than I was hoping for, but it’s nice that it’s been brought forward from February.
Games are still estimated for delivery on Friday, which means at least five painful days of having the merchandise but nothing to stick it in.
A metaphor for so much more I’m sure you’ll agree.
Firefox 1.5 was released today and this is a pretty good time to go ahead and make the leap. I’ve been doing a lot of web development work recently where everything simply looks better and works better in Firefox than IE, not to mention how quickly attached you get to the tabs.
I’m not one for Microsoft bashing, or for caring about the security problems IE has (because I’ve never been affected by any of them, not frequenting the kind of low-life websites that would install a backdoor into my files), I simply think Firefox is the better browser.
IE7 can’t be far away, but any screenshots of that show a Microsoft trying desperately to look as though they’re trying something new, and ending up with a UI that looks like it was designed by a 3 year old. With tourettes.
Of course a lot of people are saying that Firefox is doing nothing new, that it’s not innovative. But why does it need to be, it’s a web browser, it’s there to view webpages, and that’s what it does, and that’s what it does well. Innovation too often means bloat, and that’s not what I want from my browser. Let the innovation come from the web content, not from the system used to access it.
Looking through my video server tonight I couldn’t decide what to watch, so I went for Back to the Future 2.
It’s one of those comfort movies, the kind you can watch over and over again without getting bored, the kind you enjoy every time whatever the situation.
It was made in 1990, so the year 2015 where the first part of it was set was 25 years away, and I’m sure they made some sort of effort to try and guess what the world was going to be like then, what technology we were going to have. Well now it’s 2005 and it’s only 10 years away, and they were pretty much miles off. The likelyhood of flying cars being everywhere in that short a timespan is pretty slim, and there’s no sign of the kind of voice control, holographic projection, dehydrated foods or two-tie fashion statements the film suggests.
The future, as we all know, sucks. Well apart from tomorrow, when I’ll watch Back to the Future 3.
I don’t spend change. Can’t be bothered carrying it around with me. I get it every day at the supermarket, I shove it in my pocket and just take it straight back out again when I get home, adding it to the jar on top of my bookcase. Eventually the jar gets full and I count it all up. I did that today.
£326.
That’s all my Christmas presents paid for then. And my back strained when I carry it to the bank. Copper is heavy.
A nice evening with the girl who lives in the flat above me, couple of glasses of wine and some good chat.
Only took me two years to go upstairs and see if she would be interested in such an evening, but that’s just because I’m so dynamic and upfront. I’m already pencilling a date in for 2007 when I’ll have the balls to do it again.
I created a character on the test server for the World Of Warcraft 1.9 patch and jumped on today. There was a wait of a few minutes, which is the first time I’ve been stuck in a queue when trying to join, but I quickly found out why. Everybody on the test server gets to be a level 60 character of their choice and when I arrived, it was pandemonium. Never have I seen quite so many characters in one area before, many of them on mounts, with wild dancing, jumping around and conversational crazyness.
I headed over to Stormwind, because I wanted to see the new auction house, and it was quite the disappointed. What once was an empty building has been converted into a new place of business simply by sticking two NPC characters on top of the bench at one end. No real new architecture or anything, just a basic converted room. And since the auction houses are linked, it means the same prices whatever one you happen to go to, still not exactly solving the lack of a proper economy.
I haven’t found myself playing much recently (although to be honest I haven’t found myself doing much of anything), and now I can’t play it without my PC overheating and resetting. So it’s either buy a case fan, or stop my account again.
Save money and reduce noise, sounds like a decision made.
One of the new shows that I actually stuck to watching was Threshold, and now it’s been cancelled. People keep putting it in the same category as Invasion and Surface, because they’re all new sci-fi shows that started this year, but Threshold is the only one I found myself still watching. In the other two nothing ever seemed to happen, even after watching five episodes of each one.
Invasion just seemed to kept on hinting at how evil the local sherrif was without ever giving solid information, while the kids in Surface were so annoying, and so stupid that I eventually had to stop watching it before I went hoarse from shouting at the screen so much. Retarded children should not be allowed in television shows.
Threshold was light, with a great cast, and an interesting premise. Yes, it was a little formulaic and was much more episodic than the always continuing story lines of the other two, but at least something happened each week.
Following on from yesterdays t-shirt post, I put the black Marvin t-shirt on the Chatbear Store tonight. Still haven’t decided whether I’m going to stick up any further designs, but I definitely think Marvin looks better on black than he does on the white shirt.
Readers of this blog are obliged to buy three shirts each, which I think is only fair.
I decided it was time to clear out some of the older t-shirts in my drawer and ordered a bunch of new ones from Threadless. Stupidly I ordered them the day before their $10 sale started, but you know I’ve never been very bright.
I ordered You Are What You Eat, Barrow Bath, Cookies Love Milk, Calling Home, Gingerbread Nightmares, Pandamonium and Loch Ness Imposter.
Another week goes by without me writing any words, which means I guess it’s official, I’m a nanowrimo failure.
The creativity just wasn’t there, the month hasn’t been particularly conducive to conjuring up made-up worlds, not between horrible events and being ill. It just conspired against me, pairing up with my natural procrastination to create an impenetrable wall my imagination couldn’t burst through.
I’d still like to finish it off, I just think the chances of me writing 36,000 words in the next 10 days are about as likely as a lottery win.
Has anybody got any good tips for removing blood from carpets? Dried in, little spots. Previous experience with carpet cleaner has not been good (spent the next month trying to dry it out) so I’m looking for something creative.
There’s been a Chatbear Store for a while now, but I never do much promotion of it, so sales have been dead for years. One thing that’s always bugged me has been the lack of black t-shirts, since Marvin will look much better on one of those than a white one. This is been a simple technical problem with their digital printing system, and their number one most requested feature. So it’s nice to see that they’re about to start offering it.
The question I have is whether or not it’s worth me setting up the store properly? Is there a market for bear related merchandise? Forum and blogging t-shirts? A mouse mat with your favourite func_tom quote? If there is, then I’ll put it together properly. Comment, along with any merchandise ideas.
So I got a reply from Amazon customer service regarding my Xbox 360 order, and it turned out to be totally useless. They didn’t read my question at all, and I got a canned reply about shortages etc etc. So I replied, only to get a bounced message back to say that the email address I wrote to couldn’t accept incoming email.
What kind of customer service is that, where you can’t actually reply to them? It meant I had to go through the whole process of sending in my email again, following through the customer service wizard and explaining the whole issue again. This is clearly not only bad for me, but doubles their workload too, starting over again each time. Anyway, I got this…
Our ordering system automatically re-estimates dispatch and delivery dates based on any order revisions you apply; some will work in your favour, some will not (e.g. cancelling an item or upgrading your delivery preference may bring your dates forward, adding items or downgrading your delivery preference will usually push your dates back).
Following the modifications made to your order our system automatically re-estimated your dispatch and delivery dates accordingly. We are sorry if this has caused any inconvenience.
Which still doesn’t really answer my question.
So I give up. Either it’ll ship or it won’t, but at the moment it seems like I’m going to get two games turning up before I have anything to play them on.
I went and changed the payment method on my Amazon Xbox 360 order from Switch to Visa today, although to be honest I’m still thinking about cancelling the order completely. Anyway, after I changed it the estimated delivery date went from the 28-29th November to the 21-22nd February.
Huh?!
I changed the same detail on my games order (which is seperate) and the estimated delivery on that went from 8-9th December to the 1st-2nd December.
Double Huh?!
I haven’t cancelled my order, my order number is the same, my order date is the same, yet I suddenly dropped three months down the queue. And my pre-order was in from almost the moment Amazon started taking them, so I should have stood a pretty good chance of getting on at launch.
I’ve sent them an email to see what they say, but if anything is going to make me cancel my order it’s getting it in February.
Was off work sick yesterday, but decided to go back today. Probably wasn’t the best decision, really needed another day of rest and relaxation to get over this thing properly. I’m really only left with weakness and a vicious cough, the kind that hurts every time it makes an appearance. Not nice at all, and so far the cough medicine hasn’t been helping.
My sick ratio is pretty good, I think I’ve only had three or four days off with it in the last eight years. It is a marvel I manage to stay so healthy. Relatively.
Yea, this whole book writing thing is getting hard. I’m now over 14,000 words, which leaves 36,000 to go in 16 days. Which is more than 2,200 a day. And at the moment I can barely manage the 200.
My creative spark just isn’t there, I’m not sure what I’m doing anymore. I’m looking for excuses just to get some characters together so I can whack up the word count with long conversations about nothing. I even dropped in my second book idea and am not far from putting my third idea in there as well and just mixing them all around.
I need to work out where this thing is going and fast, or just give it up completely. It’s just not fun anymore.
Being sick sucks. It’s official. I’ve currently got a wide range of cold and flu symptoms, the worst of which is coughing with enough force to wake the dead.
There’s been throat pain and sneezing and sinus pain and headaches and blinding water running from both eyes. There has, in fact, been nothing but these highly enjoyable ailments since Friday.
As if I needed an excuse to sleep half the day.
I opened up the new Bearkey admin code today and did some more work updating the user interface and all the functionality. Here’s a quick screenshot of the autocomplete of your friends and enemies on the send message screen.
If I launch this before Christmas along with a more user friendly Chatbear backend (but still the v2 front-end), I’m going to expect you all to buy me presents.
If you just put a round teabag inside the Senseo instead of one of the coffee pods, which are after all just round teabags except filled with coffee, it makes a pretty damn good cup of the Douglas Adams favourite.
Drop in ample milk and sugar and it’s a soothing respite to throat pain. Much better than the warm salty water I was gargling with at 6am this morning. In the kitchen. In the dark.
Another reason why you should buy one as a Christmas present this year.
*LOST SPOILERS AHEAD*
You wait three weeks for the next episode and when it comes along, you can’t help but feel a little disappointed. The whole episode was basically geared to give Shannon the character she hasn’t had for the past series and a half. They clealy decided it was time to make her somebody you might actually care about before they, well, before the ending.
And the ending was great. It made up for it all. Even though I knew part of what was going to happen, how it went down was still excellent.
But they’ll need to have a kick ass episode last week to make up for the contrived nature of most of this one.
All content is (c) Copyright 2003-2008 Richard Smith. This is where it ends.
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