We went to the zoo yesterday. I had no idea apes were so gross. Both the gorillas and the chimps were…well…what’s the grossest thing you could think of them doing? Yeah, that’s what they were doing.
Vanessa and I ate at Namaste in Rio Rancho. Along with the Indian food, we got some veggie momo. (Excellent name for a band.) It’s basically dumplings. For dessert, we got some rasmalai, a cream cheese-based dessert that reminded me of cheesecake.
If you ever get an odd email from someone, contact them about it through other channels. Don’t just reply to the email. Hackers may have taken control of the account for the purpose of sending emails out to people saying “Help, I lost my wallet as I’m travelling here in Nigeria and need you to wire money.” If the hackers are watching the account, they’ll just delete any warning emails from anyone, which is why you need to warn the person through other channels.
The kitchen light went out so we got a different light to put in. I’ve embellished these instructions so that you know what to expect if you are in the bottom 5th percentile of people attempting home repair. Place the base of the light fixture into the electrical junction box in the ceiling. You do have a junction box up there, don’t you? You don’t? Well, go to the store and get a drywall saw and cut out a hole and put one up there. You back? Good. Now screw in these two screws and put the base of the fixture on to the screws and twist it into place. I hope you don’t mind that there isn’t really enough room to check the alignment of the screws and keep your hand out of the way at the same time in that impossibly narrow, darkened space. I’ll wait till you’re done with that………………………………………………………………3 hours? Are you serious? You bent the screws and messed up the threading? Fiberglass in your eyes and lungs? Shredded the aluminum heat shield and most of the fiberglass? Excuse me while I take a moment to laugh heartily.
We actually began this project a couple of days ago hoping to just change the ballast on the old light. It turned out to be a one-of-a-kind model, just like most of the home hardware I’ve ever tried to replace…not found on the web, etc. Well, guess I learned how to cut a bit of drywall and remove fiberglass splinters.
Windows 8 tile icons are simple white icons on a single color. Microsoft also reflected the look on their main site as well as in Visual Studio 2012. PlayStation Store’s new look: the same hard-edged simple icons on a single background color. A bunch of sites and applications are doing this…ironing out and de-colorizing their icons. Is this good or not? I guess the eyes scan such things quickly and they work better in peripheral vision…but color may convey some information too. Time will tell, I guess.
Old Windows icon
Let’s iron it out, shall we?
We saw The Hobbit 3D High Framerate version. I enjoyed the movie and was amused to see that Radagast was played by a former Doctor Who (Sylvester McCoy). Also had Guy of Gisborne from BBC Robin Hood with a big dwarf nose. Anyway, aside from being 3D, the 48 frames per second version was odd to see. I think I’m a bit prejudiced against it in up-close dialog scenes. It looked unnaturally smooth and cheap for a movie, like some kind of TV show. Maybe this is the same kind of situation when people claim that records sound better than CDs (which I always thought was pretty silly). However, in fast-moving action scenes, it really helped. You know how sometimes in a movie, the frame rate is so slow that you can’t really tell what’s going on sometimes? Well, that didn’t happen here. But there was also a scene where it made the special effects look fast and toy-like. We’ll see if they do it for the next Hobbit movies, or if the criticism was too much. (They’re splitting it into 3 movies.) Either this will catch on and people in the future will laugh at the 24 frame per second movies of the past or it will come to nothing Also, maybe they’ll learn to do it better and how to do the effects and lighting better for 48 frames per second. I mean, this was the first try.
A few years ago, we added an external glass door to our south-facing front door. Don’t do this. The glass helps trap heat and turns the whole thing into an oven. It gets hot enough to burn you and has damaged the paint on the front door. As the energy.gov site says, “Never add a glass storm door if the exterior door gets more than a few hours of direct sun each day. The glass will trap heat against the entry door and could damage it.” Would have been nice to read that a few years ago.
After playing a cooperative firefighting board game called Flash Point, I came up with the idea of one called House Work. You must clean up the childrens’ toys and take care of the other chores before the house is enveloped in utter chaos. It’s almost impossible to win because as you’re cleaning up toys in one room, the 1-year-old is scattering toys in two other rooms…somehow simultaneously. Look out! It’s an outbreak of laundry coming from the kid who’s decided to throw clean clothes directly into the laundry basket. Just like Pandemic, you almost never win.
Never thought about that…something fishy there.
We got to visit relatives and my uncle (super board game aficionado) was there. We played 7 Wonders, a big ole empire-planning strategy game. Pretty good, but with a high learning curve. We also played Flash Point: Fire Rescue, a cooperative firefighting game similar to Pandemic. Surprisingly, we actually won. I hear that’s rare. One pretty casual game that I found we liked a lot was Hamsterrolle. It’s a bit like Jenga, played in a circular will with inward facing slats around the edge. You’re trying to get rid of all your little wooden blocks by placing them on a wheel, making it slowly turn and eventually drop pieces out. If you cause pieces to fall out, you have to pick them up. Lots of tension and excitement in that game. Oh, another casual game we played was Luck of the Draw. Draw a random subject mentioned on a card and vote on some random criteria such as “most surprising” or “most angular”. Pretty fun.
