Author: splicer

All too fre­quent­ly, I use words whose mean­ing I’ve gleaned only vague­ly from con­text. Occa­sion­al­ly this leads to some minor embarass­ment as I mis­use a word, although most fre­quent­ly this has been fol­lowed by a sense of grat­i­tude and relief for hav­ing come to a bet­ter under­stand­ing of the word.

Some­times, how­ev­er, I’ll get so much con­tex­tu­al infor­ma­tion about a word that I devel­op a sub­con­scious knack for putting that word in the right place with­out real­ly under­stand­ing what it means … Read the rest

Ste­fan­grad has­n’t recovered.

The fires caused by the plane crash­es forced mas­sive infra­struc­ture expen­di­tures, and the econ­o­my spi­ralled out of con­trol. Soon, the city’s pop­u­la­tion aban­doned Ste­fan­grad, tak­ing it from a city of 45,000 down to 20,000, slash­ing the tax income need­ed to sup­port basic ser­vices like road repair and police/fire depart­ment bud­gets. Crime became ram­pant and even more of the good cit­i­zens migrat­ed out. Ste­fan­grad now stands a ghost town, a shell of its … Read the rest

I have a Sim­C­i­ty game that’s been run­ning for the last sev­er­al days.

Ste­fan­grad just had two plane crash­es, one right after the oth­er. Both went into my sports stadium.

And here I thought that traf­fic con­ges­tion was my biggest problem.

… Read the rest

I’m sin­gle again. 

I’m pret­ty sad and hurt and dis­ap­point­ed. But I’m not going to drink over it, unless you count Diet Coke.

She says that I’m per­fect in every way except that she’s not attract­ed to me. Or not always attract­ed to me. Well, that’s sort of a non-nego­tiable item. I real­ly pre­fer my gir­friends to be into me. I can put up with a lot, but that’s cross­ing the line.

I feel like I just missed the dead­line to claim the … Read the rest

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Some­one is being very kind to me… Read the rest

Fre­quent­ly, well-mean­ing friends or col­leagues send me links to arti­cles on the New York Times web­site: nytimes.com. I think it was ten years ago when I first jumped through their “give us per­son­al infor­ma­tion about your­self in exchange for free access to our arti­cles” hoops. Since then, EVERY TIME I’ve want­ed to see an arti­cle on their god­for­sak­en site I’ve had to cre­ate a brand-new login. I don’t know whether its their pol­i­cy to throw away accounts old­er than 30… Read the rest

Actu­al­ly, I did it on pur­pose. I knew there was a chance it might rain, and I thought that if I was gonna get caught rid­ing home in the rain, I’d rather ride the heavy, sta­ble, upright bike with the elec­tric hand­warm­ers (one of which actu­al­ly works) than the beast with 120 horse­pow­er on a hair­trig­ger, the steep steer­ing angle, and the brakes capa­ble of throw­ing me for­ward over the handlebars.

Well, sure enough it rained tonight. I wait­ed for … Read the rest

Appar­ent­ly a 2.1 gHz G5 has enough horse­pow­er to decode an HDTV sig­nal and dis­play it fullscreen with­out the stut­ter­ing paus­es that plagued the set­up on the old dual-proces­sor G4 sys­tem. The cin­e­ma aspect ratio mon­i­tor isn’t much big­ger than my old CRT, but it is wider, so TV shows that come in in widescreen look a lot better.

Odd­ly enough, even plain old net­work TV is pret­ty watch­able in HD. I have to admit that … Read the rest

One of the prob­lems of read­ing books that have been rec­om­mend­ed is the fall to real­i­ty from the expec­ta­tions gen­er­at­ed by high praise. Light almost cer­tain­ly suf­fered from this.

Although I found it to be an enjoy­able read, I did not find Light to be engag­ing. The char­ac­ters were large­ly dif­fi­cult to empathize with, and instead of char­ac­ter devel­op­ment Har­ri­son sends his char­ac­ters off in mul­ti­ple direc­tions with­out much rea­son. Indeed, the res­o­lu­tion of the book is so inde­ter­mi­nate that it … Read the rest

Hear that? It’s the sound of my insur­ance rates going through the roof.

	Speed Triple insur­ance pic One of the pic­tures of the 955i that I sent to my insur­ance company
	Anoth­er of the pic­tures of the 955i that I sent to my insur­ance company

… Read the rest