The Blog: Laments From La Mancha

Apparently this is the week for technology to hate me.

About a month ago the lamp in our TV went out. No biggy right, called the warrantee place (always get the extended warrantee on items over 1k I always say), they shipped us off a new one. Bim-bam, got it installed.

Sunday after deciding not to pay a $2.00 surcharge per ticket to see Meet the Robinsons, we all headed back home to watch Arthur and the Invisibles (I was later reminded that that hadn’t come out on DVD yet – yet, somehow there it was). About thirty minutes into it the TV powered down… and then powered back up. This process repeated itself about every 10 minutes. Then it went to every four minutes.

Not a huge problem. I called the warrantee place back up, and they sent out some techs on Tuesday and they’ve order another replacement lamp (we’ll see what happens with this one).

Wednesday I’m picking Michelle up for lunch and in mid-sentence the radio in my Pilot stops working. Turns out I blew a fuse. The Honda guys said it was because of my cell phone charger, but I’m hard pressed to buy that since I’ve used it now for over a year. But meh, what are you going to do?

And then the other night, I was copying some files from one hard drive (on the MacBook) to another. Mac says, “oh, there is already a folder with this name, do you want to copy over it?” Now as a long term PC guy, you’re like heck yeah, because all that does is copy over any files that share a common name, and if not, just adds them.

Nope. Not this time for some reason. Copied over 3 *purchased* seasons of The Office. Thankfully I am anal and only lost 3 episodes (backup, backup, backup).

Ugh. Why does technology hate me this week?

Oh.. and the special bulb that our kitchen uses… that died too… man oh man…

So this morning I got to thinking about birthdays.

Jace just turned 9 in April. Dafyd is racing towards 11 in June. Where does the time go? “What about me?”, I wondered. What has my life become?

This year I turn 35.

35 years old. What have I seen in my 35 years of life? What have I accomplished? How many people have I made a difference in their lives?

Half way to 70.

More than a third of the way to 100.

How much time do I have left?

Suddenly I just felt the crushing of the few remaining years I might have left.

And then it hit me… Silly Bob, you’re not turning 35 this year, you’re turning 34.

And do you want to know the crazy part? After all of that, I realized that I’m only 32

Oh yes… I know that many of you have been waiting on edge as long as I have, but you can finally relax. The game that started my board game addiction has finally made its way onto the XBOX 360 live arcade.

You know, I have to say that its not too bad. I’ve only played 3 games so far (the first one at 4 am when I discovered the game by accident), but I’ve really enjoyed myself. Now if only I can get Tom or Shane (the only folks I know with a 360) to download it so I can crush them…

None the less its nice to see Euro games coming to mainstream America. From what I understand they also have a version of Alhambra and Carcassonne coming as well. So keep an eye out for them. Or, if you’re a 360 player and reader of the blog, send me a gamer buddy request to Don Quixote1974.

They showed this clip at the beginning of church on Sunday.

For a few weeks I played with iWeb on this site while I tried to figure out how to convince my server guy to install MySQL 4+ so I could run the latest version of WordPress (and stop spam posting).

It was fun and all, but it really is designed for folks who have ABSOLUTELY no web skills or who are amazingly lazy (I fall into the amazingly lazy category).

But in the end, I just hate having no control over what my code does or the inability to add things that I want. iWeb isn’t a bad program, but then again either is using AOL dial-up if that’s the speed you move it.

I will port those 4 entries I made over there into WordPress this afternoon.

Until then, don’t drive into flooded road ways.