Look Upon my Blog and Despair

...which is exactly what I've been doing, since I haven't posted a damned thing here since April. This isn't because I haven't wanted to write, but because I seem to have been permanently blocked.

Regular readers may have noticed in the past that I've written about things that disturb me in the good ol' USA -- the simian president and his corrupt repugnican menagerie, for example, or the rabid religious right and the way they're trying to destroy the place. The trouble is that writing about that stuff makes my BP go up even higher, and frankly I decided to try to chill for the sake of my health.

Hence the more recent writings have tended to be about more laid-back subjects such as home video, or computer games, or podcasts. But the cool, crystal wellspring of inspiration about such things slowed to a trickle, and finally turned into a kind of stagnant muddy puddle with dead bugs floating in it.

Today I resolved to force myself to write something. Be prepared, gentle reader, for a collection of random brain-farts as I try to scrape the rust off my brain's writing lobe...

Video

I have work to do. I took about 90 minutes of video in Virginia, Pennsylvania and Maryland a few months ago when we went up to visit number-two son. A few weeks after that I got another couple of tapes worth at the Scarborough Faire Renaissance Festival down in Waxahachie. Both sets of tapes have been captured onto my hard drive, and I reviewed the first set... and that's as far as I've got. So I have to make a start into picking out the usable stuff and editing it into to some sort of order.

Maybe I should write a series of posts about videography. I'll consider that idea.

Games

Kate and I have been playing Sacred again, probably for the first time in a year. I'd forgotten how much fun that game is. We also went ahead and bought Sacred Underworld, the expansion pack, and that's cool too -- the graphics are definitely smoother than the original. There's a sequel on the way (Sacred: Dark Angel, I think it's going to be called) but I don't know when they're planning on releasing that yet.

Ascaron, the company that makes Sacred, has just released a space-sim called Darkstar One which looks like Freelancer on steroids. I played the free demo a few weeks ago and it looks pretty good.

I also got Half-life 2: Episode 1 right after it came out. Regular readers may cast their minds back to Christmas 2004, when I wrote on this very blog about how I would never buy another game that uses Steam. Ok, I lied. Half-life is just too good a game to miss out on. I still think Steam stinks, though.

Speed

We finally bit the bullet, got broadband installed and joined the rest of the twenty-first century. It hasn't been without its own little family of problems, though...

Setting the thing up the first time, I just couldn't get it to connect to the Internet. The problem turned out to be the order you power things up the first time -- you have to put the router on first, then the modem, and not the other way round like the manual said.

With that hurdle passed, we were off and running... or so we thought. We realized pretty soon that there was some kind of serious problem -- the connection would just seize up for twenty or thirty seconds at a time, so web pages would time out and mail wouldn't send, and all the rest.

I finally narrowed it down to a problem either in the router or the cable connecting it to the modem. "Can't be the router," I thought, because it's a Linksys made by Cisco, and Cisco know a thing or two about networks. So I replaced the cable thinking maybe I'd stretched it or kinked it or something when I was feeding it behind the furniture.

Wrong. Kate and I were very, very careful not to bend, kink, stretch or perform any other kind of topological operation on the cable as we put it in place... and it made no difference at all. The problem was still there. Bugger.

So last night I ran out to Fry's to get another router -- a Netgear, this time -- and it looks like our problems have gone away. Note to readers: avoid the Linksys BEFSR41 router -- online reviews weren't great and it sure looks like we got a bad one. The Netgear is smaller, works better and was cheaper, too.

Stop Press... the problems came back, so it wasn't the router after all, so ignore what I said about the Linksys router. Looks like the problem is at our provider's end. More on this as it develops...