Saturday, July 19, 2014

July 18, 2014

Today while I was in the bathroom, I turned my head just in time to see out of the corner of my eye, a spider alighting on my shoulder. This was quickly followed by the feeling of it touching my bare arm before I swiped it away with my cat-like reflexes. It wasn't quite a 'holy shit' moment, more of a 'what the crap, dude?' moment. A short time later I managed to find it again and got it in a cup so I could deposit him safely outside. Or her. I'm not good at identify the gender of spiders.

Despite that minor terror, I managed to achieve all of my goals for the day. I called to cancel my XM radio and ended up renewing for another five months because I got the same $20 deal. Last time it took several different offers before they got down to five months for $20. This time it was her second offer. Much like last time, I called with every intention of not renewing but I was pretty sure if they offered me a good deal I would take it. I'm not in my car long enough to get my money's worth out of the normal subscription price, other than once a week when I got see the new volunteer kid. On top of that I will be adding the trips down to grad school which is a bit of a drive, so I figured if they offered me the deal I would take it. Although if they hadn't, I planned on getting into audiobooks and listening to them on the drive down and back. I still might do that. I really like NPR and podcasts and that seems like it might bode well for my possible feelings toward audiobooks. I think I already have some downloaded, somewhere, that I never got around to listening to. I also need to get back into podcasts because I haven't done that consistently in awhile.

I texted the lady who cuts my hair and managed to move my Monday appointment to 8:30AM. I'm not exactly thrilled about having to get up an hour earlier just for a haircut but I would have to do the same thing if I had moved it to a different day so I might as well get it over with.

After that I went down and got my oil changed. At some point I want to go out to the dealership and get a full inspection because I keep getting coupons, but I keep forgetting about setting up an appointment, so I just went to the place I always go. It is pretty quick, which the dealership is not.

When that was finished, I went to see about renting some movies. For awhile now I have wanted to watch the two Matrix sequels because I want to see how they have held up. I remember liking the special effects but not really caring for the story. I believe that was the consensus of most people. I also wanted to rent The Thirteenth Floor, which came out around the same time of The Matrix and had a similar theme I guess. I ended up not finding any of them. Hastings had the The Matrix but nothing else. I could have gone to the local video rental place but I didn't feel like spending the money, because I planned on using my credit at Hastings, so I just headed home.

I took a short nap and then spent the next hour or so tracking down the Minecraft mods I like and relearning how to install them. Every few updates I get into Minecraft again and then have to re-download all of my mods so I can play the updated version of Minecraft. This time it was because I wanted to play on my new laptop. Adding mods has definitely gotten easier over the years but I always need a refresher on the latest way to go about it. I eventually got it figured out and got all of the mods I wanted installed except for two which haven't been updated yet. I replaced the mini-map one with a different mod but I didn't have time to check on a replacement for the other biome mod. Maybe tomorrow. Maybe never. It also took me longer than I would like to admit to allow Minecraft to use more RAM. I did this on my desktop and it worked wonders for the performance of the game. I knew where I needed to put the little line of text but I was forgetting the crucial first step of installing the 64-bit version of Java. Once I got that figured out, everything went smoothly. And now I can play Minecraft on my laptop. I haven't tried it with all the mods installed yet but when I checked it after I got a few installed everything was working well. Hopefully it will hold up but if not I can always lose a couple of the mods. I'm going to try it out after I catch up to the present with this.

Tonight at work I got a headache shortly after walking in the door and it stayed with me the rest of the night. That was pretty sweet. We had a special showing of Korengal that had a fairly disappointing turnout. I had to be there to pause the movie after the trailers so one of the managers could give some sort of speech. Then after the movie there was a Q&A, I'm assuming with soldiers who had fought over in Iraq and Afghanistan. That would have been interesting to sit in on but I was trapped upstairs babysitting projectors. And the LMS, which is the big server. At one point it froze and when I tried to restart it, it froze. And then wanted a login that I did have, and the manager had never seen that screen before. He tried turning the power off and back on but it got stuck on a whole different screen. He tried calling technical support but got put on hold and ended up hanging up. Later on I went back and turned it off for about thirty seconds and took out the thumb drive that was plugged in, before turning it back on. This ended up working out and I was able to transfer new trailers to one of the movies, which had all Scope trailers, instead of Flat, so they looked weird on the screen.

Coming back to Minecraft, because it has now been a few hours since last I wrote, I played it for awhile and it ran beautifully with all the mods installed. I also spawned in a pretty awesome world and got a start on a house before moving on to other things.

Those things were another cross stitch pattern. I seem to have the same problem with cross stitch patterns that I have with books. I have still only finished making one cross stitch but I have made several patterns this summer. And now I'm making another one rather than starting another cross stitch based on one of my patterns. So kind of like finishing one book and buying three more. I'm never going to catch up.

We had a midnight showing of Purge: Anarchy tonight and I ended up watching most of it because my head hurt and I needed a distraction. I watched a little bit earlier in the night so I probably ended up see all but ten minutes maybe. I can't remember how much of the first one I saw but I think I saw the majority. I liked this one better. The first one sets up the world but the whole movie takes place in a single house. In the new movie they are out playing in that crazy world and all the different characters made for a more dynamic story. It still isn't a great movie but it is an interesting concept. In a world where a Purge exists in the United States, I would not live in the United States. Or I would be traveling out of the country during the Purge. I don't hold grudges and even if I did I don't think they would ever get to the point of wanting to kill someone. I think a Purge would be the exact opposite of cathartic. In the movies there are the homeless people who are screwed, the people who just try and hide in their homes and hope for the best, people able to afford a security system for their home, people who actually go out and kill people, and really rich people who either pay people to let them kill them or pay to have people brought in that they can kill. None of those appeals to me. I would think the anxiety and terror one night of that could cause would lead to mental and physical health concerns. And now I'm just kind of rambling because it is three o'clock in the morning and I should probably go to bed.


I'm going to go to bed now.

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