It’s been a bit cold here in the MidWest recently. But that was before the snow hit. Cold on its own isn’t so bad, but snow seems to make things seem colder, especially when it’s accompanied by a stiff wind. Going outside can really be miserable. Cold snowflakes hitting you in the face isn’t something I was looking to this morning. Depending on which weather man you listen to, we could get as much as 18 inches of snow.
Personally, I never trust the weather man. If they say 3-5 inches, I only expect to get an inch or an inch and a half. For this, I’m only expecting eight inches at the most. Judging by what I’ve seen so far, I’d guess we’ve received four to five inches.
This year’s Super Bowl was a great game. I didn’t really cheer for either the Giants or the Patriots, but I did enjoy the game. I usually only watch the game for the commercials since my team is never in the big game anymore, but I walked away depressed about the ads this year. None of them were particularly great in my view. The game ended up being the highlight for the evening, which isn’t necessarily the case every year.
If you haven’t noticed, I added sub-categories to the large television category. I’ve been meaning to do this for some time now. It’ll take me a while to go through all of the old posts and cross-post them to the appropriate sub-categories, but the organization will be much neater in the long run I think. It’ll be a lot easier to find a particular show, I know that for sure. 😉
Today was my last day on the medication I was on for that infection. I can’t say that I’ll miss it, as it kept me more “regular” than ever. I was on AMOX/CLAV. Even though it’s a generic, it was still over $100 for 30 pills. Next time I’ll have to have Railwolf smuggle me in some from Canada. 😛
I left my new Dell PC running last night when I went to bed since I had uTorrent downloading something. When I woke up this morning, my PC was off. WTF?! And like an idiot, I hit the power button to turn the machine on and walked away. If there were any error messages, I would have likely seen them during the boot-up process. Damn, was that a stupid move or what?
I frankly haven’t a clue now as to why the PC crashed/shut down. I don’t know if it was a heat issue, a software crash, etc.
UPDATE: I have since learned that the neighborhood had a power outage in the middle of the night. Well, that explains things.
I’m glad to see that the weekend is coming up. Fridays are always hectic. It’s rush, rush, rush at IGN. But I got all of my work in for the day and managed to get assigned to another show to review. You’ll see links to those reviews here next week…
Ogre, you asked me about the host. Well, this is now hosted by Host Gator. It was in the running when I was looking for a host a year ago, but Dreamhost was a little bit cheaper. Sometimes you really get what you pay for. I just hope things go better here. Dreamhost was okay for a few months and went downhill.
As I was leaving Dreamhost, I received a bill from them. They tried to double bill me. Haha.
Blog spam was a huge pain in the ass for me a while back. I’d get a lot of comments and trackbacks that was mostly related to prescription drugs. Although very few of those comments and trackbacks appeared on the blog, I’d get email notifications about them from wordpress and I’d have to go in and delete them all the time. Getting dozens of emails a day was a real drag. Ever since I enabled Akismet, I have only received one or two emails, while the software has allowed me to deal with all of the spam internally (within WordPress). I’ve only had Akismet running for a few months and it has stopped over 500 spams. I’m very pleased with the results so far. It has worked just as it should. You really can’t ask for much more than that.
I came down with a nasty cold right after Christmas and when I had almost gotten over that, I had a bit of a health scare. I had been suffering from some pretty bad stomach pains. I have what’s known as an umbilical cyst. It’s typically a problem with infants, but I guess my body didn’t quite heal properly after I was born. And every now and again I have these pains in my belly-button area. Now on a normal day, I don’t have any pain or swelling in the area, but when I don’t properly take care of my belly button (thorough cleaning), a slight buildup of sweat and dirt could cause the cyst to build up and eventually rupture.
The rupture doesn’t hurt. It just lets loose of the fluids which have collected. Well two Sundays ago, the fluid was a different color than it had been in the past. That was of great concern because I’ve heard of various complications, so I took a little trip to the emergency room at 9 or 10pm. What a fun little field trip that was.
Emergency rooms are never fun. I don’t care what ailment(s) you may have; there’s just no joy in going to the hospital in my opinion. Naturally the hospital was a little busy, more so than usual I hear, but I didn’t have to wait too long (an hour in total, I’d guess). The doctor who was on call didn’t really tell me anything I didn’t already know about my condition and simply assured me that the fluid color change wasn’t a big deal. Well that was a relief. I will have to have surgery at some point to take care of the problem because it obviously won’t heal itself at this point. Surgery isn’t something I’m eager to have. You’re looking at a guy who has had very few health scares. The worst was an infected leg back in 2003. I’ve never had to have surgery before, so this is a big deal, even though it’ll probably be a relatively minor one.
Well, I’ve got a lot to talk about, but not much time, so I’ll just highlight one thing and that’s the site. I’ve changed hosts. I stuck it out with Dreamhost for an entire year and finally gave up. The site was down more often that it was up it seems.
Hopefully everybody’s DNS resolved quickly. I was able to see the site within minutes after the DNS change. 🙂
Well IGN began publishing again today after the holiday break and I must admit it’s good to be back. Along with getting the new Dell PC, I moved my computer station to another room. I still haven’t gotten everything unpacked and sorted to where I want, so I’m really “out of it” right now. I think it was good for some sense of normalcy to return while I try to get my little computer station back together and organized.
Also, I sent in two rebates today. I don’t particularly look forward to sending in rebates because we’ve all heard of the horror stories… never getting the promised money. Well, I have to admit that I’ve had pretty good luck with rebates.
The two particular rebates for today were for the Lost Season 3 DVD and my new D-Link router. Neither is for a serious chunk of change, but $10 each is still nice. I’m not going to turn it down afterall. I just had to make sure I had all of the info they asked for and get it postmarked before the expiration date.
And speaking of the mail, I sent in for my replacement discs for Ghost Hunters. I mentioned in a previous post that there was a recall offer for the second season DVDs due to mistakes made in the production. I hope they get the remastered discs to me. I’ve already heard of a few complaints regarding the recall. One guy spoke of damaged discs when he received them and there’s no information on the discs of the case stating that the discs are remastered. I’ll have to wait and see what I end up with before I worry too much. But it sure makes me wonder about the company. Not all DVD companies do a good job and I’m wondering if they will get Season 3 correct. I have the first volume of that season but I haven’t put it in the DVD player yet.
Also, I upgraded WordPress. I figured I may as well as it deals with a security hole. That pretty much wraps up tonight’s post other than to mention a video I saw on YouTube. I actually saw it linked to on Digg, which I seem to be visiting less and less these days. It’s a standup bit by Joe Rogan. It’s very over the top, but the meat of what he’s saying is funny.