under the weather

I’m feeling a bit under the weather today. I’m hoping I feel better by Monday, since it’s likely to be a hectic week at work. I guess it was a good day to feel a bit bad, since the weather was pretty bleak anyway.

I finished watching the first season of 24 today. I bought the DVD set off eBay a few weeks ago. I’m kind of hooked on it now. I have the season two set waiting, and I’ll probably pick up season three at some point. (I’ve seen the last two seasons on regular old TV, so I don’t think I’ll pick up any DVDs past season three.)

I had been thinking about going to Wizard World Philly today, but just didn’t feel up to it. I walked across the street to the local comic book store instead. I actually didn’t buy anything, but I was seriously thinking about picking up the first few issues of Warren Ellis’ new Marvel series Nextwave. I’ve heard good things about it.

Tomorrow is the Somerville Street Fair. I’ll probably have to avoid the gyros and other tasty treats, if I’m still feeling off. I’m hoping at least that it doesn’t rain, so everybody else can have some fun, even if I’m mostly lounging on the couch drinking herbal tea.

Well, it had been a while since I blogged, so I let this entry become a bit of a ramble. Hope I didn’t bore anybody.

Nero

I just bought the newest version of Nero from Best Buy. As with a lot of software that comes out these days, it seems to be a bit bloated with unnecessary features, and it (of course) wants to take over nearly every file type imaginable. Really, I just want decent software for burning CDs and DVDs. I don’t need ANOTHER music player or photo organizer! On the plus side, it does come with a nice video player that does a decent job of playing DVDs. (My DVD drive didn’t come with decent DVD software, strangely enough.)

Merrill Lynch

I realized this weekend that I’d fallen way behind in entering my Merrill Lynch statements into Quicken. Like, a year and a half behind. Oops. So I’m sitting here now entering them all. Part way through, I realize that I seem to have lost ten cents somewhere. Being the obsessive weirdo that I am, I go back through all my statements, and I find the incorrect entries in November 2004. (It wasn’t one ten-cent error, but two five-cent errors.) I have a sense of deja vu about this, so I search the blog and discover that I’ve done this before.

New supercomputer center at RPI

IBM to help build $100 million supercomputer center: “The new Computational Center for Nanotechnology Innovations, planned to be operational by the end of the year, will be the largest supercomputing center at a university and one of the 10 largest in the world, according to its backers.” They didn’t have this kind of stuff when *I* was at RPI!

damn you, cartoon network.

I decided to try and catch up on Fullmetal Alchemist a bit today, wattching a few episodes off my Tivo. I was glad to see that I had the first few episodes in the queue. I had originally started watching it near the end of the series, then I stopped watching it, then a few episodes got deleted off my Tivo because I ran out of space. So, basically, I wasn’t too sure where I was going to be. I enjoyed the first episode, but I was really puzzled with the second. Not long into it, I started hearing a bunch of random farting noises. I thought maybe there was some plot-based reason for this, but I couldn’t think of one. After a few minutes, it became obvious that something was very wrong. I checked the original air date, and realized that the episode had aired on April Fool’s day. This Wikipedia article confirms that Cartoon Network stuck a bunch of random fart noises in some of their programs on April 1. Way to go, guys. You made a perfectly good episode of FMA unwatchable. Now I’m going to have to go out and buy the DVD or something.

color printer

I’ve been using the same old b&w HP DeskJet 520 for the last 10 or 15 years. It’s always worked fine, and I’ve never really had a truly pressing need to print in color. I’ve had a Dell 720 color inkjet in a box gathering dust for the last year, though. It came free with my Dad’s computer, and he didn’t need a printer at the time, so I took it home. I finally decided to take it out of the box tonight and hook it up. It works OK, but it’s not astounding. If I’d paid money for it, I might be disappointed. I think I need to try and print something on good photo paper, and see how that looks. I don’t have much room on my computer desk, so I’m just sitting it on top of the DeskJet for now. Hopefully, that won’t be a problem.