A Smaller Target

Useless Technology

My university and the office I work for in my university have an addiction to technology. 

Seriously.

Sometimes it's nice.   My chair, for example, is perfect and comfortable.  My monitor is large with a flat bright screen. 

Sometimes it's lame.  My keyboard is high tech wireless with music control buttons and knobs, but no light to show you the "cap lock" button is depressed (nice one Dell dude).   This is not a laptop, but a desk system.  So what, you ask is the point of a wireless keyboard?

Oh, it gets better.  I also have a wireless mouse.  Which sits pretty much exactly on the same spot (okay, totally exactly) where the old wired mouse sat.  It works just exactly the same too -- point, scroll, click.  Except about every two weeks when it doesn't click anymore.

Why?  Because about every two weeks its batteries --2 double AA ones-- die.  When that happens, after first having a moment of panic that my screen has frozen, I then have to get up, take my mouse to the "battery monitor", wait while new batteries are retrieved, install them, go back to my desk, reset the mouse and continue working.

Except today a new step was added.  We now have a 2 gallon white hazardous waste bucket in which we've been told dispose of the batteries.  Because (the office manager told me in smuggest tones) we're being green about disposing of batteries in a responsible way.

Excuse me?  We're greener now than we were when our mice didn't use batteries at all?

My wireless mouse: a bit of useless technology.

Finishing and Games

Weight: 164.2

It's raining in Los Angeles.   Or at least in Santa Monica.  I've been up listening all night.  Being a child of the desert -- or at least Los Angeles -- I'm not comforted by the sound of rain in the night.  It sounds leaky, damp and disconcerting to me.  Still, it's supposed to stop by 10 or so this morning.

Not so very long ago, well -- I guess it's been two weeks -- Becky asked me if I'd finished playing the PS2 game "Rule of Rose."  After reading about it being banned in parts of Europe (the UK and Spain) and then reading about the game itself, I'd blogged about it then purchased it with the intention of playing it while I was recovering from the tummy tuck / hernia repair I had in December. 

Well, I did try and play it.   

First off, the reviews aren't wrong.  The game's art is beautiful with a strong and unique style that definitely suits the story.  They're also right that the play is clunky and the main character is annoying to try and control.  None of that really fazed me.   But after about 20 hours of play I had to give "Rule of Rose" up. 

Why, you ask?

First, it was creeping me out.  Remember, I was on drugs and had / have a long incision down and across my stomach.  The mood of the story and my own feelings of vulnerability were not helping me find my Happy Place.  But even that wasn't the deal breaker.  The fact is I'm just too lame with the freaking PS2 controller to play a game with real time action.  And I can only cope with being killed so many times in exactly the same spot.  Especially when the walk-through I download and print in the hope of getting through the "battle" / "fight" in question describes this first "boss" battle where I keep being killed as "super easy."  I figured that just didn't bode well.

Needless to say I was bummed.  No doubt at some point Paul will decide to play the game and I'll be able to watch -- which honestly is what I most want to do with this one anyway.  It's the first time that the bonus scenes in a game feel like a reward rather than something to be endured until we can get back to the action.  But I'd kind of got my head ready to play a game and now I clearly wasn't.  I was trying to figure out if I could talk Paul into buying "We Love Katamari" when something unexpected happened.  Some games he'd passed on to some friends years ago (back when we had enough cash that we didn't just sell then) came back to us along with a few DVDs.

One of the games was Final Fantasy X.  This was one of the first games I remember really being into watching Paul play soon after he got the PS2.  It's the sort of turn-taking game I can actually handle doing.  And so that's what I did, finishing it a couple days ago.  The familiarity worked as did the style of play.  While I'd seen much of the game while Paul played it years ago, I hadn't seen it all.  And it was fun.  I did it my way, which means I used walk-throughs to get past areas (usually mazes) I found frustrating.  I don't find frustrating "fun" in something that's supposed to be for pleasure.  There's enough of that at work.   Paul finds my use of walk-throughs a form of cheating, but that didn't bother me.  Ironically  my lameness with the controller actually works to my advantage in the sort of turn switching style of this sort of roleplay game.  Because I end up wandering aimlessly a bit and tend to level up a great deal just because I'm too lame to have my hero walk in a straight line.

Oh and did I mention I finished it?  That, along with Dragon Quest VIII and Myst Exile makes three completed PS2 games.  In addition to Katamari, of course.   I feel ridiculously pleased by that -- I guess because most games I start I don't finish.  Now I'm ready to play another.  But what? 

Sadly, the new FF XII is real time battle action game.  I suspect unless my ability to work this controller undergoes a transformation,  I'll just be watching that one too. 

Hey! Dude, Where's My Banner?

Look, I  knew it looked like crap, but TypePad has apparently decided that my banner was just too lame to live.  When their server came back up yesterday my banner had vanished.  Woosh.

I'm torn between reloading it, and waiting a bit to make sure it doesn't come back (otherwise I might wake to two of them damn things).  I also think that maybe this is a sign that I should leave it off until I (or maybe Paul) can make it look semi decent. 

I also accidently deleted a post by forgetting that the left click on a PC is a "back" button.  Idiot! That's what I get for blogging at work. Technology is so not my friend tonight.  Ah well. 

Thanks for all the kind words / advice on my scale whoring.  I can't throw it away -- it's too new for that -- but I think it's being given a time out. 

And I have a theory about what's caused the weight gain.  Perhaps the excess pounds are caused by the weight of the cold virus I seem to have picked up.  Feh!

The siren call of generic Nyquil awaits.

Random Stuff

Stuff that I've been meaning to write about:

• The most popular Google search that brings people to this blog is "300 pounds woman" or "picture 300 pound woman."  As my husband mentioned this morning when I told him, I'm no long their dream girl.  So sad!  (HA!)
• My new phone came (remember, my old one died on the day from hell last week).  My new one is this one from Virgin.  It's not sexy or anything (my old one was the first of the MTV Slider models and very cool) but it was only $25 with shipping.  I've been busily entering phone numbers and such.  It was great on Thursday when I was out all day being able to make and receive calls. 
• Still working on the blog re-structure.  You can't really see it, but I've been going back and assigning categories to blog entries.  I'd used them a bit from the start, but since they didn't show up sometimes I skipped out on doing them altogether or lumped everything under "Life" and/or "Musings."
• Almost 2 months after my tummy tuck / hernia repair I finally don't feel like crap at the end of each day.  Update to follow.
• The weekend before last Paul and I went to see the Spanish language film Pan's Labyrinth (El laberinto del fauno).  It was a strange and beautiful magical real film that I cannot recommend highly enough.  Definitely the best film I've seen in the last few years.  However, even though it's about a young girl, fairy tales and fantasy, this is not a film for children.  It's quite dark and disturbing, definitely meriting the R rating it was given.  Rather than being a children's film, it's a film about childhood.  And what could be more disturbing than that?

Changes...

Weight: 164.6

As you may have noticed, assuming you read on the site and not via feed, A Smaller Target is undergoing some changes right now.  Mainly, I'm trying to switch from a two to a three column style so that I have a second sidebar.  The plan is that everything to do with me and this blog would be in the left column and stuff that looks out to other blogs / sites would be on the right. [Why it's the opposite right now would take too long to explain.] I want to do this because having just the right sidebar was getting WAY too long -- I felt bad that people were having to scroll down so far to see links.  Plus I wanted to add "reader comments," a category cloud (because they're so cool) and a few other things and there was just no room.   I also like some of the new widgets and wanted to see about adding them too.

However, making this change is more complicated than it sounds because although this blog is part of Paul and my TypePad account, it was long ago cut off from the TypePad templates and had its own design and CSS (that's cascading style sheet btw) which Paul had helpfully written.   The code in the single sidebar had been hacked at by me to do my little personalizing things, stuff like that.  Basically to do this change, which I've wanted for a while, my blog goes back to square one -- a basic TypePad template that's being modified, mostly to get rid of the multiple colors and fonts.  I hate having more than one font on my pages...  not sure why, but it totally bugs me, especially when it mixes serif and non-serif fonts.

Okay, that would be a pain but not too big a problem if I could do all the work myself.  However, I have the luxury and temptation of appealing to Paul who is able to do things that blow me away.  He says all the time that he's not artistic, but I don't really see that at all.  He has a real instinct for clean design, nice layout and crisp color and shading.  And I've gotten used to my site looking good.  At least to me.

Meanwhile, he also asked me several times if I was still happy with the banner at the top -- he thinks maybe it's getting a little old.  I'm not sure.  I tend in decorating to pick something I like and then just stick with it.  But now I'm looking at websites he's designed lately and thought...hmmm maybe it could look better.  Me?  I'm especially fond of Sarah's and the way they change.  Paul's banner changes too, but not quite the same way.  Maybe it is time to introduce an element of random.

Anyway, if you have any ideas on how this blog could be made more visually appealing / interesting or things you'd like to see added (yes, the links to the before / after pictures and my measurements and such will be back), this would be the time to offer them.

And yes, we ARE taking pictures and doing measurements this month.  Promise. 

New Scale

Weight: 165.8 

Yesterday I went thrifting with Lisa Freemont (my backpacking buddy).  We hit a couple Out of the Closets (where Lisa found me a cool pumpkin colored cord jacket) and St. Vincent's before going to Pho 79 in Chinatown.  It had been a long time since I'd had that lovely soup.  Too long. 

Meanwhile, Paul had gone off shopping / picking up my synthroid at Costco.  He brought me back a couple of things: my drugs, PowerCrunch bars and... drumroll and note that it's Saturday and yet my weight is posted.

Yes!  I have a new scale.  It was a surprise kinda -- I thought he was getting me a simpler, less expensive one that we had a coupon for.  This thing is super cool.  It measures body fat and  hydration levels, lets you set goal weights and even keeps a memory of the last (not sure how many) weigh-ins.

The scale is by Health-o-Meter and is called the "Professional Body Fat Monitoring Scale."  I think it must be their newest model because I couldn't find an on-line picture -- the one there isn't the right model number and looks nothing like it.  The model I have isn't even listed on their website.  It's very sleek and was a great deal -- $29.99 at Costco, which was only $10 more than the most basic digital scale I thought he was going to get me.  I'll take a picture when I get a chance.

After spending some time reading the directions last night and programming WAY more information in then one would think a scale needed --including date and time-- I finally stepped on to find that I weighed 165.8, which sounded about right.

Anyway, I'm going to be keeping track of body fat % and hydration, though I'm also going to try not to make myself too nuts about it.

Weighing can get compulsive.  Or so says the Scale 'Ho.

Silent for a bit

Weight 204

It's going to be kind of quiet around here for a week or so.  I've gone from having a working powerbook and iMac to each one needing to be fixed.  My powerbook needs a new adapter cable (should have that by early next week at the latest).  That's been the case since before we left for the UK.  I didn't worry to much about it as my lovely flat screen iMac was fine. 

Until we got back from Coffee Bean.  The backlight on the screen seems to have gone out.  I have a great mac repair place I can take it to -- but getting the beast over there without a car will be a neat trick.  If I can somehow get it there tomorrow then it should be repaired by Friday.  But getting it in will be a feat in its own right.

Ack.  Again our current car-less situation has come back to bite us.

Anyway, if I don't post much for a while, that's why.  Paul and I are pretty good at sharing lots of things, but computers -- well, that may be a bridge too far.