Been writing some here and there as of late. Some fic-blurblets related to RT and such (and it’s not substantial enough to justify sticking on Across Universe… yet), podcast-y stubs, and other such blah that I’m sure to revisit soon and make public.

And here is where the title of this post becomes relevant. “Wait, why am I opening Word? That takes forever to load on Dinah. I should give that Google Docs thing a whirl…”
And, dude, this is actually kind of neat. No having to pass or reach around the network to grab documents, so as long as my internets are up. Hell, I could even upload my existing Word and TXT stuff (although much of it is long outdated). Why the smoo have I ignored Google Docs until now? Slow Yoshi is sloooooooooooooooooow.

Only way this gets more awesome is if Google makes, like, a Painter clone.
…knowing Google, I wouldn’t put it past them to try it… especially considering the bloated disaster that is the most recent version of Painter (11, released in ’09 and sucked so much I went back to v10).

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Meowch: Kestine and the other kitties went to the vet (and they hired a third doctor! Good for them, it means they’re pulling in lots of business). The females all checked out, but Kestine’s ear/nose/throat issues (via dribbly eye) persist and this newbie vet decided she wants to ferret out the source of it once and for all.

It’s possible he may have kitty asthma, and as much boo as it is to be sick, for some reason this doesn’t bother me so much. I guess it’s, like… considering he spent part of his first 9 months of life on the street, he could have picked up something much, MUCH worse than asthma (or he could have been born with it?) and much like human asthma it’s quite manageable. But we won’t know for sure what it really is until he gets another xray next week.

Kitty asthma. Blame my weird imagination, but this makes me imagine Kestine as some fat mouth-breather with thick glasses. Putting aside that as a boy kitty he is naturally bigger… what the hell, self. Being the tubby nerd is MY job! o_o;

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I think Evil Stepfather’s turned into General Carter (Disgaea 1)… at least by appearance. Dude’s got that same kind of ‘stache (narrow, but at the same time too bushy to be a Hitler ‘stache). Of course, Evil Stepfather sounds more like Edward James Olmos than Bob Papenbrook, but you get the idea. Head. Breaking.

I open this with a trivial yet recurring gripe about Amazon– I click “group into as few shipments as possible” and… “HELLO WE ARE GIVING YOU THIS NOW WITH THAT FOLLOWING WHEN IT BECOMES AVAILABLE” which is Amazon-speak for “both of these items are not in stock at the same warehouse so we’re splitting your order up anyway, lol.” Argh. Why even give me that option in the first place if they never listen? Seriously, it’s only actually consolidated properly ONCE that I can recall. I shouldn’t bitch because it’s still free shipping, but… packaging waste is boo.

That said, the Logitech Speaker Lapdesk N700 arrived first, with the wireless N card (a D-Link) to follow shortly. (FYI, the lapdesk came from the Amazon Arizona warehouse… the next closest station is in Nevada?) I held off unboxing it until it was time for bed, and here we are.

It’s, uh… quite big. Definitely not something I can shove in my messenger bag or easily haul around with me. Its size, however, is inconsequential to how freaking AWESOME it is– the underside has this padded fabric that’s similar to what you’d find on nice textured furniture and does not heat up at all. You can’t really hear the fan but it IS on (mine shipped with the fan switched to on). It’ll be a few hours to see if it’s able to drop Dinah’s peak temperature, but it HAS slowed the uptake quite a bit– it previously took Dinah about 40 minutes to cap out at around 136F (based on Speedfan). About an hour in and she’s at around 120F. If it doesn’t really put a dent in her final temp, that’s fine… as far as heat control goes, as long as this enables me to put her on my bed without clogging her vents (and thus trigger an overheat), it’s a success. :P Old laptop is old after all…

The ultimate awesomesauce, for me, is the speakers. They override the existing speakers with nary a fuss– just a few minutes pulling some drivers over Windows Update or what-have-you and you’re good to go. And woooow, I never knew how crappy Dinah’s speakers were until now. OMG. This lapdesk won’t give you freaking 7 channel surround but it’s stupidly better than what passes for laptop audio (short of putting on headphones). They are also much more sensibly placed than Dinah’s onboard speakers, which are often blocked off by pillows. You can toggle the volume either through the side buttons or Windows’ volume slider; there’s no OSD if you use the buttons and you’ll have to keep tapping to get where you want.

If you have a laptop, get one of these, even if you don’t have heating issues. The underpadding is comfy and the speakers rock! Not cheap at $80 (softened by about 20 for me due to spawning Amazon eCerts through my bank’s reward program) but sooo worth it. I’ve used laptop coolers and they were flimsy and not very lap-friendly…. Logitech just hit laptop coolers out of the park with this one. :D

Only one little snag and it’s not really related to the lapdesk– I can’t use my mouse with it. No room on the card table that Dinah normally sits on, since the lapdesk is so big. I’ll need to go dig up a firm mousepad or something. I can live with Dinah’s touchpad for now, though.

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Meowch: All four cats are getting their vaccinations next week. Who gets to pay for them (but doesn’t get to go because HURR DURR EVIL STEPFATHER and his wanting to go just so he can look at the other pets even though every time I go to Dr. Berg’s office it’s usually pretty empty)? Me. :P

Poor Kestine, though… dude HATES to be in a carrier. Pile that on top of someone taking his temp by sticking a thermometer up his butt, and having to listen to Daisy hiss and swear at the newbies in Cat Demon… and probably someone wanting to give him eardrops since he always has some kind of ear wax. Not fun. :|

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Post-It Notes’ LAN version is Not Hamachi: yet mother is pushing for its usage as a Hamachi replacement as she can’t be arsed to reinstall it and log back into the house VPN. *FACEPALM* I don’t care how cute the deletion sound is, the Post-it notes app is clunky as hell and I have to go through all these menus to send a note over the LAN. If this was about not wanting to reinstall Hamachi, fine…. but we could have used GBridge instead since that runs off Google. o_O;

Awesome kitty Kestine likes to rub his face on freaking EVERYTHING. Doorways, table legs, MY legs, box corners, and ninja laptop Dinah’s wifi parts.

In the case of the wireless-N card, it was just one facerub too many, because the fat purple end of the card snapped off and the card shut down. Thankfully Dinah didn’t freak and go all Blue Screen of Death, but her wireless-N card is now officially dead.

Oops.
I don’t blame Kestine enirely, though… old card is quite old (I think I got it a few months after I originally got Dinah) and it was starting to flake out. I’ve ordered a D-Link* Wireless-N card off Amazon (yay having enough rewards points to slash off half the price!) and also a Logitech lapdesk (combo cooler fan/speakers) because ninja laptop has been running VERY hot as of late.

For now I’ve fallen back on using the original onboard wireless-G… and remembered WHY I boosted Dinah to N in the first place. Wireless-G sucks! :P Actually, wireless sucks as a whole– mind you, this is coming from someone who loots podcasts left and right and at any given time is either running YouTube, Slingbox, Netflix, South Park or the TWiT Live stream– and I moved as much as my crap as I could over to wired mode earlier this year. Wireless-N is the closest to wired mode as I can get, and is the only form of wifi I’ll stick on a machine on this network ’cause I’m spoiled on my awesome gigabit ethernet that I use to pass things around inside the house network.

As for Kestine… well, he’s a bit frustrated that he can’t rub his face on Dinah for now. XD It’s funny that he goes specifically for her wifi stuff– the card and the corners of her monitor lid, which are supposedly where the wifi receiver bits are. I wonder if they emit some low-level EM wave that cats find interesting enough to facerub?

* = old router and wireless-N card were Linksys (obtained at the same time), new router is D-Link, which has been AWESOME thus far, so may as well go D-Link for the card too.

Bigger is still better: Pizza Wednesday, doods. The weekly tossup between Pizza Hut and Papa Johns is complicated a little more this time around; the former rolled out a new event pizza type (the Big Italy, yet another attempt at an extra large… dude, why can’t they bring back the Big New Yorker? THAT was awesome!), yet with the latter I’ve piled up enough rewards points to get a free pizza. Ordinarily free pizza would trump everything (because seriously, what’s better than free?), but when it comes to new/event rollouts, I gotta try it. It doesn’t help that I’m a wing addict. >_>;;;

Live from Azeroth: Yoshi now has as much of the t10 Mage armor (“Bloodmage’s Regalia”) as she’s going to get, and there’s nothing more I can pile up Frost emblems for… so any future emblems I’ll just convert into Primordial Saronites so I don’t need to kill my gold buying ‘em up to make the ICC craftables for my alts or guildies. :P Any future gear upgrades Yoshi will have to get through ICC, most likely in 25-man mode. (That said… while inferior to the Frozen Bonespike that Yoshi’s packing now, I want Halion, Staff of Forgotten Love since its essentially the WoW version of Planet’s Burden, Yoshi’s signature weapon everywhere else).

I will slug that Lich King in his noobish, ice cream-hoarding face, yes I will. >:D

While old man Phil would be next on the gear supply chain, I need to throw in Rei stat, to unlock the craftable leather/mail pants. I’ve, uh… lots of rogues/druids/hunters/shammies in the guild who could use those things and I’ve kept them waiting for quite awhile (with Robert on break, I’m the only in-house ICC crafter-dood, after all). And, of course, Rei can use ‘em too.

No Kon Do: BOOOOO. :( I liked Paranoia Agent (or, “what happens when Japan turns Law and Order into headmessy anime”) and Paprika (which I definitely need to revisit for the dub, hehehe I’m terrible). If you’ve no idea as to who this awesome dood was, do yourself a favor and watch either of the above. :O

O hi, I eventually came back to work on this one.
If WoW maintenance drags on longer than usual, I may ink the Chelsea portion of this, too.

…Dude. I think I want this game.
I hope it sells a freaking mint, too. Why? Because if it does, and if this is any indication… ohh yeah. See where I’m going? >:D

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Live from Azeroth: It cannot be said enough that I love playing old man Phil. OLD MAN CAN HEAL or something. To think that about a month ago I was spooked about raid healing because I thought I would screw up and such. Hah! Now, it’s like… the more I play him, the easier it gets. It’s part-gear upgrades, part-experience and part-”no, really, you’re not going to botch it because there’s heal redundancy.”

(…though, the other day I DID solo-heal Patchwerk. I didn’t know until AFTER the boss went down that the other healer got left behind in Ironforge. *blink*)

So I’d piled up enough frost emblems from a late-night ICC 10-man to get the first piece of his tier 10 healer set and… uh…
Where’s the “Crimson” in the “Crimson Acolyte Shoulderpads?” (Click on that armory link up there to follow along.) Those shoulders (and the rest of the armor set for that matter) are most definitely not anything resembling red, they’re all fel (demon) green and in-game they have a bit of a yellow glow effect which makes ‘em look like puke-green.

The Heroic Sanctified version? BLUE. WHAT.

Really? Really? Crimson is not puke-green or blue (though the Heroic Sanctified version would look badass on Phil), it is RED. Oddly enough, the normal Sanctified set is indeed red-ish. One out of three ftw, I guess? Still, costume designer dood, did you flunk out of color theory or something? Sheesh.

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POKE HER FACE. Lady Gaga gets boo points on the whole (mostly because of the videos– the music itself is tolerable but the videos are so disconnected from the lyrics that the end results break my head), but this is the one exception, and only because Cartman does it SO MUCH BETTER. >:D

I need to remember to watch South Park more consistently. Yes, I can always stream it from the website (and it’s better that way since they aren’t bleeped) but… you get the idea. >_>;