Well! That RAM upgrade certainly did do wonders for Dinah. It’s invisible in terms of effect on day-to-day usage (browsing the internets and such) but what it did to is make her WoW installation playable! Before I could barely wade through to attend to Auction House and mailbox and guild chat, but feeding the ninja laptop an extra 2 GB (well, actually 4 since I had to replace both slots) was just what she needed. She’s definitely raid-viable now, and is better than Yggdrasil in that I don’t have to deal with FPS-killing “senior moments.” She does run a little hot but that appears to be the extent of the stress on her as she otherwise goes back to room temperature-ish once I close out. Go go awesome ninja MacBook!

(Bonus awesome: the mac client for Vent is compatible with my guild’s server, and I’ve been told I have much better sound quality. Hot.)

Still waiting on my video card before I can assemble Blastoise. Originally sourced through an Amazon subseller, that order got canned because the subseller got some bad card in their shipment and opted to kill and refund everyone’s orders rather than risk sending out a bad card. Smart move for everyone, mildly inconvenient for me because I wanted to have Blastoise built and running before Thursday’s raid (but since testing Dinah earlier today, I’m sure the ninja will be able to handle things in Blastoise’s place, and as far as keyboard/mouse setup goes she’s not as awkward as Yggdrasil)

His case is here, and yesterday I did the final extraction of the parts being carried over (Blu Ray optical drive and flash memory reader). I wanted to temporarily reuse Blastoise’s old 9800GTX so I could start the rebuild now and drop in the newer card when it arrives, but… uh… I must have done a really good job seating that video card, because no matter how many things I unclamped/unscrewed and pried out of the way, that thing was NOT coming out. Oh well.

I ended up reordering the N560GTX from NewEgg. (I’d considered asking mother to pop into Best Buy during her errands but the one here is totally cleaned out of ‘em. Bah!) I had thought that the card would be coming from farther away (East Coast) but it’s originating from… freaking West Covina.
On UPS 3rd Day.
Can we say “Overnight by Technicality?” XD
I will laugh if it DOESN’T hit tomorrow (though if it does, circumstances will work against me and the UPS truck will arrive after the raid starts. :P)

Did I say how much I love love LOVE my Verizon iPhone?

Because I do. I mean, my LG enV was awesome for the 3-ish years I had it, but I was really glad Verizon got the iPhone when it did because my battery had gone to crap.

For one thing, which turned out to be my greatest annoyance from my old phone: no more having to worry about running out of room for incoming TXT/MMS messages, EVER. YES! As far as I know, the concept of the message inbox has been done away with entirely in favor of threading by contacts in something like iChat (AIM for Mac). On previous phones, I kept having to clean out my message inbox, which means I’d end up losing TXTs I’d wanted to keep. It wasn’t so bad for picture/video since I could save those out to the SD card, but since everything is saved on the iPhone’s giant hard drive (relative to… whatever piddly storage was on old feature and semi-feature phones), I can hold as many messages as I want henceforth. YAY!

I need to find out how mother’s inserting extra icons into her messages (she’s using cheeseburger and dollar sign and other icons). I’m thinking it’s probably a different app than the normal version. As much as I facepalm at her spamminess, those icons are cute and rather unobtrusive…

I haven’t played around too much with the camera, aside from a single shot of Kestine. This will almost certainly change in the near-future. For one thing, no more having to send pic-tweets as MMS, now I can upload directly to TwitPic via TweetDeck, with video-tweets going to YouTube. :P As for future camera abuse… let’s just say that I’m going to need to address this “buh I talk funny and I don’t like the sound of my own voice” and possibly have to correct this by force… and possibly your great amusement. Stay tuned.

—

In other news, I’m totally getting a heart-shaped Papa Johns pizza today. Tried to get one a few days ago but for some reason I got locked out of online ordering. I’d like to think I’ll, uh, compensate for this and yesterday’s Jack in the Box by following Kestine and other kitties around with my iPhone. >_>;

Dinah had her coming out party today. Mother was, as usual, late in getting up (she’d been awake for awhile, but playing with her iPad), and I’d sensed an Android phone lurking on the house LAN. I thought that this was another secret acquisition (since she’d also looted an AppleTV and a new network printer to keep on the other side of the Puppy Border) and if she’d given up on waiting for the iPhone.

Nah, turns out the Android was just some visitor who decided to tap into Altima and borrow mah internets.

Mother is so stupidly amused by her iPad; she’s got a custom skin for it with one of the bulldogs (Baby Girl, the fatass white female), and she looted an iPhone-sized version for when those happen. I decided I may as well go for it: “iPad, bah, I got something better.” And then I went and got Dinah.

Short version of what happened after:

- Dinah is NOT a Galaxy Tab. WTF. They don’t come in white!
- Dinah is NOT a MacBook Air, either… she has an optical drive and 2 USB ports rather than 1, and I wanted something that could play WoW. (Which she does, and rather well!)
- The only thing I haven’t been able to put back on or otherwise replace on Dinah is Painter. There’s also Winamp, but in its place I use VLC. As for Painter… uh… the torrents clearly favor Windows. I’m just going to wait for 12 to hit and buy that; since v11 Corel has included installers for both Windows and Mac on the same media. >_>;
- Quote of the day: “She looks like someone painted her in Carnation milk.” HAH!
- Why yes, the Apple logo on the back DOES light up.
- No, I’m not getting a Kestine cover. I love my big orange bastard, but I’m not THAT crazy. :P

—

Pizza Wednesday. New– or rather, returning after a looooong hiatus– challenger? Domino’s. Been curious about their overhaul for awhile. Brooklyn-style pizza + chicken parmesan sammich… let’s see if it’s as nomtasty as they claim!

Hurr durr Thanksgiving. Thankfully (hah!) there was no drama. Actually, it may have been kind of awesome. Aside from food, things usually entail a movie or two– in this case, Robert brought in Scott Pilgrim vs. The World. In some bizarre way it was like watching a mashup of Napoleon Dynamite and NSFW (my favorite podcast ever), the latter probably because of all the Zelda sound effects scattered through. XD

After that mother wanted Eat, Pray, Love. Bah. Screw that noise, bro and I talked WoW instead. It turned into some bizarre form of 20 questions about his characters, hee hee hee. Some gems from the chatter:
– Akaycia really is a (intentional misspelling and) reference to the tree (this one had been bothering me for months and ranks all time 2nd place to the origin of Numair’s name)
- Bro is stupidly amused by the very existence of Dinalesca, of all my characters. “How the hell do you get from a robot ninja girl to a Night Elf Rogue Engineer?!” or something. (fyi, Robert does not know that Dinah’s RL body is now a MacBook.)
- Bro’s plot to roll a Draenei Pally (Edira) to grandfather in the horse mount was for naught. It got changed into an elekk anyway. Sad bro is sad. :(
- “For the Horde!” rolls off the tongue much better than “For the Alliance.”
- The “Lich King liek HUEG SAMMICH” meme? It’s spreading. XD
- We also really hate that you cannot have spaces (and therefore surnames) in character names.
- I, uh, think I’ve permanently tainted bro into associating Kael’thas with naked Raiden (same VA). Why is it that whenever I mention Raiden, everyone defaults to THAT part of MGS2? XD;
- Robert is like me in that we would probably be competent RPers if we weren’t such damned control freaks… so instead we just go nuts writing the background and such instead. I had never really thought him to be the sort but he actually puts quite a bit of effort into researching names and whatnot. Once more I have invited him to throw his hat into the wiki (since he’s technically Across)

Semi-related: I have been spared from having to call in mother for transportation to the doctor’s office. The last thing I need is to have my blood pressure artificially jacked up because of her being a drama monster in the car and making me late again. Robert is stepping in for this (and if I interpret correctly, he also volunteered for the DMV stuff too, awesome). Don’t need to invent a cover story, really… ’cause chances are, mother would still be asleep by the time I go. XD

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White Ninja, Day 3:

It’s been said that nobody writes viruses for the Mac because it’s more worthwhile to go after Windows machines, therefore there is no need to slap antivirus on Dinah. Yet, there’s another camp that says it would still be prudent to give her an AV program anyway. Do I, or not? That is ze question. :P

Dinah talking to Blastoise and Yggdrasil is pretty easy if she’s in the same LAN. It’s when she wanders away that things start breaking… or do they? In theory, doing a “connect to server” via their Hamachi IPs should work.

Dinah is now fully Skype-functional. (If you are packing an iPhone 4 or the newest iteration of the iPod Touch, Dinah is also capable of Facetime!) I’ll put my details in a locked post shortly, but you’ll now be able to bark at me… perhaps even on video GASP.

…my bad. Turns out there IS an OS X client for Hamachi. It has been looted and Dinah joins her siblings on the network, with one teeny caveat: she is incapable of tapping into their files, and can only IM. :P Well, it’s SOMETHING, I guess. (She CAN get into their files via “connect to server” but this is no good if she wanders outside the network.)

I guess this means I’ll have to set up something like Dropbox or what-have-you as a long-term solution. Oh well, such is what comes with a mixed-OS network.

Also, it seems Dinah going into sleep mode kinda breaks network browsing on the Windows machines. XD; There doesn’t appear to be anything equal to hibernate that I know of, so it’s either sleep mode (and break the LAN) or total shutdown. Booo.

Note: I thought I had hit post before going to sleep. Guess not!

(Several hours later…)

Dinah now has WoW. Haven’t gone past login since I’d have to go down the hall and yank my iPod authenticator off Blastoise, but even the login looks hawt. :D Need to transfer my addons though.

CoH is next; Blastoise started pulling the Mac client a few days ago, so it’s just a matter of shoving it over the LAN in a way that Dinah can take it. What’s left? Steam, I guess.

Cripes, I cannot get over how cute this MacBook is, I’m so glad I got it over the MBP. And while it’s made of polycarbonate it has strangely not triggered my allergies by contact. Awesome? :P