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

Oh hello August, where the smoo did you come from?
…crap, I forgot about the Midsummer Box of Fun. It’s something I’ve done in July for the past couple of years, just do an Amazon/Best Buy clusterfwegh of an order… mostly video games but otherwise small fun or awesome things. Maybe I spaced out this time because I’d gotten Super Mario Galaxy 2 and Pikmin and passed that off as my Box of Fun.
On the flipside, I can’t really think of anything else I’d want at the moment, so I could just delay it until fall or whatever. Hm.

Live from Azeroth: So, uh, I may have invaded Khadgar server… and am making a serious attempt to play a Horde character this time rather than just bumming about when there’s slim pickings for PuG raids or other things on Draenor. (Boss is out for the weekend to attend a wedding, to name one…) I’d earlier said I was going to roll a Tauren Paladin in Cataclysm, but decided to wander over to Khadgar sooner.

This also means there are two of Koyoshial now… a shadow priest on Tanaris server (Pigeon land!) though she’s kind of a token presence there… and this Koyoshial I rolled on DM’s server, who is intended to be a Blood Elf replica of Yoshi (with things like profession changed up a little bit to be more efficient). As you can guess, the Ko- prefix is my corruption of “Kopii” because you can’t put spaces in names. Boo.
Anyway, I’ll be levelling her during the day, and holy smoo you doods in Lazy Peons spoil me. :O

Ah, so different to be in a bigger guild as opposed to tiny, tiny Shattered Knights. Not that one is necessarily better than the other, and surely SK will pick up at the expansion and our doods come back from hiatus… Still, at least with this one I won’t have to wade through awful Trade chat to find a PuG raid that may or may not be made of colossal fail.

And now, time for sleep.

New TV freaking GET. And… well, maybe this is because I haven’t watched TV in awhile, but I think this one actually looks better than my old set. The colors are a lot stronger, for one thing!

Also, Samsung has ditched the 8-bit bootup jingles. This would be kind of boo (even though it’s a fluff feature) but what has replaced it makes up for the lack of the pseudo-Konami sound. :D It’s this pretty little bumper, as if to say “good morning, how do you want to TV it up today?” The OSD is now in full color; selecting the source video is reminiscent of the Xbox 360.

I’m not too fond of the remote, though… but that’s a non-issue since I’m reconfiguring this Harmony remote (which I originally looted to replace the Slingcatcher remote that I thought had been lost) to use in its place. :P

I’m sure my PS3 and Wii are going to want to patch too, but Yggdrasil gets first dibs so he can fix up his antivirus and such. Speaking of which, I found out why he stopped letting me tap in via LogMeIn; he had no head, therefore there was no desktop to go TO. Ha ha ha… should have been obvious, right? I mean, I could tap in while the TV was off, but I guess he can tell when the monitor/TV is dead. Nowhere to output to, so he just idled in blank mode. (Yet he could still operate Hamachi and host files on the LAN… weird!)

What will get the honor of being the first thing watched on my TV? NSFW. Yes… a not-TV show on a TV. Well, the proper term is IPTV… oh, you get the idea! :P TWiT Live as a whole outputs video in very nice quality, though, and if you were to fullscreen it on an actual TV, it’s pretty indistinguishable from a SDTV channel. :)

Half the fun in loot, for me, is watching the tracker data. You plug some alphanumerical string into UPS or something and check every so often to find out where your stuff is. Sometimes it takes a rather unusual path to get to you (recall some time ago when I was all WTF about a DealExtreme package taking the long way from Shanghai to Fontana when the plane could have simply hopped the pacific in far less time).

And then I find Boxoh. Most awesome package tracker ever, because it plots the stops on Google Maps in addition to the usual tracker data! Obviously you’d have to plug in the tracker string as soon as you get it to get the maximum effect (it doesn’t retroactively plot) but there’s something HIGHLY amusing about actually seeing a package’s journey on a map.

Watch the tracker mapping for my TV that I ordered. It’s cute how Boxoh even uses a package icon in place of the usual Google location indicators. :)

Also, Weather Underground! It eats up your entire browser window and has all these switches to toggle things like temperature view, precipitation, clouds and, yes, storm radar! (The internet is for storm pooooorn~) Oddly enough, it will also plot out the locations of Holiday Inns and Wells Fargo. Huh.

No more holding out for deals on TVs… it looks like the prices are as good as they will get (also, Yggdrasil won’t let me tap in via LogMeIn OR Windows Remote Desktop anymore, clearly he does not enjoy going headless on the long-term) so I’ll be ordering this Samsung today to finally replace the old-and-busted brick that’s been sitting in my room for the past month and a half. It’s got all the HDMI and Component ports I need (and, of course, the all-important VGA port so Yggdrasil can play too). And because it’s Amazon, this also means free shipping and no sales tax.

This is good. I’ve been able to hold off because of Slingbox and such piping through to Blastoise, but it will be nice to have my media center back in working order– my busted TV not only grounded Yggdrasil, but also made my Wii and PS3 unusable too. I mean, I could have transfered my FF13 save files to the other PS3 downstairs… wait a minute, no I couldn’t, not while headless. Blah!

So, yeah. New TV get, as fast as it can get shipped here. Also? Kestine needs to stop prying my glasses off with his tail. :P