A new member of the family...

As part of my on-going mid-life crisis (heralded with my first purchase), I sold my minivan to a co-worker with a growing family, and then, after months of agonizing decision paralysis, I made an impulse buy for its replacement.

It's actually a 2010, which will be the first time I bought a vehicle early in the cycle -- but the rebates was good, and the 0% financing was icing on the proverbial cake, as it were...

And now my Mustang can continue stay out of the up-and-coming winter weather. Hooray!

G-scare

So I get home this evening and fire up the ol' blog (I use my links on the right as my bookmark list), and Google goes and tells me "Blog has been disabled" !!

I try to log in with my Gmail account, and it says "Account has been disabled" !!

Y'know, I've set up a lot of my internet life using this account, so I was a bit concerned. I followed the various "help" bits on Google's site to get to a point where I could enter a plea for help... then nothing. Okay, I figured; this'll take a while. Googling around, I see this happens now and again. Some are panicky. Some are livid. There's a little bit of "be calm and give the form time to do it's magic".

So I endeavor to be calm and wait it out, trying to imagine a scenario where this might be an opportunity to ditch my current personae and build a new internet life* from scratch... And I didn't like the thought so much, to tell the truth.

So anyway, about 3 hours later, it did do it's magic. Well, I'm still not able to access POP, but everything's intact and working again. Phew.

First thing I'm doing is backup all this up! I may not have been very active lately, but I still kind of like some of what I blathered on about back in the day.


*(I actually do have my "real" identity online, and it's not hard to find the connection, but I'd rather not have my obsessive drunken fandom linked to quite so readily, go figure...)

Honk for English...

I'll just leave this here...

"El Cazador" streaming already?

I must have missed it. Funimation has got streamed episodes of El Cazador de la Bruja (up to 22 so far) on their site. Subtitled only at this point.

My network is flaky at the moment so I'm not having much luck getting a stream of anything but their dumb commercial. So I have nothing to say about their quality yet...

Gearing up

Summer lasted for what... 2 weeks? Fall is starting already (which I'm ok with; fall is quite pleasant here if it stays sunny), and my thoughts are turning to...

Upgrades!

I'm a compulsive upgrader, both with my computers and A/V gear. With the release of Windows 7 (I have my MSDN RTM ISO's ready to burn) and my burgeoning BluRay collection, I'm going all-out. I found a great deal on the new Denon 2310CI receiver (which will decode advanced surround formats via HDMI, plus other advanced niceties), and that led to me picking up the new Oppo BluRay player (with advanced DVD upscaling that will totally obsolete the very expensive player I bought a few years ago... *sigh*), which led me to getting new parts for my HTPC, which led me to getting a new 24" monitor and upgrades to my desktop, which led to me getting an SSD hardrive for my TabletPC, which led to.... Oh hell.

So all this stuff starts arriving today (and the bill for it all arrives later in the month *cough*). So I'm going to spend my Labor Day weekend doing something that actually cheers me up -- endlessly configuing and tweaking my gear! Hooray!