Rommel develops another new ailment…

Our cat, Rommel, has had a rather checkered past when it comes to his own health.  He entered our house as a basically healthy twelve week old kitten nearly twelve years ago.  Within a few months he had fractured his kneecap (resulting in six weeks in a cast), and within a year he’d had several abscesses, various stitches added and removed, and numerous x-rays.  In more recent years he’s developed a growth in his mouth called a stomatitis, for which he has had several surgeries, regular steroidal treatments, special hypoallergenic food, and periodic doses of anti-biotics.

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Posting Youtube content on WordPress…

Some folks might have noticed my posting of a Youtube “video” (actually, it’s mostly an “audio”, but that’s being picky) here a couple of days ago.  The really observant probably noted that it didn’t work the first 68 times I tried to publish it.  I thought I’d share a little about what I discovered in that process. 

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Second Life, ATI, and Vista: fix coming

I’ve posted before before about the fact that I can’t play Second Life since I upgraded to Vista. I was pretty certain that the problem related to the ATI video drivers. ATI added OpenGL support in the 7.1 release of the drivers and updated that support in the 7.2 release, but Second Life still doesn’t work.  I haven’t been logging into SL recently: I decided to cut back and focus more on other things, but I would like to be able to log in once in a while…and the lack of support for Vista and ATI has been a major inhibitor.

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Building a console station…

I have a somewhat mixed history with regards to console games.  Looking back in history, I believe the first console I had was some kind of pong-type thing…back in the days before console games had cartridges, so about 1977…30 years ago.  Yowsa, I’m old!  The first console I had that I have a clear memory of was a Colecovision: I had Donkey Kong, plus some kind of adventure game where your “character” was a little ball with a bow going through a 2D maze.  After that I went through a succession of Sega systems, culminating in a Sega Genesis “portable”.  That was about when online PC games started showing up (1996), which somewhat coincidentally was the last time I played a console game for about a decade.

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Excitement at the homestead…

We had a bit of an adventure last night, or more accurately very early this morning.  At around 1:00 am, Irene went to get up and her surgical wound started to drain…a lot.  It took half a dozen large paper towels and a big (2′ x 1′) surgical gauze mat to sort of stem the tide of mostly-clear blood tinged fluid, during which time I called the district health nurse.  Irene started shaking and feeling faint, which isn’t too terribly surprising under the circumstances.

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File sharing: a terrorist plot, and think of the Children!

I believe in the importance of copyright.  I also firmly believe in “fair use”: that is, if I pay for the right to use your content, I have the right to use it for my own personal use on any platform I choose.  Thus I am totally against abusive DRM systems that (for example) prevent me from watching a movie on my computer, and later watching it on my TV.  

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