It’s full of post_content…

My site has been plagued by odd characters in some of my old posts for a rather long time.  The most common is the seemingly random appearance of Â characters in the midst of some of my posts.

I know the basic cause: one of my WordPress / MySQL updates in ancient times (circa 2008) ended up producing a character set mismatch.  I long ago fixed the cause, but all the existing bad characters persisted.  Until today… I hope

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The loss of a friend in a grey and white coat

I lost a dear friend on Wednesday, November 5.  We lived under the same roof for over two decades, and the fact that he wore fur and occasionally killed and ate rodents in his youth did nothing to detract from our bond.  I’m talking about my cat, Tuxedo.

The Spring

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I first met Tuxedo when he was six months old, and I was thirty.  Irene and I had been living on our acreage East of Sherwood Park for a couple of years, and decided it was time to add to our furry family.  We went to the SPCA in Edmonton, and Irene had already picked out a funny-looking, emaciated female cat who had recently given birth (Sasha).  I was still wandering about, and walked past several cat kennels when I felt a tug on my arm.  A small grey and white paw was reaching out between the bars and had caught my shirt: I looked in this child-cat’s eyes and couldn’t walk away.  I unlocked the bars of the cage and took him in my arms, and that was that.  Tuxedo, née Sylvester, was mine, and I was his.  

There is some debate in our household regarding whether we adopted Tuxedo in the October of 1994, or April of 1995.  Either way, he was born in 1994, and to say we met 20 years ago is sufficiently accurate at this point.  

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The Xbox One- Six months later

I received my Xbox One back in November.  I have some observations to share after something approaching six months living with the big black box.

  • There are no where near enough good games available yet for the Xbox One.  Titanfall is out, but yet another multiplayer shooter isn’t really all that appealing
  • I expect the game selection to improve vastly by this fall
  • the One itself is solid, quiet, and performs well.  The hardware hasn’t shown any quirks at all yet
  • There were some pretty serious shortfalls with the Xbox One software initially.  Forming up and communicating via parties was clumsy in the extreme, the friends interface was inefficient, and everything felt slower than it should because of the multiple steps through the UI that always seemed to be necessary.
  • Microsoft has been doing an impressive job fixing up those shortfalls with a fairly quick release schedule.  The improvements since January in particular have been remarkable.  I would say there is still room for improvement: adding friends to a party still feels slower than it should be, and looking up friends and their achievements is sluggish.  But I’m happy with where things are heading
  • The Kinect is… interesting, but not exactly overwhelming.  I’m probably not the “target demographic”, which seems to be people who use their Xbox One as a “home entertainment center”.  I don’t hate the Kinect, though, so it could be worse
  • It is finally possible to hook up a third party chat / audio headset.  Microsoft starting shipping the headset adapter in March

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