It started innocently enough… ah, crap, that’s how I began that other post.
Okay… here’s the deal. I’m weak. My weakness is gadgets, particularly computers. You know this if you’ve been reading this site for any length of time. It is rare that I make it through a given six month period without doing *something* that involves partly or completely gutting one or more computers.
I clearly remember how I first got into Dungeons and Dragons. I was 15 years old at the time. My friend Tim was a member of Mensa, and told me that they had this thing called Dungeons and Dragons that they played. Since I was a big fan of Tolkein’s Hobbit and Lord of the Rings, Tim’s description of D&D sounded perfect. I wrote an IQ test and discovered I missed the grade by a couple of points: the fact that I wrote the test on the day I found out my Dad had died might have had an impact, but I also never really claimed to be a genius. But the desire to play D&D remained.
I vaguely recall hearing that an Iron Man movie was in the works, but more or less ignored it. I like superhero movies when they are done well: Batman Begins was done well, the first Spiderman was done well, but many (most?) such movies end up being more or less… bad. And I didn’t have a lot of hope for Iron Man.
It started innocently enough. I was considering upgrading to a larger format monitor sometime in the next year or so. I like having lots of video “real estate” and, although my ViewSonic VP201 20″ LCD display has served me well, I am starting to feel crowded.
The final chapter… the nail in the coffin…. the slow, inexorable decline into oblivion: I’m there. I went to the optometrist today and, horror of horrors, I need bifocals.
I apologize in advance for making light of a tragic and horrifying circumstance. But the defense put forth by a man in Britain accused of raping and murdering a young model just leaves me amazed.
I’ve updated to the latest version of WordPress (2.3.3), the software that makes this blog work, and also updated half a dozen of the plugins on my site. In *theory*, none of the changes should be noticeable to anyone visiting here.
I am not really the "typical" Wired reader. For one thing, I'm far from "cool" or "hip". I've got the "geek" thing down, though. Despite being outside the correct Wired…
One of the objectives of my web server upgrade was to end up with a Linux/PHP/mySQL configuration that would work with Gallery 2. All of the photos on my site have been managed via Gallery for years now… unfortunately, so long in fact that the version of Gallery I’ve been using is three years out of date.