I thought this pantograph was pretty cool, and I figured Steve especially would get a kick out of it.

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Well, I've bought SW:TOR, Batman:AC, BF3 and NfS:TR through Origin now. Batman is installed, although I've only run it up to the opening menu, BF3 and NfS:TR are still downloading. So far, I have to say that Origin is no more annoying than Stardock Impulse was. They do require a bunch of personal info, but seem willing to not share it. There isn't a lot of clutter on the client. There looks to be "friend" functionality, although I don't have any Origin friends yet, so I can't speak to that. The downloader is slower than Steam, and there are no means by which to tweak/fine tune it.

When I was living by myself, I was fine with my computer/internet being my sole (well, ok. primary. I do speak to people, too.) source of news and entertainment. Now that Rachael's been here a while (yay!) she keeps mentioning that it'd be nice to have an actual TV for local news and current shows and watching anything with more people here than just the two of us. I can't argue with this. My only real quandary is what service to pipe through whatever hardware we might get.

So after 2½ years and 2 rather bouncy trips back and forth to the triangle area, my probably-too-good-to-be-true Hanns∙G HG-281DPB is showing why it fell into that category to begin with. A corner case/housing screw seems to have broken its mount, and the HDMI system has failed in some way. On the whole, nothing I don't think I can continue to live with, but I guess that's what happens when you buy a $300 monitor with $600 monitor specs.

HDMI failure: black screen, usually (but not exclusively) when making a change in resolution.

Here lately I've noticed a few slight (and probably unintended) changes in our d.o site. The first time was when I went looking for my cheesecake recipe (like I do every year) so that I could copy it down/print it out and subsequently make the cake at the beach. I couldn't find the recipe under Books>Recipes, or anywhere else, for that matter. It *is* still there, somewhere; I used the search field and presto! But I couldn't locate it by any other means; I couldn't even pull it up through a search and then use its header to surmise it's location, as there was no header.

So I was perusing slashdot this morning and found this story, claiming that the average gamer's age has jumped to 37 years old. In the discussion, there was a link to this blog post, written by a game designer about how he can't play games the way "everyone else" does because he sees them differently.

What with the new influx of titles here lately, it seems like people are kinda dispersing. I know I haven't fired up WoW since...I guess a couple/few weeks ago for TN. If I'm MMOing, I'm on Rift. Other than that, I'm playing DoW in some form or maybe BloodBowl just so I can understand it well enough to be able to talk to Daniel about it.

...and I'm not ashamed to admit I'm going to buy a copy. The thing is, I go to Newegg and they've got an OEM version for $190, and a full retail version for $320. I know the OEM version is just gonna be the disks, as if they'd come with a new computer, whereas (presumably) the retail box will have some sort of manual and some other stuff. My question is: what *is* all that other stuff? If I get the retail box box, what am I getting for my extra $130? If I just get the OEM disks, what will I be missing? Any ideas?

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/8178580.stm

...so why isn't WNC thriving as a tech and industry mecca?
I don't know, but this is still pretty cool.