Bits and Pieces

• Back from California, for Second Christmas (sort of like Second Breakfast, but with loot!). I am such the city mouse, compared to my sister the country mouse, running around chasing chickens in my work shoes. My nieces Amelia and Isabelle are 2.5 and 0.5, respectively; I'm no doubt contributing to Eldest Child Syndrome by finding the toddler more interesting than the pre-talking pre-crawling baby. Still, they're both still very good-natured kids. Amelia's new focus is small round things, automatically dubbed "cute". ("For most families in which the child has a potato as a pet, it's because the parents don't like animals...").
• Four out of five Art Projects done! Unfortunately, I have left the tricksiest for last.
• Lyric with Snacky Snacks last night. As is sometimes the case, I liked the actors better than the play. The faux-Japanese costumes of the frame scenes bugged me (elegant and gorgeous, but low cut and high cut sufficiently to suggest to me the aesthetics of a topless wedding dress worn with pasties), and a lot of the second act had very, um, I guess I'd call it ragged character writing (I can expand, but don't want to spoil the plot for the people who moved to later). The characters/plot didn't feel plausible to me (which was perhaps the intent, given the theme of "everyone has their own personal version of truth") - and I found the guy who had an affair with a goat a believable character, so I must not be that picky.

Sheesh!

So, it turns out I haven't run Windows Update on my home machine for a while. So I did that, and installed an embarrassing number of updates. Then it rebooted, and maliciously set the display to 16 colors, 640x480. And insisted that it couldn't do any better than that. Many many reboots and assorted thrashings later, it was still stuck in fingerpaint mode, which I have to imagine tirinian wouldn't have appreciated for Starcraft, or even Zuma. On the bright side, I had bought myself a fancier graphics card just before no-buying-yourself-stuff month, and not gotten around to installing it. Ahah, I figured - that must have graphics drivers on the disk. So I took the old card out, put the new one in, and rebooted again. Yay! It was back to 16-bit color! I ran the driver installation program, which basically said "click 'next' a lot" - but it was still in 640x480, so the "next" button was off the bottom of the screen. Sheesh. (Okay, that was fixable). But "Buy New Hardware" is not really an acceptable side effect of installing security bugfixes.

Factoid One Shouldn't Know of the Day: the keyboard cable fits in the ethernet port, if you push a little. The ethernet cable does not fit in the modem port, or I would never have figured it out. It's kind of dim behind the computer.

Sadly, I can't give plusses to Apple, either, as the indirect instigator (*) of all of this was the fact that I can't get itunes to see the new ipod without reboots, either.

*: "Well, if I have to punt tirinian to reboot anyway, I might as well do more housekeeping..."