Temporarily Untitled

Thanksgiving!

merridew — Thu, 26 Nov 2009 23:30:26 +0000

Greetings from sunny (well, it *was* sunny… now it’s dark. I hate daylight savings time…) Mississippi!

Having loads of fun with family, and the Wii has been a big hit! It’s nice, too, to have a break from remodeling the kitchen.

Also gotten a ton of great feedback on the grad school app. Very exciting!

OMG Update!

merridew — Wed, 16 Sep 2009 14:06:44 +0000

My triumphant return to soccer was anything but, as I have spent the last few days laid up from getting knocked around. I even had to miss my first fencing class. Bother.

It did, however, give me a chance to catch up on some reading. I devoured Neil Gaiman’s The Graveyard Book yesterday. It was great. I love how Gaiman manages to deal with life, death, the border between them, and with other themes, like growing up, revenge, and so forth. I should be noted that I am a fan of all things Gaiman (at least, all those things which I have gotten my grubby paws upon).

Triumphant Return

merridew — Fri, 11 Sep 2009 11:27:38 +0000

…to both blogging and a major guilty pleasure/time-suck: World of Warcraft. I’m a bit embarassed to admit to it on the Intarwebs, but no one reads this site anyway, ha ha.

Warning: Geekiness and WoW-speak ensues:
The spouse and I have taken up the game again as PvE-only (for now) duo-only (for now) as the power combo Paladin – Warlock. We’ve hit level 24 in as many hours /played, and last night cleared Shadowfang Keep with one death (not wipe, you’ll note) due to an unfortunate spot of bad luck involving an unexpected roving patrol and Arugal’s Gift ticking just as the SS on my Pally expired. Still, it was quite a rush to take down the whole place on our own.

I can only imagine that this will spark the first ever comment on my site, and that comment will be making fun of 1) my WoW admission or, and more likely, 2) our SFK run, claiming that duoing SFK at 24 is totally lame and a cakewalk for any class combo. I don’t know, maybe Blizzard nerfed SFK since I last played (over a year ago…), but it was damn fun. So there.

End Warcraft Geekery

Other noteworthy goings-ons: soccer starts up again this weekend, I’m taking a fencing class that starts next week, and ZOMGFOOTBALL!! So expect more on all these topics. Or not, if my posting frequency record is any indication. Also note the belated posting of a travel summary, which has been sitting, dormant and ignored, on my iPhone as a “Local Draft”. At least it has finally seen the light of day.

Home Sweet Home

merridew — Thu, 23 Jul 2009 15:13:58 +0000

Originally written July 23, 2009… really. Or at least, mostly. I might have touched it up. But I really did start it in July… It just never got posted, because I’m an incompetent blogger.

Back home after a week of travel. Some thoughts:

NYC – love the big-city walk-or-transit-everywhere life. Loved it in London, loved it in NYC. Amazing how a mile walk there is somehow no big deal to me, but walking a mile into town at home? I don’t even consider it. Strange.

Bar Harbor, Maine – Again, love the walkability of the city. The views are gorgeous. Even the drive from New York to Maine was beautiful. I knew the Midwest was flat, but wow… Whale watching was awesome. Great breakfast at an out-of-the-way cafe. Very much, however, a tourist town. Which was fine. Since we were.

Rockwood, Maine (and Greenville, Maine) – Pretty pretty pretty. Tiny. Also, pretty.

Quebec, Canada – Brief drive-through. Everything is in French. Buying gas with an “international” credit card sucks. Unless you speak French. Or French-Canadian. Or whatever they call their version. We took the long way to the highway, thanks to some odd navigating by our GPS device. It turned out all right because we saw some very nice smaller towns that had a very European look to them. Lovely rolling green hills and farms.

Toronto, Ontario, Canada – Also briefly visited. While we had grand plans to venture into the city, we were a bit sick of the car and ended up staying in our very Modern hotel (The Sandman Signature Hotel. How can you not love the name?) and having a fantastic meal at the in-house restaurant: Moxie’s Classic Grill. I highly recommend the Mosaic Dip appetizer. As long as you like goat cheese. Which I do.

We Now Return You To…

merridew — Tue, 09 Jun 2009 00:57:56 +0000

…random postings.

Man, am I bad at this blogging thing. Once again, doing more work on the back end stuff no one else cares about, instead of creating content. Ah well.

Will attempt to be more creative. Or something.

Post-Valentine’s Day, er, post

merridew — Mon, 16 Feb 2009 15:27:06 +0000

I’ve never been much for Valentine’s Day. Most often, it’s nothing more than another day for us. This year, however, we had a fabulous V-Day thanks to some friends who organized a retro-gaming night. They pulled out every gaming system the could get their hands on, and much fun with ancient coleco-visions, segas, nintendos, and other systems I’d never even heard of was had. Most of the games were terrible, particularly when we tried to play with 2-players (or more). It was painfully clear that many older games had very haphazard systems for implementing 2-player action, as if it had been merely tacked-on to give the game more marketability (hmm, I think things have changed very little…). On the other hand, even games that were purposefully designed for 2 or more players (*cough*gauntlet*cough*) were terrible in their execution. Funny how they could pull it off in the arcade, but the experience just isn’t the same at home. To give ourselves some respite from the awful nostalgia, we took on the hordes of undead with some 4-player Left 4 Dead (after stuffing ourselves with pizza, of course). Now *that’s* some pretty cool multi-player action. I was amazed at how little I was bothered by the split-screen and, although I suck at console FPS gaming, how much fun it was. Now there’s a Valentine’s tradition I could get used to.

Coolness, Badness, and Goodness

merridew — Wed, 28 Jan 2009 03:23:38 +0000

Coolness: 16th century portfolio of a “graphic designer” [ via ]

Badness: My laptop hard drive bit the dust in the worst possible way* – that horrible click of death came completely out of the blue…

Goodness: My computer-savvy spouse, and a slew of mini-review thingies I shall theoretically be posting soon.

* I’m certain there are, in fact, worse ways to have your hard drive go kaput, but it’s so much more dramatic to say there isn’t.

Weekend Posting

merridew — Sun, 11 Jan 2009 01:05:13 +0000

The snows have returned – in force. Makes for a cozy weekend of sports-watching (the victorious MSU basketball team) and DVD watching (more Bones and Battlestar Galactica). After a whirlwind housecleaning, that is. After all, we must try to be *somewhat* productive, mustn’t we?

In more exciting news, Cherie Priest’s Those Who Went Remain There Still arrived today. Subterranean Press‘s Limited Edition with chapbook, of course. After recently finishing her other recent release, Fathom, I’m very much looking forward to more of Ms. Priest’s writing.

Oh, we also watched Bangkok Dangerous with some friends. It was worse than I expected. We made it through the whole thing, so I suppose I’ll give it 2 stars.

Happy New Year!

merridew — Fri, 02 Jan 2009 20:40:43 +0000

…and all that jazz.

Not much to report here other than on-again-off-again snow, work, holidays, college football, and lots of movies.

In addition to the traditional Christmas Season viewing of Die Hard, we took in Kung Fu Panda¹, Tropic Thunder², Get Smart³, Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog⁴, and the first season of Bones⁵. Also on the docket is Stardust, as well as the first season of Battlestar Galactica⁶.

Gotta love the holidays!

1 – Decent film; a few laughs, enough of a plot to keep me interested and entertained for the duration. 3.5 stars.

2 – Could have been worse. I was expecting worse. Also kept me interested for the duration and at least made me curious enough to sample the commentary. Briefly. 3 stars.

3 – Not bad. Not great either, but – for someone with no familiarity with the original work – entertaining. 3.5 stars.

4 – Saw this when it was originally released online. Love love love. Watched almost all the supplements (including both(!) commentaries). 5 stars.

5 – A favorite of mine. 5 stars.

6 – Taken in the mini-series so far. Well done and engrossing. 4 stars.

Internet!

merridew — Sun, 21 Dec 2008 21:10:45 +0000

Obviously, our internet access has been restored. As I suspected, it was not due to the snow. Rather unexpectedly, however, it was lost as a result of vandalism. How lame.

In any case, it’s back. I used the non-connected time well, I think. I finished a book I’d started a month or two ago, and breezed through another. Drank a lot of tea, cleared out a goodly number of shows from the TiVo, watched a few movies (Hancock – reviewed yesterday, The X-Files: I Want to Believe, and the classic Grosse Pointe Blank), wrapped some gifts, listened to some of my backlog of podcasts…

While digging through iTunes, I came to the realization that my collection of holiday music is woefully small. I shall have to rectify this situation.