Dysmey Blog Archives > bioshock lives again, and other tales
It has been a good week for me thus far, and it is not even my early summer vacation yet.
Today I paid twenty-five dollars to put gas in my fuel tank. I feel so much like I now own an SUV back in 2001. But it is today, and I still own a subcompact with spots of rust and over-swinging wipers. The price is an annoyance, but at least I do not own an SUV now.
Nonetheless the time is coming that I will have to trade in the Aspire for a newer car, like a Honda Fit.
Speaking of which, the weather has become very warm, wet and stormy of late. It was comfortable for awhile, making it unnecessary to run the Silver Tower Of Cool until a couple of days ago. Even then I run the air conditioner only in the evenings because it works for only a couple of hours before shutting down when its condensation bucket becomes full. But I don't mind that so much. It is better than the window air conditioners, which have no way to vent their condensation — until I pick them them to put them away, at which point they let it go down my leg!
The fight against fleadom is being won slowly but steadily. Early this week I bought three desk lamps from the local Staples store, and three 60-watt-equivalent twisty bulbs for them. I distributed the lamps to the living room, bedroom and upper room. Every night they shine over white plates of soapy water. The fleas (and other insects) come into the light, fall into the water (which has no surface tension due to the soap), and drown. These lamps, and the Advantage™ flea dope I gave to my cat Isis, should suppress the flea insurgency in another week.
I found that, if I turn off my DSL modem and router, then turn one and then the other one in the order given, that I can then install BioShock and get past the patch file server phase all the way to the end. I also had to install the latest nVidia driver after the new game kept crashing my home box every fifteen to twenty minutes into the game. Anyway, I sent a thank-you e-mail to 2K Support for their help in fixing this problem.
I do not have half as much trouble installing DOOM 3 and SimCity 4 as I have done with BioShock, just because 2K has a hangup with the warez apelings. Why should I have to put up with this crap just because Lex Lusor wants to be king of the zero-hour warez scene?
I am trying to get some tasks at work done before my next vacation starting on the Fourth of July. Indeed, I got two of them out of the way this afternoon.
One was a new library toolbar for Internet Explorer, created in Visual Studio 2008 with an add-on that makes it a lot easier to create toolbars for the browser, and to do it without the licensing problem that has developed with Toolbar Studio. It needs to be tested before it makes its way onto the public workstations, but I am sure it will pass muster. Its only drawback is that it does not work on Internet Explorer 6.0 or earier.
Of course, it also means I will have to write a toolbar for Firefox 3 with similar functionality. I have done so a while ago, but I am having trouble with the popup for the CardCat (library catalog search) menu. Once the IE toolbar is out of the way, I will complete the Firefox one.
The other task was to prepare and set up three Mac Pros in the Educational Resources area in the lower level of the library. The three are in that part of Ed Res where high-resource projects like video production can take place. For that reason I have installed two of them with every bell and whistle, including Final Cut Pro, that are on the two iMacs they are replacing. The other Mac Pro does not have Final Cut Pro because we only had two licenses for it.