Swiftly Now The Old Year Passes.

Happy New Year, everybody! As I write this, we have a little over six hours of 2008 left here, and my neighbors have already started with the fireworks.

2008's been a fairly interesting year for me, I guess, mostly notably as The Year I Went to Australia, but also as The Year the Guy I Voted for Actually Won, and possibly also The Year of Too Many Computer Issues. Or, indulging my fangirl side, The Year of Donna Noble or The Year The Pretender Ate My Brain. Well, that's all much, much better than thinking of it as The Year the Entire Economy Collapsed in on Itself, anyway.

Whatever kind of year it's been for the rest of you, here's wishing you a bigger, better, brighter 2009! Don't party too hard, now.

Happy Merriness!

Here's wishing a Merry Christmas to those who celebrate, and a general merriness to all! I'm having a pleasantly lazy and low-key holiday, myself... I did have an invitation to Christmas dinner in Albuquerque, but chose to stay here in town this year, instead. Which, nice as it would have been to see the folks in question, I think was a good call, as a bit of relaxing downtime seems to be exactly what I needed this week.

Festiveness has happened, in any case. Yesterday, I made myself a nice Christmas Eve dinner, then opened my presents at midnight. Today, I might or might not visit friends in town, and later there will be Doctor Who. What more could one ask for?

Speaking of presents, this year I got:

• A copy of SpaceShipOne: An Illustrated History.
  
  
• In the Shadow of the Moon on DVD.
  
  
• Star Trek: The Animated Series.
  
  
• Two generous Amazon gift certificates.
  
  
• Tourist Season and Stormy Weather by Carl Hiaasen. (From my LibraryThing Secret Santa!)
  
  
• A wonderfully silly, colorful hand-knit hat.
  
  
• A chocolate mouse in a Santa hat that was almost too cute too eat. (Not that that's stopping me!)

My sister, by the way, wins the Coolest Santa award for the animated Trek DVDs, which I have been wanting forever. Yay! And a giant "thank you!" to all the lovely, lovely people who think of me at Christmas, whether gifts are involved in the process or not. *hugs you all*

I only hope the stuff I got for other people makes them half as happy!

I Can Haz Internet!

It seemed like a simple, five-minute exercise, involving installing one piece of software and getting one piece of information over the phone. And then, it seemed like it had broken my computer. And then, after I carefully unbroke the computer, it seemed like it wasn't working correctly, and then after that, I started randomly poking things, and then it wasn't working at all.

But I kicked it one last time, and, lo, I have wireless! And there was much rejoicing!

Except now in a couple of weeks, they're going to come and replace my old PCI card with a radio that should allow me to actually get some networking going on in here, finally. Which will doubtless break stuff all over again, because that's how this sort of thing goes.

Never mind! I has internet! Not that I really ought to be typing right now, since I was up working all night, spent all morning mucking about with the computer, and am starting to get punchy. Of course, at this point, I might as well just stay up...

Behold! Random Links!

Time to do this, I guess, since I have decent internet access at the moment.

TIGERS LEOPARDS vs Pumpkins!: Video of big cats playing with pumpkins. It's remarkable how much they remind me of my own cats.

6 Famous Unsolved Mysteries (With Really Obvious Solutions): Not all that mysterious, perhaps, but very funny. Remember folks, some things really do have simple explanations!

Exclusive Farscape Interview: A nice interview with Keith R. A. DeCandido and Matt Gagnon, writer and editor, respectively, of the upcoming Farscape comics. Warning: contains spoilers for the TV miniseries!

Majel B. Roddenberry, wife of 'Star Trek' creator, dies: A lot of people sent me this news while I was having my computer issues, so I thought I'd at least link to an obituary. I suppose it's inevitable that we'd start losing the original Trek actors in a steady stream eventually, but it still makes me sad.

Caprica Promo Now Live: Promo for the new Battlestar Galactica prequel, Caprica. I have no idea whether this is going to be worth watching or not -- I'm always leery about prequels -- but the promo at least looks kind of interesting.

ST:XI-The animated episode: The sound from the ST:XI movie trailer, set to images from the 70s animated Trek series. Personally, I think that makes it about ten times more appealing. But then, I liked the cartoon series.

Top Ten Astronomy Pictures of 2008: The Bad Astronomer picks his top space images of the year. Man, what a cool, cool universe we live in.

Mmmm, Delicious Gingerbread Geekery: Yes, it's geeky gingerbread! I think I like the K-9 best.

Season's Greetings!

A happy winter solstice to all of you! Except for those of you in the southern hemisphere. Happy summer solstice to you. Now, give us our sun back.

A Note, Upon Looking Back At This Month's Posts

Wow, I've done almost nothing this month except whine about computer problems, haven't I?

Update On The Computer Saga

So, the PC is back up and running, and apparently behaving itself as I slowly work on reinstalling everything that needs to be reinstalled. The earlier problem, as I'd suspected/hoped, was simply that a bunch of drivers needed to be installed, but it's remarkably difficult to get that done when you don't have a decent internet connection, and the driver disc that came with the computer was much less useful than you might imagine. Fortunately, my buddy and his broadband came through for me!

Unfortunately, I still don't have broadband, as there's more stuff that needs to be installed and set up properly to get my wireless working again. I'm really hoping I can get that dealt with soon. In the meantime, hey, at least working twelve-hour night shifts on the weekend means twelve hours a day of net access at work.

So, that's where things stand at the moment. What the heck. I'll take it.

Even More Woe

Have new hard drive. Have re-installed Windows. Many, many things now appear not to work.

Sigh. This may be a while.

Woe, Cont.

Well, apparently the hard drive is dead. Gaaah. I am really, really, really relieved that I had the sense to back stuff like the music files and my documents up a few days ago. Considering how lax I usually am about that sort of thing, the timing, frankly, could not have been better. If, you know, there were ever a good time for your hard drive to die. Which there isn't. Regardless, I am so not looking forward to having to reinstall every damn thing. Sigh.

My friend might not have been able to revive the drive from the dead -- some things are, alas, beyond even the geekiest among us -- but he and his wife are going to be in Albuquerque on Thursday and offered to pick me up a new one while they're there. He even found one on sale! So that's something, anyway.

In the meantime, I'm still on laptop dialup here at home. I'm going to try to take that as a sign to spend less time on the internet for a couple of days, but that thought really does make me all twitchy.

Woe.

My computer crashed. Sigh.

Fortunately, I have the laptop. Unfortunately, for stupid reasons that are, frankly, far too boring to get into here, I can only access the internet from the laptop here at home via dialup. And, man, that's even slower and more annoying than I remember it being.

I have no idea what the PC's problem is, unless maybe it's some kind of disc issue. Will go and beg one of my geekiest friends for help tomorrow. Remarkably, though, I am not really panicking, as I just backed up pretty much all my important files a couple of days ago.

Anyway. It seems likely that my presence on the internet may be more sporadic than usual for the next few days... Not that anybody who's main contact with me is following this blog is likely to notice, admittedly.

If You're Relying On My Navigation Skills, Lost In The Woods Is Definitely Where You Will Be.

You Are a Gingerbread House

A little spicy and a little sweet, anyone would like to be lost in the woods with you.

What Holiday Food Are You?

In other news, I think I have all my Christmas shopping done now. Or I hope I do. It happened rather haphazardly this year, I admit.

No, Really, I'm Still Alive! I Have A Meme And Everything!

Current clothes: A blue-green sweater. Well, blue-green with a tiny bit of black. It's got... Oh, what do you call a neck that's about the height of a turtleneck, but doesn't roll up? I swear, I don't know words for clothes. Also, blue jeans, white socks, black slippers.

Current mood: OK. A little tired and distracted. I had a boring day at work, trying and failing to concentrate on stuff I should have been working on.

Current music: Random tunes on the iPod again. I think most recently some Leonard Cohen and some Jimmy Buffett.

Current annoyance: I still have a wet, hacking cough. It comes and it goes, but when it really gets going, it's annoying as hell. Plus, it's cold and damp today -- an unusual combination here -- and that's not really helping.

Current thing: So, a little while back a friend of mine started watching The Pretender -- a show from the mid-90s that I somehow never got around to checking out when it was on -- fell in love with it, and insisted I had to start watching it too so she could talk to me about it. Being the accommodating sort that I am, I did so with only a token amount of protest, and it then proceeded to completely eat my brain. When I said in the last post that I'd been marathoning this show, that's not really accurate. What I've mostly been doing is spending 45 minutes every day watching an episode, and then many hours having thoughts and conversations along the lines of, "Oooh! The way character A said thing B in scene C, it made me wonder if he meant thing D about E's relationship with F, which got me to thinking about how that reflects thematic element G and makes me feel emotion H about possibility I..." Which, okay, is a thing I do, and, to be honest, is one of my great joys in life. But this is just about the unlikeliest show to provoke that kind of obsession ever. It's basically a gimmicky, formulaic 80s-style action/crime/drama thing -- my friend described that part of it, aptly enough, as "Quantum Leap meets The A-Team" -- with a sort of X-Files type shadowy conspiracy arc thing grafted rather oddly onto it. And it works infinitely better than it has any earthly right to, even when it's doing stuff that, on almost any other show, would seem far too cheesy to bear. I'm still not sure what the hell it is about it that's plunged me firmly into obsessive-fan mode, but I'll give a lot of credit to an astonishingly talented cast, some really good directing, a tendency to push their pet thematic issues as far as they'll possibly go, and a remarkable shades-of-gray sensibility that kind of sneaks up on you.

Current desktop picture: Still Rigel and the Witch Head Nebula. Maybe I should change it back to the wreath-on-the-TARDIS one now.

Current book: A Confederation of Valor by Tanya Huff. This is actually a compilation of the first two novels in a series: Valor's Choice and The Better Part of Valor. I got this book as part of LibraryThing's Secret Santa exchange last year, and am only just now getting around to reading it. Which I feel a bit ashamed about, but a 450-book backlog will do that to ya. Anyway, I'm most of the way through the first one now, and am really enjoying it. I'd call it Military SF, but it definitely has a stronger focus on character and dialog than on action and technology. Not that it's lacking in action; I actually think it'd adapt really well as a movie.

Current song in head: "If You Love Somebody Set Them Free" by Sting has been popping up in my brain off and on for the last couple of weeks.

Current DVD in player: Most recently, disc 6 of Season 2 of The Pretender. Which is as far as I've gotten as of yet. I've got four more episodes to go in this season, and then I'm going to take a break and watch something else while my brain recovers.

Current refreshment: Just finished some lemon-ginger green tea. Which totally tasted like more, except there's a cat on my lap preventing me from getting up and making any. Woe.

Current worry: I'm mildly worried about getting enough sleep on Friday night, because I keep falling asleep at 2AM, and I've got to work at 7:45 AM on Saturday. But, eh, that's days away.

Current thought: No, sorry. My mind just went completely blank.

Well, This Is My Life. Really, You Ought To Have Known It Was Like This When You Started Reading.

Apparently it's been a full week since I last updated my blog. I'd like to say that this is because I've been incredibly busy cleaning the entire house, or exploring the Amazon or something, but mostly I've just been marathoning episodes of The Pretender.

So, uh, how about you guys? Found a cure for the common cold in the last week or so? Watched any good television? Found any more interesting blogs?