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| Monday, February 2, 2009 09:23 AM |
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 by Fëanor |
As you can probably tell from my last batch of posts, I had time to catch up on my TV shows this weekend. On Saturday poppy was out making money, so I cleaned the house and watched a little TV. Then I looked after Rhys for a bit (which involved me playing Guitar Hero III and watching the DVD of classic Superman cartoons I got for Christmas - good deal!). Then on Sunday there was a party at my house that I wasn't invited to! But I kid poppy. She was having a brunch with the girls, so I took the opportunity to sneak off into the other room, attach the laptop to the HDTV, and watch Fringe, Battlestar, and Clone Wars. I'm still trying to figure out how to watch Wolverine and the X-Men online; I know it's possible, but the actual site where it can occur has been impossible for me to find so far.
Speaking of attaching the laptop to the HDTV, I love doing that. Essentially the HDTV just becomes a super huge monitor for the computer, with a beautiful, crisp picture. It's fantastic for watching online videos. I also used it when working from home last week, which almost made work fun! Almost.
Oh, and Sunday night we went over my parents' house to watch the Super Bowl. Great game! Very exciting and tense, especially the wild finish. Plus, the team poppy and I were supporting won, so that's cool. There were some entertaining commercials (such as the Doritos ad with the "crystal ball," and the G.I. Joe trailer), but not as many exciting ones as there have been in previous years. Thanks to that box of swag I got in the mail recently, I was able to provide the glasses for watching the 3D commercial break. Which was neat and all, but it kind of gave us all a headache, and it seems like it could have been cooler. Also, I thought they did a pretty bad job preparing people for it. Poppy wouldn't have known it was even happening if it weren't for said box of swag. It just didn't get that much publicity. I also never saw any of the kiosks with the free 3D glasses that were supposed to be in various stores. Admittedly, we don't go into a lot of stores, and we weren't really looking too hard for a kiosk, but still. There was only one preparatory message during the Super Bowl letting you know that a 3D commercial was coming up, and then all of the sudden it was happening. We were waiting for it and had our 3D glasses ready, and we still barely got them on in time.
Speaking of Bowls, I must not fail to mention the Puppy Bowl, which is a brilliant idea. Animal Planet plays a new version every year, over and over again, before and during the Super Bowl. It's just a bunch of puppies frolicking in a stadium-like play area, with a kitten half-time show. A parrot sang the national anthem at the start this year, as shots of the puppies were shown through a fuzzy filter, with a waving American flag behind them. Just genius.
A bad thing did happen this weekend, however: I totally killed my computer. It's been goofy for a while, and then I made the mistake of installing a bunch of major things one right after the other - a new version of Norton Antivirus, an audio driver, and a Windows Update. I think it was during the audio driver installation that the computer just gave up and crashed. When I turned it back on, I got the blue screen of death immediately, before it even booted up. That's not good. When I did finally get it to boot up again, it had lost all file associations. Like, it didn't even know what a shortcut or an application was. I managed to figure out how to teach it to launch applications again, but most other file associations are still lost, and there are all kinds of other insane problems - Internet Explorer just doesn't work at all, Windows Help doesn't work (apparently because my machine thinks it's trying to use evil Active X controls?), I can only launch the Control Panel through My Computer, the Windows Explorer address bar doesn't work, etc, etc, etc. It's ugly stuff. I suspect the problem is that the registry was being rewritten when the machine crashed, so now the registry is just a mess. Windows System Restore won't let me load up any of my recent system checkpoints for some reason. I'm going to do a little more research and try a few more things, but I'm afraid I might have to just dump my important files off onto the external hard drive, then wipe the machine and start fresh. I'd much rather buy a brand new computer, of course, but I'm not sure we can realistically afford such a purchase at the moment. |
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| Tagged (?): Battlestar Galactica (Not), Cartoons (Not), Computers (Not), Football (Not), Fringe (Not), Personal (Not), Sports (Not), Star Wars (Not), SW:TCW (Not), Technology (Not), TV (Not) | |
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