toys | cygnoir.net

picture perfect

When the MSG invited me to dinner tonight, I didn’t think much of it. We haven’t been going out to dinner lately, so his announcement that we should seemed to make sense, despite just having spent a long weekend together, filled with plenty of good food. Just after 21:00, he texts me with his location: at the corner down the street from my flat. I think that is slightly odd, since he usually meets me at my front door, but maybe he wants to go to the restaurant on that corner, so no biggie. O, he’s in my car, I think as I reach the corner. Since his car has all but given up the ghost, he’s taken to driving mine when he needs to run errands. It works out for me, too, since then I don’t have to move it to avoid street cleaning...

Posted on 2 Jan 2007 | 10 comments

simulated humility

Work overwhelmed me this week. For the first time since I started, I felt like maybe I had made a mistake, like I was losing my grip not because I was new but because I really couldn’t do it. And just when I was feeling so proud of myself for pushing myself outside my comfort zone, and for dealing with instances in which I didn’t immediately know how to do something or where to find something. Then this week happened, and I’d like to chalk it up to the final push of Mercury in retrograde but really it was that pause between being new and being a full-fledged part of something. This is a good time to learn some humility. ._.-. My second course of antibiotics is now complete, which means that if I don’t feel better by Monday I’m...

Posted on 18 Nov 2006 | 2 comments

puzzle pirates

I have nothing to write about because I am too busy playing a puzzle-solving pirate. Puzzle Pirates is the cutest MMORPG EVAR. I am particularly hooked on the swordfighting, especially because different weapons result in different puzzle outcomes. I love well-crafted games. Join me, ye landlubbers! (I’m Carinah on the Sage Ocean.)

Posted on 4 Oct 2006 | 2 comments

thanks, TiVo

Thanks, TiVo, for recording the mildly entertaining yet ultimately pointless “let’s review nearly everything from season two” episode of “Lost” yet NOT THE TWO-HOUR SEASON FINALE. I checked all the settings — date/time, “keep episodes until I delete them”, season pass priority of #1, etcetera — everything was set correctly. I thought the new Overlap Protection feature was supposed to prevent this from happening, but I guess it doesn’t work if it’s protecting a show from overlapping itself. My brain just broke, typing that sentence. What sucks the most about this situation is how dependent on TiVo I have become. I don’t own a video iPod. ABC doesn’t repeat these episodes, at least not...

Posted on 25 May 2006 | 10 comments

tappity

I thought I was so clever. I did the research. I planned and plotted. I waited, too, to be sure. And then I sprang, I pounced, I purchased. I bought a new keyboard for my Mac, just as the old one gasped its final letter. And I didn’t buy just any keyboard. I bought the keyboard. It is ergonomic and has buttons that do things like mute my music or bring my mail client to the foreground. Really neat, important things. And it is white, which I wasn’t really digging before I saw it but has grown on me. The problem is that it sucks. It sucks in a very subtle way, but this way makes me not want to use it. The keys are half-click, half-smush. They start out with what you think might be a satisfying THARK noise and end with a SPLUSH. Sometimes they...

Posted on 3 May 2006 | 6 comments

gummy phones

This may only be relevant to Inkbot, but those of you with smaller ears might also be interested. It is no secret that I absolutely loathe the standard iPod earbuds. Last year I tried the Griffin EarJams, but they just made the unforgiving pieces of plastic larger and unwieldy, so that they were uncomfortable and fell out of my ears constantly. I had some cheapo collapsible Sony headphones for a while, but they died, so I was back to the iPod earbuds and willing to stick it out because I’m really tired of buying substandard crap that doesn’t add value to my life. Until this morning, when my ears started to bleed. Thankfully, the eardrums weren’t bleeding, just the skin, but still — if you have never experienced impromptu ear bleeding,...

Posted on 24 Mar 2006 | 5 comments

fetch me a monkey

I am twitchy, so twitchy my twitches are twitching. I do not have a boss enough ‘puter to run The Sims 2, so I loaded the original onto my laptop, including all of the expansion packs, and immediately created Sims of two of my peeps, wootam and his buddy j. They are living together in a big fancy house with a pool and a hot tub. As soon as I remember how to get pets, they are getting a lizard for the bathroom. Why? Because I couldn’t find the fish tank, so there is now a gigantic terrarium in the bathroom, and lizards live in those. So. I also promised them a monkey. Anyone know where I can get a sim-monkey? Technorati Tags: games,...

Posted on 3 Jan 2006 | 2 comments

please do not explode

I didn’t think this day would ever come. Thanks to Mark/Space’s Missing Sync, my T-Mobile Sidekick II now syncs with my PowerBook’s iCal and Address Book. The timing on this is particularly excellent, as I spent an hour organizing my Hipster PDA last night, complete with index cards, colored labels and a pocket Moleskine memo-pockets holder. I keep glancing over at my Sidekick, as if, now that it is as functional as it was advertised when I bought it, I expect it to...

Posted on 20 Apr 2005 | 2 comments

an expensive doorstop

My Sidekick 2 has had no data service for the past three days, and this just a month after the last big network outage. On top of that, my voicemail indicator — the one that was already flaky — persists despite having no new messages. Before you ask: yes, I’ve done many, many soft resets. Nothing has worked. I truly regret purchasing this gadget last autumn. It worked well for a few months, but now I’m paying $20 a month to be a beta tester, and I resent that. It would be slightly more tolerable if I hadn’t been told outright by T-Mobile representatives that they were about to release software to sync the SK2 with a Mac. (Despite a mention of it still showing up on their website, it’s vaporware.) I don’t know whether...

Posted on 7 Mar 2005 | 4 comments

sidekick 2 woes

I’m seriously considering going back to my Nokia 3595. To borrow a phrase from this thread in the Hiptop.com forums, my Sidekick 2 has been nothing but a “backlit doorstop” since the upgrade over the weekend. It refuses to login to AIM, citing: “Signing On Too Frequently: There is a limit to how many times in a short period you can sign on with the same screen name. You have been signing on too frequently. Please try again later.” Meredith is having the same problem, unfortunately. What an upgrade. Before the AIM silliness, my Sidekick 2 wouldn’t even ring on at approximately 50% of my calls and half that time wouldn’t even record voicemail, let alone notify me of new voicemail or SMS messages. I know part of this is...

Posted on 1 Feb 2005 | 5 comments