...here I am, updating the Fungus via dialup. Yeah, Seiren (the new Dell laptop) has a modem in it.
It's monstrously slow.
It's so slow that I can't see trying to surf the blogroll--it just takes too damn long to load each page. I'll check my e-mail and blog, and maybe catch up on a couple of webcomics, but that's about all I have the patience for.
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I finished the first season of Millennium and I'm going to have to get more of it; it's just as good as I remembered it being. I saw a lot of eps I recognized but since it's been 6+ years since I saw any eps of the series I didn't really remember them or how they ended, which was good.
Anyway, seeing an entire season in order really helps you understand what's going on--the larger story, the back story, etcetera--and it enhances the feel of the show. I was watching 2, 3 eps at a sitting, that's how much I was enjoying it.
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I also finished Aishiteruze Baby and Itazura na Kiss. The former wasn't much of an ending, although it did reveal why Yuzu's mother had left her with relatives. The latter had a better ending, and it was pretty enjoyable. InK tends to throw around a lot of sudden temporal leaps, though; the last regular episode included a six-year jump. (The fansub group missed translating the text that informed the viewer that continuity had just skipped six years. Fortunately I can recognize the kanji for "six" and "year".)
I'm working now on finishing ToLoveRu. Then I'll be finished with the autumn anime season and can start on the winter season anime. *sigh*
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My sister has gotten me hooked on Craig Ferguson's late show. He comes on after Letterman. So now I'm watching a show on CBS again. But it's just that one show, and I don't expect it'll lead to me watching more shows, because 99.997% of everything on TV is crap, anyway.
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There are four eps of Battlestar Galactica left now. Will they somehow pull out a happy ending? I hope so. ("Happy" or at least not "everyone dies, human race over", that is.)
Admiral Adama spent 90% of the most recent ep walking around in the nooks and crannies of the Galactica and watching crewmen and cylons fix the structural deficiencies in the ship. WTF.
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We ended up getting about 7" of snow here in Strong, Maine; there is more snow predicted for Sunday. I decided on going down to get a sandwich, so I had to brush snow off the car and scrape ice from the windows before I could go anywhere. The AWD in the Subaru is designed so that the wheels which slip the least get the most power--and damn, it works; the thing powered right out of the snow without so much as a single wheel slipping.
The car belonged to my late brother-in-law and replaced a Subaru Impreza; it's a 1996 Subaru Legacy with AWD and a ton of bells and whistles, including heated mirrors and seats. (!) It's got the usual Subaru 2.5 liter H-4 (no turbo or anything so it's a bit anemic on the hills) and the AWD sure is neat. Very sure-footed.
The flat-4 in that car sounds much like the VW Beetle engine, of course, because the configuration is almost exactly the same. The Subaru is liquid-cooled, of course, but it still sounds like a Beetle, and that's an engine sound I love.
It's got 198,000-odd miles on it but it handles like a much newer car. (Not that that's hard to manage; my 150,000-mile Escort handles like a new car, too.) Around here, everything is 20-30-40-50 miles away, so a lot of the driving you do is highway miles, which are (of course) easiest on a vehicle, so it's possible to rack up hundreds of thousands of miles on a vehicle and still have it be reliable. There's a 1993 Jeep Cherokee sitting in the driveway, buried in snow, with 270-odd thousand on its odometer, and it's still on its original clutch. A new battery and fresh fuel would get it running again, but it wouldn't pass inspection due to rusty rocker panels. (It's sitting there screaming, "Make a trail rig out of me!" but I cannot heed its siren song.)
As for the Subaru, it's got me thinking about what I'll replace the Escort with, if-and-when...and the answer might just be "Subaru!"
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In the "please do not get the idea that I'm complaining about this" department, I've found that my daily phone calls to my girlfriend are costing me one unit per minute. I have a Tracfone, and the deal used to be that if you were outside of your "home area" it cost you two units per minute. Here, however, it's one...or at least it has been so far. (It may change now that I've said something about it.) I think it's because I'm in a Tracfone service area--a lot of people use "pay as you go" phones out here, too, which probably doesn't hurt.
Because of who I am, I don't use my cell phone all that much. I've been adding time to the thing every other month since I even had one (November of 2002) and I've accumulated quite a chunk of unused airtime since the unused minutes roll over. Even with the occasional use of the thing for ordering takeout or what-have-you, they've added up over the years.
So the 10+ hours of talk time I had when I arrived here have been whittled down to 8.5 hours (already) so I expect I'll be buying more airtime before I go home.
I'm thinking that I may buy a different phone. Look, it's really neat to have a camera phone and all, but the noise-rejection characteristics of this telephone are for the birds. I was sitting in the White Elephant (the nearby convenience store/restaurant/WiFi hot spot) and trying to talk to my girlfriend on the thing, and I couldn't hear her because of all the ambient noise that was being funneled into the ear speaker. It wasn't that I needed to turn the volume up; it's that the microphone was picking up the ambient noise and echoing it into the ear speaker: turning up the volume would only have made the ambient noise louder.
So I'm going to try her phone in a noisy environment, and if it's better, I'm buying one of those and transferring all my minutes to it. (Whatever minutes are left after this trip, that is.) (I may also lie and tell them I live in Park Forest, where she lives, because she got a phone number with the 708 area code!)
I'm happy to be using all the minutes I paid for, and I'm also glad that I've got them, because it means I can talk to my girlfriend every day without tying up my sister's telephone. Beth and I have only been a couple since early January, for crying out loud. I miss my sweetie!
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...and that's really just about all I've got right now. But now that I can use my sister's dialup account perhaps I can be better about posting here, even if I can't read the news or anything.