Wow. Haven't been here in awhile. Lots of stuff has been happening, most of it bad.
I lost my job, for one. Don't really want to discuss the details. Suffice to say I did something really fucking stupid and I paid the price for it.
We discovered that Dad's
prostate cancer has begun to spread, and so they cancelled the second surgery. I don't really understand why; maybe the idea is that removing it now will make it more difficult to treat the remaining cancer. Right now he's undergoing a host of therapies to treat his condition.
Even worse, we've looked through some medical records that were sent to the surgeon, and it seems one of his old doctors had gotten test results that clearly showed the need to check the prostate for cancer (to the point where either the doctor or a technician wrote on the paper, "refer to specialist immediately"), but for whatever reason did not do anything about it. We're looking into legal options right now.
And my
computer died on me. Near as I can tell, the
northbridge either overheated (When I opened up the case to do something else, I noticed its fan wasn't running), or when Dad was trying to help by clawing dust out of its cooling fins, he damaged it. Either way, doesn't really matter. It's gone. I was plodding along on an old failing Celeron 533 for a couple weeks, but I finally bit the bullet and bought a cheap pre-fab. Not much, but it'll run all my apps, and should run most games, especially if/when I get a decent video card in it (the current video is an onboard 64MB "Intel Extreme Graphics" chip).
On a completely unrelated note, I bought a
PS2 in early July (right before I got fired... probably should have returned it), making it the first console I've owned since the
Sega Genesis; that is, unless you count handhelds (in which case I've also had a
Game Gear, and currently own a
Game Boy Advance). I may yet get a
GameCube, especially if the Metroid package doesn't go away, and I definitely want a
Nintendo DS, but I don't think I'm ever getting an
X-Box. Mostly because it seems to be gears mostly toward online play (which you have to pay extra for), and just about any game I might want to play on the X-Box I can probably get either on the PC or the PS2.
So... yeah. Expect to start seeing more classic nodes by me about things you couldn't care less about.