It's been an unusual week.

Started last Thursday when spectralbovine  came through town and crashed on my couch. (A lot of people crash on my couch. Its comfyness and ability to eat misplaced objects are legendary from Oregon to the Canadian border.) Took the night off to hang out with him, slept normal hours like you non-nocturnal people do, and then hung out with him Friday. Then I put my computer together and went to work that night. Went to bed Saturday morning after about a 27 hour day, woke up and went back to work Saturday night, then the gang came over for gaming Sunday morning after I got off work. It was a long stretch of not very much sleep, and after the game broke up around 5pm I was kind of a wreak. Fell asleep in my chair around 6pm, then came to an hour later with the mother of all stiff necks (my head had tilted over sideways!) and moved to bed to sleep again. Woke up again around midnight, extremely temporally disoriented, zombied around until 2pm on Monday, caught a nap until 5pm, resumed zombieing.

Anyway, I'm sure you're bored, so I'll just sum it up: not a lot of sleep.

The new computer was throwing up a lot of errors, which turned out to be RAM trouble. Reduced the speed and upped the voltage and it seems to be working now.
 
Old friend from high school rolled into town Monday night, and has been hanging out and crashing on my couch since. We went out to the Big Time Brewery that night, played around with our computers a bit. It's been fun, although our options are limited because I can't go out drinking any night that I work and he doesn't watch anime.

We went and saw Star Trek on Tuesday. I suspect I'll have more to say about that later. Fun in a shiny and mindless way, but... dammit! Astronomy does not work that way! Chain of command does not work that way! Uniforms for female military personnel definitely do not work that way! And dammit, Star Trek does not work that way. Yeah, it was always a little cheezy and my favorite was always DS9, which basically spat in the eye of all the normal conventions of Trek, but it's never just been a generic scifi "manly heroes battling evil alien invaders" story.

Anyway, my friend and I hung out over the next few days when I wasn't working or sleeping, fiddling with computers and watching Farscape, The Daily Show and Hogfather. He and I tinkered with the new computer to get the second video feed out to the TV working ("Wait, that's not S-Video, that just looks like S-Video!") and we succeeded, at least temporarily. It may be time to knuckle down and get a new TV to replace the aging dinosaur I have.

At work this morning, when my relief came in she told me an interesting story. We've known each other a while, and she's a total nerd, into video gaming and anime. She has a two-year subscription to Electronic Gaming Magazine. Apparently, that publication went out of business. She found out when another magazine showed up in her mailbox with a sticker on it explaining that it with EG defunct, they were finishing out the subscribers' orders with this replacement.

"Guess which magazine it was," she asks me, with a mixture of amusement and annoyance.

I gave some thought to the context and her attitude and the answer jumped right out at me. "Maxim?"

"Yep."

Apparently, she grouses, if you're buying a gaming magazine, you must not only be a guy, but a really immature one at that. What part of Maxim isn't pseudo-risque photoshoots is retarded frat-boy humor.  "A Playboy would have been better," she notes. At least the articles would have had some redeeming value, and she wouldn't have felt stupid giving it to her boyfriend.
 
Around noon today, the UPS guy dropped off my order from Amazon. (Second delivery attempt. I had to prop the gate open before I went to sleep... no delivery man can get past it.) The first season of Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles and the second Moribito novel. TSCC was something of a lest second impulse buy. It was realatively cheap and I wanted to get the total over $25 so I could get the free shipping. (Because it totally makes sense to buy an $18 DVD to save $4 on shipping... well, I kind of wanted to get TSCC on DVD eventually.) The Moribito novel was what I'd planned to get, however... this one hasn't been adapted yet and I'm curious where the story goes next. The other thing I'd ordered was the second season of Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex, but that was from a third-part seller and came several days earlier. Amazon didn't have any copies. And I grabbed one of the last reasonably-prices third-party copies, which makes me suspect it's out of print. That'd be a shame... damned good show.

Anyway, off to work again.