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I need advice regarding my elderly parents.
I could use some advice, or even just other points of view, regarding my parents. They both turned 80 last year, and have lately made certain ill-advised lifestyle decisions. My siblings are in no position to help, and distant family is distant. If any family is going to help them, it falls to me. And I'm not sure what I should do ( Read more... ) -
2011: a thing all right
This was kind of a shit year for me, perhaps the roughest of my adult life. Not that I didn't learn a lot! But it sure did leave some bruises, this time around ( Read more... ) -
FunSpot trip, Sat Dec 10
On Saturday, December 10, I am going to travel to the FunSpot arcade in Laconia, New Hampshire, to celebrate the end of the semester. We visited it for the first time last year to celebrate Amy's graduation, and I still have a whole mess of tokens left over from that trip. It seems only appropriate to cycle them back in now that I too will soon ( Read more... ) -
"Do you want to sell sugar water for the rest of your life?"
I didn't decide overnight to back off the teaching gig. After sharing my concerns with the instructor who hired me, we redefined the role a bit and I decided to let it cruise in a probationary state before I made a final decision, remaining for the rest of the semester in any case. But then, within days of each other, two things happened that all ( Read more... ) -
Teaching
The teaching job ended up a bad fit, and I decided several weeks ago that I'd wrap it at the end of this semester. I treasure the experience I have gained, and I leave the door open for future opportunities in this sphere, but this position in particular doesn't work well for me.
Some of this is general shock at re-entering the salaried life, even ( Read more... ) -
How I got my stolen laptop back
Someone stole my laptop two weeks ago. With the help of the BackBlaze data backup service and some friends, I located it last week, after the thief had sold it to someone else. I told the police all this. I have it again. The thief remains at large, as far as I know.
The theft occurred the Wednesday before last at the Panera Bread on Huntington ( Read more... ) -
How to keep a Podcasts Smart Playlist in iOS 5
Posting this here for the sake of future google-searchers; the discussions I found on the Apple support fora didn't help much.
TL;DR: Tether your phone to your iTunes machine. In iTunes, click your phone's icon. Click the 'Podcasts' tab. Note the "Include Episodes from Playlists" checkbox list, which I do not believe existed before iOS 5. Adjust ( Read more... ) -
I'll be teaching games at Northeastern this fall.
I last week accepted a part-time position at Northeastern University, teaching a lab section attached to Games & Society, an intro-to-game-studies class taught by Brian Sullivan. I'm so far signed on just to handle the fall semester, but if I'm not terrible at it and I don't hate it, I'll likely do more afterwards ( Read more... ) -
Google+-
As mmcirvin and hrafn note in comments on my previous post, Google has been acting capriciously about perceived TOS violations involving names. If they happen to see a name they find fishy -- or that fails a regex, or that gets tattled on by another user -- they immediately lock that user out of their account with no way to get at their data until Google wills ( Read more... ) -
Google+, Facebook-, Tumblr0
Where I am on the web these days:
Still posting like dokken to Twitter, but find myself warming to Google+ as well. In many ways it does everything that LiveJournal was doing a decade ago, but with a far friendlier UI. Most everyone I know seems to be piling on in, too. It seems the best candidate for carrying LJ's torch forward.
Here's me on ( Read more... )