The weekend and a 4e Review

Holy crap, I was social this weekend. Really social.

Friday afternoon I went to a release party for 4e, which was sponsored by the Ole Miss Bookstore. The staff kept the place open for us till nearly ten, and get major points for being awesome. We had a one-off with pre-genned characters, and I snatched the wizard, curious to see how it played.

( My first impressions of 4e, cut for the disinterested. )

The one-shot lasted till about 10, and ended with the party killing a dragon. Okay, it was a baby dragon, but what a way to ring in the new system! Much fun. My regular gaming group headed out after that to the Square, where we shut down the bar before I headed home. I don't think I've ever shut down a bar before. Look at me, being social. Look, are you looking? :P

With my wretched new morning-person schedule, I was still awake at six the next morning. I dragged sonicshadow and his roommate to the Farmer's Market with me, good sports that they are, and then we got breakfast at Bottletree before I headed to school. I spent three hours weighing soil samples and getting them in the drying oven, and an equal amount of time later in the afternoon taking a wonderful nap.

Saturday night, I met folks on the Square again, though I didn't stay out quite so late this time around. Sunday morning was piano for UUCO, and later a session of haldonofgem's Exalted game.

Wow, two games in one weekend. I feel like I'm an undergrad again.

Yay, tabletop. ♥

BSOD

Hardware Malfunction

NMI: Parity error / Memory Parity Error

*The system has halted*

Behold, the Tesla Anomaly strikes again. That's two major system explosions, on separate computers, in the space of two months. I'm doing well.

Dell's service representative set me up with a system test and scheduled another rep to call me back at nine. The rep at nine politely remarked that his predecessor was an idiot ("I'm wondering why you ran *this* test when the problem seems to be the motherboard..."), set me up running a full system diagnostic, scheduled a call-back tomorrow, at nine.... and recommended I get an external hard drive and start backing up files from Safe Mode, just in case we have to do something drastic.

Enough already, guys. Just ship me a new motherboard and get it over with. :(

So. Tonight, I have re-seated my video card, tested RAM cards in every available port in every possible combination, including some that probably shouldn't be tried, spent so much time on the phone that my cordless phone ran its charge down and died in mid-call, rebooted to a BSOD about fifty bazillion times, and I am currently answering questions like "does this color show correctly on the screen?" when I WANT TO BE ASLEEP. I've just found out that I've got to cook an extra dish for Wednesday that I wasn't expecting, because someone else backed out - and I've got absolutely no idea when I'm going to find time to do this, because I made plans for tomorrow night. Plans that have already been added to by a frickin' service call from Dell.

I am about this far from a nervous breakdown, but - hey - I've got tech support calling me. That's a scary sort of accomplishment.

While diagnostic tests were running earlier tonight, I tackled my anxiety by cleaning out my closet. Which should not, in any way, imply that I was capable of culling out a significant portion of clothing. I did, however, learn several things:

• I have a lot of shoes.
  
• I need more shoes.
  
• I need a closet devoted solely to costumes. A big closet.
  

I also rediscovered the red vinyl anklebusters that I inherited from selchi. They are almost enough to make me happy in spite of what has, overall, been a frothingly irritating evening.