Civilization 5 (5 hours): Still haven’t caught up on the blog posts. Still entirely consists of games with Dan and Dave. Dan gifted me the latest expansion pack during the Winter Steam Sale, so I may fire up a solo game. Time will tell - I still have a ton of indie games from Humble Bundles and even games Dan gave me for my birthday last year like LA Noire.

This quarter I mostly listened to my music on pure random with a few variations which’ll be accounted for below. This finally allowed The Beatles to place in 2013. In the last few weeks I just listened to music that I added in this quarter to make sure I had a chance to get to know some of the newer songs.

[caption id=“attachment_7569” align=“aligncenter” width=“500”] FIF Concert (Nov 2013)[/caption]

It’s definitely hard to read books when you have other obligations. This year I had two semesters of graduate school and the majority of the second year of Scarlett’s life. Now I know why my mother, who loved reading, would only make it through a couple books a year. Frankly I only got through this many books through a combination of reading during my lunch break and the fact that I’d rather read than watch TV most any time. (Links below go to my reviews of these books on Good Reads)

A substantial percentage of outrage is bullshit. So is a substantial percentage of outrage about outrage, and so on. Outrage is often about consolidating political power and promoting the view that your political opponents are horrible people. Much of the dialogue about Mr. Robertson being suspended from A&E consists of partisans eager to use the opportunity to argue that (1) people like Mr. Robertson are horrible people or (2) people who criticize Mr. Robertson are horrible people. Outrage is often an occasion for “THIS JUST PROVES WHAT I AM ALWAYS SAYING ABOUT THEM,” with the particular case a thin disguise.

For once I found a way to run Windows for free that wasn’t a scam! Turns out the Microsoft makes VMs of Windows XP through Windows 8 available for free. The point is for you to be able to test how your websites will look in different versions of IE and different versions of Windows. Now, because of this, they’re time-limited - you can renew them ever 30 days until 90 days and then you need to regenerate them. So you can’t really use it as a complete replacement for buying a Windows license. However, if you wanted to test how well Windows would run on your Linux computer it’s perfect for that. My short-term goal is to be able to run Windows within a VM for everything but video games and therefore not have to run two computers if I want to, say, work on my photos. (I use Lightroom although Digikam is pretty awesome if you don’t already have your workflow setup in Lightroom) So to me this is the perfect way to make sure all the programs I want to run on Windows (mostly Lightroom, but occasionally some others) will work well in a VM with my current hardware (before I spend the money to buy a Windows license). Another nice thing about running windows in a VM instead of its own computer is that it’s easy to create a new VM when a new version of Windows comes out and then have the VMs side-by-side as you migrate over to a fresh install. It actually wouldn’t be a horrible idea for my main Linux distro either, but then I wouldn’t have ANY OS taking advantage of being the main OS that’s not virtualized.

First of all, here’s my referral link. Click here to sign up and they’ll give you a $25 credit you can use on a phone or against your bill.

The account sign-up was painless and pretty quick. The part where it did a bunch of stuff to my phone took a couple cycles to take, but once that was through it worked perfectly sing. I decided not to do VOIP for calls at home as I thought I would. As I went through the instructions, it turned out to be too complex and unreliable. People complained that it turned off their alarms (which I use to wake up for work) and other strange nonsense. I decided not to stress it. I barely talk on my phone anyway - ever since my parents became business owners, it’s been a lot harder to get a hold of them. At the end of my fist month I only had used a little over half of the smallest chunk of voice minutes that Ting sells. I’ve decided that whenever Hangouts for Android gets feature parity with iOS and allows VOIP calls, I’ll investigate that. Strangely, the one time I tried to use Hangouts on a desktop to call, it didn’t work as a touchtone phone.

“What Mailer told me is that the CIA is basically a white Christian Protestant organization," Fellwock said. “And white Christian Protestants have to find a devil in order to justify what they do. Their Christian values say they should help the poor, like the Communists were. But they were not helping the poor. They were helping the very rich. And this created a conflict inside of the white Christian Protestant mind that could only be resolved by them seeking out a devil and making that devil into an exaggerated thing. Thus, they exaggerated the threat of communism just like they’re exaggerating the threat of Islam today.”

It’s December and I should have gotten all of my Kickstarter products by now. But that’s not exactly what happened. Every single one of my Kickstarters was late except the one I had the least faith and relationship with - Random Encounter’s Let Me Tell You a Story.

I Fight Dragons – Project Atma (music): Holy COW! This band - my first Kickstarter - nearly disbanded over the Kickstarter! I thought they were the surest bet. They’d self-published their first few albums and they had rented a studio and had a producer and everything. However, they clashed over the direction the producer was taking them and almost broke up.

It’s once again time for my latest Photojojo post (ok, I think this’ll probably be the last one in a row…I’ve been busy!) . For those of you who haven’t been following my blog for a long time, Photojojo is a digital time capsule service. Every two weeks they send me an email that has my most interesting photos posted to flickr from one year ago.

The National Christmas Tree (it’s too bad that because of my schedule I won’t get to see it this year) and a few other random shots from last year’s period just before Christmas.

It’s once again time for my latest Photojojo post (yeah, they’re back to back this time). For those of you who haven’t been following my blog for a long time, Photojojo is a digital time capsule service. Every two weeks they send me an email that has my most interesting photos posted to flickr from one year ago.

More Scarlett - this time getting the Christmas tree. It made me sad that we didn’t do the lights on her again this year. Then again, she might have wanted to do it all the time - so maybe that’s a good thing.