5 posts tagged “irritation”

Well, two days before Christmas, and I go and break my left arm right at the elbow.

Now, since I do a fair bit of skating, and I'm quite often doing stupid stuff on my board, I'm sure it's not too heavy an assumption to figure I broke my arm in some lame attempt to ollie over a trashcan or slide down some stairs, or something equally out of my league.

But no, I merely was walking through my house in the dark and slipped on a round object, flinging my legs up into the air, and slamming me backwards.  My arm locked before I connected, and all my weight came down on my left hand.  The pain that ensued was actually heard instead of felt, rattling around deep in my skull like when you bite down too hard on some gravel or something hard and unexpected.

Anyway, it really hurt.

A few days back, I bought Half-Life 2 in response to Mark doing about the same in order to test his Mac's ability to run games in Windows.  And everything was going fine, as were my first experiences with Steam.  That was until about an hour ago.

I noticed that Steam was offering some sort of 'Everything Valve' dealie for a highly reduced price.  Now, I've already finished the original Half-Life many years ago, and even before I beat that, completed Opposing Force.  But I never got to try Blue Shift, something I'd always wanted to do.  And considering I wouldn't mind playing the previous two, and this pack included a few other things of interest (the hardcore war games don't appeal to me very much), I decided $79.99 wasn't too big of a hit, considering I'd pay most of that if I bought everything of value individually.

So, I downloaded everything just fine.  And for S&G, decided to play the original Half-Life for nostalgia and to see how it runs on a much more advanced computer.  But some of the seemingly arcane sound settings confused me, prompting me to see if I had any sort of digital manual, PDF, or the like.

And I don't.

Not one.  Even Half-Life 2, which I bought from a physical, real life store, with a thick box much too over sized for its lonely DVD and a single slip of paper detailing the basic controls and instalation instructions, contains not the slightest hint of a manual.  Not in print, not upon the DVD, and not installed to my hard drive.

Searching online for such a manual for either of these two games turns up nothing for the first, and a PDF of the same card that the store-bought box contained.  And of course Steam's 'support' page is a joke for anything I attempt to find, be it related to my sound concern or the manuals themselves.

Don't even get me started on Steam's user forum.

A little while ago, I made a post about how I'd destroyed my credit card, and instead of the bank just doing a direct replacement, they decided the card as stolen, causing all my automatic bills to fail.  A few days later, more to the little story was added though it was a little to embarrassing for me to mention at the time...  Until now -

So, about two weeks ago, I received the new credit card.  And promptly lost it not more than a day later.  I used it in one ATM, wrapped it up in the little receipt, and put it in my pocket.  When I got home, I took it out, removed the receipt and added it to my other slips (which is how I know the card itself got home), and promptly vanished the card.

I went searching everywhere.  I looked through nooks, crannies, between books, the bathroom, under my bed, in my fridge, and I even dug in all my trash bins a good long while, all to no avail.  Until about ten minutes ago, when I found it at the bottom of the washing machine in absolutely perfect condition.

But the disturbing thing is, I've done at least five or six loads of laundry since it went missing...

Anyhow, in other news:  Our heatwave seems to be abating, leaving me with a desire to actually use my computer/space heater again.  I should be back to posting more regularly, and hopefully, about more interesting happenings.

The credit card that I use for more or less all my subscriptions and automatic bills recently found itself snapped in half, and while still usable for online activities (all I used it for, really), I decided I'd go and ask the bank to issue me a replacement.

Now usually, the bank would just issue me a new card with the same number and everything pretty muchly untouched.  But this time around, even though I told them the card had been safely destroyed and everything was fine, they decided to count my card as stolen.

Of course, this renders all things that use it for billing to be completely invalid, and the new card won't come for five more days, so there's even a wait before I can change over my billing to keep things happy.

So now I'm scrambling to change all my accounts over to a temporary card before I find my cell, cable, internet, and about a dozen other services all pissed off at me in unison.