EverydayOrdinary

Worth a read. Go over to Chris’s Invincible Super-Blog right now and read it.

So I’m at a Session meeting at my church. We start late, 7:30 instead of 7:00. And we meet for just over an hour and a half.

Which means that when we finish? It’s after 9:00p.m. And I don’t get home until after 9:30.

On a Monday.

Which means (as I’m sure you have already picked up on, O astute reader), that I have MISSED THE ENTIRE FIRST HALF OF HEROES!!!!

AAAAAAHHHHH!

… breathe …

Now, maybe I can watch the rest of the show, without the benefit of the first half? No. Of course not.

I will wait patiently until Friday, and watch the full episode in all its glory on the Sci-Fi channel.

Or …

Hawaii’s in another time zone, right? Isn’t there some service that streams local TV channels over the ‘net? I could fine a local NBC affiliate in Hawaii and watch it that way…

Nah. I’m too lazy to do that. Besides, streaming video? Not really for Heroes. This show needs to be seen in smooth (artifact-free) quality. And preferrably on a large screen.

So I will wait for Friday. And in the meantime, I think I’ll start on my season six DVD of Buffy …

I need help.

No, it’s not a protest slogan. C|Net’s Download.com has a review of eight of the best free MMORPGs.

If you don’t know what an MMORPG is, you might want to check out Wikipedia’s article on MMORPGs.

I haven’t played any of the reviewed games, and I have neither the time nor the inclination to do so right now, but I think it’s great that they’re out there, and if in the future I want to try out a MMORPG, one of these will be where I start.

I did not sign up for, download, or install SecondLife today.

Again.

At some point last year, I had decided that I wanted to see what all the hubbub is about, so I headed over to the SecondLife website to download the program. To do that, I needed to sign up for an account. Okay, no big. I hate having to sign up for crap and have yet another username/password/profile set to remember, track, and maintain. But as much as I dislike mandatory user registrations, I understand that with something like SecondLife, it’s unavoidable.

So I began to fill out the form. I didn’t get very far.

You see, to create your second life, you need to pick a name. First and last. Okay. First name: the (un)imaginative choice of “Robert.” Easy. Last name: I … uh … what the heck was this? A dropdown list? Without “Hill” in it? Well, I guess they can’t have every name in the world in the list. But why not a field to let me pick my own? I don’t want to be an “Anatine” or an “Etchegaray” or a “Barthlemess” or a “Takacs.” These names are all stupid.

No offense to anybody who really has those names. They’re fine for you, but I don’t want to be you. I want to be me. And none of the names in the list fit my style or preference.

So I gave up and didn’t register. I was too annoyed.

Fast-forward to today, when I saw a mention of SecondLife over at MicroExplosion, and decided that maybe I had been a bit neurotic when I was trying to sign up before, and maybe I should give it another try.

And I started with the names on the signup form again. I put in my first name. And then froze again at the stupid dropdown menu. And got annoyed — again — because still none of the names “called out” to me. And so I navigated away from the page … again … because I still just couldn’t bring myself to care about a name I’m not yet invested in. I have no connection to “Etchegaray” or to “Takacs” or to any of the other names in the list.

I guess, in the final analysis, I really just don’t want a second life. I don’t want to be some online persona that’s not me. I want to be myself; I want to be who I already am, to feel connection with my online persona. Or, to phrase it another way, as the song lyric goes, “I gotta be me.”

There’s another movie I want to see. It comes out tomorrow. It’s called Amazing Grace, and it portrays a dramatized version of the life of Anti-Slavery activist William Wilberforce, who worked in parliament for about two decades towards his cause. I just found out about this movie today, so it wasn’t on my list of movies to see in 2007. But it should have been.

I’m not really sure how it escaped my radar for so long. It looks to be pretty good from the trailers.

An interesting tidbit (courtesy Wikipedia) is that the release date (23 February, 2007) is set “to coincide with the 200th anniversary of the date the Parliament of the United Kingdom voted to ban the transport of slaves by British subjects.”