I've kept up with my sit-ups. Up to 25 of them twice a day this week. I decided to do my push-ups a little differently last night. I usually do 'normal' ones, but I don't think I had the best form for them. It had been a while since I did them on a regular basis. Plus, my muscles are really weak now, especially in my arms. Having malabsorption issues messes with it. I still occasionally have that. Certainly not as often as I did when I first started having symptoms of colitis. My muscles were slowly weakening beforehand, too. This just made it progress faster. So, I caved and decided to start with 5 of them twice a day again, only for more than a week. Also, doing them with my knees or the 'easier' way. It used to be how they told the girls to do them in PE, which was pretty sexist. Anyways, it's probably perfect for me right now, and to work my way up to the normal ones. So far, it feels like my form is close to what it should be with the knees. Felt right. The only thing I'm finding a little difficult is going down far enough. I'm getting there.
I'm finding a lot of bugs with Duolingo's Russian course. The recordings are awful most of the time, and there have been cracks in the sound. There are still no speaking exercises. I don't want to start with another course on a different app, and it's mainly to see how much I can remember. It's still really disappointing. It seems they didn't put much effort into it. Certainly not as much as German. Maybe it'll improve as I go further? Hope so.
Read Choujin Gakuen or Supernatural Academy. It's getting even more interesting. The greatest swordsman in the World's Strongest Committee's base apparently knows Adam. She was going to kill him until she saw his face. She's infatuated with him. She's also Tarou's mother. She decided to help his group instead of killing them. She found Yoshino, and Yoshino agreed to joining Supernatural Academy. Yoshino gave Uluru her permanent residency card. Permanent residency cards are sought after in that town. It was a big deal to give up. The leader of the group tried to make Yoshino her blindly obedient puppet. Now she's finally deciding something for herself. Hagi is 'secretly' allowing her to leave. He says he's on no one's side, yet he works for the chairman...I feel kind of bad for him, too. His wife just divorced him because of his work, and he lost custody of his child. Pretty heavy. Even Adam and his group felt bad for him. The real reason there are such harsh rules at their base is because they're preparing to go up against some sort of powerful foe. Don't know much about it yet, other than another group just broke in. They mentioned something like the "day has come". And the chairman seemed much more agitated by them breaking in than Adam and co.
Managed to edit/read more of Alliance. Word definitely has a different 'look' now. It's going to take some getting used to. At least it's not drastically different. Just enough to tell. Went through more than I did with the old computer. It might not take me long to go through the whole thing. Then, I'll go through Alliance: Dawn. Once I'm done with both I'll reupload it to Amazon, and publish it through Smashwords as well. Might go through Sweet Endless Terror at some point, too.
Practiced my clarinet. Haven't done it for about a week. Mostly played Mozart pieces. Wasn't too bad. I think I need to relax more when I play.
Watched more of Hinterland on Netflix. I'm close to the end of the 2nd season. There's one more season. It's good, but there's a lot of staring, some long pauses, and lots of scenic shots. It looks amazing on my computer. I can see so many details that I couldn't on my phone.
Watched Black Clover last night. Vangeance, who's the Golden Dawn's captain, virtually destroyed the Diamond Kingdom's invading mages. Yuno who's in the Golden Dawn's squad, took care of most of the rest. It ended with the possibility that Vangeance might be the spy. Yami (captain of the Black Bulls), obviously suspecting him, asked him to take his mask off. We haven't seen him without it. It'd be kind of sad if he was the one. Not sure what Yuno would do. Plus, Vangeance is one of the strongest mages in Clover Kingdom. There were new opening and ending themes this time. The animation was interesting, but the songs were just blah.
Watched One Piece. It seemed like they've been really stretching out Luffy and Katakuri's fight. They were even getting annoyed with the fight. It was interesting that it was a rubber man vs a mochi man. Mochi can be very sticky, and he can stretch it far. With Luffy, he can stretch and heat himself up to become 'softer' and more fluid as well as tougher. Except for the stickiness, it was pretty close to Katakuri's abilities. He had a trident, unlike Luffy who doesn't usually use weapons. So, he had more of an advantage. He also has 'awakened' his ability like Doflamingo did. He can turn anything he touches into mochi. I wonder if Luffy will awaken his? That'd be interesting. Katakuri can also 'see' a few seconds into the future, but Luffy can sense what's coming. The episode ended with Luffy being smothered by several layers of mochi, and Katakuri walking away to start what he called his ritual. He knew if they had continued to fight Luffy would somehow upgrade, and he didn't want to sit around waiting for that to happen. (Somewhat rare for 'villains' in the story.) I think Luffy acted like he suffocated to death by it. He obviously didn't, and there was a cut scene showing part of him underneath it. The next episode will be about Katakuri's ritual. Supposedly, not even his family has witnessed or been with him for it. No one knows what he does for it. Luffy's probably going to interrupt him. It'd be the perfect time. I hope they end this part soon, though.
Youtube:
One Piece:
Wednesday, October 3, 2018
Tuesday, October 2, 2018
23rd of Tishri
The month-long holidays for October are: National Apple Month, National Caramel Month, National Dessert Month, National Pasta Month, National Pasta Month, National Pretzel Month, Bat Appreciation Month, Corn Month, German-American Heritage Month, LGBTQ+ History Month, National Cookbook Month, National Seafood Month, Spinach Lovers Month. Some are for important causes, some are to make you appreciate things you may take for granted, and some are just for fun. A lot of them this time. In addition to LGBTQ+ History Month, there's National Coming Out Day on the 11th. I'm part German-American. It's interesting that there's a month devoted to cookbooks.
I got a new computer on Saturday. Put it together on Sunday and was still setting it up yesterday. My old computer, which was a Windows XP, was roughly 12 years old. It was on its last legs. I could pretty much only write slowly and play 2 games (The Sims 2 and Fate). Video wouldn't work (besides what's in those games), internet was iffy, most things didn't support it anymore (even most browsers wouldn't support it), it was noisy, like a furnace, it'd freeze every few minutes, etc. The last issue was shutting itself off suddenly. So many things wrong with it. It worked well for most of the time I had it, though. I feel very lucky to have had it in the first place. It was kind of sad taking it and its monitor off my desk, and then putting it in the garage to later be dumped.
My new one is amazing! Seems futuristic to me. It's an all-in-one, so it has the computer inside the monitor. Takes up a lot less space. It also has a webcam, and I'm unsure how much I'll use that in the future. It's built into the top, you press that, and it pops up. Nice that you can pop it back in and have it popped up only when you use it. It has a DVD/CD drive on the side. The only issue I see with that is it seems like it can easily be damaged that way. It stands up or is sideways instead of the flat one that I was used to where the disc just sits. It seems delicate.
It has speakers, but I'm using my old ones. They're better. I haven't actually used them in a long time. Mostly just used them when I occasionally played games. They sound far better than I expected. I don't think they've deteriorated or anything since I got them. I also have a sub-woofer connected to them that I forgot about before. There's more power to the sound that way. It might be weird if someone's downstairs when it kicks in, though. I'm listening to Pandora at the moment with them. It sounds so much better than even my new phone, and my phone sounds good as is.
It has quite a lot of different ports. 5 USB ones (2 different kinds), a memory card slot, audio jack, and a few others. It also has a microphone.
The monitor is bigger than my old one. I think it's close to 22". It has a 1920 x 1080 resolution, and the old one had a 1440 x 900 one. I thought the old one was big...I'm still not quite used to it being so big. It's also a touch screen. That seems to be the most futuristic part. The image is so clear, detailed, and crisp, too. I've already watched something on Netflix with it, and it was amazing!
Windows has changed a lot, too. The layout is a bit different, and I think they tried to make it similar to a smart phone with the 'apps'. It's interesting that it has Cortana built in. I haven't really used her yet, except for when I was setting it up. I found a way to make the desktop and taskbar closer to what I'm used to. I used to have a silver taskbar, and I'm not sure how to turn it to that yet. I might just set it to automatically pick a color from the background. Start menu is weird. The 'app' blocks move and make it look bulky.
I managed to save all my pics and documents from the old one with a flash drive. That drive can hold up to around 5gb, and I filled up about half of it. I also imported all my music from my mp3 player to the new computer. That's basically where I put all my music from the old one, anyways. I'm not even passed filling up 1% of that mp3 player, and I have close to 340 songs on it. It's like an endless pit, and makes me want to put more on it. It feels more like 'home' with my pics, docs, and music from before. I'm glad I didn't lose any of it. I was worried the drive would be corrupted or something. It was plugged into the old one for a long time.
The only issue I have is with Microsoft Office. You can't use it unless you sign up for the month-long free trial or subscribe. Once the trial expires, they'll charge for a year of it. (If you don't back out of it by then.) That's $100. Not as bad as some, but it'd be nice if Office already was factored into the price of the computer and you had it all ready for you. You wouldn't have to buy it or a subscription. I mostly just need Word. I know there's a free version, but I feel iffy about it. As an author, it's a key program. Even the formatting guides are based on docs in Word. Anyways, I ordered the free trial version for now. I need to edit/read Alliance again. I'm already a few pages in. Another issue is I'm unsure if I'm going to use the old copy I used before of Photoshop or end up getting a new one in the future. I can't create covers very well without it. Plus, I used it for editing my drawings, too. Those would be the only 2 programs I'd really need to get.
It runs super fast compared to my old computer. It has 1tb of total storage. So much! Not sure if I'll need that much. It's much quieter. I figured out a way to not have to sign in every time it wakes up or is turned on. That would have been annoying.
It came with a keyboard and mouse. The keyboard seems much shallower than I'm used to. Writing this, I am getting a bit more used to it. The mouse is ok.
I installed Fate, the Sims 2, the Sims 2 Seasons Expansion, and Fable yesterday. Fate took almost no time. The Sims 2 has 4 discs, and the expansion is another 2. That took roughly 45-60 minutes. Much faster than my old computer. Fable is also 4 discs, and it took about as long. With my old computer, it probably would have taken an entire day for all of these.
I wasn't able to save anything from when I played Fate before. I had made it down to the 38th level of the dungeon... (The final 'boss' is on the 100th, but you can venture further than that.) The furthest I ever went. Sad. I'll be able to go further in the future with my new computer, though. It'll give me less headaches with that game. It will probably run much smoother, too. Might be even more fun.
I was able to save the file for my previous homes/neighborhoods in the Sims 2 to the flash drive. I just haven't transferred them yet. I'm not sure if it'll really work. We'll see.
I couldn't even run Fable on my old computer. The graphics card didn't support it. Fable is an intense rpg with beautiful graphics and a vast world. It was ahead of its time, and this is actually a sequel. I think I still have to mess with the settings for the in-game graphics. I played about 10 minutes of it, and the people looked a little scary. (The rest of it mostly looked great.) They have mesh and other graphics related settings. Still, it's far better than my old computer. I'm happy I can finally play it again! I never finished it the last time I played it. Another rpg I really liked was Morrowind. I thought I had a copy of it, but apparently not. This computer came with games already on it, too. It has Xbox, as well.
It'll probably be easier for me to keep up with posting more often on here. It's so smooth and there are no interruptions with it. I might even get rid of the blogging app on my phone. It's pretty crappy and was the only one that linked up to it. I was lucky there was something for it. You can't post pics or vids with it, and it messes with the font and format. Before getting the new computer, I was thinking of migrating this over to Wordpress. Since they had many highly rated apps. I did have one on there a while ago, but didn't use it for long. I'm almost up to 1000 posts on here. (4 away!) That would have been a lot to transfer. It's cool to see how close I am to the 1000 mark. I never thought, when I started this blog, that it would make it this long with that many. I guess it'll continue to stay here, thanks to my new computer.
Dad had a major raise, and the first paycheck that factored it in was on Friday. The school district is finally paying their staff (she's a school psychologist) better. Well deserved and long overdue. It was also increased because of her years of experience. Pretty awesome! Something to really celebrate, too! She also got the same type of computer, since her 9 year old computer broke down a while ago. We both really needed them. She was able to have someone look and clean out the chimney recently. They were surprised by how dirty it was. It had to be fumigated because of all the spiders and their webs. There was a lot of creosote, too. Some of the installation was taken out. Well, at least now we can have safer fires in the fireplace. Just when it's starting to get much cooler.
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