State Of The Smitty Adress

Last week Blizzard let me know I was to receive three free days of World Of Warcraft as soon as I redeemed the gift that was in my login screen.

The first day I played relentlessly, the second not as much and by the third, only somewhat. The small amount of time I spent on that last day was not unlike an elderly person "getting their affairs in order" prior to death. I tried to make sure my characters were left in a state where things could be picked back up without as much incident, unlike a lot of time I felt was wasted relearning to play each character and getting them to a place where I felt they could be productive.

My PC monitor stood tall and behind my laptop which I used to play the online stream of the Lincoln Saltdogs games as I quested away most of my weekend.

After having returned from a bathroom break my laptop monitor looked like a shattered window on acid. Colors and individual pixels danced about the mostly static screen that looked like a Microsoft Paint doodle in which someone went nuts with the paint bucket tool.

I did what any computer person would do in the above situation, I turned my laptop off and turned it back on. After two unsuccessful attempts, I let my laptop cool off as I feared I had let the poor thing get too hot ....no luck.

My fear upon seeing the screen was that I had let the laptop get too hot and I had melted or somehow damaged the graphics card but my eldest stepson was over and assured me that the screen had merely been punctured, broken or somehow hit with extreme force. He was kind enough to look up the cost of a replacement which ran right around $100 and removed the old LCD screen. Now I worry though that I lost the tiny screws for the LCD screen he had carefully gathered. He seemed baffled by what could have caused such extreme force. My guess would be my 18-month-old son who had spent the previous couple weeks popping off keys from my laptop keyboard one by one every time my wife and I were distracted for mere seconds.

I limped the laptop along getting precious database backups created and off the machine by hooking up the laptop to my flat screen tv. The second time I went to do so though resulted in a series of beeps and silences which made me worried I had lost everything else on the machine. The third attempt worked and now I can confirm that this indeed had all occurred on a Sunday because I left the laptop to copy files as the wife and I made our weekly trek for groceries.

The laptop worked a few more times after that, but a week later I can't get a visual at all anymore, regardless of what I hook it up to.

The epic and mysterious demise of my laptop plays a big factor in most of the issues I am about to list but ultimately just about everything below is also at least partially my fault.

My podcast is toast as my only unlocked version of Audacity rests in the unaccessible C drive of my laptop. By unlocked I mean, set up so that the audio can be exported. This is Audacitys way of not getting sued for people who might use it to copy or otherwise redistribute copywritten material, the name of the third-party software needed for this? L.A.M.E. I'm not making this up and can only guess that this software was both made and named as a sort of a subtle middle finger to the frustrating law side of things. Of all the issues in this blog this particular "lame" one is the easiest to remedy, and most likely will be by the time you read this.

I can't speak highly enough about Audacity, it's free, give it a go. I've seen videos on YouTube boasting that they could teach the viewer how to make music exclusively with Audacity which I may very well have to do because my only copy of FL Studio was on my laptop. I've had mixed results and the software is very expensive and somewhat frustrating. Despite these frustrations, the laptop had all of my works in progress and a working copy. I'm sure I'm allowed to download another copy if I can find my original login info, but that is a very, very big 'if'.

The above, although also solvable has for at least the moment put a halt not only to the podcast but to any headway I was making in the music creation process.

The laptop also had the best speakers I own, so even after standing up Audacity and even FL loops my playback would be limited to the cheapest pair of speakers I could find at BestBuy when I received this pc, I must remind myself, as a gift.

Another hardware failure (I think) has befallen one of the converters that enables me to use old Nintendo controllers to play Tecmo and Super Tecmo Football on my computer. Therefore the two leagues I have with my family the Smitty Family Tecmo Football League and Smitty Family Classic Tecmo Football League are both on hold again, no long after a brief return to glory since receiving new NES controllers my old ones had been devoured by the puppy of the house. Even if I pony up the dough for another converter, there is no guarantee the issue will be alleviated as my PC seems to be very picky when it comes to USB devices, especially allowing two controllers, so both of those leagues are shelved.

In addition to my two family leagues I was working towards a third solo league which I could technically work on even without being able to use both controllers but the other big factor in all of these is the general feeling of fatigue and lack of motivation that permeates my very being both at work and once at home.

Another solo league the Simulation Axis Franchise Football League sits mothballed but like the above could be getting worked on. As of this writing, I think the last tweet or the pinned tweet sums things up pretty well.

My two other leagues the NAFL and AAFL are still tangled in a database failure combined with issues from the C# front end which was as you might guess it....on my laptop. So even if I was to untangle the corrupted database their still is the systemic issues on the C# front end, I managed to get the files off the laptop as it turns out....just in time, but I doubt the links to the backend database still work and programming at home is even less appealing on my PC than it was on my laptop.

When contemplating writing this I thought about keeping up the charade of each of these accounts being attributed to different entities, but I doubt few will make it to, let alone through this entire whiny blog (Hi mom! Hi wife!).

I have other leagues like the PFL and my college league but both suffer from the same front end C# dilemma as the NAFL and the AAFL that thankfully for you none of which I created a twitter account for. As it stands only one league is still playable without effort put into external issues.

My train set is also mothballed as the curve I went to fix resulted in an entire side of the basement long layout being ripped up. I've tried to cludge together the curve from scrap wood but I think it's best to obtain a fresh piece of particle board and borrow a truck from somebody and do the thing right, in the meantime, the mediation of watching my locomotives do laps around me is also gone. Of course me being me, I was developing software and a database backend for my fictional model railroad reality....on my laptop.

Yesterday the wife and I rearranged the bedroom but not without casualties, she suffered a strained back that had already been reeling and dropped something heavy on her foot. I never should have let her move anything on that back of hers, it sucks, but that one is one me 100% she can hardly walk. The room is much better in both arrangement and functionality but I feel the cost was too high.

Our two toddlers are a constant strain on time, energy and sanity. I tried to think of a way to sugar coat that but I really can't. It's not like I'm not grateful for them but anyone who has raised a toddler let alone two at the same time can appreciate the challenge.

Most of the time we have four dogs in the house as well, one of which made quick work of the carpet next to the door here in the bedroom, I don't really mind honestly but the bare wooden subflooring acts as another reminder that the house around me is collapsing. The state of the house is also my fault but that patch of flooring yells at me for my own lethargy, laziness, and downright sloth.

The carpet in the nearby master bedroom was yanked up in what was to be a fruitless search for what was soaking the carpet in there. And as I write this my wife is trying to get the toilet in there to stop running after my efforts were ultimately fruitless. Speaking of fruitless, the bathroom that will soon pass year ten of its own remodeling abandonment, a monument to my own failures as a homeowner has a ceiling bulging with water damage, a look at the flooring between the two bathrooms reveals another potential leak.

Two of the dogs in the house are being babysat for free more often then they're not, much like the toddlers they have their positives too but additional chaos is inevitable. At work, I have a  project that is overdue and barely survived last week even with the 4th of July holiday. A holiday that went better than I ever could have imagined but stressed out about big-time beforehand.

The last home-related issue is a strange spell that seems to have been cast on my entire household where everyone but me is either unwilling or unable to sleep in their own rooms, it's bizarre, but I had to throw that in there.

This is going to sound extremely narcissistic but I feel like work is a place where I exchange part of my life, almost all of my energy and my creative soul for a paycheck. Don't get me wrong, I love my job and as far as the line of work it's in I'm convinced it's the least-worst place to be.

Many apologies as this has turned into a whine-fest but some positives exist. I'm in the middle of a good book: Ready Player One whose reality escaping premise is a welcome escape if said escape can be achieved amid toddler and dog chaos. The price for this escape is what feels like a very self-indulgent story acting as a mirror reflecting my own desires back at my being, making them seem petty, narcissistic and ultimately implausible.

Rediscovering World of Warcraft is another escape but often hinders any progress on the other ventures I have listed here. WoW offers a much easier and less tedious dopamine hit which proves addicting in my usual tired state.

I took a class on self-publishing but my lack of energy combined with, believe it or not, my inability to create enough content to fill a book compounded by constant desire to switch and think up new projects has thus far proved fruitless.

More exists but believe it or not there are problems even I won't share publicly.

Thank you for taking the time to read this.