Where Anna the Piper geeks out
Work
Buckle in, y’all, this is going to be a long one.
Short form summary: my current work machine is a 2019 16-inch MacBook Pro. And it has been driving me fucking spare because it keeps kernel panicking. If there are any MacBook maintenance gurus out there who could help me out with this, I’d appreciate it.
Continue reading “Ongoing frustrating MacBook Pro kernel panic issue”
(Those of you who follow me on Facebook already saw me posting about this, but this is for everybody who missed the story!)
Thursday morning, around 4am, I got woken up of a sound sleep to discover that the power had gone out. How my sleeping mind knew this: the air filter had gone off.
I need the soft noise of the air filter to sleep–I have a very hard time sleeping in total silence. So when the filter went out and the room was in fact silent, that was enough to wake me up.
This is definitely one of those times where I need me an icon of Professor Farnsworth from Futurama, because he’s totally in my head right as I type this!
But the news, oh, it is good. It is SHINY. Internets, I’m getting promoted! QA Engineer II, baby! This comes from an excellent year of slurping up Python and finally bending my brain around class-based coding–this is what I get for having learned how to code long enough ago that object-oriented programming wasn’t really a thing yet, so it took me a while to get the idea down. But it’s in there now and WOO! PROMOTED!
*does a little dance*
There is compensation involved, a raise as well as a bonus, and oh, there will be a Shiny Thing. A very, very Shiny Thing. It’s about time to upgrade my Macbook, and this news is going to let me do it!
Winnowill, mind you, has served me well (and only those of you who are fellow Elfquest fans will understand the number of giggles I get out of typing that phrase, ha!) and does hold the record to date for longest-operating laptop I’ve ever owned. I got this MacBook back in December of 2007, which means that as of this December, Winnowill will be hitting her five year mark.
However, that’s an eternity in laptop terms and Winnie IS getting a bit long in the tooth. Specifically, she is just a touch too old to be able to run Mountain Lion. So I want a laptop that’ll let me continue to be upgradable along with the OS, at least for the next five years or so! The only question is going to be, whether I commit to a higher-end Macbook Air (because SO SHINY), or whether I go with a Macbook Pro.
There must be much comparison of specs. And thinking hard about what I need out of the next Laptop of Awesomeness to join the Murknet.
Though I gotta admit, if I wind up with an Air, that box is totally getting called Aroree. <3
As to what I’ll do with Winnowill–actually, I’m not convinced yet I’ll be decommissioning her. Winnie DOES dual boot between Lion and Win 7, and having Win 7 around is handy sometimes, not only for testing purposes but also just for playing our games! And as Mac OS continues to develop, it’ll be handy as well to have a somewhat older version around. So we’ll see. If I wind up with an Air, Winnie could also continue to be my iTunes box since I DO have a certain number of bands for whom buying physical CDs is still absolutely essential! (Great Big Sea and Le Vent du Nord, of course!) So many choices before me!
And SHINY THINGS! And promotions! And another awesome year to look forward to at Big Fish! Which, I might add, is now the longest job I’ve had EVER, as I’ve passed my previous record of 3 years, 7 months–which was how long I was at Attachmate. This coming January will be my four-year mark!
EEEEEE! \0/
If I may take a moment to do a work-related post, I am delighted to spread the news that we have a shiny new Hidden Expeditions game out! Check out Hidden Expedition: The Uncharted Islands, newly released today! (This is the PC Collector’s Edition of the game–if you’re a Mac user, sit tight, we should have the Mac version available soon too!)
Also, we have a shiny new site for the entire Hidden Expedition series, right over here! Highly recommended, especially Hidden Expedition: Amazon. I’ve played that a couple times now, on full computers as well as on my iPad!
As a Big Fish Games employee, it is my duty to inform you all that we’re having a massive sale of all our iPhone and iPad games this weekend–every last one of ’em is .99 a pop. Go! Buy a few! You’ll be paying my paycheck, and hey, I’m FOR that. :D
I am personally very fond of Hidden Expedition: Amazon on the iPad (excellent soundtrack, fun plot, monkeys, and a dorky professor you have to find using clues left in his scattered journal pages), and Atlantis: Sky Patrol has some fun marble-shooty action going on, with a bit of retro, art deco sort of look to it. Drawn: The Painted Tower is gorgeous. And Azada is a nice family-friendly game that those of you with i-Devices AND kids might enjoy playing along with a youngster, since it’s all about various and sundry classic stories.
Search for Big Fish Games on the App Store, or, if you want a super-quick way to get to all of our i-games at once, you can find ’em on our site right over here.
I’m informed by the woman who’s directing our Help Felix Find a Cure campaign that if people would like to donate to it without buying the multimedia package we’re selling, then checks made out to the Breast Cancer Research Foundation may be mailed to Big Fish Games, ATTN: Kate Brinks. On the memo field of the check, you should include “In association with Big Fish Games”.
Any checks thusly received will be sent in with our final donation to the BCRF.
Our corporate address is listed over here. Kate’s here in the Seattle office so if you wish to send in a check for the campaign, you should send it here.
Thanks, folks, for anything you can do.
It’ll probably surprise few of you that I’m actually going to have little to say what with it being Breast Cancer Awareness Month; anyone who’s read me for a while will know I’ve had plenty to say on the subject already.
However, I will spread the word about this. My workplace, Big Fish Games, is having a fundraiser to raise money for the Breast Cancer Research Foundation. We’re selling little $5 packs of multimedia downloadable goodies, including wallpapers, screensavers, and avatars. So if you like the games we sell, consider checking this fundraiser out.
You can get all the details and buy the download package right over here. Fair warning though: the download being sold is a Windows executable file, so not immediately interesting to non-Windows users. (I’ll be asking the folks at work if there are any plans to sell equivalent download packages or other goodies for the Mac users.)
Anybody got a moment to doublecheck a problem for me?
If you have visited the Big Fish Games website before you may have noticed we have a feature called Tomorrow’s Game Today. We’ve had reports of the TGT vanishing for an hour on our Japanese site–and since as of 8am our time the TGT was supposed to show up, can anybody confirm whether you see it?
If you check our US site first and scroll down a bit, you should see a blue module with a yellow timer on its header on the left sidebar. This module contains the Tomorrow’s Game Today, and under it, today’s Daily Deal. Our US site is here.
Once you see what the module looks like, go to our JP site here and look for the same module in the same place. It should also have two games in it. If you don’t see the TGT, that’s the bug.
This module also appears on our New Releases page here. On that page the module is at the top of the right sidebar. Please check there too!
If you can repro the problem please drop a comment and let me know what browser you are using, including version number. Thanks in advance all!
ETA 9:25am: Thanks to everybody who’s looked so far! No need to look for the rest of today, since the 8am-9am Pacific time window is crucial. There will be another opportunity to check during that time frame tomorrow.