On Skyrim

Oh, what a wonderful game, oh, what agony it can create! Having gotten a PS3 on Christmas for the family, I also bought the season's "best" games and almost instantly got hooked on Skyrim, a dungeon and dragons game, the 5th from the series of Elder Scrolls games which include Morrowind and Oblivion.

After getting used to the Playstation controller, it was a few years back that I played my last console game from Sony, it was quite an awesome experience to see how far game development has evolved in the meantime. Actually, Skyrim in particular has gone so far that it reach a point where the standard PS3 hardware can no longer follow all the calculations needed to keep up with the game progress. And the consequence, the game crashed, the file system on the Playstation corrupted, and Skyrim reached the point of being unplayable.

Oh, the agony! Now the waiting began, will Bethesda come out with a fix? And when? Will it work? And what if not? I don't want to list all the things that went through my head, but I sure was very disappointed by the game makers. Not so much that the games bad, but more about the lack of testing and the willingness to release a bugged product. I would ever dare to operate on such a low level!

Well, in the end the fix came and things have greatly improved, I had since then many great battles with beasts of all kinds, plus the occasional human target! All is well in Skyrim Land, you ask? Not really, but I came to accept the rare instances when the game still crashed and forces me to restore the file and database systems, although each time I hold my breath and pray that I don't have to start again from the beginning.

So what does slaying dragons teach us then? I would say patience and appreciation for what we have (that works)!

Valentine's Day and The Canterbury Tales

The things you find out when digging just a little bit! As we are only a few days away from Valentine's Day, I checked with the good old Wikipedia to find out where this day comes from. Turns out that it probably relates to two persons a few centuries AD who, independent from each other, died as martyrs for some (good) cause, hence the day is actually called Saint Valentine's Day.

Love - not so much at that point, and it took about another One Thousand years until the famous "Father of English literature," Geoffrey Chaucer (best known for "The Canterbury Tales"), connected love and Valentine's Day in a poem in "Parlement of Foules." It goes like"

For this was on seynt Volantynys day
Whan euery bryd comyth there to chese his make.
["For this was Saint Valentine's Day, when every bird cometh there to choose his mate."]

So, with that said, Happy Saint Valentine's Day!

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And here is a link to the source: Valentine's Day

Happy 2012 - Or ...

... What else would I hope for? Of course "happy" sums it up nicely! When I am happy then all other things are in place, work, family, and health. Well, sadly enough, health is at least for my part not an option, so let's define happy as the achievement of successful containment.

But that will not stop me from wishing all people who want to listen to me:

A Happy TwothousandAndTwelve!!!

On Commuting - Part One!

Before I came to this country, or maybe I should say came to the New York area, about 17 years ago, I could not imagine a daily commute of more than an hour total. Currently, I commute on average three hours each day!

And I am for sure not alone with that kind of extra curricular effort, I would even go so far as to say that most people here in the Tri-State area commute at least two hours daily. So, let's do some math:

Let's say that only one million people in the Tri-State area (I think it's way more) commute two hours each day. These people earn on average - hm - let's say fifteen Dollars an hour (again I think it's more).

That makes daily 2,000,000 hours in transit, and a possible $ 30,000,000 lost in income (if they could have worked instead)! And two million hours are more than 228 years! Daily! In commute! Just wasted!

Ingo