That’s how I’m feeling… I really don’t feel like doing anything, it’s just so pointless… Need to stay obsessed with something in order to be able to do anything, the moment something happens to lower my interest in my current obsession I drop right back to that familiar place where all I want to do is curl up into a ball and never wake up again.
Was quite surprised to notice that I didn’t feel especially bad on the 25th, three years since she kicked me out of the room, but I assume a lot of effort was required for that, effort I wasn’t really aware of making. Felt bad enough on the 24th, knowing that day would come, and then again afterwards. And the US Open is a very sharp reminder of that time each year…
As for the obsessions that barely keep me afloat (though I doubt that’s the proper term)…
Last week it was Civilization IV. Wanted to play it properly now, after struggling with it on my old computer, waiting for up to 20 minutes for one turn to complete at the end despite running it with minimum settings. I see Sid Meier‘s games as a challenge, I have to win once and then be done with it, but this time I tried it again to see what the game really has to offer while running on a computer that supports it properly. So I won it, built the spaceship in 1914. Rather low difficulty, warlord (level three out of nine), but I’m not about to try harder ones, I want to be able to win by playing fair. The game speed was “marathon”, of course. Low score, 4515 “normalized”, said my place in history was that of Warren G. Harding. Third from the bottom, so it could have been worse. The first time I won, by the same method, sometime around 1985, I think it told me I was Ethelred the Unready, second from the bottom. I guess that’s what you get for playing fair, no wars except defensive ones, working with the environment instead of destroying it and so on.
As for now, I’m playing The Bard’s Tale. It’s wickedly fun! Or at least it would be if they would have allowed free saves in the PC version instead of keeping the save point concept from the console versions, because some areas can be quite difficult… Still, this is one game that will make you laugh out loud and for that it’s certainly worth playing. Rather sad that it seems to have been released and then forgotten… It also officially doesn’t work under Vista, but if you set XP compatibility mode for both the installer and the actual game it seems to do just fine, excepting some minor glitches when it comes to movies.
As a side note, I’m also losing myself a lot in a certain song these days. It’s been a while since I had something on repeat for so long… That kind of mood again, I guess…
Finally got a bookcase, so the books don’t have to be piled up on the floor anymore. But why do they make the shelves so far apart? Every bookcase I see has them 35 cm apart, but I’m yet to see a book that’s 35 cm tall! So I set them closer together, since thankfully they’re adjustable, hoping you could at least buy a couple more and add them. Turns out that you can’t, meaning that right now I only have shelves on the top half of it, so I guess the next plan of action is to have a carpenter make a couple more just like these. Luckily there is a door on the bottom, so if the color will be slightly off it won’t show.
The chair should also be replaced next month, hopefully, then the next move will concern carpets. I see a lot of trouble there, in between size requirements, design and material preferences and tight budget constraints… But I’ll see when I get there, I only had the bed, the desk and this old chair in here for the past three months, I’m not getting my hopes up when it comes to putting things back together.
This would be some of the best news I’ve seen in quite some time if it’d spread. But the usual problem with such things is that when something seems too good to be true it usually is, and saying that people whose shared files are valued at less than 3000 Euros, considering a song as being worth one Euro and a movie 15 Euros, will not be prosecuted regardless of any claims made by the copyright holders certainly fits that “too good to be true” bill. I foresee a lot of opposition to this, so I sure hope they can hold firm.
Of course there is still a long way to go from simply not prosecuting if it’s within certain limits to making it fully legal regardless of amount if the person sharing makes no profit from it, and also the values given, at least for the songs, are too high, but it’s a start!
What I find interesting is that it only mentions music and movies, not software, though usually software developers really have no other source of revenue than direct sales while most music and movie producers don’t have to rely on such sales in the least. The greed of the record labels and movie studios is showing again, since it’s because of them that the issue has been brought up in the first place.
This was a first for me, flashing the BIOS. As with anything that might break my computer, I was scared silly, but everything seems to have worked out well, thankfully.
I think all settings are back to the way they were before and the one difference I’m noticing is that the Windows Experience Index rates my system’s “gaming graphics” performance as 4.8 now, it was 4.7 before. Another minor thing I noticed, in BIOS this time, was that the RAM voltage is no longer listed. Since it detected the required voltage correctly the first time I assume there would have been no problems now either, but I set it manually to 2.1V (or +0.3V actually, since the setting refers to the standard 1.8V) just to be sure.
A scary moment was when I saved the proper BIOS settings again, after initially loading fail-safe defaults right after the flash, and rebooted. It didn’t just reboot, it turned itself off, waited a couple of seconds and then turned itself back on. Let’s just say that those couple of seconds were quite long, I wasn’t expecting it to do that!
I’ll have to see if this also fixed the problem with the clock. Saw some people posting messages saying that they had experienced the same problem with this specific board under Vista (or Linux) and updating the BIOS to F2 either solved it or made the time loss be negligible, only a few seconds per day instead of over four minutes. If F2 did that, F3 should normally be even more likely to solve it, right?
As you should be well aware, there’s a war in Georgia. But it’s more than that, it’s the best chance the EU and NATO will have to resolve the “Russian problem”. Or at least it was, since they have already wasted it with meaningless talks and the moment is now lost.
Of course the Georgian president just wanted to regain control of South Ossetia and relied on international support to do so. It’s also true that his actions gave Russia the excuse it had been waiting for to launch this offensive. However, this offensive is also the excuse the EU and NATO should have been waiting for to make Russia pay for their controlling habits and therefore a chance they couldn’t afford to lose, especially considering the timing.
It’s not only about Georgia. The real issue here is allowing Russia to regain their influence in the area, essentially becoming the Soviet Union once again. Once you allow it once, there’s no going back. But fear can work both ways, so a united response could send them running back, especially now since their most powerful potential allies, China, are rather busy. But that response had to come swiftly and clearly.
We are looking at two regions which have not been conquered or colonized by force by Georgia, but which desire to break away from it. However, their desire to break away isn’t necessarily a desire for independence, as they seem quite happy to attach themselves to Russia. Seeing as Russia supports this, it can certainly be accused of attempting to conquer parts of Georgia. A cultural conquest has the same result as a military one, but may actually be worse since it’s harder to prove and therefore less likely to be stopped by international intervention. And, knowing the way they responded to the Chechnya situation, the hypocrisy is obvious. And they also didn’t seem bothered by the measures taken by China to beat down the Tibetans’ desire for independence, despite the fact that they had been conquered by force to begin with.
Saying that, it’s obvious that Russia can’t accuse Georgia of invading South Ossetia. It’s true that it had a degree of autonomy, but it was part of Georgia and a country can’t invade itself! And the military aid sent to Abkhazia can’t even be explained by that, not to mention the continued offensive into previously undisputed Georgian territory. So it can be argued that Georgia gave Russia the excuse for this attack, but this attack should have given the EU and NATO the excuse to target Russia. They are conquering an independent and democratic state and this is no longer allowed in today’s world. Or at least it shouldn’t be.
Now you have to keep in mind that Russia is a very powerful country and they also have powerful allies, China coming first to mind. Thinking about that, a World War III seems extremely likely and it’s not going to be Muslims against Christians but instead have Russia and China on one side and NATO and the EU on the other. Therefore, an actual war is undesirable. But Georgia provoked this attack at the best possible moment. China is too busy with the Olympics to help Russia right now, they have their pants down and shoelaces tied together! Medvedev is also rather “green” and at the start of the conflict Putin, who obviously holds the reins, was in China. It was the only moment when Russia stood alone and it could have been scared away. Then the world’s eyes could be on China before the end of the Olympics so they would find themselves alone as well and unable to react.
The right thing to do would have been to take the UN completely out of it, since Russia can block any of its decisions that it doesn’t like, and have NATO, the EU and any other like-minded countries immediately respond in force. The time for talking is over the moment somebody takes a shot and all these threats of “cooling relations” have no relevance. Russia holds the world’s supply of natural gas and knows the EU relies on it for 40% of its energy needs, it doesn’t care whether the relations are heated or cooled or anything in between! They see that they can scare everybody else into submission, so the only right thing to do would have been to prove that’s not the case with an immediate military response.
I’m not advocating attacking Russia directly, at least not unless needed. But the proper response would have been immediately sending troops to support Georgia in defending its territory and national integrity, therefore facing Russia with a very clear choice: Either they stop the fight in Georgia and accept the sanctions the international community would impose upon them for this action or, according to their own view of things, they start a war with everyone else. I mean, if they considered that Georgia attacked them by attacking South Ossetia where they had stationed troops, it makes perfect sense to say they’d attack the EU and NATO by continuing the offensive on Georgia once EU and NATO troops would be stationed there. Either way, with China unable to help at the moment, they would have been forced to withdraw. They’re not crazy enough to start World War III alone!
Such a withdrawal would have been similar to a surrender, allowing the others to impose terms. Not that they couldn’t impose sanctions for invading an independent and democratic state anyway. And this is a chance the EU should have jumped at. They could have forced Russia to accept their terms on energy matters, therefore solving this extremely pressing problem! There is no other way to solve this issue on the EU’s terms; any diplomatic solution will have to be on Russia’s terms or it won’t work. And they could also work on Russia’s military capabilities, therefore delaying the moment they’ll be fully prepared for World War III and giving the rest of the world a better chance to prepare for it, or perhaps even prevent it.
The facts are very simple: Georgia gave the world the best, and possibly the only, chance to stop Russia, and perhaps also China, without actually starting World War III. But instead of seeing it for what it is and grasping it with both hands, the EU and NATO crapped their pants and apparently didn’t have any to spare, so they hid in the bathroom and are just yelling through the door while trying to figure out how not to shame themselves when they’ll eventually have to come back out. This only serves to make Russia feel even more at ease when they try to make things go their way. It shows them that they have already scared everyone else away, that they can expand their influence over the area of the former Soviet Union and also pressure the rest of the world into accepting their terms.
There is no way to get things back to the way they were after this. Somebody wins and somebody loses. And I’m not talking about Georgia. Georgia is irrelevant in this conflict. It’s either Russia or the EU and NATO, nothing in between. We’re talking about one country, forced to act alone, who seems to be winning against two large international alliances! What leverage would those alliances have over anything anymore if they concede defeat here without even fighting?
In short, world leaders continue to act when they should talk and talk when they should act… And one terribly bold action is allowed to go to waste instead of becoming the turning point of a new world order, or at least pivotal in pushing back Russia’s influence and also somewhat deterring China’s potential plans. The world will live to regret this lack of action, and what’s worse is that it won’t be those who made the decision not to act who’ll suffer the most as a result of it.
