Update bits

Blizzard (the makers of the W0rld of Warcraf+, S+arcraft & Diabl0 computer games) is having its annual B|izzcon in LA in October, and G and I thought we might try to go. Actually, we tried to go last year, but it took us too long to decide, because the tickets sold out in 2-3 days and we missed our opportunity. This year, I've been keeping an eye out, and caught the announcement of when the tickets would be posted online for sale. "August 11th!" they said. It took further research to find out *when* on August 11th they'd start. Midnight? No; an informal post from a forum admin at Blizzard said he thought 8am Pacific time (when the nice folks at Blizzard, which is in (gasp!) LA get to work, I imagine). So I drag myself online at 8am on Monday, not wishing to miss the boat this time. Page load? Takes forever. Several hours pass, with some bashful posts by Blizzard. Required login that I'd registered the night before? Name invalid. A search of the online forums reveal that I'm not alone. A few people manage to squeak in some ticket purchases inbetween the hours of downtime on the store site. Blizzard announces that they're going to keep the site down overnight so that people won't have to feel that they need to pull all-nighters to get tickets.

Welcome to 11:30am the next day. Site's still down 'for maintenance', and Blizzard (probably somewhat sleep-deprived and rather embarrassed by now) hasn't said a thing Given some of the experiences that G has had on similar projects, they have my sympathy, but...I'd really like to know whether we will be able to get tickets soonish...plz kthx!

Finger status: still slowly healing. I suspect that doing WoW raids with all of its right-clicks and tension doesn't help much, to judge by how it aches afterwards, but...meh. One of the two dots next to the nail has faded away, and the other is doing so. The yellow liquid under the nail is fading to dark green, interestingly enough. There is still the faintest of yellow tinting here and there down the finger and where it connects with the palm, and while the 2 sections closest to the palm are back to normal size, the pad section at the end, while back to normal color, is still noticeably larger than its opposite. Oh, and I discovered while being defensive door-opener at a Red game on Sunday that clapping probably isn't a very good idea yet. It has been, what, almost two weeks. Seems like twice that.

Oh, and my splint now has a Hello Kitty band-aid on it. Thank you, Val! It feels better already. :-D

In other news, my backyard birds have been enjoying my bird bath; I watch them cautiously make tiny hops down the sloped side to try and judge its depth (since songbirds don't float), twitching their wings eagerly, and when they find a good, stable depth, they flutter madly around, sending water everywhere. Kinda fun. :-) Makes me have to go and refill it every few days, though! And I currently have 3 watermelon seedlings, 1 or 2 white-striped pumpkin seedlings, several enthusiastic 'big max' pumpkin seedlings, and zero of the small cooking kind. Epic fail for not having planted those the same year that I bought them, sigh. It's funny how it doesn't seem to matter terribly much where I plant pumpkins in my garden, as long as it's sunny-ish for the seedlings, is a place that's not too out-of-the way for my hand watering (out of sight, out of mind), and where I have a nice sunny 1000 square feet or so for them to grow *from* there. And growing over cement is ok! This time, though, I will have dirt. Mmmmmm, dirt. Happy vines.

Side note: my splinted-fumblefingering just made my Firefox 'History' menu open up, and I noticed that it included a list of Recently Closed Tabs. Wow, cool! Hadn't noticed that before. Anyhoo...

I have to mention that my finger injury did pale into insignificance on Sunday, when I saw Nora injure her knee while goaltending in net during a Red game. I'm not sure whether any players had fallen on her 6'4? frame -- I was watching from the opposing bench, and some of my players were audibly going over their play to their teammates, trying to reassure themselves that they hadn't been involved in her injury. Goaltending, and knee injuries? Totally not surprised. Note that I am not, nor do I have any plans to be, a goaltender. She was eventually helped off the ice and back to the locker room, where some of us stayed to offer her the services of our hands and feet, and lots of players dropped by to check on her after the game. She says she'll be okay -- a pull rather than a pop, she said -- and I think she was not going to play in the 3-on-3 tournament anyway, but...ugh, knees. Not fun. And we don't have nearly as many of them as we do fingers. Heal up soon, Nora!

Yes, we're watching the Olympics. G's choosing the sports; so far it's mostly gymnastics and swimming, with a smidge of (of course!) women's volleyball. I pointed out that the men's volleyball needed some sort of equivalent beefcakey athletic suit for the sport so the hetero women of the world could enjoy beach volleyball like men do. But hey, I guess we do get men's rings in gymnastics, and men's swimming, so...not so bad. Wow, that swimmer guy who's winning all those gold medals is tall and lanky! Ho hum, another race, another gold and another new world/olympic record. Yeesh. Boy do I not have that kind of dedication -- a jill of all trades am I!

[Update Aug 13, 10pm -- btw, I did not manage to get Blizzc0n tickets. WoW (let alone the other two games) has 9 million subscribers, and only 6500 tickets were available. High website load? You betcha. Blizzard not being a company that usually has to deal with online ticket sales? Most definitely. 'Twas an epic failure. One hopes they will rethink their current convention setup and either find a way to make their convention host more people, host it in multiple places or on multiple days, or at least find a more practical algorithm for selling 6500 tickets while a million people are clicking the 'buy' button on their site.]