Finally an end to an awful weekend.

It's been years since Georgia opened their new Atlanta aquarium and my wife and I often talked about going. This Memorial Day weekend we finally made the trip. First problem was encountered about 10 minutes before we got to the hotel in Atlanta. My wife realized she'd lost her wallet. She was pretty sure that she'd left it in a gas station bathroom... 120 miles back. And the receipt we had from them didn't have a phone number on it. So we had to travel almost two hours back, not even sure if we'd find it when we got their. Fortunately! we did; someone had turned it in and it was waiting behind the counter when we got there.

The next day we got to the aquarium around 2pm and found a mob. A line so long to get in, we weren't sure it would be worth the wait. Then we discovered that the tickets being sold would only let us in at 4pm anyway. We finally decided to buy the tickets (at a kiosk, which had a shorter wait) and then tried to find a place to eat. The burger joint near the aquarium was clearly swamped. The mall near the hotel was closed because it was Sunday. When we finally got into the aquarium, it was nice but crazy crowded.

Today on the way home, with pouring rain coming down, the wipers in the van stopped working. This had been an intermittent problem for years now but the garage was never able to track it down. So we stopped and called AAA. We waited about 45 minutes for a very nice tow truck driver who tried to help as much as he could. He offered to try replacing the wiper switch, but then we discovered that we had to drive through the mob at the Lowe's Motor Speedway, as the race had just been declared a wash out. Then we finally get to the auto parts store about an hour later, only to discover that they did not actually have that part. They'd looked up the wrong part. The rain was light enough at that point that I decided to just buy some Rain-X and see how well it'd work even with the wipers not working.

So I applied it, started the car... and the wipers were working again. Soooo frustrating. Finally we got home without further incident.

It's been said in legends that some day Atlanta will sink under the ocean due to the size of its Delta hub. I say that day can't come soon enough!

Two weeks ago, the application drive in my main machine got corrupted. In the process of checkdisking it, the OS drive got problems as well. I ended up losing the data on the OS drive, which meant a couple weeks of save games. I got a new SATA drive to replace them.

On Monday I got to a trade show in Chicago to discover that my laptop drive was damaged. Checkdisk could not get past 43% on checking file data. I had to swap in my old small drive which I'd replaced in September.

A couple days ago the on-board network in my main machine just up and died. It actually shut down my computer. Until today I was running it with a USB wireless adapter.

Today I picked up a PCI network card. I installed it and now my computer won't boot. The fans spin and that's it. Removed it, same thing. It does not react to the power or reset buttons.

It seems that my very presence has now become harmful to hardware. And I am very fucking pissed about it.

World of Goo is probably the only Wii-to-PC port I've ever played. As a port, it's basically seamless. Maybe too much so. It's effectively identical to the Wii version, which includes the complete lack of options such as resolution or volume control. (These are possibly accessible in an ini file; I haven't checked.) The precision of the mouse control was a welcome feature. The game on the Wii is fun despite the shaky wiimote control.

The game just oozes atmosphere. Gameplay and level design are clever. My one disappointment is now it's over! I suppose I'll have to try for all the OCD achievements (each level has an additional set of requirements to achieve an OCD award, such as a higher minimum number of goo to save or a time limit).

Okay, so far it's been a really crappy year. Worst ever! But hopefully yesterday and today are the turning points. Out with the old, in with the new. Or in the case of today, out with the new, in with the old?