I had a bit of a scare tonight with a jammed iPhone that would not boot and being miles away from an Apple store I was out of options. After doing the whopping big update to v 2.01 late tonight the wifi router with remote hard drive went down, along with it my connected iTunes library causing iTunes to crash, right at the golden moment while the phone was updating and rebooting. Oh noooo! Even after I struggled with cables in tight spaces and resurrected the network by plugging directly into the router to get iTunes up again, the phone wasn’t even unrecognisable. The best my laptop could offer was that my shiny phone was an “unrecogniseable USB hub that may be malfunctioning”. iTunes had even folded up its usual iPhone parking space as if its own child had never played in its yard. A reboot of the laptop yielded no change. Plugging the iPhone into the power outlet didnt help either. The frozen Apple logo wouldn’t go away. I wondered if the battery could last long enough to drive down to an Apple store in the RV some time this week. It seemed unlikely. I was tired, defeated and sadder than I was the second day of school.
Lots of super simple advice to follow. And after my iphone rebooted a few times and was plugged in and out a few times it finally remembered who it was and what to do next.
Finally I can go to sleep without worrying about having lost a quarter of my brain. Good night all!
My favourite little time-stealer, Travian is a browser-based strategy game cleverly programmed in PHP so that you don’t need to download anything to play. Started in Germany, Travian is quite easily the most played browser game right now and has grown to over 3 million players worldwide.
Events occur and resources accumulate in real time. The player starts with a small, mostly empty village and some renewable resources with the intention of building an empire. As the leader of a village, either Roman, Teuton or Gaul, your village will have its own unique types of buildings, resources, armies, strengths and weaknesses. The Gauls are largely defensive, the Teutons more aggressive and the Romans have a balance of the two styes.
Many players attack villages to gain resources (lumber, clay, iron and food) and increase their armies and empire, and most players eventually join an alliance as a defensive strategy or to destroy villages en mass.
Here’s a snapshot of my peaceful Gaul village from a while back:
I really hope some of you join from my referral links as I will get gold bounty after your village has grown to a population of 75, thus allowing me to do extra fun things! Let me know if you do.
Though not out of Pittsburgh… yet. Yesterday we excitedly got into our fully loaded RV after an exhausting 4 days of moving ready to embark on a year-long roadtrip, and just half an hour into the trip we noticed the engine was smoking. So we turned off the A/C and pulled over as soon as we could.
While Nathan got out to look under the hood, I was sitting inside peering at the gauges on the dashboard trying to see if there was a water level indicator or anything else showing up but everything was in normal ranges. Suddenly Nathan started yelling frantically at me to get out. I jumped out panicking — movies taught me when someone yells, “Get out of the car!” it’s about to explode. Luckily some workmen across the road spotted the fire because Nathan couldn’t see it from above.
From a safe distance I could see fluid that had caught on fire pouring out of the engine and licking the belly, right under where my feet were. more…
