I haven’t been posting much lately for a variety of reasons including laziness and distractions. Here’s some of the things I’ve been up to lately:

Banking
Bank of America recently overhauled their whole phone and online banking system, with predictably mixed results. Some aspects are much better. For instance, we can now access our checking accounts on the website for the first time in Oregon. Some aspects are much worse. For instance, the login on the website must be a 9-20 digit number. No login names or email addresses allowed. It defaults to your social security number. You can change it to anything, but what other 10 digit number besides your social are you going to remember that isn’t dates or something else easy to guess? Also, your password must be LESS than 8 characters, so it’s not that secure, and I can’t use any of my normal passwords.

The worse part, though, was that before, Annie and I could easily deposit money into each others’ accounts and move things around. The new web setup doesn’t allow that anymore. You can only access your own accounts. This is really lame, as Annie and I tend to have to swap money around several times in a given month for a variety of reasons.

So we finally went to the bank to straighten things out, and ended up with a new string of accounts that sounds excessively complicated, but should work out much better in the end, and allow us to save money more easily. Basically, we each have our own checking account, which automatically transfers $25 a month to our own savings accounts. Then we have a joint checking account that we’ll use for paying bills and for direct deposit, and just transfer money from it to our personal checking accounts to prevent us from over-spending without realising it. Then on top of everything, we each have our own credit cards, and have been listed as cardholders on each other’s accounts, which will allow us to make payments on each other’s credit cards when needed.

I could draw up a flowchart of this, but I don’t feel geeky enough, and it’s all pretty boringly complicated. Just take my word for it that this is a good thing, and it will help us out in the long run to save money.

Power Outages
We’ve lost power a couple of times in the last month or two, and last night, when our power went out around 6:30, I called PGE. The automated system told me the following:

Thank you for reporting the power outage in your area. We are already aware of the problem, and have received sixty-four calls about it. There are approximately four thousand seven hundred people in the affected area. We expect power to be restored no later than eight-thirty p.m.. The cause of this outage is unknown.

The power came back on around 7:00, but we went over to Eric and Jill’s to hang out, and Annie bought Hot Lips for dinner. I love hot lips.

Games
Of course, the biggest distraction right now is City of Heroes – an MMORPG about super-heroes. There’s minimal plot. Basically, you create any super-hero you can imagine, and then get online to join others in fighting the forces of evil – which range from street gangs to nazis to evil-super-villians. If you play solo, you can have fun, but it gets boring quickly. The real fun comes from teaming up with a group of other characters and taking on really large groups of guys.

I’ve been resisting playing any MMORPGs because I’ve heard they’re highly addictive, and I didn’t really want to be encouraged to spend more time online than I already do. But this game was getting incredible reviews, and several people I trust said it was great, and I did what I usually do when unsure about a game – I emailed Daniel.

Daniel works in the game industry, and he’s usually played (or seen at least) any game well before I would have, so he’s a good second opinion. I emailed him to ask if he’d played it, and he replied that basically he was in the same position as me – resistant to the idea of MMORPGs, but interested in this one. So he said that if I bought a copy, he would too, and we could play with some buddies of his from Microsoft.

Over the weekend, we both started (He’s playing a Blaster character (think cyclops from x-men) who shoots fire, and I’m playing a controller (think professor X without all the pacifism)). Over the course of the weekend, we played quite a bit and we’re both at level 10 now, and the game is only getting better. I can’t wait to level up, to get better powers to go kick more butt to level up again – and I now understand why people referred to Everquest as Evercrack – gaming online is addicting.

Other Stuff
I’m still working on that photo post. The longer I wait, the bigger it gets and the more reluctant I am to tackle it. Now I also need to post screenshots of the characters everyone’s created in City of Heroes – the character creation engine is incredible, and I’m convinced they could make money just selling it as a stand-alone program. Sean and Miles have both spent a good portion of time over here making heroes, and I want to show them off. And there’s plenty of web design stuff to do, and Annie and I are going to finish the wedding photo album sometime this week so we can take it to 4th of July to show people. Ugh. No wonder I haven’t been posting much – I’m tired already.

Anyways, more to come later.