As of tomorrow, I will have been sick with the flu for 3 weeks. The bulk of the symptoms are gone, thankfully, but I’m still feeling tired, a persistent cough, as well as pressure issues with my ears (i.e. ears pop or stay popped or won’t pop as necessary). I was reading through the differences of symptoms between “regular” flu and the swine flu and I have no idea which I may have had. 
Admittedly, the seasonal flu has never lasted more than a week with me in the past. Also, the flu has never made me vomit although I know many others have suffered that particular symptom with any flu. I’m one of the lucky ones that never had that symptom and this time around has been no different. Having said that, I have had all of the symptoms as related from various sources of both types of flu (except in severe cases of H1N1 that ended in long-term hospitalizations or death). It’s not really important now, I suppose given that the bulk of the flu is gone and now I just have the aftermath. With all of the coughing, and head-cold “symptoms” that I have now, my sense of taste and smell are dramatically diminished. I haven’t figured out if that’s an advantage or disadvantage yet.
Last night/early this morning I woke up for a few hours and felt somewhat hungry. Not usually an issue, I just grab something quick and that’s that. Not this time. I didn’t feel starved when I started but after the first sandwich, I suddenly felt ravenously hungry and didn’t feel satisfied until after five sandwiches. It was the strangest thing. I don’t normally eat like that. Shortly after that, I went back to bed and woke up about an hour and a half ago. I’m guessing that experience is/was my having spent 36+ hours awake the day(s) before that trying to get my housework caught up (which, btw, was mostly successful).
In any event, I haven’t been doing much other than playing games (as you can tell from previous entries). I played Mass Effect 2 to death and then played Mass Effect a couple of times for the purposes of importing the character into ME2 later. My son was over this passed Sunday and mentioned Dragon Age – a game I forgot I even owned (go figure). So I re-downloaded it (digital ownership does have its advantages) and installed it. I’ve been playing that now instead.
It’s been a nice change of pace, really. However, with the patch to version 1.02a and subsequently 1.03, I’ve noticed a new issue cropping up. All of my installed and registered DLC‘s are showing up as not authorized when I attempt to resume a game (that I was playing just hours beforehand). A cursory search led me to the problem. Apparently if you skip the introductory movies, the Dragon Age: Origins Content Updater service doesn’t have time to start and even when it does start and you try to resume, you’ll get the same error. You have to quit the game, stop the service, start it again (as using the restart service option doesn’t seem to work), then start up the game. That’s the only way the damned thing will recognize the DLCs as authorized.
In EA‘s infinite wisdom (note the sarcasm), their need to put in some form of DRM to prevent piracy is actually pushing people into it. The more they (publishing companies) try to prevent piracy and protect against copyright infringement, the more they’re driving people to find easier methods with less hassle (and less technical problems) to play their games or use their software.
The issues people are having with this content service with Dragon Age is another example of, what was supposed to be, a seamless DRM method not working properly. Look at the games that used Starforce, for example. Starforce was another DRM system that failed so miserably that some gaming companies removed it from their software entirely (egosoft’s X3 series being a prime example). When are they going to wake up and realize that DRM doesn’t work? It’s not stopping software piracy at all. All it’s doing is forcing legitimate customers into looking at piracy as a method to get around the errors that DRM systems are causing.
