In praise and irritation at Steam

I love Steam.  It has made my gaming so much more manageable.  For instance, Julie bought me Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare for Christmas.  It's a really great game.  But like most disorganized people, DVD's or CD's and I don't really get along.  By that I mean that if I buy a game, I'll probably end up either losing or damaging the medium on which I purchased it thereby making my gaming impossible or at the minimum, very inconvenient.

Now comes Steam.

Steam is Valve Software's game distribution network.  If you play games (other than PopCap games like my Mom *cough* Zuma :) ) and you've never heard of Valve then you need to come into the 21st century.  Valve is the company that came out of nowhere and made what some consider to be the best computer game of all time, Half-Life.

Names like Gordon Freeman and Black Mesa mean nothing to you.  I pity you.  But I digress.

Steam makes it possible to buy games online quickly and easily.  It is downloaded to your computer (while you do other things, if you desire) and when it's ready you can play.  It's already registered to you and you don't have to worry about anything like disks.

Here's the really cool part.  If you ever need to reinstall it, all you have to do is delete it and tell Steam to just download it again.  You can do that on any machine!  If my computer crashes and/or I buy a new one, all I have to do to reinstall those games is download the Steam client, log in and it will tell me what games I owned and which, if any, are currently installed.  I then tell it to install whatever ones I choose.  How cool is THAT?!  And if I need more disk space, I can delete games I don't play or aren't ready to play yet or simply not install them (like the Half Life 2 expansions I'm not ready for).

And you can do that for other games like my beloved Call of Duty 4 and even PopCap games.

But there's one thing that irritates me every single day that I use it.  Sometimes when you click on a link in Steam it opens up the link in the steam client.  Other times, and without warning, it will open up my browser (which may take 30 seconds or more to load because I have a huge session with 30 tabs saved).  That really, really irritates me.  So my question is this:

How freaking hard is it to tell me when I hover over a link that it will open up my browser?!?!?!

There.  I feel better now.

Word of Wisdom Strikes Again!

I just love this headline:


Researchers Links High Quantities of Caffeine to Miscarriages in Pregnant Women

The study, which published online in the American Journal of Obstetrics and
Gynecology, found that consuming 200 mg of caffeine, equal to two cups of coffee
per day, doubles a woman's risk of miscarriage during pregnancy.

We LDS get a lot of flack for the "No coffee, No tea" provisions of the Word of Wisdom. It's something that Mormons "just do" and to most of us, it's not that big a deal. We keep hearing all of the "latest" science on how tea is just so healthy and how 2 cups of coffee a day can actually be helpful.

Well, not if you're a pregnant woman, it isn't! And if it's not good for a developing fetus, do you really think that it's not affecting you, even if it's at a smaller level?