The Week of Homework
Good thing about taking two online courses in the same term from the same teacher - you get to know them, which is important when both are writing / english related. I’m of the opinion that at least half of your grade in any fluffy class (fluffy: anything from the “arts & letters” or “social science” sections of the catalog, and yes I’m an arts major) depends on your rapport with the instructor - so building that rapport, very important, just to make it all circular.
Bad thing: She arranged both classes so the draft of the final project is due in the same week. This week. And of course, when I was picking a project topic for the literature class, I went for the one - write a short story - where I had to be creative instead of blurfing up 3 pages worth of selected quotes surrounded by some pretty sounding language, which is 2/3rds of literary criticism as I understand it.
So this week is a bit nasty. I’ve made a list of all the things I have to accomplish this week and I’ve burned through most of the little ones, like the weekly quiz, all the reading, and the non-project related discussion posts… now I need to knuckle down and bang out the hard stuff. By Thursday at noon. Oi vey.
Bitching here isn’t very productive, except that it’s helping me wind down from the half hour of Deux Ex that was supposed to help me wind down from the homework. 
Mouse & Keyboard… how very odd.
Back towards the beginning of the year, when I was trying out Vanguard, I upgraded my PC. I wound up with something that would play Vanguard on the highest visual settings and actually push out 35 fps or so. This is pretty good because Vanguard is a freaking HOG.
Then I stopped playing Vanguard.
So I have a reasonably spiffy PC and am not using it for gaming, except for the occasional emulator. Kind of shameful. I decided I would actually use it to play a game, which started an involved selection process from the available candidates.
While we mostly game on consoles, my wife and I have actually bought a few PC games in the last decade. Ignoring my purchases from JAST USA, the list looks something like: Tron 2.0 (mine). Diablo I & II (hers). Warcraft III (hers). Starcraft and Brood War (mine). Serious Sam and Serious Sam the Second Encounter (mine). Icewind Dale (hers). Neverwinter Nights (hers).
I was leaning towards Tron 2.0 when something jogged my memory.
See, among the various gaming forums I read is the Penny Arcade forum. I don’t have an account there because I’m not very good at not getting into flame wars and it’s just better for everyone if I never post anything. But I can read it. And they have a tradition that whenever someone mentions “Deux Ex”, someone has to get the CD out and install it.
And I figured, any tradition that has become THAT ritual has to have some basis, and didn’t I get a copy of Deux Ex with a graphics card a few years ago?
It turns out that I did, that I still have the CD, and that not only does it work on Windows XP but it’s trivial to tweak it for 1680 x 1050 resolution. That gives it an edge over Tron 2.0, which can’t be made to work in widescreen resolutions. One quick install later and I’m staring at the tutorial.
I’ve played it for about 4 hours and died an ungodly number of times. It’s a good thing it’s so very forgiving about being able to save and load often. I’m still having trouble with the whole “sneaky” bit. My attempts at stealth go something like this.
1: Open a trap door. Drop down into a room filled with guys with guns. Die
2: Open the trap door. Shoot the plainly labeled crate of explosives I can see. Kill all the hostages along with the guys with guns. Reload from save.
3: Open the trap door. Throw in a gas grenade. Drop down into a room filled with guys with guns and toxic gas. Kill some of the guys with guns before some that were out of the blast radius of the gas grenade shoot me. Die.
4: Back away from the trap door. Find a ladder down to another ventilation shaft that opens into the room filled with guys with guns. Crawl up to the end of the ventilation shaft without turning off my flashlight. Guys with guns see light behind shaft opening. Die.
5: …let’s not go into EVERY little permutation…
It IS a heck of an engrossing game. I can see why people go on about it. It’s not exactly pushing my machine’s hardware limits, but what the hell.
Memorial day weekend…
Unfortunately I don’t know many veterans - only one, actually. My father-in-law served in Vietnam, but it seems kind of weird to call him up and say, uh, “thanks”
So, like most Americans, I took the opportunity of this long weekend to go, well, shopping.
The Mac mini we use as our home theater PC has hit the limits of its 100GB internal drive and 160GB external drive. Down to something under 10GB free on each. Not good.
Office Depot had MyBook 500GB external hard drives on sale for $139, which will be $99 if the promised rebate actually appears.
I still have to actually, you know, hook it up, but once it’s connected we shouldn’t have to worry about free space on the mini for some while.
Then my wife and I went to the nearby… heaven help us both… the nearby outlet mall. With me bitching the whole way about how there was nothing there but clothing stores.
I managed to keep up a pretty good chain of gripes until we went into the Eddie Bauer outlet, then I kind of broke down and bought a pair of jeans, a pair of khakis and 3 shirts. I have to confess this because, you see, I was the one bitching about clothing stores and now I am shamed. I also spent WAY too much at the Jockey outlet store because something I realized in the changing room at Eddie Bauer is this: When you go from a 44 waist to a 36 waist, you need to buy more than just new pants. Not something anyone ever mentions when they talk about weight loss.
Pirates of the Caribbean 3 Spoiler-free advice:
Sit through the end credits. There’s a bit after them.
I mention this only because at last night’s showing, which was a full theater, almost everyone walked out as soon as the credits started - I think there were only six people left to see the “real” ending - and, unlike the after-credits bits for the first two movies, it was actually part of the story instead of just a quick gag.
So, you’ve been warned.
Grammar checkers am fun
I have a new job, so I have to learn a whole new set of processes and development tools, including a new bug tracking system.
I was taking notes today while I experimented with the bug tracking system, and I typed this into word:
“Presumably, blocks another bug until this one is fixed”
…and it underlined “blocks another bug until this one is fixed” in green
I right clicked on it and didn’t like any of the options, so I changed it to
“Presumably, blocks another bug until this one am fixed”
…and that goes right through the grammar checker, without comment.
So, I’m leaving it as is.
Movies, not for Americans:
I really enjoyed the live-action “Great Teacher Onizuka”, so when I found out that Takashi Sorimachi, Onizuka-sensei’s actor had been in a big budget movie in 2005, I had to track it down.
That movie - “Otokotachi no Yamato”, which I usually see translated as “Men of the Yamato” even if my mind is screaming at me that that’s backwards - wound up sitting on our DVD rack for a few months before it finally found its way into the DVD player last night.
Historical fact: The “Yamato” was a really big Japanese battleship that we Americans sunk near the end of WWII, killing a few thousand sailors. Granted, at the time they were doing their level best to kill us, too, and really, it’s been 60 years so can we let bygones be bygones?
This movie is pretty brutal in portraying the war from the viewpoint of the Japanese on the ship - first convinced that America doesn’t have the stomach for a long war, then convinced of victory, then finally succumbing to the knowledge that they’re basically on a suicide run. Couple with scene after scene of fighter planes strafing the decks of the Yamato and it’s a bit difficult to watch - there’s definitely a sense of feeling sorry for the crew of the ship but it’s hard to cheer for them at the same time.
Definitely not light hearted popcorn fare, though Sorimachi is damn cool in it.
Threatening signs, not terribly effective:
This is a door from the parking garage at my previous employer. I say “parking garage” when what it really was was a tin can factory that had gone out of business, had the walls knocked out and some stripes painted on the floor, and a ramp installed. There were lots of doors still there but they were generally nailed shut because most of them opened on to nothingness. It was a creepy thing to walk through at night, and of course it’s where they stuck the contract employees.
I just really liked this sign.
More on piles o’ stuff
It took far too long - six hours or so I’m guessing - but everything for eBay has been hooked up, tested, and photographed. Now I need to get the auctions going and I’ll be in a good mood for about a week, until it comes time to ship it all anyway. I am very surprised that the 3DO is still holding game saves from 10 years ago.
I think when all is said and done I’ll have eliminated my collections for around 20 different video game systems and classic computers. That’s a lot of storage space back.
I haven’t been staying inside working on a purge ALL day, though - I have a friend who pays far too much attention to local restaurants, so when he found a place that reputedly had the biggest chicken fried steak around, he invited several people out for a morning hike followed by a late breakfast at this joint.
It was a good hike and, well, certainly a BIG chicken fried steak, but I’ll be mum as to the quality. The separate plate of eggs and pancakes was rather good, though - also enormous. I could have eaten quite well having either plate by itself - as it was, I managed to eat both down about halfway.
I was complaining about not being able to finish and one member of the group - who I’d only met recently - made a comment along the lines of “well, you’re kind of a small guy for that much food”, which made for much amusement all around on the part of the people who remember me from my days near 300lbs.
Here are some disturbing images so you can see the amount of food that got piled in front of every person at the table - excluding the two guys who had the foresight to order one of these and split it between them.
Plate one:
Plate two:
I’m thinking that I MIGHT need to eat again sometime tomorrow afternoon.
Piles o’ stuff
…that’s what our living room is full of now.
One pile o’ Jaguar & Jaguar CD stuff.
One pile o’ Nintendo 64 stuff.
One pile o’ Virtual Boy stuff.
One very small pile o’ 3DO stuff.
One pile o’ SNES carts.
One pile o’ Genesis and Master System carts.
One pile o’ Lynx stuff
Let’s hope there’s some folks on eBay that want obscure failed videogame consoles.
No picture because it’s really shameful.
On the plus side, all the systems that are being held on to are better organized. I had TurboGrafx stuff spread across like 5 boxes, now it’s all in one. All the Gameboy carts are re-boxed and their manuals found and put in said boxes, same with the Neo Geo Pocket Color. Dreamcast and Saturn stuff is kind of mixed together, but that’s fine for now. Trying to decide if the Atari 8-bit stuff is staying or going. Couldn’t follow through on my plan of purging ALL the SNES and Genesis stuff, I just don’t have the will power. At least it’s more under control now.
Cats!
This is one of our cats. Her name is Willow. Isn’t she cute?
Of course, while she’s being so cute and all that, she’s lying directly on my homework and my student loan paperwork, using my Literature book as a pillow, and resisting all subtle attempts to convince her that I’d really prefer she pick somewhere else for her catnaps / grooming sessions.
No other lifeform could get away with it.
About
About the author:
I’m a married 30-odd-year-old fanboy, college student, and software QA guy, mostly recovered from an 8-year long Everquest addiction and trying to catch up on the last decade of videogames as a result.
I’m working towards a BA in Japanese and hope to be done by 2011.
This blog contains an awful lot of posts about games as I finish them, occasional rants about keeping in shape, the odd bit of bitching about the antics of the instructors and students I cross paths with, and every once in a while a post or two related to weird things I’ve seen while traveling.
Oh, and the occasional post about videogame girls in glasses because I like making my wife roll her eyes and shake her head at me.
