Milestones and money

Posted on February 20, 2009 by baudattitude

So, didn’t get fired today.  Actually quite a nice meeting, it seems that we are bucking the trend and doing all right despite the crashing economy.  We have more customers than the year before, delivered more products in less time, and so on and so forth.

My corporate overlords actually handed out bonuses, just to make the point about being in good financial shape, and I made out surprisingly well.

See, every time we ship a project, we send the customer a satisfaction survey sort of thing with a dozen or so questions; they’re asked to rank us on a scale of 1 to 5.

At the meeting, for every project that came back straight 5’s, they gave $50 checks to the developer, PM, and QA guy that worked on it.

We have six developers and two QA guys.

Most of the developers wound up with 1 check, a couple got 2, and, well, I wound up with 4 and the other QA guy did pretty well too.  🙂

So, not fired AND a nice bonus to offset the fact that I got a little silly at Newegg last weekend after my hard drive died.

Also, about the milestones thing:  This is the 400th post here.  It’s not a significant number in any way and the 2 year anniversary of this blog isn’t coming up for a couple of weeks, but it’s a big, round number, so it’s kind of a milestone.  I choose to think of it that way, anyway.

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I am become death, apparently

Posted on February 19, 2009 by baudattitude

I’m not sure how to feel about this.

I’m a believer, personally, in staying the hell home when I’m sick instead of going in to work.

I meet a lot of other people who feel the same way, and I see lots of articles saying that bosses would rather you stay home.

In practice, however, I have only ever been told to go home when I’m sick once, and it turned out I had pneumonia.  Usually, when I HAVE gone in to work when I was visibly sick, I’ve been praised for it, and when I’ve taken more than, say, a single day off sick, I tend to catch flack for it.

So reality differs from ideal. Big surprise, right?

Anyway, I was tremendously sick for over a week recently.  I even missed a day of school, and it marked the first time in three years that I have missed a class for any reason.  I was honestly, earnestly, sick, worse off than I have been in a very long time, to the point where I couldn’t stand or sit upright for more than a few minutes without wanting to throw up.

On the other hand, I had a project due last Friday, and guess what, was the only guy available to finish it up.

So, I took Monday off, went in to work and coughed my way through Tuesday and Wednesday, couldn’t make it in on Thursday, and then made it in on Friday to finish the project, after which I missed the aforementioned class on Saturday.

I got considerable praise for coming in and getting the project out, by the way.

Then, on Monday, two people I work reasonably closely with – one of our vice presidents and our chief architect – were out.

I’m reasonably sure that I am responsible for the godawful weekend both had and their subsequent absences.

They’re both really NICE people, so I feel bad for this on a personal level.

On a smug bastard level, I’m calculating the difference between their salary and mine and how many important decisions they make on a daily basis and – any way I look at it – the three days of working-while-sick the company got out of me last week were pretty much dwarfed by the overall productivity hit of these two power players being down.

There’s a point in there somewhere but I’m not coming to it cleanly, so I’ll leave it unsettled and move on.

We have – and this is back to work, but not at all related to my status as a Typhoid Mary – we have an all-company lunch on Friday.

Friday is a payday, mind you, and the week before last was marked by a full week of executive meetings behind closed doors with our corporate consultant.

I’m not saying that anything’s going to happen at this lunch.  It might be a jovial all-hands-let’s-talk-about-corporate direction meeting.  It’s not that I’m writing down a list of the top five people most likely to be let go and putting it in an envelope that I will bring to the meeting or anything.  Cause that would be, you know, pessimistic.  🙂

(And, yes, I’m on the list; my boss knows that I’m leaving in June so if they are looking at doing staff reductions they’d be idiots to keep me.)

Update: I took out a product manager as well, so I’m up to three.

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Media Transfer Progression

Posted on February 18, 2009 by baudattitude

Things are humming along nicely.  In the 3 days since I finished transferring the last of the audiocassettes, I’ve gotten ten out of the thirty minidiscs – the thirty minidiscs that actually have content unique to them, that is, content that wasn’t just copied off CDs that have already been encoded – recorded to the PC.

It shouldn’t be long now.

Of course, at some point – probably a long time from now – I’ll need to go through the set of massive WAV files this is all creating and think about removing noise, chopping them into tracks, so on and so forth.  That’s for the future; for now it’s all about preservation.

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One more media milestone

Posted on February 16, 2009 by baudattitude

Finally have all the audiocassettes – all the ones I’m going to bother with, anyway – recorded onto a PC as 16-bit, 48KHz WAV files.  I have an awful lot of audiocassettes that I’m simply not bothering with.  They’re mostly off-air recordings of the Dr. Demento show from 1989 to 1990… while I’m sure that I will, at some future date, come to regret not having kept archival copies of “Shaving Cream” and “My Ding-A-Ling”, for now I’m too scarred by the concept of having to edit out  hundreds of Dentyne commercials.

The next project that I’m working on is, well, sort of a mix of LPs and Minidiscs.  That is to say, when I was trying to archive our irreplacable vinyl records, I recorded them on to minidisc because it was easier than going directly from vinyl –> PC, and now I’m transferring them over via SPDIF.  Presumably, that should avoid generational loss.

I do have one pre-recorded minidisc, which might be something of a collector’s item to the right kind of very odd collector; Pink Floyd’s “The Wall”. It’s something of a tradition of mine to – if I’m going to buy something from a weird format – make it Pink Floyd; I have “Dark Side of the Moon” on SACD, for example.

I also have a couple of concerts recorded on MD and a few J-Pop albums that I rented and copied to MD that I’ll be transferring over, but the bulk of it is LP-to-MD-and-then-to-PC stuff.

When I’m done with all of this, I get to retire a lot of hardware, both audio hardware and the PC that I’m using to do all this recording – the only thing keeping it from a 3-pass DBAN run and then being consigned to the tender care of our local computer recycling co-operative is that it has this one, final task to accomplish.

As I was saying to my wife earlier, I’ve spent most of my life doing everything I can to acquire as much technology as I can cram into my living space, and now I’m going to great lengths to get RID of some of it.  It’s a crazy world. 🙂

P.S. Audacity is a fine, fine piece of software and made even more so by being free, free, free.  If you hit this post by some weird search engine direction, I recommend it highly.  I’d also recommend the audio hardware I’m using to do these encodes, but it’s been out of production for years, so just use whatever you can find. 🙂

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Dead Drives and ranting

Posted on February 15, 2009 by baudattitude

Here’s a picture for you:

deaddrive

This is a Western Digital Raptor 150GB, 10K RPM drive, about 2 years old.  It was not a cheap piece of kit when it was bought, but it was also nice and fast and one allows for this when one is building a new machine.

It’s pictured here and not in my machine because it flat-out died yesterday.  No, not any namby-pampy data corruption thing, a nice and definitive hardware failure.  Splut.  It makes some fascinating sounds when it’s powered up now, by the way.

I took this as a sign that I deserved an upgrade, and I wound up with a Western Digital VelociRaptor  300GB drive, another 10K RPM unit, because I will give Western Digital the benefit of the doubt on the failure of this one.

Anyway, it didn’t want to play nice, but I made it format, and got Vista installed, and then went to do a restore, because, well, I have been running an automatic backup every Sunday night, and don’t I feel awfully smug about that considering I started running said automatic backup only about a month and a half ago.

Vista’s restore is, well, it’s a little annoying to navigate but it let me restore my documents folders and all should have been well.

Except, see:

There’s a file called prefs.js.  It’s part of Thunderbird and Firefox; it stores things like your mail account settings.

Vista backup thinks that it’s an “Internet file” and doesn’t back it up.

As a result, I had all of my documents, yes, thank you ever so much Vista backup, and all of my mail and bookmarks… but without the prefs.js files, Thunderbird had no idea where to FIND the mail on the drive.

I had to create all my email accounts over from scratch, and then go into the newly created prefs.js, and hand-tweak it, and THEN I got all my email back, at least I think I do.  I’m just a little worried now about what else Vista backup might not consider worth saving.

I’m not quite paranoid enough to assume that prefs.js is automatically ignored as punishment for not using Microsoft Approved Mail Clients.  Not quite.

PS.  The irony involved in having a drive failure happen on Saturday morning when I run a backup on Sunday nights is not lost on me, thank you.  I DID lose about a week’s worth of email, but because I spent most of the last week sick as a dog, I didn’t lose too much else; I wasn’t DOING anything to lose!

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A Winner Is Me (Again)

Posted on February 8, 2009 by baudattitude

After scoring a free copy of Braid last December, I didn’t expect to be winning anything again any time soon, much less from a contest I didn’t know I’d entered.

See, I have a JCB card.  JCB being, basically, Japan’s version of Visa or Mastercard or what have you; it’s accepted almost everywhere you go in Japan but in very few places in the USA.  I like trying to pay for things, especially meals out, with it because it often evokes a brief moment of terror on the face of whatever waiter I’ve handed it to; it’s the “Oh god, we don’t take this card and they’ve already eaten what am I going to do now?” look.

Then I take pity on them and give them a credit card they recognize and the light of recognition on their face is, well, it’s a beautiful thing.

If that makes me a bad man, then, well, I’m a bad man.

Anyway.

I CAN use it at the local Kinokuniya bookstore, and do so whenever I shop there, just to keep it active.  You know, on the off chance that I happen to need to fly to Japan at a moment’s notice.

I live an ACTIVE fantasy life, yes.

Over the holiday spending season, they apparently ran a sweepstakes where 10 lucky JCB card members wound up with a DS Lite or a PSP.  Since I suspect that there are, roughly, 10 actual JCB card holders in the US, I shouldn’t consider myself TOO incredibly lucky in winning a DS Lite, but I will gracefully accept it.  🙂

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I’ve, uh, covered wars?

Posted on February 4, 2009 by baudattitude

So, I have one of those friends.

You know, the ones that get new gadgets when they come out and then shows them off and makes you go all ooh and ahh over their shininess and then you somehow wind up buying one yourself?

That kind of friend.

Mind you, that wasn’t really a complaint.  It’s good to have someone around to test drive stuff for you.

Anyway, back in early 2006, I was visiting this friend and he was, as normal, showing off a new gadget, in this case the recently-released Xbox360.  I don’t actually remember that he was showing games on the thing so much as showing off the way you could download trailers and such, including a trailer for a game he was quite anticipating, Dead Rising.

I had to admit, at the time, that it looked like an enjoyable romp.  Zombies are one of the Two Perfect Videogame Enemies, being that you can kill… well, you know what I mean… all the zombies you want, and nobody objects.

It wasn’t, however, a system seller for me, so I didn’t buy an Xbox 360 then, or even in August when it was actually released.

But, when Dead or Alive Xtreme 2 came out, and I bought an Xbox 360 so I could play it, I did put a copy of Dead Rising on the counter next to it.

It turned out that, while it did feature lots of zombie bashing, it was also kind of a frustrating game to play.  Your character, Frank, is kind of a wimp and the whole thing is time-driven instead of event driven, so you’re constantly playing against a six-hour clock and trying to keep NPCs alive so the story can progress.

This is, I am told, As Intended.  You’re not expected to finish the game on your first play-through; you’re supposed to play until you get eaten, then start over.  Since Frank does get stronger, faster, etc, as he gets experience, and since your character building does carry over from play session to play session, the idea is that you gradually get buff enough that you can actually try to finish the game.

This is Dumb.  This is a personal opinion, but I believe it to be nigh unto fact.

I went along with it for a bit, anyway, and got Frank up to level 12 or so.  I’ve seen recommendations of level 20 before you actually try to finish the game, by the way.

On the other hand, something I discovered at the time was that you can start the game, leave Frank standing in the same spot for six hours, and you will get, if not a Good Ending, at least An Ending, and this ending comes with 51,000 experience points, which is a fair bit in Dead Rising terms.

I did this a couple of times and got burned out and put the game aside.

The impending release – and I am deeply shamed because it was a superhuman effort not to type “wii-lease” – of the Wii remake brought the game back to mind, and I’m going to make a serious go at it this time, just as soon as I get Frank up to level 20 by leaving him on rooftops while I’m at work, at school, overnight, yada yada yada.

It’s cheap, i admit, but I have no shame.

Posted in videogames, Xbox 360 | Leave a comment

You don’t frighten us, English pig dogs.

Posted on February 3, 2009 by baudattitude

If my mother played videogames – which, let’s be straight up here, she used to be quite fond of Asteroids and Ms Pac Man… If my mother played tactical RPGs, which she doesn’t, at least as far as I’ve seen recently, she’d like Jeanne D’arc.

See, she’s from Glasgow, and if there’s one thing that is apparently endemic to the Scots, it’s an undying hatred of the English.

Jeanne D’arc is all about, well beating down the English.  You play a, well, look, if I have to explain that your characters are French, you really need to go back and take a history class, or at least watch Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure again. Go on, I’ll be here when you get back.

I’m given to understand that this game is based, at least in some sort of vague way, on historical fact, though I don’t think that the English ever actually made pacts with evil demon critters back in the good old days.

These days, I think they’re all for it, but they’ve also stopped fighting with the French, so it doesn’t really matter one way or the other.

Anyway, Jeanne D’arc, which I’m hoping will not end with a tragic immolation scene and delayed canonization, is so close to being a Shining Force game that it really doesn’t matter that I don’t have any centaurs on my side.

Put simply: It’s mighty good, at least up to where I’ve gotten, which isn’t TOO far really but is enough to have gotten me good and hooked.

Now that I’ve said that, some nitpicks:

1) It’s a portable game, but it has an awful lot of cutscenes and dialogue heavy bits.  You can, at least, pause them.  You can also elect to SKIP them once paused, which is a wonderful thing if you’re retrying a battle for the third time.

2) There’s a lot of loading between fights.  This is probably much better if you’re running it on a PSP2000 or 3000, or – even better – if you’ve bought it off PSN and are running it off memory stick, but on my PSP1000, it does grind the old UMD drive an awful lot.

3) Pretty early on, you get into a battle where the objective is to run away.  You are, after all, playing a band of French soldiers.

YES, I WENT THERE.

Anyway.

The enemy general is a freakin’ monster, and not in the orcs-and-lizardmen sort of way.  If he gets two hits in on any of your characters, they’re pretty much done for, and if you lose any of your characters you lose the battle.

You’re not supposed to be able to beat him, which was made obvious when I DID beat him and then he showed up in the very next cutscene and my characters were all, like, “but we just got away from you!” and I’m thinking, “no, you didn’t, you whupped his tea swilling armor-plated-arse in the last encounter!”

A little bit of a continuity flaw there.

Those minor things aside, serious thumbs up. It’s challenging, it’s satisfying, and – tragic lack of catgirls aside – it’s awfully pretty.

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One month with a new OS

Posted on February 2, 2009 by baudattitude

After moving my desktop from XP Professional to Vista Professional at the beginning of January, I decided to leave it mostly software-free and just install things as I needed them, keeping a log as I went.  The results were, well, pretty dull I guess, but give a good picture of what’s actually important on a machine.  It’ll serve as a good checklist for the next time I start from scratch on a box.

  • Vista, followed by running Windows Update
  • Logitech G15 keyboard & G5 Mouse drivers
  • AVG
  • X-fi driver
  • Office 2007, followed by running Microsoft Update
  • Irfanview
  • Firefox
  • Thunderbird
  • TightVNC
  • Printer drivers for our HP 6180 all-in-one
  • VLC
  • 7zip
  • CDisplay
  • PDF Creator
  • Adobe Reader
  • Directx9
  • SSF
  • windirstat
  • ePSXe
  • vmware player
  • iTunes
  • Picasa
  • Handbrake
  • ffmpeg
  • DVD Decryptor
  • Microsoft Reader
  • UltraVNC
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More Kool-aid

Posted on February 1, 2009 by baudattitude

I have used, for the last couple of years, a Logitech G15 keyboard.  It’s an awesome keyboard, really, with a built-in-LCD panel and 18 programmable function keys, etc.  It was most useful when I was playing Everquest because I had all sorts of macros set up on it for various things.

Also it was all blue and glowy.

Problem is, it’s huge, and my computer desk has a built-in-keyboard drawer that’s really a little too small for it.  It made hitting any key on the top row kind of a pain, really – escape, all the F keys, etc –  but I put up with it because it made Everquest so much easier.

In a hopefully-Everquest-free-existence, I realized that I could finally use a keyboard that was a little, well, smaller, and that I could use without squeezing my big man-hands into a space that was really too small for them.

Enter one (1) Apple aluminum keyboard.

This thing – after a little bit of poking around the net to figure out how to swap the command and alt keys, and then how to make f13 work like a print screen key – is just freaking amazing, and I’m not just saying that because I can finally type comfortably.

So, one more tasteful white box for the steadily growing pile of boxes that say “Designed by Apple in California”

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