Trusting souls…

Posted on October 21, 2007 by baudattitude

My statistics class is the single strangest math class I’ve ever been in.  Day one of class, we all got put in to little 4-person groups and we’ve been doing 90% of our work in these little 4-person groups.  The only time we’re not doing everything as a group of 4 is during tests, and even then we get to take the test a second time as a four-person group which can improve our individual scores if we do better as a group than individually.

This is a math class.  I’m kind of used to them being intensely solitary classes, so this is weird, but at the same time it’s working pretty well.

I get an e-mail from one of my group members tonight.  We’ve got homework due tomorrow, and it’s 20% of our final grade, and she’s not sure she’ll be able to find a printer, so could I please print it out?

It’s in OpenOffice format.  A .odt file.  I do HAVE OpenOffice installed, so I could open it – and, yes, I printed it for her because I’m not a bastard – but, really: OpenOffice can save .doc format files.  If she’d sent that .odt file to someone without OpenOffice, about all they could say tomorrow would be “uh, I couldn’t open your file. sorry about that.”

In other school happenings, I have an Economics midterm coming up – 50 questions, all multiple choice, 36% of our grade for the term, but I’m finding that Microeconomics, at least, is pretty damn common sense stuff.  Not too worried about that.  I also have an English midterm, which a little more worrisome because it’s, you know, creative writing, but less worrisome because I seem to be on the teacher’s good side – and, with stuff that gets graded subjectively, that counts for a lot.

I did get to meet some of my English classmates recently – unusual since it’s an all-online course – as our teacher arranged for us to go to a local theater production of “Grace”.  It wasn’t to my normal tastes, seeing as I usually confine myself to the comic-sci-fi and light-fantasy end of the literary world, but I thought that it was a good play, that the ending was a little depressing, and that it presented the matter of finding faith in what I thought was a pretty positive manner…

…and then I logged on to the classroom discussion board and find that it set one of my classmates off into a frothing-at-the-mouth rant with Randomly capitalized Words and All CAPS emphasis about how anti-Christian it was.

It was weird to have gotten such completely different messages from the play, so I’m left wondering if I missed something, or if he missed something, and – of course – which interpretation the teacher is going to look upon more favorably when we have to do the inevitable paper on it.

I think I may dodge the issue and talk about the technical direction, because whether you see it as a pro-faith or anti-faith message, the lighting and sound work were both excellent.  🙂

Posted in school | Leave a comment

Katakana is a untrustworthy friend.

Posted on October 21, 2007 by baudattitude

Normally, I like seeing words in katakana, because normally they’re nice friendly English words.

Then, I hit a word spelled in katakana, like, oh, I dunno, “ホーム”, and this of course makes perfect sense. Ho-mu. Home.

And then I hit a sentence in my JLPT study manual like “ホームにならんでいます” which means “Standing in line at… home(?)”

I’m standing in line at home? What does that mean?

And after trying to figure out if there’s a different meaning for ならんで that would possibly make this make sense, I find out that the Japanese use ホーム for the English word “home”, yes, as in “home plate” or “home base” but they ALSO use it for “train platform”

Standing in line at the train platform. That makes sense.

“ホーム” instead of “乗り場”, that doesn’t bloody make sense. I just have to remember it and it will all be good in the end. Right?

Posted in jlpt, 日本語 | Leave a comment

Endings, quite satisfactory.

Posted on October 17, 2007 by baudattitude

Finally managed to catch up to see the end of Lucky Star this last week. With shows that don’t really have an overall story arc, it’s hard to say when a good “end point” really is, but I really liked where they closed it out. I fully expect that, if I hopped onto niconico RIGHT NOW, I would find a half-dozen versions of the Big Dance Number recreated by assorted fan groups, with another dozen or two in the works.

Having the ending credits song be… admittedly, a horribly sung version of… the ED from Beautiful Dreamer, which is one of my all-time favorite movies, was a nice touch. I was a little annoyed, though, when I put in the US-released Beautiful Dreamer DVD and found that the ending credits were actually cut a little bit – you hear the ending song, but you don’t hear the Tomobiki high school bell ringing. As a result, if someone hadn’t ever seen the movie on VHS or laserdisc, they wouldn’t understand why the heck Minoru is making bell sounds at the very end of the Lucky Star ending credits.

OK, so, minor quibble that doesn’t have anything to do with Lucky Star so much as it has to do with a very early domestic anime DVD with a bit of a sloppy release. I understand they even re-released the DVD, maybe the newer version has the full ED. I don’t think it’s worth buying it to find out, though. 🙂

“Let’s Learn Japanese” progress: 32/52.

Posted in anime, 日本語 | Leave a comment

Back on the horse.

Posted on October 15, 2007 by baudattitude

“Let’s Learn Japanese” progress: 29/52

I started the second season back in August and watched 27 & 28… then got off track. Posting here to keep myself in-line. It’s not directly tied to the material covered on the JLPT, but I think it will still help me.

It’s a little bit odd to be watching footage shot in Japan, see a pan shot over the river that includes a 水上バス　(the ferries that run along the river in Tokyo), and have it evoke a “hey, that’s familiar” feeling instead of a “that’s foreign” feeling.

Posted in 日本語 | Leave a comment

To-do: Renew domain

Posted on October 12, 2007 by baudattitude

Got a message from WordPress warning me about my domain expiration – putting it here so I remember to do it sometime before 2044.

renewreminder.jpg

I so bet I’m not the only one making this exact same joke at their expense.

Posted in random | Leave a comment

Backlog: The Listmaking

Posted on October 12, 2007 by baudattitude

This isn’t really a “to-do” list that is going to happen any time in the near future. Honestly, keeping on top of my three classes is pushing me hard enough, much less getting ready for the JLPT in December. The only gaming I’m really making time for is, well, the “get some use out of the PSP” project, which is something I’ve mentioned before and will return to once I have some more to say on it.

But.

Before this term started, I had a little extra time, so I spent it figuring out what games I owned for which systems and which I’d finished and so on. My reasoning was that, well, whenever I’m looking for something new to play, I waste so much time looking through stuff that I sometimes wind up with no time to play whatever I’ve decided on.

It came out to… mmm. I’m actually kind of embarrassed to go into numbers. Let’s leave it at this: It’s a really good thing I almost never pay anything close to full, new price for a game.

I bought a bunch of DVD and CD bins from Ikea. These are kind of cheesy cardboard affairs, but they seem like they’ll hold up and they let me do one of the more important things: Hide most of the games.

I put just about everything that would fit in to a box into a box. It came out to 18 DVD-size boxes and 12 CD-sized boxes. Lots of stuff didn’t fit into these nice Ikea boxes, unfortunately, so I need to find some kind of a home for those nice big Saturn and Sega CD boxed games.

neatandtidy.jpg

Side effect: Bookshelves with identical storage boxes on them look better than a sea of spines. At least, they’re a change.

Then I went through the boxes and tried to pick one shelf’s worth of games that are either really highly recommended, or that I’ve always been curious about, or that I think I ought to play because they’re part of the overall language of the community, as it were, or that I just bought, darn it, and want to play them at least a little bit even though I don’t really want to, you know, try to finish them or anything.

I left portable stuff out of this, because by their nature they’re usually played outside the home.

I came out with the following shelf o’ games that serve two purposes:

  1. Helps me narrow down what to play next, in the unlikely event I have any real time to devote to getting into a game anytime soon.
  2. Helps remind me, when I’m in a store and something catches my eye, that I have all of these to play and I really ought to, instead of buying new ones.
  3. Helps me avoid the shame associated with the sheer number of games that are NOT on this list, despite their unplayed statuses, because they’re not right in my face taunting me. I have, as an example, something like 6 Zelda games. I’ve never finished a Zelda game, or even come close to getting very far in one. I don’t need to see six Zelda games every time I look at the shelf.

The list:

  • Shenmue II (Dreamcast)
  • Skies of Arcadia (Dreamcast)
  • Final Fantasy IX (PS1)
  • Castle of Shikigami (PS2)
  • Disgaea (PS2)
  • Final Fantasy X-2 (PS2)
  • Final Fantasy XII (PS2)
  • Grim Grimoire (PS2)
  • We (heart) Katamari Damacy (PS2)
  • Kingdom Hearts (PS2)
  • Odin Sphere (PS2)
  • Okami (PS2)
  • Sly Cooper (PS2)
  • The Maid and Machine Gun (PS2)
  • Xenosaga (PS2)
  • Ys: The Ark of Naphishtim (PS2)
  • Rayman: Raving Rabbids (Wii)
  • Eternal Darkness (GCN)
  • Killer 7 (GCN)
  • Metroid Prime (GCN)
  • Resident Evil (GCN)
  • Sonic Gems : Sonic CD (GCN)
  • Starfox Adventures (GCN)
  • Armed and Dangerous (Xbox)
  • Brute Force (Xbox)
  • Conker’s : Uncut & Reloaded (Xbox)
  • Fable (Xbox)
  • Fatal Frame II (Xbox)
  • Half-Life 2 (Xbox)
  • Lego Star Wars II (Xbox)
  • Metal Arms (Xbox)
  • Panzer Dragoon Orta (Xbox)
  • Prince of Persia : The Sands of Time (Xbox)
  • The Chronicles of Riddick (Xbox)
  • X-Men Legends (Xbox)
  • Dead or Alive 4 (360)
  • Dead Rising (360)
  • Kameo (360)
  • Phantasy Star Universe (360)
  • Prey (360)
  • Rumble Roses XX (360)
  • Itadaki Jan-Gari-An R (PC)
  • Psychonauts (PC)
  • To Heart 2 (PC)
  • Tomb Raider Anniversary (PC)

Yeah, that’s a list that’s going to get gone through REAL fast. All those quick-to-play knock-out-in-a-weekend RPGs, for a start…

Posted in Dreamcast, gamecube, organization, PS2, videogames, Wii, xbox, Xbox 360 | Leave a comment

So I found out I’ve been driving my boss insane.

Posted on October 7, 2007 by baudattitude

At work, there’s an analog clock on the wall near my desk.

It’s typically about 5 minutes fast.  I’m basing this by comparing its time to two different cell phones – that automatically have their time set from the cell towers – and the time on our network, which agrees with my cell phones.  I’ve even checked the USNC clock via time.gov.

I’m pretty certain of the time difference between this clock and reality, is all I’m saying.

So: if I’m leaving after most people have gone home, I take it off the wall and set it to the proper time, or even a couple of minutes slow because I thought it was going fast over time.

I found out last week, by overhearing a conversation between my boss and one of my co-workers, that the clock is really getting under his skin because “It used to keep the right time, and now it goes slow all the time!”

He wasn’t quite frothing-at-the-mouth mad, but he had that little twitch to his voice that makes me wonder if there’s a fire axe anywhere on the premises and, if so, maybe it should be removed.

And then I watched him carefully set the clock again 5 minutes fast.

So my moral quandary is this, now:  Do I keep setting it back to the right time and see how long it takes before he snaps?

Posted in work | 2 Comments

I made you a mix tape.

Posted on October 3, 2007 by baudattitude

OK.  So I didn’t, really, but if I wanted to, I could now, you see.

The unprecedented completion of my “record all the vinyl on to the computer” project prompted my wife to make delicate coughing noises and point out that she had several albums on cassette that had never been released on CD, or that were long out of print, and that gosh, it’d be nice if they could be made into digital sometime soon.  I have a few albums that I can’t easily replace, myself, so I didn’t take much talking in to the idea of doing something about it.

We have a couple of things around the apartment that can play back cassettes.  Unfortunately, none of them have line level outputs, so I’d have had to deal with matching input levels to whatever came out of their headphone jacks.  Very much sub-optimal.

Obviously, I needed to get a component-style cassette deck.

At this point I made some minor tactical errors, which I will recount for your amusement and as a caution.

When we were at Fry’s buying other stuff, I looked at their selection.  None were under $150.  This seemed a bit excessive.  I thought about trying my luck at Goodwill, and even went to the big Goodwill store near… to the big Halloween store that is where the big Goodwill near our house USED to be.  It was weird to think of a Goodwill as going out of business, but it either folded or moved.

I got the bright idea of checking Craigslist, and found a listing for a rather nice looking Pioneer cassette deck with a local seller.  He swore, and here I am not kidding, that it had been owned by his grandmother who no longer had any use for it, and it seemed like a deal at 55 bucks.

Of course I’m an idiot and didn’t insist on testing the deck before I packed it into the car and drove home with it.  His reaction upon my “hey, this cassette deck you sold me, it doesn’t play cassettes” was “well, it worked the last time I used it!”

Then I did what I should have done in the first place, I went and looked on Amazon.   For 85 bucks, shipped, I got a Teac W-600R dual-deck cassette component, which is quite happily playing back a tape as I type this.

So I still, uh, saved 10 bucks as opposed to buying a deck at Fry’s, but… not my best showing, overall.

Posted in gadgets, organization | Leave a comment

Scary yet flattering…

Posted on October 1, 2007 by baudattitude

I was feeling out of sorts this morning, so I decided to play hooky and go out for some retail therapy.

After a quick trip to Ikea, I remembered that I hadn’t gone to my favorite Indian lunch place in a long time – since 2004, to be exact – and I was close enough that I could hit it early in the lunch rush, before they ran out of my favorite curry. I used to eat at this place 2 or 3 times a week and, while I am too much of a wuss to regularly eat vindaloo, I got hooked on their chicken korma with potatoes on the side.

Since 2004, I’ve shaved off a full beard, gone from long hair to short, and lost 100+ pounds. Oh, and I wear glasses now.

I wait through the line, get to the chef, he looks at me and says “You’ve lost weight. Korma and potatoes?”

Posted in food | Leave a comment

War for the Pocket.

Posted on September 28, 2007 by baudattitude

I finished “Me & My Katamari” this evening.  This makes the second PSP game I’ve managed to play through from beginning to end… and I’ve had the system since August of 2006.  A quick look at the shelf tells me that I have 19 PSP titles – one of those is the Sega Genesis Collection, which has something like 28 games on it, and another is Parodius Portable, which has five games.

I’ve got RPGs – Astonisha Story, Brave Story, Kingdom of Paradise, Popolocrois, Untold Legends.  I’ve got Ridge Racer, Twisted Metal, and Wipeout Pure, so driving games are covered.  I’ve got PIQ, Exit, Lumines and Gunpey to handle my puzzle needs and Death Jr. and MegaMan Powered Up if I feel in the mood for a platformer.

And I’ve got LocoRoco, which is the only other PSP game I’ve actually completed.

Basically – I have a lot of PSP games and they cover all the major genres.  So why doesn’t it get played more?  It makes a great media player, and I watch stuff with it all the time, but it should be first and foremost a game system.

I’m going to try an experiment – keep my kanji dictionary cart in the DS, but leave the rest of the DS games at home, and try to pull out the PSP when I have a few minutes to fill with gaming.

I have an 8-slot PSP UMD case, so I’ve filled it with Kingdom of Paradise, Sega Genesis Collection, Ridge Racer, Exit, Lumines, Brave Story, Every Extend Extra – and I left Me & My Katamari in there because, well, I unlocked some modes where I can go back and replay earlier levels without a time limit.

We’ll see what happens.

Oh – and Me & My Katamari?  It was pretty good except for, mmm, the five or six straight levels where you are taking on the exact same levels in the exact same order with the exact same size requirements and the only difference is the animal you make an island for at the end.  I swear, the developers made 12 levels and were patting themselves on the back and heading out the door for the ship party, and some marketer said “I thought this was going to have 16 levels?”

That aside, it’s Katamari, so it’s effing brilliant.  Just that minor quibble that came very near to making me shut off the system in disgust and decide not to buy Beautiful Katamari.  But I’m better now.

Posted in nds, psp, videogames | Leave a comment