Baud Attitude

eBay angst

Posted on June 2, 2007 by baudattitude

eBay auctions are done for a little while. Have gotten an amazing amount of closet space back, made a fair hunk of cash, now I need to decide what I want to auction off next.

Of course, one of the perils of eBay is the buying side of things.

Case in point: QR Codes. Hang on, I’m getting there. QR Codes are these 2D barcodes that you see on virtually everything that comes out of Japan. Usually they’re used to encode URLs so you don’t have to type them in, that sort of thing. It annoys me that they exist and I can’t read them, since virtually every phone that comes out in Japan can be used to decode them. The Japanese get cooler cell phones than us, I guess is the real source of my vexation.

However, one of the great things about there being an infinite number of geeks at an infinite number of keyboards out there, some of them have the same vexations I do and are much better at coding. Hence I found that there is a QR-code reader application for cell phones I might actually be able to buy. Not that it works on my Razr V3c of course, I couldn’t be that lucky.

One of the phones it does run on is the Nokia 6630, which also turns out to be one of the VERY few phones that will work on a GSM network (like we have here in the US, over in Europe and in fact most of the world) AND will work on the phone standard in Japan that almost no other country uses. In theory… and this is in theory only… when I’m over in Japan this August, if I were to have a phone like this, I would be reachable in case of emergency. Presumably at a hideous price per minute with the roaming fees taken into account, but the option of communication is there.

So… obviously I need to buy one. Off to Google I went, and found that I had the following options in this country:

1) Buy it new from a gray-market importer that would probably take my money, promise to ship me a phone, never ship the phone, disappear into the ether and send someone over to break my legs if I complained.

2) Buy from an Amazon storefront. The only time I’ve ever bought anything from an Amazon storefront (not Amazon itself, mind you, I know there’s a difference), they took my money and never sent me anything. Fortunately it was only a $10 DVD, but still… I’m a bit wary of ordering that way. Also they’re considerably more expensive than the other gray market importers and if I’m going to have my money taken and no phone provided the least they could do is be price competitive. Maybe they spend the extra cash on really GOOD leg breaking guys.

3) Buy a used one off eBay. Advantage: 1/3rd the price of the Amazon storefront people, 1/2 the price of the creepy gray market importer, and at least the guy has 180+ feedback so I might actually get the phone.

I am in the twitchy bit of the eBay experience, though, and you may be familiar with it: It’s the bit where you’ve sent someone money via Paypal but haven’t heard anything yet so you’re not sure he’s really going to get you the thing you paid for and you spend way too much time looking at his feedback going “is this real feedback? did he just make up some fake accounts to make himself look good?” when in reality I’ve only had ONE bad experience with eBay and that was as a seller – I’ve never NOT gotten an item bought from eBay, so really I should just relax.

In the meantime though, I’m twitchy.

Posted in gadgets | 1 Comment

Feelings of guilt, also: stuff.

Posted on June 2, 2007 by baudattitude

So, a large part of this week has been critiquing papers written by my classmates. They’re doing the same thing, of course – in my Literature class everyone needs to post a draft of their final project and provide a critique on at least one other person’s draft, and in my Technical Writing class, everyone needs to post two drafts and critique four. Lots of critiquing going on, is what I’m saying. Lot of people seem to have completely disappeared from the class, too, the discussion board is virtually empty where in a normal week it’s hopping.

To make my point quickly and move on: There’s rather a lot of guilt that happens when you spend a half hour utterly ravaging some poor Joe’s paper and pointing out all the places they didn’t follow the assignment and in general have no business being allowed near a keyboard…

…And you get your OWN paper back from that same Joe and it’s filled with comments like “I really like what you did here” and “good images” and “this is great” and basically non-stop positive happy vibes…

I’m just saying, I’m glad I don’t have to actually face these people on a daily basis.

Other stuff:

The last Moon Phase / tsukiyomi DVD came out! Time to sit down and get my nekomimi on. Boy, that’s a weird phrase. Try : “Time to sit down and watch the rest of the series since I only watched the first 2 DVDs and now I finally have it all”.

The first Haruhi DVD came out! I intended to be strong and not buy the collector’s edition and maybe even hold out for the complete series box, but my wife wouldn’t let me – she took the box off the shelf and made me buy it. Probably just so she doesn’t have to hear me whining about missing out on it later.

I will present Greg Dean’s take on what it’s like to be lucky enough to be married to a woman who understands fanboys … This is really quite close to a normal scene for us.

On the subject of fanboys, one advantage of my new job is that if I walk home, immediately put a DVD in, eat, and walk back, I can get an episode of something in and make it back to work in less than an hour. So I’ve been re-watching Genshiken, a great series and probably this generation’s best answer to Otaku no Video. Otaku no Video represents a completely different age, of course, one in which being otaku was so unusual that if you were one you tended to turn into a bit of an evangelist… trying to convert people to the otaku way. These days, with the different attitudes and the sheer ease of access, converts find their own otaku way on their own, and seek out others of their kind. It’s hard to put in to words how things have changed… but I think if you were around then and you’re still around you understand.

To get off the maudlin sentimental bit, Deux Ex continues to be an excellent and engrossing game. I’m just past the bit where you meet your brother at the 747, I think that’s a good way to describe my progress without spoiling it for anyone. I think I have an awful lot of “game” left to see, there are so many plot threads open at this point that there’s no way they can resolve quickly. I’m kind of wishing I’d downgraded pistol at the start and dumped every point I could into low-tech weaponry, I find that 90% of the time I’m using either the baton or the prod.

Other stuff… I downloaded Stepmania recently and need to see if my PS2-to-USB converter works with my PS2 dance mat. I’d been curious about it for a while and not really sure where to get started, but j1m0ne posted an excellent writeup that got me going in the right direction. I’ve played around a bit with it on keyboard, but it will be much more enjoyable once it’s actually making me sweat. It’s like DDR… but with songs I actually know!

Also in Eternally Behind the Times… I can’t use my DS Lite’s Wi-fi connectivity at home because it only supports WEP and my wireless network is running WPA with as much security turned on as I can manage, but I did take it to a McDonald’s yesterday so I could try out the online mode of Bomberman Land Touch for the first time. First time I’ve had McDonald’s food in a year and a half, too, apart from a couple of McBiscuits – very weird considering I used to have McDonald’s probably 5-10 times every week.

But that aside aside, Bomberman Land Touch online. Setup was easy, very few people out there to play with though and once I got into a match I died quite quickly. Still an enjoyable experiment. I’ll have to look into what other DS games offer online connectivity.

Posted in anime, haruhi, nds, nekomimi, PC Gaming, school | Leave a comment

The Week of Homework

Posted on May 29, 2007 by baudattitude

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. 🙂

Posted in school | Leave a comment

Mouse & Keyboard… how very odd.

Posted on May 27, 2007 by baudattitude

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.

Posted in PC Gaming, videogames | Leave a comment

Memorial day weekend…

Posted on May 27, 2007 by baudattitude

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. 🙂

Posted in gadgets, random | Leave a comment

Grammar checkers am fun

Posted on May 22, 2007 by baudattitude

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.

Posted in work | Leave a comment

Movies, not for Americans:

Posted on May 22, 2007 by baudattitude

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.

Posted in Japan, movies & tv | 1 Comment

Threatening signs, not terribly effective:

Posted on May 21, 2007 by baudattitude

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.

Posted in random | Leave a comment

More on piles o’ stuff

Posted on May 19, 2007 by baudattitude

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.

Posted in food, organization, videogames | Leave a comment

Piles o’ stuff

Posted on May 18, 2007 by baudattitude

…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.

Posted in organization, videogames | Leave a comment