03.13.07
Posted in Rants
at 6:40 am
Ordinarily, after reading the kind of tirade that Brian Clevinger wrote about Cleveland Hopkins, I would feel some kind of urge to rise to the city’s defense, and say that his impressions of food in Cleveland are, to say the least, a bit over-the-top in their inaccuracy.
Then I took another look at where he actually ate at the airport, and all sympathy for him dissolves instantly. Seriously, there were nine other places to eat that were blatantly less shady than the Home Turf Grill. Hell, even eating at the goddamn Burger King, which is known for its life-extending food, would have been a safer bet than the Home Turf. I myself knew enough not to eat there when I saw seven small children screaming outside the Home Turf, pleading and bargaining with their parents not to make them go in. That was enough to prompt me to go to Max & Erma’s, down the hall.
And anyway, airport food is expensive, but not nearly as expensive as airport booze. I gave serious consideration to spending $14 on a shotglass of Guinness. …for about three seconds before I went down the hall and bought a $4 can of Red Bull.
Anyway, since I live in Pittsburgh now I have to be careful about what I say about Cleveland, because the people here have some sort of freakish Ohio-dar that can sense loyalty to the Browns. Therefore, all I can compliment Cleveland Hopkins International Airport on is that it is, in fact, not LAX.
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03.12.07
Posted in Gaming
at 6:19 am
After my post last night I decided to get off my butt and get StepMania running on the Mac Mini. So I did; I now have a reasonable facsimile of DDR on my big-screen TV. To say I’m happy about it would be an understatement, especially after I dropped a good $5 at the Robinson mall on Saturday evening playing a very tricked-out In The Groove machine. I mean, that sucker had thousands of songs… I knew folks were customizing them, but this one was… wow. Hot Limit, the full song, was available, so naturally I did it. I didn’t, however, realize that it was the full three and a half minute version until about ninety seconds in when I heard the second verse kick in, as it wasn’t labeled as a long song…. man, was that exhausting.
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03.11.07
Posted in Anime, Bailout, Link Wednesday
at 7:26 pm
Posting a link to bail me out of having to search for Bailout. I think that violates a law of physics or something. Anyway, the guys behind Mac Hall launched their “next phase” last month, Three Panel Soul. Aside from not bearing any resemblance whatsoever to “something different from Mac Hall”, it’s exactly as advertised. Whatever. At least Tenkay added a couple of intermission issues.
In other news, this entry’s late because I spent the day working, and also getting caught up to ‘current’ on Kanon. One episode left– the big one– for next week; I’m already atwitter with excitement. I also finished up my rewatch of Outlaw Star. I think next on the list is a rewatch of Love Hina, or Kare Kano (though that last one means a trip out to Robinson Township to pick it up first).
So, despite the chaos that was Thursday and Friday, this was actually a pretty relaxing weekend. I feel good. I also feel like I need to get back into a game soon… but that’s for tomorrow night, I suppose.
Trust me, I’ll probably start posting in the mornings again starting tomorrow.
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03.10.07
Posted in Rants
at 8:41 am
I woke up Friday at 7a. That in and of itself wouldn’t be all that out of the ordinary if I hadn’t stayed up until 1a the night before handling minor tasks around the house. In any event, my disposition was not going to be particularly sunny for the time being. I got my stuff together and delayed leaving for as long as possible to allow the chargers for my phone and computer to absorb as much power as they could. That part’s important, too.
The first thing I needed to do was to head off any trouble before it could get caught at the inspection. The only obvious thing was the need for an oil change, and being the frugal individual cheap bastard I am, I decided to get it at the Wal-Mart near my house, namely because I knew that it wouldn’t be too crowded on a Friday morning. An hour later, I learned that my front tires were badly out of alignment and were almost bald. That was just great, I thought, hoping that that was the worst of it. I paid, got back into my car, and took it to Monroeville for the inspection.
Now here’s where things start to get interesting. I got to the inspection station– a Monro Muffler/Brakes situated near the mall and in between a McDonald’s and a Honeybaked Ham store– at just before noon. My car didn’t get moved into the garage until about 12:45 or so; that was understandable as I hadn’t secured an appointment beforehand. Anyway, at 1p even they called me in and said that my gas cap had failed inspection and would need to be replaced. “Fine, whatever,” I said, “just do it.” I went back to what I was doing.
What I was doing, in fact, was desperately thinking of something to do because I had forgotten to charge my DS the night before. I had pulled out my laptop and was tinkering around with some local files when I remembered that I had the ability to use Wi-Fi. The problem was finding an access point. McDonald’s has access that must be paid for, so that was out of the question. There were a couple of other networks in range but only one looked promising, an unsecured “dlink”. I am sure that I am not the first person to have used an open access point they just stumbled across, so I connected and started using it. The speed was remarkable and I was certainly not dumb enough to log in to any secure sites or use anything that could have had a compromising effect on my security.
Around 1:30p I was called back into the garage. The mechanic took me to the front tire and started wobbling it. “See that?” he asked. “Yeah,” I replied. “Feel it,” he said, indicating I should wobble the tire myself. “It’s wobbling, I can see that,” I said,, jamming my hands firmly into my pockets, “and I presume it’s not supposed to do that.” “No, it ain’t,” he said, apparently dismayed that I had not bought into The Car Whisperer’s Holistic Mechanical Therapy, “but come look at the other one.” We went around the car to the other front tire, and it, too, wobbled. “So, that’s wobbling too,” I said, stating the obvious as he continued to fondle the rubber. “Yeah, they ain’t supposed to do that. You need a new tie rod on both of ‘em.” Cultural note: The Pittsburgh accent’s peculiarities managed to convert “tie rod” into “tireodd”, and it took me about twenty minutes to understand what it was I needed. Not coincidentally, it took twenty minutes for an estimate to make it to my eyes. The grand total with tax was $730, and that counted the two tie rods, two tires, the inspection(s), and the labor… and the gas cap. Seeing no other choice, I consented.
Historically, the fact that I spent $700+ on a car the day after payday means that my car has less than a week to live. I’m actually hoping that that particular idiosyncrasy doesn’t recur.
Anyway, it was 2p by now, and I was hungry. Where did I go to eat? McDonald’s, of course– since I was currently undergoing a walletectomy (the surgical procedure performed by mechanics whereby they remove your testicles through your credit card), cheap food was the order of the day. I ordered one fish sandwich and a large tea; got two fish sandwiches and a small and large tea (in that order), and paid for three fish sandwiches and a large ball of Coke-flavored earwax waved under six anemic Chernobyl-grown tea leaves. Yeah, not going back there again. In any event, I sat back down at the garage and started to think about the access point I was using.
I’m a pretty principled person; at least I think I am. I decided that I should probably do some checking to make sure nobody with a shotgun would be coming for me because I was “stealin’ mah internets with brain lazers”, and so I did a little poking around in the dlink network. There was one workgroup on the network, called “hbh sales”. I wasn’t exactly sure who or where they were at the moment, so I decided to delve a little deeper. There was one computer on the network, named “laptop”. I tried connecting to it, and came to the familiar “enter your credentials for SMB authentication” screen. My first thought was to turn away; I then thought, “What the hell, they couldn’t possibly be that stupid.” I clicked “connect” with a blank password. “laptop” threw the doors open wide for me on the Shared Docs folder. With read/write access, no less.
Oh, the fun I could have had. It was by chance that I managed to look outside and take note of my surroundings, seeing the Honeybaked Ham store for the first time. I had to make a difficult choice– decide whether to be a pissant kid inflating my ego for no tangible rewards, or to be an adult and hold them for ransom in exchange for free food. I packed up my laptop, told the garage to watch the rest of my bag for the time being, and went over to the Honeybaked Ham store.
I spoke to the manager, who seemed a little unconvinced. “Well,” I said, “I happen to have my computer here,” I said, pulling out the MacBook and setting it on the counter. I showed him every file on his laptop, and he said, “Wow. OK, so why are you telling us this?” “Well, partly because I feel a little guilty about using your access point for the past three hours,” I said, “but also partly because I want a free ham.” “Well, a free ham is a little much… how about lunch?” “Sure!” I said. He then turned to the clerk and said, verbatim, “Give him whatever he wants.”
It was, I kid you not, the single most delicious tuna salad sandwich I’ve ever had.
Thus satisfied that I had done the right thing, I went back to the mechanics so they could suture the hemmhorage in my bank account. It wouldn’t be until 4:30, and it would take two test drives because the mechanic apparently wasn’t familiar with my car. He tried to sell me a new set of struts as well; I wasn’t going to buy into that. I finally got out at 4:45, and drove back home to collapse into bed.
Yeah, ultimately I’m not disabused of the notion that we’d all be better off just using public transportation. I could focus on the fact that I have continued my unbroken streak of getting ripped off at the mechanic (3 for 3 so far), or I could focus on “hey, free lunch after the fact”. As I like food, I think I’ll pick that one.
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03.09.07
Posted in Rants
at 7:52 pm
On his Comedy Central special, Dane Cook mused:
In the future, everything will be instant. [...] But the DMV will still take nine f[...]ing seconds. “Come on! I gotta be to work in three seconds!”
Surprisingly enough, the DMV was the least of my worries over the past 24 hours.
Now, I’ve actually been resisting getting my driver’s license changed over. I’ve not actually lived in New York state since 2002, setting aside a couple of temporary layovers. I came extremely close to getting everything changed over to an Ohio license in late 2005/early 2006, but as it turned out the car fell apart before I could get it inspected/re-registered. And, of course, the other car exploded six months after I got it. As I was waiting in line yesterday, I noticed that I had the same license I was issued when I turned 21. It actually wasn’t set to expire until 2009. However, the photo bore almost no resemblance to me at all.
The DMV office I went to, in Penn Hills, was relatively new– only a few years old. There was a button one would press to determine which line one would be in. Technically, it wasn’t even really a line. Once I pressed the button, a small printer spat out a slip of paper with a number (488) on it, and directed me to wait for the number to be called. There was a small waiting area with plenty of chairs, and seven small teller-station-like terminals. Three of those were staffed; each had a small LED sign with the next number. That’s important. I only had about a ten-minute wait; things progressed quickly and smoothly, and as I had everything in order well ahead of time, there was no trouble at all. I actually was complimented– seriously– for having my act together. Thus satisfied and with a much more flattering portrait on my card, I left, bearing a brand-new Pennsylvania driver’s license.
That’s when the trouble started. See, I started this whole thing yesterday afternoon, when I found out that the only time I could get insurance was a) when I was at the insurance office and b) RIGHT THEN, because they closed at 5 on Thursday and would for some reason not be open today. I rocketed from Penn Hills back to Forest Hills, about a 5-mile trip on the parkway; I had plenty of time when I got to the insurance office, which was good, because the lady there went through absolutely every possible scenario to try to get my bill down. Now, most of you know that the troubles I’ve had with cars have usually not been my fault except for one itty bitty little time back in Erie, when I, in my little Metro, accidentally rear-ended a huge-ass pimpmobile Lincoln. He didn’t have a scratch; my front end was wrecked, and the car came mere pennies away from being totaled. Well, as it turned out, my insurance company doesn’t count accidents that happened over three years ago (on a running cycle). And if I had been able to wait seven months before getting car insurance again, I could have had that little dustup overlooked. Lovely… in October I’ll have to go back and renegotiate that element of it.
Anyway, it was 5 by the time I got out of the insurance agency. I stopped at Taco Bell and wolfed down a couple of soft tacos (sadly, this was not the Taco Bell of Sleazy Sauce) on my way to the AAA at Monroeville (10 miles from Forest Hills). I’ve been a member of AAA since I locked myself out of my car way back in Coudersport, and I’ve kept up the membership because, as my dad so succinctly put it, I’m “incompetent”. I freely admit it. There is a reason I am a computer scientist and it is because I faint at the sight of motor oil. Now, that said, I’ve availed myself of the club’s non-emergency services more than once. The only way I made it to Baltimore and back is by the virtue of maps provided by them, and my trip to E3 was also booked through the service. In all of those cases my requests were expediently handled.
Well, not yesterday. I got in at about 5:20 or so and sat down, after having checked in and been given a number. Remember those little LED signs back at the DMV? Well, the AAA office has only one of those, and the number it says it is currently serving is divorced from reality by all known vectors. My number showed up right away, but I wasn’t called until 6:45; and that’s when the fun began. I had a form all filled out which claimed that my dad had purchased the car new and was giving it to me as a gift, thus preventing me from having to pay sales tax on the vehicle. This of course required proof that such tax had been paid to the appropriate state (in this case, New York); we had conscientiously provided a photocopy of the original bill of sale. Yeah, that wasn’t good enough for the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. In the end I had to ‘buy’ the car from my father for one hundred fictitious dollars, which I then had to pay a very real seven percent sales tax on. That was, you guessed it, another form. Wait, it gets better!
On the form I had filled out for the gift, I also noted that I would need a tracing or notarized recording of the car’s VIN (vehicle identification number). The form stated that this would be taken at the time the car was registered. Yeah, AAA doesn’t do that. I was directed to go to the Mr Tire store just down the road, who would gladly charge me $5 to do it. I would have made the VIN tracing myself– and I even tried– but the VIN plate was jammed so far forward on the dashboard that it was impossible to even touch, let alone scrape a pencil over. The good news was that I got to Mr. Tire just before they were about to close. I then had to go back to the AAA and wait in line for another 45 minutes, before the whole process ended. I got my registration, a temporary title, and the license plate– and while I was in Hell, I decided to get an EZPass transponder as well in case a job requires me to cross over to the west side of town; otherwise, it’s useful for the Otakon trips and trips back home.
The license plate couldn’t go onto my car until the car was inspected. By now it was 8:30, and I was tired, cranky, and out of battery power on my Mac and my DS. I went home, vowing to get the inspection done early the next day…
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03.08.07
Posted in GTD
at 7:30 am
Hey. So I’m a little late with the linkage love. As a result, I’m giving you a 110% money back guarantee on the subscription fees to TFO.net*.
I’d been playing around with a few more GTD tools (that stands for Getting Things Done, incidentally) and found that my Dock was starting to get a little crowded. I briefly considered a replacement or extension to it until I decided to take a flyer on Quicksilver. The basic idea behind QS is that it instantly lets you search and automate certain tasks with just a few keystrokes. Let’s say I want to open up my “new blog post” bookmark; ordinarily I’d have to go to FireFox, click “Bookmarks”, then click “New Blog Post”. With QS, all I do is hit control-space and type “new blo”; it finds the FF bookmark and sets up a list of actions. I can hit Enter if all I want to do is open the bookmark (usually) or I can hit Tab to see what other options are available to me. All without leaving the keyboard. The iCal plugin isn’t obvious from an immediate glance but it’s damn nifty for quickly adding new events/logs. I still have to go into iCal to flesh out the details, but it’s faster to type “Friday 8am — DMV trip” than to mouse through the whole thing, especially on a trackpad.
As noted last night, I’m moving quickly through games. To be fair, I was nearly at the end of Castlevania anyway, but I still chose to add one more completion to the moratorium so as to slow myself down even further. I trimmed down my open games list on my whiteboard and will probably fix the list int he blog later today… I don’t want to get into another RPG so quickly just yet, so I’ll likely go through Hotel Dusk. I also want to talk a litte bit about FF12, but in the forums… perhaps this weekend.
I’ve collected about half a dozen agents to work with for publishing Incon. All, actually, without really reading through the copy of Writer’s Market I’d received back in November. That’s about to change, of course; I should be leafing through it and underlining stuff tomorrow in line at the DMV, though just because I should be doing it, it does not necessarily follow that I will.
Oh, yes. There will be a long rant, possibly upset, tomorrow. But it will be late; I want to save my ranting for after I have something to rant about, so as soon as I get done with the car stuff, we’ll talk. Ciao, folks.
* Refund offer expired… yeah, yesterday.
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03.07.07
Posted in Game Cleared 2007, Gaming
at 8:06 pm
At 7:50p, I completed Castlevania: Dawn of Sorrow for the DS. This is the fourth game cleared in 2007. I have completed three out of five games needed to break the moratorium on purchasing new games; the moratorium limit was increased by one due to the fact that less than a week had passed since the previous completion. The next game that is closest to completion is Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney (DS), followed by Super Robot Taisen (GBA) and Trauma Center: Second Opinion (Wii).
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Posted in Site News
at 6:55 am
Sorry for the lack of a Link Wednesday yet again. Yesterday brought both trouble and good tidings, most of which I can’t really talk about right now. In any event, I suppose it’s fair to say that I’m on my way to finishing Castlevania sometime this week (maybe), and then I can move on to Dead Rising. All of these being great big ‘maybes’. I’ll keep you folks posted and hopefully I’ll have something worth discussing tomorrow.
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03.06.07
Posted in Rants, Site News
at 7:28 am
According to some recent reports from Japan, feng shui experts are claiming that cleaning your toilet can bring good luck. (Please pause for three minutes before continuing to read.)
…..sorry, I’ve just finally stopped giggling from typing that out. Anyway, yes, proper purification of your porcelain potentate can produce a propensity for prodigious prosperity. Now, bear in mind that I’m not exactly enamored with the wisdom of feng shui masters of late, but I will say that my luck was kind of bad last year. My bathroom has never exactly been a sanctuary for germophobes, so perhaps there’s a connection of some sort…
Speaking of connections, I’ve been having a little bit of net trouble, so further updates this week might be a little late. Rest assured one-a-day is still the order of the day.
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03.05.07
Posted in Anime, Gaming
at 6:27 am
There’s an FF12 gag in there, but only if you’ve finished the game. ANYWAY.
In between my completion of various games I started an anime marathon; I’ve gotten just about halfway through Outlaw Star and I do have every intent of finishing Kanon (so you can put down the hacksaw, Slipgate… really I’ll watch it… I’m just a huge slacker and you know it). A couple of other short story ideas have been coming to me, as well, and I’ve been jotting notes in my ‘later’ file for each one. Eventually I’d like to take another weekend and go on a writing blitz, but I’m starting to worry about my unbalanced lifestyle. Seems like I can never get anything done unless I exclude all else in the meantime… not like that’s really all that different from how I’ve always done things, but alas, introspection is one of those peculiarities I am predisposed to.
Dammit. I’m even talking like them now. I’ve been in Ivalice too long… I’ll probably have to lose myself in Vana’diel or Paragon City for a while just to get myself to unconsciously use silly acronyms, or at the very least until I can correctly pronounce “Marquis” again.
I never actually got around to talking much about the Ghost Rider movie; I caught it Monday night, but I was so paralyzed by its Aura Of Stupid that I could not comprehend the verbal thingies needed to… oh, dear Christ, even remembering it has affected my… wordy…. list of… words.
Yeah, I’ll talk to you guys about it sometime when my brain isn’t trying to evacuate my skull by way of my eye sockets. Both of them. At the same time.
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