Cleaner. Slightly.

Well, the first phase of spring cleaning is done, and I can once again see the surfaces of my kitchen table and bedroom desk. Huh, I guess it *is* wood…

Although I did throw out a few bags full of junk in the process, most of this was unfortunately accomplished by simple relocation of items. I’ve long since passed the point of having more ‘stuff’ than ‘room for stuff.’ What I still have to do, and this is always the hardest part, is to go through and actually throw items out.

There’s a large dictionary on my bookshelf that consumes a lot of space that could be taken up by other books that I use more often. Who uses paper dictionaries nowadays anyway, when it’s far easier to just plug ‘m-w.com’ into the address bar, or install some browser extension. But…it was given to me by my parents over 20 years ago, and was one of those first early bits of encouragement. How do you throw that away? But damn, it’s big and heavy…

Maybe I Can Get Half A Shed

I really should have bought a house a couple of years ago.

I could have, but every time I thought about setting things in motion, the sheer magnitude of all of the effort required and risks involved overwhelmed me and sent me scurrying back into a “oh it’s not so bad as it is now” frame of mind. Really though, at my age it’s far past time I started facing those kinds of responsibilities.

Of course, now the question is, do I grab something soon and just accept the increased cost, or try and wait it out if it’s a temporary ‘bubble’? Try and do something creative with terms and interest rates? Consider moving somewhere cheaper? Adjust my lifestyle to accommodate a smaller budget?

Dammit, I’m starting to feel overwhelmed again…

Save Me, Superman!

I bought a scanner a while back to help with my mess of papers and documents, and then it collected dust in a corner for a while. One of the other reasons I got it though, was so that I could scan some of my comic collection, for convenience and long-term archival. Unfortunately it’s probably one of those ideas that was better in theory than in practice.

It takes about two or three minutes per page to do the basic scanning, after accounting for proper positioning attempts, previews, the full scan, the slowness of the software and disk processing, and trying to handle things carefully. That just gets me a bunch of extremely large raw images that still need to be postprocessed, though. Stuff like the colour curves and black level adjustment could be skipped if I’m not feeling too picky, but at the very least it has to be cropped, rescaled to a manageable size, compressed, and checked for gross errors or aliasing patterns.

For now I’ll probably only bother doing this on my very favourite and rarer, hard-to-replace issues. For others, I may as well let someone else do all the work and just find some pirate scans online… :-P

Partially Surprised

I didn’t even know about today’s announcements from Apple until I saw a “hey, it’s starting” forum post somewhere. The cases and Hi-Fi are kind of underwhelming and are really just more expensive and underperforming accessories.

The new Mini is a bit more interesting to me though. I’ve been thinking of putting together a home theatre PC for a while now, and this Mini slides into that role fairly nicely. The only sticking point is that it still doesn’t have video capture built-in, so it wouldn’t entirely replace my MythTV server, but it could act as a front end to it. It’s also not clear if it’ll be quite powerful enough to decode HD video, but that’s more of a future concern and there are still a bunch of other unsolved problems surrounding HD anyway.

Then it’s just a question of whether a home theatre computer is worth the cost…

Backups, Finally

A new hard drive is on the way, to resolve my current disk woes. Apparently it’s been generating these bad block errors since at least October, so it’s not exactly dying rapidly, but better safe than sorry.

I was tempted to just go ahead and upgrade the whole system while I was at it since it’s now on the lower end of gaming performance. Especially with the new monitor and its much larger number of pixels to fill, which often requires me to turn down or disable higher-quality video options. After putting together a list of parts though, a bit of sticker shock convinced me that I can probably make do with what I have for a bit longer yet…

There is one thing I can do now that I should have done long ago, though: put a proper backup solution in place.
Continue reading “Backups, Finally”

All Mario, All The Time

More 30 second reviews.

Mario Kart DS (DS)

It’s the same old classic Mario Kart gameplay, but the DS version improves it by having loads of tracks (16 new ones plus 16 classic ones from previous versions), a lot of choices in characters and vehicles, and online play. There’s a wide variety of different layouts and obstacles among the tracks, too, so it’s never the same race twice.

It’s a little bit frustrating in that online competition often involves a ‘snaking’ technique that’s difficult to pull off — if your thumbs aren’t up to it, you’d better get used to second or third place. The blue shell item seems a bit unfair, too — it can knock you from the lead back into third place by nothing more than the sheer luck of the person who got it. It’s still fun just to try, though.

Mario vs. Donkey Kong (GBA)

I wasn’t sure whether the gameplay in this one would be more like Super Mario Brothers or the original Donkey Kongs, and surprisingly, it’s both and neither. It’s like DK in that it’s on a smaller scale, with a particular goal to reach and some familiar elements like the hammer, but it’s also more like SMB in how you can move and fight enemies, but it’s also more puzzle-based than either of them were.

It’s kind of fun, but also a little too easy (so far) and looks like it could be fairly short. (On the other hand, considering how many unfinished games I have lined up, a shorter one might not be so bad…)

Mario & Luigi: Partners In Time (DS)

It’s apparently more of the same of the previous game (M&L: Superstar Saga) on the GBA, but I didn’t play the first one so that’s fine with me. It’s great anyways, combining RPGish stats and items with some reflex-testing action in the combat screens and while moving around, all done in the Mario universe style.

30 Second Reviews

Shadow Of The Colossus (PS2)

This is probably one of the best games I’ve played this year. It’s fairly simple — all you do is fight these giant creatures by climbing all over them and stabbing them in their weak spots, but each one presents a slightly different puzzle as to how you get to those spots or even how to get on them in the first place. Then, once you’re on, it’s fairly tense and exciting as you struggle to hold on and reach those spots without losing your grip and falling off. Add a tragic story, an excellent soundtrack, and a unique visual style, and you’ve got a great game.

Animal Crossing: Wild World (DS)

This is basically The Sims, but geared more towards the kiddie crowd. Fish, dig up fossils, visit your neighbours, plant trees and flowers, arrange furniture for better ‘feng shui’, expand your house, catch bugs, shop, construct constellations in the sky… The DS version adds online support, so you can visit each others’ towns, and some things will subtly spread from town to town. A constellation you draw might suddenly show up in a friend’s town, you can write messages in bottles and throw them in the ocean and they’ll wash up on the shore of someone else’s town, and there’s a cat that wanders between towns whose face you can redraw.

Despite its simplicity and kid-targetted cutesyness, it’s strangely addictive. There are a lot of little subtleties, and I find myself turning it on at least once per day just to see if there’s some new NPC visiting the town, if the other residents have sent me mail, what’s new in the shops…

Need For Speed: Most Wanted (PC)

The story is stupid and the cutscenes are eye-rollingly cheesy, but the important part is the driving, and NFS:MW does that extremely well. The cars control well, the city you drive around in is large and good-looking, and there’s a wide variety of different races and challenges to participate in. Best of all is when you get the attention of the cops and enter pursuit mode, where you try to rack up as many infractions, fines, and bounties as possible, avoid the ever-escalating police efforts (they’ll eventually pull out roadblocks, high-speed pursuit cruisers, spike strips, SUVs, helicopters…), and eventually ditch them and hide out until things cool down.

The only downsides are that the tuning options are a bit more limited compared to other games, and it’s fairly linear; once you’ve finished the storyline and challenge series, that’s it and there are no further free-form or random goals.

Civilization IV (PC)

Civ 3 had a bit of a lukewarm reception since it introduced some bad design choices (rampant corruption, killer unit stacks) that made it frustrating at times. Civ 4 fixes most of Civ 3’s problems while keeping the best parts of it (culture, expanding borders) and adding some interesting new elements (religion, Great Citizens, military unit skill specializations). It’s easily the best version of Civilization yet, finally knocking Civ 2 off that perch.

Its only faults so far are that you’re still vulnerable to getting screwed by not having certain critical resources in your territory, and some victory types are much harder to achieve than others. If you try to go for a Conquest victory, it takes so long to conquer neighbours that it’s likely one of the AI civilizations will hit a Cultural or Space Race victory first. If you really want to win certain ways, you pretty much have to disable all of the other victory types first.

Fable: The Lost Chapters (PC)

This was kind of fun in the sense that it was ‘comfortable’ — all of the familiar RPG elements are there and the combat is a little more action-oriented to keep things interesting. Still, the overall story was fairly bland and generic and a lot of the hyped-up features (choosing good or evil, wooing town residents, your character aging, etc.) were fairly shallow or meaningless in the end.

Beware of Piles

The mouse I was using at the office had a rather difficult-to-press mouse wheel, which became a big problem when I switched back over to doing more Unix development, since it’s used so often for pasting. Fortunately, like any good IT department, we have a big pile of spares to choose from.

Unfortunately I didn’t notice that the first one I took back to my desk had a *completely* broken scroll wheel — it couldn’t be pressed in at all.

I double-checked to make sure that the second one had a good feel to the click before taking it back to my office. It wasn’t until about 15 minutes later that I noticed that whenever I switched to one application, one of its subwindows would always scroll to the bottom of its list of items. I tried to scroll back up in it, but it immediately went right back down again. Turns out that its scroll wheel was reporting as if it was constantly scrolling downwards, no matter what I did.

So, back to the pile for another replacement. Fortunately this one worked well; the wheel clicked nicely, and scrolled properly. Except that over the course of a few hours, it became apparent that the wheel’s click might be a little *too* sensitive. Wheel movements meant merely to scroll would sometimes inadvertently register as a click, pasting whatever junk I happened to have in the clipboard right into the middle of some source code.

I’m still not sure there’s a single good mouse in that pile…

Things Fall Apart

The reliability of hardware can unfortunately be an unpredictable phenomenon, and it seems I am bitten once again. About a month ago, my Slackware box would suddenly start ‘going nuts’ every few days, for lack of a better term; network services would no longer launch, common commands could not be found, and directory listings would produce garbage.

(Warning: boring techno-geekery and personal woe to follow.)
Continue reading “Things Fall Apart”

Carpet Fever

On Tuesday I woke up to find that my carpet was a bit squishier than usual. It turned out that the water feed to the neighbour’s toilet had broken, and the water was leaking into my place as well. Fortunately it only reached half the bedroom, the bathroom, and one hallway, so the damage wasn’t that great. Just a bunch of cardboard boxes with wrecked bottoms, and I’ve got more boxes than I need anyway.

Cleaning up however, is taking a bit of effort. Continue reading “Carpet Fever”

Brick And Mortar Is Dead

I’ve been saving up a list of books that have been recommended by people I know from various places on the net. So, tonight I went down to the fairly large Chapters store at Chinook to buy some of them, and I could not find a single one of the titles.

It’s not like they’re obscure, out-of-print books either; I jumped on amazon.ca and found every one of them available new, and that’s where I’ll be getting them from. No, in most cases their major fault was simply being more than five or ten years old, or being earlier in a series. That last one in particular baffles me; they’ll stock the latest and greatest book in a long-running series or world, but not the early ones that someone new to it might like to start off at?

I also took a look at the technical books, and although there were a couple interesting ones, the standard prices are still a lot higher than what I can get online.

Instead, I just picked up a few popular classics that I’d been meaning to get around to eventually, but still left without a single one of the books I’d intended to get there. Amazon, here I come (again).