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July 14, 2007

Price of Driving

So, as mentioned previously, I bought a car.

This has proben to be a an expensive operation, nickel-and-diming the hell out of me. So far...

  • $90 - Engine diagnostic and disposal of the old car
  • $3399.00 - Purchase price of the car
  • $954.10 - Taxes, Tags, and MD State Inspection repairs
  • $6.96 - Wiring harness adapter
  • $8.50 - Center Console Pocket (Necessary to fill the extra space in the dash left by...)
  • $179.99 - New stereo to replace the old one that sucked
  • $1.05 - Bandages for the cuts on my hand from pulling the stock stereo out
  • -$4.23 - Found in change inside the stock radio
  • $29.95 - Keyless entry fob that isn't compatibile with my car
  • $32.99 - Keyless entry fob that is compatible with my car
  • $19.99 - Faux Suede seat cover for the passenger seat, since Leah sticks to leather.
  • $7.99 - Steering wheel cover the day after I parked in direct sunlight and nearly defleshed my hands
  • $38 - New power antenna that isn't quite compatible with my car but which I managed to get in there anyway
  • $30.98 - Performance module
  • $11.58 - SD cards for the new stereo
Grand total: $4806.85

Personal Thoughts

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June 19, 2007

Yes Sir, That's My Baby

Previously, on A Mind Occasionally Voyaging...

My car finally melted away to nothing.

I've been driving my dad's old Volvo since then. It's not a bad car, or, at least, it wasn't in her heyday. 18 gallon gas tank, which means that I only have to fill her up once a week, even with the mileage hit it takes when the turbocharger kicks in. But it's old, and it loses two quarts of oil a week, most of which ends up on the rear windscreen. And most of the electronics are out. And there are other various things wrong with it. But it runs great, and it's a comfy car to drive.

But it's also just a loaner. Which is why I did something uncharacteristic, and didn't spend months agonizing over this decision.

I bought a car. Here she is:

New Car

For those of you who do better with statistics than with pictures, here's her vitals:

1998 Subaru Legacy Outback Limited Edition
117k miles
4-speed Automatic Transmission
2.5L H4 PFI DOHC 16V
Leather Seats
Alloy Wheels
All-wheel drive

There's a few things I'll miss: you can't get automatic seatbelts any more, so I'll be buckling up manually from now on. And the stereo has a CD player built in, so they didn't think anyone would need a line input jack. And the controls are all small and dainty as you see on most modern cars. And the speedometer is on the left, which creeps me the hell out.

But she's mine. Yay me.

Personal Thoughts

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June 12, 2007

It's like you're always stuck in second gear

For the third time this year, I find myself constrained to blog a bit on the passing of another treasured friend of the non-human variety. It really seems these days like nothing good can happen to me without some equal and opposite bad thing happening. Only by "equal and opposite" I mean "At least a little worse"

Aside from a brief stint in a rusted out Ford Escort, I've driven a Subaru all my driving life. In fact, I've driven a '91 Subaru Legacy Wagon my entire driving life. Not the same wagon, mind you: Some time late in 2001 or 2002, I traded in the old red one for a gold one with less than half the miles.

If you've owned a Subaru of that vintage, you know that they're tough cars. The red one lasted the equivalent of driving it to the moon and halfway back. The electrical system was pretty badly damaged, to the point that I had to run new lines directly from the battery to the headlights, and my tail lights plugged into the cigarette lighter. The door locks were shot, the air conditioner had died one day so violently that it took out the power steering belt. It also had a bad wrinkle in the fender where I'd lost control in the rain and slammed into a jersey wall. I replaced it shortly after the timing belt had gone, leaving me stranded at a Home Depot.

The gold Subaru was in much better shape. But not for long. There's some sort of design flaw on that vintage of Subaru that results in the driver's side ball joint breaking about once every other year. Had them replaced quite a few times. The timing belt went too once, and early this year, the windshield developed a crack. I had to have the entire exhaust system replaced in January as most of it had fallen off.

For the past few months, she's been idling rough. I replaced the spark plug wires, and then the spark plugs. And then I bought a ratcheting offset screwdriver and turned the idle up. That made it run smoother once she got started, but it also made the check engine light come on. She got harder to start -- the engine would turn over, but would die immediately if I didn't give it gas right away. And then she started to lose acceleration. Had to push the pedal to the floor to gain any sort of speed at all.

So, last night, I took her into the shop. I was hoping that my fuel injector was going to turn out to be clogged, but something in my head told me that the solution was going to include "rebuilt engine".

I got the call this morning at 10:00 AM. The engine has internal damage. There's a 90 psi drop between the left and right side.

In lieu of flowers, please send motor oil.

Personal Thoughts

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April 29, 2007

Thank you for getting me out of that well

Some time, I don't remember when exactly, early in 1991, my dad brought Sarah home to live with us. She shipped in a cardboard crate with a blue blanket inside it, but, I am told, she rode most of the way on dad's arm. It was, I think, a good thing that the previous year, he'd traded in his old Subaru for a newer one and switched to an automatic transmission. A few years later, she would wrap her leash around the handbrake, leaving a mark in it that lasted until I finally sent the car to rest in 2002. Westies were popular at the time, and Sarah herself had the distinction of having been born on Christmas day.

Sarah, on her 15th birthday

Sarah was an affectionate puppy. For years, I remember her always greeting me at the door when I got home from school, jumping on me and losing control of her bladder. We were new to dog-ownership and had our various ups and downs. Bred for hunting small game, Sarah had an insatiable desire to dig holes, and I recall that she once dyed herself orange for the better part of a year as she excavated a huge mound of sand we'd had dumped in the back yard to lay a patio behind the house.

For some time, she had some sort of skin condition, that caused her to tear out clumps of her own fur. Her habit of doing this at night while she lay under my parents' bed eventually led to so much collateral damage to the carpeting that they replaced the floor in their bedroom with commercial tile. Later in her life, she took to sleeping in bed with my mom, and then eventually to sleeping on a mat at the end of the hallway once getting in an out of bed as the mood struck her became more than her hips could handle.

Sarah was for the most part a friendly, well-behaved dog, aside from her unfortunate tendency to snap when startled. She gave my sister a scar on her nose that I don't think she ever fully forgave her for. Sarah became closest to my mother, and even as she grew old and tired, would usually rouse herself from a half-slumber to follow her from room to room. Once, she changed direction abruptly, and my mother lost her footing and twisted her ankle.

But all things considered, Sarah was a good dog, and we grew to appreciate her even more when, years later, my sister would convince my parents to let her get a second dog, a lab, who still hasn't calmed down and can't be left alone for so much as a minute. Sarah and Jamie got on well -- we're fairly sure that on at least one occasion, they actually collaborated to steal a ham sandwich.

When I went away to college, dad liked to tease her that I'd fallen down a well, a little running gag that he'd repeat every time I came back ot the home of my youth.

Because she was small, it was always difficult to think of Sarah as anything other than a puppy, even as she grew old and bouts of arthritis impaired her mobility from time to time. Cataracts took most of her vision, though you couldn't always tell, except when she went running for the wrought iron gate my parents had installed at the end of the hallway to restrain the lab. Sarah could wriggle under it without much problem, but at a full run, she couldn't see it until it was too late to stop, and she'd occasionally end up ramming it headlong.

About a week ago, I'm told, she collapsed after her morning walk and had to be carried in. She vacillated between better and worse for a few days, eating little and often too tired to move. Late Tuesday night, Sarah got down off the couch (My parents didn't care enough about the furniture to keep her off of it until they bought new furniture a few years ago, by which time she was old enough that a policy change would have seemed cruel) and slumped to the floor. Her breathing slowed, and finally stopped. We do not think she suffered. Sarah passed away at about 12:25 AM Wednesday morning of a condition my sister called "Too Many Birthdays". She was 16 years old, which, depending on who you go by, is either 77 or 112 in dog years.

They laid her to rest beside Jamie. I imagine that they are frolicking together and stealing ham sandwiches in whatever sort of afterlife is reserved for pets.

Sarah Jane Raszewski, December 25, 1990-April 25, 2007. You will be missed. Good dog.

Personal Thoughts

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January 31, 2007

Good news/Bad news

I've had something of a bimodal month.

12/31: Jamie died
1/15: Was issued a housing code violation for the Gasoline Alley-like state of my back yard. Given 10 days to repair the situation and get it inspected
1/17: Took the car into the shop on account of exhaust system noises that sounded indicative of me not being likely to pass the emissions inspection I had to have by the end of the month
1/18: Found out that the whole exhaust system had disintegrated and repairs would cost $1,000
1/19: Recieved housing code violation, realized I had much less than 10 days, thanks to the delay in my getting it.
1/20: Cleaned up and relandscaped the back yard. Despite soreness, felt strangely good for the exercise. Felt unstrangely bad on seeing the bill from the Home Despot.
1/21: Set myself on fire. No, really. Bumped into a space heater and ignighted part of my jacket. Didn't notice for several minutes as my coat smouldered. Found a Nintendo DS game in the parking lot (Mario vs. Donkey Kong 3). Finished work on back yard. I think technically I had completed the work mandatated by the city on Friday night, but I wanted to reduce the chances of this ever happening again by sealing up everything that tends to accumulate drifting loose trash. Then it started to snow.
1/22: Found out that the inspector couldn't come by today on account of the snow
1/24: Recieved another housing code violation, dated 1/22 (yes, after I'd cleaned the place up) for the same thing. Found out the inspector wasn't going to be back in the office until Friday.
1/25: Recieved letter of abatement on the first violation.
1/26: Played phone tag with my doctor and the inspector both, as he'd gotten some blood test results back (from October; mix-up at the lab), and she was in a meeting all day. Told that the second notice was the result of some bad timing, and that, though I didn't have to do anything, she had to come back and take more photos of my yard. She also told me that I had to get rid of the boxes under my porch. As these boxes do not exist, and one of Saturday's repairs was to seal up the space under the porch, I suspect she went to the wrong house (My next-door neighbors do have some boxes under their porch), but that she'd take care of it.
1/27: Turned 28. The love of my life gave me a Nintendo Wii. Got happy and forgot my troubles for a bit. Got drunk and remembered them, but only for a bit. At any rate, there was a whole lot of me being happy going around. I mean, a Nintendo Wii is one of the best presents you can get from someone, aside from a pony, and I don't really want a pony anyway. And I'd have been happy enough just to spend the day with her, so this was like ultimate happiness on top of ultimate happiness. Zelda is hard when you're left-handed. I bet this is how generations of Right-handed gamers felt trying to learn to use a thumbstick with their left hand.
1/28: Dinner with my parents, who gave me a cordless Dremmel tool. Damned fine dinner too. Still have leftovers. Sneezed violently and somehow bruised my throat. Gave Mario vs. Donkey Kong 3 to my sister.
1/30: Went to Target in search of band aids and Wii/Gamecube games. Bought a new Optimus Prime (My third in the past year, though I still regret not having bought the Energon version. This one was a bit crap, but he came with a Megatron and a Bonus DVD. Ended up with $1.68 on the Target giftcard I got for Christmas. Tried to buy a cup of coffee at the Target Starbucks with the target giftcard and a Starbucks gift card. Barrista ran them through in the wrong order, so now I have a Target gift card with $1.68 on it and a Starbucks gift card with $6 on it, and still have to tote both of them around.
1/31: I'll tell you later.

But let me tell you. The Wii is FUN. I'll upload a picture of My Mii once I work out how to get one without buying a bluteooth card for my computer.

Personal Thoughts

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January 04, 2007

The Thought That Counts

This Christmas, I tried to be all subtle about what I wanted, thinking I was too old to go around making Christmas lists. As it turns out, subtlty is not my strong suit. Seems that after my long stint as a Person of Little Income, I'm not very comfortable asking for things I could do without or buy myself. In fact, it's really difficult for me to write this now. Just feels sort of childish.

But anyway, the point of this little story is that I've got a birthday coming up. This post is not me asking for stuff. This post is just to document some things I'd really like to have. Also, I'll point out that I've had an amazon.com wishlist hiding behind one of those little badges on the left side of the screen just about ever since I switched to Movable Type.

So, if you were a person looking to get me something but you don't know what I'd like, here are some things I'd like. Don't feel yourself constrained to this list in any way. And if you aren't looking to get me something, then please don't. The last thing I need is a perfunctory gift that gives me the feeling that you didn't want to get me anything but felt duty-bound to do so.

  • A cordless dremmel tool, having burned out my corded dremmel knock-off last year
  • A Nintendo Wii & the new Zelda Game, because these are so hard to get that I ought to start asking now if I want to get one in time for next Christmas.
  • A Nintendo DS *amp; the new Super Mario game, the new DS Zelda game, or the not-so-new Metroid game, because every person in Japan has three of them by now, and I'm jealous
  • A Bluetooth Headset so that I do not crash my car while talking on the phone. Don't care much about the brand per se, so long as it's a good unit. The kind that has a ring to clip over your ear, not the kind that holds itself up by your ear canal.
  • A new car, because mine is broken
  • Transformers Milennium Falcon It transforms into Han and Chewie robots. How cool is that?
  • A Red Ryder carbine-action, two hundred shot Range Model air rifle BB gun with a compass in the stock and a thing which tells time --wait. On second thought, naah. I'd shoot my eye out.

Personal Thoughts

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January 01, 2007

In Loving Memory

In the summer of 1991, my parents brought Jamie home, concealed in a grocery sack. He cost $25. My sister paid. Jamie was a small black-and-white kitten with a spot on his upper lip that looked like a half-Hitler-moustache. He was named for a character from Doctor Who. He enjoyed sitting on my father's chest when he sat in his recliner, and he enjoyed hiding on the chairs in the dining room and swatting at the dogs as they walked by. He developed a wanderlust in his middle years and was constantly trying to slip out of the house. He also enjoyed catnip.

Jamie

Jamie was personable, reasonably outgoing, and very vocal. He got along well with pets older than he was. When he was small, he had a bad habit of falling into the toilet.


Jamie

Some time last year, he was diagnosed with diabetes, and entered into a slow decline. Jamie passed away at 8:45 PM on New Year's Eve. He was 15 years old.

Jamie

In Loving Memory, Jamie The Cat Raszewski, July 1991-December 31, 2006

Personal Thoughts

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December 20, 2006

Announce: GWindows 1.0

As a followup to the release of Moments out of TIme (Adventure Type), I'm proud to announce the release of GWindows 1.0, the Screen Management Framework I used to design the look-and-feel of the game.

This new version of the screen management framework for Glulx Inform
(6) adds a variety of features, including:

  • Fixes to several minor bugs
  • GForm: a widget for building forms containing features like radio buttons, checkboxes, and the like
  • GRTS: A system for scheduling real-time events in Glulx
And what I think is the most exciting development of all: the GLoader Gallery. The GLoader Gallery is a collection of templates for GWindows user interfaces that you can slot into your games with very little effort.

Included is the gltemplate program, which acts both as a skeleton
template for writing GWindows code that uses UIs from the Gloader
Gallery and as a demo of the gallery itself.

The new home of GWindows and the GLoader Gallery is:
http://gwindows.trenchcoatsoft.com

Personal Thoughts/Projects

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November 30, 2006

The Wait Is Over

Well, it's bad form to pull the same gag twice running, so I'll be forthright
this time. I've written a sequel to Moments Out of Time, and now it's out.

At 865741.3 UDC, StreamDiver Alpha Tango-678 performed a routine
StreamDive to the middle of the twenty-first century.

He did not travel alone...

An agent of the Temporal Sciences Commission has gone rogue.
Now you, Captain Remington of the Streamdive Investigation
Division, must follow him back into the past to set right
what he has set wrong before all of history is unravelled in
his wake.

Explore six detailed environments for the clues you'll need
to unlock a mystery woven into humanity's past -- a secret so
powerful that it drove one of your own to commit the ultimate
crime against history.

Fully illustrated and with a complete musical score, Moments Out
of Time (Adventure Type) explodes the story begun 2001's
Interactive Fiction Competition second place winner.

Available now at http://streamdive.trenchcoatsoft.com, Download.com, and shortly at the if-archive.

Personal Thoughts/Projects, Personal Thoughts/Projects

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November 22, 2006

[Announce]: Moments out of Time Re-release

It gives me great pleasure to announce that, after five years, I'm releasing
A revised version of my 2001 game, Moments out of Time. I did a lot of work
Making this game, and it always bothered me that my own poor choice of
platform and a few bad decisions alienated so many players from taking the
Leap and finding out what it was all about. So this new version is in Glulx:
You can rest assured that (though it might take a little effort), any solid
Interpreter should be able to handle it. Thanks to an unfortunate hard-drive
Not working at a key moment, I've had to rebuild the game from the ground up.
Go try it out, please, even if you've already played: you might even
say that it's a whole new game.


Moments out of Time is the story of a time traveler, sent back to study the
way humans lived on the eve of the third world war -- it's also the story
of a human family, flawed in their many ways, trying to cope with the
increasing inevitability of the end of their world. It's a parable about
the way we see the world, with a lot of symbolism I only noticed well
after-the-fact.

Moments out of Time took second place in the 2001 rec.arts.int-fiction
competition.

It is available at http://streamdive.trenchcoatsoft.com/moments.r2.gblorb
and will shortly appear on the if-archive.

For historical purposes, I have also rereleased the original competition
version of the game, upgraded with cover art and metadata based on the Babel
initiative (http://babel.ifarchive.org).

I hope you enjoy.

Personal Thoughts/Projects

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October 27, 2006

Holy Neologisms, Batman!

I'm not a grammar nazi by any means, but I do get irked by certain classes of misuse. Scare quotes drive me up a "wall". The "Grocer's Apostrophe" (When you try to make a noun plural by adding an apostrophe-S, so named for the frequency of its use in produce sections: "Carrot's: $2") makes the hair's on the back of my neck stand up. But I think what really bothers me is not the mistake, but the people who make it -- people who, 9 times out of 10, when you tell them that they've made a mistake, go on a tirade about how this isn't French, English is a language that grows and changes, and they should be able to do what they want, and how dare you try to impose your rules on their usage, and if everyone understood what I meant anyway you're just being a pedant and a jerk. (And no, I didn't understand what you meant. I guessed at what you meant. For a moment there, the automatic background task of parsing the English language stopped working and had to pop up a modal dialogue box in my brain asking for my conscious mind to intercede. My brain wasn't focused on the exchange of ideas, it was focused on working out what the hell you were trying to convey). Being wrong is no crime. But being proud of your wrongness when you know you're wrong is, well, pathological. (Had they argued that it wasn't wrong, that would be one thing. They'd still be wrong, but at least they'd be honestly wrong. But the reaction I usually get is "I accept that I am wrong, but I'm going to keep doing it anyway and you are a bad person for caring about my wrongness.").

So why is it that I find myself so fond of coining neologisms? I am generally skeptical of repurposing existing words (Just today, I had to tell someone that "Architect" is not a verb), but all too often, I find myself wanting a single vocal atom for something or other, and so I just make one up. And generally, though I may only use it once, it's a really fun word. Some recent examples:

  • enchopulator: That which performs chopping, but which is not a knife: I need to chop this video file into several smaller files. I have to dig out my AVI enchopulator
  • enweirden: (reflexive verb) To give (someone) the experience of having just experienced something weird. Almost equivalent to "I find (thing) weird," but less passive: Bald women enweirden me.
  • bendicacity: The capacity to bend: All I know about David Beckham is that his bendicacity is emulable. (NB: For all I know, "emulable" is also a neologism)

Personal Thoughts/Writing

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June 07, 2006

The Best Single Sentence I've Read In A While

New feature. If it takes, it'll get its own category. The Best Single Sentence I've Read In A While is an award given out "once in a while," celebrating an art which seems to be dying: the art of composing a phrase well.

I really love language and what it can do. And these days, people seem to write without artistry, without cleverness. Most of them write without even a basic respect for the laws of usage and grammar. So I think it's worth celebrating when someone does better.


Without further ado, The Best Single Sentence I've Read In A While goes to Fred Clark, for this gem:

Attempts to convey the ineffable often come across as kind of effed up.

Congrats, Fred. Keep up the good work.

Personal Thoughts/Writing

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May 25, 2006

I bring you: Catopia

So, my girlfriend has just moved to town (Which is among the reasons that I've failed to keep to anything like a regular posting schedule), and she has a cat.

Her cat, being of a certain age, and being, well, a cat, is not expected to have an easy time adjusting. So, as any caring cat-owner would, my girlfriend means to bribe the cat into being happy.

More specifically, we figure that if we made her a nice cat condo (they call them that because "cathouse" was already taken), it would ease her transition to the new environment.

So we had a looksee and found that those tiny little carpeted pedestals are actually surprisingly expensive. And, as my beloved is really rather fond of her cat, she wanted to furnish her with something extravagant -- and we tok a look, and whatever the prices were, they weren't even willing to display them on the floor models for fear of scaring off the customers.

Well, it occurred to me that I could almost certainly build one of these for a fraction of the cost. So I fired up Poser (Blender or Visio would have been closer to the right tool for the job, but I've hardly ever used Visio, and Blender's UI seems to have been designed by a blind autistic Nazi) and came up with a design.

This rendering is not quite the final design, but it's pretty close. Construction s underway, and I'll have an itemized material and cost list as soon as I can find one.

In the mean time, I give you: Catopia

Personal Thoughts/Projects, Personal Thoughts/Projects

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January 08, 2006

All the girlies say I'm pretty fly for a white guy

So I'm reading MAKE:Blog today (see link to the left), and two things caught my eye. I'm throwing this out there to the public. Maybe one of you can build it, maybe I'll build it myself (Though it seems likely that by the time I can afford the development costs, I won't have the time).

Link 1: A detailed review of the Fly Pentop Computer

The fly, if you haven't already heard the hype, is a gizmo targeted at the 8-13 crowd. It's a computer shoved into a pen. You scribble on a piece of paper (Has to be special paper, unfortunately. There's some very clever math in how it works, but the notion is that there's this thing called the Anoto pattern, which the Fly -- and most other digital writing systems -- uses to orient itself), and it does interesting stuff. The most basic of its features is that it can record what you wrote. Of course, since the Fly is, in addition to being a pen computer, a computer pen, you've technically already got a hard copy of whatever you wrote.

But it does other neat things. You can draw a calculator and use it to do math. It's very flexible in this regard; you write a C within a circle, activating calculator mode, then draw a rectangle and put some numbers and symbols in it -- in any arrangement you like -- then tap on them to do math. You can also draw a keyboard and play music. Or insert the translator biochip [2 points], and have whatever you write in English read back to you in Spanish. (Actually, I kinda get the feeling that they invented this thing, then realized that they couldn't think of very much to do with it.)

But limited in use though it may be (for now), it's a really neat evolution of the medium. Which is why an alarm went off in my brain when I saw this:

Link 2: How to turn an optical mouse into a handheld scanner

As you know, an optical mouse is a mouse that uses, very basically, a pretty simple digital camera (or, rather, a CCD -- the bit of a digital camera that takes the picture) instead of a ball to detect motion. As it turns out, there is a way to just pull the image from the CCD on some mice instead of turning it into a direction and distance.

So, here's my big and infeasable idea: Let's combine the information in these two links and build ourselves a Ghetto Fly homebrew pen computer.

There are some obvious problems with this idea. First, the optical mouse CCD has a very low resolution, and probably can't read an Anoto pattern. Second, the Fly is not built from off-the-shelf components. But hey, I just stuck a computer inside a radio. I think we can overcome these problems if we just make everything BIGGER.

I'm now imagining my homebrew pen computer. I figure that the "pen" would be about the size of an electric leaf-blower. A sheet of notebook paper would have to be enlarged to, say, 8 feet wide. It would weigh about 50 pounds.

But imagine pulling that out at a party...

Personal Thoughts/Projects

By Ross at 01:22 PM | | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

January 04, 2006

MP3 Unveilled

So, as previously mentioned, I was building an mp3 player. It worked for a solid fifteen minutes before the hard drive crashed.

Well, I've replaced the hard drive, and made a few changes that I hope will keep it from happening again (A possibly unsuccessful attempt to make it mount the primary filesystem as read-only).

At any rate, it seems to be working now, though I want to add another control knob to hit a mouse button triggering a soft shutdown in the hopes of keeping this from happening again.

But now that the gift is given and received, I can reveal what it was all about:

I stuck a computer into the chassis of a 30s-style tombstone radio. The body only cost me about thirteen dollars (Two bucks plus shipping), the pedestal is made from scrap wood, and the computer was given to me by a friend's wife when she moved out of town. The speakers were an old pair I picked up years ago, the mouse came with my newest computer (Sacrificed because I had an optical mouse to use instead). The most expensive single component I had to buy for it were the three drawer knobs I bought for controls (About $4 and change a piece). The three knobs on the front control the volume, power, and track. The body came with three drilled holes for the knobs, marked for volume, tuning, and band. I drilled the connector for the volume knob directly into the original plastic volume dial for the speakers, attached the tuner dial to a dowel which presses against the Y-motion wheel from the mouse, and attached the band wheel to a dowel with various nails stuck in it to hit the controls. On the upsweep, toward the AM postion, it hits the power button for the PC. On the downsweep, toward a band which I've never heard of, it clicks one of the mouse buttons, causing the software to pause. One of the other mouse buttons now causes a shutdown. I haven't quite worked out what to hook that to.

For the tuner dial, I found a photograph of a compatable tuner dial on the internet, printed it out, and mounted it over the relevant opening. Right smack in the center, I drilled a hole and mounted a yellow LED to illuminate the dial. It doesn't look quite as natural as I'd hoped, but the other choices I had seemed likely to be even worse (I considered a cold cathode, which would have been (a) too bright, (b) too big, and (c) Too cold-cathodeish. I also tried an incandescent bulb, which burned out instantly. The LED takes its power from the motherboard's power LED jack, and glows apropriately. If I'd had more space and time, I might have tried to wire up a cluster of LEDs to the power supply, but I was on a timetable).

In all, I think it ended up looking quite convincing. If you find that hard to believe, have a look at these grainy, low-resolution pictures (Really got to get a proper digital camera): http://photos.trenchcoatsoft.com/thumbnails.php?album=5.

Cool? I like to think so.

Personal Thoughts/Projects

By Ross at 04:21 PM | | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

January 04, 2006

Me: 0, Ubersoft: 10

I've done tech support before, so I know how tempting it is to just assume the user is a moron. But as a tech support guy, I always began from the assumption that even if the user was an idiot, solving his problem was my job.

It seems that this is a bizarre notion among tech support people.

I'm the developer for Valpac, an industrial adhesive manufacturer on the eastern shore of Maryland (and no, not the people who mail you coupons.

A few weeks ago, I redesigned the entire website in PHP (You can't see it just now, because it's still in a Seekrit Development Directory until I solve the problem I'm about to complain about). I've grown to really like PHP, and I'm rather proud of the new design.

But there's a problem: the damned thing doesn't work. More specifically, if I access any of the PHP pages, I get a 403 error. Sometimes. In my line of work, I have access to a whole heap of machines, and some of them get the page, and others get the 403. Most of them get the 403. Various proxies and other web services (Like Google's translator and W3C's validator) also get the 403. So this isn't a problem at my end. Doing a little research, I discovered that the web host has more than one servers, and you only get the 403 error when one particular server on their end tries to serve the page. If one of their other servers fields the request, it works fine. So it's not a problem at my end. In fact, it is a problem with just one of their servers.

And I say this not just because I used my deductive logic skills to deduce it. I say it because I called technical support two weeks ago, and after about an hour of haranguing the guy on the other end, he determined that it was a problem on their end with one of their servers. And he promised to fix it.

And he did. At least, the next day, every computer I tried it from could access the page.

And now, none of the computers I tried can access the page. I checked everything, and all the symptoms are the same. So, it's time to contact technical support again.

So, being tired of this, I had someone who could speak with somewhat more authority make the call. The vice president for research and development at Valpac called the web host, explained the problem in detail, and was told to clear his browser cache and try again.

So, it was time for me to actually do my job and contact them myself. I sent off an email in which I detailed exactly what was wrong, I explained that I had tried it in IE, I had tried it in Firefox, I had tried it in Opera, heck, I had even tried it in Lynx (Okay, I really hadn't, but I was hoping that the fact that I knew what Lynx was would convince them that I was technically saavy enough to actually be worth listening to). I had tried it from several computers. I had tried it from computers that weren't behind the same proxy. I had tried it from computers with different operating systems. I had uploaded the php to my own personal webserver and tried it there. The problem wasn't with my computer. It wasn't with my browser. It wasn't with my PHP. It was with their server. I explained exactly what the problem was and what they had to do to fix it.

Guess what they told me? Yep. "Try clearing your browser cache." So I responsed that I *had* cleared my browser cache, I gave them ,as they requested, the version of my browser. I told them what their own diagnostic scripts told me about the server that was giving me the problem. I even told them that the *last time* I'd had this problem, they had fixed it, and I told them how they had fixed it the last time.

They told me, "Try clearing your browser cache".

Bastards.

What bothers me isn't being treated like an idiot. I mean, I don't like being treated like an idiot, but I know full well that 99.99999% of the requests they get are stupid, nonsensical, and sent by idiots, so I am willing to concede that "treat the user like an idiot" is probably the most efficient business model for them to follow. What bothers me is that it is becoming increasingly clear that they aren't even reading my requests. When the very first line of my request is "I have ALREADY CLEARED THE BROWSER CACHE," what other possible reason could they have for saying "Clear your browser cache"?

I'm not asking for special treatment. I mean, it'd be both nice for me and useful for them if I could just, like, say a secret magic word to let them know that I'm not an idiot and they could therefore skip all the question-deflecting crap they normally have to go through, but I don't actually need it, and since I'm not the one paying the tech support guy's salary, it's no skin off my back if he wants to waste time on the bonehead stuff first. All I'm asking is for them to actually do their jobs. You know, read the freaking message.

I'm sure Alex would be proud and all [2 points], but, well, were it up to me, these folks would have already lost my business.

Now, if you don't mind, I have to go clear out my browser cache.

Personal Thoughts

By Ross at 01:48 AM | | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

December 13, 2005

This guy kicks my ass

As you know, I've been working on an arcade cabinet for several months now. My stumbling block has been that some of the parts I need to buy are an extravagance that I'd like to put off until after the holidays. So I don't feel that bad, but still, it's a little disencouraging that I'm on month 4 of my project while I find in MAKE: Blog this:

Build a MAME Cabinet in 24 Hours

Kudos.

Personal Thoughts/Projects

By Ross at 07:30 PM | | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

December 13, 2005

MP3 Project: The Final Chapter

Today, the whole shebang is completed. Pictures will be available after christmas, and I'll post the player code too.

Here's the endgame:

94. Glue down the gutted mouse. Insert and secure a dowel rod that presses against the vertical motion mechanism inside the mouse (tuner). Screw a knob on the front
95. Mount a second dowel with a screw through it such that it hits the mouse button when turned (pause). Secure both dowels at the opposite end with blocks of wood
96. Gut a pair of computer speakers. Mount the volume control inside the case, then drill a screw into it onto which the third control knob is mounted. Mount the dial face and speakers. Stick a yellow LED in the middle of the dial.
97. Glue the power switch to another dowel and mount it so that the pause knob hits it on the upswing (lefty pausey, righty rebooty). Try to work out a way to wire the speaker power to the DC supply in the computer. Fail, because the speakers apparantly run off of 9 volts AC (An AC-AC adapter? WTF?)
98. Stick the CD drive in there, power it up. Nothing happens. Take the whole thing apart to reinstall the video card and see what gives. Just a loose connection. But while I'm in here, make a last minute change to the player code
99. Secure the CD-ROM. Correct for an error in the alignment by screwing through a floppy disk (the bad one from step 23).
100. Stick a back on the thing and turn the knob counterclockwise. Thirty seconds later, and it's "Time now for... (brrrrring) Johnny Dollar."

So that's the way it went. 100 steps and a pint of blood later, I am the proud temporary steward of a somewhat awkward MP3-CD player. There's a lot of things I could have done better, but I'm on a schedule. We'll fix it all in the next version. And let me tell you, it's a fine looking machine.

Just hope it keeps working.

Personal Thoughts/Projects

By Ross at 03:51 AM | | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

December 09, 2005

MP3 Project: Day Four

On day 4 (Yesterday), the case arrived. It's absolutely beautiful. It's also much smaller than I was imagining (I wasn't mislead about its size when I bought it, I just have a poor sense of scale.

I realize I haven't told you all the details, such as what the case is. That's because this is a Christmas present, and the person whose Christmas present it is may be reading this blog. You'll find out next year.

So day 4 was spent building an external case for most of the hardware in the form of a pedestal. Here's how it went...

72. Yoink the motherboard.
73. Convince myself that no, this motherboard is not going to fit in that case
74. Cut a piece of lawan to the dimensions of the motherboard plus the power supply.
75. Realize that I ought to have left an inch on each side for the side panels. Oh well.
76. Measure how big this will be. Yoink out the wavetable and video card
77. Make sure it still works
78. It does. The bios makes some new and exciting beeps (probably the "I couldn't find a video card" beep), but it works. Huh. I wonder what that wavetable does anyway.
79. Extract the little stand-off nuts that the motherboard screws into.
80. Drill holes through the baseboard for these little stand offs.
81. Discover that the board shifted while I was marking the places to drill, so only two of the stand offs are in the right place. Drill new holes, which work
82. Experiment with setting the power supply on top of the motherboard
83. I don't like how tall that makes it, or how unstable. Screw down the power supply beside the motherboard
84. And now I need feet on the bottom since the screws went right through.
85. Trim the baseboard -- but this time remember to leave an inch on one side for a side panel.
86. Cut sides out of 1x4 -- coincidentally the same height as the power supply.
87. The back has to be attached low, since it bolts to the feet. I justify this on the principle that it will make a vent.
88. Build a top out of the heavy cardboard that was originally the back of the cupboard in my desk. The top should be load-bearing, but nothing else I had looked nice enough to be functional. I will shift the load onto the sides.
89. The back looks atrocious. Replace it with more cardboard.
90. Run the wires through the top. Realize that the physics of IDE cables precludes putting the hard drive inside the upper case. Stick it in the pedestal
91. Trim a quarter inch off the front place of the CD drive to make it fit without compromising the structural integrity of the case.
92. Slip with the saw and cut my thumb. Bleed for about 15 minutes
93. Finish trimming the CD drive. Try to work out how to secure it. Fail. Nail the back panel on. Whack my thumb with the hammer. Bleed some more.

So this is where we stand. I still need to rig up the controls, which will involve a trip to the home despot to buy some knobs and dowels. The speakers are in the mail. I may buy a sheet of fiberboard to replace the top. Looks like I've got one more day's work ahead.

Personal Thoughts/Projects

By Ross at 02:42 PM | | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

December 07, 2005

More On The Mp3 Box

Kudos to hink, for pointing me at Limp. It looks like it should do exactly what I need (though MoviX also looked like that before it failed to run, but I am enheartened to learn that there's another option).

However, by the time I'd read his comment (ie. Ten minutes ago), I'd already solved the problem. So, where was I?

Day Two:
21. Boot off the slack bootdisk. Boot failed. Investigate
22. Try about fifteen other things before I realize that the boot failed because the disk was bad. Write another.
23. And another...
24. And another.... I should point out that I haven't bought a floppy disk in about ten years, so I'm just using the massive pile of old discs I've had sitting around since '95.
25. It boots! Write a root disk
26. And another...
27. And another...
28. Hey, that's a bash prompt! Let's try installing...
29. "Lost interrupt"? WTF?
30. Okay. Worked that time. Install me just enough slack to get going.
31. Hey, the BIOS never made that alarm sound before.
32. But it seems not to care.
33. Okay. I'm linuxing!
34. Let's try inserting a USB pen drive.
35. Kernel Panic. Retry.
36. etc.
37. Okay. Giving up on USB. Remove the PCI usb card because I'll use that for something else I guess
38. Mount the CDROM and try to play an MP3
39. What do you mean no sound?
40. Run ALSA configuratior. It flashes "Found 2 sound cards" then tells me it didn't find any.
41. I bet it's...
42. Yep. Reinstall the ALSA packages. Now it finds the sound card.
43. But none of the mp3 players I installed work. Something about a library...
44. Which also wasn't installed. Install it.
45. And another.
46. And another.
47. And, lo, an episode of Yours Truly, Johnny Dollar starts playing.
48. Okay. Now I need some controls...
49. Knit 1. Perl 2.
50. Cobble together a perl program that builds a playlist and then plays it. Have the program check which signal amp died from to detect whether to go to the next file on the list or the previous one.
51. Cobble together a perl program to respond to keyboard input by sending a SIGSTOP, SIGCONT, SIGTERM, or SIGHUP to amp.
52. Huh. Amp always dies from a SIGPIPE. WTF?
53. Oh. I'm killing the wrong process.
54. Success!
55. Edit inittab to launch the player and control program automagically.
56. Catastrophic failure! You can't just launch arbitrary programs from inittab if they want to talk to the real world.
57. Coax getty into running the program for me.
58. Success! Sleep mode

Day Three:
59. The thought occurs t ome that it would be mechanically simpler to accept input via the mouse.
60. Gut a mouse
61. Think long and hard about how to do this.
62. Start GPM
63. Write a perl function that opens a pipe to mev and parses its output, turning leftward, rightward, upward, or downward movement into a a single character
64. Test it. Hey! It works!
65. Replace the keyboard input bit of my controller with the mouse input bit
66. It doesn't work
67. Huh. Calling a function doesn't store the result in $_. Learn something new every day
68. Yay it works!
69. Oh. It crashed.
70. Stick a half second sleep in the controller program to keep it from responding to a zillion mouse events for every gesture
71. Success. Turn the damned thing off and do some real work.

Personal Thoughts/Projects

By Ross at 04:29 PM | | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

December 06, 2005

MP3 Jukebox

Okay, here's the goal:
I want a device that will boot up, search the CD-ROM and attached USB drives for MP3 files, and play them. The device needs to respond to the following commands:
*Next
*Previous
*Volume up
*Volume down

And that's it. Also, it ought to boot up as fast as possible.

So, here's what I've done so far:

1. Buy case
2. Find target hardware (Pentium 133, 32 MB of ram. Small hard drive.
3. Download and install MoviX, which is a linux live-cd which can be installed to the hard drive to make a standalone media player.
4. MoviX won't load on the target machine. Start over.
5. Download and install Damn Small Linux. This is an itty bitty little linux distribution that should install on anything
6. Damn Small Linux won't boot on the target machine. Start over.
7. Try both on some other hardware
8. Won't work on any of those either. Start over
9. Boot target machine off of old salvaged hard drive
10. Linux boots. Fast! Hey. I wonder what the root password is on this...
11. Reboot in single-user mode and reset the password.
12. Linux boots! Fast! Yay!
13. It's redhat 5.2. Ask some friends how to get sound working in redhat 5.2
14. They tell me, rather snarkily, to buy a whole new computer costing several hundred dollars to perform the exact same task that a my $25 mp3 player does.
15. Hey. This computer doesn't have a network card. I don't actually need one, but without it, it's going to be a bitch to download the relevant software.
16. Did I mention this computer couldn't boot from the CD-ROM?
17. Decide to have a go at slackware. Hey, there's no isos. I have to download all these files manually?
18. Oh. This mirror has isos. Let me download that
19. Four CDs. Okay. Fine.
20. Estimated time Left: 3 hrs. 46 minutes.

So, I'm not going to get this done today. Sigh.

Personal Thoughts/Projects

By Ross at 12:20 AM | | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

December 05, 2005

My life this weekend, and why the weekly updates are late

My beloved girlfriend had a birthday this weekend. Because she is a wonderful person, she made the long drive down to see me and went on to go to the trivia playoffs with me, as they were, tragically scheduled for her birthday. (Second place, by the way, so we move on to the semifinals). So I had a wonderful weekend with a beautiful woman doing things way more enjoyable than writing in my blog (We watched Love Actually and Pirates of the Carribean). I'll try to update the regular features this week.

The other -- and far less interesting -- thing that is consuming my time this week is Christmas shopping, after a fashion. For the sake of security, I can't say much right now, but I will say this: The world is full of obsolete PCs. It really bugs me that there aren't more sites where you can find interesting things to do with them. I am working to turn a 133ish Mhz Pentium class machine -- this was the machine I used as my primary box not 8 months ago -- into a computer that does exactly one thing, exactly the same thing as a $30 MP3 player.

As it turns out, this is very hard. Ridiculously hard. Comically hard.

As I will outline shortly.

In the mean time, I've added del.icio.us to the badges down the side. You can find out what I've found noteworthy on the internet by clicking it.

Personal Thoughts

By Ross at 10:37 PM | | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

November 25, 2005

Eternity alone, and hardly any swag

[2 points]

As well you know, I am not above occasional self-promotion. I hope it doesn't become too annoying, and I hope that I'll always be able to couch it in something you'll find worthwhile otherwise.

I've mentioned three or so times by now that a few years ago, I wrote a game, Moments out of Time, which won some awards. You can find its specific webpage here, and there's a new thing on that page.

Interactive Fiction as it exists today owes a good 90 percent of its stylistic and technological trappings to the work of Infocom, the company that produced virtually all of the best works of IF to ever come from the commercial era. One of the absolute coolest things about Infocom's games was that they came in a box full of swag.

We call this stuff "feelies". These were little physical and printed objects which had some relevance to the game world. Typically, at least one of them would contain some hint (or, even more frequently, copy protection) to the game, and the rest would just be cute little game-enhancing toys. A Mind Forever Voyaging, this blog's namesake, shipped with a tourist map of the game's location and a pen, branded with the logo of one of the companies mentioned in the game, as well as a couple of other cool things. Infocom's The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy included a "Don't Panic" badge, pocket fluff, orders of destruction for your home and planet, a microscopic space fleet, and peril-sensitive (that is, opaque) sunglasses.

Feelies kinda went the same way that printed manuals did. But, just as you were amazed to find that people still write IF, you'll be amazed to find that a very few IF writers still commission feelies which you can order on-line.

Though technically, I didn't do that. What I did do was to slap the game's logo on some merchandise. And you can now buy said merchandise for a modest fee. I think it's a pretty cool looking logo, and I think that if you liked the game, it makes a nifty clock or coffee mug. Heck, even if you didn't play the game, I think it looks pretty neat on a clock or coffee mug.

So, buy a nifty Moments out of Time T-shirt, click, or mug. You can click on the cafepress badge below, or follow this link: http://www.cafepress.com/streamdive.

In the future, I hope to whip up some more cool swag, and I'll announce any cool new items here. Enjoy!

Personal Thoughts/Writing

By Ross at 01:54 PM | | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

October 09, 2005

I vo, you vo, we all vo for TiVo

So, less than 48 hours after getting the replacement TiVo, it started acting up. A few times an hour, the image would freeze, then the drive would emit an audible 'click', then it'd go back to normal. This came and went, but it seemes to be getting more frequent.

Then, sometimes the encoding would break down during playback. Ghost images, dropped audio, that kind of thing. I am going to assume that this is the same thing, only with the momentary freeze and click happening during recording instead of playback.

So, I considered my choices: call TiVo and deal with all that crap again. Or: take matters into my own hands.

Guess which one I chose.

So yeah, it cost a little more, but Friday afternoon, a 300 GB Maxtor Quickview arrived on my doorstep. Foolishly, I stayed up all night performing a TiVoToMy.

Lessons learned: There is a known issue with some linux kernels not getting past the partition check when probing Maxtor hard drives over 120 GB. This would have been a nice thing for the folks at Weaknees to mention, because I, thinking it was doing the mfs equivalent of an fsck, let it sit there and idle for six hours before I switched it off, did some googling, and found out. So, reboot with DMA turned off. (In case this page turns up in someone's Google search, the answer to your problem is to type "linux ide=nodma" at the boot prompt) Yay! Shell prompt!.

(Oh, another lesson learned: Frankly, cable select is your friend. Turns out that at least two of the drives in my host machine had their master/slave jumpers set, which rather limited my options in terms of how to wire up the drives without changing the laws of physics.)

So, I typed in the magic commands, and it began the transfer. Now, I don't know if it's because I had DMA turned off, or if it had more to do with the fact that 100 GB is a honkin' lot of data, but the instructions I was working from said "This process will take some time." As it turns out, "Some time" means "twenty-nine hours". So about 20 minutes ago, I finished bolting down the drive (Who in the world thought it would be a good idea to use Torx screws? Is it just to keep me out? Because it didn't keep me out. It just pissed me off.

The tivo is back up, and it hasn't clicked yet. I have tried watching some of the salvaged shows, and they still play back in the broken (2) way. For the moment, I choose to assume that this is because the drive hiccuped while recording, and is not a symptom that the brokenness goes beyond the drive. I'll know soon enough, I hope.

One thing I should point out to those who would do this at home: enlarging your drive like this will make the TiVo slower. While this gives me hope, in the sense that, if you will recall, TiVo has the processing power of a 386, so there is no fundamental reason I can't make a PVR out of the pile of ancient computers in the basement, it's a bit annoying, and I may add "increase the TiVo's ram" to my list of future projects. But that involves soldering. Soldering scares me.

Personal Thoughts

By Ross at 05:22 PM | | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

October 05, 2005

The Weapon, Redux

http://photos.trenchcoatsoft.com/thumbnails.php?album=2

New pictures of The Weapon are up. As you can see, I've installed the top and base panels. On the woodworking front, all that's left is the front and tops of the control boxes, then it's drywall, plexiglass and rubberized molding.

And, of course, the delicious computery innards.

Personal Thoughts

By Ross at 09:05 PM | | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

September 21, 2005

We are TiVo. T I V O.

[3 points]

The tivo has returned. The world is a little brighter.

But since I like to complain, here's some things that really bug me about this process:

1. They've been at this for the better part of a decade now. Why can't I use my network for guided setup?
2. Why can't I edit wishlists on my computer, where I have, say, a keyboard, instead of the freaking ouija board thing?
3. Or, indeed, where I could save a backup of my wishlists
4. Eight hours? It's going to take it eight hours?
5. This tivo has approximately the same processing power as the computer I was using in 1995. Why are the minimum specs for a homebrew PVR faster than almost anything I own?
6. STUPID FREAKING OUIJA BOARD
7. Augh! Choke! Walked into the phone cord that's strung across my dining room at neck height.
8. Nobody wants that stupid damn "skip to end" button.
9. For that matter, why did I need to have the damned thing replaced in the first place? This should have been a 45 second fix, tops.

There. Now I feel better, and can go back to programming my tivo.

Personal Thoughts

By Ross at 06:35 PM | | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

September 17, 2005

Everybody lives!

[99 points. It's not hard, but I am in an excellent mood]

I haven't slept in a long time, so I may say more after a nap. But here's the Reader's Digest Version:

It's going to be hard. Don't quite know yet how we're going to handle it. But we're going to. Ladies and gentlemen, we are back together.

As I'm not really coherent right now, that's all I have to say on the matter. Except that I am tired, dizzy, sore, and I can't remember the last time I was this happy.

And since I now know for a fact that she's reading: Miss you already. See you soon