A Mind Occasionally Voyaging: Personal Thoughts Archives

By Ross at 04:01 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

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:

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.

By Ross at 02:22 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

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.

By Ross at 11:28 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

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 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.

By Ross at 01:08 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

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.

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

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.

By Ross at 03:42 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

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 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.

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.

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

By Ross at 08:52 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

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, Personal Thoughts/Projects

By Ross at 12:32 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

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.

By Ross at 12:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

[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/Writing

By Ross at 08:25 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

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)

By Ross at 03:58 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

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

By Ross at 07:58 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

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

By Ross at 01:43 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

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...

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

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.

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

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.

Build a MAME Cabinet in 24 Hours

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

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:

Kudos.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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/Writing

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

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!

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

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.

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

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

The Weapon, Redux

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.

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

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.

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

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

By Ross at 12:56 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Volcano Day

[2 points]

Well, my most popular, or, at least, most cathartic posting (here) is a couple of weeks old now, and in keeping with the slow evolution of my life into a TV show, that means it's time for a sequel.

You will recall that a few weeks ago, the girl with whom I was romantically linked in college (I get that "woman" is really more apropriate than "girl", but every time I see the sentence with the word "woman" in it, the cadence jives wrong) was in town, leading to me seeing her for the first time in several years, and resulting existential angst.

Now, what happened next is an interesting story but not really relevant except insofar as it served as a lens through which to interpret my feelings. What is relevant is what happened after that.

I'm going to see her again this Friday. That's right. She's going to be in town again, and she wants to come out to karaoke again. Yes, karaoke, that miracle healer.

My first thought was, "do not read anything more into this than that she likes karaoke and the show to which I go is, in fact, excellent." My second thought was "Even you can not possibly be that pessimistic." If you trek over into my subconscious, you'll see that my non-waking mind has a different view on the matter.

Exactly what I had feared when she asked to see me weeks ago has come to pass: I can't seem to get her out of my head. This is not really surprising, since it took about a year the last time. Unfortunately, the voices in my head all have different opinions. My conscious mind says "Take this as nothing more than it is: a nice gesture between old friends." My subconscious mind says "Are you blind, man? Hello? Hammer... Useful.... Hammer? [4 points]"

I'm not usually the sort to do cliche and stupid things like making pro/con lists, but I'm also not the sort to do anything at all without worrying about the consequences, so:

Pro: Everyone who is not me who was witness to the last time we hung out together thinks the signs are unequivocal.
Con: My understanding of the reasons that things ended before is not total. My general sense of it is that it was, ultimately, almost but not quite entirely all my fault, and while I think I've grown a lot since then, I am not confident that I will know how to avoid making the same mistakes again.
Pro: My mom and my sister think I should have done it years ago.
Con: She lives two states away
Pro: She likes karaoke
Con: I may come off as insane-stalker-guy.
Pro: (Withheld for dramatic effect)

I can make this list longer I'm sure, but this is as far as the thought experiment ever gets before I hit the thought that makes all the other ones irrelevant.

Looking back over the things I've written this past year, it seems like if I have a literary gift, it's the gift of circumlocution. Whenever I talk about my own feelings or opinions, I'm circituitous about it. I think it comes back to my faith in words. If I don't say it, if I leave myself some room, I'm not tied down. It's not quite real. Safe. Also, it's not like I have infinite time before she happens upon this blog, boosting its readership into, well, single digits.

But there are things in this life that it's worth taking a chance on. I think this is one of them. So I'm going to admit it to myself, and I'm going to admit it to all of you. I don't know what's going to come of it. And I don't know how to go about it. Hell, I can't even guarantee that I won't chicken out even if I do work out exactly how to approach this. But I have to take the chance. Make it real.

Pro: I really, really want to.

I guess that's it then. The other stuff kinda pales in comparison. I started writing this entry days ago, and it hasn't been easy. What comes after this is even harder, and I don't know how to do it (Advice?). But even if I can't make it happen, I am going to try. So in this place and on this date, I'm going to say it, if to no one else but myself.

I want to get back together with her.

Now I just have to work out how.

Two days till volcano day.

By Ross at 10:44 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Tivo: And the Legend Continues

As you know, Tivo and I have been having some unlove recently. I missed The Daily Show last night. I almost missed the Gilmore Girls season premiere. I am running out of DVDs to watch during the dead hours.

But now, at least, I know why. PVRBlog reports that TiVo can now stop you from keeping your recordings.

I like to think that I'm a man of taste, culture, and morality, and I hope that rubs off. So, my natural conclusion is that my Tivo killed itself out of shame.

DRM has its place in the world, don't get me wrong. Even though I don't think that what we term "Intellectual Property" is really "property" in any meaningful sense, nor that copyright infringement is "stealing" does not mean that I think it's okay, or that I dispute that it is and ought to be illegal.

But let us get this straight: the purpose of DRM today is not to protect copyright. It is (as, for example, the XRML specification says) nothing more and nothing less than a mechanism to enable new business models.

It's not a matter of "Now we have a way to protect our media from those evil pirates!" Instead, it's "Hell's Bells! Before, we had to actually sell you a physical copy of the movie, which you could watch as often as you wanted! But now, we can charge you for things we had to give away before. We can charge you for every viewing! We can charge you extra to pause! Double fees if you rewind! An extra charge for turning the volume up too high!"

The real problem, for me, is that the technology isn't being driven by what the consumers want. It's being driven by what the industry wants. How many consumers want this? None. None at all. We get what they want us to have. And what recourse do we have? A few of the really clever among us might have something, but not most.

Remember Divx? Not the Mpeg-4 codec (that's DiVx); I'm talking about the DVD-competitor. Their schtick was that you'd only pay $5 or so for the discs, but they'd bill you a dollar every time you watched it.

If you remember, it also failed spectacularly. But I'm not boycotting Tivo, and neither are you, are you?

However, please leave a comment if you have evidence that you can build a PVR out of a <200Mhz computer (It only has to record; I can handle playback externally). Because I'm really thinking of building a MythTV or Freevo or something.

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

By Ross at 12:53 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The Weapon

Previously, on A Mind Occasionally Voyaging, I had a plan.

Well, it's time for me to crow about my progress. So, here are grainy, low-resolution photographs taken with my cell phone's camera. I present, for your vieing approval, the project:

By Ross at 09:06 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I am, as it turns out, the man.

Humphrey Bogart
You scored 33% Tough, 14% Roguish, 33% Friendly, and 19% Charming!

You're the original man of honor, rough and tough but willing to stick your neck out when you need to, despite what you might say to the contrary. You're a complex character full of spit and vinegar, but with a soft heart and a tender streak that you try to hide. There's usually a complicated dame in the picture, someone who sees the real you behind all the tough talk and can dish it out as well as you can. You're not easy to get next to, but when you find the right partner, you're caring and loyal to a fault. A big fault. But you take it on the chin and move on, nursing your pain inside and maintaining your armor...until the next dame walks in. Or possibly the same dame, and of all the gin joints in all the world, it had to be yours. Co-stars include Ingrid Bergman and Lauren Bacall, hot chicks with problems.

Find out what kind of classic dame you'd make by taking the Classic Dames Test.

My test tracked 4 variables How you compared to other people your age and gender:

You scored higher than 66% on Tough

You scored higher than 35% on Roguish

You scored higher than 55% on Friendly

You scored higher than 21% on Charming

Link: The Classic Leading Man Test written by gidgetgoes on Ok Cupid

[1 point]: I don't mind a parasite. I object to a cut-rate one.

By Ross at 01:25 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Tivoed

Well, there's nothing tech support can do about it. So they're going to exchange it.

Now, I could have opened the thing up and fiddled with the drive -- if nothing else, I could replace the hard drive and salvage the shows (not to mention my wishlists -- why can't they give me a program to do really sophisticated scheduling over the computer, where I have, say, a keyboard?), but then they wouldn't do the exchange.

So I am out:

$49 for the replacement
$5.75 FedEx
$2.89 for the box (The Tivo's original box having been discarded in the great basement cleaning incident of last month)
$3.50 gasoline to Kinkos and back
2 hours on the phone
1.5 hours at Kinkos (!)
1 copy of the MacGyver episode "Hell Week"
1 copy of the made-for-TV movie The Librarian
1 rather good parking space

But I feel purged at the least. Now I just have to see if they'll credit me the service for the days I am bereft of tivo.

Gee. Technology sure makes our lives easier.

By Ross at 09:32 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The day the Tivo died

Isn't it just the way? My tivo went crazy and is now stuck in a reboot-green screen-reboot cycle. Called tech support, and was told to let it grind for three hours and call back. I wish there was some kind of password I could give tech support lines when I called to let them know I wasn't an idiot. That green screen is generated by the filesystem checker. If the screen stayed green, the FS checker would be running, and there's be a chance that it would fix the problem. But it's cycling. This means that the FS checker is dying without fixing the problem. After three hours, it's not going to be any better, and I'm not going to be any closer to a solution.

And I know the next bit too. Send the DVR to us, we'll fix it, charge you shipping, and send it back. This will take a couple of weeks. Now, there is a chance (provided the drive isn't, after nine months, borked. This is possible I suppose, since recording video all the time certainly does spin the drive a lot. But it's only nine months old at the outside) that I could fix the problem myself by popping the drive out and running some diagnostic tools on it. But, of course, you're not supposed to go opening up consumer electronics, and I do not want warranty trouble. SO I'll send it to them, and they will slap in a new hard drive. This means I will lose all the stuff on that drive, including my favortie Macgyver episode and a TV movie I'd been hoping they would show ever since I got the thing, and which they just did last night and I never got the chance to watch it. And, of course, they won't just send me the replacement drive, even though it would take me approximately eighteen seconds to install it by myself.

And this is the week the network season starts up. So I am going to miss out on the tivoey goodness of tivoing all my favorite shows which have just started up.

On top of all this, I've got one of those damn 20 hour skull-cracking headaches from sleeping on my neck wrong. And my NecroTech just got killed again.

I know that none of the problems in my life are really all that big (I mean, except for the big ones), but it's like when I was cleaning up my basement last week: the piles of boxes and ancient computers took a day or so to clean up. The small pieces of life-flotsam took the balance of the time. A billion styrofoam packing peanuts are as much work to clean up as a dozen boxes of old clothes. It takes as much time and effort to deal with a whole bunch of little things as it does do deal with a couple of big things. Like Sam Spade said, "Maybe some of them don't matter, but look at the number of them." The camel's back is loaded with straws, and each new one makes it shudder.

The most worrisome part of it is that there is a (small) glimmer of hope, which I will discuss at length when the mood strikes me to be able to do it justice. Each bad thing that happens (What I've talked about here is the tip of the iceberg) makes that glimmer more dear to me, which is cute and all, but when you start investing so much importance on a hope (especially one whose exact probability of turning out well), you can set yourself up for a fall.

If this doesn't work out, I really think I'm going to lose it.

And I watch too much damned TV anyway.

By Ross at 12:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Spinoff! Is there any word more thrilling to the human soul?

Ladies and Gentlemen, I HAVE A PROJECT. Those of you who know me (I have a total readership of what, three?) know that, my natural sloth aside, I really like building things. I also really like repurposing things in true MacGyver fashion. I'm also a pack-rat.

Now, I recently spent a week or so organizing my basement. The results were amazing. A whole bunch of Home Despot shelf systems and a whole lot of sweat later, and my entire history has been compacted from "gigantic pile of crap in my basement" to "carefully organized alcove of crap forming a de facto partition dividing my basement into a laundry room, room of storage, and other room". A side effect of this is that there is now a space approximately the same size as my living room in the basement with nothing in it.

I like clutter. It's just a thing about me. I like rooms full of stuff. Having a big empty space in my basement just will not do. I needed a project.

Now, I could install a pool table, but, well, I don't play pool. Also, pool isn't much fun alone, and I can't guarantee guests to play with, since it doesn't happen often. Most importantly, I live in a townhouse. It's about ten feet wide. A pool table would maybe fit, but it'd be tight and difficult to play. Now, I could install a bumper-pool table. But, um, no one plays bumper-pool.

So, what can I contrive to fill the basement? I need something that is fun solo, fun at a party, and, above all, cheap. Hm. I've got a pile of ancient computers. I've got power tools. I've got lots of scrap lumber. And I've got a plan.

Okay. Here's the deal. You know that scene in Apollo 13 where they point out how amazing it is that they could build a computer that fits in a single room? That computer had almost, but not quite as much processing power as a modern graphing calculator. So, I've got a pile of ancient computers, but they're still a zillion times more powerful than computers of the 70s and early 80s. From this, I developed my plan.

I am going to build a video arcade. In fact, I'm going to build a cocktail cabinet arcade, using ancient computers to emulate real old-school video consoles. I've got plans for a Ms. Pac-Man cocktail cabinet, which I will modify based on the specific dimensions I need, insert an ancient computer with emulators installed, liberally mix with the coolest joystick ever, and provide a real old-timey arcade experience.

I will post more details as work progresses, but for right now, I am contriving the games. I plan to pack as much game as I can into this thing, but I'm starting with the original Nintendo Entertainment System. So I went out, got a bunch of ROMs, and am now in the process of sorting through them. And playing through these old games of my youth has reminded me of two things:

1. My god that music is bad.
2. Man, I really liked some of these games. Why aren't there more?

So, here's a list of games whose franchises have not lasted into the modern era, but which I really hope will reappear in new gamecubey 64-bit glory:

1. Kid Icarus
2. Bionic Commando
3. A Boy and His Blob
4. Bomberman
5. Wizards and Warriors
6. Blaster Master

And on the other hand, I played "The 3D Adventures of World Runner". When I was a kid, this game was amazing and excellent. It would totally not work at all now. Shame.

Anyway, 10,701 games left to consider. Wish me luck.

Oh, and the title? [.5 points].

Let the games begin.

By Ross at 07:06 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (1)

It never rains but it pours

Hello again, gentle reader. I was planning to write you last week, but I decided to take some time to try to process what's happened to me since I blogged last.

Unfortunately, I still haven't come to peace with it, so I'm going to editorialize somewhat less than is my habit, and just tell you what happened.

They say that when the gods want to punish us, they answer our prayers.

As you know, Bob, two weeks ago, an old flame I hadn't seen in a long time was in town and we spent some time together. After I wrote this on the subject, she came out to trivia and it was just about as akward and pleasant (yes, both). We parted amicably at the end of the evening and I'm still all angsty and confused. Now, the reports of my various friends who were witness to these evenings tells me that perhaps I was mistaken in not making some kind of move, and as a result I find myself wondering whether the fact that I held back is due more to my determination to "do the right thing" or my natural cowardice. But this is only tangentially relevant to the topic of this article.

Guess what happened the very next day?

Now, I don't want to sound like the 40 year old virgin or anything (least of all because I'm only 26). I've dated a number of women, had several flings, but I've only been in two really serious romantic relationships.

All the same, I think it's an extraordinary coincidence that the very next day, the percentage of my former girlfriends who I've spoken to recently went up to 100%.

Yes, folks, the other one called me the next day. Some background: I started seeing ex #2 late in 2002, basically right after I finished recovering from the previous breakup (Yeah, it did take a while. First love, you know). I tried my best, but at some level, I'm fairly sure she was always more into me than I was into her, though our actions belied this. What we had seemed very much like a long-distance relationship, even though she only lived about ten miles away. She had some medical problems I won't go into and as a result never wanted to go out -- which is really fine by me; my karaoke habits aside, I'd really much rather spend an evening at home doing cuddly domestic things anyway. But she didn't just not want to go out; she didn't want to stay in either, at least not with me. And she didn't want me to go out either, which was the really strange bit: she wanted us to just stay in. Independently. There were other rather sketchy things about our relationship that to anyone more perceptive than me would have sent up a bright red flag emblazoned with the words "GET OUT OF DODGE, FAST". But I hung on, convinced that if I could just stick it out a little bit longer, things would be okay. But they weren't, and she finally cut me loose when I disagreed that the solution to our problems was to get engaged. You know, I don't even think she really meant to break up with me: it seems that some women will break up with you just to win a fight, and you're expected to come begging your way back so that she can be magnanimous and accept you. Only I didn't, because I was not really all that upset at being dumped. That was December of 2003. (Truly, December is the cruelest month. 2000: My first love breaks up with me. 2001: Threw my back out. 2002: Lost a job. 2003: Second girlfriend breaks up with me. 2004: Threw my back out, again. This is why I'm so unpleasant at Christmas.)

Anyway, over the next several months, we did this little dance: she'd call me up, ask if I was "still mad at her", I'd say no because I, well, wasn't. She'd ask if I wanted to get back together. I'd say no. She'd get angry and tell me how horribly I treated her, how shallow and immateur I was, and how much better off she was without me. Repeat every 4-6 weeks until August, at which point she asked if I wanted her to just leave me alone and never talk to me again. Now, she'd asked before, and I had always said that, no, I didn't want her not to ever call me again. This is because I didn't. Which is not to say that I did want her to call me again; I honestly had no feelings one way or the other. This is what was wrong with our relationship: by the end of it, I didn't feel anything for her. One way or the other. At the time, I didn't feel this was a good enough reason to break up with her, and maybe that was wrong of me, but, well, I didn't want to break up with her -- like I said, I had no opinion one way or the other on the matter. But it seemed like it was better than being alone, and I held out hope that I might start feeling something again if I just stuck it out. But when she finally asked me that time in August, I decided that I'd had enough. I had tried to be honest, tried not to lead her on, but she wasn't getting it. So I told her: While I personally did not mind if she kept calling me, I thought it would probably be best for her if she just stopped and got on with her life because I had no more uncertain terms in which to tell her that I did not want her back.

And that was the last I heard from her. Untill two weeks ago Monday, the day after I saw my first ex-girlfriend. What, has my life turned into an episode of Charles in Charge or something?

So, she called me up, and was surprised when I didn't yell at her and hang up -- as if I had ever done anything in my entire life to lead her to believe that I would do something like that. She went on at some length about how much "better" she was now, and how she wished she had not met me until now, since she's in a much better emotional place at the moment. And she asked if she could see me, and come out to Karaoke that Friday. Now, obviously, I have no power to stop anyone who likes from coming out to karaoke, but I thought that bit would be weird and awkward and I wasn't thrilled by the prospect. She could not comprehend this. She thought I meant that my friends would get into a fight with her. I told her this was not what I meant, but could not explain in any terms she could understand why I thought this would be strange (Perhaps it is indeed something hard to understand. What do you think, gentle reader? I suspect she was just being obtuse).

But I did agree, not being able to think of any good reason why not, to meet her for dinner during the week. As before, this was not because I actively wanted to see her, but rather because she wanted to see me and I had no objection. I mean, it would have been rude to refuse her.

So I saw her. Now, I know what she wanted to happen, but at the time, I didn't quite. I swear to God I was not trying to lead her on, but she seemed to have gotten it into her head that I would, on seeing her, reverse my previous position, take her up in my arms, profess my undying love, take her home with me, and bed her (But kudos to her on bringing her own contraceptives just in case). I like to think that it marks me as a man of integrity that, once I discovered this, one I knew that I was pretty much guaranteed sex if I just said the magic phrase, that I did not lie to her, claim to want to get back together with her, and use this to, irm, fulfill some of my baser urges. It would have been easy enough, and after the treatment she'd given me in the past, I know a lot of people would have forgiven me had I done it. But I had told myself I wasn't going to lie to her, so I didn't. She had a hard time accepting this, and told me so. What I did tell her was that I did not want to be in a serious relationship at the moment (which I think is technically true. However, I will grant that I left out the fact that I am confident that the right person could sway me from this course), but that if I did, I would not automatically exclude her from the running, and I was not opposed to trying to build a relationship again from scratch. But this was not what she wanted to hear, so she didn't. Instead, she persisted with the notion that she could by sheer force of will, instantly become my steady girlfriend again instantaneously. So she asked me again every five minutes whether I was ready to be in a relationship now.

She did not come out to karaoke, which surprised me more than it should have, since by the end of the night I had given her my blessing to do so. But the next night, as I was, again, at karaoke with my friends, she called me every five minutes to ask me to meet her at some other bar where she was hanging out. I told her that I had made plans with my friends and that I would try to meet her there if I got out of things earlier. Of course, this was not what she wanted to hear, and became enraged: why was I being "so ignorant to her"? (note: few things annoy me more than people who use 'ignorant' to mean 'rude') Why wouldn't I brush my friends off to be with her? This, in her mind, clearly meant that I did not care at all about her.

Over the course of these increasingly irate phone calls, she eventually asked me two questions, neither of which she ought to have, but which I answered honestly:

Q: What did your friends think about me calling you?
A: My friends think that you are a nice enough person but you are not at all right for me.

This set her off. "Well I guess this means I should give up trying because you always do what your friends say!" she insisted. Now, the evidence for this in our past history is that my friends have always thought that about her, and I have tried to defend them to her, rather than just accepting her incorrect hypothesis that they just hate her and I should stop hanging out with them, in favor of not hanging out with her (really. She threatened to break up with me if I didn't not-hang-out with them one night. I said "Okay. Can I come hang out with you instead?" "No. If you really love me, why can't you just stay in by yourself every night?"). Now, I will concede that I often agree with the opinions of my friends. This is part of why I count these people "friends". That's what "friends" means. But I have never made a point of letting my friends make my decisions for me. I could have gotten away with this, but she asked the next question:

Q: When you saw me yesterday, didn't it bring back some of those old feelings?
A: No.

Now, yes. Maybe I am cold for not getting all cuddly and nostalgic upon seeing her again. But is there some law that says that I have to be attracted to her? I just didn't feel anything. And maybe I could have if we had worked at it, but right at that moment, I did not, and I think being honest about it was the right thing to do. I tried to explain this. I wasn't saying that I could never feel anything for her again, just that I'm not some kind of love-machine who can switch it on and off at request. But all she heard was "You're not getting your own way," so I got an angry voice mail telling me -- it's like she was reading from a script -- "No one's ever treated me as badly as you did. We could have really had something. You don't know what you're missing. You always do what your friends say," etc. Now, I am very bothered by this. I mean, given that I was not interested, what sort of response would have made her happy? Would she have been happier had I lied, claimed I felt something I didn't? Or perhaps if I had coated my feelings in so much sugar that I gave her false hope? Ultimately, I think that she was angry at me for not loving her, and that's incredibly unfair to me. I mean, if it was something I could choose, then, well, why not? I mean, I've been in love with someone who didn't love me. It's not very pleasant. So if I could choose to fall in love with someone, I think "she loves me as well" would be near the top of my list of reasons.

But since we're in this weird sitcommy plot, it's got me thinking. The thing that keeps me from regretting not having tried to start something new with ex #1 (I want to point out, I don't think of them like this in my head; I just don't think it'd be right to use names in this forum) is the fact that I keep imagining myself as being in the opposite position, because I know for a fact that if you are the person trying to initiate the, um, unbreakup, you run the risk of looking like a psychopath.

Wow. You are seriously not going to believe this. She just called me. Right now. She's sorry about getting so angry. Do I feel any different now? Right. Do I mind if she keeps calling? No, I don't mind. Do I want her to keep calling? Really don't care one way or the other. Why am I being so "ignorant to her"?

Here we go again...

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By Ross at 08:54 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (1)

Brought to you by the number 5 and the letter Ex

So, maybe this was a dumb thing to do, but I did it anyway.

About five years ago, I was in a relationship with a girl, probably the happiest one I've had. It ultimately ended, for a lot of reasons, some of which I understand and agree with, others which even now I haven't quite gotten my mind around. But that's always the way and really beside the point.

The point, as usual, is karaoke.

She's in town this weekend and called me to see if we could hang out. Now, I've never really gotten the whole "being friends with exes" thing. Maybe there's something actually wrong with me, but I can't exactly work out why, having broken up with someone, you'd want to be friends. But more importantly, I can't work out how. The whole idea of trying to relate to someone on that level once you've got a history like that just seems strange and alien.

So I had some misgivings, but I invited her to karaoke anyway. I'm not sure what exactly I was afraid of. Maybe that seeing her again would open all the old wounds. It took me a long time to get over her. I recover slowly from broken hearts. Maybe I was worried that I wouldn't know how to relate to her.

Whatever it was, what I had was a pleasant time with an old friend.

But...

Saying that I had a pleasant time with an old friend is not to say that it wasn't still very strange. The main thing that troubled me, really troubled me, wasn't that the old pain was still there. It's that it wasn't.

And this was a problem, because without that pain, what was left? Well, what was left was that I spent the evening with an attractive young woman who is exactly the sort of person I'd like to be involved with. More than that, as we've both grown as people over the last few years, my impression is that she's even more the sort of person I'd like to be involved with now than she was at the time. It's not that I'm still in love with her but that it seemed like I could so easily fall in love with her again. In fact, if she had been anyone else, I'd have been strongly tempted to ask her out.

But of course, I didn't, because we'd already tried that. That's the really weird part. That it was so much like the old days and yet irrevocably not.

I don't know. Maybe I'm making too much of things. After all, it's not like there's some kind of law that says I couldn't have just asked her out again (provided I wasn't such a coward. At this point, I think a rejection would be hard to survive.). In any case, I think the aftermath of tonight is going to be with me for a while.

That said, do I regret seeing her again? I don't want to. I'm not sure. That's why this merits my ponderings: I literally do not know how I feel -- and isn't that itself a pretty strange state of affairs?

Inappropriate Thoughts will return Sunday, but before I go, since I have a long history of trivializing things that are deep and worthy of contemplation with a pithy one-liner, here's the inappropriate thought that kept coming to me tonight:

We went out on our last date on December 11, 2000. I really wish I hadn't fought her for the check.

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By Ross at 02:46 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (2)

Moments out of Context

Before I begin, I'd like to mention that the title of this article is a title that's been proposed to me more than once for a parody of my game. For those of you with money on this, it took me 12 entries to get around to hawking my game. Yes, I'm a whore. Of course I'm a whore; the whole reason I started this blog is because a cute girl at a party recently said, "You're so funny. Do you have a blog?"

So, on with the show. I think that we tend to associate people with a context (But then I think rain is wet, so who am I to judge? [1 point]) Maybe you've found yourself in this position before: You run in to someone. You know you know them. You know you know them well enough that you shouldn't be in this position. But you can't for the life of you remember who they are and how the hell you know them.

Here's what happened to me at karaoke saturday:

I came in at the appointed hour. As usual, my regular gang was seated, many of them finishing dinner. There were also a group of young women at the end of the table, all pleasant to behold. I gather that one of them is dating the son of one of my Karaoke Amigos, which had something to do with why they were there. One of them stands up, greets me by name, comments on how long it's been since we've seen each other, shows off her shiny new engagement ring and-don't-I-know-it's-been-a-long-time-coming.

Now, because seating was tight, I spent the next four hours sitting next to this girl, making small talk and chit-chat with a very personable woman while, for the life of me, I could remember how the hell I knew her.

And, of course, the awkward part of this is that it was clear that she remembered me, so I couldn't really cop to now having a clue to who she was.

I mean, I could have; I had the physical power to form the question. But, come on. What would you have done? How do you phrase the question: "Sorry, I have no idea who the hell you are. Could you help me out here?" "Clearly, our last meeting was more memorable for you than it was for me. Who are you?" "You seem to be mistaking me for, um, me." It's awkward. It's embarrasing. It's easier to just play along and hope it comes to you before you say something revealing (For example, it would be embarrasing if you said, "So, have you ever been to Spain?" only to have her respond, "Um, yeah. It's where we met."). I'm pretty good at this anyway, since I was not blessed with a particularly good ability to distinguish conversations in a crowd. As a result, I often find myself answering questions with vague, enigmatic and contentless statements, in order to cover up the fact that I couldn't hear the question (Because it gets annoying to say "What?" five times to every statement.). Yeah. Of course. Well, you know. Hard to say.

It finally did come to me. I dated her cousin. Seriously. For over a year. There was talk of marriage. But it doesn't always. About seven years ago, I bumped into someone at the K-mart, who said "Hi," and "How are you?" and "Long time no see," and to this day, I have no idea who this woman was (That's actually a lie. As I started writing this column, seven years later, it occured to me who she was: she was the clerk at the gas station I usually filled up at while I was in high school.)

I'm not really going anywhere with this, just something I wanted to point out. Until next time.

I've never actually been to Spain. But I kinda like the music.

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By Ross at 10:36 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Kamikazioke

Okay. I have a confession to make. This is not going to be a shocking confession, because everyone reading these pages right now already knows, and, through the miracle of reverse chronological organization, everyone who shows up later will probably have already heard this.

"Music is a religion; Karaoke is a cult." I, gentle readers, am a cultist.

Three nights a week (Recently up from two. I just don't get the same high I used to) I shuffle off to the four corners of the earth (Well, Dundalk, Essex, and Perry Hall. But driving past the sewage treatment plant on a hot summer night is enough to make you wish you've driven off the edge of the earth. Or, if you are a slightly more level-headed person, wish they would[2 points]) to drink beer and sing badly (Actually, I sing rather well. The classic notion of karaoke being a bunch of drunken businessmen singing badly is largely fictional. Hardly any of us are businessmen.) with the finest karaoke host in the business.

The human competitive spirit is strong, and so it shouldn't be surprising that one hugely successful venture at my regular show is a competition.

Now, your first guess is probably that this would be a simple singing competition, in which the person who does the least insult to his favorite artist's career is rewarded. Well, that's only partially true. The competion of which I speak is a clever little gimmick they call "Suicide Karaoke", and yes, you are judged, more or less, on your ability to sing without sucking.

But here's the twist: It is not until the moment the song begins that you know what song you'll be endeavouring not to murder. The song is selected at random from the host's catalog of about 450 discs spanning all known genres, epochs, and other metrics of taste. The first song is selected by the host's wife, and subsequent songs are chosen by the preceeding competitor. You might find yourself singing a song you know (I was once dealt my own "wheelhouse" song, Tommy Tutone's 867-5309/Jenny), a song you've never heard of before, or (and I think this sort of the Platonic Ideal) a song it would never occur to you to sing, but which you turn out to be really good at (This hardly ever happens). The fates tend to deal me a lot of 60s female country vocalists. Whatever comes up, you are compelled to sing, however inappropriate (There is an exception made, and a redraw allowed, in the rare case that someone is dealt a duet, because, c'mon, that's just unfair)

There are upsides and downsides to this method. I think it would be hard to run a straightforward karaoke context on a regular basis, since all the regulars would just always sing their best songs, and, barring accident or illness, I'm not going to belt out the seven magic digits any better or worse than I ever do, so we'd all pretty much end up placing in the same position week after week. Of course, someone who is really good can get shafted -- the big guy with a voice to rival Pavoratti can draw Madonna, and what's he going to do with that? But such is the luck of the draw. What it comes down to, and I'm not sure whether or not I like this, is that it's really the song that's being judged. I happen to think that one of the songs I did recently, I sang very well indeed, but it just wasn't a very popular song to begin with, and my ratings suffered. Ultimately, I guess, it's no more or less fair than any game of chance, a lottery or a slot machine, but with the added chance of Public Humiliation (Like the time I had to sing Somewhere Over the Rainbow -- though the very next week I went to see the film 50 First Dates, the end theme to which was a male singer covering the selfsame song) -- but this is karaoke after all, and it's not a hobby that attracts a lot of people with a low threshhold for public humiliation

I collected my second win tonight, which was a long time coming, after drawing Achy Breaky Heart in the first round and The Search Is Over in the second. I think I've done better, personally (The Search Is Over I've actually tried before, so I went in knowing it was way too high for my deep, sexy baritone), but the fates were clearly backing me, since the runner-up's second round draft was Jewel's Hands, while his wife failed to place after forgetting that the H is silent in the phrase, "I'm Henry the Eighth, I am."

But I'm not writing this article to brag (well, not just to brag). I'm writing it for the benefit of anyone out there who runs a singing show of their own, because if they decide to get into the action and the surefire crowd-pleasing that is Suicide Karaoke, I want kickbacks.

Now, I've occasionally suggested that "Suicide Karaoke" is not the ideal name for this event -- I think more often than not, it's really "Homicide Karaoke," because nine times out of ten, the song gets murdered. However, I mentioned this event to some friends tonight, and one of them came up with a name so funny, I just like to keep saying it over and over: Kamikazioke.

And that's why I'm writing this column.

I guess it's a nice day for a white wedding after all.

(PS. As I was writing this, a name I like almost as much occurred to me, and since this one is my own invention, I'm gonna share it. Hari-Karioke)

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