media stuff

Beautiful Katamari: 10/26/07
Ace Combat 6: 11/13/07

I have to say the Heroes finale was kind of a letdown. The last two episodes of the season just couldn't keep my full attention.

now all i hear is tearing of paper

Now that the futon situation is at least contained thanks to metal plates, my new domestic project is to spruce up my balcony. I didn't have a proper one in Corvallis so I'd like to make good use of this one now that the weather is getting nice. The biggest change I am trying to make is to use mosquito netting to screen it off (at least mostly) so I don't have to worry about bugs or leaves and seeds blowing in. This is actually a bigger challenge than it may sound. I have already been through two iterations and still have not found a suitable way to mount the nets. I was hoping to finish that tonight but I have to let my blokish ingenuity simmer on that one. Perhaps metal plates are involved.

computer h8, part II

I have too much Microsoft in my life right now. My computer is under control, and the Xbox 360 works pretty well by itself, but getting the two to talk together is a pain in the ass. The most annoying bit is that in order to stream music to the Xbox I have to use the Zune software. Even though I don't have one of the damned things. Unlike iTunes for the iPod, which actually works really well, the Zune software is the worst thing in the world. It takes forever to load, keeps trying to rescan the same folders over and over, doesn't organize things properly, and the stupid network sharing service takes up 40 megs of my precious RAM. God forbid if Vista got mixed up in this somehow.

As long as I'm hating on computer stuff, I'd also like to give a shout out to Creative, who can't make an Audigy 2 that won't make mysterious static drown everything out in San Andreas. At the moment my sound drivers have completely failed for no reason. I did see some heartening news recently, which said that sound cards are becoming endangered because it is now possible to do 7.1 Dolby surround sound without dedicated hardware. I was worried I would have to settle for another Creative product in my future supercomputer, but maybe I won't after all.

Since I got the 360 I'm not in as much of a hurry to build a new computer. I did see that Hitachi finally put a 1TB drive on the market, but apparently it's relatively loud and uses a fair amount of power. Which I suppose should be expected from the leading edge. Still, the only thing I've decided on for the new computer is the case, an Antec P180.

look to my left and you'll see where i tried

So I got an Xbox 360 a couple of weeks ago. I have to say that Dead Rising does a fantastic job of desensitizing you to zombies. I had to start playing the game slowly because it freaked me out and now I've beaten Overtime Mode and gotten Zombie Genocider. The only other decent 360 game I've played so far is Test Drive Unlimited. I got a bunch of demos off Xbox Live but none of them were very good. Guess I'm stuck until Ace Combat 6 and the new Katamari game come out.

computer h8

I had a bit of a scare today at work when I messed up my work computer. I had changed some network setting so when I tried to log in it couldn't talk to the company network and it wouldn't log me on. I was about to call in the IT guys when I figured out there was no password for admin on the local machine, so I was able to get in and fix the network without anyone knowing. The irony is that I messed up the computer while renaming it Ephialtes, which I had picked because I knew it would eventually betray me. So the machine and I have a mutual h8 now.

these missiles you bubble wrap

Well I just figured out why the font is always so freaking tiny when I post. Something to do with the stupid template. I don't really want to mess with it but I can try and correct for it from now on.

Tomorrow is Friday! I have a much greater appreciation for them now that I am working full time. I even get to wear jeans.

My boss gets back tomorrow, this will be the first time he's been around since I started working. I think I have gotten quite a bit accomplished, but I couldn't do the main task he set out for me because the manufacturers are being snooty.

I finally got access to test data yesterday, but it's in another building so I've been running back and forth to upload the latest copy to the network. This isn't going to work if it starts pouring so I wrote a batch file to automatically copy the file to the network every 15 minutes.

I also started writing up some of the basic framework for my final report. My thesis. It's kind of scary because this is part of the end. It's about time.

Unfortunately I have yet to see the best part of having a real job (or something like it), a decent paycheck. My first payday isn't until next week. After that I might head down to Fry's to spend a bit of it, but mostly I need to start saving back up again after the move, especially since the financial aid office at OSU is being bitchy about the last part of my student loan.

Car sighting of the day: Lotus Elise.

from where i sit none of it seems real

I remember when I was taking a computer science class that the teacher explained we use a decimal system of numbers because we have ten fingers, and that if we had eight fingers we'd probably use octal. But really, we don't count on our hands in decimal. We count in unary. You need ten fingers to count to ten. It would be a major improvement in finger-numeral efficiency even just to move up to binary. That way the maximum number you could count to on one hand would be 31, and for both hands it would be 1023, not 10. Just...be careful where you're pointing when you get to 4 or 128. It probably seems really strange at first but I bet it's like Top Gear steering, it becomes second nature because it's a better way to do things.

It has been a slow couple of days on the car-watching front. I did see the red NSX the other day, but since then I've been struggling even to tally a few Porsches, although I have been seeing enough Land Rovers that I'm wondering if I should tally those too.

but does that mean i have to walk on water

I have been meaning to update for a while, and have even gotten as far as logging in to this, but couldn't actually think of anything to post.

Today has been quite a car-spotting day. First I saw a BMW 830Ci on my way out to some stores. I didn't even know there was an 8-series. Then I saw a Corvette C6 Z06 coming out of Fred Meyer, and in the parking lot itself was an Aston Martin DB7 Vantage. I really need to start taking my camera everywhere I go.

Those cars were on top of the million 911s I see all the time. There are Porsches around here like there are Jettas around a college campus. In Corvallis I once decided to count how many Jettas I could see on the ten minute walk into campus, and the record was 13. I'm tempted to start doing the same thing with Porsches. I think I might start keeping a car-watching journal.

In other news, I finished one week of my internship. Only 12 to go. My regular boss is out for the first two weeks so nobody really knows what to do with me, but I have been making progress. They didn't really give me anything to do so I've been doing literature research and poking around the compnay intranet, generally getting up to speed on everything that is going on.

Also, I got a grill this week, so I've been trying to learn how to grill stuff properly.

everything looks perfect from far away

Well, that's it. I am in Lake Oswego and getting settled. My new apartment is pretty huge and is only a 10 minute non-highway drive from where I'll be doing my internship.

I got my DSL up and running yesterday after some confusion - Qwest actually turned my DSL on first thing in the morning, but botched the programming, so I thought they hadn't turned it on at all. After some slightly irate phone calls after 5 one guy was helpful enough to get the DSL people on the line and fix it.

I am still getting used to the area. If I didn't have my GPS I would probably die of starvation because I still don't know where most of the stores are. That thing has earned its keep several times over during the move. At least there are stores here.

electrical devices that transfer energy from one circuit to another by magnetic coupling

TRANSFORMERS.

Because the only thing cooler than a Veyron...

...is a Veyron with rocket launchers.