knowing everything could come undone

I found my grad school acceptance letters for Purdue and UCSD. I pitched them. It's stupid to play what if.

but all i hear are low sounds

It snowed last night. Apparently it all got dumped around 5AM because it definitely wasn't looking that way when I was out last night. So the first thing I did was drop everything, get around and go driving. I needed groceries at some point and I don't patronize the hippie mart because they don't carry things like pasteurized processed grape food. I also hurried to catch the heathen window when the few brave souls that were out would be at church. The roads were pretty treacherous - it just came down as light puffy snow but it just got mashed into the ground because Portland has almost no anti-snow infrastructure. I did make it to the grocery store in town and back in one piece. I had to drive quite slow but somehow was still passing Land Rovers. It's been a while since I drove on snow. It reminds me of home.

waiting for the light to come back

My new camera showed up earlier this week. Unfortunately it's always dark after I get back from work so I haven't been able to get out and play with it yet. I have tried it out a little though. It feels cheaper than I thought, which is pretty lame for the king of the A-series. Also I'm used to my old camera's manual flash open so I have to get used to autoflash again. It also has face detection, and was smart enough to work on an episode of Top Gear.

of another place and time

I finally stopped playing Spore and have been playing Fallout 3 instead. I picked it up just because everyone else was raving about it, but I was really more interested in Red Alert 3. However the night I got the games my internet was down, which means I couldn't activate RA3 (thanks, brave new world of PC copy protection) so I got a jump on Fallout. And I have to say I'm impressed.

I beat the main storyline fairly handily but that's not really the point of the game. It's an open-world RPG and they want you to explore so much that the secondary quests have the same achievement scores as the primary ones. I never played the first two games so I'm having a hard time getting a feel for the game. I keep expecting it to have scary things jump out everywhere, like any other game or movie. (Particularly window scares) Of course you have to fight baddies, but it's not like that. A lot of the horror is not that something horrible is going on wherever you're at, but that something horrible happened long ago. It doesn't even come out and say what happened but you can pick up pieces of evidence to put it together. I guess if they took cheap shots like window scares, people would be less inclined to explore and try to learn about this world. This game is a master of immersion. Part of that is just the stillness. If you stand still and listen there is almost nothing - the Capital Wasteland is very tranquil. So any unusual noise at all means you'll be on edge. Even if it's just you tripping over empty bottles on the ground.

Incidentally I did finally get RA3 up after Qwest fixed my damn internet, and shall we say I'm less than impressed.

In other news, Top Gear just did another America show. It started off kind of slow, and since their visas were only for producing factual shows and not entertainment shows they couldn't do any interesting side challenges (lest Bruce Willis show up in a Dept. of State helicopter gunship). It finally started picking up when they got to Bonneville as they pursued speed targets at Speed Week. Top Gear Top Tip: when driving on salt, pump up your tires until they almost explode. It was interesting to see them look at a new aspect of car culture and it makes me more excited about the Genesis Coupe, though I'm still wondering which loadout would be better - Grand Touring or Track.

failing to recall what i was missing

Well that was a bust. I went to go look at a Firebird from Craigslist. It sounded pretty good online. The engine and transmission had been rebuilt which I'm not big on but I figured this meant the owner took car of the car like the rebuilt Camaro I had seen.

This was not the case.

Just walking up to it was pretty bad. The guy had put a bunch of go-faster decals on it so it was covered in fake bullet holes. Getting closer it was appallingly filthy, with leaves and stuff inside the car. And then he started walking me through the car. The driver's side door handle doesn't work. Speedometer doesn't work. Stereo was stolen. Hood won't stay up so he has a big stick. The shift stick is just a bare metal bar. And the battery won't hold a charge. This combined with the fact it had been sitting there for two months meant it was particularly start-resistant.

Mind you the Craigslist listing doesn't mention any of this.

So it's back to square one. And I guess I need to screen these cars more thoroughly. For now it's back to creepy Fallout 3. Also: daylight savings tonight!

prodrive

The driving school looked like the Top Gear production office, but most of the time we were outside anyway.

SkidCar - Toyota Camry lifts in each corner to reduce tire contact patch either in front or in the rear so it will skid/spin at 15 mph.

no rocket no heat

I just finished my car control course. It starts in a classroom and the instructor talks about understeer and oversteer and what you should do. Everyone then goes outside and breaks into groups for the skidcars, which are Camrys mounted on a steel frame with pneumatics at each corner. I was with a UO student who had once spun his car and has several speeding tickets, so his family "encouraged" him to come to this, and a high school kid who had an accident involving a mailbox and some trees and ended up needed two brain surgeries. So I apparently get points for being proactive.

The instructor first set up the car so it would understeer at 15 mph and we all had some practice doing figure 8's with that to see how steering less can get you to steer more. Then the car was set up for oversteer. I was the first in the series to go and I spun the car several times before I could get it to go around a corner at all. We did some figure 8's like that, then widened up the driving area to add some different corners, and then took the widened course in the opposite direction. By the end of the day we were all doing pretty good. The instructor even asked me if I was sandbagging at one point, but that just made me start spinning again. Overall I think it was a worthwhile experience.

Now I'm going to go play Midnight Club Los Angeles and do the opposite of everything I've learned today.

there's so many things that i cannot explain

On the advice of family members I've started reading "A Random Walk Down Wall Street." It is supposed to be a guide for investing, but so far it is mostly concerned with how people are stupid and irrational. Once I finish this book it might be interesting to go back to "Critical Mass" and go through what it says about patterns (or lack thereof) in the stock market.

Another week of work. But car control class on Saturday!

fell asleep on tuesday woke up monday afternoon

Sadly I'm not done ranting about alarm clocks. I found a model that looked like it was almost done properly so I decided to get it. You care to guess what store it was at? Best Buy? Target? Nope. Toys 'R Us. I could see going there if I wanted a pirate alarm clock, but why are they the only ones who sell decent normal ones as well?

So I get this thing home and plug it in. It says it has Indiglo. But of course it hasn't been done properly. Instead of lighting up when you hit the button, like in a proper alarm clock, it does an always-on and the button just sets the brightness. Fortunately one of the settings is off. But now if I want to check the time during the night, I have to hit the button four times instead of one. Outstanding work.

I then went to set the time. Pretty standard stuff. Except that it asks for the year as well. I don't need to know what year it is! I just need to know when to get my ass out of bed!!

Fortunately the new alarm clock doesn't seem to have any other stupid functions built in - no temperature or atomics - so I may be able to get some use out of it yet. For the record this is like the fourth time I've tried to replace my old one.

(I can just imagine an Apple alarm clock. Requires AT&T service and WiFi connection, charges you for a $10 firmware update to tell hours in addition to minutes, daily alarm downloads from iTunes store are DRM-enabled.)

While we're on the subject of badly designed things, it turns out that under New Facebook the posted items app won't actually let you post items. It's just for sorting things already posted. Way to put functions where nobody will find them, New Facebook.

The one bright spot in my badly designed day was that more Genesis Coupe news has come to light. It has gone on sale in SK, where the first review sounded pretty good, and a very well put together ad appeared on YouTube. Which is what I was trying to post.

october moon and rusty skies

I am trying to buy a new alarm clock, as my current one is in a bad way and I slept through it on Friday. The difficulty is that I absolutely require Indiglo, and that is exactly what you can't find. I saw all of two Indiglo clocks in stores, one with a ridiculous four-minute snooze and one billed as 'All-Night' Indiglo that never turns off. Which completely defeats the purpose. It's not much better online, where Amazon's results for 'Indiglo alarm clock' are three travel clocks, an iPod dock and a Tom Clancy book. Google chips in with an Indiglo thermometer.

It's also hard to find one that is just an alarm clock. I've ranted before about "atomic clocks." And telling the temperature just clutters up the display for the purpose of telling me what I already knew, that it's warmer in bed than out.