The Diamond Age

Last night I came home to find the 'data' light on my spanky new DSL modem a steady green. Sure enough, I am able to connect to the Internet now using DHCP via ethernet. Top speed seems to be about 50KB/sec, which works out to 3MB a minute. Since I'm signed up for Enhanced Bronze+, which has a top speed of 1.5Mb/sec, or 150KB/sec, I'm only getting about a third of the top bandwidth. I'll be following up on that over time. If they can't get me more, no sense in paying for more, right?

So I was monkeying around with it last night, fired up Napster and did some random grazing. I downloaded a couple of Trent Reznor songs, Reaction and Aftermath (Quake Theme). These are a lot different from Closer, one of his Nine Inch Nails albums, and you can understand why my friend Tom is annoyed with the MTV production values, if he prefers the two songs I downloaded. [by the way, Tom, I like 'em too].

Guess I'll have to ask Tom which NIN albums he likes...

I also downloaded Yello's "Oh Yeah", which I owned on vinyl, and Tuxedomoon's What Use, again from my vinyl collection.

One of the fun features of Napster is the ability to look at what else a user has online, once you start downloading something from them. This is how I found Modest Mouse, a band from Olympia, WA. I am definitely going to buy an album from them, probably The Lonesome Crowded West. Take that, RIAA!

Sunday Driving

Sunday just flew. Jean's had an annoying flaw in her new Honda Civic, in that the radio, equipped with security features, often loses power, and she has to punch in the security code to get it to work again. Not to mention resetting the clock every time. The Honda dealers admitted it was a known problem, and that they were expecting a fix soon. This weekend was it.

We drove up to Beaverton Honda and dropped Jean's car off. Then (using my car) we went shopping. Jean wanted to find some chocolate turtles to give to Kelly's Kindergarten teacher, Mrs. Wentzell. Apparently, Mrs. W. likes turtles, and Kelly had already painted a ceramic turtle at a craft store which fires the dishes, cups, pots and chachkas that you paint, fixing the glaze for a small fee. Turtles were not to be found, so we moved on to the Beaverton Mall, where we visited Tower Records. Kelly wanted Del Shannon's Runaway, and ended up getting two Fifties compilation discs. Jean bought some Bix Biederbeck, and I bought Do The Collapse by Guided By Voices. The linked review calls this GBV's most mainstream album, which seems to be my fate. When I finally checked out Radiohead, it was with Kid A, their most mainstream album to date. It makes sense when you consider that I'm not really that plugged in to the musical trends anymore, so I'll only really hear about a band after they 'make it'.

Once I made my CD purchase, I moved quickly to Game Trader, a used videogame store. I just decided to stock up, and I've got enough games to fill the RPG corner of my console-playing hobby for a year. What'd I get? These:

• Metal Gear Solid



• Parasite Eve



• Final Fantasy VIII



• Resident Evil

Okay, in some the RPG element is pretty weak, for instance Resident Evil is little more than a Zombie Shooter^(tm) game. But they should provide a few hours of amusement.

After the shopping spree, we went home for a little while, then finally got to Juan Colorado for lunch. This is a local Mexican restaurant in Tualatin, and it's very nice. They have an open-air balcony where the majority of their tables are, and we sat there, looking out over Tualatin toward the skate park. The food was good, though Kelly was disappointed that they didn't have black olives.

Those are the highlights. We went back into Beaverton and got Jean's car, then it was home to do those chores. That's all folks!

Geek Pilgrimage

Saturday was my NOVA meeting, and the usual suspects were there. But for a change of pace, instead of going off to get something to eat during the meeting, we gave in to our geek natures, and five of us, Alan, Tom, James, Chris and me, piled into a car and drove from Tigard down to Wilsonville, to visit Fry's Electronics Superstore [ECHO, Echo, echo!].

Tom wanted to look at stereo hardware. He resisted the temptation to buy gleaming metal, but ended up buying a bunch of anime DVDs. Alan bought an upgrade for his Adobe Premiere software. I don't think Chris or James ended up buying anything. I bought a copy of Final Fantasy VII, since it's been sitting on the Playstation game racks at $13.95 for the last two times I've visited, and I couldn't stand it anymore .

I haven't done more than stumble through the first few minutes of the game without reading any manuals or having played any of the previous games (Kelly was very helpful there, cheering my fumbling attempts to squash bad guys with magic while getting overwhelmed with strange menus and such). But I've come to realize that the game must tell you how much time it takes to complete it. Why? Because everybody I've ever met who played it tells me to the hour how long it took them. "I played FF7 over the weekend and it took me 40 hours to finish." Not, "it took a whole weekend", not "it took a long time", but "it took me 40 hours."

This was reinforced after the meeting when I went with the crowd to Carrow's to have a late night snack. After eating, I was paying my bill and telling Alan that it was probably too late to break open the game and play with it. The waitress at the register said "you're playing Final Fantasy VII?"

I was kind of embarrassed, since the game's been out for some time (VIII and IX are out, X is coming soon and XI is in planning). "Yeah, I just bought a PS2 and I'm getting back into games after a few years..."

"I played FF7, and it took me 56 hours!"

"Really? At the rate I'll be playing, I'll take six months to finish."

"That's how long it took me!"

Suddenly I didn't feel so embarrassed .

Smile...

Yesterday was actually busier than I expected, so here's Saturday's news...

Kelly and I were at home while Jean was running errands. Kelly surprised me by turning off the television herself! But I was eating lunch, so I kept reading my book as she played quietly by herself. After a little while, she left the room, nothing extraordinary in that.

Time passed, and Kelly came back into the living room. I saw her approaching in the periphery of my vision. "Daddy?" I turned around. In a rather loose circle around her lips was a ring of lipstick. There were signs that she'd actually tried to apply it carefully, but no such luck. "Am I beautiful?"

Speaking directly to the question, I replied "of course you are. Your lipstick is a little smeared, let me help touch it up..."

QOTD

"It's almost impossible never to get hacked, it's what you do once that happens that counts."

Rafe Colburn

Invisible Lossage

I was pondering the outage of Agora over the weekend just now, and realized that I didn't even notice it until late Sunday, I was that busy off the 'net. I can't really enumerate everything that took place, but there were the usual chores, and additional errands I'll talk about in a later post.

I just wanted to note that I don't always come home from sitting in front of a computer all day and immediately log onto my home account .

Agora Down

Agora, the host for this site, was down part of the weekend, due to being hacked by the infamous disgruntled Chinese hackers. I would have sworn we were too low profile to attract their attention, but I guess when you've got a billion people, no web site is too small .

Anyway, Alan expired everybody's password for security, forcing me to change my password for the first time in three years. Gah! And now I know why I don't do it more often. Resetting the password in Eudora (email) on two machines, in the Airport hub (wireless networking and dial-up), in the Free-PPP software, and on and on. It sucketh greatly.

So now Terebi II is back on the air, and I'll try to post a few catch-up articles during the longer compiles today. Take care all!