Stupid Morning Things

I have two cars at the moment.  So I had been driving one car quite a bit then the other day I needed to take the other car somewhere.

I get into this car, start it up, and put the gear thing in reverse.  I didn’t feel the usual jolt of it being put into gear, though.  Then I looked at the digital indicator; it still said “N.”  I found this worrisome.  I tried putting it into different gears, but it still just said “N.”  Finally, I put it back in reverse.  I felt the transmission kick in and I tried to back out of the driveway.  Sure enough, it started moving.  In the correct direction.

Half a second later I realized that I’m an idiot.  The other car that I had been driving, you see, had the gear selector between the front seats.  On the dashboard it has a digital readout showing what gear is selected.

The car I was driving when this happened has the gear selector on the steering column.  So it has the usual “P R N D123” thing with the red line showing what gear you’re in.  It doesn’t have a digital indicator on the dashboard because that would be kind of stupid.

What it does have, that the other car lacks, is a compass.

So I found out that my driveway points North.

Garbage

Garbage.  It’s a fact of life, really.  You use stuff and it generates garbage.  Just about anything you do is going to generate garbage.  Cooking, cleaning, and, well, I guess there’s more to life than those two things.

Back in the old days of just one or two people in an apartment garbage was a pretty straightforward thing.  The garbage bag gets filled up and taken out to the dumpster.  I had no idea when it got emptied and, frankly, I didn’t care.  Once it got to the dumpster, full or empty, it was out of my hands.

When you get into a house, though, things get a bit more difficult.  As a kid, the biggest worry was being in sight when it was time for someone to take the can out to the curb.  Stay invisible and Dad would have to do it.  Get your own house, though, then a whole new world of hassle is opened up to you.  You have to know when the days are that your garbage gets picked up.  Miss it, and you run the risk of an overflowing can.

I’m sure I mentioned that I have four kids under my wings. Kids could end the energy crisis if we could power houses with garbage.  They magically create garbage from nothing.  Spend the day cleaning your house.  Marvel at the sparkling loveliness of your abode.  Turn your back for five minutes while the kids walk through the living room and when you turn around again it’s full of garbage.  There’s stuff on the floor now that you’d swear was never in the house to begin with.

So, miss a day of bringing your full can to the curb and you’ll be guaranteed a heaping mound of garbage to go out the next garbage day.

So, what prompted this little insight?  The township I live in has knocked me down to one garbage pickup a week.  Down from two.  Which I found to be woefully inadequate.  And I’m pretty sure it’s illegal to burn trash in the backyard around here.

The upside is that recyclables are collected every other week in a bin that’s the same size as the trash bins.  If I can be disciplined enough it could be enough.  There’s an amazing amount of school papers and Dr Pepper cans that could go in that bin.  I’m just hoping it’s big enough for two weeks.  I may have to mash them up.

Mystery Lost

Warning

If you are as behind the times as I am when it comes to TV and you haven’t seen any episodes of “Lost” but you plan on doing so at some point then STOP READING NOW because I’ll probably ruin it for you.

I love mysterious things.  When it comes to TV shows, movies, or books I love having a sense of mystery, of history, of lost and hidden knowledge.

The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings trilogy, for example, kept me in wonder the entire time I read them.  It wasn’t just the story or the characters that were involving, it was also the places they went, the things they saw, and who they met that were intriguing. I wanted to know what happened to the ruins that they went through, or why the woods were evil, how did Glamdring, Orcrist and Sting end up with those Trolls?  Who the heck is Tom Bombadil, and what’s his story?

That these things are never really explained makes them bright spots for me; far brighter than if there was an explanation to go with them.  It gives the fictional world a deeper sense of existence, of history, of realism.

And this, in a roundabout way, brings me to Lost.

As with most television shows that were or are extremely popular, I missed out on the first several years of them.  Now that seasons 1-5 are on Hulu, though, I’ve been burning through them.

I’ll admit that I was enjoying the first season.  The end of one episode invariably led to me watching the next one, just to see what was going to happen. 

Strangely, it’s not the characters that kept me interested.  I don’t like the characters on Lost.  I don’t think any of them, except possibly for Claire, are even remotely likable.  Oh, and Hurley.  The others are just big bags of neurosis and criminal intent.  Also, I find it strange that everyone knows how to handle a gun and are expert Kung-Fu fighters.  I keep expecting Rose and Bernard to go on a Ninja assassination spree.

Anyway, what was keeping me hooked was the mystery.  What was the island?  Who were “the others?”  What is “the monster?”  And as season went into season, some of the questions were answered.  And the ones that weren’t suddenly became less interesting anyway.

So we know, kind of, who “the others” are: people that aren’t the castaways.  But they’re aren’t that interesting either.  Switch the viewpoint around and the castaways can be just as much “the others” as “the others” are.  They’re really the same big bags of neurosis, violence, and back stabbing. 

I’m on the fourth season now and my interest is waning.  I liked seeing mysterious glimpses of “the others.”  I liked it when old bunkers were explored.  I liked just seeing the trees move around when the “monster” came by.  Those were things that kept the mystery part alive.

Now it’s getting complicated, though, by the amount of flashbacks, flash forwards, time travel, dreams and God knows what all else.  Half the time I’m not even sure which time period I’m looking at.  I’m not a big fan of telling a story through flashbacks, which is what Lost is.  But to make it worse by throwing in flash forwards and stuff makes it hard to get into.

As more aspects of the island and the Dharma Initiative are revealed I find myself becoming more and more uninterested.  It’s just a bunch of jerks killing each other.

Inanimate Objections

In the normal course of a day I consider myself quite sane.  In particular, I don’t attribute human-like behavior to inanimate objects.

Until something goes wrong.

It’s late in the morning meaning I’m going to be late for work.  The remote doesn’t unlock the door so I stand there for a few minutes pressing the button and getting agitated.  Finally, I use the key to open it and throw in my stuff.  Then I sit in the driver’s seat, close the door, and try and fasten the seatbelt.  But I can’t because it’s stuck in the door.  After opening the door, getting the belt out unstuck, and closing it again, I try and start the car up.  It won’t start.

First comes the pleading and sweet talking.  “C’mon, start up.  You can start up!  Yes! You can!  Go ahead.”  The car doesn’t start.  Then it’s the threats and violence.  “Damn it!  You need to start!  Start!” Cussing and dashboard pounding ensues.

After getting it to someone who knows what they’re doing it’s all explained to me: While driving in a storm a rock must have gotten shot up under the car which punctured a plastic covering which allowed road water to get splashed onto a piece of sensitive electronic equipment which rendered the vehicle unable to start.

But I know the truth: It did it to spite me.

When a laptop isn’t working right, like the touchpad doesn’t work, it’s because it hates me.  It wants to rile me up.

It’s not physics that causes a rubber hose to coil in the wrong direction or violently uncoil once the job is done.  It happened just to annoy me.

Deep inside I know that machines have souls.  An intelligence of some kind.

Now On Facebook

I thought I would play with making a page on Facebook. The obvious choice was, of course, to make a page for my blog. Because I’m just that into myself. So you can now go here and become a fan. So I can finally see just who it is that reads this stuff.

Believe me, it’ll do a lot for my self-esteem.

Modern Family

I have Modern Family automatically added to my queue in Hulu.  Yet, every time it gets added I dread watching it.  I wait until there’s nothing left in the list to watch before I start it up. 

Yet, when I finally get around to watching it, I laugh and laugh.  There are aspects of this show that I think are hysterical.  And I think the actors are perfect.  And I love Ed O’Neill. 

The show is about a patriarch (Ed O’Neill), his young Spanishy wife and her son.  His son is gay and has the best gay boyfriend since Nathan Lane in The Birdcage.  They just adopted a Vietnamese baby.  His daughter is married to a guy who tries to be hip and is really a jerky nerd.  They have three kids.

Anyway, the show is set up kind of like a reality show.  The characters get into weird situations and then they have brief interviews with the characters involved.

I don’t understand how I can dread watching something so much, yet enjoy it so much when I finally do.

Facebook Games Review V:Petville

There’s a new pet game in town and it’s Petville by Zynga.  This is in competition with Playfish’s Pet Society.  As usual, there’s going to be a lot of similarities between the two.

You begin the game by creating your humanoid “pet” by changing its looks and giving it a name.  Once that’s done you’re tossed into a new house and ready to begin cleaning and feeding your pet and buying a bunch of stuff to customize your house.  Sound familiar?

As is customary with Facebook games, you can send and receive free gifts between friends.  Usually this is a pet “treat.”  It has a nice effect for each treat which makes getting new and different ones interesting.

You can level up your pet by gaining “love” points.  You get these points by wiping your pet with soap, cleaning up the horrible messes it makes, buying new things for the house, buying it food, and interacting with your friend’s pets.

When you level up you get to buy new items from the shops and, at certain points, a new room gets added to your house.

There are four shops, currently.  A clothing store where you can outfit your pet in different styles of clothes and costumes.  There’s a furniture store, nicely separated into floors containing items for different areas of your house.  A hardware store to buy flooring and wallpaper.  There’s also a car dealership where you can buy a car to sit in your garage when you get one.

The stores are nice in that they have different floors to make what you’re trying to find a bit easier.  They are setup essentially the same way Pet Society’s are.  They can also be really cluttered with items placed on top of other items and price tags all over the place.  If an item comes in different colors there’s a multi-colored icon on the price tag.

As far as game play goes, though, there isn’t much to do.  Petville hasn’t been around as long as Pet Society has, granted.  But at least PS has the balls and Frisbees and stuff.  And the fishing pond.  And the hurdles race.  The most  you can do in Petville is visit your friends and clean up after them.

Which brings up a few of the negative aspects of this game.  Cleaning up means going from room to room picking up bits of garbage and clothes.  These items are marked by flies buzzing around each dirty item.  Finding them is a game in itself because things can be stuck on top of the fridge, or on a chair.  Mostly they end up on the floor.  The design of the game screen, though, makes picking things up a chore.  Stuff gets hidden behind the the status information across the top or behind the icons on the bottom.  The icons will generally bring up a “pop-up balloon” when the mouse hovers over it obscuring what you’re trying to click on even more.  You can, and have to, use the scroll arrows on the sides to move the house back and forth.  Your pet, though, won’t stay out of frame for long and has no problems running right on top of what you’re trying to pick up.  They’ll also sit on things and generally get in the way.  Doing this in a friend’s house means having to fight your way through two pets to get this done.  And you can’t control your friend’s critter so if they feel like sitting on an apple core that’s what they’ll do.  It is possible to pick up and move pets, but it seems to be a hit miss operation.  Sometimes I can do it, but it can be a bit frustrating to get it done.

The graphics in Petville are nice, though.  It looks better than PS, especially for the items.  These fancy graphics come at a price, though, for players with lower end computers and slower Internet connections.  The large size of the pets also makes it difficult for collecting garbage strewn around the house.

Unlike PS, though, Zynga doesn’t seem to be pushing buying things with really money as much.  And it’s a lot easier to accrue game dollars so you don’t always feel like you’re missing out on things. 

There is one major negative point, though.  I’ve complained in the past about Facebook games penalizing you for not constantly checking your things.  In the farm games, for instance, your crops will wither and die if you decide to have a life and not harvest them in time.  Petville is no different because if you don’t feed your pet in time they’ll check themselves into the pound if you don’t feed them in time.  Then  you need to pony up some game dollars to get them out.  Yes, they’d rather be put down than die of starvation.

Like all Facebook games, Petville is in beta so hopefully they’ll get some things ironed out and maybe add more to do.

The Good:

• Nice graphics
• Interesting animations for pet snacks
• Hip animations for actions visiting your friends

The not so Good:

• Cleaning up can be a real chore
• Hyper pets means hard store browsing
• There’s really not much to do

Linksys WMP54G versus Me

Recently I’v had to change my setup a bit and rely on a wireless card instead of my beloved and most favored Ethernet. This was cause for some consternation because I use Windows 7 (64-bit) and Linux (Gentoo, 64-bit). This was not something I could just run out and buy; it needed to have research done.

Not only did I have to figure out what worked in Linux, the usual sore spot, I had to find something that would also work with the 64-bit version of Windows 7.

Eventually I decided on the Linksys WMP54G, since it was so widely available and supposedly had drivers for Linux built into the kernel now. I also assumed, wrongly, that since the card was still sold in so many places that Linksys would have thought to create new drivers for it. I was dead wrong.

Strangely, getting it working in Linux proved to be easy. I use the Genkernel setup for Gentoo so the driver was already built into the kernel. All I needed was the firmware and I was basically ready to go.

The Windows side, however, was a nightmare. I installed the drivers from the included CD, which was a mistake because those were for Windows XP 32-bit. Performance with this driver was so poor, it was unusable.

Windows then told me that it had a driver for the card so I let that install thinking that it would, at least, be a 64-bit driver for Windows 7. Performance improved, but not by much.

Finally, I went to the RALink (the people who make the chips on the card) and downloaded their Windows 7 64-bit drivers. Performance improved slightly but, really, the card is essentially unusable.

There are times when surfing the internet acts like the connection is being constantly cut even though there’s no indication that the signal is getting dropped. It’s all choppy and IM programs abort because they can’t see the server anymore.

On Linux, however, it works great. I have a decent signal and I never have a problem with it. At all.

So, if you have a Windows 7 desktop and you’re looking for a wireless card I can’t stress enough to stay away from the Linksys WMP54G. I’d actually recommend staying away from Linksys altogether. Windows 7 was no secret and Linksys has had plenty of time to create a driver for this card which, I might remind you, is available for sale nearly everywhere. But they obviously don’t really care if their customers upgrade their operating system.

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Welcome to 2010

And so the Earth completes another circle around the Sun bringing us into the year 2010.

I, for one, am glad to see 2009 leave.  It’s been a horrible year for me.  2010 doesn’t look like it’ll be much better, but at least it still has a few months to redeem itself.

Traditionally, New Years Eve is a time to make resolutions.  A person finally figures out what kind of changes need to be done in life and then spend the next twelve months making it happen.  Sometimes they don’t last long but, sometimes, they manage it.

The year 2010 is another Arthur C. Clarke year.  If I remember correctly, this year Jupiter is supposed to turn into another sun so that beings on its moons can begin to evolve.  I wouldn’t have anything against this but I wonder what it would do for night time around here.  Considering 2001 didn’t happen quite like it did in the book and movie I’m guessing I won’t have to worry about it too much.

2009 didn’t seem like a good year for celebrities, either.

Some celebrities that died in 2009:

1. Bea Arthur
2. Billy Mays
3. Brittany Murphy
4. David Carridine
5. Dom Deluise
6. Ed McMahon
7. Ted Kennedy
8. Farrah Fawcett
9. Henry Gibson
10. John Updike
11. Karl Malden
12. Les Paul
13. Lou Albano
14. Marilyn Chambers
15. Michael Jackson
16. Natasha Richardson
17. Oscar Mayer Jr
18. Pat Hingle
19. Patrick McGoohan
20. Patrick Swayze
21. Ricardo Montalban
22. Ron Silver
23. Soupy Sales
24. Walter Cronkite

Those are just the ones that I know.  I have to confess that there are a couple on that list I didn’t know about until I looked it up.

I didn’t know Bea Arthur died.  I always thought she’d make a good Granny Weatherwax.  On the other hand, I thought John Updike died years ago, so I guess it all balances out.

But now it’s time for a new year to start and people can make new beginnings for themselves.  It’s just too bad that doesn’t matter to everyone else in the world.  Your company isn’t going to say, “Hey, last year was pretty bad so let’s start from scratch today!”  And if your spouse was mad at you on December 31st, they may still be mad at you on January 1st.

The best I can do right now, though, is to wish everyone a decent 2010.  May your lives get brighter.

Facebook Games Review IV: Fish World

If you use Facebook then you’ve probably noticed that once a certain game gets well known then everyone and their brother makes a copy of it. How many farming games are there on Facebook now? A dozen?

Another type of game making the rounds is fish tank games.

Fish tank games, like Fish World, involve buying fish and then selling them, I guess.

Well, let’s be frank here. I don’t care for them. I have mentioned that my big problem with any Facebook game is that they really require you to have a lot of friends playing the same game so you can get anywhere or they require constant attention. In my life, I really can’t sit around loading a game up every few hours to make sure everything is going fine. So, with that said…

In Fish World you buy fish, sell fish, buy junk to put in your fish tank, clean your tank, feed your fish and, of course, send gifts to friends so everyones tank can look basically the same.

I started playing it sometime before Halloween of 2009. I tried to keep up with it, I really did. Then there was a period of time when I just couldn’t get to it. When I finally got back to my tank it looked like this.

Yeah, some dead fishies. I could revive them, but I’d have to pay actual money to do that. I don’t think there’s any game in the world that would be good enough to entice me to spend real money to do anything with it, so these poor fellows will be floating belly up for the rest of eternity.

Amazingly, this is probably what I would end up with if I had a real aquarium, so I guess it’s true to life.