Archive for January, 2005

Observations: Saturday, January 29th

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Apple and I went out for dinner on Saturday night. I have to say, we had a great time, despite the restaurant we selected not quite being up to our expectations. As usual, though, the simple observations of life once again proved interesting enough to write about in and of themselves.

The restaurant—a Japanese sushi / teppanyaki grill type place—was about 40 minutes away, so we took the newly-opened north/south corridor that nobody has found yet. The traffic was great, as usual—it’s the only road in the county of which that can be said, even during season. The only problem was the Ford Lightning pickup ahead of us, which was hauling two refrigerators in its bed. The cargo wasn’t tied down whatsoever and it was too long for the truck’s liftgate to close. I hate following anyone carrying cargo, but when it’s not secured, it stops being annoying and starts becoming dangerous. I kept my distance.

The truck changed lanes, other vehicles merged in front of us, life continued unabated. But it wasn’t long before the van in front of us slowed down abruptly, and we soon discovered why: One of the Lightning’s refrigerators had fallen off the back of the truck and was now smashed in the middle of the road. Up ahead, the truck had pulled over, and the driver was probably cussing up a storm having just realized he’d destroyed half of his cargo because he’s a total and complete retard. Bully for him.

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Search For $A, Find $B

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Here’s some light and cheerful kookiness (which, as you know, is the best kind). A lot of people have fun posting the top 10 search terms that people use to get to their website, because often it’s something ridiculous. My statistics report that most of the terms people use to find my site actually make sense, such as “update on gm ssr”, “kitt replica picture”, and “ftp mirrors duke3d”, all of which are things I’ve indirectly mentioned not so long ago.

But those are just amongst the top ten. If you drill in further to get the complete list, you start to see some amusing entries. Following are some of them. (I hope I don’t have to say this, but hit the little “Continue Reading” link right below this paragraph to see ‘em.)

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Chii wa Chii!

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As animes go, there are only two series that I have seen in their entirety. One is Neon Genesis Evangelion and the other, now, is Chobits. Yes, not even Kimagure Orange Road—possibly my favorite anime—makes that list; while I do own all the tapes, there are still some I never got around to watching. I got the last half of the KOR TV series on VHS after the DVD revolution had already taken over, and playing tapes anymore just seems like a waste of time. But I digress.

The final, seventh disc of Chobits is really just a bonus disc. It contains three “recap episodes” and a 6-minute reunion special of sorts called “Chibits.” The recap episodes are pretty standard; they are 95% recycled footage from earlier episodes, with a few new scenes and some new voiceovers. Each recap is done in the style of “A Chat With…” where two of the series’ supporting characters discuss recent events in the series. For a series with only 24 episodes, three recaps hardly seem necessary, and I am not sure they even aired originally in Japan. Hence, the DVD producer stuck them on a seventh bonus disc that does not come in the boxed set, so you don’t have to spend money on them if you don’t want to. Kind of a nice idea.

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Random Tidbits, Cause I’m in a Hurry

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Yeah, so I’m hankerin’ to play some Vampire or something before I trot off to bed, so I’ll make this snappy. I’ve had random little glimpses of complete thoughts floating through my head today, none of which warrant more than a passing mention. To wit:

After seeing some more photos of just how apparently poorly assembled the new Roush Mustang is, and hearing that the new Cobra is no longer a product of SVT but of Shelby, a product whose price tag will be well above $50,000…well, the GTO is starting to look real sweet. But the entire GTO as we know it will be officially gone in 2007—replaced with a Zeta-platformed, aggressive screamer that may even be powered by GM’s LS7 motor. Oh, drool. Oh, excitement.

We finished the entire Chobits series (except for the “Chibits” reunion special), but the new anime we rented—Azumanga Daioh—was horrid. Maybe it was designed for an audience of five-year-olds, or for people who can’t stand it if their anime isn’t filled with excruciatingly long pauses in which no dialog is spoken and nothing happens. Either way, we’re sending it back with a rating of 2/5. The Chobits extras disc is on its way, which will undoubtedly ease the pain.

There’s more. Just open it up.

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Save a Life. Pay Attention.

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Everything in life comes back to how much you are paying attention. I’m serious. This occurred to me yesterday after a woman in a Pontiac Bonneville made a right turn on a red light directly into my path of travel, as I was approaching at 45 miles an hour and was only about 50 feet away from her car. I was quite thankful that there were no cars in the left lane, which I made generous use of in order to avoid condemning both my car and hers to a painful afterlife in a scrapyard somewhere. Of course, as I flew past with my horn screaming for all it was worth, I noticed the old bat was too busy talking to her passenger to have even bothered to glance at oncoming traffic before pulling out into it.

I was making a right turn shortly after this occurred, so I had to pull back into the right lane. The Bonneville simpered past as I was turning, so I lit up the throttle to give them a bark of exhaust which was arguably louder than my horn. I like to think of a cacophonic eight-cylinder rev as my car’s way of delivering a personal fuck-you. The passenger in the Bonnie was looking at me as they went past, and I shook my head as I realized the boneheads both probably thought it was my fault. Look, he’s driving a surly-looking, black, loud car with big nostrils on it. Of course he was breaking the law, and it’s his fault for driving recklessly and yada yada yada oh my weakened heart tissue.

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2004, Oddball Digest Edition

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So I saw this idea on another site. You take the first sentence of the first post of each month for a year, put ‘em all next to each other and you get an (often amusing) overview of what kind of crap you write about. Thought I’d give it a shot for 2004.

  • January – Well, the honeymoon is over.
  • February – I took my wife’s car in for an oil change on Saturday.
  • March – So the other day, my friends were chatting about the grand old classic game of Duke Nukem 3D when the subject of level design arose.
  • April – In the spirit of the “Pilot’s Gripe Sheet” I posted earlier, here is some more humor from the commercial aviation industry.
  • May – Ever wonder what people will say about you after you’re dead and buried?
  • June – A little morning update for you!
  • July – When the Oddball Update first went live, I posted ludicrous amounts of stuff on here.
  • August – At long last, id Software’s third installment in the Doom franchise is arriving tomorrow afternoon.
  • September – Well, long time no see, eh?
  • October – My wife and I are just back from two weeks in Thailand!
  • November – I don’t like WordPress.
  • December – Ah, titling the update with a Shatnerism.

Yeah…that pretty much sums up this place, all right.

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Vampire: Bloodlines

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My friend Pooch bought me this game for Christmas, and it took me a couple of weeks before I really spent some time getting into it. But now I’m hooked, and totally wasting unchecked hours playing it. Basically Bloodlines is an RPG with some elements of a first-person shooter thrown in, in fact if I had to pick one game to compare it to mechanically, it would be Deus Ex. You play the role of a newly sired vampire in southern California, and the game surrounds your exploits in your new life as a member of the damned.

The game is built on Valve’s Source engine, the same used for Half-Life 2, although it may not immediately look like it. The graphics here aren’t as top notch as HL2, but more importantly, the story and dialog are rich and the environments are very thorough and well-done. Just like the aforementioned Deus Ex, in fact. Although I installed the latest patch, there are still a good number of little glitches, graphic weirdness, and other buggy stuff that you wouldn’t see in a AAA title like HL2, but so far it’s all been minor; nothing game-killing.

And it’s really quite fun, this vampire stuff. Okay, you get to feed on random blokes walking down the street. That’s fun. You also have superhuman strength and healing capabilities, and when you start throwing your fists around, people go flying. Pure entertainment. The RPG elements of experience points and character attributes are here in full force, and are just as much fun as always. A new skill that I haven’t seen before in similar games is “Seduction,” which, if built up, allows you to seduce NPCs into doing…things…for you, or tricks them into letting their guard down so you can suck their…uh, hemoglobin.

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“Name” Problem with Online User List

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A couple of readers reported a strange ”{name}” bug with the online user list over on the sidebar, so I looked into it. Turns out that ”{name}” was being shown to represent any user who had chosen to login anonymously. Weird thing was, nobody chose that. That’s because I omitted that option from the login form altogether. Problem is, when you omit the checkbox, the form defaults to “anonymous” and thus generates the {name} thing.

Mind you, it shouldn’t really show anything if the user is anonymous; I mean, showing {name} with a link to their profile is kind of stupid. I don’t know why that was happening. It’s not really anonymous at all, it’s more like “Guess the user!” and then you click to find out if you were right. Plus, if you happen to be the user who has logged in anonymously, you would see your actual name printed over there, with an asterisk next to it, but everyone else (including lurkers) would see ”{name}”. Stupid. Anyway, I put the checkbox back onto the form, checked it by default, and hid it. Now everyone who’s logged in will show up, and no one should see ”{name}” anymore.

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Productive Weekend

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I’ve been mostly spending my spare time screwing around, which is why it was good this weekend for me to actually get some stuff done. For starters, I washed both the Trans Am and the Mazda6, neither of which had seen hide nor hair of the sponge in an embarrassingly long time, and were both in dire need. I washed the T/A the old fashioned way, but to the Mazda I took the new Mr. Clean AutoDry Car Wash kit that my parents gave me for Christmas. It’s pretty awesome! The de-ionized spotfree rinse mode is sweet. I bloody HATE drying the car and that feature makes it completely unnecessary. (Well, except for under the spoiler, but if that’s the only part I have to take a towel to, I’m satisfied.)

I also sent mail to a freelance contact I was overdue to get back with, and included the end results of a small logo adjustment project she had requested. The bikini website guy emailed asking for progress on his site, and there hasn’t been time for much yet…so I’ll throw him a bone tomorrow morning and give myself a chance to actually do some work on the thing.

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January in Michigan: The Return

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Rated R. R for REALLY BAD WEATHER.

Our front yard...somewhere in there

Our front yard…somewhere in there

Well, last year I believe I posted something called “March in Michigan” in which I described an sudden onslaught of snow. Well, it’s still January, so of course snow is to be expected—but that’s a pretty good blanket, there. My dad took this photo of our front yard this morning at around 7:30 am.

The nastified driving conditions have nixed an attempt by my friends to visit the 2005 North American International Auto Show, where you can see such wonders as Ford’s new Baby Brinks Truck with bulletproof glass for those special 8 Mile cruises, really pitiful attempts by Kia to make actual cool-looking vehicles, and of course, the DCX “Smart Car” which for some reason everybody is just loving. I also hear the new Eclipse is looking good—much nicer than the prototype they exercised last time around—but if you want one, better hope the company will be around long enough to build ‘em. (Just a rib, really. I’m sure Mitsy isn’t going anywhere.)

And I don’t want to bask in it, but it’s 75 and sunny here in Florida right now. tongue rolleye

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