With His Fate Sealed, He Tasks Me
Decided to take the WS6 out for a drive today. I don’t drive it too much anymore, maybe once every week or two, since I’ve been working at home full time. Since this is also the slow season at Apple’s restaurant, she doesn’t work as often either, so usually when I want to go somewhere I take her car. Today, though, she’s on duty (and it’s Coupon Day™, no less), and after reading the GTO message board I felt like taking my own 6-speed V8 for a spin. So out I went.
It occurred to me, as I pulled out of the garage, that I ought to check the garage floor for fluid leakage, just in case the car’s recent change in usage has caused some kind of new and exciting parts failure. Lo and behold, there was some semi-clear, faintly rust-tinged liquid on the garage floor — right in the middle of the rather large rust stain from where the WS6′s factory battery sprang a leak and ate through part of my suspension about three or four years ago. The fluid looked like battery acid — again. Here we go.
The battery I’m running right now is a top-of-the-line Die Hard Gold, but it’s aged and frankly I wasn’t sure how much life it had left in it. The fact that it had to start dying all messily doesn’t please me any. I wonder if its death has anything to do with the out-of-control short circuit I was experiencing back in July, that took a couple of weeks to sort out and get fixed? Oh, I didn’t write about that short circuit? Hmm, that’s right — I was ignoring this site then. Well, suffice it to say, I had an energizer fail from excessive heat (the car was sitting outside under the sun almost every day that month). It took out the DRL circuit, physically blew apart two headlamp switches and almost blew the battery up before we finally got it isolated and replaced (at a cost of damn near $500 dollars). What with the unnatural power draw (and even some wild arcing), I was wondering if the battery had taken damage. Maybe it has. Either way, it’s inexorably doomed to die now. I need to get a new battery…for a car I’ll probably own less than three more months. Cooooool.
But is the battery all that’s wrong with the electrical system? Doubt would soon be cast…
Restaurant Cheapskates
My wife Apple works at a restaurant, so of course there are always plenty of comedy bits to hear about when she gets home. Tales of stingy customers, drunken fools, employee drama, etc. are always entertaining, sometimes maddening. I heard a story last night of a party who was determined to get their coupon’s worth no matter how they had to go about it.
During the slow season — that’s summer for you non-Florida types — the restaurant where Apple works runs a “2 for $34″ special on Tuesdays and Thursdays. If you bring in this big coupon you get in the mail (or if you cut it out of the newspaper), two people can dine for $34 bucks. Normally this would be more like a $50 endeavor, so it’s a good deal. You don’t even need to bring the coupon — management is so forgiving, they’ll just give you one when you get the check. But even all of this generosity could not conspire to get a clue for these two people I heard about last night.
A couple of people showed up at the restaurant on Monday night and ate dinner at the sushi bar. They wanted to use their 2 for $34 coupon which they had in hand. Unfortunately, it says right on the coupon (and not just in fine print, either) that the deal is only valid on Tuesdays and Thursdays. The customers asked to be allowed to use it anyway. Their server didn’t have that authority, so the manager was brought out. The customers whined that they were non-residents and would be leaving the area the following day, so they “had no choice” but to come and eat there on Monday. The manager also refused to honor the coupon since it just plain wasn’t coupon day. Case closed, right?
Maybe for you and me, but these customers decided they’d stick it to the restaurant. After receiving their four sushi rolls (probably about $30-40 right there) and eating them all completely, they complained that the sushi was “not what they expected” and demanded that the charge for it be taken off the bill! Okay, that’s one thing if you haven’t eaten it. But they cleaned the plates! Surprisingly, the manager complied, in a move I still don’t quite understand. So the customer ended up bilking the restaurant out of more money than they would have if they’d been allowed to fraudulently use the coupon. There you go, folks — pure “gimme gimme” tactics in effect!
I still don’t get why the manager rolled over so easily, though. To hear her explain it, it was more apathy than anything…like, “Oh well, if you keep abusing our restaurant like this, eventually we’ll go out of business and then you won’t be able to kick us around anymore.” I’m sure the bevy of employees that work at said restaurant would be real happy to hear what a high value has been placed on their services, that they would be sold out to make an albeit very weak point (I mean, wouldn’t it be pretty easy for theiving customers to just go somewhere else and play the same gag?). Anyway, it’s not my business…literally.
On The Cusp: Retiring From PC Gaming?
I haven’t played a game on my PC in quite a while. The last thing I played was the F.E.A.R. demo. I’d really like to get the full version when it arrives next month, but the truth is, that kind of stuff doesn’t feel like a priority anymore. There were days when I used to salivate over the impending release date of titles like Duke Nukem 3D and Quake II, but now I almost dread it. Because buying and installing a new game means the possibility of jacking with the system for hours trying to get it to work reliably. It means having to take the lid off my case, point a box fan at the mainboard and shut down all ambient incandescent light sources every time I want to play something, just to minimize what I call the “space heater” effect. And then if I’m lucky, I’ll get to play something for a couple of hours before the machine crashes and I have to leave it in a cool, dry place for a while so the components can recover from heat soak. It’s like an LS2 engine baking under a black hood on a Texas dragstrip on a 110-degree day.
With that said, I feel that I may be on the cusp of giving up PC gaming altogether. Or at least for the most part. Hell, I’ve already given it up for the most part. I seem to recall posting similar sentiments about a year or two ago when the selection of new games was looking pretty bleak, and then recanting when some hot new titles arrived. But my feelings now are for different reasons…not reasons of boredom, as there are lots of games I could be playing if I wanted to, but for reasons of pure exasperation. I’m tired of keeping up, of paying hundreds if not thousands of dollars for top-of-the-line components, of worrying over driver versions and which ones are still beta and which ones will hose my video overlay or which ones will cause conflicts with some obscure piece of software that I just happen to use religiously. I’m tired of PCI Express 2, of outboard physics processors, of filling a box with screaming 60-CFM fans just to keep it from melting. My personal seesaw of “Amount of crap I’m willing to endure” vs. “Amount of rewarding fun I have actually playing games” has been tilting to the opposite side lately.
Of course, this is a personal decision — which I am making because I no longer feel I have the time or money to devote to being a PC gaming enthusiast. Like modifying your car to wring the fastest quarter-mile from it, it’s a hobby which almost needs to be mutually exclusive of any others. In the PC gaming world, I never liked to settle for less than the best. Unfortunately, the best is costing too much, progressing too fast. Since I can never be satisfied, it makes more sense from a sanity perspective to scale back, to focus more on something else. But since I am still a gamer at heart, I am moving my focus to my consoles instead of my computer.
Blitzball: An Exercise in Frustration
Last night, for the first time, I got pissed off at Final Fantasy X.
It all began with the championship Blitzball game at Luca Stadium. All throughout the beginning of the game, the player is taunted with the concept of Blitzball, a sort of combination of football and basketball that’s played underwater, and was the former professional sport of choice for our main character, Tidus. You keep wondering when you’re going to actually play this Blitzball, and then finally it happens — you’re thrust into the make-or-break game in the finals, and the goal is to bring your team to victory. (Your team, incidentally, sucks so bad that they haven’t made it past the first round in twenty-some years.)
So anyway, after a very lengthy tutorial in which you learn Blitzball strategy and techniques, which is a pretty sizeable minigame in and of itself, you’re thrust into this game with a team full of mostly incompetents, going up against a powerhouse gang of goons on the opposing side. I soon came to realize that statistically, the match-up is nigh impossible. While your team has a couple of good players, the overwhelming majority have no passing accuracy and no endurance to speak of. The opposing team busts through their tackles, shoots goals and basically goes to town, all while you have literally no chance of stopping it because you haven’t even gotten the ball yet, and in defense mode the computer uninterruptably moves all of your players for you so you can’t even try to steal. Then, when you finally get the ball, the opposition triple- or quadruple-teams before you can even pass it, so you’re stuck with some 3-endurance doofus going up against four guys with attack ratings of 12. You can’t break through, you can’t pass and you can’t shoot.
Worse, the computer seems to respond with horrifying slowness to your commands. I eventually realized that “automatic” movement mode on offense was murdering me, so I switched to manual. But even then, there’s a full second delay between when I push the command button and when the command window actually appears, during which some opposing players usually rush me and block me in as usual. I keep trying to pass the ball before I get triple-teamed, but the damn computer won’t let me execute that command until it’s brought the opposition right up in my face!
Honestly, are you supposed to lose this game? From what I gather, you don’t have to win it, and it’s not really even likely that you will, but God — I’d really like to win the damn thing if I could, but nothing is helping. I even found a “cheat the system” strategy online, in which you make certain moves that are so ludicrous, the computer AI basically gets confused and makes a critical error. Not even that worked.
What’s the worst part of all? Each time the game ends up not going my way, I have to reset the PlayStation to load my game and try again. And then I have to sit through over five minutes of un-skippable cinematics and conversation before I can get back into it. I THINK I WILL SCREAM IF I SEE THOSE SCENES AGAIN.
I’ll try it again tonight.
This Is Why I Suck at RPGs
All right, let me explain why I have never been, am not, and probably never will be good at role-playing games. Because I ALWAYS CHOOSE THE WRONG DAMN OPTION.
Yesterday afternoon, for old times’ sake, I decided to break out Final Fantasy VII. Yes, for the original PlayStation. It was the game that kept my high school friends occupied for days (if not weeks) back in 1997, and it looked fun so I bought a copy for myself. I spent a few days on-and-off trying to get into it, and could never quite find the groove. It always seemed like I was screwing up by making the wrong decisions when presented with a dialog fork, or not knowing where to go, or not understanding the seemingly obvious things I was supposed to do to keep my characters alive.
I remember abandoning, and then restarting, FFVII three or four times over the years since then, and I always had the exact same experience. Then, the other way I was reminded of this game again — I can’t even remember how — and decided to get it out of mothballs yet again. (Strangely, for not having touched it for years, I knew exactly where the game was.) So I popped it in, stared agog at the low-res super-deformed graphics and tried to recall when this was state-of-the-art, then grit my teeth and gave it another shot.
And I made the same goddamn mistake again.
I TOLD AERIS TO GO AWAY!
My brain is simply not built for these games. I do not understand why. When Cloud encounters Aeris (the beautiful flower girl) during his escape from Mako Reactor #1, Aeris asks what’s going on, and the player is given two dialog choices to respond with. One is “”Nothing…hey, listen…” and the other is “You’d better get out of here.” My memory must fail me, because I ALWAYS CHOOSE THE SECOND ONE. My rationale is this: Hey, this girl is a major character who I eventually want to be on friendly terms with, so I shouldn’t lie to the chick, right? After all, “Nothing” is most certainly not what’s happening. And secondly, I just blew up a friggin’ reactor and there are armed guards chasing me. It’s probably not a very safe place to be, so I should tell her to get out of the area, right?
Of course, this is wrong, because if you tell Aeris to “get out of here,” you apparently don’t get to join up with her later in the game. Of course, it’s not required that this happen later, but she’s kind of a big part of the game that I guess you otherwise don’t get to experience. The funny thing is, I discovered that this was the wrong option by looking it up in an online game guide. That’s funny only because I looked up the same information eight years ago and realized my mistake then, too.
I suppose I’ll go reload from an earlier save point and try it again, but God…that was like the first dialog fork in the entire three-disc game. How many more times am I going to make the wrong choice before this is over? Or perhaps a better question would be, how much longer do I have before the PS1 pixelation gives me a huge headache?
So, Why Choose the GTO?
I don’t post anything on this site for nearly two months, then I show up out of nowhere and proclaim that I’ve ordered a Pontiac GTO as my next new car. So what happened? A few months ago, I was proclaiming proudly that the GTO sucked and I was gonna be getting my hands on a new Shelby GT-500. Why did I change my mind?
A lot can happen in a few months. Actually, I imagine that if I were still working at my old job, still doing the same stuff I’d been doing the last few months or even years straight, I probably still would be on course to try and snag a GT-500 (not that that’s going to be real easy for anyone to do). But since I changed jobs, started riding with a different crew, and broadened my outlook on life, I think my tastes in cars have also changed. Matured, I’d like to say.
I’ve decided that my next car should be less of a rackety muscle machine and more of a refined grand tourer. However, I’m still unable to divorce myself from the shit-eating grin-inducing power and growl of a V8, which would seem to make for an interesting dilemma — what sort of soft, cushy grand-tourer can one get equipped with a raucous eight-cylinder with a sound that harkens back to the sixties? And then it hit me — a GTO.
Cassette Digitizing At Last
Well, it’s only 2005, but I’m finally getting around to digitizing at least some of my vast library of audio tapes. Or, as Pastor John C. Mills would say, “tape cassettes.” (Is that guy still alive?) I’ve done this before, usually small pieces at at time, with mixed results. This time, I’ve been going nearly nonstop since last night. I’ve got three and a half cassettes digitized already, out of a probable…oh, I don’t know…500 tapes. Yeah, I’m a tape whore. But hey, I’ve had the last two decades to create them. Yeah, these aren’t just regular tapes, either, like music albums I could buy CD editions of. 95% of these tapes I recorded myself — radio show stuff, parodies, audio drama, the like. So that’s why I’m going to the trouble, before you ask.
Some of the new audio hardware in the computer I recently built has been helping me out. Namely, the Sound Blaster “LiveDrive” front panel audio connections. I’ve got an “Auxiliary 2″ line-level input there with RCA connections, so it’s much easier for me to hook up a tape deck. Only problem is, I don’t have a tape deck with a line-level output. So, I go for the ghetto method: Connect my the stereo’s headphone output to the computer’s aux input, play the tape and adjust the stereo volume while I watch Cool Edit’s VU meter. Imperfect, but acceptable.
Once I get the level set properly, I hit play on the tape deck and record in Cool Edit, and that’s it — for 45 minutes. Yep, thanks to the wonders of analog, the dubbing process must proceed in real-time. Once I get the waveform into the computer, if it’s hissy enough I run a high-res FFT noise filter. If the content of the recording is too quiet, I’ll then run a hard limit filter to boost it up about 3 or 4 dB. Lastly, I save the file down in FLAC format (Free Lossless Audio Codec) which reduces the file size by 40-60%, but sacrifices no quality at all. (It’s like a ZIP file.) Coupled with FLAC plugins for Cool Edit and Winamp, it’s a complete solution. One side of a 90-minute tape, dubbed at 16-bit stereo / 44 KHz, averages around 200-250 MB compressed. The nice thing is, my new PC has enough horsepower and memory to do this in the background while I work on other things, even Photoshop and Illustrator simultaneously.
Eventually I’ll burn archives of my tapes to DVD-ROM, and maybe make some MP3 versions to put on the iPod. But it’ll be nice to have FLAC images of my cassette library at my fingertips, right here at the computer. Will I digitize the whole library? I’d like to, but that’ll undoubtedly take years. I’ll probably get bored of this and stop eventually, but if I keep coming back every so often and dubbing a few more…well, eventually I’ll get the whole damn thing done. And then I’ll goodbye to analog once and for all!
