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Three Rings to Screw Them All: Another Xbox Dies

By Chief Oddball on March 20th, 2010 at 4:24 am

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Crap. My 360 died. Part Deux.

A long time ago in a not-so faraway land, my launch day Xbox 360 console bit the dust, killed by GPU failure. Tonight, the refurbished console that Microsoft sent me as a warranty replacement for that original unit also bit the dust, also killed by GPU failure. It was a new design, sporting a new chipset, a quieter DVD drive and, most importantly, an enormous heatsink inside. And it failed anyway.

Ironically, I turned on my Xbox tonight because my friend Forster suggested some online gaming. He was undoubtedly in the gaming mood, having just received his warranty replacement Xbox from Microsoft this week after his original console suffered the exact same problem as mine. So we decided to try some co-op in Borderlands, a pretty cool hybrid shooter/RPG that I just got my hands on last weekend.

On our first game, we got about three minutes in before my Xbox locked up hard. Forster was in the midst of telling me something over the chat headset when both he and the game sounds completely cut out. Most unnervingly, I could immediately hear my console’s cooling fans spin down, as if the system had been returned to the dashboard, but it was completely unresponsive and required that I press the power button on the console faceplate to turn it off.

Upon booting it back up, I once again fired up Borderlands and was about to start the game when it abruptly crashed again, this time displaying a solid screen of black and white vertical pinstripes. First tangible sign of GPU failure, CHECK!

Forster and I tried three more times to start a co-op game, and each time I encountered a hard lock a couple minutes in. I was starting to get a little pissed off, so I suggested we try another game — Forza Motorsport 3 — to see if the problem would manifest there, or if it was just something goofy with Borderlands.

So we started up Forza, got into a 5-lap competitive race, and proceeded to finish without any hiccups whatsoever. Hmm.

Continue Reading…

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Thoughts on Being Thirty

By Chief Oddball on February 23rd, 2010 at 11:22 pm

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At 6:43 p.m. this evening I officially turned thirty. For the last few days — weeks, even — I haven’t known exactly how to feel. Mostly I wasn’t even thinking about my upcoming milestone birthday; I’ve been too preoccupied with how wholly dissatisfying and depressing life seems to have been of late. My wife and I have dealt with a lot of stress: career issues, medical issues, and some that have been a combination of both. This has been going on for months, and is largely responsible for the dearth of posts on this site. On any given day, after I finally get done with work and chores for the day, I don’t want to think about doing much more than playing video games or reading.

I feel like things started taking a turn for the better today, though. It seems odd to say that now, because the first half of the day was filled with little stresses that really got under my skin: incompetence at work; awful seasonal traffic filled with bad drivers making dumb decisions; my doctor treating me like my time wasn’t valuable by making me late for a meeting while he carried on a conversation with his next patient during my appointment time. After that, though, things got a lot better — thanks in part to my wife and family, and thanks in part to my simply freeing my mind, taking charge of things and declaring, “Fuck it.”

I had an impromptu meeting (which I was late for, as I mentioned) at work, during which I received another massive assignment that came out of nowhere as they always do, to design all the user interfaces for a new web app that’s going to do project management, customer management, task management, time tracking, employee management, support queueing and just about everything else. At its conclusion, I pretty much said, “Bye, fragsters.” I hung up the phone, logged off the computer and went to Gamestop. Yeah, no shit.

My wife bought me Heavy Rain (the new PS3 game) and more Microsoft points. We picked up my parents, who are here in town, and went to Carrabba’s for dinner. After a good meal we came back home for some birthday cake, and queued up the Office Space DVD for a few laughs (we’d been quoting it in the car all the way home). It was a great time, and a great way to kick off the next decade of my life. For the first time in a while, I felt like I actually have something to look forward to as that next decade marches on.

I’ve always allowed myself to be taken advantage of to some degree, and I’m about tired of it. If I could make one personal resolution as I enter my thirties, it’s to stop being such a goddamn pushover. Or, if I absolutely must accept being pushed around, to have the balls to push back when it’s strategically advantageous. My company has really put the screws to me over my health care, and since Christmas it’s been one stress after another, more and more bills, confusion and red tape — all so they could save their W-2 employees a few dollars a month while I lose my coverage entirely. For the month of February I’ve paid for two insurance companies at once while my employer drags me through this transition, and most of it I don’t really expect to get back. How bad do you think I feel about “cutting class” early today so I could do something for my own birthday? Not a damn bit, frankly.

I am, however, going to go into my work tomorrow with a clear head, with a renewed focus and energy on my tasks. I finally feel like I’m breaking through into a place where I can actually care about my work again, in a way that I haven’t been able to for weeks upon weeks. At the same time, I’m going to remember that that in this world, no one gets ahead without taking advantage. If you play the nice guy every day, you’re not going anywhere. You just have to know when the right time is to unleash your inner “bad guy.”

So, while I go forward into my thirties with the aforementioned in mind, what else have I got in store for my week? Well, when I’m here at home — this doesn’t apply in Thailand, where I don’t have full control over my activities — I like to bring a little slice of birthday celebration to every day of my birth week. A nice meal, a slice of cake, a marathon session of gaming, a favorite Star Trek episode, or whatever else suits my fancy.

On the gaming front, there’s plenty for me to do. I’m still going through Mass Effect 2, which is easily the most amazing game I’ve played in 2010 — and which I feel will be a Game Of The Year contender, even knowing the kinds of titles that are yet to release this year. It’s the perfect blend of adventure, role-playing and shooting, all tied together by a well-written story with a cast of excellent characters voiced by some real powerhouse talent. If you even remotely like sci-fi space opera, Mass Effect 2 is unquestionably a game you must play.

There’s also Heavy Rain, a PS3 exclusive that I just picked up today (thanks honey!). This is a different type of game — a sort of interactive narrative that makes you feel like you’re playing a movie. Admittedly, there could be limited appeal with such an approach, leaving players to grow bored or complain that they’re not playing so much as watching. But the free demo I tried was actually quite engaging, and despite the fairly wonky controls, I decided it was worth a purchase. I like these “interactive story” type games, and felt like rewarding and supporting the developer rather than saving it for the bargain bin or the rental store.

I almost picked up BioShock 2 today as well, but had to be realistic: I wouldn’t be playing it for weeks to come. I’ve still got Mass Effect to get through, and then — although I am embarrassed to admit it — I still need to finish the original BioShock! It was a game that I got about halfway through before putting it aside thanks to a tidal wave of amazing games that all landed at the same time, and the fact that I missed the first three weeks of the game’s launch due to my Xbox failure. Once I get ready to play the sequel, I may frankly pick it up used. To be honest, I never thought of BioShock as a game that needed a sequel — but I hear that, as a sequel, it’s actually quite good.

As an outro, I’d like this post to serve as a the first in a new line of posts that return to my original theme — commentary on news items, reviews of movies and games, and general gabbery about work, music, life, and whatever else I may be into at the moment. I’ve really let this place go, because in a way I think I really let myself go, emotionally at least. With so much to talk about in the news now that personally interests me, and with my goal to set foot on a new path, now seems like the perfect time to get back to that. Starting tomorrow, I hope, that will come to fruition. Stay tuned.

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Paradoxes

By Chief Oddball on February 17th, 2010 at 12:01 am

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I haven’t really been sure what to think these past few days, as I’ve approached my thirtieth birthday. I’ve had a particularly hard time just facing the average workday recently, feeling as though my efforts are largely boring and devoid of purpose. On the other hand, I’ve also found creative solace in a number of personal projects of varying degrees. In these business and personal pursuits alike, I’ve had hit-or-miss success — one minute cranking out marketing documents with reckless abandon, and the next minute unable to even finish a paragraph. Quite paradoxical.

In the end, I have to admit that these last few endlessly contradictory days have had nothing at all to do with the “milestone” birthday I’m about to celebrate next week; undoubtedly neither my body nor my mind gives a damn about such minutiae. These phases come and go; there are always times now and again when I just can’t seem to muster the will to care about anything.

To that end, I’ve been spending the meantime simply going wherever my mind wishes to go. As if to prove that turning thirty hasn’t changed the things that are important to me, my most recent personal project has involved going back to the stories I wrote between 1987 and 1995, on an old DOS-based word processor called First Choice. Since 64-bit operating systems are becoming the norm, and 16-bit code (like DOS apps) can’t be executed natively on them, I decided suddenly that it was time to convert the whole kit ‘n’ kaboodle to a more modern format, like Word or RTF or something.

So I’ve been going back to the classics, the ancient dreck I wrote between the ages of seven and fifteen. This, too, has been a contradictory experience: So much of what I wrote back then was utterly horrible, and yet there are gems that still make me smile when I read them, wondering how they’ve managed to hold up for so many years. The conversion process itself is essentially manual (what few utilities exist don’t do a competent enough job to be worthwhile), and far more arduous than I expected, but I’ve already converted some 50-60 stories and have put them all on my iPhone for reading whenever the mood strikes.

Meanwhile, some other changes are also afoot, changes which I hope will make life a little more interesting. One of my bosses (the one who’s also a friend) and his family are likely going to move back to Florida, to this very area in fact. Not only will it be great, personally, for both my wife and I to have more friends to hang out with, but having one of the owners of this company back in my neck of the woods can only strengthen my position here. Lately I’ve been feeling marginalized and neglected as the sole remaining employee left in Florida, and perhaps having one of the Big Bosses™ in my corner will help.

I had hoped to write more than this, but the paradoxical phase I’m in doesn’t seem to be over yet. Despite having a variety of ideas with which I wanted to infuse this post, I could never figure out how to put them into words. (Having the Olympics on in the background hasn’t helped my concentration.) This entry will have to stand as-is, perhaps as little more than a reminder that yes, I’m still here. Even if I don’t feel compelled to post much of late.

It’s going to be a busy weekend, with the Asian Festival taking place at the Mercato, my parents coming into town and the possibility that I might see Shutter Island, a movie that I’ve been wanting to watch since I put down the book upon which it’s based. With all of that going on, maybe I’ll have something to post here again soon. Stranger things have happened.

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Reconnecting

By Chief Oddball on February 3rd, 2010 at 8:23 pm

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I’ve been sort of shut-in lately…which is saying something, given that I work from home and already spend 99% of my time inside my house on any given day. After getting a cold early last week, even my daily walks ceased (the weather was cold and rainy too, by Florida standards). Then I transmitted my cold to Apple, and by Thursday and Friday we were both cooped up at home, sniffling and sneezing together.

Come Sunday, I hadn’t ventured outside for any Vitamin D or O2 in nearly a week — so it was fortuitous that Apple’s Thai friend Lek gave her a call and asked if we wanted to come to her house for an impromptu dinner get-together. Even Apple’s warnings about having a cold didn’t faze Lek, who brashly replied that she wasn’t afraid of it. Besides, she added, she had already invited another friend who had a cold as well, so there was no point in bailing out. I had essentially recovered fully by then, and Apple was longing for some of Lek’s home-cooked Thai food to unblock her sinuses, so we decided to go.

If I’m being honest, at first I didn’t know what to think of the idea. It’s not that I didn’t want to go out, eat dinner at a friend’s house and see other people — I just don’t take well to spur-of-the-moment activities. I like to have everything planned, like to know when I can expect to have the evening to myself and when I can expect to go out and do stuff. I had also just finished a truly rotten (read: ricockulously busy) week at the office and was looking at starting an even busier one on Monday, and part of me wanted to just play video games and vegetate all night. But an even larger part of me yearned to get the hell out of the house and interact with other humans, so I agreed to go.

I’m so glad I did, for we had a great time. As is always the case when you visit Lek’s house, lots of friends show up whom you haven’t seen in ages (and some whom you’ve never even met). We had an excellent meal filled with a variety of home-cooked dishes, including papaya salad, larb, tom yum and even teriyaki chicken. After dinner, while the gaggle of Thai girls hung out together, laughing and joking and telling stories, the husbands and boyfriends swapped their own stories about Thailand and the things we had encountered during our travels there.

Feeling like I was actually a knowledgeable authority on a subject other than that of video games, web development or cars was different for me — and refreshing. We talked about the places we’ve been, the food we’ve eaten and the exotic fruits native to Thailand, and I found myself likewise sharing a lot of stories with Lek’s husband. At one point he presented us with what he called “magic fruit”: Tiny little red fruits that, once you ate them, had the amazing effect of converting all sour and bitter flavors into sweet flavors. To demonstrate, he asked us each to eat a magic fruit and then suck on a slice of fresh lime. Much to everyone’s surprise, the lime tasted like sugar candy. It really was incredible. (And potentially quite useful.)

Sunday’s outing was such a good time that Apple and I have vowed to get out of the house more often for similar activities. Lek has a big karaoke party scheduled for late February that we’ll be going to (I won’t be singing, though…I do have my limits), and tomorrow we’re going to meet her and her husband at a highly-recommended new Thai restaurant where Lek works a couple days per week. I hear tell that I might be invited to develop a simple website for them in exchange for something tasty, like a whole bunch of free Thai food and sushi. I can get on board with that.

So here’s to getting out more, and hanging out with these folks again soon.

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Finally Found the Mercato Car Cruise

By Chief Oddball on January 16th, 2010 at 8:40 pm ··· Leave a Comment

The Mercato Holiday Car Cruise that was canceled back in mid-December on account of poor weather was finally rescheduled, I guess, because I showed up at the Mercato tonight to pick up a sandwich and it was in full swing. Unfortunately we were already starting to lose the daylight, but I grabbed a few pics with my iPhone. There was a staggering amount of exotics in attendance; the pictures barely do them justice.

See them all in this gallery on Flickr. (Or you could just go to my photos page.)


Work/Play

By Chief Oddball on January 16th, 2010 at 4:32 pm

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Local headline: Woman crashes BMW into photo shop while attempting to park.

Well…welcome to winter in Florida. The fact that we’re having our busiest “snowbird season” in two or three years must be a bittersweet pill to swallow for the owner of that Fifth Avenue photo shop, who says this is the third time in 16 years that a car has driven through his front window. Oh well, perhaps the additional business this year will help him pay his undoubtedly increasing insurance premiums.

Anyway, I would also be remiss if I didn’t welcome you officially to Oddball Update 2010. Contrary to recent evidence, this blog has not fallen under new management. I’ve simply been too preoccupied with not doing anything constructive to give much of a crap about posting anything. In truth, the holidays this past year were rather hit-and-miss. The last two weeks of December were an emotional roller coaster of good and bad, hair-pulling frustration and classic good times. It was hard to know which you were going to get when you woke up in the morning.

Things have settled down a bit in the past week or two, but the “head in the sand” mode into which I regressed during the holidays is still here. I work every day ’till six or six-thirty, take a brisk walk for my daily exercise and fresh air, and play some enjoyable video games in the evening before kicking back with Apple for some chatting, gossiping or giggling like schoolchildren before bed. The routine hasn’t varied much, if at all, in a month. It’s quite comforting, really, like your grandmother’s fresh-baked strawberry pie or a nice hot bowl of soup on a cold day.

Unfortunately, this routine hasn’t been very conducive to creative pursuits, such as writing, designing, recording or any of the other constructive tomfoolery I like to get up to from time to time. Even so, I’m trying to move beyond caring about such matters. Somewhere after I got out of high school and into a job where I actually had to (and wanted to) care about what I was spending my time doing, I started getting very sensitive about how my hours were spent. I’d get all guilt-wracked if I felt like I hadn’t “accomplished something” or “done something constructive” even during my off hours. So on those nights when I’d just feel like playing a game, watching a movie or reading a book, I’d go to bed feeling like I wasted the evening.

Not anymore, really. I’m eating it up. Give me three hours to explore the wasteland in Fallout 3, or explore the galaxy in Star Trek Online (which I’ll talk more about some other time). I’ll go to bed happy. Usually much happier than I was before I started playing, when I’d just gotten off work for the day. In fact, during the holidays I was pretty damn surly just about every weekday, at least until the sun set.

For a time, there, I really felt like the guys at work were trying to screw me. Not really on purpose; I had no illusions about them deliberately designing a conspiracy against me or anything grandiose like that. I just felt marginalized, like it was easy for them to make choices that ended up screwing me because I’m out of sight and out of mind down here in Florida, whereas the rest of the crew is in another part of the country (or the world, in some cases). See, when I was first asked to sign on with this firm, I was part of a small Florida satellite office that no longer exists today. Or, more to the point, I’m the last remaining member of its former ranks.

It all started just days before Christmas, when the company admins decided they wanted to switch our health insurance group plan to a new vendor by the first of the year, in order to save everybody some money on premiums. Unfortunately, since I work out of a different state and am thus a 1099 contractor (so the company doesn’t have to play by Florida’s rules), the new heath insurer decided I wasn’t going to qualify because they don’t like contractors. So this touched off an immediate scramble where I and the human resources coordinator tried to put together a solution that would allow Apple and I to retain coverage. Given that we’re still trying to get pregnant right now, the possibility of losing health coverage was not something I wanted to hear.

Continue Reading…

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Cheer-Yourself-Up Day

By Chief Oddball on December 18th, 2009 at 10:00 pm

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It’s no surprise that 2009 was the year from hell for a great many of us. As we prepare to send it packing and usher in not just a new year, but a new decade as well, my wife Apple and I are taking the opportunity to celebrate together in the form of a specially-prepared “cheer-yourself-up” day. And boy, am I ready for it.

Although we were certainly spared from the worst of the economic trauma that swept across most of the world in 2009, we’ve had our share of difficulties — including our continued attempts to conceive a child, efforts toward which have at times taken a harsh toll on us both. This, combined with pressures at work (including the impending shake-up or even loss of our health care benefits) and the home repair costs that we’ve had to eat over the last few months, has had us running a little ragged. But since the heavy load of sidework I’ve recently been engaged in has netted me a bit more money than I expected to make, we decided to take some of it and go shopping together, eat out at our favorite restaurants, enjoy some ice cream and do whatever else we wanted for one day. That day is this Saturday.

There are a number of very nice outdoor malls — of the typically southwest-Floridian upscale variety — within striking distance of us, but we haven’t been anywhere near one since we got back from Thailand in May. For the most part, we’ve had too much work and too little money to waste on mall trawling. Tomorrow we’re going to take our spoils of war and visit Coconut Point, where they’ve got just about everything you could want, for a little shameless retail indulgence.

After my usual Saturday afternoon acupuncture treatment, we’re planning at late lunch at our favorite Vietnamese cafe, followed by a leisurely jaunt around the Coconut Point campus. Between my games, videos and books and Apple’s fashions and housewares, we’ll undoubtedly find something fun to get ourselves for Christmas. We’re also likely to find some pretty staggering crowds, given that the last Saturday before Christmas is statistically the busiest shopping day of the year, according to what I’ve heard. However, after the week I’ve had, a bunch of people milling about hardly even registers on my give-a-shit meter.

For the latter part of the day, we’ll head further northward to Gulf Coast Town Center, another one of those outdoor malls that competes for the attention of regional shoppers and tourists. They’ve got a Carrabba’s Italian Grill there, where I’ve already made an 8:00 reservation. Blast chain restaurants if you must, but it won’t change the fact that we are both suckers for Carrabba’s. After ordering enough food to enjoy for two entire meals, I’m going to walk over to Cold Stone Creamery and see if they’ve got eggnog ice cream. I loooove me some eggnog ice cream.

We will probably not be stopping at The Dude Cereal Bar, a rather eclectic new addition to the Town Center lineup; apparently it’s a bar where you eat cereal. Yeah, like that kind of cereal — Count Chocula is their best-selling flavor. The proprietors of The Dude (yes, it’s named after the guy from The Big Lebowski) claim that their bar is a great place for folks to come and eat all the sugary cereal their moms wouldn’t buy for them. Okay, I guess I get that. But wow…a whole bar for cereal? In a way it’s strangely right up my alley, what with me being a cereal fiend, but I can’t see myself paying $6 or $8 bucks for a bowl of cereal. I’ve got plenty of the stuff in my cabinet at home.

In the meantime, I’m looking forward to a couple more quiet hours of writing this evening before hitting the sack. I’ve either worked or stressed over something work-related every night this week until nine or ten o’clock, and trust me, I’ve had it. And I am officially not working any more until Monday.

So now we really get into the greatest part of the month. This weekend it’s our own private Fun Time™, then next weekend is Christmas itself — and a day or two later, my parents will be arriving from Michigan on their annual road trip to Florida. We’ll undoubtedly get together and do stuff while they’re here, and so far, it looks like the weather will play nice as well — we’ve got a cold front moving in, and some comfortable temperatures arrive tomorrow and look to be staying for the foreseeable future. It’s about damn time.

That’s it for this post. Perhaps I’ll check in later this weekend to report if our first annual cheer-yourself-up day was everything we hoped it would be.

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Fix Slow WebDAV Performance in Windows 7

By Chief Oddball on December 18th, 2009 at 8:39 pm

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I have an iPhone file storage app called Air Sharing that uses a WebDAV server to let you connect to it with a PC. For some reason, a few weeks after installing Windows 7, file transfers to or from this (or any other) WebDAV server became incredibly, mind-numbingly, literally-33.6K-dialup slow. And yet, from all my other computers in the house, even those still running Windows XP, file transfers over the LAN to my iPhone were as fast as you’d expect.

Today, finally, I got so sick and tired of it that I — gasp! — searched for a solution. To my embarrassment, I found the answer in just a minute or two, illustrating quite succinctly just how much time I had been wasting just “putting up with it.” Oddly, the culprit is none other than Internet Explorer 8. Quite simply, all you have to do is turn off IE’s automatic proxy settings detection. Here’s how to do that:

  1. In Internet Explorer, open the Tools menu, then click Internet Options.
  2. Select the Connections tab.
  3. Click the LAN Settings button.
  4. Uncheck the “Automatically detect settings” box.
  5. Click OK until you’re out of dialog hell.

Immediately after doing this, file transfers to my iPhone graduated from CompuServe Modem Simulator to Transwarp Conduit Simulator. It was that much of an improvement.

I found the answer on this Microsoft Technet discussion, incidentally. The solution was posted by “Daniel CD” about two-thirds of the way down the page. Props to that guy.

Gotta love Intarweb collaboration.

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Getting Seasonal

By Chief Oddball on December 2nd, 2009 at 6:29 pm

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Every year it’s the same thing. The same commercialized rush for your shopping dollars, the same rotating playlist of seemingly half a dozen Christmas songs on at least one local radio station, the same daily avalanche of direct mail catalogs and coupons from every company you’ve ever done business with in your life. And for some reason that I cannot explain, I love all of it.

Okay, that may be a bit much. I don’t love the heaps of junk mail, and the incessant retail hullabaloo can get a bit old. But for as long as I can remember, I’ve always loved this time of year — the Christmas “season,” as it were, that seems to officially begin over the long Thanksgiving weekend and doesn’t end until you finally start winding down from your New Year’s festivities. It’s easy to get overwhelmed by the increasingly crass and commercialized way that the retail industry treats the holiday season, or any other occasion they can use as an excuse to leverage more money from us. But in the process, it’s also easy to overlook the genuine magic of the season, those almost palpable hints of cheer that creep in when you see all the Christmas lights on your neighbors’ houses, see cars drive by with fake reindeer antlers (I swear, today was the first time I ever thought of a Prius as “cute”) or hear a favorite Christmas carol while walking amongst the shops and restaurants with someone you love.

You could say that I’m being naïve; after all, there’s no real “magic” to this season other than that of the artificial variety, created by the morass of commercial enterprises that claim to govern our daily lives. And it’s hard to feel all that “magical” when you’ve got bills to pay, when you’re out of work, when you have family members fighting on the front lines in the Middle East for an increasingly dubious and unidentifiable cause, or when your own dreams just don’t seem to be coming true despite your best expenditures of money, spirit and time. You could say whatever you like — one way or another, during the month of December I can never help but become intractably giddy.

It’s largely an internal phenomenon — an escape mechanism, dare I say. While you’ll never find me using the holidays as an excuse to stand in a Black Friday sale line at 3:00 in the morning, cavort drunkenly at a local Christmas party or spend myself into a debt-fueled coma, you will find me using them as an excuse to put all the pain, suffering and workaday shit in a drawer somewhere for a month and just be happy. It doesn’t always work — not every day, for that would mean I would have to change my last name to “Stepford” — but it always propels my sense of creativity and inspiration to new heights, and puts me in the mood to go beyond the usual daily routine of work, eat, sleep.

Continue Reading…

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Corpse Marked…They’re Gone

By Chief Oddball on November 13th, 2009 at 5:12 pm ··· 3 Comments

Apparently I didn’t get the message some six months ago when the entire Virgin Megastore chain went out of business, so there was no Call of Duty to be heard by these ears today. Also, no “free giant cookie,” as was promised to all Disney Vacation Club members at the (former) store’s smoothie bar upstairs.

Note to Disney: You might want to update the DVC perks booklet you give to guests at check-in.

Good news? My wallet was spared any collateral damage.


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