Late yesterday afternoon, the UPS guy dropped off the final piece of the entertainment center. Thanks to everyone (Mom and Dad, Adam and Aric, Will and Jean-Claude) who helped out with this!

Fuzzball, seen partially at the extreme left of this picture, was so impressed that she decided to take a nap. So far, I’ve figured out that the wireless controller will occasionally lose track of itself and refuse to register button presses right in the middle of a song, which is really, really annoying. I eventually fixed it well enough to play through the first 5 songs, which is just fine for right now.

The guitar controller and game also had warnings about which controllers you can use with the game. Seriously, they imply that legal action can be taken against people who attempt to play the game using a controller that isn’t a Genuine Activision Controller©™ or a regular PS2 controller. I am not a lawyer, but I do believe that any sane judge would throw that out of court in 5 seconds. That’s like Chrysler saying that you can only use Chrysler brand socket wrenches to work on a Chrysler car.

It’s going to be a long, long time before I can play “Through the Fire and Flames” (the most difficult song in the game) on Expert, though. Apparently Guitar Hero 3 is more difficult than Rock Band or the other 2 games in the series. Good. I need to get better quickly. . . .

Fuzzball with a caption. If she ever had coffee, she’d be a holy terror, as she’s hyper lots of the time.

Finally got my MI tax refund. Not a whole lot of money, but better than nothing. I think that after tax prep expenses, I got about $30 back in refund for 2007.

Apparently, WePublishNews has enough forms and info from me now, and they will make some sort of decision soon. The express bus from Tempe to downtown Phoenix leaves from either the bus stop right by my place, or the bus stop a few blocks away—not sure which. Either one would be great, since gas will hit $4/gallon soon. The real problem is that the express buses to Phoenix only run early, like at 7:34am.

Not much else to report right now.

Siamese kitty shows you the dangers of having too many energy drinks at one sitting.

Went over to Steve’s last night. He has a new dog, which was interesting. His previous dogs are still trying to get used to the new dog, so it was almost like an extended Israel- Palestine negotiation session getting ourselves and the dogs from one place in the house to another without major hostilities breaking out.

Then we spent some time troubleshooting sound (and OpenGL) on a couple of Linux machines, which worked out well. I showed him some of the things that you could do with the KDE inter-app communication protocol DCOP (warning: technical). He mentioned Frets On Fire, an open-source and relatively easily extensible clone of Guitar Hero written in Python. So we had to download it and try it out on the newly sound/video capable machine. It worked fine, but using a keyboard as a controller is not insanely easy or fun. They say you can use a joystick or a guitar controller on that game as well. I may be able to try that at some point.

Heard from Meghan yesterday. That was kind of cool, as I haven’t heard from her in months. She got an internship in L.A., which could be any combination of interesting, strange, cool, and scary. No news on the job front. Sigh.

Sometimes, I think of very old video games and the recent marketing trend of prepending “i” to everything, and weird stuff happens.

Trivia: We didn’t win, we got 3rd place, which was annoying since we almost had a number of questions and could’ve gotten second if we had been more focused.

Zach told a story of an identity thief who was trying to be smart by using a stolen credit card number to order hundreds of dollars worth of Christian books.  Why is this partially smart?  Well, if the thief is able to pretend to be a fundamentalist Christian, then other fundamentalist Christians will think the thief is unlikely to lie about where he obtained the stolen books.  This makes fencing the stolen goods easier.  The thief is still an idiot, and will probably find that the police are not sent to bring peace, but an arse-kicking and a court date.

This is apparently my hundredth actual post despite being numbered 106. There were apparently 6 tests, drafts that got thrown out, and experiments along the way. Here’s to many more posts!

Not a whole lot else to report. I’ve finished all the books I checked out, so it’s time to go down to the library again and get some more. Walking 1.2 miles (1.4 miles?) is always a good thing though.

I don’t know what would possess someone to dress up like this. Large amounts of cheap, nasty beer? A bet that he lost? A dare? The trouble with pictures found on the Net is that too often, you never know the story behind them.

Saw a couple of personalized license plates yesterday that were more interesting than usual. One of them read “A QT GUY”, which is something Jo might find amusing. The other one read “EUPHIO ?” referencing one of Kurt Vonnegut’s lesser-known short stories.

Finished Stross’s Halting State. He apparently didn’t have any literary reason for using second-person in that book. The idea that people might pay to engage in real-world training sessions if those training sessions were disguised as an MMORPG is interesting. I don’t know how practical that idea is, but some game companies are probably investigating it. Thousands of people have spent money on “Guitar Hero” and “Rock Band”, after all, so it’s probable that thousands of people would spend money on “Spy Simulator 1.0″ or “Counter-Terrorist Unit Code Alpha” if such games existed.

Went grocery shopping yesterday and saw a number of odd things. Small packages of sliced ham were 21.2 cents per ounce. Large packages of sliced ham were 21.8 cents per ounce. A 24-pack of store brand pop was $4.88, while 4 12-packs of the same brand were $9.00, meaning 2 12-packs were $4.50. Stores have relied on customers being innumerate since the 1970s if not before, but laws require stores to list price per ounce (or similar information) for everything. Maybe now they’re relying on the fact that too many people can’t do arithmetic without a calculator.

I don’t have any good or relevant images to post today.

Yesterday, went out to the rifle range with Zach, Juan, Juan’s wife, and Dave. I fired a number of things, including Zach’s .22 Magnum short-barreled “noisy cricket”, which I found a bit difficult to use. It’s just such a tiny pistol that it was difficult for me to hold and fire. Practice would solve this. Also tried Juan’s wife’s .22, which was also a bit too small for me to hold comfortably. According to Juan, the 10-round .22 that he had is pretty cheap and so are parts and ammo for it. After firing about 40 rounds through it, I said, “Dangit, Juan, you are making me want one of these things.”

Then we went for a late lunch, and Sarah and Jen joined us. After lunch and some debate, we decided to give Rock Band another try. Dave had something or other to do, so he bailed. We found that on some songs, it was impossible to select “easy” difficulty, which annoyed Juan as it was the first time he’d played a game like this. Baptism of fire, I guess. I couldn’t play guitar on “medium” (chords add tons of complexity) so I was . . . stuck. I left at about 6:15.

As I was driving back on I-10 west, I noticed that the setting sun was almost perfectly obscured by the A-pillar of my car. I wondered if the highway designers planned the road that way, or if I was just lucky. Probably the latter.

The 66% complete entertain- ment center referred to last entry. The bright yellow bar (added in Gimp) is 26.5″ or 67.3 cm. This is the largest video display I’ve ever owned. My previous TV was 21″ diagonal, and my current LCD monitor is 19″ diagonal.

Today the plan is to go down to the Casa Grande rifle range again, with Juan, Zach, possibly Pete, and maybe some other people. Zach said something about possibly combining this with a Rock Band jam session, but whether that will work is dependent on other things. So the only thing I’m counting on is firing a few rounds through various rifles and possibly pistols.

I finally managed to fix the problem with my mouse emitting multiple clicks when the button was only pressed once.  There was a piece of hair or lint inside the housing, and removing it fixed everything.  The real problem is that opening this optical mouse to clean it is difficult, since optical mice are not supposed to need regular cleaning.  (Replacing a part that “can’t break” is always orders of magnitude more expensive and time-consuming than replacing parts that you know will eventually fail, after all.)

The previous entry look more closer is actually a reference to Order Of The Stick #525, which is silly but well-done.

So yesterday, I found a guy on craigslist who had a fairly large CRT TV for sale for a much more reasonable price than any of the LCD TVs that I could find on the net. 33″ screen, multiple appropriate inputs, and it had a stand. I went over to Glendale (long way) and made sure that it worked properly, then we had an interesting time loading it into my car. A 33″ CRT is almost too big to fit into a Tiburon, and we had to tie the trunk lid down.

Then I had to unload the things I bought once I got home. The stand was filthy, possibly because the guy I bought the TV from was a heavy smoker and smoked in his own house. Seriously, in the time it took to load the TV into my car, I think he and his son made it through 3 cigarettes. Oh well, it wasn’t hard to clean the stand up, it just took a while. I needed help from my neighbors Will and Jean-Claude to unload the TV since it was too awkward and heavy for one person to carry.

But I got the living room rearranged to fit the TV in, and got the PS2 plugged in. It works for PS1 games, at least. If I had a longer S-video cable, I could display video from the computer on the TV as well. This will have to wait. But it’s almost complete.

I also have to figure out why the left button on this stupid mouse has decided to start registering double-clicks for no reason. It’s really annoying.

The other day, I was cleaning out my wallet, and noticed that one of my old grocery receipts said, “Turn this receipt in for a really lousy free ticket to the May 17 D-Backs vs. Tigers game”. It was, of course, too late for me to do that. Would’ve been neat to see a baseball game for the cost of driving to it, though.

I don’t know for sure how well the interview with WePublishNews went. Talking with the team members went well. There was a test, though, and this test was fairly difficult. Some things were easy for me, but there was at least one question that I had never seen before. Turns out it’s a semi-common problem with AUTO INCREMENT in MySQL. If unspecified things happen, a column with that attribute can jump to max(int32) for some reason. An appropriate ALTER TABLE fixes it up. I think I may have gotten partial credit on this one, but not knowing the fix instantly may have hurt me. I heard from one of the guys there that there’s an express bus that runs through the middle of Mesa and Tempe, stops very close to the office there, and is pretty cheap. That would be really cool if I could commute by bus and save gas money. The hiring decision is out of my hands now though.

I went looking for a TV later that afternoon, and found nothing under $350. I don’t want an enormous 50″ LCD. I want something about 21″ in size and reasonably cheap that takes composite-in. I shouldn’t have given my old CRT TV away when I left Michigan. Heck, a Playstation2->VGA adapter would work if there was a way to deal with the sound. Oh well, I’ll figure something out. Tons of people in the Phoenix area sell old junk on craigslist. . .

Old-school space Lego had a lot going for it. While building completely new models from the basic parts was fun, one of the things that I always liked was that you could partially disassemble any model to simulate the ship being damaged by aliens, lasers, pirates, missiles, or whatever.

Troubleshot mount.cifs on Ubuntu yesterday at Steve’s. The real problem was one that I had never seen before, namely that mount tried to contact the remote machine on port 445. If the remote machine wasn’t listening on port 445, mount waited forever (much longer than the 30 seconds these things usually wait) for a response. This was reasonably easy to fix once we knew what the heck was going on, just make sure that mount had port=139 in its options.

Steve’s sons also gave me a nice gift. They had an older PS2 as well as a PS3. The PS2 won’t play DVD movies now, but it will play games. Since they knew that I wanted to play Guitar Hero and its sequels, they gave me their old PS2. This was very nice of them. Now all I have to do is obtain a TV, the game, and a guitar controller, and I’ll be . . . ready to waste a great deal of time.

Started reading Charlie Stross’s Halting State yesterday.  Didn’t get more than 50 pages into it, but it’s one of the only novels that I’ve ever seen that’s written in second person.  Most authors use omniescent third person for maximum flexibility, or limited third person for slightly less flexibility, or first person if they don’t need flexibility and are sure the protagonist can capture the reader’s interest.  Second person is not widely used, possibly because the “Choose Your Own Adventure” books were written that way, and those books are horribly gauche.  Maybe Stross has some reason for the person shift that will be revealed in due course.

Interview today with WePublishNews.  Here’s hoping.