Minimally Exceptional

I was reading on ufck about a project that someone was working on, and I’ve basically decided to take that general concept and steal it for myself.

It is no secret that I love video games, and have since I was a kid. My parents didn’t understand why they were buying their 23 year old kid a PS2 for Christmas – little do they know I’ll be first in line for a PS9 when I’m 62.

So anyway, I have a tremendous back catalogue of games that I am embarrased and ashamed to admit that I have never played. Metal gear solid. Metroid prime. Bioshock. Fable. A drawer full of RPGs that I couldn’t list out right now if I wanted to. I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that I have probably spent thousands on games that I have yet to play.

I’m going to try and change that and play through the catalog in no particular order, and while I play, I’m going to write.

Why? Who cares? Well chances are no one cares. Hopefully by writing about my experience with these games I’ll accomplish three things: actually updating this site once in a while, knocking some of these games off of my list before more good games come out, and maybe even improving my writing a little while I’m at it.

So next up: the back catalogue listing and Fallout.

I recently picked up an acer laptop from someone at work. The hard drive failed, and he was in the market to buy a new computer anyway, so he passed it along to me.

I just happened to have an extra 2.5″ hard drive, so I plugged it in, tracked down the recovery disc, and fired it up.

Turns out acer doesn’t give you a factory restore disc. Instead, they put the restore data on a recovery partition and have the user burn their own recovery disc.

It’s a cost cutting measure, I guess. Doesn’t sound like too evil of an idea, but as always there is a catch. What if your hard drive fails? No problem. Put in a new drive and restore from your burned recovery disc.

The thing about burned media is that consumer grade writable media is more unstable than a pressed cd or DVD. As a result, burned discs can have reliability issues when it comes to using them for backup and recovery. Needless to say, the burned recovery disc has failed, so there is no way to get the original drivers and OS reinstalled.

A quick review of acers website shows that there is a twenty four hour help desk. I fire off an email with my problem and get a relatively personalty-free answer in a few hours. This email told me two things: I was dealing with an automated help system (A ROBOT), and I could purchase a new recovery disc directly from acer.

Great! I click the link, enter the serial number, and… get an error code. I report the error code to the help desk rep who then tells me that acer is no longer able to produce my recovery disk because this is a “legacy machine” that is no longer supported. A legacy machine? Come on. This laptop is 20 months old. If it was a work machine we would still be depreciating the bastard. His (its) advice to me? Purchase a retail operating system, install it, and track down drivers for hardware on the Internet.

I don’t know about you, but I do not have extra cash lying around than I can burn on another copy of an operating system that I already own a legitimate license for. Acer should be embarassed that this is “the best [they] can do” for customers who spend a grand (or more) on a computer and accessories and need help less than two years later.

There is no way that I am the only person in this situation, which means there is likely a small but angry group of acer owners with effectively bricked units, and the way I see it there are three options:

1) shell out a bunch of money for a copy of an OS that they already own a license for,

2) switch to a free OS that they likely don’t want, or

3) get over the fact that their laptop is now a large and expensive paperweight.

None of those opitions are good ones. It’s no wonder people pirate software. I don’t know what I’ll be doing, but I can tell you with pretty solid confidence where my next laptop will NOT be coming from.

Oh, sorry – did I say “paperweight”? I meant “Legacy Paperweight”.

Why am I so stupidly addicted to Shirt.woot? I mean, I love the shirt.woots overall (there are probably 6 or 7 that I bought and wear regularly), but the random shirt.woot gets me every time. In all fairness, I guess I am addicted to woot and their super cheap SD/Micro SD memory cards, because for some reason I buy 3 of them whenever they’re up (and Laura yells at me every time).

I guess it’s better than being addicted to cocaine or meth, but I just can’t figure out why I am a sucker for $7.00 mystery shirts. I have picked up the random shirt.woot three times now (with a fourth on the way), and ordered the maximum of 3 shirts each time. So that ’s a grand total of 12 random shirts. In terms of the shirts themselves, I’m batting about .500 pending this week’s order. I have had one really great set of 3, one lame set of 3, and one set with two good ones and a lame one.

I’ll have to take a look at the shirt.woots that I have so far and post some of the ones that I really like.

What is it about a random shirt that hooks me in every time? Is it the uncertainty of not knowing what you’re going to get or how great/terrible they’re going to be? Is it the high hopes of getting a neat shirt that you wanted but missed the first time around? Am I just that much of a total dork?

…

Well, I guess I answered my own question there, didn’t I.

Watchmen starts showing in theaters soon, and I have to say that I’m pretty excited. The graphic novel is just awesome. Plot, characters, artwork – really, there is nothing about it to not love.

Flickr and YouTube both have a lot of promotional pictures and videos up, and they look great. Strictly speaking about physical appearance, it looks like they did a great job casting (with the exception of Veidt, who I am on the fence about). Rorschach and The Comedian both look very true to the original concept.

I do have one concern – the ending. The original story does not have what most would consider a happy ending. I have read that the film will have a different ending, and hopefully at least a little bit of artistic integrity is maintained. If the movie ends with Hollywood rainbows and sunshine, I’ll be at least a little disappointed.

Who am I kidding? Even if the ending is sunshine and rainbows, I’m still going to watch it and enjoy the hell out of it.

So now that we’ve been able to get settled in at the house and the wedding chaos has passed, I’ve been able to start catching up on the backlog of video games that I’ve bought and never played. In the last 6 or so months, I’ve played and finished:

Final Fantasy XII
Final Fantasy XII – Revenant Wings
Final Fantasy IV – DS
Chrono Trigger DS
Dragon Warrior IV DS
God of War
God of War II
Super Paper Mario
Castlevania – Order of Ecclesia
Ace Attorney – Apollo Justice

I’ve also played a good deal of Grand Theft Auto IV, but just like every other GTA game before it, I quit halfway through. I don’t really know why – it really is a fantastic game, and I want to finish it, but for some reason about halfway through I moved on and just never picked it back up.

Right now I’m in the middle of Okami, which is really pretty fantastic. I also have a ton of games lined up that I’m really excited about, although I don’t know which one I’ll start when I’m finished with Okami:

Fallout 3
Bioshock
Metal Gear Solid IV
Oblivion IV
Drake’s Fortune
Ratchet and Clank: FTOD
Assassin’s Creed
Star Wars: Force Unleashed
Lego Batman
Lego Indiana Jones
Shadow Hearts
Grandia II & III
Radiata Stories
Metroid Prime: Corruption
Dragon Quest Swords: Tower of Mirrors
Spore

There are a bunch of others that I have (Fable, Command and Conquer 3), but the list above is really what I want to make sure I get through. The only things coming out soon that I’m really excited for are Resident Evil 5 (which is going to be fucking awesome), and Ys Book I & II for DS – how great is that? I loved the Ys games. I had Ys 3 for the Super NES and Ys 6 for the PS2, and I’ve played some of the others via translations and emulators, and they’re really all pretty great. Classic “old school” hack and slash action RPG’s. I’d love to get the whole series in english, but I know that’s not very realistic.

Dragon Quest V and VI for DS are supposed to be coming out soon too, and I’m looking forward to those as well.

And my final moment of nerdiness tonight: I think I’m going to have to get a PSP. There’s a Kingdom Hearts title coming out for the PSP, and that’s a must for me. The PSP is also getting some Star Ocean titles, including a re-release of Star Ocean I and II. Star Ocean III is one of my favorite RPG’s. I though it was really well done, and apparently it takes place in the same universe as I and II, so I’d really like to play through those (even though they’re going to wind up being kind of dated).

It’s an expensive habit, but at least I’m not spending all of my money on drugs and cigarettes, right?

Christ, I’m such a geek.

Ahh, good ole’ Mr. Bennet. I was on the fence about him for most of the season, but I ultimately believed he was a good guy. In the last 5 or so episodes he’s really been fantastic, and has indeed been an ally. I’m really pleased with how his character turned out.

“Save the cheerleader, Save the world.”

We’ve been wondering for months how saving the cheerleader could save the world. She’s a healer – not a fighter – how could she stop Sylar? How can she stop the exploding man? Sure, she can save her own ass, but how can she save millions of people?

It all made sense after last night. By saving Claire, she survived long enough to throw herself out a window. There’s Nathan, watching his only daughter that he barely knows throw herself out a window because she doesn’t want anything to do with him. That moment instantly changed him, defining Nathan Petrelli as a ‘good guy,’ and allowing him to save the day.

Sylar? Alive.

Peter Petrelli? Alive.

Nathan? Could potentially be alive, but he’s probably dead – I hate to see him go, but if he is dead, at least he will be remembered for potentially one of the most fantastic character redemptions on television. It’s totally possible (and incredibly cheesy) – Nathan could have flown Peter up to a safe distance in the atmosphere and gotten the hell out of dodge before he exploded. It’s also totally possible that the writers will kill Nathan. Nathan could have wanted to be with his brother until the end, knowing that Peter was terrified. At the same time, Peter wouldn’t want to be responsible for the death of Nathan, so really, who the hell knows?!?

Hiro? He’s hundreds of years in the past, and that can only mean one thing: Hiro is/was the ‘legendary warrior’ Takezo Kensai.

The fate of DL and Matt Parkman is anyone’s guess.

I don’t think that either Peter Petrelli or Sylar can be killed without taking the other one with them. There is a delicate good vs. evil balance to be maintained in these comic book type scenarios, and killing either of them without killing both of them would greatly disrupt that balance. Peter is too much of a badass to be left unchecked, and no one else can even hope to compete with Sylar these days…

The comics have been quite revealing, especially with the history of the Petrelli/Linderman connection.

The other thing that I think is really interesting is the connection between Charles Deveaux and the Linderman/Petrelli/Nakamura ’save the world’ super friends club. The super friends club dissolved over the bomb in new york – there were pro bomb and anti bomb people in the club, and each side thought the other side defected and became corrupt. We now know that Charles was not only connected to Linderman and the Petrellis, but that he was/is a ‘anti bomb’ player (read: good guy) along with Kaito Nakamura.

So we have Linderman and the Petrelli’s as the pro-bomb faction, and Nakamura and Deveaux as the anti-bomb faction. Both sides think the other side was corrupted, when in all reality it’s going to wind up being a matter of personal faith and perspective. I’m assuming that papa patrelli was pro-bomb based solely off of the comic books, but I guess the jury is still out on that.

Season one is available on DVD in august – I’ll be buying it, and anxiously awaiting season two. Hopefully this show is around for a while. I feel like the writers still have a hell of a story to tell – past, present, and future – and I’d love for them to have the chance to tell it the way it should be told.

What a great show.

I recently switched hosting services. Previously, I was using Hasweb, which when I signed up with them four or so years ago, they were a great deal. If I pay for a year in advance, I get 5GB of storage and 100GB of transfer for about eight bucks a month.

I wanted to be able to upload and make available for download the concert recordings and DVDs that Laura and I have put together – I want to distribute them, but my upload is capped at a low enough speed that seeding through bittorrent isn’t feasable. Obviously, HTTP access isn’t happening on 5gb of space.

I started looking for a new host a few weeks ago, and found HostMonster. Their plan looked great, had lots of storage, and tons a bandwidth all for a reasonable price. Sounded great, until I read the terms of service. No profanity, not offensive content.

Fuck, I guess that’s out.

Eventually my search lead me to Hostgator. Hostgator also had a great plan. I’m paying $15 a month for 200GB of storage and 2TB of bandwidth – more than enough for what I want to do. I signed up, changed name servers on my domain, and was up and running within a few days. Overall, the process was much less painless than I expected it to be. I was expecting flurries of emails to and from support desks and techies trying to move all of my stuff from host A to host B. This was much easier than the other web change I made, which was registering Laura’s domain at somethingferretrelated.com and changing the main domain associated with my hasweb account. That was a little more painful.

Anyway, after a few days of uploading, downloading, md5 checking, et cetera – the first set is available online. Info files aren’t there yet but they will be after this weekend.

In the downloads section there is now the Greg Howard 2005-07-15 DVD, the Tim Reynolds 2005-07-15 Early DVD, and the Tim Reynolds 2005-07-15 Late DVD. The Matt Nathanson / Graham Colton / Kyle Riabko show at the Gargoyle in 2004 will be going up next, as soon as the graham and kyle discs are ready. Yes, this is the ripped pants show.

So anyway, I’d like to think that’s a pretty significant improvement/addition to the site. There’s finally content available here other than my petty bitching and geeking out. Go nuts and download them if you want them – I’ll password lock the directories if/when I run out of bandwidth.

So the first hour of the three hour Heroes finale is on tonight.

What a great show this wound up being. I remember back in August when they were really pushing the promos for it – I just wasn’t interested. The previews didn’t make it look like it was worth a crap. Just another example of why you shouldn’t judge on first impressions.

So the blurbs in TV guide and online say that, between this week and next week, we’re going to see the resolution of the exploding man, and we’re going to lose two more heroes.

My personal prediction: Ted Sprague (which I’m almost certain about) and DL. I don’t really have anything to back up DL, it’s really just a hunch. At this point he seems like the most expendible. Everyone else still seems like they have some purpose to serve in the grand scheme of things, so I just can’t see any of them being killed off. Maybe Matt Parkman. But plot-wise, it seems like everyone else still needs to be around. The Petrelli clan, the Hiro clan, Micah, Niki, Linderman, and Claire all need to stay relatively intact.

I guess they could kill Sylar. I’d probably be OK with that and technically, he’s a person with a power, so he counts, I suppose.

I actually felt really bad for him last week, during the scene with his mom and during the scene where he realized he would be the bomb. For a moment, he realized his humanity. He realized that what he had been doing was wrong, and he just wanted to be normal. His whacked out mom just couldn’t let him have that and insisted that he should be ’special,’ and he kind of snapped. I don’t think he has any desire to really kill a bunch of innocents, everyone he has killed so far has just been in an effort to make himself more special. There’s nothing in it for him to kill a bunch of normal humans.

Ted is the other hero that I’m pretty sure is screwed. Ted has to be killed for Sylar to get his power, and regardless of whether or not Sylar is the bomb, he’s going to need that ‘power’ for whatever showdowns he has with Peter. So I’d be willing to bet that Ted’s out.

My other prediction: The bomb is going to happen. Three weeks ago I would have sworn up and down that they were going to stop the bomb and save the world, and while I guess they still could, it just doesn’t feel like it’s going to happen. Don’t get me wrong – I want them to stop the bomb and have a happy ending – I just don’t think it’s going in that direction. For better or worse, I’m in the ‘bomb’ camp. Everyone else at work seems to be in the ‘no bomb’ camp, and if that’s any reflection of the fanbase in general, I’m in the minority.

Back to work for now, I guess. I have some other thoughts on it, but nothing coherent enough to write about. At a certain point you just have to stop theorizing and watch the damn show.

Once it’s common for computers to have one or more terabytes of storage, what will we call it?

Will we call it a ‘ter,’ kind of like a ‘gig’ or a ‘meg?’ Will we call it a Tera? Or will we just refer to it by it’s common name – a ‘metric shit ton’?

I have crossed the magical 1T mark on my home computer. I already had a 250 and a 300 in my desktop, and last night I bought a 500gb external drive. It’s pretty neat, actually. It connects to my router and is a network enabled device, so I can hook it up to any computer on my home network, including my laptop with wireless networking.

As neat as it is, I have a little bit of a bitch about it: Proprietary software.

It uses the MIOnet service to connect the hard drive to your computer. It also uses MIOnet for remote access. If I leave my modem, router, and drive powered on and connected, I can access the contents of the drive from any internet connected computer by grabbing the MIOnet client off of their website.

Neat concept, but it really irks me that I have to install and use their bullshit just to get the basic functionality out of the device. Especially considering that the software wants to be connected to the internet all the time. I just didn’t want to use it, and it’s kind of a deal breaker.

Fortunately I was able to get around it. I’m actually really pleased with myself that I figured it out. Since I’m not much of a techie these days, I’m always a little worried that I’m losing the little bit of tech savvy that I still have.

It’s a Western Digital MyBook world edition. I haven’t been able to find anything about how to get around the proprietary software, so here’s how I did it just in case anyone is out there googling for answers.

Here’s some basic network information. I have 4 devices on my home network. Two desktop PCs (one running XP Pro and one running XP Home), a laptop running XP Media Center 2005, and a nintendo Wii. I use Earthlink DSL for my internet connection, and I have a netgear wireless router. I can’t remember the model number on the router.

So I sat here for a long time last night trying to map a network drive to the mybook. No luck. Windows network could detect the device, and see that it had two folders, but neither of them would map to a drive letter. I was prompted for a username and password, and the login information that I had set up when I initially installed the device didn’t work.

Then, on a whim, I logged into my router configuration, where I could check the status of connected devices.

I guess it’s worth mentioning that I manually assign local IP addresses to all of my devices. I need to do this so that I can open specific ports to use with bittorrent, which I use quite a bit. So all of my devices are 192.168.1.XXX, where I assign the XXX. My Wii is 192.168.1.4, my PC is 192.168.1.2, et cetera. The myBook was being automatically assigned an IP address of 192.168.1.4 (the Wii was off and so the address was not in use.)

That’s when something useful hit me – what if I just tried access that address via firefox?

Well I did – and it took me to a manual configuration screen for the mybook and prompted me for a login and password.

Here the login and password from the initial setup worked. Within the config pages of the drive, I was able to do all kinds of stuff. Set up users and passwords, manage file shares, and manually assign the drive an IP address. So I did all those things. I set up a username and password, I set up a file share (essentially just a folder on the root of the drive that will serve as the ‘root’ of the share,) and I forced the IP address to be the next in the sequence of available numbers.

Well guess what? If I try to map a network drive, let’s call it Y:, to \\192.168.1.X\SHARE, it prompts me for a username and password. If I use the name and password that I set up in advanced settings, the SHARE folder maps to y: as the root.

Perfect. Exactly what I was looking for. I uninstalled the crappy software, rebooted all computers, and mapped the drive to each computer just to make sure it works.

My initial thoughts on the drive itself is that it’s very asthetically pleasing. It’s glossy white with blue accent lights – think the Wii – and isn’t nearly as big as I’d expected it to be. It’s a little noisy depending on how you stand it up and what you have it set on, but it’s no louder than a cpu fan. Performance wise, I haven’t had a lot of time to do anything with it as it’s only been a day, but it seems to be a little on the slow with write speeds. I’m not really suprised. I’m not using gigabit networking or anything. Probably no slower than a connection to a standard external USB drive.

So anyway, that’s my story. I’m going to go see how quickly I can fill a .5 terabyte drive.

Lately, I’m an interesting combination of IT guy and accountant (read: geek and nerd) with this job of mine. While I do perform a lot of accounting functions, more and more I’m picking up IT responsibilities to go along with it. All of this is fine; after all, my bachelor’s degree is in MIS, so it’s nice to feel like I’m actually using the five years of college I endured.

The experience of being kind of a hybrid techie/bean counter has really given me a new perspective – and perhaps a new respect – for both sides of the fence.

No matter where you work, the company line that everyone is expected to tow always sounds a little bit like ‘We’re all part of the same team and we should be acting in the best interest of the company.’ Anyone who is really a part of it, though, knows fully well the the team mentality sounds great in theory, but often deteriorates into ‘our’ team and ‘their’ team. Generally, this mentality often happens when you are dealing with the IT department and, well, anyone else.

Let’s face it – it’s not their fault. IT has a responsibility to make things work and keep them working. So when you have dozens of different ‘user’ departments, consisting of potentially hundreds of individual workstations and systems, it isn’t rare for everything to break at once. Then the IT guy has to prioritize who’s problems to fix when, all in the face of all the users bitching about how their problem is the most important and needs to be taken care of right away. Compound this with a general end-user skill level of ‘I don’t know dick’ and it’s easy to see how us vs. them comes into play – IT guys don’t have the time to educate, and users don’t have any desire to understand. Studies show that IT professionals are highly stressed (if not THE most highly stressed) and this explains why.

We’re in the midst of preparing for an upgrade of our accounting system this week. Additionally, we are converting from a client-install setup to terminal services (just in case you lost the decoder ring: moving from installing software on each individual computer to remote access of the server itself.) Typically, this is a really bad idea – doing both of these things at once means that we will have a much harder time diagnosing problems once we go live. Is it terminal services? Is it the new version of the software? Is it a combination? Who the hell knows?

In for a penny, in for a pound; Regardless of how we got here, we’re here.

Perhaps the hardest part of this process – and what I am absolutely talking about when I say it’s interesting being in the middle – is determining user setup and group policy on the terminal server. All of our users have admin rights on their win2K/winxp workstations, but in terminal services we restrict the access to only the things that they need. So things like the control panel are out, my computer is out, access to c: is out, et cetera. As we move along, it kind of becomes a fight between the ‘us’ and the ‘them’.

From the IT point of view, we want to restrict the terminal server as much as possible so that people can’t screw it up (because people *will* screw it up.)

From the user point of view, back up the damn server daily if you have to, but give me the access I need so that I can do my work – don’t leave me with some crippled half-assed system that doesn’t do what I need it to do, especially when it worked before the ‘upgrade.’

Which point of view is right? Hard to tell. Your users are technically internal customers, so I’m not sure it’s right to break the systems they need to do their jobs. At the same time, your users are often idiots about technology and need to be protected from themselves before they accidentally render said systems useless. A delicate and fragile balance, indeed. If users aren’t willing to adapt and techies aren’t willing to educate and help and be flexible, all you’re going to get is a god damn mess.

Personally, I don’t want to make any more work for the IT staff than necessary, but at the same time, I want to have the kind of functionality that I’ve come to expect from my systems. I can’t think of a good reason to have a software system that is less functional after an ‘upgrade,’ but that’s just me. I tend to think that there needs to be a little bit of common sense, a little bit of cooperation, and a little bit of willingness to evolve for things to really work out well. IT departments need to have a little flexibility and a little extra patience, and end users need to be willing to make some changes to their procedures – that handwritten list of steps you use to run a report in version 2.4 won’t work for shit in version 5.5, so you need to be prepared to run it ‘the new way.’

Let’s be honest – the ‘new way’ is probably better anyway.