I’ve still got it, ur, my hearing that is! After seeing the headlines for a couple of days, I finally took a look at the story going around about the ringtone that only teenagers can hear. I watched the story and later downloaded an mp3 of the tone. I was and am very pleased to say that even at my advanced age, relative to teenagers, I can hear it! So I guess years of attempted (and mostly failed) debauchery has not damaged me too much!
Xbox chief Peter Moore is “clarifying” his statements concerning Xbox 360 backwards compatibility. Earlier he made remarks that nobody really cared about this anymore. Well, people got into a big uproar as they often do when someone has the audacity to say something that is either patently false or in this case too true for people to handle. I think Moore was right, no one really cares about backwards compatibility, its only true usefulness is as a marketing tool. Backwards compatibility is the thing that makes it easier to sell our parents, spouses, and significant others on the notion that we should be allowed to spend $600 bucks or more on a new game machine. Oh but look sweet babe, the new box will play all of my old games too, so I can clear some space here in the living room — smootch smootch.
We gamers know darn well that we couldn’t care less about playing those old games, even the ones we haven’t finished, when a shiny new box comes out. But Mr. Moore forgot that you can’t say that in public or else the marketing guys who have to move the boxes get pissed. So now that he’s been to the woodshed, we can all get on with buying that new hardware with a clear conscience!
After a longer absence than I would have liked, I logged on to play Final Fantasy XI last night hoping to find a good party and gain another level or two. Things were pretty quiet in the Valkurm dunes on Shiva last night, but I did, for the very first time in playing FFXI, meet a player who I had actually met in real life. Like crossing the streams in Ghostbusters, I generally try to avoid mixing my online life with my RL, but I had a lot of fun at the FFXI panel at Anime Central so I decided to go ahead and cross the streams. I chatted with him a bit before going off to solo sand hares for a while.
Before long I got a party invite from another warrior which, having no other prospects, I accepted. He was level 21 to my level 20, but I soon discovered that he was probably still relatively new to the game and a relatively young person too. Not having any healers, I figured we would just take it easy on things like the hares and maybe goblin ambushers and muggers. It would be slow, but doable. Unfortunately, my partner il-advisably provoked a damsel fly which tend to be tough for full parties at this level. It didn’t help that I wasn’t being as careful as I usually am soloing. So I bought the farm. That’s when the worshipping began.
Dying wasn’t a big deal to me, but my partner let loose with some serious roleplaying hystrionics, which seemed a bit flirtatious. I was playing my female warrior, and most of the time I don’t get a lot of unprovoked attention, but this was just a bit silly. He didn’t really hit on me, I think, but the emotional scene put on when I later logged out would have turned my face red. Again, I don’t know if it was flirting or not, but I was definitely a goddess on a pedestal for that moment. It makes me wonder a bit how women put up with this in RL, especially from young men as I’m guessing the other player was. I was a little embarrassed (I may be still blushing), but all in all I had a fun session.
Mondays are generally pretty stressful for me no matter what. I just accept that now for the most part. Today I was mostly filled with a great sense of dread, as if fearing what was going to happen next. I think it really got started with a rather vivid dream I had last night.
In this dream, I found myself acting as a servant in the compound of a wealthy and powerful family. It was like Rong-guo House in The Dream of the Red Chamber, which I’ve been reading. The thing about though was that I really didn’t belong there. I was actually there trying to get someone else out, woman whose name don’t remember. At least that is the impression that I remember having. On my first attempt, I barely got into the main house and out before being caught. And a little later I received a summons to the house from one of the old and powerful family matrons.
Oddly enough, I missed my appointment with her because of a party. It was outside of the compound and the people lined up to get in were common folk. Unfortunately it filled up just before I could get in. So I rushed back to the compound for my appointment, but it was too late. The next thing I knew, I was acting as a servant helping serve meals and pretty much winging it the whole way. But no one seemed to notice or even care that I was just an outsider who had slipped in. I guess they really needed the workers.
Finally, there was a loud commotion. Someone in the family was very upset that there were all of these outsiders inside of the compound. He declared that they were going to purify the house. I took this to mean that outsiders like me were going to be killed, so I took that as my cue to leave. What surprised me at the end was the fact that a lot of people were hurrying to get out of there as well. Apparently the whole place was full of outsiders not related to the family by blood or formal relationship!
I never rescued the girl, and I don’t remember getting out of the compound either. But I did wake up with some pretty intense feelings, and perhaps that’s what colored my mood today. I like to joke that I’m Chinese by marriage, but clearly now I have some proof that my subconcious has been thoroughly influenced by my exposure to Chinese, Japanese, and Korean culture as I certainly didn’t gain such imagery from my midwestern upbringing! Maybe tonight I’ll dream the conclusion…
The other day I was thinking a bit about how anime and manga had affected the way I look at things. That is, what things had I taken from anime and manga and grafted onto my personal reference frame? I didn’t come up with any really good answers to that because by and large it was Star Trek that shaped much of my world view long before I became an anime enthusiast. At lunch today, I found my answer, and it quite honestly is rather important. In short, I do not assume that every woman I see is definitely a woman.
While waiting in line, I noticed a rather tall black woman in a nice, skirt and jacket business suit combo. She had long legs in white stockings. The skirt was maybe a little short, but that could have been because of her height. But something just did not seem quite right. I only got a brief glimpse of her face so I really didn’t have a lot to go on. It could have been her overall shape, coupled with the height that fed my doubts. But it has really only been during the last 3 years that I really got into anime and manga and attending anime conventions that I would take note of any such gender doubts.
Crossplay, cosplaying as a character whose gender is opposite your own, is fairly common at anime conventions. Gender bending characters and plotlines are also fairly common in manga and anime. By and large there tend to be more males cosplaying as female characters than females cosplaying as male characters. Some of these crossplaying guys are actually quite convincing, while some are infamously unconvincing. Soon I found myself always taking the femaleness of any given cosplayer with a grain of salt. It really wasn’t important to me anyway, since my interest was in the great costume they had put together. A lot of the time I don’t even bother trying to make a gender assessment until I look at the pictures at home.
I don’t know if the woman I saw today was born a female or not. And honestly, it really doesn’t matter to me beyond simple intellectual musings. So what have anime and manga taught me about women? Don’t believe everything you see!
ZOMG! Once again an attempt to ammend the U.S. Constitution to ban gay marriage has failed in the U.S. Senate! OMGZ! Puhlease! If the government really wanted to protect marriage, they could start by making it harder to get married in the first place and harder to get unmarried once you got married. Making adultery a criminal offense would probably help too. Oh, and they could actually do something about the very very high costs associated with raising children.
In a world where the front page of CNN has a link to a story about Pitt and Jolie denying rumors of their getting married, after just having a baby no less, I hardly think that men wanting to marry men and women wanting to marry women is a threat to heterosexual marriage. Our society’s failure to support marriage has nothing to do with gay people, who one would think must be crazy in some sense to want to embrace it. But far from crazy, the passion exhibited in their drive to marry must surely tell us something about human nature and the things that are really important.
I just finished reading Neon Genesis Evangelion, Volume 9
I doubt that the game, a dating sim essentially, will ever see U.S. shores, especially since Kaworu is one of the people you, as Shinji, can date. So that just leaves the manga which is similar to the anime, but has a refreshing new take on the plot and characters. On the whole, the manga has a darker tone that seems more consistent with the situations that the characters find themselves in. While I’m waiting, I’m going to take a look at The Mysterious Stranger by Mark Twain for some further insight into Kaworu. This will be particularly interesting to me after watching a History Channel program on Satan and Hell today (6-6-06).
Months ago I switched to Comcast cable for internet service because SBC DSL was just too unreliable in my neighborhood. But over that last several weeks I’d been seeing more outages. I didn’t think much of this because they were not as often as the old DSL had been. Then this morning, waking up not feeling too well, WillowBrow, who was also battling some nasty bug, tells me that the internet connection is out. She was already pretty pissed off for other reasons I won’t go into here.
I check the connection and do all of the usual things, power cycle, etc., and then call Comcast. Since I’m too sick for work anyway, I schedule a service call for the afternoon. I didn’t want to wait around doing nothing, so I checking the tv signal too. The standard cable channels looked fine, but the digital channels were suffering some heavy pixelation. After that it became clear to me that the problem was not on my end at all. Indeed, I’d been seeing more pixelation on all of the digital channels I usually watch, but had blamed it on TiVo bugs, sorry TiVo.
In the end, the technician found that too much bird poop on the ports in the cable box up the pole in back was a big part of the problem. So he took care of that and installed another device to import the signal and we were back in business, poop free.
Monday Monday and it looks like Slashdot has a shiny new look to it! Not only that, the new CSS based layout seems to load faster than the last one. This isn’t a radical redesign, but I like it. It makes me want to get all creative today. Looks aren’t everything, but with the tools available today, there just aren’t any excuses for crappy looking stuff. So I always work hard to make sure that my projects not only work, but look good too. It’s more fun that way anyway! 😀
Sigh… Another Friday night goes by and I’m not out shakin my bootay… Sigh… I’ve been a little down lately so here in the real world I languish at the computer feeling tired and wondering where my youth has gone. Meanwhile in Vana’diel I languish in on the borders of the Valkurm Dunes. I just need a magicked skull to complete the subjob quest, but right now I just don’t have the energy to go find a party to do it. God I need a pick me up!
While I was hanging out with my Dad last week I had the opportunity of totally vegging out in front of his huge TV in the basement. Sigh, once again I am reminded that all of my relatives and inlaws have bigger TVs than I do… Eventually I’ll probably buy some giant flat screen TV, not so much because of the higher resolution picture, or to enhance my video games, but because they take up so much less space. Lately I’ve been inspired to cut down on the amount of space eating junk around the house. A flat screen TV would allow me to reclaim some major living room realestate. Unfortunately, what I want is still way too expensive, but once the sets come down to say the $500 USD range, then I’ll get seriously interested. I was tempted a bit by the Xbox 360 launch and the upcoming Playstation 3, but right now I’m thinking of picking up a Nintendo Wii first. The Wii will be a lot less expensive ($250 USD) than those other two consoles, and doesn’t need an HDTV to get the most out of the games. So for now the 32 inch Philips will just have to do!
As promised (or threatened), I’ve bundled up my Worldtime WordPress widget.
From the readme.txt file.
Description
Adds a sidebar widget to show current time and date of three places of your choice.
Installation Instructions
Note: The Worldtime widget only displays the times and dates each time the page is loaded. So you’ll have to turn off WordPress page caching on the pages that display this widget for visitors to see the correct time.
The night before a trip is always filled with stress and excitement for me. But as I prepare to return home to bury and bid farewell to another grandparent, I am also filled with lamentations. It’s only been about 6 months since the last time I did this, and that was quite a heart wrenching affair on so many levels. Funerals are not about the dead, they’re about the living and how those of us left behind get on with life and our relationships with each other. As I witness my parents losing their parents, I cannot help but dread the time when I myself must perform the grim and final duties that all children owe to their parents. Still I will not let that weigh me down. These things are all a natural part of life, and while the emotions of pain and anguish are not comfortable, they are just another necessary pigment in the great portrait of life. So tomorrow I look forward to what new paintings God has in store for me, I’m sure my grandmother has an even better view of the picture now. Guess, I’d better behave myself.
After recovering from a pretty bad morning yesterday, I did the thing that comes naturally to me, I started writing code! I decided to widgetize my sidebar on the blog here. Setting up for the widget plugin was pretty easy and in the process I discovered some nasty stuff that was going on when my site was viewed in IE (it was my fault…). Next I decided to take a shot at building my own widget. I had always wanted to display the local time and date for a few select places around the globe. So first I wrote some PHP code to do what I wanted and then I used the Google Search widget as a template to create a widget that used the time code I’d written. After a few hiccups, I came up with the widget you see in the sidebar below the calendar. The widget shows the time in Chicago, Hong Kong, and Osaka which is a sister city of Chicago. I’ll package the widget code a little later for download so that anyone can use it. It isn’t a realtime flash clock, just good ol’ PHP. And the three places displayed are configurable.
Heh heh, I can’t speak Japanese very well, but I do know computer! One of the fun things about my job is all of the puzzles I get to solve. Right now I’m working on a project that has forced me to use VBA in order to create a very smart Excel spreadsheet. After the fun I’ve had with Python, it was a bit of a step backwards. But I’m very pleased that most of my guesses about how things should work, armed with a pretty good book, Office XP Development with VBA, are correct. The puzzle is nearly solved. The sweet thing about this is that the people using it won’t really have to do anything different than what they are doing right now! I love it when a plan comes together! 😀