Older: August 2004
Newer: October 2004

The Internet has ruined me

While at work I have to correspond with professors quite often and I've found I am completely unable to write a courteous email anymore without being paranoid that it will come off as incredibly obnoxious and condescending. I feel like Dave Foley's Kids in the Hall character who always sounded like he was being sarcastic. I'm almost tempted to just give in and start using italics in my emails. "We'd really appreciate your response. Thank you veerrry much!"

太早了

I can't remember the last time I was as torn over some decision as this Chinese thing. That is, whether or not to continue studying the language.

If you'll take a look at my current schedule, you'll notice that class is at 9 AM five days a week. The only other time it's offered this quarter is 8 AM, which is HORRIBLE. It also leaves this irritating two-hour gap between my classes three days a week. One hour gaps are tolerable because I can just go somewhere and do some work or check my email or something, and three hours is enough time to go home for a while, but a free two hours has always been awkward.

The class is also a lot of constant work and not necessary to graduate. If I dropped it I would have significantly more free time weeknights and could take a disgustingly minimal number of units until June. In the short term, if I weren't taking the class I could also sit here for another three hours before having to go to campus.

On the other hand, it would be a shame to stop halfway through the series, especially when this is supposedly the last quarter of new grammar. And, of course, it's not like it hasn't been interesting.

This week should be fun.

Gradius V initial impressions

  • This is the best-looking game on the PS2
  • The new option control system's potential is apparent after just a few seconds, particularly type 2's
  • Having a boss retreat over to the left side of the screen only to watch all four options swing around and blast it is a great thing
  • So far the only problem is that the screen can become quite busy, making it hard to pick out enemy bullets, or whether ships are in the background or foreground
  • Type 2 options are great
  • It's too bad classes start tomorrow

Save yourselves

Today was the second day of staff training at Instructional Computing, and it was awful. Having to be there all day listening to workshops on things like Mathematica and, god, Photoshop is really putting me in a poor mindset to work there. I'm sure I'll feel better about it once work actually starts and I'm back in the media lab. And, more optimistically, at least I was with the returning consultants group. The newhires had to spend four hours on Word and Excel.

But anyway. After lunch we reconvened to go over Microsoft Access, which, if you are unfamiliar with, does database and related document management. The workshop leader mentioned to us that as the workshop progressed we should provide suggestions for how the new consultants should advise users with Access questions. After about half an hour of going over tables and queries and forms and reports and so on, I think the best thing to tell anyone asking how to use Access would be to just change their major right away so there's not even a chance they'll end up doing Access for a living. Seriously. Get out of there.

New image: Rorschach

Seafaring

A personal boat seems like a really poor investment.

Pre-instructional activities begin

According to my calendar, I have work training from 9-5 for the next three days. Obviously there has been some mistake; I don't think I was scheduled for that much training even after three quarters of working at IC. I wonder if there is even that much stuff that changed over the summer to necessitate 24 hours of training.

Well, although that puts a pretty big wrench in my plans to go have lunch downtown before classes start, it's one step towards being responsible once again.

I'm still planning to go pick up Gradius V and Katamari Damacy Wednesday evening, though. Could that be considered a step in the opposite direction?

I never knew life could be so fabulous

After picking up some groceries and unpacking the rest of my stuff, Morgan and I finally broke open Street Fighter Anniversary Collection. After thirty or so matches of Hyper SF2, we started up Street Fighter III: 3rd Strike. As much as I like Street Fighter, I've only had a handful of chances to play any of the SF3 games. Most of my exposure to them comes from the soundtracks, which I listen to on occasion.

Anyway, after a couple rounds, I decide we need to play on Remy's stage. "This is going to be great," I say. "Remy's stage music is hilarious. It sounds like a Madonna song." I already know this because I've heard the soundtrack many times. The stage starts. I wait for the goofy pop beat to kick in.

It doesn't. It's a completely different track. "Ah, this must be the remixed version," I muse aloud. Later on, I check the sound test and it is not. It's the original version. For some reason, many years ago, an alien track snuck onto my computer, and all this time it's been posing as Remy's theme. Why didn't I even suspect something was wrong when I first listened to the song? Why didn't the Madonna beat and crazy lyrics tip me off? I suppose that the song being included on the same soundtrack which introduced the infamous character select rap could have something to do with it. After a game throws that at you, you just assume all bets are off.

So I looked up the fake song that I've been harboring all this time and it turned out to be "If You Buy This Record Your Life Will Be Better," (rated 2/5, playcount: 3) by the group Tamperer. Meanwhile, I feel like everything I know is wrong. Well, limited to things rearding this one particular track. It's a very unnerving feeling. It's like, you know... At the end of that one movie, with the ridiculous twist ending. But I can't really tell you which one, because that'll ruin it.

Anyway.

New Googlegame idea

I'm always trying to come up with fantastic games to play using everyone's favorite search engine (specifically, its image search), and I think this one is promising. It's similar to a scavenger hunt: You pick a word, put it into the image search, and then score points by checking off a list of categories based on the results. Possible categories could be (and this is just off the top of my head): portrait, animal, landscape, news photo, comic strip, animated gif, MS Paint, screen capture, poorly-drawn anime character, photo with timestamp, something on fire, angsty LiveJournal user, Christopher Walken, poorly-drawn anime sex, and horrific wound or sore. There could also be some kind of score multiplier based on how much your word has to do with the item on the list. Also, if you ever catch someone playing this game, you should probably kill them. It's for their own good.

Uh oh, toothpaste entry!!

Bought some new toothpaste today, because my Sensodyne had run out. A few months ago I switched to using Sensodyne because word on teh stret is that it helps against canker sores, to which I am prone during school, probably from less sleep and more work piling up. I guess the rumors are true, because after my tube ran out I went back to my old tube for a day and immediately a canker sore appeared. Horrible.

Sorry about that last paragraph. I was mainly wondering: Does anyone else have difficulty choosing a new tube of toothpaste? I don't know how quickly toothpaste technology advances, but it seems like every time I go to the toothpaste section there several varieties that I haven't seen before. And I don't mean there are new brands—each brand has four or five different variations on itself. There's the plaque and tartar control tube, the whitening tube, the long-lasting fresh breath tube, and the new extreme mint (or whatever).

This raises a potentially endless amount of questions: What if people want more than one thing out of their toothpaste? What prevents toothpaste companies from putting out an all-in-one supertube? It's not like they're making more money this way off people having to buy all five tubes.1 Are there ingredients in the whitening formula that would explode if mixed with the extreme mint? And lastly, which toothpaste has a good amount of agility, and while lacking in defense, makes up for it with a powerful projectile attack?

1 At least, I seriously hope not.

A look at things to come

So here's a little sample of what I've been working on for most of the summer. It occurred to me that I've never mentioned it on the main page before, so here's a peek. I'll probably go into more detail about it later.

The Queue

I miss your kissin' and I miss your...

Electronics Boutique called me today to let me know that they had in my three copies of Silent Hill 4: The Room. Yes, three whole copies. I guess that's what happens when you place your reservation with the newhire.

So I went and got my copy, and immediately came home and threw it onto my stack of games that I won't even get around to playing for a month. At the moment this only contains Front Mission 4 and Dragon Warrior VII, but I expect Gradius V, Katamari Damacy and Shadow Hearts II coming out one a week till the end of the month to complicate things. October and November will see the launches of behemoths GTA: San Andreas and Metal Gear Solid 3. Where were all these games back in June? Pretty soon I'm going to have to do things like go to class and work. And sleep!

Time for a random anecdote

So I'm driving on 101 one night and see a bumper sticker that intrigues me on a truck in the right lane. Since the text is too small to read without being almost directly on the guy's bumper, I remain in my lane and try to match his speed. The problem is the sticker is on the opposite side of the bumper from me, so it's still very difficult to read. Eventually the guy exits and I return to a normal speed. Just then, a car flies past me on the left, easily going 15 or 20 MPH faster than whatever I'm doing, but what catches my attention is the guy in the passenger seat: He's got his head completely outside the car, screaming and grinning like a maniac, making the two-fingered "to the extreme" gesture with both hands. Then I realize it was probably the car behind me and remember that I had pretty much been braking seemingly at random for the last mile and a half. I can only assume that what I saw was the next evolution of the finger.

I never even found out what the bumper sticker said.

Top 5 track names from King of Fighters: Maximum Impact

  1. The Usual C'mon
  2. Can You Listen Until the Guitar Solo?
  3. Rooftop Realism
  4. Flying Tremolo Arm
  5. Duke to Go!
Older: August 2004
Newer: October 2004