November 26, 2007

Yeah, So Brain Age

I managed to borrow a friend's Nintendo DS Lite and played a bit of Brain Age 2. Inspired by the example of Nicole Kidman playing BA2---commented upon here---I figured I could give it a shot. Given my highly trained legal background, I expected to combine age and guile with youth and agility.

Mrs. Urban got 52 as her brain age.

Your correspondent, doing terrible at rock, paper, scissors, got 54. An outrage. I'm going to crawl away and hide or something. Nearly 2.75 times worse than the predicted peak, and it confirms deeply held suspicions that my intellectual capabilities have been declining since some time in undergraduate. Fantastic.

This depressing news was offset by an ad for The Golden Compass in which Kidman featured reasonably promptly.

EDIT: Great. I can't even type on the computer this evening. The closing sentence should read "...in which Kidman featured reasonably prominently." Hi, my name's Charlie Gordon. This is my pet mouse, Algernon.

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October 03, 2007

Wii Would Like to Play with Prince

No, that's not a cheesy double entendre involving the Artist Formerly and Currently Known as, but rather a lame attempt at invoking the subjects of the story.

That is to say that, courtesy of Tennis Served Fresh, Prince is getting into the gaming peripheral business. I don't own a Wii yet---as Sergeant Zim might say, glad you qualified that---but this is an added incentive for me to consider getting one.

It's got a rather nice cost as well, certainly a lot cheaper than Prince's o3. One wonders if there will be a Sharapova edition like I see in the cheap section at Wal-Mart, where my tennis browsing occurs. That is, at least one with her face emblazoned on the packaging. I've never really looked at it that closely.

I would rather that the thing be a Wilson, given the sponsorship package of my favorite player, but that's small beans next to the apparent lack of a real-world Wii tennis game. (I say that as if I was worthy of a real-world game; I can manage at Top Spin on the Xbox only because I play minor tournaments and have never ventured online.)

Yay.

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September 09, 2007

Dell, per Lawrence Auster

Mr. Auster writes today, commenting upon a story in the New York Times on the troubles of Dell in regards to computer sales. In brief, the Times believes that Dell has stuck to its old business model for too long.

Mr. Auster disagrees, saying that Dell strayed from its path of world-beating customer and technical support. He highlights "the world's worst customer and tech support",

provided by frequently incompetent or barely competent, passive Indians who do not speak English that is readily understood by Americans; who follow scripts instead of their own intelligence and knowledge; who substitute excessive and irritating politeness for actual response to a customer's problems; and who are mired in an unresponsive and unaccountable bureaucracy.

I dissent from Mr. Auster and his correspondent, Chris L. I have had a Dell computer since 2004, and it has been a very good instrument. I've had to call them on several occasions regarding hardware maintenance or replacement (mostly fans) and I haven't had any real trouble with their Indo-Pakistani staffs.

This is one of these things that confuses me about the issue. All I ever hear is that the Indo-Pakistani replacements are barely literate, yet I've always gotten people who I can understand and who wind up, after some cajoling and back-and-forth, generally providing a fix to the problem I'm calling about. In fact, I don't mind talking to a pleasant chap on the phone from Bangalore or whatever.

I thought about it, and my good fortune in technical support has not been due to some status of mine as a highly-educated, cosmopolitan transational elite. I speak English, with a vestigial ability to comprehend some Spanish, a couple words of French, and whatever German I could pick up from World War II movies and games. I've never been east of Western Europe, and I don't live in some multi-cultural hellhole of diversity, so my exposure to vastly different cultures is minimal to nil. (I also don't see that as a terrible thing, just one that I intend to tamper with at my leisure and on my own dime; no Federal program or NGO necessary.)

So why do I have good luck with these people? I think a lot of it comes down to temperament. I deliberately try to remain calm and placid when dealing with these folks, and I think it helps. I don't mind asking them to repeat themselves---"Wait, I didn't hear you clearly"---when I don't understand what they say, and I don't mind if they ask me to repeat themselves.

As for the supposed passivity of these folks, is that a bad thing? Maybe I'm betraying the ol' Type A personality, but if they're passive, that ought to mean that I can direct them as I see fit, ideally to a favorable resolution of whatever problem I'm having. Passive tech support means, at least to me, that I can get further than I would if I had to deal with some hostile greaser from New Jersey who'd say, "Tough" when the call turned complicated.

I think the better view is provided by that Indian living in the West, who complains about Dell living for the next quarter's profit report. If I read the Times article right, that's been Dell policy since Day One, but there are ways to do that, and there are ways to muck it up. It appears that Dell managed to find the latter with its corporate choices, and thus is reaping the negative results. It's a topic for another piece that I'll never write, but the over-emphasis on This Quarter Is All That Matters can't be helped by the presence of economists and financial analysts sticking their noses everywhere, constantly demanding higher profits, lower costs, and growth, and everything-else-be-damned-so-long-as-there's-GROWTH. Hello, Jim Kramer and Larry Kudlow.

Enh. I doubt anything I've hammered out here would dissuade Mr. Auster or his correspondents, so let me leave you with a valuable maxim that kind of guides my dealings with Indo-Pakistani technical support: "Politeness helps". Outsourcing is a dastardly thing and I don't care for it (or the exporting of our industry to Red China) but that doesn't confer upon the citizen a license to be rude and hostile to some poor sap on the other end of the line in God-only-knows-where, India.

---

NB: I am not encouraged by the account of Michael Dell wanting to "turbocharge growth" by acquiring small companies. You could ask the shade of Stuart Saunders whether buying up small companies like Executive Jet did much for the growth of the Penn Central Company.

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June 30, 2007

Nintendo's Newest Spokeswoman

Be still my beating heart, for Nicole Kidman's doing Nintendo ads!

The entire aesthetic of it makes me think that she's in the employ of M.C. Briggs, III. Haven't seen that much white since, well, the last episode of Airwolf where Archangel and Marella showed up to yell at Hawke & Santini. I wonder if she can fly a helicopter, run computer analyses, or testify in a meaningful manner before Congress.

The game Mrs. Urban's playing is Nintendo's Brain Age on the Nintendo DS system.

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February 09, 2006

Eh, Four Years Behind Ain't Bad

I don't know how I missed this one, but it appears that U.S. Cellular uses Joan Cusack in their television commercials. Apparently, they've been a national campaign since some time in 2003, but darned if I've ever seen one.

The one I saw was mocking the Verizon Wireless "Can you hear me now?" guy, and sort of effectively. It was far more amusing than most of the Super Bowl commercials.

Go figure.

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January 10, 2006

An Evening Drive

Well, the Vick entry was scrubbed because I simply no longer care. Good riddance, hasta la vista, et cetera, et cetera. I'll laugh when some small-market team gets him.

Allow me to sing praise to the XM radio system, for the following reason:

Channel 27 played selections from the Don Davis/Juno Reactor scores for the Matrix trilogy.

While I'm not a die-hard Matrix type, I did enjoy the soundtrack scores produced for the pictures. One, maybe two, major papers were written to the eerie industrial beats and dissonance from these, and darned if they didn't both come out with solid grades.

Anyways. I'm driving back from an outing, and I'm fiddling with my XM radio. I'm paging through the channels as usual, hunting for an artist or two to secure in the notification system, when I pass Cinemagic. This channel has already scored with me for playing John Williams' work on Star Wars and subsequent productions, but tonight provided a perfect fusion of music, road, and opportunity.

Your correspondent is like most men in that he likes fast cars, especially those of the NASCAR, Formula 1 and NHRA sort. Therefore he cannot turn down an opportunity to run a deserted and winding back country road at night, especially when the XM station's playing something out of the collective of Don Davis and Juno Reactor.

Yeah, I turned up the volume on the radio to deafening levels and took off on the road. I've been driving it for years, but I'd never tried it with "Navras" before.

As John Travolta's character in Broken Arrow says, "What a rush!"

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June 09, 2005

Mr. Morse's Code in the Age of Flash

Here's something that's certainly interesting: A Flash-based Morse code generator/converter, courtesy of glassgiant.com.

This little gadget is really nifty. I er, sheepishly admit to sending "CQD MGY" once I got the site loaded. Then again, I spent something like thirty minutes fiddling around with the Morse code telegraph keys at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., just listening to the things. And yes, I tried to send "CQD MGY" there, too. Until then, I hadn't the foggiest that telegraphy had a sound to it, other than which I picked up from watching old war movies and the like.

Instead, I found out that the system in place aboard Titanic was something called 'the spark drag' or 'drag spark'. The SI's exhibit had three keys, including one specifically designated as the type in use circa 1912. Naturally, I played with that one the most. It didn't sound like that radio-style chirp from the 1920s or the clattering I generally associate with railroad telegraphy; rather, it sounded like someone opening and closing an electrical circuit or a short/long sparking motion.

It was, in short, both creepy and cool.

Tip of the Executor hat to Ghost of a Flea.

UPDATE: Found this discussing the Marconi wireless system deployed aboard Titanic. Interesting, even though I don't understand much of it. Reading the article suggests that the spark drag/drag spark system wasn't what Titanic had, but I could be wrong.

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February 25, 2005

Firefox 1.0.1 Released

An update to Mozilla's most excellent Firefox web browser has been released. Read the front page of mozillaZine for more details; in the alternative, click here for the supposed full text of the article.

I haven't gotten it yet, unfortunately. I'll have to figure out the exact strategy for local implementation on two different machines.

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December 07, 2004

Limited Posting

I er, got Knights of the Old Republic II earlier today. That's where I've been. Dark Saaaaiiiiiiiiiide.

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November 18, 2004

Knights of the Old Republic Light Side Victory

Hooray! I just finished Knights of the Old Republic for the Xbox earlier, using my first Light Side character. It's the first time I'd ever played through with a Light Side character, so I was really looking forward to a) making time with Bastila Shan and b) repairing HK-47 to his full operational status.

However, as the game developed, it was more beneficial to draw from a pool of Bastila Shan, Jolee Bindo, or Juhani as opposed to HK-47 or my other two blaster users, Canderous Ordo and Carth Onasi. (Although, I did wind up using Onasi eventually while trying to trigger a certain side quest.) I've still never really used Mission Vao---bloody worthless, in my opinion---and I'm having more fun running around with T3-M4, because it's fun to watch it chuck grenades and the like. Plus, cheap Force powers don't affect either him or HK-47.

Bioware did a really good job in differentiating the game play experiences for the Dark Side and Light Side campaigns. Me, I did like everyone else and played through the game the first two times as a Dark Jedi. My last Dark Jedi was basically capable of walking into anywhere and laying waste to darned near anything, only finding trouble on the later levels of the Star Forge.

My Light Side character, a male scout, had a fit dealing with enemies. I must've messed up something in the build---it's been months since I started that particular game---because I usually needed a lot more help, no thanks to those weak Light Side powers. One misses Vader-style remote kills, Force lightning, and other things that make the leveled-up Dark Jedi darned near invincible.

At any rate. Now this means I can eagerly await the release of The Sith Lords, shortly before Christmas. Heh heh heh.

UPDATE, 07 December 2004: This post gets traffic on the basis of repairing HK-47. You need a Repair skill of 17 to fully repair him, and it may take you a try or two even then. I'm told that the various Valor Force powers can help here. In the meantime, I'll be picking up my copy of The Sith Lords later today. Dark Saaiiiiiiiiiiiiide!

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June 04, 2004

Bless EBGames!

Thanks to a local EBGames, I've been able to secure a copy of Jet Grind Radio and Sonic Adventure for my Dreamcast. This EBGames also had a copy of Space Channel 5 Special Edition, which is an interesting title to say the least.

JGR is a title originally dubbed Jet Set Radio in Japan, where the game sort of takes place. It centers around the adventures of an inline-skate gang and their efforts to defend their turf from rival gangs. There's no real violence involved; the defense involves going around and spraying your gang (the GGs; gotta love that since it harkens back to the Penn Central's GG1 electrics) logo in various places. This is done while dodging the local police and a Steve McGarrett-meets-Harry Callahan police inspector named Onishima who shoots at you.

There's even a disclaimer at the beginning of the game that makes reference to graffiti being a crime and basically "don't do this at home". It was something of a hit for the Dreamcast, but died there when Sega pulled the plug due to Sony's release of the PlayStation 2. EBGames was good enough to replace a faulty disc so that I was able to play it and so forth; with that kind of service, they've secured my business in the Dreamcast market.

Also purchased: P.N. 03 by Capcom for the Gamecube; it involves a gal in body armor shooting things and dodging; kind of like Trinity without the black leather in a manner of speaking. It got trashed in reviews, but I'm liking it so far.

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June 03, 2004

Hooray for Non-Binding Sales Restrictions

Since I'm a long-time fan of the Nintendo consoles, I've played the Legend of Zelda series on a regular basis. Now, the Gamecube is no exception, and I've managed to pick up a copy of The Legend of Zelda: The Ocarina of Time used. Why is this so worthy of comment? Primarily because it's got a big "NOT FOR RESALE" marking on the back.

I don't know how Nintendo of America would enforce such a restriction, but I'm glad they didn't in this case. Now to track down the Zelda Collector's Edition somewhere...

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June 01, 2004

The Seventies Strike Back

OK, so I said in the previous posting that I bought Rogue Squadron III for the Gamecube, right? Yeah.

It's rather early in the morning and I'm tired from a variety of things, but I've been reduced to a giggling fit at the opening sequence for this game. Instead of some hoary logo popping up, we're treated to the Lucasarts gold dude logo, which all of a sudden starts tapping its foot to...

The Meco Menardo disco remix of John Williams' main theme to Star Wars. But wait, that's not all! We get to see several of the main characters from the series on a disco floor, dancing and so forth while a mirrorball that's modeled on the Death Star sends out rays of green light.

Hee hee. That's too funny.

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May 31, 2004

Hooray for Cheap Games

Over the Memorial Day holiday weekend, I went out and picked up a Nintendo Gamecube. Since I'm Star Wars fan, the second-to-launch title was Star Wars: Rogue Squadron III - Rebel Strike.

Luckily, both system and game have been out for a while, so my total expenditure is less than what I paid for my PlayStation 2 in February or March. Of course, the Gamecube is probably the least-selling system out of the big three (PS2, XBox, and GCN) and it might be a dying platform, but hey, I'm still buying games for my 16-bit Super Nintendo Entertainment System, which I've had for twelve or thirteen years. (Matter of fact, the last time I bought a Nintendo console, George Bush was President and we were fighting in Iraq. The more things change, the more things stay the same.)

Since that means that I've got four operational game systems to suck up my time when not studying for the bar, er, blogging may suffer. Badly.

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May 27, 2004

X-Files Deja Vu

I recently found a copy of the X-Files game for the PlayStation and picked it up. I was an inveterate fan of the series back in its heyday, and really enjoyed it, so the game was a must-buy when found. It was in really good condition and cheap, too; used video game sales are a gift from God.

Anyways, I was poking around early on and read some correspondence or a receipt or something. Having said that, let me say this: It is jarring to read something described as "recent" when the date on it says something like March 1996.

Shock to the system, eh. So far, I haven't found an option that lets me try to make time with Laurie Holden's Marita Covarrubias or steal a light from William B. Davis' Cigarette-Smoking Man. Bother!

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May 26, 2004

Victory!

Hee hee, I did it. At around 0230 this morning, I finished Federation versus Zeon's campaign mode. Which side, you ask? The Principality of Zeon, of course. Give me an MS-14A Gelgoog with a beam rifle, and I can do darn near anything, including whipping the RX-78-2 Gundam.

The only problem with this game is that it doesn't have an open ending; no matter how good the Zeon player does in campaign, the Earth Federation still wins. Bother.

UPDATE: Those of you wondering just what in the world I'm talking about can visit Bandai's relevant site. This is, after all, Japanese animation, and I'm a sucker for snazzy uniforms, mecha, and the like.

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April 16, 2004

Troubling Talk from NPR

I was out and about just now, and heard something disturbing on NPR's Morning Edition, and no, I don't mean the voice of the recently-fired Bob Edwards.1

In a piece on search engines, Edwards interviewed some whiny-voiced fellow who had connections to the "search" industry. Aside from the interviewee's horrible grammar (typified by his constant reference solely to "search" without saying "search engines" or the like; it's comparable to saying "blog will be the future of the internet" instead of saying that "blogging will be the future of the internet") the man blathered happily about a disturbing view of what the search engine providers want.

What they want, he explained (and Edwards elaborated on) is to be able to get more data and get more comprehensive data about the searches run. Here's the rub: They want to make it personal. This engineer spoke approvingly of the need for companies to be able to match a pattern of searching activity over time, so that "the most relevant results" can be provided. In other words, they wish to create a user-specific profile that knows what I've looked for in the past.

The example given was to be able to discern what I'm looking for when I punch "china" into say Google. Currently, I'd have to pick between sites regarding a very large country in the Pacific Rim, or something that belongs on a dinner table. What the next-generation search engine types want is to be able to know in advance, based on past activity, whether I'm looking for info on the country or on the plates.

Edwards noted that privacy advocates objected to this, but it was also pointed out that generally technology advances anyways. The repellent individual who Edwards was speaking to happily pointed out that there were "billions" in revenue for this sort of activity, and gave me the impression that this was only a matter of time.

I find unacceptable the notion that Google will keep track of my searching habits on a personal level. A detailed list of one's WWW searches is not something that should be kept, even by the Federal government. I do not trust someone simply because they're from Silicon Valley. In fact, when you take into consideration Oracle's Larry Ellison, my trust in them plummets lower than the government.2

Also mentioned was Google's upcoming e-mail system that mines the content of your messages in order to provide targeted advertising. It'll be a cold day in Camp X-Ray before I use that system. I don't usually march with the Internet privacy advocates, but both of these things go too far. I miss the Internet as it used to be.

The quotes and attribution are not offered as wholly accurate statements; if I can get the piece from NPR's RealAudio section, I'll link it and also correct this article. more...

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April 14, 2004

Titanic MMORPG

I don't play massively-multiplayer online role-playing games, but this is still funny:

[Anarchy Online] chat log taken when the RMS Titanic sank

Yes, I know that the loss of ~1500 people is a bad thing, and yes it's awful that RMS Titanic sank, but this is still funny.

Tip of the Wisconsin hat to Dodd Harris for this little gem.

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April 13, 2004

From My Cold Dead Hands

It appears that the "green" movement is after another dangerous threat to the environment, i.e. the cellular telephone in national parks.

The Interested-Participant is covering this, and promises to have more information as it develops. The IP also notes that while, "cell phones can be an annoyance", he doesn't "think that freedoms in America should be taken away just because some people are annoyed. I also believe that the action by the environmentalists is only a small initiative in their overall campaign to outlaw everything that annoys them in society."

For what it's worth, I tend to agree. The basic observation I have of the radical environmentalist movement is that they're not interested in a sustainable equilibrium, or even that much in the way of human progress. I won't go so far as to tar them with the brush of the folks in Rainbow Six, but one wonders where the logical end of their preferred policy objectives are. Now, let me mount the soapbox, and hope that the wood's been kept up: more...

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March 15, 2004

Another Sprint PCS Website

Found this one at sprintusers: Sprint PCS Info.

In their own words: "[L]ike all carriers, Sprint PCS has some major problems. This site is created to help you work around them, get the best service, and hold Sprint accountable for the stuff that they screw up on."

I haven't fully explored the site yet, but I figured I'd pass it along to all the other SPCS users out there.

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