Adventures of Bad Hamster

GameStop.

2009-12-09T19:18:52Z

This is why I always read the fine print... you never know when it may have been written by somebody with a sense of humor.

Within the next hour, we will send you a confirmation e-mail verifying receipt of your order. Once your order has shipped, we will send you a second e-mail detailing the contents of your order and tracking information. Your credit card will not be billed until your order actually ships. The packing slip included in each shipment also serves as your receipt, freeing us from the need to send you a third email, and makes a great paper airplane.

Duh.

2009-10-06T05:42:39Z

So... you'll recall when I posted about having wasted much time tracking down a "bug" that turned out to be my inability to type. Apparently, I can't spell either. I just spent over 20 minutes pulling my hair out over something that wasn't working the way the manual said it should, only to finally notice that "verticle" and "vertical" aren't the same thing. Who'da thought? What gets me is that the only reason I finally noticed the typo is that I swapped over to my HTML editor for a moment to check something in the preview window (the document in question that was causing trouble was a stylesheet, not a web page, so I'd been working on it in Notepad rather than the editor) and it turns out my beloved CoffeeCup editor has a built-in spell checking feature. Or rather... it's not precisely a spellchecker in the sense that it points out incorrectly spelled English words; instead it highlights various bits of markup on the page. HTML block element tags are one color, inline element tags are a different color, image tags are another, etc. CSS markup has its own color scheme for selectors, properties, and opening\closing brackets and semicolons. A style rule will only highlight automatically if the editor can recognize it as such. So if you leave out a semicolon at the end of a declaration or misspell a property or a value, it won't recognize the markup as being a rule -- it won't recognize it as anything, for that matter, beyond just plain text scribbled in between rules, so it doesn't highlight. I noticed the chunk of regular black text right away but I admit it took me a couple read-overs of the same five lines to realize I'd spelled vertical wrong. Shoot me now.

In other website news, I don't understand why Comic Sans MS is included in the cursive font family. It isn't remotely cursive-like; in fact it kind of looks like somebody took Times New Roman and injected it with a turkey baster so the letters would plump up and be soft and round. The whole point of a cursive font is that it's supposed to resemble script handwriting; the letters flow together because with cursive script you never lift your pen from the page as you're writing. Comic Sans MS has distinct, separate letters that would never for an instant be confused with anyone's handwriting. I'm aggravated by this because not every computer is installed with the fonts I want to use, but if I specify my top couple of choices and then use cursive as the default fallback (the one that gets used if none of the specifically named fonts are available), it's nearly always going to default to Comic because more than 95% of computers have that one. I'm not too picky, I don't need my site to be viewed in the exact font I choose every time -- but there is a huge difference between elegant script and the cartoony Comic Sans MS. This is not the home page of the Yellow Ducky Play Group. Damn you, Comic Sans!

Swan Lake.

2009-10-05T19:48:18Z

For the past week or two, my daily wardrobe ensemble has frequently consisted of a dance leotard and jeans. You know, those black stretchy bodysuit things that you (or your kids) had to wear to ballet class with pink tights? And woe betide the girl who showed up in white tights instead of pink. I've had two black leotards neatly folded in my dresser, unworn, for years. I picked up a few other colors this week after realizing what a great discovery these are. They're comfortable, flattering, weather-appropriate, and don't require much thought on my part. They go nicely with all the lightweight buttoned jacket-style sweaters I have in the closet, if I need an extra layer or a less casual look in a hurry. Most importantly, they're about ten bucks apiece and manage to fit me properly when no other clothing in the world wants to. And you know what, I've just realized why that is...

My two main fashion problems are that I'm very short with proportionately long legs and I'm reasonably slim but not reed-thin. There are only two shapes for small women, according to the fashion industry. If you're under 5'5", you're either a waif with a 20-inch waist and zero percent body fat, or you're round and dumpy with a big butt and thighs. If you're of normal proportions but happen to be short, you don't exist, so good luck finding clothing that fits off the rack. To make things worse, I'm also incredibly narrow-hipped and flabby around the middle, which means I have no natural waist at all. My waist and hip measurements are the same number. When I try on pants, anything that fits neatly around the waist will inevitably be several inches too big around the butt and thighs and often down through the leg as well. Fortunately, that particular issue is one of the easiest to fix with a needle and thread. Nearly all my pants from jeans to pajama bottoms have had several inches hacked off the leg circumference and height of the crotch.

Anyway... so when I started peering at the sizing charts for leotards, I figured I'd have to whip out the thread box and do some alterations when my new prizes arrived. I chose sizes based on waist measurement and estimated on the large side, because with a leotard, I can shorten the torso or the arms and take in the hips, but if it's too tight around the middle there isn't much I can do. I was expecting that anything that fit my waist would be much too long in the torso and I'd end up with the crotch hanging in the vicinity of my knees and the scoop-neck reaching up to my collarbone. Well, the first leotard arrived in today's mail, and to my complete shock it fits perfectly right out of the package. As I said earlier, after some thought I'm realizing a very likely reason why that is. Among all the many and varied female body shapes out there, the demographic who are smaller in height but not overweight, with petite bone structure, narrow hips and long legs? That particular body type lends itself well to professional gymnastics or ballet. Granted it's a profession that can be somewhat weight-obsessed (many of them have to weigh in before a meet and catch hell from their trainers if they're a single ounce heavier than last time)... but it also requires health, flexibility, and ungodly amounts of strength and energy. A waif-like anorexic isn't going to make it far as a gymnast or dancer; the real professionals may have very little body fat but they do have plenty of lean muscle mass. They're slim and strong rather than stick-thin with bones jutting out.

I, of course, am a slug composed of pure body fat with no muscle tone whatsoever, but fortunately when it comes to clothing sizes, that amounts to the same shape -- short, average weight, no hips, long legs. It's exactly the shape that manufacturers of dancewear and leotards are designing for. Finally!

A few of my favorite things.

2009-10-04T04:14:47Z

I need a new mousepad.

Rather, I need a mousepad. Because I work almost exclusively on laptop computers, it's been years since I used a mouse on a regular basis. Recently I picked up two wireless USB mice -- a cheapie one to use with the laptop when I'm fiddling in a graphics program (you just try editing in Photoshop with a touchpad and see how far you get), and a decent one with a much longer range for when I'm playing computer games via the television screen, so I don't have to sit with my nose touching the TV in order for the wireless mouse to work.

So now that I'm mousing more than once or twice a year, I need my own mousepad. I've been grabbing the one we use with the living room's desktop computer whenever I need to mouse, but it's several years old and the fabric top is all nubbed up, which makes the optical mouse skip and snag constantly. Besides, a) it's ugly and b) mousepads are cheap. You can get pretty much any image you want on a mousepad; there's no reason I shouldn't have my very own with a design I find pleasing!

There are a LOT of mousepads available out there on the Internet. Originally I wanted to go with CafePress and get one with a photo of Sky on it, but you need a really large photograph to screen decently onto a mousepad and I just don't have any pics of Sky that are big enough to use without looking blurry. Not any cute ones, anyway. Allie effortlessly manages to look like an AKC champion preening on a postcard in every single picture ever taken of her, but Sky is somewhat less photogenic and often looks scruffy or is making a strange face for the camera. I would happily murder something to be able to use the photo of her that's in use as my LiveJournal icon -- yes, that is my actual dog in that picture, looking much like a posed stuffed toy -- but every copy I have of that particular pic is way too small for CafePress to use. I'm still chasing her with the camera regularly in the hopes of lucking into a great picture, but in the meantime, I did some poking around to see what other mousepads might be available.

It's amazing what pops into your head when you start considering, "Hmmm... what things do I like enough to want to stare at the picture for hours on my mousepad?" I've managed to narrow it down to about half a dozen potentials:

-- Mickey Mouse
-- Winnie the Pooh
-- a squirrel
-- a purple and white iris
-- a map of Middle Earth (very similar to the 4x3 ft giant poster that takes up most of my bedroom wall)
-- the shield \ coat of arms of the Jedi Knights
-- the Legend of Zelda Triforce

What would be on YOUR mousepad?

Say cheese.

2009-10-02T13:56:27Z

It's not yet 10am and I've just spent close to an hour snapping photos... of my breakfast. Step by step production and assembly of a maple egg muffin with cheese and bacon. It's really hard to get good photos of something while also trying to not let it burn or get cold during the cooking process. I'm thinking most food photographers do not generally plan to eat their subjects after the shoot. I made two muffins, actually; if you're already making one it doesn't take any extra time to make two. It's a good thing, because one of them turned out to be way more photogenic than the other. (If you've ever seen that episode of The West Wing with CJ and the two Thanksgiving turkeys, that's the scene in my kitchen while I tried to evaluate egg muffins according to their best photographic properties.)

Baby's first idiocy! Awww!

2009-09-29T01:32:22Z

Tonight, for the very first time during my website-building efforts, I've experienced a cherished moment which I'm certain will be followed by many, many more of the same. Months from now I'll look back at this night and think to myself how new and shiny everything was...

Yes, dear readers, tonight was the very first time that I spent 2+ hours uploading, tweaking, re-uploading, consulting books and web tutorials, tweaking, re-uploading, and tweaking some more, adding complicated and convoluted CSS styling properties that stretched half a page or more, all in the vain effort to fix something that turned out to be a typo further up in the markup.

There will be many more of these incidents. I recall them fondly from prior webpage-wrangling days. Anyone who's ever programmed in any language knows what I'm talking about. If you haven't written 100+ lines of code and even deigned to consult the manual while trying to make something work the way it's supposed to, only to later realize that the issue is because of a typo (or a similar "duh" moment)... you're not a real programmer.

Free shopping!

2009-09-25T16:54:38Z

I discovered something cool last night. I may possibly have been the last person on the planet to realize that there are literally thousands of different add-ons available for the Firefox browser, but I'm aware of it now, and I'm nearly giddy! I spent a good hour "shopping" for add-ons to customize Firefox to a ridiculous extent. It's so easy; you just browse the different categories, click to read about any that sound interesting or useful, and if you decide to use it, you just click the download button and Firefox immediately installs it. How did I not know about this? I stumbled across the add-on community while searching for a way to keep my bookmarks synched between laptop and netbook. Google Bookmarks seemed to be the answer until I realized it uses an absurd "label" system to organize bookmarks and won't let you create subfolders within bookmark categories. Fuck that. If I wanted to run a search of my bookmark list to find the page I'm looking for, I wouldn't have bookmarked it to begin with. So I found an add-on (GMarks) that addresses that very issue, and from there, I discovered the multitude of other available add-ons to customize pretty much anything I could possibly want and lots of things I didn't know I wanted until I saw them.

Some of my new toys:

-- let you re-load a page every X seconds or minutes (useful on eBay and Woot)
-- extend your Bookmark Toolbar to allow multiple rows
-- allow you to drag-and-drop elements (images, paragraphs) from a page onto your desktop or into a folder
-- re-organize the elements on the bottom status bar, and\or hide what you don't want to see
-- assign rainbow colors to browser tabs depending on the domain

I even found one that lets you make a backup of all your Firefox browser preferences, including downloaded add-ons. And you can transfer the backup file to different computers via a free online account. Ha!

If this makes sense, you're a nerd too.

2009-09-22T21:19:25Z

Still reading through Learning Web Design... I hit the section on CSS generated content and was informed that Internet Explorer doesn't support it. Now, earlier in the book it had mentioned the current usage statistics for different browsers. At the time of publication, IE7 had already been released and was gaining ground, but IE6 still had a majority. Because of that, whenever Internet Explorer is mentioned throughout the book the author differentiates between the two releases and offers qualifiers such as, "such-and-such is now (finally!) supported in IE7, but it won't work in IE6; so keep in mind that while IE7 is slowly gaining hold and eventually this won't be an issue, right now the majority of users are still using IE6 and thus won't be able to [whatever]."

There was a footnote on the page that contained the browser statistics, something along the lines of, "by the time you read this, the statistics will have changed, so be sure to check out the current numbers at w3counter.com). So I hopped over there to take a peek. Currently, it's IE7 that has dominance with 23% of the pie, but just barely -- IE8 is behind only by a small margin with 15%, and IE6 is still clinging on with 14%.

Anyway... I had a point when I started typing. CSS generated content. The book states unequivocally that Internet Explorer does not support it, "including IE7" -- but at the time of the book's publication IE8 hadn't been released. So right after I read that information, I put down my book and went for Google to find out whether Microsoft has managed to pull its head out of its ass yet. I'm delighted to report that IE8 does indeed support generated content; in fact it fully supports CSS2.1 with all the bells and whistles. I'm not sure how quickly the w3counter.com numbers change... right now it reports a total of roughly 56%** of people using "modern" browsers capable of handling any CSS I care to throw at them, and that's not nearly enough of a majority to do anything important with generated content. I could create a separate style sheet for browsers that don't support it, but that kind of defeats the purpose of CSS, which would be not having to update more than one page every time I need to make a content adjustment. It's not a big deal; just that when I'd read the chapter on generated content I had momentary visions of being able to solve the issue of printed copies of recipes and measurement tables needing to look slightly different than they do when viewed on the website. There are myriad other ways around that problem, and it's not a big problem to begin with; just that none of the solutions are quite as neatly efficient (i.e. they require more effort on my part). I've been reading through the book with an eye towards anything that will cut down on the amount of maintaining and updating I'll need to do whenever I want to introduce new content, because new content is what will keep the site alive and I want it to be as simple as possible.

In re-reading this post, I have realized that I've learned more about websites in the past two days than I had in years previous, and that the fact that I'm excited by IE8 supporting CSS2.1 means I'm a huge nerd.

**Various releases of Firefox come in at around 30% total, the latest versions of Safari and Chrome are another 3%-and-change each, and Opera's share is a little over 1%. Adding those to the 18% of IE8 is where the 56% comes from (rounded to include the "and change"). There are more people using browsers that can support CSS2.1 than there are people using browsers that can't, which is good news.

Cleardot is dead! Long live cleardot!

2009-09-21T17:13:38Z

Sometimes it's the little things...

I picked up a bunch of books on web design from Amazon and of course everything arrived in a big heap, so I've got to devote some serious time to reading through everything and deciding which ones to keep and which to return. I feel guilty using Amazon as a public library, but I did try the actual library first, along with PBS, and came up with nothin'. I could get a ride to B&N some afternoon but I can't camp out there every single day for six hours at a clip until I've read enough to select the books I need. I didn't see any other options. Besides, with the amount of business I give Amazon annually (weekly!) I'm sure they won't mind.

The one thing I've noticed so far is that every book I've flipped through states a few things NOT to do, usually in the first introductory chapter. Among those NO's? Apparently it's not cool to use "spacer gifs" any longer; the web's moved beyond that kind of hack.

A spacer gif is an image of one single pixel, a transparent pixel. "cleardot.gif" is the usual name you'd give the image file. It's mainly of use when you need a certain amount of empty space between two things on the page -- "things" being images, or blocks of text, or perhaps an image that's supposed to be alongside a block of text and keeps displaying under it no matter how many break tags you use -- and for whatever reason the usual HTML tags aren't giving you the visual results you need. Lots of people also used borderless table layouts for this kind of thing, but keep in mind the cleardot hack was popular years ago when there was a lot less continuity between browsers than there is now; a complicated table layout wouldn't necessarily look the same in Netscape as it did in Internet Explorer. Anyway, if spacing was a problem you'd upload the single clear pixel and put in an image tag attribute to specify how wide or tall the space you need to create should be, and voila! There's your empty space. It's not actually empty, of course; the image is there -- your cleardot.gif -- working as a placeholder, but it's an invisible image because the spacer pixel is transparent, so it looks like empty space on the page.

Why am I so thrilled to hear that the era of the spacer gif is over? Because it implies that there was an era of the spacer gif to begin with. What I mean is... I used cleardot.gif in a couple of my homepage designs or other personal projects from time to time, and so did the other amateur webslingers in the forums I frequented. We did it because we weren't professionals, because we didn't always know the latest or the most obscure and complicated HTML. Hell, we frequently didn't even know how to make basic HTML work properly. Dreamweaver was on the scene already -- albeit with fewer bells and whistles than it has now -- but I was writing my HTML in Windows Notepad. WYSIWYG was for pussies! (I'm still fighting against that particular mindset; I use an HTML editor called CoffeeCup now and it does have quite a few helpful bells and whistles, but it's not drag-and-drop WYSIWYG). I was always sure that there must be some "correct" way to make my images align themselves properly; I just wasn't good enough to know how, so I cheated with cleardot.gif. It may not have been professional, but it worked.

I didn't know that it was such a common hack that large corporations also used it when designing those slick, flashy websites that cost millions of dollars and required a whole team of highly-paid professional webmasters. I didn't know that The GAP's storefront page used to include cleardot.gif, or that the furniture giant IKEA's did too.

I guess it just makes me smile to know that apparently I wasn't as hopeless a naive amateur as I'd always believed. If I could remember the web design I knew when I was sixteen, I'd be a lot better off now... although I suppose things have changed radically enough that maybe it's a good thing I don't have to un-learn bad habits. I don't think the HTML is going to be too problematic; it's the graphics I'm troubled with. The delightful angel_fly worked her magic on my website's logo and made it behave properly, but it's still the same logo I hacked together from some public domain clipart -- it's messy and doesn't look at all professional. I'm thinking that I may need to take a deep breath and throw away the original graphic, even though I've spent most of this week wrestling pixels to get it just the way I wanted, and find something that doesn't look like a 5-yr-old drew it in Paint. :(

I hate pixels.

2009-09-19T21:26:58Z

Is there anyone out there who is reasonably decent at creating \ manipulating graphics? I've been wrangling pixels for days and it's become apparent that my little skill with PaintShop is not going to be good enough. I can't afford to hire a professional graphics designer, but I CAN afford to pay a friend or acquaintance a reasonable fee to help me out. If you know anyone who could use some extra cash to put together some simple website graphics for me, please get in touch. I really don't need pro-level work; just someone who understands PaintShop or PhotoShop better than I do.

Win.

2009-09-14T19:25:01Z

Ben & Jerry's is temporarily changing the name of their "Chubby Hubby" ice cream to "Hubby Hubby" in celebration of legalized gay marriage in Vermont (where B&J's is based). Ha! I'm so getting a carton so I can keep it (the carton, not the ice cream... that'll go pretty quick in this house).

Libre libra!

2009-09-11T06:11:05Z

Quick question, in case anybody knows something I don't. Is there anywhere out there to find cheap books, OTHER than PBS (or the library)? As much as I love PBS's $3.47 per credit and my local library's fabulous pricing structure of absolutely free, neither of those two sources have much in the way of newer titles. I'm looking for stuff on HTML, CSS and Javascript, so a manual published in 2000 isn't much help to me. I'm just wondering if anybody knows of some obscure place on the web where programming-oriented books are either sold cheaply or traded, or if there's another PBS-like book trade\sell site I could browse.

If anybody has books of this nature laying around, I'd be happy to take them off your hands for a reasonable value! I'm just trying to get what I need as cheaply as possible and it's unfortunate that current web programming manuals tend to retail for far more than the used trade paperbacks I usually buy on Amazon. I'm suffering from a bit of sticker shock -- I'd budgeted maybe fifty bucks for reference materials, only to realize that $30 is an average price for what I need and nobody's selling cheap used copies of books that were only published a year ago. I tried the library, but they don't have anything new either. Interlibrary loan has some of it (not all or even most, but some, and that would get me started), but there's a two-month waiting list for the two titles I need the most and I can't wait that long or I'll never have my site functional in time to catch the holiday spending orgy. And these aren't the types of books where I could spend a few hours at Barnes & Noble finding out what I want to know without buying the book. I'm going to need to look through, re-read, and refer back almost constantly.

Any ideas appreciated.

SBI SiteSell.

2009-09-03T03:00:10Z

So after two weeks of research, I finally picked out a web hosting service (it's more of a site building service, to be exact) for THE WEBSITE. I'll explain what that is in a later post -- for now, I'm just amused as hell and wanted to share the reasons behind why I'm more and more pleased with my decision. There's a shitload of documentation and preparation material to be weeded through before you're even "allowed" to start researching the potential profitability of whatever topic you're planning to focus your site on. I've been wading through it most of the day, and at the moment I'm ass-deep in a PDF called "Why People Fail" which illustrates many of the more common attitudes and personality types that tend to lead to business failure. It includes the ones you'd expect, of course; the pessimist, the quitter, the it's-not-my-fault type, the people who think there's such thing as a money tree... but it also identifies two other kinds of people who are simply not going to make it, and I had to laugh when I read this because of the pure refreshing honesty. You don't see much in the way of business-oriented documentation that has the guts to lay it on the line.

First type? The IQ-Challenged. There's no "you can do anything if you try hard, you're special!" garbage here. It simply states that some people are better off, happier and more productive, working in an offline, manual \ labor trade instead of getting snared in a World Wide Web they don't understand. Not everyone is smart enough to run an online business. Harsh, but true. You don't need to be a genius, but you do need common sense and some average intelligence, and it's a sad fact that a good percentage of the world just doesn't have either one.

Second type. The scourge of customer-service and support departments everywhere: People who need to RTFM. These are the ones who skip past every explanatory email, every page of documentation, every bit of helpful advice, and then don't understand why it isn't working for them, whatever it is. It also includes people who are so sure they know everything that they don't bother to understand (or even read) the question before shooting off the answer. This is a particular pet hate of mine -- my favorite example is that I once posted on a forum for advice about a bird that had gotten into my house, and the question went something like this: "...my home has an open floor plan with 20-foot cathedral ceiling and the bird's up on the ceiling fan...we don't have a ladder that tall..." And I promptly received more than half a dozen replies that told me to toss a dark cloth over the bird, or to shut the door of the room and open the windows. Did you even READ the fucking question?! I don't get how this type of person manages to drive a car, let alone run a business.

I may be easily entertained, but I'm also glad to see that I'm going to be working with a company who understands reality and is more concerned with actually helping people succeed than in selling their service to anyone and everyone who clicks.

Addictive? Surely not.

2009-08-21T20:39:28Z

My copy of Civ IV arrived today. Seeya in a couple weeks...

F-lock.

2009-08-12T23:39:10Z

I'm going Friends-Only for a while in this journal. I hate to do it, but upon consideration I'm fairly sure I know who's fucking with me -- the same person who deleted my MUA account, years ago -- and I don't really care for my life to be an open book to somebody who seems to hate me so much.

If you're not on my Friends list and you'd like to continue reading my journal, leave a comment here and I'll add you.

Whatchamacallit.

2009-08-11T00:55:18Z

It's so goddamn irritating trying to hunt for something on the web when you know damn well it must exist, but you don't know what it's called.

Edit: I really appreciate the offers to help me identify the thingie, but if I could describe it to you, I'd be able to describe it to Google! I'll give it a shot, though.

We're talking electronics. The audio\visual department, and to be specific, AV cables. I've learned more than I ever wanted to know about the topic while Googling randomly in an attempt to stumble over what I need. Here's what I have discovered...

Most electronics that are used with a television -- for instance, a DVD player or a video game system -- are connected to the TV via something called a "composite" cable, which is the kind with three little plugs on the end colored red, white, and yellow. They are also sometimes called RCA cables, but from what I can tell, RCA refers to the male\female, plug\socket physical structure of the cables' connections, whereas "composite" refers to the format of the video signal, which is the important bit for the purposes of this explanation. Anyway... whatever name you use, the three plugs or pins (male) on the cable fit into three sockets (female) on the TV, which helpfully have matching colors so that you know which plug goes where. ***Edit: I moved the babble about various kinds of AV cables to the end of the post, because it's irrelevant to the original situation I meant to explain.

Let me back up a little here and try to explain my problem, before this turns into a rambling 5-page lecture on audio\visual technology. I recently acquired a composite AV cable of the variety used to connect a PSP (Sony's answer to the GameBoy) to a television screen. It works beautifully save for the fact that the cable is only six feet long and the three sockets that you put the cable's red, white and yellow plugs into are located around the back of the TV. The end result of this is that I have to sit two feet from the TV with my face glued to the screen in order to play. Not cool.

So, I have a cable that is significantly too short for its intended purpose, and the thingie that I need to get is... well, basically an extension cord for a composite AV cable. After some research I'm absolutely certain that such a thing does in fact exist, because I found a couple of them on eBay. The problem is that the ones I found were from a single seller located in England and the "extension cord" is only a meter long; it's designed to be permanently installed in an older TV set that has its composite input in the back, just like mine. The cord is a normal composite AV cable with the red, yellow and white plugs on one end, and the other end has matching red, yellow and white sockets, just like the ones on the back of the TV. You stick the cable's three plugs into the three TV sockets, then wrap the cable around the side of the TV and secure it with its three sockets in the front so that, effectively, your TV now has its composite input in the front where it's easier to get at. A lot of newer TVs come standard with things already set up this way -- the red, yellow and white sockets located at the front of the TV, usually right near the volume and power buttons -- but for older ones it's nearly always in the back, so I can see where this product would find a market. In fact, if they weren't about $20 I'd buy one for my TV purely because it's hard for me to stoop down and fumble around behind the TV whenever I want to switch out the various toys I have that need a composite connection (currently the PS3, GameCube, and my old laptop). It may actually be worth the twenty bucks really, the longer I think about it... I swap out the Cube and PS3 quite frequently and there've been more than a few times where I couldn't play the game or watch the movie I wanted to because I wasn't feeling well enough to be able to bend down and swap the cables.

Well, anyway, that's neither here nor there. The fact that such a thing obviously exists -- a cable with three composite plugs on one end, and three composite sockets on the other -- means that there must be tons of them out there and readily available. I am dead certain that it isn't uncommon to find oneself with a composite AV cable that's too short. I just don't know what the fuck I'm looking for, in terms of search words. I tried "composite AV cable extender" and "composite cable extender" and every variation I could think of substituting the words "lengthener" and "coupler" and "cord" and omitting the "AV" bit. The only result that comes up is this thingie which is not only way out of my price range, but isn't really what I'm looking for. It seems to be more like the audio/video equivalent of a USB hub or a network router, and what I need is much, much simpler. I'm starting to think that, despite its prevalence in all the AV-related FAQs I've read, the term "extender" isn't usually applied to the thingie that I'm looking for. I just can't for the life of me figure out what it IS called.

Edit again: Oh for the love of puppies. Searched "composite extension cord" and about fifty thousand of them came up, all in the $2 to $10 range. I have GOT to stop over-thinking things.

three little plugs on the end colored red, white, and yellow

The yellow plug is used for video, and the red and white are for audio. I mention this because there are similar cables with only two plugs instead of three; they have the red and white male pins that are used for stereo\audio connections, but no yellow video pin. I'd assume (though I haven't verified) that these would be referred to as RCA cables, because they use male\female connectors identical to the ones on the composite cables, but seeing as how "composite" refers to a video signal I guess the audio-only red and white ones wouldn't be called composite cables. Eh, doesn't matter; a rose is a rose. The cables in question are usually used in conjunction with a separate S-video cable to display the picture, assuming you're using them with something that requires video displayed on a TV screen. I actually knew that already, because I use this kind of cable to connect my laptop to the TV.

The PlayStation and GameCube came with the standard three-color composite cables included, but to hook up the laptop to the TV I had to do a little research and make a trip to Radio Shack. My laptop doesn't have the useful red, white and yellow female sockets (I don't think any laptops do). Instead, it has an S-video port and the usual ability to plug in external headphones. I checked the back of the TV set (this required a flashlight and some Yoga positions) and found that it has not one, but two composite inputs -- that is, two sets of red, white and yellow sockets. The second set has an S-video port right beside it, so that you can plug in your choice of cables; either a three-pin cable into all three sockets, or a two-pin audio cable into just the red and white sockets, and a separate S-video cable into the adjacent port. Fabulous. So now the laptop can be hooked up to the 35" TV screen by means of S-video and an audio cable that plugs into the laptop's headphone jack. It means I can download movies to the laptop's disk drive (250gb holds a lot of shit; it's an old laptop but I swapped out the original teensy 20gb drive and replaced the keyboard, go me!) and watch them on the TV, and also that the laptop can function as a DVD player. I just didn't know the technical names for any of it, and now I do. Yay.

As an aside... there are also "component" cables which do exactly the same thing as the composite, only with five little plugs instead of three, but those are for newer high-definition TVs. My TV doesn't have a component input (translation: you can't connect the sort of cable with five little plugs; only the one with the three plugs) so fortunately that narrowed down the research a bit. It turns out, if you cared -- I did, but only because I'm looking into a high-def TV for my bedroom; more on that in another post -- that nearly all electronics on the market today use composite input as a general rule. The newer\higher-end stuff also has component capability (in addition to, not instead of), so you can use either kind of connection depending on whether your TV supports component technology. That's neither here nor there, though, as my TV is older than I am, so we're talking composite. For now!

The next big thing.

2009-08-06T04:41:45Z

Final Fantasy VII is available for portable play via a PlayStation Network download. Excellent.

I need to figure out a permanent, workable solution to the "LCD screen + sunlight = unviewable" dilemma, and when I do, I'm going to market it en masse and retire to Disney World. I've already mastered the art of using my laptop out on the pool patio, by means of putting it inside a plastic storage box turned sideways on the table. I tried that on a smaller scale with the GameBoy (using a shoebox) and sadly it doesn't work out due to the fact that you need to position your hands around the edges of the GB in order to play, and the sides of the shoebox get in the way. Not an issue with a laptop because you only need to reach forwards into the larger box to use the keyboard. It'd work fine using the same box that I put the laptop in, but having to sit at the table and rest my hands on its surface while playing kinda defeats the purpose of having a portable game player the size of a credit card. I need to devise a sun shield that's small enough to rest comfortably in my lap wherever I'm sitting.

Hrmmm.

Hitting it worked, too.

2009-07-31T18:16:18Z

In honor of this month's obsession: Nintendo.

Remember when?

Grand Theft Childhood.

2009-07-26T22:31:37Z

I'm aware that (according to my mother) the video game Grand Theft Auto is singlehandedly responsible for the downfall of our society, but I have to say: It's really damned fun. I just started playing IV last night. I don't know what I was expecting, really... maybe something more akin to a standard FPS, or something kinda like Super Mario Brothers only with an urban backdrop and graphics, where the general idea is to run rightwards across a scrolling screen, shooting things and dodging obstacles. Only you'd be doing it in a jacked car. Well, whatever I was expecting, the reality is sure as hell NOT it. GTA IV is a visually stunning 3d game with attention to detail that I find amazing. Maybe it's typical for these sorts of games; I don't know. This is the first time I've ever played something that wasn't a turn-based RPG or a Zelda\Mario. All I know is that I turned on the game before midnight and by 4am I was still completely entranced by the realism of the environment. I spent a good hour messing with the radio stations in the original car you're given, and watching the TV in the apartment. That's what I mean by attention to detail -- the game is set in a city roughly based on New York, and you play by navigating around the city in various vehicles and carrying out different activities, but you can also do a shitload of things that really have nothing to do with the plot or the actual game play. They're strictly there to make the background more immersive and realistic. Not only can you turn on the TV in your character's apartment, but it has a bunch of different channels, and each one has actual programming that's very entertaining to watch. It's all parodies of things you might find on real TV (for instance, there's a game show like Next Top Model only the contestants are prostitutes). I assume the content on each channel eventually cycles back to the beginning again, but I watched several channels for a good 10 or 15 minutes each and never saw it repeat. I also spent over half an hour at a men's clothing store trying on jeans and jackets and footwear, wasted time trying to figure out how to program my character's cell phone, rode around the city on the subway purely to see where I could go, and had entirely too much fun bowling at a seedy place called Memory Lanes, which is every bit as interactive and detailed as some games I've played that focus completely on bowling. In GTA you could probably play the entire game from start to finish and never even set foot in the bowling alley, yet the game-within-a-game available there is incredibly rich and detailed, not to mention a great time-waster.

I managed to play the game for over four hours and I haven't done anything illegal yet other than run some red lights and accidentally assault a businessman at the hot dog stand. How do you accidentally punch someone out? Err, well, I was trying to figure out which button to press to buy a hot dog, and ended up just pushing every button on the controller looking for the right one. It turns out the X button makes you punch the air in front of you if you're not holding a weapon, and it was unfortunate timing that there was a guy with a briefcase and a cup of coffee standing next to my character when I pressed X. Oops. He dropped his coffee onto the sidewalk and cursed me out, but didn't attack back, which was lucky considering I was still busily trying to figure out how to buy my dog.

Tonight, I may actually get around to stealing a car.

Never gonna give you up.

2009-07-18T21:44:12Z

(laughing) In my search for videos of the Hot Coffee mod for GTA III, I have now been rickrolled a total of seven times in the past 20 minutes.

Game on.

2009-07-18T06:12:34Z

I've been blessed with a great many wonderful things due to sheer accident of birth. I have a non-dysfunctional loving family, a place to live, food to eat, and central air conditioning. Oh, and a PlayStation. But this week, the thing that I'm the most thankful for is the simple fact that I love vintage games. Such a little thing... but with far-reaching consequences. To sum it up without a longwinded explanation: It makes me happy to have choices. Choices about everything, but right now we're talking games. If I feel like playing a game, I love that I can choose from a variety of them; not only different titles, but different styles of play. Everything from real-time strategy to roleplaying to the occasional FPS. And because I'm drawn primarily to older games, it means I can HAVE those choices because I'm not shelling out $50 a pop for the latest release of Halo III; it's more like $5 for GTA III (literally; I bought it for a buck and four dollars in shipping).

Anyway, I've been in serious gaming mode this week and if you've read my journal lately you know I've been haunting eBay to feed the habit; both selling games I no longer play (and some other shit I've had laying around) and buying the ones I want. I was able to sell four old Super Nintendo games and a collector's edition leather-bound copy of Harry Potter for a total of exactly $78.87 -- I love how eBay tots up the numbers for you to see at a glance. With that money, I bought... choices!

Final Fantasy III for the Nintendo DS
Grand Theft Auto III and Grand Theft Auto IV for the PlayStation, GTA Advance for the GameBoy
Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess, and LoZ: Ocarina of Time for the GameCube
Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, and Shadow of the Colossus, both action-RPG-strategies for PlayStation
Rome: Total War and the Barbarian Invasion expansion pack (a computer game for WinXP)
More vintage early 90s Zelda: Link's Awakening, Oracle of Seasons, Oracle of Ages for the GameBoy Color

All of those games came from the proceeds of my eBay selling. Of course... before a couple of weeks ago I didn't own a Nintendo DS or a PlayStation III (or even a PlayStation II for that matter), and both of those were purchased with money out of my pocket, considerably more than $78.87. Or, well, maybe not my pocket precisely, as that would imply I'd actually earned it myself. Maybe I did. I am trapped inside the physical equivalent of an 80 yr old woman. I'll never live my dreams, I don't get to have dreams, even stupid ones like riding a horse or camping on the Appalachian Trail. I've spent a serious portion of the past fifteen years unable to get out of my bed or use the toilet by myself, and I will spend the rest of my life in pain, every single day. Because of these things, the great state of New York and the federal gov'mint send me a check every month. (Fine, maybe that's not precisely why, but it may as well be.) Do I earn it? Does it matter? I used it to buy a PlayStation III and a copy of Rock Band with a guitar and drums and a microphone. Too bad I can't buy any friends to play with me.

Edited to add: So my original estimate of $78.87 was from two hours before the auctions actually ended. I forgot how there tends to be sniping at the last minute. Turns out my games sold for $109 and change. With that extra thirty bucks I'm eyeing a copy of Total War: Shogun, and possibly GTA San Andreas... I'd like to find an old one with the Hot Coffee mod, purely out of curiosity mind you, but I have a feeling (haven't checked yet) that I'd have to pay significantly more for it and it's not worth it just to watch blurry pixelated sex. Mostly I want to see exactly how graphic the little scene is that set off such a fiery controversy. I'll hit YouTube and I bet there are a bunch of videos of it.

The only other game I want at the moment is Ico for PS2. It's the prequel to Shadow of the Colossus, but it wasn't as popular in the mainstream and so there aren't many copies available now, and the ones on eBay are selling upwards of $50. Ha, I don't think so. I'll rent it if I want to play that badly.

RTFM.

2009-07-16T21:56:46Z

I'm trying to figure out an oddity I've noticed with regards to the eBay market for used video games. So I'd like to conduct a little poll.

(or somewhere else online). You'd like to have the original manual for the game, too. It isn't absolutely necessary because most games are pretty easy to figure out and you can always Google anything that doesn't make sense. Still, the manual would be nice. You do some searching for the best prices, and find the following results (shipping included in all prices):

- dozens of copies of the game disc only, no manual, ranging in price from $10 to $20
- a brand new copy of the game and manual, still sealed in its box, for $50
- a used copy of the game with original manual, in worn but working condition, for $25
- a copy of the brand-new manual, no game disc, for $5
- a copy of a used manual in bent\torn condition but readable, for $3

So what do you buy?

You'd imagine that most people with sense in their heads but not much money in their wallets would choose to buy the cheapest possible copy of the game disc ($10) and a separate copy of the manual, either the new one or the torn-up one ($5 or $3). Total price $15 at the most. Yet what I'm noticing is that when given these options, auctions for the game + manual nearly always get snapped up within a few days even when the price for both together is considerably more than buying the two separately. I just don't get it. Is it really worth that much extra to buy a game and its manual from the same seller? You have to look carefully to even find an auction that includes both. The vast majority of auctions for used video games include only the game disc or cartridge, no box or manual, and it only takes a few minutes of searching and clicking to find another auction for just the manual by itself, in most cases. Yeah, there are a ton of games being sold for which the manual isn't available separately, but I'm talking about popular games such as Super Mario Advance -- there are currently three copies of the manual by itself selling on eBay and I didn't even check other auction sites or used game stores. Yet a quick search for completed auctions within the past few weeks shows me that somebody paid over $25 for a copy of the game with its included manual, and somebody else paid close to twice that for a brand-new sealed game. The game cartridge without a manual is available for less than $15. I completely understand wanting to have the manual and being willing to pay extra for it; what I don't get is why you'd buy a single auction that includes both when you can buy the two separately for as much as $10 cheaper in some cases. Auctions for a game + manual are snapped up like rare treasures, so why do auctions for manuals alone languish un-watched and un-bid?

is that I'm making the assumption that people who buy used video games on eBay are on a budget and looking to save as much money as possible; therefore it makes no sense to bid $25 on an auction for a game with its manual when you can buy the game for $10 and the manual for $2. It occurs to me, though, that the games in question -- the ones I've paid attention to -- are mostly older titles for the Nintendo 64, the GameCube, the GBA, and even the GameBoy Color. N64s were first introduced in late 1996; by 2001, the GameCube had been released and production of N64s stopped. Then the Wii came onto the scene in 2006 and Cubes were phased out. As for GameBoy Colors... wow, those haven't been produced since the late 80s. I don't believe the GameBoy Advance SP has been discontinued (I may be wrong) but nobody is really making games for it anymore; the reigning Nintendo handheld is the DS in its various incarnations. Anyway, all this boils down to the fact that even the most current of these games hasn't been manufactured for nearly five years now, and the older ones are looking at 10+ years since they were available in stores. You can't go down to Wal-Mart or Best Buy and pick up a new sealed copy of Ocarina of Time, in other words. And if you're looking for GBC games that weren't popular\common to begin with, such as the two password-linked Legend of Zelda games Oracle of Ages and Oracle of Seasons, you'll be lucky to even find a game store clerk who knows what you're talking about. The guy at GameStop tried to tell me there was only one Zelda game ever produced for the GameBoy, Link's Awakening, and had never heard of the Oracles (despite the fact that they did, amazingly, have a copy of Seasons in stock).

My point here is that I'd been assuming that anyone buying games on eBay would be looking to save money, when in actuality, some of those people may well be willing to spend whatever it costs for a new, sealed copy of their game of choice... and the only place to buy these games now is online, on auction sites. You could try a physical store such as GameStop or Game Crazy, but those places get their stock of older games from people who trade them in, so any copy they have available is going to be used and may or may not have its original manual and packaging. If you want a brand-new copy of a game that's not produced anymore, you'll have to get it from somebody who bought it years ago when it was on the shelves (or someone who bought it from someone who bought it when... etc). That means eBay or Amazon Marketplace. So it isn't necessarily true that everyone buying video games on eBay is in the market to save money by purchasing worn-out copies of heavily used games on the cheap. Some of them, for all I know, may be New York State lottery winners with a taste for the vintage games of their childhood -- which aren't available anywhere else no matter how rich you are.

I still think it's dumb to pay an extra $10 for a game + manual instead of buying each separately. Then again, I'm also going to be purchasing a couple of manuals for the old SNES games I'm selling. If spending $5 on a manual means I can sell my game for $30 instead of $10, you'd better believe I'll take advantage of it.

Going once, going twice, sold.

2009-07-12T04:09:50Z

Okay, that's scary... two of the four SNES games I listed on eBay about six hours ago have already sold. I should have listed higher prices! Though if I had, maybe they wouldn't have been sold, period. I'd much rather have $20 in my hands (well, in my checking account) than a possible-maybe $25 floating out there unavailable. I did list both of those games at the highest price that was currently available for each; that is, I searched existing auctions first to get an idea of what each game was selling for, then listed mine by matching the highest price I could find. I figured I'd get it because my auctions included the manuals and none of the others did, and I was right. When a potential buyer has a choice between $$ for the game cartridge and the same $$ for the game and the manual, they're going to go for mine, duh. For the games that I don't have a manual, I picked an average-to-low price. To be more exact, I noticed that the very lowest prices listed for the various games invariably came from a seller with either very little feedback or a low feedback score. So I listed my games higher than that, but lower (by a dollar) than the sellers who have about the same or more feedback than myself. We'll see what happens. The two games I sold have already paid for my GameCube; if the others sell, I'll have covered the extra game controllers and a copy of Twilight Princess to go along. Cool.

Legend of Zelda.

2009-07-11T17:48:26Z

My GameCube has arrived!

I actually got a shitload of mail yesterday... seems everything I'd ordered in the past two weeks all showed up at once. The GameCube and GameBoy Player, the Nintendo DS Lite, two DS games (Final Fantasy III and IV), a couple of Paperback Swap books. About the only major thing I'm still waiting on is the wireless Cube controller, because the one I have doesn't quiiiiite reach from where the Cube sits on top of the TV over to the couch. In order to play comfortably I'd have to either move the desk chair across the entire living room and stick it in front of the TV, or move the Cube somewhere closer to the couch, which isn't really an option because I can't have the cables trailing over the floor or the dogs will trip over them and end up yanking the whole thing down.

I've also just finished listing a bunch of stuff on eBay. I didn't realize until I started buying games this month that people are still paying for Super Nintendo equipment. I dug out my SNES drawer and it turns out I still have Final Fantasy II and III, Link to the Past, Mario Kart, Mario World, and Monopoly. What's more, I have the manuals for most of them. The majority of the eBay auctions available are for the game cartridge only, so anyone who includes the original manual has a good advantage. I also have a ton of original NES games, including the two Zelda ones with the shiny gold cartridges, but I'm debating whether it's worth the trouble of listing those for auction because they don't seem to be worth much. You'd think they'd be worth MORE; they're older and harder to find. I'm thinking it's probably because fewer and fewer people still have a working NES console. Most of the market for vintage games is with people like myself who are somewhat tech-savvy, and we tend to play on emulators because it's such a pain in the ass to acquire a 20-yr-old system console that actually works. Come to think of it, I'm not sure who the hell would do that, when it's so much easier -- not to mention FREE -- to download Nestopia. Maybe it's people who don't realize that you can buy a cheap USB attachment for Nintendo controllers and still be able to play the games without needing to use a computer joystick (which is admittedly aggravating).

Arghh.

2009-07-07T23:08:22Z

Awhile back I learned how to connect my old laptop to the big-screen TV in the living room, so I could watch my enormous collection of illegal -- I mean, so I could watch movies I'd stumbled across on the Internet. More importantly, so that everyone else could watch them too, on the TV screen rather than the tiny laptop monitor. Before that, I'd acquired a cable that lets me plug original Nintendo game controllers into the computer via USB port, for use with emulators. (You just TRY running, jumping, and swinging a sword using the laptop keyboard.) The combination of the two meant I could play Nintendo on the TV without needing an actual game system, which is good because my favored games are all for systems that haven't been manufactured since sometime in the 80s. I also have a GameBoy Micro and an Advance SP, and Nintendo has happily obliged me by re-releasing nearly all of my favorite NES games onto GB Advance. So I can play The Adventure of Link on the TV at home, or in the waiting room at my doctor's office.

The problem has been that although I can play the game wherever and whenever I wish, I can't play the SAME game. That is, when I play on the GameBoy I'm using the physical cartridge and when I play on the TV I'm using an emulator and a ROM version of the game. So if I get to a certain point and save my game at home, I can't pick up again using the GameBoy. I can play the same game with the GameBoy, but it won't have my saved progress. If this isn't making sense to you, you're not a gamer, go away.

I've been trying to figure out for ages how to work around this problem so that I can take my saved games from the TV at home and play them on the portable GameBoy. It's an issue without an easy solution. The teensy GameBoy hardware simply isn't capable of saving games onto anything other than the game cartridge, so the only way to accomplish what I want to do is to find a way to play on the TV using the actual cartridge rather than an emulator. And Nintendo hasn't made it easy to do this. There are a couple of aftermarket transverters that let you plug a GameBoy into a computer, but they use the same cables and ports that would connect the computer to the TV. You can connect the GameBoy to the laptop or the laptop to the TV, but not both simultaneously.

The only viable solution that I've been able to find, after much consultation with self-styled "experts" on the topic, is to plug the GameBoy into a GameCube. Nintendo actually manufactures an accessory intended for this very activity. The problem's been that I don't own a GameCube so I had dismissed that as a possibility, until it became apparent that there just isn't any other option, legal or otherwise. I assumed (stupidly, it turns out) that buying a GameCube just for the sole purpose of being able to play Link on the TV and then bring it with me on the GameBoy was a frivolous waste of money. Then recently, I found myself in possession of both a miserable emotional state and also a small-ish sum of money I'd put aside to pay for something that turned out not to cost as much as I'd planned for. So I decided I'd at least look into the whole GameCube thing and see if I might be able to buy myself a little cheering-up present. Happy unbirthday to me, from me.

It turns out the GameCube system console AND the accessory I need (called a GameBoy Player) are under $50. For both of them together. I got them used on Amazon for $39 and change including shipping. Let me just bang my head against a wall now. Then I can start trying to convince my dad to play Link with me... it's the only thing we ever really did together.

I wonder how much it will cost to buy a Wii five years from now.