The sickness continues

3 posts in one day. Boy, I bet you are all feeling lucky.. or maybe you haven't checked in a few days and are feeling overwhelmed.

So the video game saga continues. I am officially down 1 PS2 but instead of hunting for one on the cheap I decided to exchange Guitar Hero 2 for an undamaged disk. What a trip that was. Tom was itching to go to Fry's Electronics because he was in a bad mood. I was in a similar mood and decided to join him. Luckily he had the Best Buy receipt for GH2. He picked me up and we stopped by Best Buy on the way to Fry's.
I stand in the returns line for about 15 minutes while Tom goes and plays with the latest smart phones. I finally get to the service rep, the look at the disk, look at the receipt, then tell me to go get a new copy of the game and bring it back up to them. They also tell me I don't have to wait in line.
I walk to the back of the store, find the game, and head back to the counter. When I get there they have gone from 4 Customer Service reps to 2. I walk to the front of the line and wait patiently. After 5 minutes the guy I am waiting on takes my receipt and hands it to the lackey too his right. I assume this was to speed up my transaction as he is now dealing with a difficult return. So I go stand by the obviously younger and less knowledgeable worker and continue waiting patiently. After 10 more minutes and a few conversations with some other guys in line about cars and manly stuff the young kid finally finds what was wrong with the lady's order in front of me. Apparently she had ordered something, taken too long to pick it up, and they had canceled the order. It took him15 minutes to figure that out. I was still better off though since the smart guy was still trying to figure out how a cordless mouse was on some guy's receipt but wouldn't scan into the system (as in they don't actually carry that mouse).
The guy helping me takes the 5 seconds required to print the exchange receipt and I am done. Total wait time 30 min, total "help" time, about 1.5 minutes.
Amazing.

As I turn around I see a man in the now very long returns line holding a Wii. I immediately approach him and ask if the machine is broken. He says no, he just doesn't want it. I talk with him a little more as I try to grasp the cusp of the situation. It still doesn't quite compute to me and I sort of wander away pondering the mere possibility of the situation he claimed. I find Tom, confer with him and we decide this is an opportunity that can not be passed up. I approach the man again and ask him if he would rather just sell me the machine instead of waiting in line to return it. He politely declines, mumbling something about a credit card. He says I could probably just wait and buy the system as soon as he returns it. I consider this good advice and take my post at the end of the costumer service counter. About 5 more minutes of waiting go buy when the General Manager comes over, I assume because he has noticed how long and aggravated the line has become due to the counter being staffed at half strength.
After inquiring to the where abouts of all his workers he decides to pitch in and help. Instead of helping the next person in line he singles me.. the guy standing randomly at the edge and ask if I need help. I ask him how long the turn around is for a returned item to hit the floor. He looks at me like I just asked how many cucumbers he could shove up his ass in 45 seconds and asks for clarification and specifically what kind of item. I point out the man with the Wii and tell him the man will not sell it to me, but wants to make the full return instead. The manager states he is obligated to make an announcement, then grabs the mic attached to his shirt and makes a call on the radio to all his employees that goes something like this.
"attention, we have a customer returning a Nintendo Wii, however we already have another customer lined up to buy it. Repeat, We have a Wii to sell and somone inline to buy it." He then promised me the Wii and went about bossing people around. Tom and I waited another 10 minutes or so for the guy with the nintendo to get helped. As soon as the transaction was done the CS rep brought the machine to me at the end of the counter and rang it up.
I was in a pretty foul mood today when it came to video games and video game systems. All that has changed. I am a very very very happy boy.
My wife, Tom, and I have spent the last 2 hours taking turns on Wii sports. All the rumors are true. The system is just plain fun. I just wish I could find another controller. Tom and I tried 3 stores and no one has any extra controllers.

I hope you all come over to play soon, it really is a whole new social experience.

Fuck Gameplus

So, I took the PS2 in for repairs.. it was $50 with a 30 day warranty. I picked it up last thursday and went of vacation on friday. We go home on tuesday so on wednesday I finally go around to trying the console out. It still isn't working. It won't read any of my disks. I took it back in and they told me it wasn't covered by my warranty. They claim that it was working perfectly fine when the gave it too me and that they warned me about using damaged disks in the machine. This isn't true. When I picked up the machine they told me to check my disks for damage. They never mentioned a damaged disk could damage the machine.
They say that there is something wrong with the laser now because it won't read any disks and this doesn't relate to the repair they made. Since it is a different problem it is not covered by the warranty and would be another $50 to look at.
What a fucking rip off. They expect me to believe that a scratched disk damaged the lens on my laser? You have got to be kidding me.
SO, I am out $50, have 2 damaged disks and still no play station. I am not a very happy person right now.

Pockets of Doom

Well.. I should be blogging about my trip to Colorado for Christmas but I really don't feel like it right now. I am feeling very lazy and long winded. I warn you not to read this post unless you are looking to be bored.
Instead of the vacation I will talk about pockets. I love pockets. Pockets are great. They hold things that I need so I don't have to carry them. This frees my hands to do important things like open doors, drive cars, stop the ground from hitting my face when I fall, etc. etc.
Like most men I have a system when it comes to my pockets. Keys go in the right, phone in the left, wallet in the back right. When I have my PDA on me, as I often do, the PDA goes in the left, phone and keys in the right, and wallet in the back right.
This system works very well for me as my keys and wallet are always in my right pockets. Whenever I leave a place like my house, or my friends house, or I arrive at a destination I do the man pat. You know what I'm talking about. The quick tap of my thighs and ass to ensure my pockets have the appropriate bulge. I personally do 5-6 taps, checking my front pockets twice. This usually takes less than 3 seconds and I often don't even realize I do it. When all the pockets check O.K. a lower level of consciousness sits quietly by waiting to perform the next trivial task so my higher levels of consciousness are free to continue the conversation I am having, contemplating the Universe, or doing calculus.
When my pocket check reveals a deficiency a whole different process takes place. That little background task manager of my mind elevates its priority level to a higher consciousness. If the deficiency is a critical one, like my keys or my wallet the thought gets the highest priority and my mind sees if fit to elevate my bodies readiness levels. My heart rate quickens, my breathing deepens and I could swear a very minuscule amount of adrenaline is released.
Once my awareness is sufficiently heightened my mind begins the process of trying to locate the missing item. This usually takes only a second or two of tracing my last steps from memory and is often accompanied by a more frenzied pat down of all my pockets, including those not usually in the line up.
At this point I am sure you are wondering how the hell I could have gone on so long about pockets and still had nothing of interest to say. Well, its a gift, but now we get to the whole point of the matter and you get to use your mind's eye to laugh at me.
Imagine me standing outside a store randomly slapping my body while I gaze absently at the sky. When I say slapping my body I mean all over my body. When I am in panicked pocket check mode I check everywhere I have had pockets, and that is alot of places. I slap both breasts, my upper thighs, both butt cheeks, grab my pant legs (looking for cargo pockets) and will lastly slap the center of my chest. Thats right the center of my chest. When I was in the Marine Corps I didn't put my pen in my pocket, I clipped it between the first and second button on my blouse, and I find I still do that occasionally when I am wearing a polo or buttoned shirt. I got used to checking my breastbone for the item I am looking for.

I came to be completely aware of my odd behavior yesterday while standing in front of Target randomly slapping myself and receiving odd looks from passing shoppers. The whole process usually doesn't last long enough for other people to notice, but my keys where missing and I was panicked thinking I had locked them in the car.. but I couldn't have because i locked the car using the remote.. but I don't have the keys so they must be locked in the car.. maybe the fell out of your pocket.. but I never took anything out of my pocket while I was in the store, I only returned a gift and that was in a bag so they must be locked in the car... As you can see my mind was stuck in a loop.. then my autopilot pocket search realized I was wearing a jacket.
The keys where in my jacket pocket. For some reason I find it completely natural to stick stuff in my jacket pocket. I do it without thinking and without realizing something is in there. I don't usually wear a jacket, it hasn't been part of my daily wardrobe since high school so why am I so eager to use my jacket pockets?
Its a frustrating place to be in because every time I get out of the car I put my keys in my jacket pocket and when I go to find them later I panic because I can't find my keys. This is not something I am used to. I am not a panic prone guy so having these daily alarms is getting really annoying plus I look like an idiot every time it happens.
I think I will stop wearing a jacket and just catch a cold.

My brain is hung like a horse

Grades where posted this weekend.
I got all Bs. This surprised me because I was expecting a C in my circuits class. I must have kicked ass on that final.
The class was pretty rough. It was the first year they had it and it is a combination of 2 separate classes in attempt to reduce the required credits for a EE degree. There are definitely some bugs that still need to be ironed out of the curriculum.

I am so proud of myself :D

*p.s. I think I finally broke the play station for good. I will be taking it in tomorrow to a repair shop to see about getting a new dvd drive. Man is that frustrating. I am only about 8 songs in to Guitar Hero 2.

Radio Gaga

I was on the radio this morning. My clip was about 20 seconds long.
The Edge morning show asked their listeners to call in and tell them the weirdest place they had gone to the bathroom.
They where worried things would get too graphic and the stories where taking too long so by the time they got to me they where in rapid fire mode and all they wanted to hear was where it happened. My story got turned into something like this:
"My roommate; in his closet. 2 months later, walks through the bathroom and goes into our neighbors closet." They laughed and talked about it for about 10 more seconds and then went onto the next caller. If you where listening to The Edge 103.9 this morning at about 7:32ish I was the first caller after they took a commercial break, and the first of the "rapid fire" callers. I didn't hear it, but my wife says it didn't sound like me on the radio.

I had a great story that would have taken about 15 more seconds to tell and would have made the hilarity of the situation even greater but I was following the rules so that my story would get on the air. BTW for things like this they didn't go live. They talked to me while a song was playing and recorded the entire conversation, when the song was done they just played the clip. I thought that was an interesting workaround for saving that emergency "dump button" for errant swear words, or maybe it was just so they could cue up as many stories as possible and remove any dead air time.

Anyway.. I feel the story needs to be told in a more robust and less "embellished" nature.
I was not actually present to witness the acts but I heard about them first hand in the fashion that all great stories in the military are retold.. the very next day. When I was in the Marine Corps my friend Scott Kruse told me a tale of his roommate Ian Cole. Ian came home drunk one night and passed out on his bed. A while later he gets up, stumbles over to the wall locker and proceeds to relieve himself in it. It left a rather lingering odor, and as my fuzzy memory serves me, it wasn't his wall locker, it was Scott's and a large amount of clothing was stored at the bottom of the locker. A number of weeks later Ian once again gets up and stumbles toward the wall locker but Scott is keenly aware of the past transgressions and re-routes Ian towards the head. Ian walks through the head and into the neighboring room (keep in mind that in the barracks 2 rooms share a bathroom). Ian can not open the neighbor's wall locker because it is locked (as it is supposed to be) so Ian just pees on the wall locker, the wall, and the very cheap carpeting.

Oddly enough this is not how Cole got the nickname of "Head."

Clarification

Has our society of spoon fed information and comedy in a box sitcom watching been so detrimental to the ability to think and reason that we no longer see a joke when it is staring us in the face? Perhaps I am just not as obvious or as ironic as I though I was.
After the 5th comment (oddly enough all by private contact, either in person or email) about my blog title being misspelled I feel compelled to explain the joke.
Yes, I know "blissfull" is spelled wrong. It is part of the irony of the title. I did this on purpose.
The tried and true rule for telling jokes is "if you have to explain it then the joke isn't funny".
It actually saddens me that this is the case because I thought the title was quite clever. I understand that small spelling errors like this have become much more common with the advent of online communications but I also thought those around me had more respect for my abilities, especially since Firefox 2.o has a built in spell checker. I will give credit to those who contacted me in that they all did it through some form of discrete communication instead of what they felt would have been a humiliating public one.

So.. to set the record straight "Blissfull Ignorance" is intentional and a comment on itself. However, now that I have commented on it I am no longer ignorant about it and therefore I have lost my bliss. :P

18 hours

I finally converted my 15.2 GB itunes library of .m4a to MP3. It is now only 14.1 GB but there was about 6 hours of files that didn't convert because they are DRMed (an audio book). It took 18 hours. I used my laptop so my main rig wouldn't get bogged down or slow the conversion process. Hell, my laptop has a full desktop P4 3.2GHz HT processor so I would say it was definitely up to the challenge. I did notice a slow down after 9 hours of that I attribute to processor throttling due to thermal protection so I gave it an hour break in the middle.

You may be asking yourself "why"? Well, I don't like itunes very much. I don't really know why, I just never quite got the hang of it. I'm not one of those "let my computer tell me what to listen to" kind of guys and I didn't like making a bunch of play lists. I am kind of old school like that.
I go through my mp3 directory where everything is organized nicely and just queue it up in winamp or WMP through the right click menu. All media players have some sort of library management and I don't really like any of them, although the itunes one is the best overall in my opinion and I feel that winamp has a stronger search function.

The real problem is that when all the CDs where ripped into itunes they where given a serialized file name and stuffed in a random serialized folder. This means an album can have 3 songs in 1 folder and 6 in another but you would never know it because the folders are called f00 and f27 and the file names are ZQLFS.m4a or IGPAK.m4a
For someone who likes to browse his music collection by wandering through his folder hierarchy this doesn't help. By converting all the songs to MP3 itunes renames the files by the same hierarchy I've been using for almost 10 years now (started way back when I would record my CDs into .WAVbecause there wasn't anything else). That structure is a folder for the artist->folder for album->song files.
Compilation albums are clumped under various artist or don't get an artist folder.
Itunes follows this close enough for it's mp3s and I can now find and listen to all those songs on my IPAQ. With a 1 gb SD card I can fit enough music to get me through the week but all those .m4a files where off limits. Not anymore. It feels good to have my library consolidated and standardized. No I need to go through and weed out all the duplicates and I know there is a lot of them.

Special thanks to C1 for donating large portions of my itunes library ;)

I have no testies!!

My wife told me "you have no testies" tonight. I know what your all thinking... "las vegas was a lie!"
No no.. its ok, no lies yet. I was is a rather chipper mood tonight and my wife asked why. I told her I had my last test today for a while and was homework free.

On a slightly different topic both of us have gotten a cold. I am pretty sure I brought the damned thing into the house and I am getting better while my wife is just passing the worst of it. I'm sorry baby, I didn't know. I love you, I didn't mean to make you sick. Man what a crappy week.

The last time we got sick together was a week after I moved here. It was our first New Years together and we toasted the occasion with a shot of Nyquil.

Too much free time is dangerous

This was going to be part of my last blog but I thought it warrented it's own space. Think of it as an addendum, or better yet, a spin-off of the last blog. Kind of like our favorite spin-off: Stargate Atlantis. Without further pontification, sublimation, or ado.... I bring you a repost the story I forgot to blog about.

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This is why too much free time is dangerous. This weekend was like the perfect storm. My wife went out of town (no supervision), my computer died (no games or other entertainment), I finished the book I was reading and really had no homework to speak of. Being depressed by the computer crash and lonely since my wife and all but 1 of my friends is out of town for the weekend I am looking for something to do. The 1 friend in town works on saturdays, but when he gets off he says he is going to an oktober fest party and invites me along. I jump at the chance.
Through some slight miscomunication I am on the way to the party when I realize it isn't an Oktoberfest as much as it is just a party at some guy's house that he throws every year for oktoberfest. This brightens me up because it means I don't have to pay to get in, or buy beer, or deal with a big ol' crowd and public drunks.
The guy throwing the party went to high school with my friend's fiance, so I will know exactly 3 people at the party. As you will see, that doesn't stop me in the least and with the help of alchohol, my inhibitions and judgement are non-existant. I will let Scott, a guy I met at the party tell the story through his blog on myspace.

The following is an excert from Scott's blog:


Quote:
Move over Flaming Moe's behold the Flaming Marshmallow!
Current mood: amused
Category: Food and Restaurants

Oh yes, I am currently recovering from an Oktoberfest Party that my old high school friend Jeff threw last night. He has a fire pit at his house needless to say you know the dangers of fire and alcohol!! While sitting around the fire and having a few beers and bratwursts the question of the availability of marshmallows arrived. Jeff being a bachelor had some but likely they were purchased in 2004-2005 time frame. Realizing that we have discovered a new material to re-tile the space shuttle with these marshmallows, again beers, engineers and fire (beware, experiments will commence). To soften these lightweight briquettes we figured on soaking them in a mixture of 2 parts vodka and 1 part rum and Wow! You definitely have something special here, marshmallow shots! Even better roast these marshmallow and you have the Flaming Marshmallow, that's right in the same spirit as the Friend's invented game of Fireball! Ironically the best part about it all was the mixture that you soak them in the marshmallows slightly dissolve in the alcohol mixture and actually makes vodka and rum go down more smoothly, enough to sip! If you gulp the following results below. And yes this is footage from the party! I would like to thank Curtis for being the stuntman for this trick!

BTW, there were 2 chemical engineers, and aerospace engineer, and aspiring electrical engineer (me) and a professional councelor (as in someone who should know better) involved in that whole fiasco.

Its dead Jim

So last week my computer died. By my computer I mean the control board on my main hard drive. Kristina went to K-town to visit her parents and all but 1 of my friends where out of town. I took this rare opportunity to play Company of Heroes online with some friends until about midnight. I went to bed with dreams of gaming all day Saturday dancing in my head. I got up the next morning about 8 am and crawled into my office. My computer was not sleeping as I expected nor was it quietly and patiently waiting for me to start some delicious games. No my friends, instead it was sitting at the BIOS screen waiting for me to insert a bootable disk or drive.

This next bit is for you more techno savvy among us:
My immediate action is to hit the power button, pull the plug and go take a piss. As I contemplate making a pot of coffee I plug my computer back in and hit the power button. The computer POSTs, runs through the RAM check and then hangs on the IDE autodetect. After about 30 seconds of watching the little blinking cursor blink in the same spot I start to panic.
I am going to fast foward through a few hours of frantic phone calls, hard drive swapping, and much much much swearing and bring you up to about 1:00 in the afternoon.
At this point I have determined that some little tiny piece of silicon on the control board on the bottom of my hard drive decided 3 years and 2 months was a long enough life and it didn't need to do whatever it is that the little piece of silicon is supposed to do. The drive powers up just fine, I can feel the platters spin. There where no warning signs of mechanical damage like the click of death but I tried the freezer trick anyway. The drive is not recognized as being attached at all, I tried it on 3 motherboards. Some boards hang on trying to detect the drive and some just don't bother and skip over it no matter how adamantly or precisely I tell the BIOS exactly what kind of drive is attached. Conclusion: bad control board, perfectly good platters and heads. If I can't get a computer to see the drive how the hell am I supposed to use all my sweet recovery software? The drive is exactly 2 months out of warranty and it has also been discontinued so no one has an identical unit in stock. There go all my hopes of getting a free replacement or a good drive to cannabalize parts off of in an attempt to recover my data.


Regular readers pick up here:
This dead hard drive had all of my personal stuff on it, you know, pictures, this semesters' homework, emails,and inexplicably all my backups. I swear I had my backups going to another hard drive. I guess I was wrong, lazy, or careless. I finally resign myself to the fact that I have lost everything with no chance whatsoever of recovery. The next logical step is to begin to rebuild. I head out to Fry's Electronics to pick up a new drive. They don't have any of the drives I want in stock. I head over to CompUSA and Best Buy. They have the drives I am looking for but for exactly twice as much as my favorite online merchant. While I am desperate to get my computer back up and running quickly I am not "pay twice as much for the same thing" desperate.
I head home dejected and lonely. When I get home I go online to www.newegg.com and order 2 hard drives

Tech alert: I am running a Raid 1 array of 2 -250GB SATA Western Digital drives. 100% data redundancy FTW!!!!11!!1! I find it slightly humorous that Fry's had no Western Digital drives in stock except for some high priced Raptors.

I now sit and wait patiently for 3 days for my order to process and ship. As usual newegg is disturbingly fast and efficient with my order. It is processed by Sunday night and the drives ship Monday morning. UPS 3 day ground gets them here in... drum roll please.... 3 DAYS!
So Wednesday night I begin the system rebuild and that pretty much brings us up to today. The system is back up to my personal standards and I have begun to install all those unnecessary additions.. like games.

I know it was probably a pretty boring read but thanks for sticking with it. This was a pretty big deal in my book and I will be saying things like "I had a copy of that but it died in the crash of '06" for years to come. Just like I still say "I had that album/song until the drive crash of '02". Case in point: Don called me yesterday asking for an updated resume.
One of these days I will learn to stay diligent with my computer back-ups.

If ignorance is bliss, then bliss is over-rated.

Sounds profound (or maybe it doesn't) but its a little something I said one night when I was drunk and I was able to remember it the next morning. This tells me that there is something profound in the statment and it has become a kind of mantra for me.

My geek name is Excess3 and I am now a blogger.