On the subject of my FFXII addiction…
I had an occasion to visit the local EBGames to get their exclusive FFXII Collector’s Strategy Guide. Normally I never buy anything from those guys; they’re good for browsing the latest releases and listening to uninformed gamers hype the latest game to each other but are otherwise overpriced and rip off gamers trying to sell their used titles.
And I’ve forgotten how clueless the salespeople are at these shops. You’d think that selling games for a living would force them to be more knowledgeable about the industry or even the games they’re selling; ignoring the blatant attempts to trick good-intentioned mothers into buying GTA3 for their kids, they still seemed to lack what would constitute as an informed opinion on games or systems.
Of course, this is the week when it pays to be informed about video games, what with the release of the Playstation 3 and the Nintendo Wii as well as the launch of the Microsoft Zune. Spending 10 minutes online will give you a good gist of the capabilities, availability, and price of entry for each “must have” holiday gadget; spending the same amount of time with any of these EBGames reps will give you basically all the wrong impressions (e.g., “the Zune is awesome and way better than an iPod!”).
I was trying to come up with alternate titles to “Craigslist sucks”; that was the best I could come up with.
Craigslist, as you have probably heard of, is a thriving online forum-based community which happens to include a huge classifieds as well as dating section, and supports itself by charging for job listings at a discount – something that only works because of its enormous size and readership. If you’ve ever used Craigslist, though, you were probably looking at or posting at the classifieds.
I’ve found the Craigslist listings to be, well, a bit lacking. It’s like Craigslist took the worst elements of the Internet and traditional classifieds and mushed them together – terrible pre-1997 layout and design, free and unlimited postings inviting spam, limited 10-day run with no opportunity to reorder postings, no system whatsoever to validate the user’s identity, etc.
Upgrading a computer is like watching a prime time sitcom – you start of innocent enough, watch a few episodes, then a few more, until you’re downing entire seasons’ worth of content and holding week-long couch marathons. Then comes the period where you form a cone of quotes from the show and annoy everybody around you, hence prompting you to drop the obsession and pick up something else less addictive, like a…crime drama, say. Rinse and repeat.
Recently, price drops in computing parts of goodness have prompted me to look at means to turbocharge my machine and give it a swift, speedy kick in its metaphorical pants. As I said, chasing performance in personal computing can be an expensive, time-consuming, and if nothing else futile effort, but it’s damned fun while you’re doing deed.
I’d like to say that my room is organized, neat even. I’ve spent a good chunk of change getting various pieces of furniture and equipment to refacilitate this supposed cleanliness: shelves, CD racks, drawer organizers, velcro strips for cables, etc. A few of these things work, but most fail due to the simple fact that people have a lot more stuff than it is depicted in those ads selling these items. When bookshelves are designed to look good half empty, trying to stuff a shelf full of heavy tomes of knowledge tend to result in an unnatural sag that can be corrected by having the books in the shelf below prop up the droopy middle.
But I hate dusting and vacuuming. The areas of the house that I frequent are free of dust; it’s the places that I don’t go which gather motes, and are often the subject of reprimands by girlfriend and parents alike. So instead of cleaning the place myself, I did the next next next next best thing to hiring a maid, which is buying one of those iRobot Roomba vacuums.
(For those who aren’t familiar w/ the little red machine, it’s a squat little robot that runs around the house vacuuming floors, automatically detecting walls and obstacles as well as avoiding falling off high places)
I recently tried updating my computer’s hardware (the keyword being “tried”) by replacing the graphics card – the part that affects game and graphics performance the most on modern systems and will make running Windows Vista bearable. With the amount of games I play, I figured this was a good visual investment (although it’s a terrible monetary one, graphics cards depreciate even faster than other computer parts).
As it turned out, the card I picked (the nVidia 7900GT) was a dud; people have been complaining about failures for a few weeks now, and chalk it up to my lack of extensive research that I went ahead and bought a card known to have issues anyway. I will say that it looked real nice for the week I had it.
But what I wanted to jot down wasn’t how nVidia won’t admit to problems with their cards, it’s how good some company’s customer service can be. I had made the purchase from Newegg (I had never had to return something from them before), and from my previous experience with the online retailer buy.com, I was expecting some hard work and argumentation on my part to get an acceptable return.
I’ve been continuously making small updates to my site since I got back from my east coast conference. Believe it or not, I actually keep a list of enhancements and bug fixes myself and others have found and spend time implementing those items; the last two weeks, I revamped my journal search interface and added navigational arrows to journal entry pages as well as fixed up a few display bugs. If you have suggestions or find anything wrong, lemme know via comments, thanks.
Lately I’ve been trying to get myself more energetic and less…well, sleepy, at work and at home as well. I don’t get that many hours of sleep on weekdays (and as it turns out, I’m usually more tired than not the next day regardless of how many hours I get), and staring at thousands of lines of written code for hours on end doesn’t make things better.
