Seattle Snowstorm

This is what we call a blizzard in Seattle.

Take Me Out to the Ball Game

I'm not a big baseball fan, but with a little arm twisting, I was dragged convinced to attend my first baseball game last Tuesday. The Mariners beat the Kansas City Royals 11 to 6. Apparently, they also set a record for most suicide flys in a game or something. I'm not sure because it was difficult to follow what was happening due to the fact that I was freezing to death the whole time.

Experiments in Weed Control

The rocky area next to my driveway is infested with weeds. I thought it would be a cinch to move the rocks, put in some landscaping fabric, and then move the rocks back. Of course, it's always harder than it sounds.

Three hours of backbreaking labor later, I'm not even a quarter of the way done. I discover the fabric is all used up, due to me greatly underestimated the size of the area. I also find that I need to buy more rocks in order to cover all the fabric, and I have no idea where to buy them.

There may also be a problem with the fabric. When I bought it I chose the one that said most durable or something of that nature, thinking it would be the best at stopping weeds. I didn't realize this would also mean that it would prevent water from seeping through. I guess I'll have to wait until it rains to see if I created a very large, shallow pool.

I probably should have just used roundup.

How Not to Buy Dance Pads

I wanted to play StepMania the free, open-source, awesome dancing rhythm game for the PC. In order to do so properly, I needed a dance pad (playing with a keyboard doesn't count). Here's where things start to get complicated.

Instant Gratification

When I get an idea into my head, I like to act on it right at that moment. That's why the first thing I did was drive to some brick-and-mortar stores. I went to Fry's, Best Buy, and Walmart, hoping they would have dance pads - and I was right - just none that were compatible with the PC. So I go home and order from Amazon. I order a cheap Red Octane PlayStation 2 dance pad, and I also order a PlayStation 2 to USB converter.

The Worst Present Ever

You know that feeling you got when you were a kid right before Christmas? Anticipation mixed with anger over why you can't have your present now. That's how I feel whenever I'm waiting for a delivery. Of course, none of it matters when the day finally comes and you're holding the package in your hands, ready to rip it open. That moment, is the best moment of all - except of course, when you get clothes instead of an xbox360, or in my case, the thing doesn't work.

I plug the dance pad into the PS2 to USB adapter and plug that into my PC. I configure the inputs in StepMania and then use the pad to navigate to and start a song. So far so good. When I'm trying to play the song though, I find I'm missing all the left-right and up-down jump steps. Thinking it's a problem with my dance pad, I try to smooth it out, but no luck, it's still broken (or so I thought - more on this later).

Two for the Price of Two

After waiting for a week for my dance pad, only to find that it doesn't work, I get a little angry. I'm not the best decision maker when I'm angry, so in hindsight, driving back to BestBuy and buying another dance pad may not have been the best decision. But anyway, that's what I did.

Faulty Diagnostics

So I'm back home with my new dance pad ready to play some StepMania and what happens? The dance pad I just bought doesn't work either. It has the same exact problem. Since I had bought a different brand and the bug was too similar to be a coincidence, it can only mean one thing. It wasn't the dance pads that were faulty, it was the converter!

After the euphoria of my great revelation wears off, I'm even more upset. This means I bought an extra dance pad that I don't need, and the worst part is I have to order another adapter (since no conventional stores seem to have it), which means another week of agonizing waiting! By this point, I'm ready to give up, I don't even want to play StepMania anymore.

Google is Your Friend

Just for kicks, I do some searching, not really expecting a solution to my problems. How wrong I was to underestimate the power of the internet. StepMania has a wiki, that wiki has a page devoted to all the different USB converters, the one I purchased is on there with a comment talking about my exact problem and a very simple fix.

The fix?

Press the Up, Start, and Select buttons for 3 seconds to put it in multistep mode. -o-

Cop Avoidance Device

My friend Kevin Chiu got me this cop avoidance device (i.e., radar detector), seeing as how I've had problems with them in the past. It's too early to tell if it actually works...

Building My First Computer

My 2.5 year old Dell Inspiron 9300 was beginning to show signs of its age (i.e., not being able to play Crysis at a decent framerate), and I felt it was the right time to get a new computer.

The processor and video card were easy decisions:
* Q6600 @ 2.4GHz (OC to 3.3GHz)
* 8800GT w/512MB

For components that were harder to choose, I usually picked what was relatively cheap and popular on Newegg:
* Gigabyte P35 motherboard
* PC Power & Cooling 610W power supply
* Antec 900 case

For the hard drive, memory, and optical drive, it didn't really matter what brand I got, so I just went for what was cheapest:
* WD 1TB hard drive
* 2x Crucial 1GB DDR2 800 memory
* Samsung DVD burner

I got most of the components from Newegg, and I went to Fry's to get the case. The total came to around $1300.

Go here if you want to see more pictures of the computer assembly.

AMIP

I've been searching for a way to make using iTunes more bearable. There are only two reasons I keep it around: I need it to sync with my iPhone, and I need it to keep track of my playcounts (I don't rate my music, I just use playcounts). It's a terribly slow and bulky music player, and I would ditch it for Winamp in a heartbeat if not for the reasons I just mentioned. Winamp is much much faster and has features I need like, global hotkeys, jump-to dialog, better visualizations, and smooth fade on play/pause.

Thank God there's AMIP. AMIP is like the Swiss Army knife of plugins - it can do almost anything and is compatible with every popular music player. You need to download the version of AMIP for your player and the AMIP Configurator. Out-of-the-box you get the extremely useful search/jump feature, much like Winamp's jump-to dialog. Just press the hotkey to bring up the search/jump box, start typing the song you want and see the results filter down as you type, then hit enter to play the song and make the box go away.

AMIP's original purpose was to automatically announce the song your were playing to IRC, which is something I have no interest in. I am however, very interested in AMIP's ability to act as a server and the SDKs available to write your own client. In particular, the Java SDK makes it extremely easy to write a Java AMIP client.

You may be wondering what this means. Who cares if AMIP can act as a server? Why would you want to write a client? Well, it means that you have a substantial amount of control over your music player. It means, if you want, you never have to look at your player's slow ugly UI again; you can just keep it minimized and interact with it through your own homegrown frontend, personalized to show exactly the info you want with only the controls you want. It means you can log much more about your music listening habits, not just how many times you played each song, but when you played it, what other songs you played it with, and how much of it you listened to. It means you can control your player over a network, across your house on your LAN or across the internet (if you really wanted to).