Crawling
So over the weekend I traded off with my mom staying with my brother up at the hospital. I brought my notebook with me, and planned on remoting in to my machine at home to do some work on another update for Skewed before it becomes October and I get to working on my Halloween story (which I'll introduce at that time). Figured this wouldn't be a problem, as they said they had wireless there and the hospital is on University of Utah campus, which has crazy fast internet, being an original part of ARPANET and all.
But the internet had other plans for me. Apparently, by some cruel fate, whoever set up the wireless there decided to use 802.11g wireless routers, to connect something barely faster than dialup. Testing my speeds, I was peaking at 256kbps download.
I was planning on streaming my music collection over the internet to listen to, and sharing it with Notebook Forums members as a temporary 'Radio Conda', so I left my Zune at home. I didn't have anywhere close to enough speed to successfully remote into my home machine, which prevented me from turning on any music streaming, leaving me with no music from home. I also couldn't keep a stable connection to any streaming radio providers, leaving me with no music from elsewhere. No music period. In addition to this, I had a devil of a time trying to transfer over anything from my home machine, because of the great diffuculty of trying to remote in, so I couldn't grab anything to work on. And, as I discovered to my great dismay, I had brought my DS with me to play Final Fantasy 3, but the game was damaged and could not be read.
And to make matters worse, the machines they had set up in a couple places in the building for public use connected to the ethernet had 40,000+kbps download.
I was very much enraged.
Tags: anecdote computer internet music video_games
Of Few Words
I haven't really had much to say this week. I had heard a bad play-on-words in a commercial the other day, but forgot about it later.
Mostly been busy around home, as my brother just went in for surgery. I started up reading Tad Williams' Otherland series again, which I had dropped shortly into the second book about when Pokemon Diamond came out a few months ago. And I'm trying to figure out how to do tags in Pivot, following which I'll start moving my personal writings over here.
Tags: novels personal website_design
Internet Speak
Since I was first introduced to it, I've been a big fan of the .hack series. For those not familiar with it, at its core it is a series of video games for the PS2, with storyline supplements in anime, manga, and novel form. The games are based on a fictional MMORPG, named "The World."
Being based on an MMORPRG, the games' translations have an unusually lax script, as, to a point, it's meant to imitate internet speak. Random smilies thrown into conversations, the occasional 'lol', spellings in l33t, and abnormal spellings for words all grace the games' scripts for realism. As I was starting the most recent game to come out after buying it on Wednesday, this could be seen very plainly in the opening cinematics for the game, where one character's subtitles spell the abbrevative of 'because' as cuz, and not 'cause. And I wasn't the only one to pick up on this, my younger brother, who was watching the cinema from behind me, commented "why did they spell it 'cuz' and not the correct way?"
But the translated version is mild compared to the Japanese version. I simply could not wait for the games for the current series, .hack//GU, to come out here, so I got them in Japanese as well. And littered through the games were all sorts of japanese internet speak. Being a (currently inactive) player of FFXI, I could recognize a few of these from the little exposure I saw of Japanese players talking out in the open, such as the sentence suffix 'w' that is equivalent to our 'lol'. But I saw much more through the games, between crazy smilies that can't be typed with the US ASCII character sets, to all sorts of sentence suffixes that I couldn't recognize, to foreign players' writing showing up as typed out with Roman characters rathern than Japanese. Trying to follow a conversation with my limited Japanese was certainly no easy task when only half of what was showing up in the captions underneath was actually being said out loud.
Tags: internet japanese spelling typography video_games words
A Failure
Buying the mouse I mentioned yesterday isn't my only current activity on eBay. I also have a pile of some Pokemon TCG singles from the latest set that I had intended on listing, but so far I had only listed one because I had been distracted.
A couple days ago I decided to list another one. I pretty much duplicated my previous one's entry, which in itself was just a little bit of text added upon the default template. Scrolling through the page making sure my options were all set properly, my Google Toolbar's spell check pointed out the following mistake:
"Buyer must notify me of a return they are going to make within 7 days, otherwise returns will not be accepted. Buyer is responsible for paying for the shipping back to me. Once return is recieved, full refund (including original shipping charges) will be sent."
Now I don't recall typing that description out, but I'm not entirely sure. I think it was something it provided for me as part of a template. I presume I would have noticed it from my toolbar if I had typed it out. However, be it their or my mistake, it isnt the only place where I have found it on eBay. This link shows it as the title of a security alert, and is the first result you get from searching Google for it (right under the link it gives you to correct your spelling.) If you notice, right below it in the actual body of the alert, it is correctly spelled. Numerous other places on their forums it is present, and all in all Google reports "about 7,170,000 from ebay.com for recieved."
A rampant misspelling, surprising its so prolific. Especially since practially everyone should know the little rhyme "I before E except after C" that clearly shows its correct letter order.
Tags: anecdote internet spelling words
City Notoriety
A few days ago I noticed that Blender has started experimental support for 3D devices, or rather devices with six degrees of freedom. Back in December when I first bought a Wiimote (quite before I actually got a Wii), I had wanted to write a plugin to use the Wiimote with Blender. But I upgraded to Vista, my bluetooth adapter didn't have drivers yet, and that idea was scrapped.
Catching back up to the now, the devices they were working on to add the support are the SpaceNavigators by 3DConnexion, a fairly cheap device compared to some I've seen. Reviews on it great everywhere, I decided to buy one. I bid on (and subsequently won) one on eBay, hoping to get it cheaper than the $60 retail price. Yesterday, drlouis on Notebook Forums linked me to a special deal on it that he found, which was equal to the price I had my bid at on eBay, and then had an addition $10 off of that for signing up a Google Checkout account, bringing it down to half the retail price.
Since I won the auction I wasn't able to get it at the $10 less price, but since it was still cheaper than the retail I wasn't too disappointed. The one review on Buy.com struck me as pretty humorous, however, when I read the following line.
"I first was too agressive with my movements. Once you seattle down to small controlled movements the screen responds to very subtile movements of the controller for all pan, zoom and rotatations."
Do you see what is wrong there?
Usually, its very possible to use a location as a personality generalization. May or may not be entirely accurate, but its used quite often. But his mistyping of 'settle' doesn't quite make sense in this case.
Unless he wanted it taken literally, and he meant he was raining on the device to make it better for him to control.
Tags: computer software spelling words