Plaidophile

So, the inspiration for the Wii Fit comic is that, after about a week of daily weigh-ins, I started to feel like Garfield in his Sisyphean struggles against the talking bathroom scale. I have a feeling that Nintendo's designers really weren't thinking things through when they designed the daily body test component.

The big problem with it stems from that it uses BMI's ridiculous classification system (which is good for a casual statistical clustering of body types but is not in and of itself a useful diagnostic tool), and that it disregards progress and only tells you how you're doing based on where you are in the BMI.

So, many decent Blu-Ray discs are finally around $15. Maybe the format will actually catch on now.

(Of course, I'll just keep on renting them through Netflix.)

This would be the most likely candidate.

I'm just sayin'.

So today I took a couple hours off from work saw two more condos, and both of them were actually quite compelling and ones which I would not mind buying. (Obviously I'd only buy one of them.)

The first was a recent conversion from apartments. 1 bedroom, decent size kitchen, laid out pretty okay, although it still seemed like it'd feel a bit constrained, and while it was 900 square feet it certainly didn't feel like it. List price $515K, in a nice part of the Mission.

The second has always been a condo, and has been occupied by the current owners since it was built in the mid-80s. It's HUGE, both in actual space (1042 square feet!) and perceived (it makes very good use of the space). In a very nice part of the Mission (on the edge of Bernal Heights), for $529K. Its only downsides are that there's no vent for a dryer (the current owners use a clothesline) and that the kitchen was recently refloored with some fugly photolaminate as part of a complete remodel. There's not much of a view to speak of but it's nestled in a very quiet pocket (you'd never know it was right on Mission St) and there's a nice common yard.

I am pretty sure I will be making an offer on the second one, but first I have to find out if I can get a loan for that much (I might not be able to).

So, it looks like there was a class-action lawsuit regarding the iBook power adapter which finally got a settlement. So, great, I could theoretically get $79 back for the power adapter I had to buy for my iBook back in grad school, because said adapter failed after just a few months due to its shitty design.

Of course, in order to file a claim, one must have:

• The computer's serial number (which I haven't had for, what, 5 years now?)
• The receipt for purchasing the power adapter (yep, I'm going to hang on to a receipt for 7 years!)
• A document from Apple indicating that I attempted to get it serviced under warranty and was denied (nope, like an idiot I went to the shop where I bought the iBook and they said, "Sorry, Apple considers that customer abuse," and it never got documented at all)

Okay, so, we've had modern-day updates of such classic television as Superman, Battlestar Galactica, Bionic Woman, and Doctor Who, where all of them are presented in a slicker-yet-grittier world, with more angst and darkness, in a world with conspiracies upon conspiracies being orchestrated by vengeful and mostly-unseen enemies.

The premise: A distant star goes supernova. A survivor from an ancient alien world crosses the galaxy, trying to find any way possible to survive, not sure if he is alone. He must establish a base of operations somewhere in a desperate attempt to find others of his kind, but through a navigational error he ends up stranded on Earth. Taking refuge with a well-to-do family, he finds himself caught in he middle of a society which is paranoid and intolerant, and must remain hidden so as to avoid the government and those who would profit from his discovery.

His name is Gordon. He is an alien lifeform.

So, I've switched to yet another realtor (this time through ZipRealty, since they actually give me a decent level of control over my own home search! what a concept), and am looking at condos with her today. The two that are definitely on the schedule are a very neat loft-style condo (two bedroom, each bedroom with its own storage loft - very nifty) which is right on the edge of the Tenderloin (was very scary a few years ago but has apparently cleaned up a bit), and also a very nice (and way underpriced, and expected to sell for much more) more traditional condo in the Mission, about a block from Pat's apartment, which is an area I like.

So, my copy of Wii Fit arrived today.

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Apparently, the new hotness is making fake video reviews on Amazon.

So, my latest foray in entertainment-based weight loss has shipped from Amazon (I was smart enough to preorder it a month ago). In a few days I'm sure I'll be all "oh wow this is so much fun!" and then within a week I'll have stopped doing it regularly, just like what happened with DDR after I finally invested $600 in a pair of Cobalt Flux pads. (At least Wii Fit is only $80 though, and has a lot more variety. I stopped playing DDR just because it got so boring.)

On the other hand, people have already been reporting success with it, so maybe this time will work out better for me too.

Does anyone know how to make Photoshop CS3 not switch layers after doing a "step backwards" command? It's really irritating how I'll switch to a layer to draw on it, undo the drawing, and then Photoshop "helpfully" goes back to the previous layer. Like, it's aggregating the layer switch into the history item. I don't know when it got this behavior but 7.0 didn't have it (I'm guessing it's one of the many minor gotcha-type changes that came with the new UI).

It doesn't do this on "undo," but I hate that and I've bound cmd-Z to "step backwards" instead since often I want to undo many strokes in a row (since I draw with a tablet) and just having a one-command toggle undo is really dumb. Photoshop 7 let you actually select undo vs. step backwards as a global option (rather than them being completely separate commands) and so they both had the same behavior overall.

11:17 Finally found a Google hit on it. Apparently the solution is "just get used to it."

Any Photoshop CS3 gurus out there?

I'm not the one who's dying, and the event which precipitated the previous entry has nothing to do with the "life clock" in the corner of my weblog's front page, aside from it being an all-too-ironic confluence of events. Perhaps there's a basis in the reason behind the countdown timer, since I didn't feel it appropriate to actually broadcast details to the world about something in my personal life.

Anyway, it's just generally good advice. If there is someone who you care about, tell them you love them, and really mean it. Nobody does it enough, and eventually it'll be too late.

I know it's cliché. If certain things didn't happen constantly they wouldn't be clichés.

I was trying to see if I could emulate something like Java's final by changing the scope of an inheritance. I got some weird results.

Okay, so, nobody else ever got around to posting a full version of the Spokane experience. I was just reminded of this, and so I figure I'd might as well write it up.

Okay, so a while ago I decided to try keeping my power bill under $25.

My last power bill before that was $58.71. My power bill right after that (with almost everything turned off for a week while I was in Japan) was $40.99. The power bill I just got was $42.02. So, even with my normal levels of activity, by just being a little more conscientious about power usage I've saved $16/month. It's still a far cry from my goal, but I'm not sure how feasible that is anyway. I wonder how much of that is just the refrigerator, for example (and if I let it get any warmer my frozen foods will melt and my refrigerated foods will spoil).

So, today I paired my bluetooth phone with my Windows laptop, and the pairing process automatically set up a dialup connection. Ever since then, whenever a DNS lookup fails, XP has been trying to connect on this connection, which of course I don't want it to do. I went to the "Network Connections" control panel and saw that the dialup connection was set as "default," which I canceled, but it's still doing this. Looking into the problem I could only find one purported solution but that didn't change things (the service wasn't running to begin with, and even when I did disable it, the problem persists).

Then I realized there was a separate "Internet Propeties" control panel, which I had always thought was really just MSIE settings (since generally, settings for network connections are under, you know, Network Connections), the "Connections" tab has an option to turn off automatic dialing. The Bluetooth pairing process set it to "Dial whenever a network connection is not present" which is both badly-worded (there are a lot of network connections which are not present at any given time) and incorrect (DNS lookup failure because of a tpyo is not the same thing as my network connection being down).

Windows just makes me roll my eyes sometimes.

As an experiment, I've uploaded some of my better photos to my deviantART account and enrolled them (as well as some of my drawings) in the prints program. Are there any other no-effort artwork-selling things I should use as well? How is Flickr's "make stuff" thing for that? Should I even bother?

Oh, and uh, any specific other things I should make available as prints?

I just worked out that I have about 4TB of storage in my apartment. How did that happen?

Last night I played a bunch of TF2. Then I played a bunch of Portal's advanced maps. Then I went to bed, and in something like a Tetris effect, I couldn't get certain imagery out of my mind: two pyros (one red, one blue) running around various Portal maps, with a flamethrower and a portal gun.

It seemed like a lot of fun.

So, my new record player arrived today. After running to Radio Shack to get some RCA couplers (for some reason this turntable has an integrated interconnect cable, which is way too short) I got it hooked up, and finally put on an album I picked up in a pile of free stuff at Amazon a couple years ago.

There's something surprisingly satisfying about hearing the needle hit the groove with a nice "pop," then the subtle crackling which comes before the music starting. I won't say the sound is any better than CD (not that I've heard this album before in CD format or anything) but it does sound nice and crisp, and the bass is exceptionally clear. Now that I've made sure that this player works and doesn't, say, destroy records put onto it I might try out Radiohead - In Rainbows since until now I've only heard that in CD form (actually, only in 160Kbps mp3 and later as 192Kbps AAC). Most likely I'll listen to the first track on vinyl and then on CD (via my PS3).

Of course the most annoying thing about a record player is it's so huge. In order to fit this onto my entertainment center I had to move my TV forward and put the AppleTV onto the TV's base (although there's a better place to put it if I tidy things up a bit). All for the ability to listen to music in a format which was made obsolete two generations ago.

Oh well. Now this gives me an excuse to head over to Amoeba.

Which is closer to San Francisco, CA: Sacramento CA, or Reno, NV?