John Zeitler

…red dragon tattoo, hmm just about hmm hmm…

…er, yeah. Sorry, got massively sidetracked today, and tomorrow’s not lookin’ much better. Still, I should have something for you guys at some point before bedtime. Later, folks.

Ha! Now you’re infected, too.

…I’m fit to be dyed, hmm hmm fit to hmm you…

A couple of things worth discussing today, folks, all of them rather brief. The first is that I think my tweaking of my main habits is just about finished. I spent a little bit of time setting up GeekTool to close Firefox for me if the computer’s been idle for longer than ten minutes. I then went ahead and set THAT up to disable the monitoring as needed. The net effect is that if my attention wanders, I don’t have a zillion tabs open to wade through and re-distract me once I get done. Conversely, if I’m using Mahoro to look up code while I do coding on the Windows machine, then I don’t have to worry about wiggling the mouse every so often.

Let’s move on to the new project, then: the second XNA engine. Yesterday I got it set up to sort through sprites and render them in a specific order. Today I went on to create a collision-detection engine that handles layers very elegantly. I did, however, encounter a really interesting bug that I’m going to have to figure out a better solution for, involving two sprites on the same layer having the exact same position. Right now it works on a “last in gets rendered” order, but that’s not gonna work if the sprites have different sizes. On the plus side, though, my idea of setting up each ‘logical’ map layer as a physical tile layer and a ‘pawn’ layer worked splendidly, and I may have figured out a solution to moving sprites between layers as well (but that might need work too). It’s getting there, bit by bit– but given that the system was able to handle 10 layers without a hiccup (that would be along the lines of 1700 sprites at 80 by 80 pixels, filling a 720p screen) it’s doing better than I expected.

Finally, I decided to re-start my XM radio. I have to admit that the service isn’t as bad as I had believed it to be on the day they transitioned to the “XM/Sirius” setup, but there’s still some disappointments. For one thing, I still think that they should have kept the guys doing the election coverage rather than ditching them unceremoniously. For another thing, while it’s close, Area is no replacement for The System. And the audiobook station is almost completely useless now, with most of the shows being rescheduled to oblivion. However, there are some bright spots. One of the more annoying glitches in the system was fixed: now, when the radio powers on, it’s authorized for all of my stations immediately, rather than a two-minute delay (at times) to let me tune into football games. Really, that’s how I justify it: I will be getting new music and such during the week and during the summer, but I wanted to have every football game and every hockey game at my disposal once more.

That’s the plan. I haven’t done any Japanese studying today, but I’ll be doing some later tonight (before bed)… and probably in the morning I’ll do the kana drill again. I’m also going to start up the morning exercise routine as well, but we’ll see how that works out.

Catch you folks later.

Still on break, folks, but I did want to let you know that I’ve recently had opportunity to look into wireless headphones since the 3.0 OS update hit, permitting stereo Bluetooth use with the iPhone. The pair I settled on is the Samsung SBH500, which should be going for about $50 in most circles, less if you can swing a discount. I highly recommend you do. Granted that $50 for headphones is a bit exorbitant, but for iPhone users they’re the least expensive way to get your music and talking done on the same device, without strangling yourself on silly cords and adapters. The sound quality is excellent on them, and the controls are placed very intuitively on the right earpiece. The fact that the music-related controls beyond “play/pause” and volume don’t work is sadly on Apple’s part; they probably rushed the A2DP implementation and are planning to patch it out soon. Even if they don’t, wireless is without a doubt the way to go, and this set is a great way to do it. Be aware, though, that Bluetooth anything drains battery life ridiculously fast on the phone… so grab some spare chargers and keep ‘em handy.

You know, sometimes I remember bits and pieces of the past. Sometimes I have clear memories of something that was, at the time, completely mundane, to the point where its details could be fudged to anything. Usually, when that happens, it infuriates me when I can’t remember everything exactly… or, worse still, when the only way to get the memory off my mind is to replicate it– say, watching a television show that’s quite possibly as old as I am, disregarding that the odds are stupid excessively against me having seen it in the first place.

So if anyone does happen to know if a complete series box for The Raccoons exists, I would be mighty grateful.

Up until recently I’ve stuck to guitar and bass while playing Rock Band, mostly because the drums are a bit unfamiliar to me, but also because I did not seem to have much luck with the instrument. My coordination appeared insufficient to master the task of banging on things in some semblance of rhythm. However, I have since discovered that there may have been another reason why I had done so poorly, and it’s what I call the “universal excuse”: blaming the equipment. Yeah, my drums were still crap, even after the ordeal of returning them the first time.

It should be noted that I now no longer have that problem– the combination of some timely coupons and the remainder of a gift card meant that I was able to pick up the RB2 drums, and those work flawlessly. No double-hits, no misses when you KNOW you hit it… they just work.

I still love and play Dance Dance Revolution, the fact that I’m also still terrible at it notwithstanding. However, I have significantly less enthusiasm for Konami’s other music games as presented to the English-speaking world. Don’t get me wrong, I dig Pop’n Music, but nobody can say that Beat’n Groovy was anything other than an insult to the NA fans of the series.

So it probably should not surprise me at all that Dance Dance Revolution S Lite, recently released as a free trial of the upcoming DDR for iPhone and iPod Touch, is equally terrible. I could say that the whole idea of arrow matching on a touch screen removes a lot of the charm from the game mechanic, but then again it’s not that far removed from Guitar Hero or Rock Band (or even straight-up Beatmania). That’s not the major problem. The problem is that the iPhone and iPod Touch have such small screens and that half of them are consumed by the arrow hotspots… which are transparent overlays over the scrolling arrows. And try as you might, you are probably not going to find anyone with transparent thumbs. My opinion is not to bother with DDR S when it becomes available, and to not even waste the time or effort with the free trial.

I doubt anyone from Konami is reading this, but if they are, they ought to know that I’m through with the NA Bemani games until Konami of America straightens up and flies right. To be honest I should have seen this coming when Beatmania US was released to absolutely no fanfare or attention, or for that matter anything resembling playtesting for the difficulty curve… Little did I know, four years ago, that it was just the beginning of the end for North American Bemani. Ah well. DJ Max Fever is out next week. Le roi est mort; vive le roi.

I know I can’t be the only one to avoid syncing my music player unless it’s absolutely necessary. Granted, iTunes has been much better about speeding up the process, but in my case that’s not the reason. Primarily, I don’t sync unless I have to because of the playlists I set up. See, they’re randomized based on what I’ve listened to recently, and they don’t update unless I sync. So, if there’s a song I like or am in the mood for more than usual, and I listen to it all the way through or skip it at a certain point (the criteria for what counts as a “skip” are vague), it’s pulled out of “rotation” for at least two weeks. I just heard a song today that I don’t think I’ve heard since, oh, 2006, and I have to sync tonight so that a new audio drama gets onto the phone.

Yeah, it’s my own fault, and ultimately not listening to the same stuff over and over again is good, but not when it works against me.

The RSS feed might be temporarily screwed up. Mea culpa. This is because I forgot to set the time zone properly three weeks ago when I set up the blog. More or less it’s the Web 2.0 equivalent of leaving your VCR to flash “12:00″ forever. (On a completely unrelated note, my microwave shows “12:00″ in perpetuity primarily because I’m too lazy to set the time after each power outage.)

In an offering of thanks, mayhap I could point you to a 13-minute mix of Geometry Wars music?

Another quiet day, folks. Overall I’m just dealing with life day-by-day, so there’s not much to report beyond the fact that I’m still loving Tales of Vesperia, and that the ability to download music on-demand via the iPhone is very, very bad for me (despite the fact that I will end you if you try to take my phone). More as it comes along, folks.

The movies thing… is probably not gonna be finished in time. I’m resigned to this, because Vesperia is just that damn awesome.

It’s almost two months now, or rather going on over two months, since the XM/Sirius channels merged. And by “merged” I mean “Sirius gutted all the good stuff”. I wound up cancelling my service that day, after discovering that their “classic alternative” station, Lithium, which replaced the genuinely quirky and very college-radio-like Lucy, was in fact just every album recorded by Alice in Chains, Pearl Jam, and Nirvana lumped into an MP3 player set to shuffle. There might have been something else in there but when I heard three songs by the same artist in the span of an hour, that’s bad. Lucy at least mixed things up a bit, reminding me of some tracks I hadn’t heard in years– or at all (I was a sheltered kid, so I didn’t get into alternative until, well, I was actually at college, playing it myself). To make a long story short, the news that a combined Sirius/XM receiver is at last on the market utterly fails to impress me and in fact makes me wonder why they even bothered, if they were going to just make everything Sirius-y.

And I’m still royally pissed off that The System is gone. Best damn place to find new trance and progressive short of going to clubs for it which don’t seem to exist in Pittsburgh, and what happens? Gone, no real replacement, just pop-tronica that all sounds the same. (Think Freezepop, only irritating and not even half as clever.) In the end it’s all a wash; I have the Pandora client for the iPhone but haven’t used it as much as I should, and when I’m home I usually turn on the cable’s music channels, but they’re poor replacements.

Other things went very wrong today in terms of customer service, but they’re not important. What is important, really, is that I discovered that City of Heroes’ Mac client, just released out of beta today, runs beautifully on my machine. I indulged in a month pass, just to sate the desire to enter Scrapperlock again. I never much enjoyed the villain side of things, but all the same it’s just a fun game. I might not continue it after the pass expires, but one way or another it’ll all work itself out.

As for the movies, I’m still working my way through those when time and patience permit. I’m not likely to make it through the 30 in 30, but I’ll have taken a good chunk out of them. Which, really, is all I wanted to do.

Later, folks.