Rough Draft

Victory

This little game occupied about half an hour of my time this afternoon. What can I say, I'm a sucker for old school Nintendo like games. I actually got the perfect score twice, but the first time I used apple-shift-4 (which lets you select a specifc region of the screen) to try taking the screenshot, but the game went back to the main menu before I could take the picture. (On a side note, why does OS X take screenshots in pdf format?) I also took a break from the game to take this quiz that Erik sent to me.

404 Search Function

You can now type "kenshin.cwru.edu/searchterm or terms" and instead of giving you a 404 page saying whatever not found, you will be sent to a page with search results for the term, or if there was only one result, you will be sent directly to that page. Pretty spiffy, eh?
Thanks Erik for the idea and the code.

Too Many Remotes

We have a pretty nice setup in our lounge with TV, receiver, DVD player, ReplayTV, GameCube, Playstation 2. Unfortunately, we also have 4 different remotes, most of which we only need to use one or 2 buttons on. The Replay Remote gets used the most, and pretty much all of its buttons are used. The recevier remote has way too many buttons, and I'm not even sure they all actually do something. The only buttons we use on it are power, volume up/down, and the button to change the input. The only button used on the TV remote is the strangely named Who/Input button. Finally, there's the DVD remote, which isn't used that much and in theory the TV remote should also control the DVD player, since they are both RCA, but for some reason that doesn't always work. The annoying thing is something as simple as wanting to watch something off the Replay usually requires 3 different remotes: The receiver needs turned on and set to the right input, the tv needs set to the right input, and the Replay and TV need to be turned on. The other annoying thing is the Replay remote can't control the volume on the receiver. Ok, that's enough silly ranting about remotes.

Fax Troubles

I had to fax in a copy of my student ID and current schedule for Apple's WWDC Student Scholarship. Pfil set up the dialing instructions in his fax software so I could use CWRU's long distance service to make the call. Everything seemed to be set up ok, but we kept getting no dial tone errors or busy signal errors. For some reason we couldn't get the speaker on his modem turned on, so finally we picked up the phone while we tried a fax and heard ringing well before the number was finished being dialed. It turns out the software wasn't using the dialing instructions, so instead of dialing 9-1-408-xxx-xxxx it wasn't dialing the 9 and getting an outside line. Unfortunately, 1408 is an extension for some room in Taft, so some poor people got a lot of accidental phone calls last night. Oops. We eventually got the fax to send by just entering the 9, phone number, and pin number as one long comma separated string instead of trying to use the dialing instructions.

Suburban Trunk Monkies

Martin sent me this video. I'd say we definitely need one of these for our late night trips to Ghetto Bell.

Generally Liberal

How Republican Are You?
brought to you by Quizilla

Looks like I don't have to worry about a boot to the head. I'd also like to note that Aaron Sorkin writes The West Wing on a Mac, as seen here.

Design Guru

Apple's Vice President of Industrial Design is featured in Time's Style and Design special issue. You can read the writeup here.

Resident Evil 0

Ah, Resident Evil. Over Christmas break Dan and I talked about how much the original freaked us out and how we couldn't even play the game for long periods of time. So when Kurt brought Resident Evil 0 for the Gamecube back, I had to try it out. Graphically the game is gorgeous. The lightining is amazing, objects in the environment move (like the skillet vibrating on the stove in the train), and there's so much detail to each of the rooms. The overall feel of the game reminds me a lot of Resident Evil 2, my favorite in the series.

There's really only 2 things I've noticed that make this different from the rest of the Resident Evil games. The first is that instead of storing items in a magic box, you simply leave them on the ground. Fortunately, the map marks where you've left items so you don't have to worry about where you left things. This makes the game a bit more real, and now you don't have to worry about having to use up an herb, just you can pick up a key or other item that you need.

The other new feature is that you have 2 characters to control at any given time. In the other games, you would control a second character for certain parts of the story, but in this one you have control of 2 characters all the time. So far I haven't been too impressed with this though. The interface for exchanging items between the characters is pretty clunky and constantly swapping items between the two gets annoying.

There are options for whether the character you are not currently controlling follows you around or stays where they are as well as if they should shoot when they see enemies or not. I usually end up just leaving one behind while I explore various rooms until I get to a puzzle that requires both characters (or I need an item the other person has). I've already died several times because the person I'm not controlling gets killed by a zombie. Even if they are set to shoot when they see enemies, they don't seem to try to avoid the enemies, so they usually end up getting attacked anyway.

I'm playing on the normal difficulty setting, and it's been pretty challenging so far. I'm pretty much always on the verge of running out of ammo, and both characters spend very little time in the "Fine" condition.

Overall, it's a fun game and I'm going to try and beat it. Although that will probably take me the rest of the semester, since I've only put a couple hours in since the beginning of the semester.

Recent Tunes

I now have whatever song iTunes is currently playing listed on the main page, as well as a link to a page with a spiffy table of the last 50 songs played. I got the idea from Erik's blog and borrowed some php code from here. I'm using Kung Tunes to get the list of songs from iTunes right now, but if I can get some free time in the near future I can integrate this functionality into Recent Tunes. Now it's time to watch the 300th Simpsons episode, hopefully it will be good.

Project Mayhem

Last night's concert was a much needed break from the almost non stop work I had every other night this past week. The pit was pretty crazy and definitely the roughest one I've been in yet. At times you were completely squashed and couldn't move at all and other times when you did have room to move everyone around you would just be jumping into you. Sarah and I were only in the pit for My Chemical Romance and Finch. It was all fun though. I'm a little sore today, but I'm still going to play racquetball later this afternoon. The only bad part of the pit was Sarah getting kicked in the neck by a crowd surfer. I think she's doing ok though...she always says she's tough.

My Chemical Romance had a pretty good set. I hadn't heard any of their songs beforehand, but I still enjoyed them. The Movielife played next and they were also quite good. They said they're doing a headlinging tour in a month or so, so I'll probably go see them when they come back.

Much to Sarah's and my surprise, Finch played next. This was Finch's headlining tour so we have no idea why they didn't play last. Our best guess is someone in the band was sick or hurt because they didn't even play that many songs. I'm really surprised they didn't play Letters to You seeing as that is one of their most well known songs. Despite that Finch's set was still incredible. They played a new song Worms of the Earth, which sounded a lot different from all their other songs. It was still good and hopefully I can find a copy of it soon. I don't remember the correct order but I think these are the songs they played:
Untitled
New Beginnings
Post Script
Grey Matter
Perfection Through Silence
Awake
Project Mayhem
Worms of the Earth
What it is to Burn

Next up was The Used. Their set didn't start out too well, but it got pretty good towards the end. Sarah and I stood in the back of the Agora for their set, so we could get out quickly, but there's a good reason for that. :-) Of the songs they played The Taste of Ink was the one I enjoyed the most. Bert (the lead singer) did a standing flip at one point which was pretty cool. He also stage dove into the crowd at one point.

Surprisingly, there was some flashing at the concert. Nate from Finch said "Wow, that is the first time anything like that has ever happened to us." After some girl flashed The Used Bert said, "Ok, that's enough self degradation for tonight."

So why did we want to be able to leave quickly after The Used were done? Because Allister was going to be playing in the Ballroom right after The Used were done! Since the last I read was that Allister had broken up, this was quite a surprise. Apparently they found a replacement guitarist and drummer, and this was the first (maybe second) time they played on this tour.

Sarah and I managed to get all the way up front in the middle of the stage. There's no barrier in the Ballroom, so we were just inches away from Scottie and Tim. The crowd was really tame, no pushing (except for 2 guys at the beginning of the set) or crowd surfing, just lots of jumping and singing. When they played Somewhere Down on Fullerton, Scottie said anyone who knows the words should come up on stage. Sarah and I did manage to make it up. I still don't know how the drums and sound equipment didn't get knocked over. After Allister was done Sarah manged to get their set list from one of the Agora workers. She's already gotten a pick at a concert, so her goal next time is a drumstick. Sarah typed up their set list for me to post, so here it is:

Scratch, Stuck, Overrated, Moper, The One That Got Away, Somewhere on Fullteron, Miz, Don't Think Twice, None of My Friends are Punks, Jacob, Camouflage, Boysenberry, Flypaper, Radio Player, and "cover"

I don't know what else to say except I had a blast and Allister's set was the most fun I've ever had at a concert.

What it is to Burn?

I'm going to the Finch concert tonight and as if I needed any more reason to be excited they releseased their video for What it is to Burn? yesterday. A very well done video for one of their best songs. Click here for the real video stream or here for the windows media stream.

Piano Rock

Needless to say, last Saturday's concert was lots of fun. Fiction Plane was good. Their lead singer looked a lot like Sting and even had a hint of a British accent. Although, the people around me didn't seem to like them very much, a group of about 15 people even sat down for a while. Vendetta Red was a lot different than I expected. I downloaded some of their mp3s before the show and they seemed like they'd be good, but they ended up mainly just screaming way too much. Juliana Theory wasn't as good live as I thought they would be. I can't believe they didn't play Congratulations, with such a cool guitar part and the fact that their CD has a video of them playing it live you would think they would have.

Something Corporate was simply amazing as always. They defintely got the crowd into their songs more so than any of the other bands. Though there's something very amusing about seeing/hearing a bunch of 12 year old girls singing "I kissed a drunk girl." And I have to admit setting the piano and stool on fire at the end of the show was a fun touch.

Here's the setlist for SoCo as best as I could remember:
Konstantine
Fall
Straw Dog
Little
I Want To Save You
The Astronaut
Drunk Girl
I Woke Up In A Car
Punk Rock Princess
Hurricane
Wait
If You C Jordan