Linkstew

So I've bad mouthed the PlayStation 2 often, and yet, now I'm spending hours reloading Amazon's web page trying to buy one. Why? Well, there are several reasons, but first let me say that I still don't like Sony or the PS2, and there are currently zero games that I want for the system.

The first reason I'm trying to buy a PS2, and really the main reason, is because I sold my Playstation to my brother after his broke. I was just going to wait awhile and get a PS2 when they became more available, but there's no way I'm going to beat Chrono Cross before I leave for Berkeley, so I was hoping to get a PS2 today so that I would have something to play Chrono Cross on back in Berkeley. The reason I'm not going to beat Chrono Cross is the reason I was sitting on the computer reloading Amazon -- My brother has been playing Smack Down 2 since he got it, and then he and his friend were playing it and now they're playing Dreamcast games. I tried pointing out to my brother that he'd have plenty of time to play Smack Down once I went back to Berkeley, but for some reason, that didn't work. At least arguing that they won't be able to play the Dreamcast is a valid argument on their part, and unlike my brother, I'm willing to grant play time for a valid argument.

So I'm kind of resigned to not finishing Chrono Cross, as much as it irritates me. Someday I'm sure I'll manage to buy a PS2, though at this rate, Metal Gear Solid 2 will probably be out by then. At least then I'll be able to tell myself that I got it for a game.

I had several bad-ish dreams last night, and they were all variations upon the same bad theme. I kept dreaming that my PowerBook screen had cracked somehow. I should have known it was a dream, though, because the cracks that I dreamt weren't LCD cracks, but were glass cracks, like you sometimes get in Palms. Sure, Palms get LCD cracks, too, but a glass crack is what I've most recently seen, and Palms still kind of function with glass cracks, whereas you're hosed with an LCD crack.

What kind of conspiracy is it where bad credit is better than no credit at all? At any rate, I now find myself in that "worse credit" bracket simply because I have no credit. Heck, I couldn't even sign up for my cell phone service in my own name thanks to the stigma of no credit, and so I had to use my dad's name.

So I've spent a couple of hours today reading about credit cards, and in general, it irritates me. I was looking mainly at Bank of America, because I do my banking there, and CitiBank, because my dad came in with a credit card offer for my mom from CitiBank today. But I guess one is in my future, because as it is I have "worse credit." And besides, look at the hassles no credit card has caused me between the "PowerBook Incident" and the "cell phone incident." A credit card will make me feel dirty, but at least it should make my life easier.

Amazon's PS2 store is advertising that they will have PlayStation 2's in today, so I've been occasionally reloading to see if I can get lucky and get one. My brother has a friend over, and when my brother told his friend what I was doing, the friend said "Yeah, I'm going to get a Playstation 2 as soon as I can. It's got a lot of good games."

To which I replied, "No, it doesn't, the Dreamcast has many more good games than the PS2."

This, of course, got a "Dreamcast sucks" from him, and he asked me what games it had that were so good. So, as I just happened to have my Dreamcast with me, I pulled it out and showed him Crazy Taxi and Soul Calibur.

Half an hour later, while flying through the streets of Crazy Taxi, the words "I need to get a Sega Dreamcast" parted his lips. I love how easy it is to show how good the Dreamcast is.

Bakersfield certainly is a different world. In Berkeley, I'm pretty sure I didn't see a single pro-Bush bumper sticker. There was the campus republican party, but even they didn't seem that motivated about Bush and probably just felt obligated to make a showing. But here in Bakersfield, I hadn't been driving for five blocks when I saw my first pro-Bush/anti-Gore bumper sticker. It said, and I quote the spacing and everything exactly, "Al gore isa Bad-idea"

What the hell? I'm not sure what the emphasis on "is" was supposed to convey, and I don't know if the lack of spaces meant something, and in general, I'm very afraid, because where there was one bumper sticker, there must be more. And people must think this is clever for some reason, which only tells me how alien some people really think. Normally I can figure out why someone thought something, or at least get a handle on their point of view, but in this case, not only have I know idea what the makers of this sticker were thinking, but I'm also not sure I want to know.

Hey, slick, I can send and receive e-mail on my cell phone. I wonder how much extra I'm paying for that. It's probably the guy told me I got for free for two months and had to pay for after that. It's still really cool, even if it's a nightmare to type anything on the phone. It took me a couple of minutes just to peck out my e-mail address. I wonder if phone makers have considered making phones that put vowels as the first character on the key, and order the letters on each key by how frequently they're used?

Anyway, I noticed the "send e-mail" menu option while I was poking around trying to change my start up screen from "Welcome to AT&T" to something better, like "Bingley Bingley Bop!"

While I've never claimed to sleep normal hours, I've been getting pretty bad while on vacation. Without anything to force me to bed or to get up, my sleep schedule tends to drift towards somewhere around 36 hour cycles. This works great for me, but the rest of the world doesn't seem to deal with that too well. So I don't remember when I went to sleep last night, but I was awoken at 9 am by something that I've completely forgotten now. I'm pretty sure I went to bed around 4 or 5 in the morning, and I'd been up for a long time before that. I'd been planning on sleeping until 1 or 2 in the afternoon, so 9 am was quite a shock to my system. It really threw my day off. At around noon I looked at a clock and was very disoriented when I realized I shouldn't be awake for 2 more hours. At 2 I looked at a clock and was very irritated to think that I'd already been awake for five hours. It's been a long day, because it's almost 3 now, but I didn't have very much sleep.

Of course, for the Rose Parade, my mom is planning to go to sleep at around 6 pm so we can leave for Pasadena at around 3 am. Whew. That means I get to sleep in the back of her car, right?

"Can I have your car?" I asked my mom as I came in the door. "How about if I pay for it?" I asked after she said no. "Well, can I at least drive it down to Bakersfield Saturday?" I resorted to, and I was rewarded with a "Yes" for my determination.

You see, my mom just bought a new Toyota RAV4 on the Friday I came down for vacation. She'd been planning to get one for awhile, but for some reason, it happened the day I came down. It was convenient, because she left her old car in Bakersfield for me to drive to the Kern Valley the next day.

But when I came in and asked her if I could have her car, it was not referring to her old geo tracker. Instead, the question came after I'd driven the RAV4 six miles to Burger King and back. Now, it's a bit of an understatement to say that there are windy roads up here, and the main reason I was so excited about the RAV4 was because it handled those windy roads ridiculously well. It didn't sway at all, and it took turns at 60 that I would have taken at 45 in my mom's old car. In other words, it was a damn nice road for the windy roads in the Kern Valley. I can't say how nice it is for around town driving, though. I guess I'll find out Saturday.

It seems to me that a good old fashioned car would be more practical for town driving, though. If I lived in the valley with it's windy roads, I'd probably consider something that handled turns that well, too.

Ed, That poor guy. He got fired, then caught his wife sleeping with the mailman. I mean, a mailman. So he went back to his hometown, bought a bowling ally, and attempts to win the heart of a high school teacher. And, his plan for winning her apparently involves making not just an ass, but a complete ass of himself. Talk about my kind of guy.

He's done a pretty good job of it so far, what with delivering flowers to her in a suit of armor. Oh, and it featured great lines such as Ed saying "Hang on, I'm playing hard to get."

For those that don't know, Ed is a TV show on NBC. I watched the rerun of the first episode tonight, and I enjoyed it quite a lot for being a TV show. I really like the premise, and the show managed to be funny for an hour, and from what my mom and brother say, it's been funny all season. Good job. Too bad I never manage to catch a TV show every week, making a show with continuity like this a little difficult for me. Maybe I should look into a TiVo...

And besides, there was a character named "Benjie", so it can't be all bad, even if those weird Stuckeyville folks spell a little funny, and even if Ed made fun of the name.

First, I've got a few of those dangling questions that I want answered. How was it determined that a clock stopped a week before the game time started? Why did all of those enemies keep zombifying my party when I started using auto-regen? And most importantly, why did the final sequence of the game have to steal from Neon Genesis Evangelion, Star Wars Episode I and The Matrix?

But those small questions aside, I really liked Final Fantasy IX. I'm still undecided on where it falls compared to the other Final Fantasy games, but it was a very good game that was a cut above the rest. I don't think it will unseat Final Fantasy VI (III in the US) from number one in my heart, but I'd wager IX has a good run for number 2. I'd probably have to play them all again to really rank them, because it's been so long since I've played some of them.

One of the first things I desire in a Role Playing Game is good characters. This is really reason number one that I like Final Fantasy VI so much. With fourteen characters, each of whom have their moments in the sun, there was excessive character to go around. In Final Fantasy IX, the characters interacted well, and while there were a couple I was less than thrilled with, I could live with it. I felt the same about Final Fantasy VI. And for that matter, I liked everyone in Final Fantasy IX better than I liked my least favorite characters from VI. What did irritate me about the characters in IX was that there were so many scenes of character development that were hidden from the player unless you happened to have a certain character in your party at just the right moment. Now that I've read a couple of walkthroughs, I see I missed a fair amount of development for the couple of characters I wasn't too happy with. Maybe that has something to do with it?

Next, the pacing of the game was great, right up until I stopped to do a "little sidequest" at the start of disc 4 that took me 15 hours. The chocobo quest would have been much more fun if the chocographs had been about twice as common initially instead of the quest getting exponentially easier as your chocobo evolved. The only reason I kept playing it was because I knew what the prizes were, not because I wanted to. Compare this to the card game in FFVIII, which I played for about fifteen hours because I wanted to, and I didn't know about it's rewards until Pi told me after I'd beaten the game.

The game was way too easy, and the final dungeon doubly so. In FFVIII, that last dungeon really sucked... But in IX, it was just a walk down a straight park. Feh. Yawn. The rest of the game was pretty easy, too. The only times I really got killed were when I did things that were optional. I don't mind the ease too much, though, because that really keeps the story moving as long as I want to go forward.

The other thing that kept my motivated was my desire to strangle the villain. Kuja, much like Kefka, annoyed me, and hence, I wanted to finish him off. Even if he looked suspiciously like a she at certain times. Looking at a couple of columns, I see Kuja didn't seem very popular amongst long time Final Fantasy fans. I'd just like to remind them that, whether he was smart or evil or anything isn't important, as long as you want to see him dead before the game is over. The purpose of the villain is to be beaten, and if the player likes the villain, then why would the player want to smash the villain and laugh at his crumpled corpse?

The graphics and sound were both great, as far as I'm concerned. The graphics maintained an acceptable framerate, unlike Chrono Cross. The full motion videos were great fun, and the music was all tasteful and well done.

Finally, my only real complaint about Final Fantasy IX. The various interfaces in the game were less than stellar. Why didn't the synth shops tell me how many of the items to be synthed I had remaining? How come there were about three different targeting methods during battle, depending on if you were using magic, attacking, or using an item? Why did the damage inflicted upon my party always get covered up by my menus? How come no one ever told me that pressing select showed me so much useful help? Why wasn't there a way to quickly see who had learned what abilities from each item so I knew if I could ditch it or not? And the list goes on. I liked the battle system itself, I liked the story, I liked the characters, I liked the ending, I liked the graphics, and I liked the music. The interface just lacked a lot polish. Most screens didn't present enough information where it would have been easy to toss in more useful stuff, and while it was possible to do everything I needed to do, a lot of it could have been done more efficiently. But much like windows, that wasn't enough to stop me from getting the job done.

Merry belated Christmas. I asked people not to give me anything, but I got stuff anyway. You see, I agreed with this years South Park Christmas episode, which pointed out that Christmas is what supports our economy. It's too true! There are companies which take losses three quarters of the year merely because they make enough money off of Xmas to survive for the rest of the year. Most companies make more at Christmas anyway, and I wouldn't be surpised if any company in that situation takes that into account when they're plotting world domination from high atop their towers of power.

But that's enough about that, because I'm sure you're dying to hear that I got an AM/FM radio shaped like a computer, complete with monitor shaped speaker, mouse shaped control, and keyboard shaped waste of plastic. I also got clothes, which is fine, because they're actually useful. Oh, and a blender, which there's no way I'll be able to carry back to Berkeley on the train, so my parents will have to send it to me. I don't think I've actually used a blender for anything ever, but I'm sure I can think of something. Hmmm... Potato Milkshake? There were a few other things, like a book, Titan AE on DVD (if you're even thinking about buying me a movie, go DVD), and something else.

Oh, and I got cell phone, though, thanks mom, I get to pay for the service!

So I kind of knew I was going to get a cell phone for Christmas, because my mom had discussed it with me. In some of my procrastination fits, I did research on what phone and service wanted. I knew I liked Nokia phones, because my parents have them -- they're not cluttered, the interface is clean, and they feel solid. The two reasonable options for service in the bay area, based on what I've heard from friends, are Verizon and AT&T. Granted, I'd heard bad things about both of them as well, but every company has someone who hates them. These two seemed to have the least hatred targeted at them, though. And since Verizon didn't have Nokia phones, and the phones they did have, though highly reviewed on sites like epinions, didn't look as good to me as the simple and solid Nokia phones I knew I liked.

Let me point out that right now I'm on the phone attempting to activate my cellular service with AT&T. I just spent something like an hour or so on hold, and I'm now being told that to activate the phone for the Bay Area, I have to call a different number. That's ... frustrating.

So, having decided on AT&T that left me with the options of the 5160 , the 6160, or 8260 series Nokia phones. A couple of people I know recently picked up the 8260s, and while they are very small and sleek, the reviews I've read said that there are issues with signal strength, and my friends confirmed this problem. So that ruled the 8260 out, leaving the 6160 and the 5160. Between these two, I was leaning towards the 6160 because it had more features. My mom, however, wanting to have something to wrap for me and put under the tree, picked me up a 5165 series phone, which is a pretty new model. I liked the looks of it, so I went and downloaded the manuals for each phone and compared the features, and found that the new 5165 was a lot better than the 5160. In fact, the only features the 6160 seemed to have that the 5165 didn't was a calendar, a calculator, twice as many contacts, one more game and editable profiles. I considered that I already had a calendar, calculator, and as many contacts and games as I wanted on my Palm, and all I really needed in the way of profiles was a quick way to turn the noisy little bugger off, which all Nokia phones seem to have, and decided that the 5165 was more phone than I needed.

So after being redirected to a second number, I called AT&T's Bay Area Wireless Services. The first thing I noticed was that their elevator music was much more obnoxious than that of the first number I dialed. The next thing I noticed, however, was that I didn't stay on hold very long to listen to it. In fact, I was only on hold for about half a minute. I was on and off hold throughout the call, though, and I got to hear all kinds of wacky stuff.

Lacking a credit record myself, I had to use my Dad's name to sign up for the phone. It was fun saying things like "Service for my son.... Yes, I'm fifty sumodd years old... Yeah, sure, you can talk to the real Mr. Stewart." I think my asking my dad how old he was tipped the guy on the other end of the phone off. Oh well, it was still highly amusing for me at least. I later found out that they had to check with my dad to make sure it was okay to run a credit check on his name and to put the phone in his name. Understandable.

It was really amazing how quickly the phone was activated, though. I have vague memories of getting a pager three or four years ago and the activation taking something like 24 hours. But the man I was speaking to gave the phone a test call while the credit check was still running, and it was up and running immediately.

So I've now got a cell phone and service, but I'm not telling you the number, because I probably won't answer the phone most of the time anyway.