Linkstew

6:50 am:
ROOMMATE: BENJY, WAKE UP, MY FLIGHT IS IN AN HOUR!
BENJY: Mumble.
ROOMMATE: FROM SFO!
BENJY: Mumble!
ROOMMATE: Benjy, hurry up!

Admittedly, this doesn't have a whole lot to do with my car, because even without my car we probably would have just taken my roommate's car...

What is interesting, is I managed to get from Berkeley, through a 10 minute wait at the toll plaza and across the bay bridge, with a stop at SFO, and to work in San Mateo, in less than an hour. This is notable because it normally takes 40-50 minutes to do 880 to 92 between 9 and 10. The only real flaws are that there's no carpool lane on 101, and the carpool lane on the bay bridge requires 3 people instead of 92's 2 people.

Hey, y'know what?

The city of Berkeley doesn't like it when you make a left turn from Ashby onto MLK between 7 and 9 am.

You know what else?

Cops don't like it, either.

A block after turning onto MLK, I noticed one cop behind me with his lights on, and another cop to my right. Not having any clue what was going on, and unsettled as I was by the fact that I'd just been swarmed by cops, I went ahead and pulled over.

He prefaced the whole exchange with "It's a city ordinance that you can't make a left turn from Ashby onto MLK between 7 and 9 am, and it's 8:13 right now. This is just a city ordinance, so it won't go on your record or affect your insurance, but I have to give you a citation."

And given his qualification, I figured I'd just pay my left turn tax and be done with it. "Oh... I just got the car two days ago, and I'm still learning the city." I told him. He gave me the citation anyway.

"I'm never awake between 7 and 9 am, so I ignore that sign every time I see it," I said in my head.

Of course, I didn't realize until a day later that the clock in the car was still set to daylight savings time.

So, you're in your newly purchased car, without any CDs, with a 5+ hour drive up I-5 in front of you... and you find yourself in Wasco, near a K-Mart... where they subdivided their music into "Music en Espanol," "Latin Music," "Compilations," and Everything Else... and "Music en Espanol" plus "Latin Music" put together had more CDs than "Everything Else."

In a word, "whoa." I've probably said "whoa" enough times in my first 3 hours of using Panther to give gold ole' Keanu a run for his money. If you're for any reason waiting to buy Panther, let me just reassure that it made my PowerBook feel like a whole new computer. There are so many improvements that I couldn't even begin to list them all. Boy, I sure wish I had a Mac to use at work. I'd be so much more productive than with windows.

But just to pick one out of the hat, here's a feature of Expose that I hadn't heard anything about until I discovered it myself: Activate Expose in either "All Windows" or "Application Windows" mode, and then hit "tab," and Expose will cycle through the open applications, displaying each one in "Application Windows" mode. So cool.

I've played a lot more of Tactics Advance since my first impressions, and it being the marathon game that it is, that means I've got plenty of time for second impressions:

• In my first impressions I complained about how annoying it was to not be able to see how a given piece of equipment would alter a character's stats. Well, it turns out if you hold start, it will show you how the equipment impacts the stats. Thank god.
• For some reason, I overlooked the fact that a character can equip two different Action "A" ability sets simultaneously. This is an important game play point, because otherwise a character is locked into the abilities of whatever job he is currently assigned. But nope! A character actually gets A abilities from both his assigned job, and one other selected job set.
• The first time I saw an extra character named "Foobar," I thought it was cute and laughed a bit. But by the third time I'd seen an extra named "Foobar," it began to lose its charm.
• The game time clock says I've been playing for 30 hours and 8 minutes,, and 72 missions. Of course, the 30 hours doesn't take into account either (on one hand) all the times I fell asleep while playing only to wake up and just turn the game boy off in the middle of a battle, or (on the other hand) all the times I set the game boy down in the middle of a battle, only to come back to it awhile later and finish the fight. I don't actually know if it balances out or not.
• Finally, it's been a long time since I muttered something like "This game is a lot of work" about a game I was still actually enjoying. But seriously: a lot of work. And you know you're in trouble when you start seriously considering writing software to help you play the game more efficiently.

Since I use Windows at work, I got to immediately download and try out iTunes for Windows. Here are my first three impressions:

1. While the installer asked me if I wanted it to put icons on my desktop, and use iTunes as the default audio player and use QuickTime as the default media player, it did not ask me if I wanted it to put iTunes and QuickTime in my Quick Launch toolbar. It just did it. Bad Apple.
2. The performance isn't bad -- it's a little sluggish at some interface tasks like resizing the window and scrolling, but it's not unresponsive or anything...
   • Subpoint: I'm fairly amused by the Aqua scrollbars for a Windows app.
3. The minimize/maximize features don't work like a normal Windows app. In fact, there's no way to actually fully maximize the iTunes Window -- all you can do is drag it so it's mostly full screen. Double clicking on the title bar toggles between default window dimensions / placement, and your custom window dimensions / placement. Clicking on the minimize/maximize button, meanwhile, toggles the iTunes window between the controller window and the full window.
   • Subpoint: The controller window lacks several features that Windows users will be used to from WinAmp: In particular, there's no way to dock the controller with the edge of the screen, and there's no way to make the controller float above other windows.

All in all, not bad for a first Windows version. It shouldn't send people screaming, and hopefully it has enough features that Windows users will keep it around. It's surprisingly faithful to the Mac version. I'll be really interested to see what Windows users think of iTunes.

Oh, and I'm still upset that I can't just re-download music I already bought at the Music Store on this computer. That would have been a really nice feature to have today, because I don't have any music on my work computer. It'd be great to be able to redownload, because then I could buy new music at work and listen to it, and then when I got home it would just be in my download queue on my Mac, and I could download it there and then put it on my iPod for the future. Well, you know what to do.

After a bit of frustration with UPS requiring a signature for the package (admittedly, the shipper did set the "signature required" flag, so UPS was just "following orders"...), I finally got my shiny new 200 gig firewire hard drive today. Now I'll be able to backup my entire hard drive again, and ready to do a full reinstall once I get Panther in 11 short days. I would have had to go pick up the package from UPS if it hadn't been for my awesome roommate, though:

"Sure I'll sign for it, if I can have a cut of whatever it is."
"Uh, do you want a 20 gig partition to backup your laptop on?"
-- my roommate/me

The particular drive I got was Trans Intl's 200 GB FireWire F400 External Drive. So far it's definitely faster than my old Maxtor drive, but the bottleneck is going to be with my PowerBook's slow hard drive any which way. The drive has made a few interesting sounding clunks on drive spin up / down, though -- I'll definitely keep an ear on it, in case it starts to sound worse. The power light is a blindingly bright blue LED, and on drive access the LED only gets brighter. I had to put several layers of masking tape over it to keep it from blinding my peripheral vision, and it still glows through that masking tape well enough that I can see when the drive is being accessed. Anyway, I'm happy with it so far.

Oh, No: It's a Girl! - Do daughters cause divorce?

A fluff piece about what sounds like a neat study on family dynamics. Worth a quick read.

I did four loads of laundry today, and then I dumped it out on my bed so I'd have to put it away before I could go to sleep.

The Mathematics of . . . Pocket Change. Brother, can you spare 18 cents?

This article is pretty cool, but it only reinforces my belief that the penny just needs to go. Even with an 18 cent coin, 24 cents would still an unpleasant amount of change to recieve.

I called up Hayward Toyota last week and placed an order for a 2004 Prius. At the time, I was certain that that was what I wanted, and that it'd be worth waiting for. But since then, my certainty has wavered a little. It's a good thing my deposit is fully refundable.

I first began to waffle when I had to select which option package I wanted while I was placing the order, and I began to realize just how much money a new car actually costs. I only started my job three months ago, and I don't exactly have a lot of spare cash saved up at the moment, and I still have a bit of debt here and there. Getting a Prius will be a serious commitment over the course of years.

My uncertainty grew when the dealer emailed me and told me that there was a lot of demand for the car, and that I might get the car ... maybe by January? It's only been two months, and the BART+CalTrain routine is already getting pretty old. Waiting until January is going to be killer, because the weather is bound to take a turn for the worse soon, making the outdoor portions of my morning commute much less pleasant.

And things weren't helped when a friend of mine started trying to convince me to buy a "little commuter car" that gets nearly as good-gas mileage (cough yeah right cough) -- "like an Echo."

Not that I'd buy an Echo, but I did start wondering if I should just give up on waiting and buy a used car now. It'd be extremely convenient to have a car as soon as possible, and a used car would be cost effective, allowing me to actually save money instead of spending a more significant chunk of my check on car payments. I'd also probably be able to pay a used car off pretty quickly, freeing me from that commitment.

But tonight, I got a ride home in a co-worker's new Honda Civic Hybrid, and that ride both bolstered my will to at least wait for the Prius, and confirmed my suspicion that the Civic Hybrid is a fairly bare bones vehicle compared to the comparably priced geek's dream 2004 Prius.

So, I'll still keep an eye out for used cars, in case some super deal crosses my path that would hold me over until I can get a Prius (though if I were going to do that, I really wish I would have just done that this summer, instead of messing with BART+CalTrain for the last two months). Once my Prius is available, I'll go drive it and decide if it's actually worth all the money. And in the meantime, the extra wait just means I'll be able to save up more money for a down payment.

Apparently AT&T snuck a bunch of shareware onto my phone while I wasn't looking [1], because when I started up the application manager earlier this evening, it asked me if I wanted to install 6 new programs. In what was probably a foolish decision, I said "yes," and quite awhile later I had a bunch of new programs that sucked.

One of them was "Active Toons," which is apparently a little app for making "MMS" pictures to send to your friends. When I opened Active Toons, I was greeted with a little cartoon picture of a guy with blonde hair in a red shirt. The first menu item was "Edit Character," which I clicked on, because I neither have blonde hair nor would I ever wear a red shirt.

On the edit character screen, there were menu items for "Change Skin Color," "Change Hair" (with three or four options for haircut, and then an option to change hair color), and "Change Top" (with two options for shirt styles and option to change top color). But the first item in the list was "Become a Woman."

So I did.

But the point is, with all of the other menu items consistently reading "Change X," the "Become a Woman" verbiage only stuck out that much more. Admittedly, I'm not sure if "Change Sex" would have been any better, but at least it would have been consistent.

And then, when it comes time to compose an MMS, you have a few options to change backgrounds (there are a few cartoon backgrounds, or you can impose your character over a picture you've taken with the phone's camera), and you can also select an emotion from the options of Happy, Angry, Sad, and "Surprized [2]."

Here's the character I ended up with. I can't imagine why she looks so surprized.

And that was the extent of the entertainment I derived from these programs. And they were less useful than they were entertaining. Thanks AT&T.

[1] Huh, I wonder if that's why my phone's been periodically refusing to make or receive calls sometimes, and the only fix I've found is to restart the phone. That'd be really awesome. SALLMRV.
[2] Yes, it's spelled with a z in the program.