Nintendo Likes Money

Well, they've done it again. Nintendo has officially announced a re-design of their most recent portable, the Nintendo DS. The Nintendo DS Lite will be smaller and lighter, featuring adjustable brightness and with a change in colour to the disgustingly trendy iPod white. But does anyone really care?


Anyone who's at all familiar with Nintendo's portables is aware that Nintendo is no stranger to re-designs. Ignoring the many Gameboys of generations past (trust me-- there's a lot of them), even just their next-most recent portable, the Gameboy Advance, has seen three different versions. It began with the first GBA, which was a great machine with a great library, as its sales can attest to. However, it wasn't back-lit, and was, as far as I'm concerned, essentially broken because of it. I bought one anyway though, because I NEEDED to get my Circle of the Moon on (a common symptom of Symphony of the Night withdrawal). Thus, I was fairly bitter when the GBA SP was announced sometime after that.

The SP fixed the GBA, giving it a backlight, and having a lighter and smaller clamshell design makeover to boot. However, not content to release a complete system, Nintendo inexplicably did not include a headphone port. So, the GBA SP was essentially broken as well. But people bought it anyway. LOTS of people. Many of whom had already purchased a GBA. And believe me, I was sorely tempted to do the same. But I'm a stubborn, stubborn man, so I held onto my money and stuck with my original GBA. So, when I'd play against other people using SPs, they could play worry-free while I twisted in my chair underneath a light so that I could get an angle where I could see most of the screen without a terrible glare. But I gritted my teeth and stood firm-- Nintendo was NOT making me buy the same system twice.

Some time after that, the Gameboy Player was released, an attachment for the Gamecube that would allow it to play GBA games, and I promptly bought one. Now, that might seem like a cop-out at first glance, and it is in some respects, but it had been my plan all along. There had been some precedent for such a device, and I was eagerly awaiting its announcement and subsequent release. You see, I don't actually need a portable system, in that I hate playing video games in public, just as I hate doing anything in public that telegraphs what my interests are. Whenever I did play my GBA, it was at home with it plugged into the wall (and in front of a window desperately trying to catch the sun at the proper angle *grumble*). However, portables have lower graphical standards than other modern consoles, which means they are a haven for the disappearing genres of yester-year that I love, like 2D platformers and old-school RPGs. So, playing those games on my big screen using my Gamecube essentially gives me a modern Super Nintendo, which is really what I want most anyway. I was perfectly happy to start using my Gameboy Player exclusively and retire my GBA, and it's pretty much sat on my shelf ever since.

At last year's E3, the newest GBA re-design was announced: the Gameboy Micro. The Gameboy Micro, as you might guess from the name, was positively tiny. It was a GBA that was roughly the size of a pile of a half dozen credit cards. Now, such a thing was useless to me, since, as I've stated, I don't need a portable gaming device, but it seemed to me at the time that this was the perfect portable. Finally, a portable had been released that wasn't ugly and bulky-- a portable that you could truly just slip in your pocket and travel with. It didn't sell well, and continues to sell poorly. I hate people.

One of the biggest reasons for its poor sales performance, however, was likely the release of Nintendo's newest portable, the Nintendo Dual Screen. Nintendo claimed at the time that the DS was not meant to replace the GBA, and that the two portables were meant to coexist, but noone believed them at the time, and the rapid drop in volume of GBA game releases between then and now would seem to validate those doubts. The DS was, and is, a really slick system. It is a rectangular clamshell shape with a backlit screen on the inside surface of each half of the clamshell. The bottom screen is touch-sensitive, meaning that you can play games by touching the screen. This is generally done using a small plastic stylus that is stored in a slot along the system's top edge, but an attached thumbstrap can also be used for more analog control (although I find that your thumb obscures too much of the screen to be useful). It has a rechargeable battery, an AC adapter for direct power or for charging, and a nifty sleep function that conserves power-- if you get interrupted while playing, you can simply close up the system and it will go to sleep without shutting off and losing your progress. It can also communicate wirelessly with other nearby DSs or with the global DS network if you have a wireless internet connection (or are in a public wireless hotspot, such as every McDonald's in North America, thanks to a McD's/Nintendo promotional deal). This allows people to play multiplayer games using only one copy of the game by transmitting small downloadable multiplayer functionality, or to chat using the built-in chatroom/drawing program. Finally, it plays GBA games, which is a nice touch for those of us who skipped the GBA SP, since it effectively doubles as a backlit GBA.

So, unlike the original GBA, the Nintendo DS is not broken. It's actually a nice system with a very slick interface and alot of fun and innovative software. Granted, it is perhaps a bit heavy for the one-handed grip that is necessary to hold it in the air while using the stylus, but it's still quite reasonable, and I usually balance it on my knee or a table in any case. So why do we need a new one already? I just got mine for Christmas, so you might chalk this up to bitterness on my part (and you'd likely be partially right, since I am certainly a bitter, bitter man), but I just really don't see the justification. I don't even want one of the damn things. There's barely any difference between it and the current model, and I like the current silver colour better anyway. Nintendo, I love your systems, and your games, and even your crazy peripherals, but please, stop trying to get me to buy the same things twice.

Bad Hair Day

For those of you who may not know, I have an infrequent but alarming problem with my left hand. Roughly once a month, all five fingers on it will start jumping around and twitching without any prompting by me. I still largely retain control over the fingers during these spasms, but I can't keep them still. Even if I clamp my other hand or my arm over them, they'll still try to move, and I can watch my veins pumping blood to them madly. It feels as if someone else is controlling the hand, and, needless to say, I find the entire experience to be rather unnerving, although I have become accustomed to it over the last several years.

If you're curious why I'm sharing this unpleasant problem, it is in order to explain why I had an EEG, or electroencephalogram, yesterday morning. I've had this problem for years, but I generally will only go see my doctor after I have a laundry list of at least a dozen problems built up, and I'd forgotten to mention this on my previous trip a couple of years earlier. So, when I finally mentioned the problem to him during my most recent trip a few months ago, he seemed to be concerned, and he scheduled an EEG for me. If you don't know what an EEG is, don't worry-- I didn't either before a few months ago. An electroencephalogram is a brain scan where lots of sensors are attached to your head and various neurophysiological measurements of your brain's electrical activity are taken and analyzed. More important than that more technical explanation, however, is what it does to your hair. :-)

I'm going to explain the process in detail now, but I want to stress that many of these are uneducated observations and inferences on my part, so I may not have everything right. If anyone is inclined to correct me, feel free. First, the woman who was conducting the examination had me lie down on a bed and then pointed a couple of cameras at me. Then, she measured my head's dimensions (news flash: it's big!), presumably to help judge how she should space out what she was going to do next. At this point, she took out a marker and began to mark points all over my head, and the way in which it grated against my hair was rather unpleasant. My best guess for these markings were that they served one of two purposes: either they were simply a guide for where she should attach each of the upcoming sensors, or they were a special ink that would be picked up by the cameras and used as reference points. I lost count of just how many markings she made, but I'd guess anywhere from a dozen to thirty.

At this point, the time that I'd been fearing had finally arrived-- it was time to mess up my hair. She was about to place roughly twenty of what I will, for lack of a better word, refer to as sensors (those little suction cups with cords that you always see on TV-- can a non-invasive sensing device be called a probe?) all over my head, and in order for these sensors to take proper readings, each spot where they were placed had to be coated in what I believe was a conducting gel. Now, twenty sticky spots all over my head might sound like my worst nightmare, but it was far better than the procedure from a couple of decades earlier that the gel application had replaced. You see, my uncle Royce once had an EEG many years ago, and when he had it done, they'd had to shave little holes in his hair at each point where the wanted to place a sensor. So, all things considered, I'm fortunate to just have to worry about sticky hair.

In any case, she applied all of the sensors (as well as one on my chest), wrapped my head several times in what I believe was gauze to keep them in place, and then went to the other side of the room to begin the test. I didn't actually get to see myself in this state, but I suspect I looked like one of those involuntary experimental subjects you see escaping from sterile facilities in movies. She then shut off the lights and told me to close my eyes. I hadn't gotten much sleep over the last several days (and still haven't), so I asked if my falling asleep was a concern. Far from it-- apparently they prefer it if you fall asleep, as it makes for more accurate readings. I was happy to oblige, so I tried to have a little nap, with limited, but existent, success.

My biggest problem was that she wanted me to relax. As anyone who knows me is aware, relaxation is not a state that comes easily to me, especially in an emasculating situation like this. It wasn't helped by the fact that she wanted this relaxed state to consist of several specific qualities: slow steady breathing, eyes closed, teeth separated, mouth slightly open, etc. For much the same reason that I can't swing a golf club properly, this proved difficult. You see, whenever I try to swing a golf club, I think to myself "knees bent, back straight, arms straight, feet spaced, eye on the ball" and so forth, and I get so tense running through that mental checklist that I have no hope of hitting the ball well.

Regardless, I tried to relax as best I could, and the test began. For some reason, I had considerable difficulty keeping my eyes closed. If she'd just asked me to lie there in the dark, I'd probably have closed my eyes anyway, but, in much the same way that a person told not to think about pink elephants invariably turns their thoughts to pink elephants, I desperately wanted to open my eyes once I was told not to. There were a couple of times that I had to resort to furrowing my brow in order to simulate blinking in an effort to resist the urge to open them. I perservered, however.

Not all of my time was spent napping in the dark, though. At one point early on, she had me breathe deeply and rapidly for three minutes, which got pretty distressing by the end. I'm sure it had a point, but that sounds like just the kind of task I'd make up in her place if I felt like having some fun at the patient's expense. Also, near the test's end, she brought in a bright light and placed it over me. It proceeded to blink in bursts, with the time between blinks slow at first but progressively getting faster and faster until it was almost faster than I could perceive. This too proved distressing.

After that, I was done. I'd asked when she had first placed all of the sensors if there was any chance that they'd take hair with them when they were removed, and she'd assured me that they would not. This point was driven home, when, after the test was completed, she simply grabbed a big handful of cords and easily yanked them all off in one big pull, including the one on my chest. I barely felt them come off. All that remained after their removal was for her to take a wet cloth and do her best to wash the ink and gel off of my head. Unfortunately, the only thing that gets it off completely is a good shampoo and wash, and when I stepped onto the elevator soon after and looked in the mirror, I realized that my hair was quite possibly the messiest it had ever been. Certainly the messiest it had been in the last decade, at any rate. It was wet and sticky and pointing out in a dozen different directions. Needless to say, I went home and had a shower before returning to work.

All things considered, it wasn't a bad experience. In fact, I would characterize it as a pleasant experience, given how much difficulty I generally have during hospital visits. I got to take the morning off from work and catch up on my sleep in a dark room, at the expense of my hair. I've been told that my doctor will have the results in a couple of weeks, but I'm hoping that I won't be hearing from him, since he'll only want to talk to me if they found something, and I don't think there's such a thing as a trivial brain problem. *crosses fingers*

[Note: Travis has a blog now. The link has been added to my sidebar.]

You'd Think a Shiny New Red Car would be Hard to Miss

My poor new car has not been very lucky. It's a sweet (and expensive) ride, it looks great, I love it to death, and I hope to have it for a long time, but I think it's cursed. Within a month of first buying it, a gravel truck trundled by and scratched the front and almost put a hole in my radiator with some loose bouncing stones, as well as cracking my brand new windshield, which had to be replaced. Then, as mentioned several posts below, a deer jumped out in front of it on Christmas Eve. This was arguably not entirely outside of my control, but I think I did the best I could given the circumstances. So, yeah, it's had a run of bad luck. That brings us to Wednesday night.

Wednesday was a very long day. I had a hair appointment at 5:30 with my hairdresser, Zelda, but I wanted to leave at the end of the work day, so I went early, intending to play my Nintendo DS while I waited in her basement. Her driveway was fairly full, and I didn't want to block anyone in, so I parked across the street from her house as I normally do and went inside. Just for the record, I was perfectly straight, flush with the side of the road, on the proper side of the road, facing in the proper direction, and equidistant between two driveways on that side. It was a textbook example of how to park on a street.

After I had been there a while, playing Advance Wars DS for roughly ten minutes, someone came downstairs asking to be let out of the driveway. The lady getting her hair cut at the time said that it was probably her ride home, and that there should be someone in the car who would move it for him. A minute or so later, Zelda's son, Josh, ran downstairs and said that he just saw someone run into a car hard and heard a loud bang. He asked if any of us had driven here in a red car parked across the street. I said in an exasperated voice for the second time in as many weeks "My new car!" and ran outside to take a look. As I approached, things didn't look that bad. On closer inspection, it was a different story.

The back end of my car had been hit hard enough that it was now at a 30 degree angle to the side of the street, with my rear pushed against the snow bank. The paneling on the left side of my car towards the read had been dented back enough that I could put my hand inside the car's body. The reason things didn't look that bad at first glance was because the plastic paneling and bumper jammed in against the rest of the car hard and then bounced back into place. Unfortunately, the metal it jammed against doesn't bounce well. It still doesn't look all that bad outside. The paint is scraped in several places, and the metal is bent, but I suspect the damage inside may be much worse once they get it open. It'll likely cost quite a bit to fix, but Ted (president of Wood Motors) has assured me that it'll look like new when they're done with it.

Apparently it's customary to call the police when something like this happens, but noone I knew was sure what to do, so I didn't. I was mad (although, incidentally, I had to hide it since the lady getting her hair cut was dating the driver), but I wasn't comfortable doing something like that. They both pissed me off, though. They weren't quit flippant, but they were close, and I got nothing close to an apology from either one of them. The consensus among myself, Zelda, and Josh is that the driver wasn't quite right in the head. Whether or not that means he was drunk, high, crazy, or just senile, I don't know, but he seemed as if he barely knew where he was.

In any case, he was entirely at fault, so the repairs will be paid for by his insurance. My insurance company has assured me that this will have no bearing on my rates in the future, but I suspect they're full of shit, since it'll be on record that I had an accident, even though I wasn't even in the fucking car. He had rented the car from Budget (incidentally, dad checked the phone book, and he didn't give his own phone number to them, but some other person's), so I think they'll provide me a temporary replacement when I take my car in to be fixed. I'm not sure when that will be yet, though. I just hope I can keep it out of the body shop for a while this time. *sigh*

The Pursuit of Happiness

Everyone prepare to laugh. You have been warned. Like most people, I've always entertained the foolish nebulous intent to write the great American Canadian novel some unspecified day in the future, well aware that I probably never would get around to it. Well, lately, I've been feeling a little stifled. As I put it in a recent e-mail: "My life is unrelenting boredom and fatigue, punctuated by brief periods of reflective misery. Only 35 more years to go, presuming I live that long." So, I decided that I need an outlet for some creative energy, and a way to relax, and writing a foolish novel that noone will ever read seems to fit the bill. So, the above subject line is the title of the novel that I've decided to start writing, in a silly waste of what little free time I have these days. It seems to be working so far though, as I've been writing like a man possessed, and my every spare moment is spent with ideas and scenes bouncing around in my brain, begging to be recorded.

The whole enterprise is of course complete and utter lunacy-- I don't know the first thing about writing a novel, I don't have the drive or the free time to get it done, and even if I finish it noone will ever read it. But I'm going to give it a shot anyway, because I'm an idiot. I'm hoping at the very least that I'm not well-read enough for it to be derivative. I already have a high-level outline and several scenes written.

Anyway, here's a brief summary of the idea:

A group of 5 Caucasian Atlantic Canadian young men (I toyed with a sexually, ethnically, and geographically diverse main cast, but in the end decided to stick with what I know) have jobs that they hate and are feeling directionless and miserable (like I said, writing what I know :-P). They each have several chances to relive their lives (not consciously, so no religion, magic, or science fiction or anything), each time trying to find happiness in different ways. Each set of life stories is told primarily from the POV of one of the main characters in turn, and ends with a final wish by the last remaining character at the moment of his death that provides the theme for the next set of stories.

Here's a short contextless random scene from the fourth set, to give everyone a bit of a feel for it (note that this has gone through zero editing, and hasn't even seen a spell-checker, so it may be rife with errors, although I don't think it's too bad):

[...]

Moments later, as Mitchell was reclaiming his beanbag, the doorbell rang. "I'm not getting it," he said. "I just answered the damn phone-- it's your turn now."

"It's never for me anyway. You get it." countered Marvin.

"What if it's the Chinese food?"

Marvin and Mitchell exchanged a long glance then, each hoping to stare the other into submission, and finally Mitchell said "If it's important, they'll ring a few more times. Let's wait it out."

Just then, a shout came from the door: "I know you lazy assholes are in there-- I can hear you. And if one of you doesn't open this fucking door right now, I'm going to ram it up your ass!"

Marvin, recognizing Gordan's voice, smiled then, and shouted back "That doesn't make any sense!"

"OPEN THE GODDAMNED DOOR!"

Finally, rolling his eyes, Mitchell reluctantly levered himself back out of his cushioned paradise and made his way to the door. The moment he unlocked it, Gordan came barelling into the room as only he can do.

"Why the hell did I even come over here? If I wanted to watch a bunch of lazy assholes sit around and drink themselves stupid, I could have gone into work."

"Work?" replied a surprised Mitchell as he moved to reclaim his seat, only to have Gordan march in front of him and block his way.

"That's right, work. In today's society, people who aren't busy being useless twits can receive compensation for services rendered."

"I thought you said you were going to stop doing any work."

"I did." replied a suddenly sullen Gordan.

"And?"

Gordan heaved a big sigh and said "They gave me a grade of 'Satisfactory' on my annual performance evaluation. Satisfactory! I haven't done anything but read webcomics for three months, and apparently the government is satisfied with that."

"Why don't you just quit?" tossed in Marvin without taking his eyes from the television screen.

"Did you not hear what I just said? I just got paid for three months of reading webcomics. I don't want to be there, but if they want to throw money at me for doing nothing, I'm certainly not going to stop them."

Gordon then finally stopped to take in the room, noticed Marvin's preoccupation with the television, and asked "What the hell are you guys doing, anyway?"

"We're competing to see who can get the highest Pitfall score before we get sick of it" replied Marvin, gesturing towards the dust-laden Atari 2600 sitting on top of the television. "It hasn't happened yet."

"Awesome" said a now-calm Gordan, and flopped down onto the beanbag chair just in time to thwart Mitchell's attempt to do the same. "I'll have a glass of orange juice. No pulp."

"Coming right up" was Mitchell's icy reply as he stared daggers at an apparently oblivious Gordan for a long moment before giving up and going to the kitchen to fetch his juice. But it was going to be mostly pulp, damn it!

[End scene]

So, that's what I'm up to these days. I would like to say that despite what the above might seem to imply/explicitly state (:-P), I do like my job. I'm just feeling a little bored and directionless as of late, is all.

Also, to end with, there's some good entertainment news as of late. Jon Stewart will be hosting this year's Oscars. The bad news is that that means I'll have to remember to watch the damn Oscars this year.