Standing On Boxes

Even though my cell phone (a cheap, camera-less Motorola thing) is getting a bit long in the tooth – For the things I use my cell phone for , the occasional call, emergencies, and when I’m traveling, I can’t justify the cost of an iPhone as much as it would be cool to get one.
I’ve done the early adopter thing before – I’ve got a PSP. I bought Apple’s original attempt at a PDA – the Newton MessagePad (The original, not even the MessagePad 100). That isn’t the problem. I just don’t want a $600+ phone.
If Apple came out with a phone-less iPhone… I’d buy it. It’s be a nice iPod upgrade. An iPod/Mac OS X based PDA with wireless? With 8+GB of flash memory?
Gimme!
Sure, I could buy one and 1. never activate it or 2. Cancel service after getting it. But that is a waste of money.
[30-Jun-2007]Addendum: Listen/reading about the iPhone experience from assorted sources (So, all second hand) –

• it looks like the chances of getting an iPhone are better at an actual Apple store. The AT&T stores had a lot fewer. But either way, the 8GB iPhones are in shorter supply.
  Most Apple stores reportedly didn’t sell out of their stock, except in a few metropolitan areas.

• The user/shopper experience is sounding much better at an Apple story.
  They are just selling the phone that you activate via iTunes when you get home. AT&T stores, in general, seem to be behaving like cell phone stores – trying to up-sell buyers on more expensive rate plans, credit checks, and all sorts of shenanigans like that.

• Some people had no problems with activation. (East Coast buyers seem to have had it easier). The biggest one seems to be transferring your current cell phone number to your iPhone. That can take hours if you aren’t an AT&T/Cingular customer already.

We’ll see how it goes…

I’ve started thinking/working on “The Two” again. (Not a lot – 3K words total in the past two months. But it’s a start.)
I posted/finished Part 13 almost a year ago.
It’s been so long I’m not really sure what the completed section (Parts 13-18) will look like when I finish. And my writing style is a bit different than when I started it. And not just more verbose.
But it isn’t as bad as some other fics I haven’t finished… I was looking at one the other day (I won’t say which one) and I couldn’t remember where it was going from that point. And I couldn’t find the outline I thought I had for it. Argh!.

(Sounds like a potential chapter title in a fan fic. Hmm…)
Catching up on some DVR’ed KP episodes tonight.

• A short episode (the aforementioned Zombie snowmen (made with a combination of water from Lake Wannaweep (3rd appearance of the lake?), the weather machine Drakken tried to use to take over Canada during ‘Career Day’, and an invention of the Tweebs. Oops.)
• Last week’s “Mathter and Fervent” (I think that’s what it was) about a Math villain. Comcast’s episode summary was only vaguely correct. They made it sound like it was going to be like that Trek episode where Kirk gets split into Good Kirk and Evil Kirk or the Buffy episode where Xander gets split into “Cool/Competent Xander” and “Uber-Goofy Xander”
  No, this was an “Anti-matter Ron” episode – with a little bit of reality mangling since an anti-matter Ron wouldn’t have worked the way they depicted. And let me just say… way too much uniform-less Hego in this episode (The Mathter was a Team Go foe).

• And the new episode – about Ron mentoring someone and failing spectacularly at it. (though I feel like I’m the only person who watched it on cable. Everyone else seems to have caught it on the internet earlier in the week…).
  The best part was Rufus and the mail tube he zipped around in at the end of the episode. Other good parts -
  Shego and Kim deciding whether to do the banter thing at one point (cute).
  Rufus’s juvenile reaction to the almost Kim/Ron kiss at the end.
  Still not believing the whole Kim/Ron thing. Throwing in one or two 10 second Kim/Ron moments in an episode doesn’t really do much for making it believable. They just don’t behave any different than previous seasons.

(AIUI OVA = the anime equivalent of ‘direct to video’)
Found at the used book story today… Galaxy Fraulein Yuna. The DVD had two ‘series’ (not sure of the term for OVA’s) on it. A 2 part episode and a 3 part episode. Based on a video game.
Interesting though I felt like I’d come into the story in the middle. And if Wiki is to be believed… I sort of did. The first ‘series’ happens after the first couple games in the game series and the other one happens later.
A couple things to notice… it’s mildly humorous but in a different style to Jubei-chan. One character, Yuri, is always eating. Yuna, the heroine of the series, defeats her enemies by making friends with them. At least that is the story mythos. Doesn’t happen much in the OVA. She can make friends with anyone!
(Let’s not forget the lesbian subtext (or more like blatant references))
Yuna won a beauty contest… and got her “powers” and “toys” because of it. All of which happened in the video game so we don’t really see it in the OVA. I wouldn’t have known if I hadn’t looked on Wiki.
It’s Bishojo(??) Or so says Wiki. Meaning “cute girls” – a specific anime type. Like ‘Sailor Moon’ style characters.
Word to the wise — if you aren’t familiar with the video games (and if you weren’t playing PC video games in the early 90′s you probably aren’t) – Read the Wiki entry before watching this – sure it has spoilers in it but the bits of back story as seen in the OVA won’t make sense otherwise IMHO.

My car is sitting by itself in the parking lot. 2 empty spots on either side of it. The alarm just went off (it blew the horn 6 times and stopped).
Must be an electrical gremlin. Or maybe the heat – it’s in the 90′s out there. Hot and humid. Not sure what else it could be.

I didn’t even think of looking on eBay for this.
On the other hand, I found a copy of the first Jubei-chan 2 DVD this morning at the same place I got the first series. Four episodes.

Finally watched the rest of Jubei-chan: The Secret of the Lovely Eyepatch.
That style of anime humour isn’t really my thing but the story itself was good. And short at 13 episodes.
There’s actually a sequel Jubei-chan 2: The Counter Attack of Siberian Yagyu, another 13 episodes set a couple years later. Not sure if I’ll be seeing it any time soon. A different company did the English translation and they want $80 for the boxed set. For 13 episodes!
That’s more than a lot of boxed sets with 4 times the episodes. I don’t think they’ll sell very many at that price.

I tried the Safari v3 beta on several different machines this past week. On my work PC (Windows XP Pro) it actually works like a charm. No crashes or anything like that.
On my Powerbook (A 12″ G4 (last generation before the MacBooks – so it is maxed out as far as Powerbooks go))… on the other hand..
It ran BUT everything seemed to have slowed down. Menus dropped down slower. Text entry in some programs was slower. Firefox slowed down to almost unusable. Overall… not encouraging (Good thing it is a beta)
I uninstalled it on my Powerbook. The system seems a bit faster now. Except Firefox (2.0). That stayed slow after the uninstall. The uninstall must not have uninstalled everything.
Haven’t tried it on my mini (under either Mac OSX or XP)
I should say, just to be honest, that I’ve always felt Firefox on a Mac was excruciatingly slow. Speed wise, on my Macs, Safari has always been faster subjectively. Not a big deal. I prefer the uncluttered looked of Safari anyway. I don’t need/want “Kitchen Sink Software.” I just want a web browser that works. And I have yet needed to visit a web site that doesn’t work with Safari.
Sure, Firefox has that wonderful extension thing going for it… but I don’t need most of that. (And I don’t understand the Safari hatred in some quarters. And I don’t care that some people claim Firefox is better. So let’s not go there. Okay? I come from the “Simple is good” school of user interface design. Safari fits my philosophy better than anything else at this point.)
I do use Firefox almost exclusively at work. But that’s because I don’t have much choice other than IE. (I use both because I work on a Web 1.0 application/web interface to one of our applications (Meaning it has very little Javascript and only uses CSS for font colors, and other color things.) And no, I can’t rewrite it as a Web 2.0 kind of thing. I can’t change the interface – much.)

Not a lot of writing. So much for plans to finish off a couple stories by the summer. I feel more like a reader than a writer this year.
About all I’ve decided is that I can’t start anything new until I finish the old stuff. Hence the lack of writing. I just can’t get inspired enough about any of my stories to work on them.

Can’t explain it, I just do. Probably more than I really should. Used to drive my ex crazy.
Usually it’s about the future. I try to guess/predict what is going to happen based on things I’ve done or things that could have happened. And prepare for them. In all possible permutations.
Not a good thing, I think, to be so pessimistic as a result of that. Hope for the best, expect the worst?
I also worry about things happening as a result of something I did. Usually as a result of driving (A lot of my worries? Center around my car. Especially if I felt like I did something stupid or potentially foolish while driving. Yes, a matter of perception. )
Oddly enough… this part of the country… some of the worse drivers I’ve ever seen. They don’t pay any attention to speed limits or things like yield signs or stop signs or red lights…
And I worry that this has seriously affected my own driving ability. I know I drive faster than I should on the way to work/home every day… even if I’m driving WITH traffic so I can’t really drive much slower without causing an accident. I need to work on that. Need to get my regular speed down a notch or two. Cut back on the yellow light syndrome. Especially since I’ll be traveling this summer to a part of the country where they actually pay attention to traffic laws.
Bad driving habits? Hard to break. Especially when it is the norm for your area.
And to top all this off? This area… rated in the top 10 by my insurance company for safe drivers… in the country… based on how many accidents people have. Scary, very scary. Especially since I actually see how people around here drive.
Have to wonder if that is based on only that insurance company’s customers (Insurance wasn’t required around here until a couple years ago. So a lot of people didn’t even have car insurance.)

Another ‘dream-fic’. Maybe. Kind of. Sort of. More with the realism this time. In a sci-fi kind of way.

Two burgers
(the kind you get at a grocery store – no spices, just hamburger pressed into a round, flat disc)) – baked, not fried (Easier to clean up, less work to prepare), with onions, a slice of pseudo-cheese (Forgot I had some Swiss in the fridge), some salsa (instead of ketchup) of the non-chunky sort, and an avocado ( mashed – as if for guacamole, with a little bit of salt and lime, and a drop of green salsa (from the Mexican foods (Not sure if the brand names are really Mexican but they could be) section of my regular grocery store.)
On cheap store buns…
Not bad… dessert will be chocolate ice cream later tonight.

Some additional notes…
The problem with the blog… the partition on my Powerbook I keep my blog on… something went wrong with it last night. A huge chunk of it is unreadable. And a ton of files were in that spot… including the database file containing my daily blog entries. And my backup was 4 days old. Fortunately, my fics are stored elsewhere.
(I have a new/larger drive waiting to be installed but there are warrantee issues… and the whole — Apple doesn;t design their laptops to have user upgradable hard drives. Add memory? No problem. Add a wireless card? Sure. Change the battery. Not a big deal. Replace/upgrade the hard drive? Expect to spend an hour with a screw driver just taking it apart. There must be over 50 screws to take out to get to the hard drive. Yikes!)
I backed up everything important tonight… but there are a bunch of programs I’ll have to reinstall when I replace the hard drive (though if I want to use them, I have them installed on my mini so it isn’t a big deal.)

(From June 7th, 2007)

Nothing on tv I want to watch… so I have soccer on ( MLS – Houston vs Colorado) as filler.

Gotta wonder who picked out the uniform colors.

One team is all in sky/powder/light blue (Colorado?). The other is in white and orange. (Is there a rule that socks have to match shirts (Except the goalies) ?)

Watching them in HD? Makes the eyeballs hurt.

The only ones wearing “Don’t mess with me” colors are the goalies.

I don’t remember such clashing colors when I watched the World Cup last year…

(From June 7th, 2007)

Spent an hour tonight wandering around Croft Manor. Looks like Lara just moved in. Boxes everywhere. Other than a couple computers sitting on a couple desks in the library… this looks like pre “TR: Legend” (Yes, it SHOULD since it in theory takes place way before that.)

I won’t give away any details but… the basic layout of the Manor is the same as in Legend but the are some new hidden passageways and some things outdoors that are new. And some of what is in Legend is incomplete/unfinished so you can’t play it exactly the same.

I also think Lara has a new style of one move… when she jumps up from one ledge to another she sort of does a kick.

This weekend we’ll do some real exploring…
9:30:20 PM