Final Fantasy X-2

12.29.2003

My tv watching demographic must be the target audience for the latest Final Fantasy game. Over the past few days, I've seen commercials for the game humpteen billion times. Normally this would annoy me, much as the sequence of Castrol oil commercial, razor blade commercial, and Snickers commercial seem to appear during WWE Raw, but the commercial has a catchy little pop tune that I find myself bouncing around too.

Thanks tothe goodness we call the internet (god bless the internet), I found that the song in the commerical is "Real EMotion" by Koda Kumi. So, anyone searching the net for the song can now have a little help in case they don't want to shell out $50 for the Final Fantasy X-2 soundtrack.

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Hunka Hunka Christmas Time

12.23.2003

I'm not one for all the hullabaloo that goes along with Christmas. Ever since that first Christmas that I got clothes and cologne instead of toys, it's lost its luster. That's part of why I still get myself toys to this day, I guess to make up for it.

Every once in a while I do get a little in the Christmas mood and find myself a Christmas cd (maybe every other year). This year the spirit kicked in and I found myself with an Elvis cd to bounce along with in the truck. It's a little goofy. It's a little hokey. Of the 10 songs on the cd, not one is over 2:20 long, and most are under 2 minutes. But it still brings back thoughts of the good old days, when I would get TOYS for Christmas!

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More Fun With Phone Solicitors

12.22.2003

I was poking around on the computer Sunday when the phone rang. I answered and found it was the same solicitor that had called a couple of weeks ago about the septic tank cleaner. Not the same company, the same guy. This time he was selling some super stain cleaner that will also get rid of hair clogs in your drain. He kept going on and on, and would even defer payment until the end of February, so against my better judgement (and to shut him up) I'm letting him ship me the stuff. Of course, I'm going to ship it right back, unless I forget, and then we can start this whole thing over like we did with the septic ttank cleaner.

But the guy kept on talking and we started to talk about websites. It seems he was only a quarter away from getting his webmaster degree. I tried hard not to laugh, because I know a webmaster degree might be worth the paper it's printed on. He asked me about things like Dreamweaver and PHP, ASP and shopping carts. Along the way, I learned that (1) a webmaster degree teaches you a lot of words, but you really don't know what they mean, and (2) this guy is the prototypical salesman who thinks he can get rich by doing every little thing that comes along.

Case in point: he thinks the next big thing will be eBrochures - a pop-up, multipage presentation that can be sent via email, like on AOL.

There were just so many things wrong with that I didn't know where to start. Then I remembered that I didn't really want to talk to the guy anyway, so I stuck with "Wow. Really? That does sound like a good idea."

Now I've just got to think of why I'm going to send back the cleaner they're sending, because I just know he's going to call back. I'm like his best friend now. I'm thinking his super cleaner may clog my drains instead of cleanse them!

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Spooooon!

12.19.2003

I came across a great find yesterday at Best Buy, The Tick Live Action Series on sweet binary flow. I only watched maybe 2 episodes when it originally aired (like most people who knew who The Tick was, I bet), so finding all of the episodes was like finding a little treasure chest.

I've been a Tick fan for years. The Tick started out as a black and white comic from an independant publisher and would come out... occasionally. I think quarterly would be a good way to put it, except for the year that nothing came out due to the author/artists mother dying. Popularity grew, and the comic evolved into a cartoon. The cartoon primarily rehashed the old comic scripts, merging some, cutting out parts of others, and evolving into something new. After a couple of years, the cartoon morphed into a live action series (of 8 episodes).

The best part of The Tick, in any incarnation, has always been The Ticks dialog. There's just a way the words sound coming out of his mouth (whether written or spoken). After watching the live action series last night, I noticed that Patrick Warburton does a good job delivering his lines. I don't know if it's intentional, but his voice carries an Adam West-like tone, and nothing says super hero dialogue like Adam West. I think that's what makes me like the series. The other actors, the action, the setting, all of it fades to the back as I just listen to words of wisdom that come from The Tick. My favorite is after hitting the ground from a falling elevator, The Tick looks to his fallen foe and says "Gravity is a harsh mistress." Thinking back to the times I've tripped and fallen, I can concur that she is, indeed, a harsh mistress.

And now I'll have the coolest internal dialogue going on all day...

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Photo Printer Happiness

12.18.2003

Last night Gina came over to print Christmas pictures she had taken with her new/my old Olympus digital camera. She had managed about 90 pictures of Jacob and the dog (mostly the dog - that's why she's Crazy Dog Lady), and had settled on 3 to send out. 1 of Jacob and the dog, 2 of just the dog.

This was my first real use of the ne HP photo printer, and along the way I had to dig out the instructions. Instructions! For a printer! I'm gettin' old.

My first problemwas how to clear a paper jam (there's a big door on the back that says "Remove to clear paper jam"). Evidently the glossy, cardboard separator for some Epson photo paper I had wasn't printer friendly. I was printing 4x6 pictures, so Ihad to learn how the 4x6 paper tray works - it's a lot like loading a magazine into a gun, so I thought that part was cool.

I ended up loading the memory card into the printer and printing straight from there. The quality was very good, although the cropping could have used a little tweaking. Between test prints and keepers, I think I ended up printing 45 4x6 sized pictures last night. After the last one finished, the printer flashed a warning that it was time to replace the black ink cartridge (which is really a photo black ink cartridge with 3 shades of grey). The pictures were fairly dark, so I think getting 45 pictures out of a cartidge is actually pretty good, especially for the quality of pictures I got.

For now, I'm going to say that my HP 7960 is a keeper. Now I've just got to go see how much that ink cartridge is going to cost me.

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