Holiday Flat II

11.25.2004

Ah, Thanksgiving. A time for giving thanks for and eating turkey. And for me, a day to change a flat tire since I managed to drive over a nail last night! Wednesday was just not my day.

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The Loons Are Loose

11.24.2004

Usually the world and I get along pretty well. Part of it is that I respect how the world works, and the world in turn respects how I work. Well, the world's schedule got moved around a little Wednesday and it pissed me off!

The silly season begins on Thanksgiving. On that day, everyone begins to act stupid. You can turn left if you saw that the light was green at some point in the past. People walking in front of you will seemingly stop and move over to get in your way. Traffic triples. I'm ok with this. I know when it starts, I know when to expect it. As such, I usually make plans for my last trip of pre-holiday supplies (food, toiletries, and such) on the day before Thanksgiving to then limit the amount of time I have to spend with the stupid.

Except someone let them all out a day early this year.

I made a trip to Target to get some groceries. It seems each woman there had a minimum of 3 children tethered to a buggy. Each woman would manage to find another woman to talk to (along with their 3 tethered children). The 2, or 8, of them would then park buggies and stand in a fashion to somehow take up the whole aisle. And I managed to find this on 3 separate aisles while I was there.

People were everywhere. Walking slow. Getting in my way.

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Hard Drive Fun

11.22.2004

2 weeks ago I ordered new hard drives. One of mine was developing some bad sectors, which makes me paranoid enough to replace it at the drop of a hat. 1 week ago, a box of hard drives was waiting on my stoop. At that point my real troubles began.

I opened the box to find two Western Digital 250GB hard drives. And that was it. No install discs (usually packed with scripts to transfer data), no instructions, nothing. I'm still running Windows 2000, and I had heard about a problem with large hard drives. It turns out that there's a natural limit of 137GB on a hard drive for most versions of Windows. Luckily, they've patched this for Windows 2000 (in Service Pack 4) and XP (Service Pack 1). I had installed SP4, so I thought I was good to go.

I installed the 1st drive and.... nothing happened. I opened up "My Computer" and didn't see "Your New Hard Drive". I went into the Control Panel to Add New Hardware, and the drive was already there, it even had drivers installed. I was guessing the drive needed to be formatted, but I needed a way to point to the drive to format it. After trying multiple guesses for a day, I finally went to the Western Digital website for an answer. It seems I needed to add the drive under Control Panel - >Administrative Tools -> Computer Management -> Storage -> Disk Management. OK, I can do that. Once I did that it seemed to work ok. I now had a 233GB (after formatting, you always lose a little from formatting) hard drive showing up! I tried the same steps on the second drive. Only 131GB were showing up. That didn't sound right, so I tried to re-format the drive, but the max size it would give me was 131GB.

After trying all kinds of things (including a wrong turn when I accidently knocked the extra IDE card loose), I finally went back to the Western Digital site and searched through their tools. It seems that they have a tool that not only transfers your data and shows you how to install, but also sets up and formats the drive. I only had to search down from the product page 4 extra levels (at about 1.5 days/level) to find out that this was a much needed application to make my hard drive experience a happy one. Western Digital bastards.

So now I have all my hard drives installed and recognized. I'm moving files from old drives to new drives now, hoping to soon have 578GB of potential formatted hard drive hardness from my two new 250GB drives and an old 120GB. All of my old stuff almost filled up an 80GB drive. Now I bet I'll never have to delete anything ever again!

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EC F'N W

11.17.2004

One of the new video releases yesterday was The Rise and Fall of ECW. It's a 2-disc set, the first disc being a 3 hour documentary about the life of ECW, while the 2nd disc has some of the better (I guess) matches. Last night I sat and watched the documentary disc and was amazed by how good it was.

The one thing that really comes through is how much Paul Heyman (The guy running the show at ECW) and Eric Bischoff (The guy running WCW back then) really dislike one another. I've always liked Heyman. Well, once he stopped being a manager I liked him. You could just tell he was doing what he loved, and it still comes through in the interviews when he talks about ECW. In the interview segments where Heyman and Bischoff were talking about one another, you could just feel the animosity between them. It makes you wonder how they do now that they're both working for WWE.

Although 3 hours seems like a long show to cover the history of a wrestling organization, there seemed to be a lot of things left out. They really only touched on the wrestlers that made the move from ECW to WWE (except for the Sandman). I had started watching ECW about the time their popularity peaked. A local cable access channel would air the show at midnight on Saturday, usually (that's the problem with local cable, sometimes people forget to turn a switch). I got caught up in how different the story lines and action were. Like Paul, you could tell that these guys loved what they did, there's no other explanation for why they would put their bodies through the torture that they were going through. They were the underground, counter culture wrestling group. If there were a way that they could have remained that group and survived financially, I bet they would still be around today.

Bleeding. Jumping off 2 story balconies onto burning tables. Cursing at the fans the whole way down.

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More Binary Wrestling

11.16.2004

It's been a busy couple of months for me and my wrestling game fetish. I got Day of Reckoning for the Gamecube, which made me get a Gamecube, so while I was at it I got 2 more older wrestling games for the Gamecube. I've learned that wrestling games on the Gamecube are fairly disappointing. I got the latest Smackdown game for the PS2, my annual "it's November, get new wrestling game" fix. It too, was a bit of a disappointment this year. This leads me to the wild card of wrestling games, Rumble Roses.

Rumble Roses isn't the traditional wrestling game. It's chicks. All chicks. All showing off the latest in graphics with bouncing boobs and butts. And a mud wrestling match. Now, as much as that sounds like a porn game, it's actually a good wrestling game. The move sets are well animated. It's not too arcade-like (except when the evil cyborg shows up at the end and starts whirling around). I especially like the way you can concentrate on a specific body part to wear your opponent down.

As far as story, the game plays more like DOA 3. You start with about 10 characters. You pick one and start a story mode that lasts about 10 matches. While each story follows roughly the same track, each one has back story differences unique to the character. Once finishing the story line, you unlock alternate costumes along with the character's heel (or face, depending on which you're playing) character. You can then play an abbreviated story mode with the unlocked character to unlock more costumes. Once you unlock everybody, a new character is unlocked (I've got 5 more to unlock before I find out, but I'm betting the bonus character is the cyborg chick).

It's a fun little game. Going through the story mode for one of the characters takes 20-30 minutes, so it's a nice little diversion. It lacks a lot of things that most other wrestling games have come to offer as standard - creating your own wrestler, different types of matches, guys - but I think that not trying to do everything is what makes this game good. Except for the voice acting. Oh god, it's just horrible. It's like it's been translated from English, to Japanese, back to English with inflections in all the wrong places. But I don't think anybody plays this game to listen to the actors. It's all about the bouncing boobage.

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