free speaker stands: score!

If you didn't know, Legion has come home to small-town Sherbrooke. Amazing what you can find "just lying around." And the old adage "one man's garbage" has never been truer. I was sitting on the back-porch this morning and happened to look down into the junkpile behind the cabin when my "eagle-eyes" happened to pick out a pair of black bars in a matt-finish.

That doesn't look right for a rusty pile of crap, I thought.

Turns out that a few days before, my grandfather was taking a walk around the neighbourhood and stumbled on this "junk" - not that he knew what it was, but decided to pick it up from the neighbour's garbage on the sidewalk anyway. What I have now are a pair of speaker-stands complete with rubber slip-proof pads.

Sweetness: all I had to do was hosed them down (seems they've been outdoor for a bit now). I'm waiting for them to dry but in a bit I'll load'em into the car to take back to my apartment. Score!

w00t: new cabling

Someday I will be l337 ...but until then I'll just settle to tag along when babou goes shopping. Today I took my lunch break to visit a computer store here in town... While there I changed my mind about spending all that money on extra RAM and decided to splurge on something completely unnecessary...

Yay - UV light reactive cabling for my IDE ports! :p

Admittedly, I ended up spending a little more than I had hoped anyhow. The total came just just around 45. Yikes. But that's a full set - pair of IDE cables for my optical drives and for my harddrives, and then a smaller floppy cable.

Do I actually have a black light inside my case? No.

Do I even have a window on my case so that would even see this stuff? No.

I suck? yes... :)

Force FX: the last word isn't

Well, I'm back from the store. Talked to Rob and showed him the lightsaber. He gave the eye and found the one thing that Master Replicas might use against me: a small blemish on the blade that happens to land dead-center where the dark spot is. He said, "to be honest, if I were MR, I would use this against you and say the customer obviously hit it too hard and broke it so we won't honour the warranty." Well...

My only counter would be to say, "there are similar markings all over the blade though." Just for the hell of it we also opened up a fresh sample the store happened to have in stock (a different one unfortunately) just to compare. Even I had to admit, the fresh one was somewhat more pristine than mine...

Anyhow, I knew I was telling him something he already knew, but I decided to mention it anyway figuring that I couldn't hurt: I was surprised at just how hard I had to hit it before it triggered the "clash" sound-effect. So you could imagine just how gingerly I had be handling - that it was highly unlikely that I would have been abusing it.

He took my name down for a replacement anyway (whether MR chooses to take mine back or not) so I'm covered. I thanked him and was on my way.

I'm almost afraid to light it up in the meantime...
...almost. Maybe I'll take a few more action shots if I have time for it. ^.^;;

evening wrap-up: batteries changed

Well, it seems my Force FX woes aren't as bad as I thought. Firstly, I went and bought some fresh batteries (something I promised myself I'd never do since I personally think we're at the level of technology that we should be able to avoid environmentally harmful disposable batteries).

I swapped in the new set and lit up the lightsaber. To my dismay it fired up just fine. And just to test my own sanity, I swapped in the old batteries to retry them and sure enough, not only was the dark spot back, but it was also noticeably dimmer with the weaker batteries.

However, as I played with the newly re-energized toy (no pun intended, I actually bought Duracell brand), I paid extra close attention what was the dark spot. Sure enough, on close inspection, the blade flicker at the same spot. And although I don't ever intend to abuse this thing - it's a collector's item after all, not a toy, per se - it's disappointing to note this imperfection. And a couple of test tapping against my futon (to trigger the "clash" sound effect), the flicker was more noticeable... And at one point, the dark spot returned until I gave it a gentle tap again to shake up its innards.

I've sent an email to Master Replicas asking if this was at all "normal" before pursuing warranty service... not sure what their turn-around is for email (but I'm told they're really good for customer service). I still aim to call the store tomorrow to try getting a hold of "Rob" - the infamous store owner I keep hearing about. If anything I'll get to ask if he's aware of anybody else with a similar condition on thier lightsaber collectable...

Well ...they don't know from what.

So I just got off the phone with the store. The girl who answered said she was sorry but that there wasn't much she could do at the moment and suggested I call back and try getting a hold of the store owner himself. In the meantime I'm just sitting here ventilating... which isn't good because I'm not getting a lot of work done.

I'm thinking now I'll head over next door and pick up a fresh set of batteries. I have my doubts that new batteries will help, but at least it'll put to rest the question at the back of my head that goes: "maybe it's just that weak batteries won't light up the whole thing?"

Anyway, she said she'd leave a message with the boss and that I should try to call around 3pm tomorrow when he's there to supervise shipment arrivals.

You know what'd be really neat? If this turns out like that portable keyboard I had for my PDA. It's had a stuck key, I called about it and was told it'd cost less to just buy a new one than to repair. And months later, miraculously, it just suddenly started working again. Wishful thinking...

Force FX: defect!

Uh oh... problem. On the very first day I got it home I played with it for a while. The bright blade in the dark was nearly blinding... thought my eyes were playing tricks on me because the light was almost... vibrating.

It was last night the truth was revealed as without a doubt, I knew there was something weird going on with the Force FX lightsaber I bought the day before... a dark spot appeared. Every movement seemed to indicate there was something knocked loose in there because the dark spot would briefly light up and then going out again. Sucks.... will need to call the store and see about collecting on the warranty.

I mean really, I didn't do anything that was unreasonable to it. Cripes: a demo survived like 3 weeks in the hands of bratty kids at the local Toys R Us earlier this summer. Well, better now than later, I suppose.

expired coupons - argh! >:(

They do it to piss you off, I'm sure.

I scan Redflagdeals.com regularly but every time those Customer Appreciation Nights roll around at Futureshop I manage to miss them! Oh well.

Heh - also just realized that a $5 discount coupon at YesAsia.com expired this weekend. Bleah. I'd been saving up for a CD I wanted too. I know - it's "only" $5... I shouldn't be all riled up for nothing.

Annoying.

But I do have that T-shirt ...so there. Cosmic justice.

Force-FX: purple!

Well it started out fairly harmless - I hadn't planned on it. Up until this Friday I was still set to hunt for a blue lightsaber... but luck would have things turn out differently: While out and about yesterday, I walked into the local comic shop and was chatting with one of the guys at the counter. The lightsaber topic came up again so I asked if they'd be getting those fancy "Force FX" types in...

Turns out they had been holding onto a sold-out-from-the-manufacturer purple Mace Windu lightsaber... They called the guy who special ordered it but he never returned their call. In fact, if the guy didn't call within that day, the hold would be dropped and the product would be fair-game.

The guy also tipped me off that as of this week, anybody walking into the store wearing their store-logo T-shirt would be "surprised" with a 10% discount! *nudge nudge* Just goes to show it's not always what you know... but who you know.

So this morning, I hopped in, bought a T-shirt, put it on right away, and there you go - Works out to being a free T-shirt and a few bucks off...

Yeah so the picture is kinda blurry - the dangers of dim-light photography... but you get to see a couple of things I didn't plan out: in the background between my face and the glowing blade you can make out my latest eBay winning: the statue of Kasumi bent over adjusting her stocking. My face is surprisingly clear and you get to see the new glasses I got back in May (and a haircut which just gives a goofy silhouette in the dark). What you don't see is the gold and chrome hilt of the lightsaber and the watch that I was bragging about earlier this year (oh well).

Also what you don't see is the funky Comic Book Shoppe logo on the front of the T-shirt (I didn't mean to hide it for the photo but I didn't really plan on taking a picture of it either).

mailbox: irony of ironies

After that post about the blue lightsaber I suddenly had the urge to run out and buy one of those Force FX edition props. I'd seen a couple around town before at several locations (all of which sold out fairly quickly). Naturally I spent the previous day or two after hours hopping from specialty store to specialty store looking for the high-end collectible. Didn't find the one I wanted.

This afternoon tho for whatever reason I decided to pick up some juice from the local market before heading home and decided to stop by another comicbook shop a little closer to home. What should I find there but that 1/6 scale Kasumi character statue. I stood there momentarily eyeing the price-tag doing calculations in my head about whether or not I had overpaid on eBay for the very same thing. (I didn't, thankfully).

Then it dawned on me: hey - that was just about a week ago! Shouldn't my own be arriving any day now? I'll go home and check!

Naturally by this time it was about 5:45pm... and what do I find in my mailbox but a notification card from the post office saying that they'd dropped off my box in a "safe-drop" location... that location being my apartment admin office... *sigh*

I guess I'll be hurrying home tomorrow after work! "Yippeeeee!"

Ten points to whoever can ID that last quote for me... ~_^

abused poultry?

This just in!

Now hear this: battered chicken does not involve domestic violence from roosters.

That is all.

Lady Death: mediocre anime

Well it was like 2 years in the making and been a year since it was released direct to video... I'll be up front, I've never been much of a Chaos! fan. In my view they were somewhat imaginative but more or less fluff in terms of story ideas. In fact, I've never even read a whole Lady Death comic from start to end. Even the concept of a hot woman in a revealing leather bikini outfit ruling over hell wasn't enough of a visual catch for me to stick around.

That said, I'm not a total idiot about it. Lady Death's character design is among the comics pantheon of classic designs and started the "bad girls are sexy" trend of the early 90's. I'd just settle for looking at an occasional pin-up than to sit thru reading a mediocre comic.

I suppose that would explain why I felt the way I do about last year's Lady Death: The Motion Picture. It's not like it was a budget production or anything. Behind the script adaptation was Carl Macek - an icon in the anime industry. Whether you appreciate what he did to Macross or not, one cannot argue against the fact that Robotech was a serious world-wide hit that did wonders for Japanese anime awareness at large. That said, the man's been pretty much behind the curtains since 1985 managing a small-time animation importing business and desperately trying to revive Robotech as a franchise.

Lady Death was Macek's attempt at another hit. The concept: bring on the R-rated violence to the screen via the anime format. Sounds okay: especially since anime has hit it big-time State-side in the last couple of years. One problem... Lady Death has been out of the lime-light for about 10 frickin' years! And old-school fans of Chaos! have more or less moved on since that company restructured its line of comics a few years ago.

So the movie isn't coming out under the best circumstances. Was it good? In a word, not really. It was by no means bad. If they were going for the anime-inspired look and feel, then yes, they succeeded in that respect. But what for? I got the feeling the whole time that they did so only because they felt this was the only way they could get away with the blood and gore. And unfortunately for anime, this projects a bad image... since we all know nowadays that there's anime of all sorts for all tastes - not just the violent imports that arrived in the late 80's.

It was okay... for a Lady Death movie. But I think we're allowed a right to demand better of the industry.

Seems to me that old Carl is stuck in the 80's.

The Lightsaber was blue (or white?)

On a whim I stopped by Toys R Us the other night looking for accessories for my PSP. Which on a side note: there's been a ton of price drops across the board including UMD movies for just over $10 instead of $20!

Anyway, I found that they had those Master Replicas "Force FX" lightsabers in stock again. Seriously thought about picking up a blue one (in my childhood I held the misconception that Luke and Obi-Wan both shared the same blue lightsaber). Anyway, the blue one in stock was actually "Anakin's Lightsaber" from Episode 3... which if memory serves, is also the one given to Luke about 28 years ago.

But I wasn't so sure - were those two hilts indeed identical - I decided to Google it. You wouldn't believe the forum debates that pop up with that search... Granted most of these forum posts were made prior to the release of the prequels. It's now generally accepted that good-guys have blue or green blades and the bad-guys use red... a rare exception is the case of Samual L Jackson saying "how about purple?" and George Lucas saying "okay, why not?"

But there are folks out there convinced that the original lightsaber in Star Wars was yellow!
...common sense should tell us that visual effects of 1977 hardly stand up to today's standards, but I'm fairly certain that even as a child I recognized that it was supposed to be blue. Yes, I'll agree there were several times where the footage looks washed out and the blade didn't have any colour at all (it appears gray-white), but it never once looked yellow to me.

Anywhow - just find it funny to see that some people are so adamant in their belief that the blade was yellow...

BTW - I never did find a clear screen shot of the "Luke" lightsaber prop from the 1977 movie. :P

Here comes another one

Wheee!
Didn't you see this one coming... I stumbled on a Paypal/eBay coupon over at redflagdeals for 10% off a transaction not including shipping (it expires today).

http://cgi.ebay.ca/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=5987093157&rd=1&sspagename=STRK%3AMEWN%3AIT&rd=1

She's Kasumi from the Dead or Alive series of video games.
I'm pretty picky when it comes to these collectible statues - especially since Kasumi happens to be one of my favourite game characters - I hold her merchandise to a higher standard. This is the first time i've seen one that looks remotely like the image I have in my mind's eye for a cartoon version of her.

There've been other sculpts but they never looked quite right to me.

ZZ Top @ Bluesfest

It occurs to me that a lot of the time I make my life out to be fairly dull. But it's not entirely boring day to day. Take last night for instance. I live in Ottawa and there're plenty of live events to see in the summer: Bluesfest is one. I'm not a huge fan of blues music but I'll make an exception for hard rock laced with blues undertones.

The ZZ Top concert was fantastic. I learned that I really ought to expand my horizons. And that these guys have a repertoire of songs going back over 35 years. They played some stuff older than I am! ^_^;

But for the stuff I did know - wow: a pumping version of Viva Las Vegas followed by the classic "Eliminator" trilogy back-to-back was something else. And finally an encore performance where you could see who was a fan and who was just there because they had week-long event passes. After the "casuals" thinned out the crowd, the rest of us really got into their rendition of Jail House Rock and medley of Tush and La Grange - classics any fan worth their salt knows by heart.

Twenty-five bucks for a day-ticket? Heck, that was the bargain of the century.

...but first... about that deck

http://www.clarioncanada.com/en/products/source_units/DXZ755MC.html

Ah - that would be sweetness. Too bad it's so damn expensive. Just that I've lived on radio for so long it'd be really nice to have a working deck in my car again. And in the meantime, I already have a television set - primitive as it may be - that still works just fine.

But that sweetness is calling to me... if I were smart, I'd wait till it went on sale and used the money I save on one of those extended warranty plans. (*sigh*) I'm just a little peeved about being burned on that dead p.o.s. that I have right now. Considering the wear and tear I put on this stuff, maybe for once, one of those plans might actually be worth it for a change.

plasma-envy

Some people just had some very different priorities 5 years ago... I bought my first car.

My Singapore penpal sent me a JPG of her family room over the weekend ...I drooled at the sight of a 40-something inch plasma screen television. She told me it was a very old model: something her folks picked up years ago at a stunning $30'000SGD (that's just under $20'000 USD if I've done my math right). And in her own bed room is a 32" LCD television...

And to think I was gun-shy about firing off a few thousand bucks for a smaller LCD screen a little while back. If anything, this revelation about her television arrangement has gotten me thinking that I ought to be comfortable with spending money on a bit of luxury. Why confine my spending to a few comics a month or a few new gokin for my colletion every year?

Besides which, my car is about paid for (another two months, I believe)... *sigh*

If bored Friday, I've been dead since

What a wash-out... I just glanced at the clock and thought: wow - it's almost supper time. That's right, I never even made it out of my apartment today. Just as well, the temperature went up again.

Went into town as usual yesterday on foot. Wasn't nearly as hot as today. My haul:
The OMAC Project #3
DC Special: The Return of Donna Troy #2
Amazing Fantasy #10
Fathom #2

Wipeout Pure for PSP used - saved about $5.

And a novelty T-shirt featuring a print of the green 1-Up mushroom from the classic Super Mario Bros. game...

No comments to share on any of it. Except perhaps the OMAC story-line - freaky. Cool... can't wait to see what this all leads up to. I'm not nearly as hardcore when it comes to collecting comics as before, but I thoroughly enjoyed Identity Crisis last summer so I'm looking forward to this big event DC has been hyping up for the fall.

Oh, I've also discovered that I'm none too sure of how I look in green. Maybe I should've gone with the red mushroom shirt...

it's worse... I'm so lonely...

What's worse than a dull afternoon in the office? It's being the only one here on a Friday... the rest of my cube-mates had the foresight to book the afternoon. Which normally ain't that bad. But there sounds like somebody else in the cube adjacent to mine who I don't know (not part of our division - might just be a temp or something). So I'm hesitant to play my music....

Well, it's 3pm. Another hour? I'm thinking I might just skip out for f*ck sake.

Wanna know how I dealt with the last hour? I'm completely unmotivated. I debugged some minor compiler error I had really slowly. That is, I'd check something and then turn away for absolutely no reason... sometimes just to stare out the window. Some times to shuffle a few sheet of paper around. At one point I even pulled out my PSP and watched part of that Ultraman Nexus show I mentioned this morning!! ...and I got away with all this slack...

Naturally I had a crazy-long lunch break alone for almost 2 hours...

Bah! I just had to get this all out of my system. I'm thinking perhaps I oughtta get back and do a bit of serious work before heading out. But still... do have that motivation problem. I'm in one of those dead-zones. I'm fairly certain that I put in a fair amount of effort at work. I'm entitled to some slack now and then, but today's just been ridiculous. I mean, if I were boss and I knew what I know about myself, I'd have myself fired.

low-key morning

Hmm... I should be eating more - I feel great after a big breakfast. I think my metabolism has sped up lately. I eat less at meals because I get full but I'm hungry pretty much all the time.

Maybe it's those crunches I've been doing every morning and evening. I gave up the dumbells for now. It reached a point where I wasn't seeing any results from my upper-body workout routine... But crunches can't be bad. Maybe I'll eventually develope a six pack (if I'm lucky in time for next summer?) ^o^;

MSN Messenger has been a curse and a blessing.
Got to chat with my penpal more frequently (even tho we have to keep in mind that we're on opposite sides of the world - when it's late night for me, she's in her office, etc).
But lately I've been hearing a whole lot more from my brother than I really care for... It's not him personally. I just feel obligated to carry a conversation on that I had no interest in starting. Luckily, so far he's the only one who's been doing that to me. Last night for instance. I got home around 7pm and only a few minutes after logging on, he messages me. There was a little light banter but then it sort of dragged on and my MSN window didn't close until around 10pm. At which point I pretty much ignored him for the rest of the night.

Went down to the cafeteria for breakfast. I sat with some former co-workers (we're all in the same complex, but we don't actually work together anymore). We did some random catching up and talking behind other peoples' backs. I feel kinda dirty about it. Gossip doesn't agree with me.

Looks like eBloggy is down again (and/or just acting really weird). Forums are not even up so I don't know what's going on... I think I lost some entries again.

Got up with that memory stick over the last two days. Loaded it with videos I downloaded of Ultraman. Whoa - I can't believe that franchise is still running strong in its native Japan. The current series airing on TV is all modernized with CG monsters and FX now. What the heck? But the good-old rubber-suited versions are still used for the hand-to-hand fight scenes tho. ^_^

Speaking of Japanese stuff... I picked up the first volume of the manga for Sakura Taisen yesterday at a book store. It's cute - whoever this artist is, they've brilliantly captured the look of Kosuke Fujishima's character-designs.

Need to do groceries tonight... but first, gotta get back to work. Deadlines looming for the end-of-week stuff...

949 megabytes in my pocket

Well, got the delivery confirmation shortly before lunch so I ran out after having a quick meal and picked up that memory stick. Got back, popped the stick marked 1.0Gb into my PSP eager to check the actual capacity (I had heard various oddball numbers over time).

The total on mine: 949Mb... which isn't so bad I guess.
Industry standard is to round Gigabytes into billions of bytes - yes, even hard-drive manufacturers are guilty of this misleading practice. But measures of bytes are supposed to be base 2 and not base 10... that is where the confusion is.

Take 1 billion and divide by 1024 - that gives you the same value in kilobytes. Then again by 1024 to figure out the number of megabytes. According to the storage industry, 1 "gigabyte" is actually only 953 megabytes.

3 or 4 megabytes is acceptable for the overhead of defining a file structure, I guess. But still, the final tally is that I'm being shortaged about 50Mb on the Gb.

Wanna know something even funnier? The package for my new memory stick pro duo was marked "1.0GB" - as if indicating .0 would make it any more accurate. I'd said that it only indicates they are accurately screwing us over...

Outgeeking YOU

I can't wait now. Over the weekend I finally found an incredible deal on Memory Stick Pro Duo - 1Gb at about $50 less than anywhere else. So good I even quit the eBay hunt. What for? my PSP of course...

The oddball development tho is that www.NCIX.com offered a deal on Express shipping - it was even cheaper than regular mail. (WTF?). I didn't realize however than "express" meant courier service. Which in itself is pretty cool since I pretty much get it overnight.

But here's the catch - as a 9-to-5er, I'm never home to receive stuff. Argh! So I sat here today periodically checking the tracking number on-line just waiting to see the "attempted delivery" notice...
Well, "receiver not available" finally happened a few minutes ago so I called the 1-800 number to have them redirect the package across town to the local shipping centre closer to me (the "local" one to my postal code is not very "local" at all).

On a side note: I also gave up my eBay hunt for a copy of Kill Bill Vol.1 on UMD. With the money I saved on the Memory Stick, I decided it was worth the cost of simply buying it at the local Wal-mart. Yes, I've heard it all before - they're a faceless ruthless entity with no scruples. But the fact is, sometimes they really do offer the best prices. And if I can save 5 bucks, so be it. Anyway, I got my copy for only $25CAD.
True it's still quite pricy considering I can get both Volumes 1 and 2 for the same price on DVD, but the whole point of this exercise was for the novelty of having it on my portable....

And that, my friend, outgeeks YOU too. ^_^;

Logitech headset - this whole time?!

You might recall a little while ago, I blogged about a game called Lifeline for PS2. Well, the game works by you talking into a mic and issuing commands to the main character who responds and walks around doing things.

Well, that was months ago when I borrowed the game and the Playstation 2 headset from my brother. I just realized last night that the headset is actually just a standard Logitech headset for USB.

Anyway, it took a few tries but in short order I got my MSN Messenger configured to recognize the headset. And for the first time, I finally got around to actually speaking to and hearing the voice of my penpal buddy from Singapore! I can't believe that after so many years being in contact with each other she and I finally spoke to each other... neat!

The only down side was that I think around midnight my ISP was acting up (either that or this headset isn't too reliable). She said she heard me just fine but I had trouble making out her complete sentences as there were plenty of drop-outs. Which was too bad since she was excited to spend a bit of time with a fellow-multi-linguist. She wanted to hear more of me speaking to her in French (it's a long story - she's been taking lessons since high school). "Come to Singapore! The women here will think you're awefully sexy when they hear your French," she enthused!

*blush*

Anyway... so it was Canada Day yesterday. And I ended up spending the whole day inside. It was so damn hot and humid. I just couldn't bring myself to step outside. So I slept through most of the day and then only got out for a walk around 10pm. Headed over to the riverside to see the fireworks launched from Parliament Hill.

It cooled down dramatically. And last night I actually had to close my bedroom window and turn off the fan in the middle of the night. This morning I stepped out onto the balcony and nearly froze... I think today'll be great for that walk I wanted to take. Bring my huge backpack and shop like a shopoholic should... :)