chaos!...more stuff...

Just catching up on all sorts of stuff... photo-records.
Here's that groovy jacket I've been wearing lately... Tacky zipper is in blue-green-red: the station logo for TVB - a well-known network in Hong Kong. My aunt sent this jacket over as a gift last year but I never wore it. Mostly I'm afraid to get it dirty - it's just so damn white!
These are the shoes I breifly mentioned a couple of weeks ago in the FusionAce blog. It's not evident in this photo, but the Phat Farm logo is insanely reflective in daylight. It's so damn *bling bling* that I'm almost embarrassed to wear them. After 2 weeks, I'm stunned they're still as white as they are.
Not a Robert Jordan fan... but a little while ago I happened on Conan the Barbarian as directed by Dino DeLaurentis (I think he directed it...) on MovePix. Gave me a sudden craving to read about the godfather of sword-and-sorcery... picked this up last weekend. So far it's been fun. A little juvenile, but I'm okay with a little escapism (hence the post about Power Girl's chest the other day).
I remember posting about winning Kasumi a while back but I don't recall actually taking a picture... so here she is at the front of my case. The angle plays tricks on the sizes but Yuna (the gun-slinger from Final Fantasy X-2) is actually the same scale as Kasumi. I picked up Yuna this afternoon using my discount-T-shirt... what a great deal. Also in this show: Sayaka from Mazinger Z, Maria from Goldorak (up in the back) and Major Kusanagi from Ghost in the Shell (far back).
Finally, just wanted to mention for those keeping track: no, there wasn't any news about the lightsaber (whether a replacement or a repair under warranty). Rob says "to be honest, it's not looking good... but there's always hope and no news doesn't always mean bad news." I reminded him that time is rapidly running out on Master Replicas' limited warranty... he shook his head and ecould only sympathize with me.

Minor follow-ups: fans and props

Hmm... let's see.
Just check the order tracking option on the NCIX web site. Still haven't shipped that CPU fan I ordered. At this rate it'll ship and then it'll take forever to go cross country and knowing my luck it'll arrive in town on Monday morning... Labour Day. So I won't see it until Tuesday. Ugh.

Then again, maybe it really is slotted for shipping today and they just haven't gotten around to it since NCIX is on the west coast (it's late afternoon here but, y'know).

After being thoroughly thrown off schedule last night around midnight I had the urge to play with that defective (or just REALLY delicate) lightsaber. Dug it out from storage and plugged in a set of batteries. Worked okay but still, swing it hard enough and you see a portion go dimmer. Got over being disappointed to went to bed. I suppose I'll live, but I just wish I could get an answer from the store about when I might be able to expect a replacement.
I was digging around my wallet over the weekend and realized that it has already been a month since I bought the thing. Holy cow, what's up with Rob's distributor?! Like I said, at worst case I'll always have to treat mine with extra-special care, but I certainly wish I had one that worked right like everybody else's.

Lastly - finally got around to picking up Final Fantasy X-2 again. Damn it's been a while. I could barely recall where I was in the story. Still fun though and I got back into it fairly quickly.

Need to get milk, juice and other essentials tonight, but it'll likely be another session of PS2 after supper...

"Hooray for Boobies"

Back in 1991, I stumbled on an issue of Justice League Europe. It was part of a massive cross-over event or otherwise I would never have even thought to pick up an issue of that. Something about DC was uncool at the time. The only hot-commodities in DC’s stable was Batman thanks to the block-buster hit movie a couple of years earlier. But thankfully, with that issue I discovered and fell in love with a little-known second-stringer by the name of Power-Girl.

See, while it’s obvious that by design, she’s got a huge set of boobies, Power Girl was different from all the top-heavy females who catered to adolescent fantasies… she seemed to be the only one of those super-powered women who was remotely aware that her chest was unusually big. And I, for one, found that refreshingly original. DC was able to poke fun at the industry as a whole with a single panel in JLE Annual #2: Waverider had come from the future to scout for potential threats to his timeline and while Power-Girl “volunteers” to be scanned, she makes it very clear that he “better be careful where [he] touches her!” In one single word balloon, I found that to be the funniest damn line I’d read that entire year.

Alas, years would go by before I saw anything on Power Girl again. Either I was pre-occupied with the gigantic industry-wrecking X-Men revival of the day, or that eventually I just took a hiatus from collecting comics while I studied at university, Power Girl didn’t come around until just this last year when I happened upon the hardcover edition of the recent Superman/Batman series. She resurfaces in this story as a supporting character and again she knows she’s a fanboy’s dream…

(Sorry about the fuzziness; that's the trouble with trying scan hardbound volumes)

Anyway, more recently, (ie: today) I read the new “JSA:Classified” book and once again… well, besides being a strong reminder of how ridiculous women are physically portrayed in comics overall, I’m man enough to admit: sometime I just can’t get enough of seeing gags about boobies. It’s just better when Power Girl is involved.

PSP Wallpaper: Supergirl redux

Once a gadget-geek, always a gadget geek. And here’s some of the fun stuff you can do with the new Version 2.00 firmware update to the Sony PSP I mentioned earlier – choose a photo from your library to be you wallpaper!
Of course, best results are using the standard screen-size so that the wallpaper appear messed up. Here’s the Supergirl Windows desktop I posted last week, now reformatted to fit a Playstation Portable (that’s 480x272 pixels for those of you ready to play with an image editor). Good luck!

(Right click to save the image - Blogger seems to not want to create an HMTL link for small pictures - deal with it). I’ll post some more stuff later, I’m sure.

Updated: PSP v2.0 now available

Just a heads up for those of you who didn't hear yet. As of yesterday morning Sony finally released the version 2.00 OS update for Playstation Portable. The update offers security tweaks, support for more file types (for digital music and picture formats), a few cusomization features and tweaks to the media players), and a web browser.

Find info on www.ign.com - they have some articles in the PSP section talking about the new features.

This is just great... a new browser and no wi-fi hot spot to use it... Now I need to add item 9 to my wishlist: a wireless router. ^_^;;;

Wal-Mart: $20-spindle!!

If anybody’s interested, just wanted to tip you off that Wal-Mart Canada has just dropped the price on 50-piece spindles of Sony brand DVD-R to a mere $20. I’d hazard a guess that the American chain is doing likewise. I’m excited – that’s brand-name media at only 40 cents apiece!

BTW, I also made a note that in my previous post, an “ordered list” became a series of individual lists with one “list item” each when Blogger-For-Word converted my wish-list into HTML form. I’ll need to tip Blogger about that.

Naturally – thought of a seventh item today: that Nokia cell phone I mentioned earlier… so groovy, so cheap-ass-looking and plasticy. So damn tacky, I wouldn't hesitate to slip a custom plate under its case with a Autobot symbol and a huge graphic of Optimus Prime on the back… If you’re gonna go tacky, go all the way.

Wishlist: if it weren't for that traffic ticket...

Funny how sometimes wish-lists are more fun than actually going out and acquiring stuff. Daydreaming can be fun and I’ll likely be doing a bit more for the next couple of months considering what’s happening with the traffic ticket FusionAce is about to get in the mail…

1. The Pioneer DV-588A-S – well, after several days of researching this sucker, it sounds like a decent player after all. And the price is just about right. I’d obviously like it to drop a bit further than it is right now, but still… all things considered, it’s fairly affordable even for the tight-wads of the world. I spoke to my brother this weekend and he said he’d be glad to take my old bare-bones player off my hands when he gets a place of his own in the (hopefully) near future. Nothing I hate more than derelict equipment that’s in perfectly good shape.


2. An upgrade to my cabling between my home theatre components. The plan is to start small. Since my television is a bit dated, hi-tech is out of the question since I don’t have S-Video or Component options. But I can ensure I get the best of what I do have by purchasing a Monster brand cable for the Composite video feed. Better than nothin’ I say. I’m looking at no more than $30 for such a cable. Not bad.


3. More PC upgrades – no, not the case yet. I seem to have a small reprieve with that CPU cooling fan (it acted up and was buzzing real loud last night, but seemed to have settled down now)… must’ve been dust or something caught in the ball-bearings. But still. If I had my choice I’d follow babou’s example and get one of those Arctic Cooler Heat-sink/Fan combos. Duh, while I’m at it (having to remove the assembly from the motherboard), I think I’d like to spring for a CPU upgrade as well. Hmm… looks like the price has dropped another 5 bucks in the last month I’ve been dilly-dallying over this.


4. Batman all over again. Yes, I collected the first run individual issues of the Hush story a couple of years ago when my hero, Jim Lee made his triumphant return to drawing comics (on a hi-profile Batman gig, no less). But this I gotta see – a single volume in over-sized format bound in a hardcover. Granted this link is for the very limited version with a unique sketch by Jim himself – I’ll settle for the regular edition expected to come out later this year at a mere 50 bucks or so. And hopefully my favourite store will have it in stock so I’ll be able to get my “T-Shirt” discount.


5. Speaking of the shop, no I haven’t heard anything from The Rob yet. The last time I was there, I noticed that they did indeed get some new stock, but it was a blue “Anakin Skywalker” model so still nothing to replace my purple “Mace Windu” collectable. If anything would totally make my week, it’d be that I get a call from Rob tomorrow morning saying, “Guess what? You’re getting your replacement on Wednesday!” That would be sweet.


6. The fact that I was supposed to have finished paying for my car this month means that next month this traffic ticket I'm getting will be like a 61st payment to make... which implies I'm gonna put off that new MP3 player I've had my eye on. *sigh* such coolness in its simplicity. Then again, I'm also waiting for Futureshop to rotate their sale-price to this model ...if I'm lucky I'll be able to swing a $70 discount or so. Plus I've been talking to friends who know a little something. Starfish offered to lend his expertise (and tools) to disconnect the car battery and I know another guy who'd installed car radios before...

Weekend Haul - and mellow.

Managed to score Taiko Drum Master for PS2 for cheap – I’m pleased. Just over $50 was about right considering how it originally retailed for like $75. The game comes with a miniature version of a traditional Japanese “taiko” drum and a pair of drum sticks. As you watch the patterns and symbols scroll across the screen, you hit the drum or tap the edges according to the beat. Surprisingly addictive (played for a few hours already). But I wonder how long before it gets repetitive like all video games do. Maybe it’s just my changing tastes for entertainment tho…

Another shipment from YesAsia arrived. For whatever reason, it shipped directly from Hong Kong this time. That means customs inspectors and duty fees, ugh. Oh well. Going through my latest Twins album. Cute as always but… hmm… not too sure about the evolutionary direction of the music. I kinda liked them for the innocent bubblegum pop in the beginning. Ah well. Came in a fancy case and all so…
Also got the latest concert disc for 12 Girls Band (you may recall reading about the traditional Chinese-musical troupe before). Mmm… not sure I like this one either. Seems like more of the same (except that they’ve aged a bit). ^_^;

Oh yeah – also grabbed Stephen Chow’s Kung-Fu Hustle – and the packaging says it all: “It’s Kill Bill meets Looney Tunes.” Whatever… anybody ever see Shaolin Soccer? Same dude… Looney doesn’t begin to describe it.

DVD-Audio isn't sound of a DVD movie

There was a time I recall when babou and I were at Futureshop and we overheard some guy asking about DVD writers and was being told that they didn’t exist. Um… they do exist, you just don’t have them in stock yet because they’re not mainstream enough for a big retailer like you. That was several years ago, of course, and I’m of a forgiving nature.

Tonight I was at Best Buy and I overheard some hapless older gentleman asking about an “HD” DVD player. And for the life of me, I don’t know where they took him, but a sales rep led him away to see …something. Never mind that neither next-gen competitors HD-DVD or Blu-Ray have hit the streets yet. I haven’t a bloody clue where that sales rep was leading the man.

So minding my own business, I continued browsing the DVD players on the shelf. A “helpful” rep asked if I was looking for anything in particular. “Yes, actually. In fact, I’m looking for a deck that will play DVD-Audio.”
He tried to convince me that “they all play DVD-Audio.”

No son, you clearly have no frickin’ idea. So here’s some advice to the corporate brains behind Best Buy:
Have your sales reps from different departments talk to each other!!!

I know – it’s a stretch, but hey, worth a try. Best Buy carries the biggest selection of DVD-Audio discs I’ve seen anywhere. So it wouldn’t be a big assumption on my part to think that just maybe, guys that work at Best Buy might actually know something.

“No – I mean, yes. They come on DVD media, as in discs that are DVD format. No – I’m talking about the audio tracks on a DVD-Video like DTS or Dolby Digital 5.1 – I’m talking about DVD-Audio – like SACD from Sony, but it’s a competitor to SACD.” You have no idea what I’m talking about do you?

For the curious, DVD-Audio is a special format of DVD disc that is essentially a really hi-resolution sound disc. Because of the high rate of raw data that is being pumped out when it plays, the decoding hardware has to be built-in unlike the digital sound from a DVD-Video movie (which can be decoded in a home theatre’s amplifier). You gotta look for a DVD-Audio logo on your player.

Anyway – I did find what I was looking for on my own… Should research this model before I buy it though. It’s a Pioneer model that claims to play not only DVD-Audio, but also SACD, and here’s the kicker: DivX video!! Sweetness. That means I’d be able to play my computer downloads in the comfort of my living room.

On a side note: this is my first blog entry typed into MS Word. So far this plug-in is pretty neat…

don't touch me! ^_^;

Becks Tagged me, I’m it now, so here are my answers. . .
“List ten songs that you are currently digging … it doesn’t matter what genre they are from, whether they have words, or even if they’re no good, but they must be songs you’re really enjoying right now. Post these instructions, the artists, and the ten songs in your blog. Then tag five other people to see what they’re listening to.”

Faint - Linkin Park
All the Things I've Done - The Killers
Take Me Out - Franz Ferdanand
A Love Big as the Sky (Translated from Chinese) - Twins
Teo Torriate - Queen
The Gambler - Kenny Rogers
Ballad of the Dukes of Hazzard - Weylon Jennings
Fuel - Metallica
Back in Black - AC/DC
Foolish Dream - Yoko Ishida

I have no idea who reads this blog... least likely ebloggy folks - jellipop, kissashark, Maaya, Torren, and 3carnations. That's 5... *poke*

Fireworks revisited

So I'm too lazy to look up who I was watching last night (I think I recall the news mentioning that South Africa won, so I'm assuming last night's finale show was also them...) Anyway, here're some pics I took again from my balcony.

Supergirl: rebooted

So I finally got around to taking advantage of that goofy store-logo T-shirt: wear it into the store and get a 10% discount on everything from comics to DVDs... and since I arrived a little too early I found I had to pay the parking meter. Well you best believe that I would certain take the store for at least that buck-fifty I just dropped into the meter. I think I spent just under $40 so that was nearly $4 in discounts I collected. More than enough to pay for the parking on the street that afternoon.

One of the gems I snatched up was the recent reboot of DC's Supergirl character. Older fans may recall some wacky story about a girl who was Superman's cousin who came from a fragment of planet Krypton who came to Earth... and there was that horrible movie with Helen Slater back in the 80's. Ugh.

Anyway, DCU effectively killed off that iteration of Supergirl back in the mid-80's. But time and time again they brought her back in different incarnations... sometimes an clone, sometimes an android, sometimes... oh forget it. Sooner or later tho they had to come back to a "long-lost Kryptonian cousin" tho... and this year they finally did it.

Yours truly used a couple of custom hi-res scans and built this today... I intend to use as a wallpaper in my office. I'm also somewhat curious as to how long before I start to see this file posted somewhere without my permission... BTW - artwork is by Michael Turner, for those of you who are wondering. Copyrights are obviously DC Comics, etc...

Spanish Pyro: the fireworks over the casino

Quick post: some shots I took last night standing on my balcony looking over at the Casino du Lac Leamy. That tall building is a 20-something-story hotel. The competitor was Spain this time. And my batteries conked out before their really big ones... ~_~;

Pics: more crap I posess

Just following up on a couple of things:

Finally here's the watch I was talking about before...

To which UG plainly said, "my god, when I buy a watch I'm busy thinking about how soon before it breaks." ^_^;

{side note: yeah, that's that trusty old keyboard I'm using at home for the moment - at least until I get around to upgrading back to something bit more hi-tech... in the meantime, all I ask is that it frickin' works}

And here's another pic I snapped (cropped of course, you don't need to see the rest of the crap on my desk, etc). The pic is a request from the cronies on Robot-Japan who asked to see my RM-Series Transformers collection (yes, those little bots on the right).

speaking of clocks: my "cool" watch

Long time readers may recall the fuss I made about a watch I won through an eBay auction earlier this year. It's by Oakley and therefore somewhat difficult to come by in Canada (they're made and shipped from Stateside - even if you order thru the Canadian web-site).

Anyway, just thought it was a funny thing this past week. I must've been living the hermit life or something (or at least my left wrist has been doing so). I've worn the watch nearly 5 months now and for the first time I started getting complimented on "that's a cool watch you're wearing!"

Brown brought it up last week (granted we haven't been hanging together much but still, we've seen each other often enough). And my cousins last weekend commented on it (I suppose that was expected: when they last saw me I was in the midst of an eBay bidding-war for this very watch)... And the guys at the comic-book shop downtown likened it to "something Batman would wear."

On a related note - I've just discovered this morning that it hadn't been set right since I got it. All this time I thought it was a defect of some sort (not surprising considering how I got this watch).
Hard to tell since the minutes hand is "smooth-movement" and does not "tick." The only way I ever noticed this problem was while playing with the alarm a while back.
The alarm is a seperate dial you set like a "detonator." But it's much simpler than the main dial isn't smooth; it ticks.

Therein was the problem: and the tick would occur only at the 45seconds mark... and the alarm would always sound at 45 seconds - not at zero. It was as though the whole watch had been tuned to be 15 seconds off. Turns out that all I needed to do was to wait until the seconds hand was at zero, and resync my watch completely (play with the minutes hand just a bit). Colour me embarrassed. ^.^

out of sync? nice to know

So I was talking to one of my old Montreal buddies this weekend and everything suddenly makes sense now... he tells me that if my front side bus is slower, it'll be difficult to run a stable machine if the memory is going too fast - the clock cycles go out of sync.

And this is where "overclocking" becomes a feasible and logical step. I could ramp up my FSB settings by playing with the multipliers on the clocking. The side effects: decreased stability on my CPU.

Well, can't have it all.

But I funny coicidence was that this morning my CPU cooling fan started buzzing - as tho my bearings were starting to go. All the more reason for me to change the fan... maybe even the CPU while I'm at it...

I gotta stop before I end up spending too much money on this.

For the score-keeper

For those few people out there who's been givin' a flying sh*t, I left the machine on all night to finish a bit-torrent I had going. The machine did not crash and appeared fine when I check this morning (I did turn it off since it's been super hot lately and the heat can't be good for a computer).

I'm still a little miffed about not being able to run the full 200MHz the RAM is supposed be spec at. And that my motherboard supports it and is known to be less-than reliable when pushing the top end of the spectrum.

Maybe this weekend I'll take the sticks back to the shop to have them tested just to be sure.
Oh yeah, also, lately my machine has been giving me "warning beeps" in Windows for no apparent reason. Weird. Oh well.

Hey - on another topic: the comics place is having their fall sale this week (everybody's on that back-to-school blitz, I guess... not sure what reading comics has to do with anything tho). I picked up two graphic novels last night at 20% discounts on cover. The first I read almost in one sitting - the epic Avengers: Disassembled recounting the recent event (last summer, I guess) where everything went from bad to worse and culminated in the end of the traditional line of the Avengers (i.e.: Captain America, Iron Man, Thor, Wasp, Yellowjacket, et al). They're back as a new team, by the way, but hardly recognizable.
The second was a cool hard-bound book collecting the mini-series from a year or so ago called Phoenix: End Song. This one I read during my lunch break today. The deadly entity known as Phoenix is back and looking for its old human host.... but Jean Grey has been dead for a while... what's a power-cosmic to do? And how does Jean's widower, Cyclops, and the rest of the X-Men deal with this? Cool story, really.

for the record: stable at 166MHz

Thanks go out to babou for for tipping me off on this. I had to switch my BIOS over to manual mode to access this speed, but still... I get better clock latency at this speed.... and I've been running for just about two hours now.

Played some videos, chatted on MSN with my brother, lots of typing (a bit of blogging, actually), running a bit-torrent client, ripping a music CD to my drive, playing said music.

I even tried to reinstall that USB keyboard - mighty suspisious that it would die out on me the very same day I upgraded my RAM, eh? To hell with it - I never really liked it anyway. The only good thing about it was those hot-keys for my broadband connection and MS Outlook.

15 minutes and counting?

Well, I got home a little while ago. Foregoing babou's advice, I just decided to try reseating the RAM first... Rebooted...

Now it's been just over 20 minutes or so... seems stable (I said the same thing this morning)...

We'll see, won't we? ^_^

babou shook his head with pity

Well, working with that old beater keyboard last night everything seemed fine so I went ahead and clocked the RAM back up to spec. Rebooted and everything seemed stable... played around for a bit, chatted for a while with my Singaporean penpal, and then shut down and went to bed. Everything seemed stable.

This morning I booted again and within 15 minutes or so, the system froze up. Ugh.

I spoke with babou this morning and recounted my story. He suggested two things - first to clock down and force the RAM to run at only 166MHz instead of the default "safe mode" of 133MHz or the native 200MHz. And secondly perhaps just bring it back and have the shop test them with their diagnostic gadgets explaining that these lock-ups only started happening when I installed the new sticks.

Well, first thing's first: gonna reseat the sticks. You never know but RAM sticks are temperamental and sometimes the most innoccuous thing will kill your sanity.
Then I'll continue running them at 200MHz just for the hell of it to see how long before the system freezes up. Hmm...

The way things work out ~_~;

Well, after the phone troubles got fixed up I was feeling a lot better - but since my lunch break doesn't coincide with babou's break (his hours are staggerred to be 1 hour earlier than me), we didn't get to hit the local shop today.

But well - for details about my phone-line and my oddball encounter with UG today, check out the FusionAce blog.

As for the lighter side of things that worked out okay in a strange turn:

Because I ended up leaving the office so late, I decided not to deal with the afternoon traffic and headed to the shop anyway. Picked up some new RAM. Finally - I now have matching clock speeds on both sticks - and I doubled my total memory today for a reasonable price (conveniently the shop was sold out of the matched-pair upgrade kits and they sold me two seperate sticks - which oddly enough turned out to cost less than the two-pack).

Anywho - above you see them as they were when I got home... and next to that you see them in the box. Also in the box you can see those l337 cables I bought last week. Wheee! Now if only I could do something about those power-supply wires dangling around near the bottom of the case.

So I booted up and noticed right away that the BIOS was now detecting a full Gigabyte of system memory... and in Dual-Mode! Yay! (that's supposed to mean it reads and write memory twice as fast because it's accessing both sticks in tandem per operation). But here's the catch - it was running the RAM at only 133MHz... this RAM is rated for 400MHz (and so is the motherboard)... OK.

A bit of reading later I smacked my forehead and realized that it probably meant 200MHz in tandem is the same as 400MHz total... (somebody please correct me if I'm wrong)... or maybe I'll swing by babou's office tomorrow and chat about it.

So I set the BIOS to reboot at 200MHz RAM speed...

What do you know but that the system becomes unstable. *smacks head again*

The whole thing freezes and then I reboot and get a message that there is no keyboard detected! Huh?

Well as luck would have it, many moons ago, a techie came by UG's office (we used to sit across from each other) and replaced her PC... the keyboard was... (I can't believe this) dropped into the waste-basket. Naturally, being the pack-rat that I am, I plucked it out and brought it home. It's a perfectly good keyboard. And who knew that years later, I'd be stuck with a messed up USB keyboard and had to turn to none other than a conventional keyboard ...one I'd gone through UG's garbage to get. ^_^;;

Now... gotta figure out if it was that clock speed thing or the USB that did me in... Hmm....

why can't I enjoy this?

Well, as you may have heard my home phone is out so I'm a little stressed out right now. I hate living in an appartment some times. What with the repair guy coming and I don't even know if I'll have to pay for this visit (I'm convinced tho that the problem is from the line box up to my appartment - which I can't possibly be responsible for).

Anyway, after setting up the appointment last night, I got to work threading the speaker wire through my "new" used stands. I'm quite pleased with them so far: even though I haven't actually used them. I even discovered that I hadn't left enough slack on one side so I didn't get to thread that one up the base (got a dangling wire - at least it's hidden around the back of the TV for now).

Hmm... still haven't heard from the comics shop... but I did get an email from MR on Friday. They "helpfully" suggested that I change the batteries and then call their 1-800 number (never mind that I clearly stated in my initial message that the first thing I did was to put fresh batteries in it)... sounds like a form-letter to me. Which is weird because it took them 3 days to send out a form letter?!

~_~;;

Came in to work early: got to leave early, because the phone company also "helpfully" said that their technician would arrive some time between 4pm and 8pm today. Nice. @_@;