cool kid report

I hate how every episode of the show Numb3rs ends with a tender moments between the brothers. If a show about math wants to include tender moments, it should simply display the inteded amount of tenderness on the screen in the form of a vector.

Startling new report: I just bought myself an expensive pair of dance pads for Dance Dance Revolution on Playstation. In Doctor World*, Dance Dance Revolution is the only form of physical exertion I recommend. The pads came very promptly through UPS, gratifying me almost instantaneously. I had to drive out to the civilized parts of Madison to obtain the necessary software to put my new hard foam friends to use and so the cry range out, "To me, my Buick!" I checked Target, who foolishly did not carry the title, and quickly moved on to Toys R Us. On a sidenote, I learned Toys R Us has its own Yu-Gi-Oh league, which could prove to be a key element in my quest to prove my gamemanship over as many small children as possible. The whole Toys R Us experience is a little lacking. Not only was the eletronics section not visable immediately upon entry, a personal insult to those who feel uncomfortable being indoors without seeing a computer, but the games are only purchased by proxy through a small slip of paper. If this is the kind of system that a store wishes to implement, then there's really no reason for me to walk back there at all. I should be able to simply enter the store, throw some money on the ground and yell out the name of the game I'm trying to purchase. This would preferably cause it to drop into my outstreached hands from the sky, or at least cause an overweight employee to wadle over with it in his sweaty palm. As it turns out, not only did I have to do my own legwork, sweaty palms had to get in on the action too, reducing overall efficiency and decreasing the liklehood of my return. In fact, the loop around the store ended up costing me, as I was easily suckered into picking up the newly released DVD set of the original Star Wars trilogy. The purchase of this little gem caused even more semantic hilarity, as it came with a $10 Toys R Us gift card. Of course, I tried to apply it to the purchase I was making, an attempt which Toys R Us didn't appreciate. Fortunately, my fast thinking brain realized I could just split my purchase down the middle and apply the gift card to the DDR proxy. This is fortunate, since a return trip to the store clearly would have booby trapped me into some sort of Star Wars merchandise pyramid scheme.

The pads work great and I can already feel myself jumping up a few Feet in dance prowess. The downstairs neightbors seem fairly pissed though.



*Doctor World is the alternate reality where every non-doctor from this reality has a doctor counterpart and every doctor a non-doctor counterpart (and Jim's girlfriend is preparing herself to be released from her duties at the hospital,)

Here's something to cheer you up before you perform your next arbitrary task. My solution? Buy your kid a shirt that says "I am going to die." If desired, you can buy a shirt that says, "I am going to live forever."

Normally I like to talk about tech or comics but the Japanese language will have to be excuse enough this time. I challenge my fellow Internauts to find an article more absurd than this one:

I might have teased this article as a "tradeoff for getting video games first" or "they already did that to my major" but it turns out those are both in bad taste.

In related news, Japanese manga Usagi Yojimbo is the latest graphic/text enriched bound series of pages to be thoroughly enjoyed in this apartment. Anyone with a taste for samurai or anthropomorphism should borrow it from me or attempt to experience it through some sort of advanced telepathy. Remember the episode of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles where they teamed up with a Samurai Rabbit? That was Usagi. Having said that, this comic takes place in an entirely different continuity. A much better one. Don't even get me started on TMNT continuity though. Did you know they killed Shredder in the first TMNT comic book? You see, you shouldn't have got me started.

Today I bought some comic books. In other news, check out this article about copyrights and update on the Hitchhiker marketing machine. Don't click the first one unless you want to read something long, or read the first few paragraphs of something long.

As previously documented, I hate the iPod nearly as much as I hate life itself. Since no one forced the iPod upon me there was only so much complaining I could do about it and since no one really understands my problem with it anyway, it was all pretty moot. Furthermore, for a long time there hadn't really been a direct competitor to the iPod. The only other player that can really be compared is the Nomad Jukebox, which was basically an iPod but CD player sized. Also the Jukebox came before the era when soulless corporations saw fit to endow their homonculi with required software. These days the Nomad products are about as bad as the iPod in terms of software. The Nomad and the iPod belong to the "microdrive" class of MP3 players, storing their data on a small internal hard drive, or in the case of the Jukebox, just an internal hard drive. Other classes include flash MP3 players which generally don't have enough storage to compete and MP3/CD players which have the same size limitations as a standard CD player (and seem to take a long time to boot.)

Personally, the storage space offered by an MP3 player was always my biggest concern. Flash players are too small, CD players about right and the iPod too big. When the Jukebox came out I considered too ridiculously large to ever be filled, and that was before they started coming out with bigger models. However, I seem to be in the minority here, everyone wants to get their hands on the massive storage of an iPod. 40,000 minutes of songs on 6 hours of battery time just doesn't make any sense to me. Apparently though, there exists a class of computer users who just want to move all their MP3s onto the MP3 player without keeping them on the computer. This makes even less sense to me. But, being a social trend, there's no precedant that it would. Anyway, the 1.5 GB SoniqCast Aireo is just the right storage size for me and except for physical dimensions (think Buick of microdrive MP3 players) and storage it beats the iPod hands down. In addition to being a standard USB mass storage device, the obvious choice of nonmonolithic business entities everywhere, it has a host of other advanced features to confuse and bewilder the common user, which I vow to cover in a future post. Probably after I buy one.

For the standard conformist to the Apple iPod trend, there's the iRiver iHP, which is also a conformist to the Apple iPod trend. The iHP, besides demonstrating Apple's failure to purchase the lowercase letter i, is pretty much everything I can tolerate about the iPod: storage size, battery life, physical size and none of the things that make me hate it: proprietary software, Apple brandname. It's an interesting point that while iPod and iTunes were my initial reason for hating Apple, I now hate them so much that the iPod can never recover in my mind. The iHP even has a much better price; it only costs $300 for the 20 GB model, instead of $300 and a human soul.

Before I started college, a friend told me that I should go see a
movie alone. I'm sure his point was that I should take in the
experience of a movie without the distraction of someone sitting next
to me, thus fully realizing the poetry and cohesion of the film as a
work of art. These concepts normally exist only in a hazy cloud that
hovers somewhere above me which in my mind I have labeled "Art &
Related," a place which is visited only when an English teacher or
analagous entity forces me to produce some sort of "meaningful"
interpretation of an "artpiece." Art is like sports, I understand
that it exists, I just don't understand WHY it exists.

Anyway, Friday night I found myself alone, tired and weary of this
mortal earth. Setting it apart from most Fridays, I found myself also
homeless. Thus I set off into the world, society's world that is, to
make my way. The process of elimination soon led me to one of the few
socially accepted Friday night activities I don't aceticly deny
myself: the movie. My most sincere efforts having produced no
companions and my decisive d12 confirming the plan, I was soon seeing
Spider-man 2 alone. There was actually one other person in the
theater, but I didn't talk to him or anything.

I'm not even going to talk about the movie. You guys would have to
level up 100 times before you'd be ready for the amount of complaining
I want to do. Okay, actually I am, but just not as much as I could.
If you have a probem with that you should probably ignore not only the
rest of this paragraph, but possibly the rest of my life. Anyway, for
those of you who paid attention when you saw it, do you realize that
Spider-man struggled with spider-impotence in this movie? Spider-man
loses his powers often enough, assuming those instances haven't been
retconned out of the standurd continuity, but usually the culprit is
the common cold, or the common bolt of lightning, or the common
machine designed to transfer Spider-man's lifeforce into the Kingpin's
son. In non-complaint oriented comic book analysis, we have a nice
setup for two future villains, although it makes no sense for Kurt
Connors to be teaching fusion. Regardless I can't really see a
Spider-man movie with the Lizard as the bad guy. Well, I can see it
but it doesn't suck. Of course I didn't think they could pull off Doc
Ock either, but they did an adequate enough job. Anyway, it seems
pretty obvious that we'll be seeing Green Goblin II as the next
badguy. You the general populace will I'm sure be spared from seeing
any of the subsequent Green Goblins. You should feel thankful for
that, but cheated that I have infected you with the somewhat viriitic
knowledge of their existences.

My friend would be pleased to know I saw a movie in almost total
isolation but since I actually hadn't set foot in a movie theater in
almost a year, my accomplishment was probably cancelled out in his
mind.

Gwen Stacy was thrown off a bridge and died.

Shameful event of the day: called out of bed by Steve.
Cublicle addition of the day: Marvel page-a-day calendar.
Number of people seen in cubicles wearing cowboy hats: 1.