It's Dai Time

Katie & Scott & Simon & Cecily.

Author: Scott (Page 77 of 104)

Day 94: what ifs

May 16, 2009 / / 0 Comments

I went to the mall today and saw a mall cop zip by on a segway. It was an odd, somewhat surreal moment.

I was never a big mall teenager in high school. I was never a big anything teenager in high school. I was a bit of a loner, but I had my own little group of friends. I was a bit of a stick-in-the-mud, but not as much as some other kids. I mainly hung in the background and spent most of my time outside of school at home.

So, I don’t really know what the mall scene was like. Did people go on dates to the mall? Did people form cliques and gossip at the mall? Did shopping together form some sort of intimate high school bond that I missed out on?

I feel like there were many subcultures within high school that I was either not aware of or intentionally kept on the outside. In a way, I’m somewhat glad. I get the feeling that a lot of high school drama just caused unnecessary angst. I didn’t have to deal too much with what people thought of me because I kind of flew under the radar most of the time.

In another way, I do kind of wish I had more of a high school experience just because I’ll never have that chance again. In general, I feel that way about a lot of things. I wish I had the chance to experience different childhoods, different high school personas, different college times. What if I had been into football instead of chess? What if I had been really into newspaper? What if I had majored in creative writing or theatre instead? What if I had never left China?

I wouldn’t give up any of my current life and experiences, but it is certainly interesting to think about. And it is something I wish I had: several lifetimes of experiences. Am I the only one that feels like this? Do others think about this too, or do they just go about their lives, content with one life to live?

Day 93: what you don’t want to hear at a buffet

May 15, 2009 / / 0 Comments

One time, Katie and I went to Chinese buffet.  After we walked in the door, we waited for a few minutes and no one seated us.

We started to look around at the buffet itself, to get an idea of what food was there.  Suddenly, a few Chinese people appeared from the back, where the kitchen was, and started shouting at us.  They told us, in no uncertain terms, that they were out of food and to leave.

It was a bizarre experience.  A buffet, out of food?  If you can’t count on a buffet having an unlimited supply of food in this world, what can you count on?

Day 92: gametap, or how to ruin a good thing

May 14, 2009 / / 0 Comments

I used to love GameTap.  A few months ago, I would have heartily recommended it to friends and family.  Shelling out a mere $60 a year in order to play a huge assortment of retro games, along with a growing library of modern PC games?  A single entry fee in order to try out games I’m interested in but might never actually buy (e.g. Far Cry, the new Tomb Raiders, Sherlock Holmes: The Awakened)?  Count me in!

Then, the incident happened.

Metaboli acquired GameTap.  That, in and of itself, was not a bad thing.  Metaboli had infrastructure in Europe and with the acquisition came the possibility of an even greater games library with the two services merging.

But a mistake was made – a big mistake.  Prior to approximately a month and a half ago, GameTap had a desktop client.  You downloaded and launched games from within the client, which (for me) always worked flawlessly.  The client also allowed for the setting of such things as subaccounts, where games were stored, and the setting of a variety of playlists (favorites, RTSs I like, etc).

When Metaboli took over GameTap, they forced the desktop client out of existence and instituted a web-based plugin instead.  My guess is that this was to streamline operations; Metaboli’s European market was already using a browser plugin and supporting the old GameTap client must have seemed like a waste of money.

But the first few months of the web-based plugin have been disastrous.  GameTap’s forum have been blazing since the transition and, a little insultingly, the GameTap site now has “BETA” emblazoned on the front of it.  It feels a bit like subscribers got the shaft.  Sure, people who just want to play games for free have a slightly easier initial experience, with no client to download.  But those of us that pay money to access the entire catalog?  We have to deal with a buggy web plugin that deleted our old save games, refuses to download new games half the time, and sometimes (for seemingly no reproducible reason) will refuse to load.  Additionally, the browser plugin has lost several features that the desktop client had, including fullscreen play of old console games, which are now forced into a tiny flash window in your browser.

I still like the games that GameTap offers.  I still like the intention behind the service.  But the transition from desktop client to browser-based plugin has been infuriating.  For a good several weeks of my paid subscription, I was unable to reliably play games.  I am still wary about accessing the website; every day is a coin flip on whether or not I’ll be able to access my old saves or download new games.

I mentioned to Katie yesterday that I might cancel my subscription.  But because I have the yearly package, that doesn’t expire until March of next year.  Maybe, by then, GameTap will have finally sorted through this debacle.

Currently, though, I could not honestly recommend the service to anyone, which is a shame.

Day 91: why blinds suck

May 13, 2009 / / 0 Comments

Not blind people.  That’d be insensitive.

I mean the window coverings.

Blinds suck.  They do.  They are the jack of many trades, king of none.  Let’s break down what blinds are supposed to do.  Blinds are supposed to keep the sun out when you don’t want it and to let the sun in when you do.  They’re supposed to be able to be removed temporarily (putting them up).

Overall, though, blinds do a terrible job at all of this.  Most blinds can’t close completely when you want to keep the sun out – curtains do a far superior job.  Blinds have little holes along the side that always let the sun in, and usually has tiny slivers between the blinds that allow a striped pattern of annoying sunlight in.

Blinds also do a poor job of letting sunlight in.  If you don’t put them up completely, there will always be blinds in the way of the actual sunlight.  If you do put them up, you have to deal with a different wire that, well, doesn’t really work half the time.  Because, in some kind of total user experience failure, the wire both makes the blinds go up and down, as well as make it stop moving, depending on the angle.

And they break all the time.  Blinds get bent, wires get tangled, and the rotation rod sometimes falls off.  Any of these happening causes either the entire window of blinds or a large portion of it to be rendered useless.

How have we put a man on the moon but not come up with a better way to cover our windows?  Get on it, top scientists!

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