Where have you been all my life, Dual Shock 2?

I finished Ocarina of Time on Monday. After all that work I decided to give up on finding the last four Pieces of Heart and the last six Gold Skulltulas. Wikipedia tells me that I also missed out on the biggest quiver that can hold 50 arrows, but that particular minigame was just dastardly and I have no particular wish to do it again.

So what to do with my unused time? Well, I got started on some work... like, actual work. Today I got back on track with my research reading, too. Before I resorted to that, though, I decided to try my hand at the original Legend of Zelda (yes I own the game, so having the ROM is legal, fascist). Those of you who remember my original retro-gaming period of second year will recall that my drive to be good at Metroid was entirely fuelled by the fact that I have owned the game since I was 7 or so and yet sucked it very, very hard at Metroid. I am still very proud to say that twelve years after getting it, about eleven of which were spent honing my dexterity with musical instruments, I beat Metroid.

(Oh my God, Samus is a girl!)

So it goes with Zelda. I've owned Zelda probably even longer than Metroid, yet even four years ago after my Metroid kick I decided to try Zelda and could barely survive past the first three screens. I had better things to be doing, so I forgot about it. But now it's time to conquer that mountain too. I fired up FCEultra, set it up to work with my trusty Gravis Eliminator Aftershock, named my character "Dickolas", and we were off to the races.

In an up-left diagonal direction.

Unfortunately, I had forgotten that for all of its charms, the Gravis Eliminator Aftershock suffers from a really, really shitty D-pad. It's very difficult to just press up -- no, you'll usually get up-left or up-right. But not up. I had previously just lived with it, as I was conscious of the fact that I paid $50 for it and at the time it was clearly the best gamepad on the market (or at least of the ones that I tried). So, I beat Super Metroid despite aiming diagonally up-right most of the time, and I suffered -- suffered -- through Tony Hawk 3. Later I discovered that people make console controller-to-USB adaptors. B'oh.

Today, figuring that the warranty must be long-past by now anyway, I opened it up to see if I could hack it or make a new D-pad for it. Instead, I came away very impressed at the internal construction and saddened because there's no way in hell I could possibly make a new D-pad for it. To add injury to insult, I broke a wire so only one of the rumble motors works now. Do any of you have a soldering iron? Do any of you know how to solder?

Look at this thing. The D-pad is not a cross. It's a... fucking... I don't know what it is. It's a regular D-pad, in a funhouse mirror. What were the folks at Gravis thinking? D-pads should always be Euclidean.

Fuck this! I said. I decided to right my previous wrong and pony up for a Dual Shock 2 and USB adaptor. I almost bought a nice $10 adaptor (Mac-compatible! w00t) and $17 Dual Shock 2 online but shipping was $10, so I thought I'd go Chinatown and/or Japantown to look for a cheapo adaptor. But then I realized:

• it costs $6 to get to Chinatown, another $2 to get to Japantown;


• I might find a $5 adaptor in Chinatown, but I also might only find a $15 adaptor, and regardless, it probably won't support rumble or the Mac, and it came from Chinatown and as such possibly contains lead in its construction;


• Japantown has a website and none of their stores sell gaming equipment;


• Dual Shock 2's start at $19 used at EB, as opposed to $17 new on that website; and


• there's no tax if I buy it online.

So, I did.

I really can't wait to get my Dual Shock 2. Now maybe I can WALK IN A STRAIGHT DAMN LINE through Hyrule. I could even execute a fastplant in THPS3 again! Hell, I could even finally play THPS4 on my Mac without constantly spinning in circles!

I think I'll name it Excalibur.

Current Music: XTC - Neon Shuffle

New template

Thanks to Steve, I have a new template. The old one, while nice, was just a stock Blogger template that I threw more and more hacks onto, and it didn't really work on IE either. This one was built from the ground up by Steve to my specifications, and is much cleaner and better suited to the way I like to make changes.

This is his return gift for the theme song I wrote for stevekwan.com. He very patiently spent numerous hours listening while I kept asking him to tweak things and then change them back. I feel a little bad because he spent a good amount of time on it, while the theme song took about 45 minutes total.

I guess I better record a better quality version of it. It's the least I can do.

Current Music: Marvin Gaye - What's Going On

LUGs.com 100th post

After much planning and waiting, the LUGs are proud to present to you our 100th post. We hope you enjoy.

EDIT (7:53PM, May 28, 2006): Actually, we just hope you read it.

Current Music: Hot Hot Heat - This Town

How I became notorious (Random quotes from my past, provided with some context)

Prof. Greg Martin, instructor of Math 432B: Any questions? Any last questions?

class: ...

me: Are you my father?

Two months later

Prof. Greg Martin, instructor of Math 331: I'm always afraid to ask if you have any questions.

me: ...

Ten minutes later...

me: Oh, right.

Six months later

Chris: All of the grad students are always saying, "Man, we should take more classes with Richard!

And that's how I won the respect of the graduate students in the math department.

Current Music: Sloan - Don't you Believe a Word

What's YOUR personality defect?

Robot You are 57% Rational, 42% Extroverted, 28% Brutal, and 28% Arrogant.

You are the Robot! You are characterized by your rationality. In fact, this is really ALL you are characterized by. Like a cold, heartless machine, you are so logical and unemotional that you scarcely seem human. For instance, you are very humble and don't bother thinking of your own interests, you are very gentle and lack emotion, and you are also very introverted and introspective. You may have noticed that these traits are just as applicable to your laptop as they are to a human being. You are not like the robots they show in the movies. Movie robots are make-believe, because they always get all personable and likeable after being struck by lightning, or they are cold, cruel killing machines. In all reality, though, you are much more boring than all that. Real robots just sit there, doing their stupid jobs, and doing little else. If you get struck by lightning, you won't develop a winning personality and heart of gold. (Robots don't have hearts, silly, and if they did, they would probably be made of steel, not gold.) You also won't be likely to terrorize humanity by becoming an ultra-violent killing machine sent into the past to kill the mother of a child who will lead a rebellion against machines, because that movie was dumb as hell, and because real robots don't kill--they horribly maim at best, and they don't even do that on purpose. Real robots are boringly kind and all too rarely try to kill people. In all my years, my laptop has only attacked me once, and that was only because my brother threw it at me. In short, your personality defect is that you don't really HAVE a personality. You are one of those annoying, super-logical people that never gets upset or flustered. Unless, of course, you short circuit. Or if someone throws a pie at you. Pies sure are delicious. To put it less negatively: 1. You are more RATIONAL than intuitive. 2. You are more INTROVERTED than extroverted. 3. You are more GENTLE than brutal. 4. You are more HUMBLE than arrogant. Compatibility: Your exact opposite is the Class Clown. Other personalities you would probably get along with are the Hand-Raiser, the Emo Kid, and the Haughty Intellectual. * * If you scored near fifty percent for a certain trait (42%-58%), you could very well go either way. For example, someone with 42% Extroversion is slightly leaning towards being an introvert, but is close enough to being an extrovert to be classified that way as well. Below is a list of the other personality types so that you can determine which other possible categories you may fill if you scored near fifty percent for certain traits. The other personality types: The Emo Kid: Intuitive, Introverted, Gentle, Humble. The Starving Artist: Intuitive, Introverted, Gentle, Arrogant. The Bitch-Slap: Intuitive, Introverted, Brutal, Humble. The Brute: Intuitive, Introverted, Brutal, Arrogant. The Hippie: Intuitive, Extroverted, Gentle, Humble. The Televangelist: Intuitive, Extroverted, Gentle, Arrogant. The Schoolyard Bully: Intuitive, Extroverted, Brutal, Humble. The Class Clown: Intuitive, Extroverted, Brutal, Arrogant. The Robot: Rational, Introverted, Gentle, Humble. The Haughty Intellectual: Rational, Introverted, Gentle, Arrogant. The Spiteful Loner: Rational, Introverted, Brutal, Humble. The Sociopath: Rational, Introverted, Brutal, Arrogant. The Hand-Raiser: Rational, Extroverted, Gentle, Humble. The Braggart: Rational, Extroverted, Gentle, Arrogant. The Capitalist Pig: Rational, Extroverted, Brutal, Humble. The Smartass: Rational, Extroverted, Brutal, Arrogant. Be sure to take my Sublime Philosophical Crap Test if you are interested in taking a slightly more intellectual test that has just as many insane ramblings as this one does!

My test tracked 4 variables How you compared to other people your age and gender: You scored higher than 36% on Rationality You scored higher than 45% on Extroversion You scored higher than 27% on Brutality You scored higher than 20% on Arrogance

Link: The Personality Defect Test written by saint_gasoline on OkCupid Free Online Dating, home of the 32-Type Dating Test

Current Music: Link - Bolero of Fire

Linky linky dumpy dumpy: FEATURING The Legend of Zelda, Bi-monthly Man vs. Clown! link dump, and "Apache" by the Sugarhill Gang

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An oversight

I went to the department commencement ceremony today. Unlike at UBC where everybody's commencement happens in the one gorgeous building on campus, our department just books a medium-sized lecture hall. The commencement speech here appears to be very different in flavour from those at UBC, too -- today's commencement speaker was a statistician who basically talked about his research as examples of the kinds of things the new graduates will be pioneering, working on, etc.

One of the things he showed was a satellite image of a neighbourhood in LA with the names of all of the wireless networks publicly accessible there when wardriving. There were a bunch that had names akin to the default "Linksys" or "Netgear" networks you get on an unconfigured router, and then there were ones that were clearly people who knew they were being watched with names like "f*ckyougetyourownshit", names he was apparently very careful to censor.

Except for "Lesbian Dildo Vagina Party".