Hundred Hand

Yesterday I went to an actual record store, FYE, to purchase a CD. It had to be purchased in person because I was giving it as a gift, and I can’t say which CD, in case my mom is reading this (she’s not).

Normally just the threat of having to walk to a store is enough to keep me buying online, but I was equally annoyed by the price. One CD, $19. How does that make sense? How is this store still in business? The first thing everyone does when they get a CD anyway is rip it to their iPod. Even if you don’t have an iPod, you could just download it and burn it for half the price.

And I’m not factoring all the costs in here. Here is what my breakdown looks like:

In-Person Purchasing:
Album: $19
Extra Train Fare: $1.75
Opporunity Cost @ $28/hr: $14
Total Cost: $34.75

Online Purchasing:
Album: $10
Opportunity Cost @ $28/hr: $2.33
Total Cost: $12.33

I thought about telling my cashier that I wouldn’t be buying this from them if I wasn’t giving it as a gift, but she was nice and probably in highschool and wouldn’t have cared anyway. And I didn’t want to be a whinny old man.

Is the age of in-person music stores ending? How long it be before this happens with music and video games? Boxers or briefs?

I am a perfectionist. That doesn’t just mean that I want everything to be perfect, everybody wants that. It means that I have a hard time accepting imperfections. By definition, I am a normal adaptive perfectionist; meaning I am able to take joy from my actions when they meet my standards, and that, for the most part, I am able to fit in with society. Basically, this the most mild flavor of perfectionism.

There are some good aspects to this: I’ve never cheated on anyone, I work very hard at the things I feel I can do well, I produce high quality work, I stay in good shape, keep a fairly healthy diet and am good with personal finances.

But I’m also a huge procrastinator. This I have learned, goes hand in hand with perfectionism. When you feel that you won’t be able to do something well enough, you don’t want to start doing it in the first place. Take writing this blog post for instance. I have a lot of things to say, but I’m writing it up very slowly, and rereading often as I go. And the whole reason I am writing a blog post, is to avoid an issue at work to which I’m assigned, and am having difficulty figuring out. I don’t like to do things on a whim because I need to have my schedule planned out perfectly in advance. I avoid sports which I don’t think I’ll be good at (even hackysack for a while), and I go extremely long times between relationships waiting for the stars to align. If I don’t like any of the food I have in the house, I won’t eat. My desk at work is spotless, not because I am a neat person, but because cleaning is another one of my procrastination techniques. Compare that to my room at home, which is quite messy because I haven’t had to do any serious work there in a long time.

But I’ve found a cure for all of these; it’s this great new thing called alcohol. I discovered in college, while trying to write term papers that I am able to write much more easily with just a beer or two in my system. It’s not necessarily great writing, but it’s not terrible and it’s much better than writing nothing. Plus I can always go back when I’m sober and fix it up. I also program better, am able to talk to strangers without fear of saying the wrong thing and am much less afraid to make a fool of myself by trying to sing or attempt a physical activity. Alcohol may be debilitating when trying to drive a car, but it’s quite enabling in most other ways for a person like myself.

This might be my own nearsightedness, but I assumed (at least before researching this) most people are perfectionists. After reading about some of the traits of perfectionism how many of you identify with these? In a totally flawed study, 18% of people were determined to be perfectionists; let’s see how that lines up with our even more flawed results.

I started to write a post a while back about how looks matter in life, and for more than just the stuff you’d suspect. It got really long, obvious and rambly. Instead I’ll summarize here. Attractive people look more “normal” and like they fit in so they are desirable to employers even when the goal isn’t to get into their pants. Well dressed people look like they have more money and don’t fuck around so they get better deals and salespeople, among others, take them more seriously. In general, if you can make yourself presentable and dress well, life will be easier (if not necessarily better).

So being attractive, though genes, effort and purchased goods helps one to make more money.

And there are also a lot of ways that having money makes one more attractive. Between clothes, haircuts, better quality food, beauty products and education there are many serious advantages that having at least a moderate amount of money will offer. Which will then lead to you getting more money back. It’s quite the cycle.

We are constantly told that looks aren’t important, and that’s not really true. That doesn’t mean if you’re ugly you should kill yourself, but try to do what you can with what you have. Money spent on your appearance, within reason, is not a wasted investment. I’ve started paying for haircuts and getting them on a regular basis, and consequently my hair looks better, I look more professional, and they decided to make me CEO (this last part may not have actually happened). Trying to look presentable really isn’t superficial or illogical. If you’re one of the people who generally ignores their appearance, you may want to think about making a couple little changes and see how things go for you.

Ugly Betty is now in it’s 4th season. Shouldn’t those braces have come off by now?

The immaculate conception that they talk about in the bible probably just means Mary had sex without leaving one of those wet spots in the bed.

Couldn’t Data have written his own software-based solution for emotions rather than needing a dedicated emotion chip?

A beggar made an insteresting speech on the subway this morning on my way to work. He was well spoken and clean-cut, at least for a beggar, and explained his finances to us. Apparently, it costs him $32 dollars a night to stay at a YMCA in the city, and if he doesn’t have his money ready in the morning then the room is up for grabs, for which there is a lot of competition. The halirious part however, was that he tried to invoke our patriotism by saying the person that gets his room may not even be in this country legally.

I thought about this a little. The whole purpose behind the immigration process is to make sure that those who come to our country can support themselves, and won’t be a burden on others. For example, you wouldn’t let someone in the country if their only skill was begging on the subway.

He went on further by talking about his life philosophy. He said he doesn’t steal, doesn’t do drugs, because he lives his life by accountability. He even offered to let us take on his philosophy if we chose. I just don’t see this happening; that the people in suits heading to work at Rockafeller Center are going to decide that maybe they have lived their life all wrong, and they should be more like the guy asking for 32 bucks.

It was all cool though, he got some money from a Hasidic Jew, thanked him for the mitzvah (I just learned what this means), then spouted a few jumbled Bible verses and hopped off at the next stop.

And because it’s against my policy to give money to beggars I didn’t give him anything. However, I have to figure out what my policy is on people selling blog post ideas.

Today 7th ave around where I work was closed down due to a bomb scare. What caused this scare, do you ask? Well it was due to a suitcase being left in a nearby Starbucks. Yes, very scary indeed.

Not that it was a huge deal; we just had to enter and exit the building through the basement parking garage instead of the front. Though, it does seem excessive how skittish Americans, and especially New Yorkers are nowadays. Safety procedure is to assume every piece of trash capable on concealing a bomb is actually a bomb. Then we have to get cops to rope off the area, a bomb squad to come in and disarm it. Seems like a lot of work just to throw away someone’s trash from lunch, or a forgotten backpack. I’d like to think that if someone really wanted to plant a bomb they could come up with a better way to do it; especially when there are posters everywhere telling people to call the cops if they see packages lying around, unclaimed. However, seeing as how these plane explosion attempts always fail, we are dealing with some pretty incompetent terrorists.

And haven’t we missed the whole point of this thing? Weren’t we adamant about not allowing the terrorists to change our style of life? And we decided that the best way to not change anything was by changing everything and causing a great number of inconvenieces in the pursuit of safety? There are so many people in New York, and we really don’t need them all. Wouldn’t we save time and money and improve our quality of life if we weren’t so overly cautious?

There’s probably a good reason I’m not in charge of security here.

A while back I ran out of books to read. Remembering a good movie I saw back in the day, “The Andomeda Strain”, I decided I should get the book off which it was based, written by Michael Crichton. Well the cheapest price I found on the book was to order it as part of a 3 book collection also containing “Terminal Man” and “The Great Train Robbery”, so I went with that one, intending only to read the first story.

Now Michael Crichton is someone who I usually associate with action movies and political thrillers (I may have had him confused with John Grisham), but this movie had lots of science, and that appealed to me as a kid. I found out from reading the book, all the movies based on Michael Crichton’s work have to cut out the vast amount of explanitory passages in order to keep up the pace and average moviegoers attention. About half of the books’ content comes in the form of asides where he goes into detail about real science and how it applies to the story. Are you familiar with the cartoon scene early in Jurrasic Park where they explain how they can find dinosaur blood within some fossilized amber? His books are filled with that type of information that often can’t be worked into a movie. If your least favorite part of a Michael Crichton movie was the action, then you’ll like his books much more.

Well I did end up reading the other 2 books in that collection I purchased, and I didn’t stop there. I also read Sphere, Congo and Eaters of the Dead and all were thoroughly fascinating. He made me interested in things that I didn’t even think I would be interested in. The best part is, that he has a book for everyone. Do you like political stuff? Read Rising Sun. Do you like the ocean? Read Sphere. Do you like heists? Read the Great Train Robbery.

I guess what I’m saying is, read some Michael Crichton. Then, next time we are at a Wine and Cheese party together we can discuss.

I just got Borderlands yesterday and now I’m sitting here at work just thinking about it all day. I’ve only played about 4 hours of it so far, but from what I can tell, it’s a very fun game. This won’t be a full review, but I’ll talk about some of the things that seem to make this game work, and the new things it brings to the table.

I’m an RPG fan by nature. I grew up with Final Fantasy and Dragon Warrior being my favorite series. If I got tired of the turn based combat I had things like Zelda II and Castlevania: SOTN to play, which had real time combat, but were still RPGs at their core. In my highschool years I was hopelessly addicted to Diablo II, which was just an action-RPG with a crazy loot system. I also played my fair share of Wolfenstein and Quake, which were fun, but always hated how once all the guns were collected, your character stopped improving. Honestly, once I found the secret double barrel shotgun in level 2, that’s basically what I used the entire game.

Fastforward to today. The two games I play the most are WoW and Halo 3. WoW is still fun, but I’ve been playing it for 5 years now and you need 9 other people who play specific types of characters in order to see anything new. The result is that I end up hopping on just one or two nights a week for scheduled raids, but play little at other times. Halo 3 is a great game to play when you have a couple buddies around, and I’ve wasted entire days just doing random deathmatches (I feel like I’m dating myself with that term) but after playing for 6 hours straight, I feel like I should be getting some kind of reward besides just a higher ranking.

So of course I was intrigued when Hellgate: London came out a couple years ago; I was even in the beta. It was the first game to combine an RPG and a FPS, and included the same kind of excessive loot drops featured in the Diablo games. But the company didn’t last long, and for good reason. The game was rushed and was released with some big bugs. It felt unbalanced with how many skills became obsolete just a few levels after first obtaining them. The weapon upgrade system was cool at first, but eventually meant that your upgraded weapon was better than anything that could drop, so it hurt the loot system overall. Probably my biggest gripe with the game was how similar and disjointed all the levels seemed and it started to feel very grindy after a while. It was one of those games with a good ideas, but some big flaws.

That’s where Borderlands comes in. Borderlands is a shooter-RPG set on a desolate planet with some humorous characters. The visual style is cartoonish, but like a cartoon intended for adults (as opposed to an adult cartoon). You play as one of 4 characters, all of whom have the ability to use every type of gun, but with skills that generally help to improve the 2 types of guns to which they are best suited. You complete quests which drive the main storyline, force you to explore, and give you nice rewards. Enemies spawn in small packs and drop the things you’ll need to become more badass. This includes mainly guns and ammo, but also can drop items to change the properties of your grenades, restore health and damage absorbing shielding.

The mechanics are largely that of a shooter, but you’ll have to gain levels in order to use the guns you’ll need to kill the harder enemies. One problem that often plagues RPGs is how grindy they can feel, having to level in order to do the things you want to do. Luckily this game has a nice experience curve, that a good player will be able to game to speed up the process significantly. The experience you get is largely based on your level in comparrison to your enemies’. You may not get any experience for killing an enemy 5 levels lower than you, 100 exp for something around your level, and 1000 exp for something 3 levels higher than you. There are definitely rewards for those that want to attempt some hard fights. There are also many achievements that reward experience. These are things like “Get 25 kills with a pistol”, “Open up 250 chests” or “Kill 12 enemies with no more than 7 seconds in between each kill.” With the right amount of planning, one could conceiveably jump from level 1 to level 7-8 in just a minute; however the way enemies are placed, and the timing needed to reload or change weapons without it interrupting your killing spree make these rather difficult.

I’ve been playing as a sniper and I really enjoy the way in which it works. Sniper weapons in general are pretty innefective when delivering body shots; their only real advantage being the range at which you can begin your attack. However, shots to the head (or whatever part of a creature is most vital) deal something like 4-5 times normal damage often 1-shotting enemies, and 3-4 shotting bosses. Thus, your ability to take on higher level guys, and advance quickly in level can be totally dependant on your aim. Likewise, how much damage you take is largely dependant on your ability to dodge attacks, and find good places from which to attack enemies.

The guns are fun and there are many different properties that can be randomly assigned to them. They can change the damage they do, clip size, reload time, recoil from firing, accuracy, add elemental effects to the shots, etc.. At first it was a bit of an overload trying to compare different properties and figure out which one was better. Eventually though, I stopped worrying and started basing my choices on just a few categories, weapon damage, weapon speed, and the availablity of a scope. As you progress through the game, you’ll start to notice weapons whose names are in different colors. They go from white, to green, to blue, to purple from what I’ve seen and each new color generally denotes a much more powerful and rare weapon. It may be racist, but after a while, once you’ve outfitted yourself in blue and purple gear, you can start ignoring the green and white items, and just sell them for cash.

So those are the things I’ve witnessed so far, and it seems like a good start. All the areas I’ve explored seem to be kinda Texas desert-like, but I’ve only been to 3 so I’m hoping the landscape has more variation as I advance. Also, I’ve been playing Single player to learn the game, though all the reviews I’ve read say that multiplayer is where the game really gets fun. I’ll have to check tonight to see if there is a way to find random internet party-mates.

If you know me, you may know that I upgrade my computer pretty much every 2 years like clockwork. While I would like to upgrade every time a new exciting component comes out, my 2 year rule is the contract I make with myself that keeps me from overspending. I also believe that if you’re on a set budget, and you want to keep your computer as current as possible, you get the most bang for your buck by spending a moderate amount of money at set intervals. So through the course of my college career I spent about $1200 combined for two upgrades, and my computer stayed nice and fast. Very different from my sister, who got a $3000 computer her freshman year, and then didn’t replace it until 4 years after it had been outdated, long after graduating.

Well I’m bending the rules a bit this week and getting a new graphics card six months early, but for a good reason. I’ve been having computer issues lately. As far as I can tell, my video card is dead, at least according to the beeps my computer is making; long short short. I’ll probably take a hit to my nerd cred for this, but I didn’t have any spare video cards around to use as a test case, and my motherboard had no integrated video. However, after completely removing my old card, with no change in error, it either has to be that my video card was bad, or my motherboard has lost the ability to detect video cards, aka “fucked”. Because I’m an optomist, I’m banking on it being the former, and I ordered a new card. According to the internet, it has just arrived at my apartment, and I can’t wait to go home and stick it in.

This comes right around the point that I could use a new card anyway. There are a couple places where I could tell my old card wasn’t cutting the mustard. First, I played through Dragon Age: Origins, which is a very cool game; but like a loser I had to turn my resolution down to 1600×1000 from 1920×1200 because the frame rate would get really bad during large battles or when there were a lot of environmental effects going on. In WoW, it was taking quite a while for people to load whenever I teleported to the major city (Dalaran for those of you that play). Also, I’ve been playing through Final Fantasy X on a PS2 emulator lately, and at certain points the frame rate will drop, and the background music slows down and characters start speaking slower; it’s just a pain.

The card that I ended up going with is this, a Radeon 4890. It was $210 bucks, comes with an aftermarket cooler already attached, and should have about double the performance of my old 8800gt, which cost $270 a year and a half ago. I was seriously considering going up to the Radeon 5 series, where I could get about 50% more performance for twice the price, but it just seemed unnecessary. Also, I’m trying hard to build a fairly quiet computer, and the card I chose seemed to be less of a power hog, which means less heat, which means less cooling, which means less noise.

If this new card doesn’t fix my problem, then I’m just going to ditch my plan and upgrade everything else, since swapping out a motherboard means swapping everything. Personally I can’t wait to add a couple more cores to my processor, and bump up my ram now that I don’t have that stupid 2 gig limit from old versions of Windows. Choosing an SSD is going to be a tough decision though. That one I should give a little time for prices to settle down.

I’ve been reading up on Flash Harddrives (aka SSD’s, aka Solid State Disks) the last couple days and I’m getting pretty darned excited about them (good thing my boxer briefs have a lot of “support”). They hold a lot of advantages over standard magnetic platter based drives. SSD’s have no moving parts so once the technology is mature they should have low failure rates, especially in laptops that often get jarred around. They consume far less power than traditional drives and make no noise. They also produce much less heat, because electricity is always indirectly converted to heat when consumed. Of course these are great things for laptops, but the most important part which makes it just as attractive to desktops are the performance benefits. SSD’s are able to access any part of the disk equally quickly with no “spin-up” time. For the most part disk fragmentation doesn’t affect performance in the least, and on a highly fragmented disk, an SSD will be about 70x faster than a top of the line traditional drive.

For a rough estimate, I’d say that the average SSD will be about 2x-15x faster in practice than what you’re using now. People have reported boot times as low as 7 seconds from power button to surfing the web and most programs opening almost as quickly as if they had just been minimized. With all the little random reads and writes computers have to perform it makes a big difference. People in the know are saying switching from traditional to SSD is easily the biggest thing the average nerd can do to increase the overall performance of their computer.

Of course, there are downsides to it. First is size; the sizes of the SSD’s that are available are about the same as traditional drives were when I first began college 8 years ago. The average consumer will only end up buying between a 40g and 160g SSD due to budgetary reasons. Which brings me to the second downside; these things cost a bunch right now. A high quality 160 gig SSD costs about $500. At best, companies are charging about $2.34 per gig. It doesn’t seem ridiculous, but when you consider traditional drives are down to about 9c per gig, you only get 4% of the space per dollar. One company is making a 1TB SSD, but it’s actually just 4 250gb drives stuck together, and costs over $2000; expensive enough that the average consumer will never use it till prices drop significantly.

And so I’m sitting around hoping prices will drop. Except, right now is one of the few times with technology that prices are actually going up. The demand is so high compared to supply right now that many stores are sold out of all decent SSD’s, and those that are selling them are charging 30% more than they did this summer. I’m about 6 months away from building a new system; they’d better get their act together before that time.

Anyway, the solution to this size problem (besides pills and creams) is to just get a reasonable sized SSD to hold your OS and a few of the programs you use all the time, and placing the rest of your data on your dirt cheap and massive traditional drive. It’s the same thing we’ve been doing with high-end performance drives in the past, and while it was looking like things were getting cheap enough for that to become obsolete, it’s come back in a big way; much like houndstooth and thick rimmed glasses.