bktheirregular

I didn't pick up the Playstation until I'd found the apartment I was going to move into when I vacated my hole-in-the-wall rent-too-damn-high crash pad in the fall of 1009. I knew that when I moved in, I was finally going to get a television, and I figured I might as well invest in a hi-def movie player to go with it, and most of the reviews I'd read said that the PS3 was the best Blu-ray player on the market. Plus the price had dropped and they'd just come out with the smaller, more power-efficient model, so it was easier to justify spending the money I'd put aside for the hi-def purchase. I hadn't realized that the following summer, the machine would also turn into the best solution for my baseball-deprivation problem.

Well, until the now-infamous Sony hack took down the Playstation network and kneecapped MLB's internet streaming capabilities along with it.

But then, I hadn't really noticed, because the hack hit right as I was leaving for New York, and when I got back to Athens, I almost immediately had to unplug my TV and associated devices and put them under a sheet and a blanket while the workers tore open my wall to plug the leaks. (Sheet to keep away dust, blanket to protect against damage from more substantial chips of debris.)

I left for New York two weeks ago, I've been back a week, and in that time, they've opened my wall up, ripped out the badly-designed balcony stoop, replaced the stoop with a new marble slab, sealed the doorway from leaks, replaced the torn-out brickwork on the inner wall, re-plastered the wall, and if the flooring guy's to be believed, in the next couple of days they'll have replaced six square meters (about 64 square feet) of warped parquet with new wood.

And it's looking like even odds I still won't have my baseball back by then.

Anyone who, like me, was clobbered by the Twitter hack of Tuesday the 21st of September: I strongly recommend you clear the caches on every browser you run on the computer you were using when you got hit, and then run a full antivirus scan. I got warnings from stuff in the cache of two different browsers after the hit.

DSL came back today while I was out at work. Came back home, all five lights on the new router were green.

yay!

Did I ever mention that, while in the army, I was wistful for my time at the law office, and looking very much forward to being in an environment where the truly moronic couldn't get through the door?

I take it back. I take it all back.

Submitted for your consideration: a virus hunt that ended with this incredulous statement:

"You pirated your antivirus software?!"

Punctuated with an actual honest-to-God dopesmack.

Fixed the router.

Turns out the procedure called for a hard reset, which I only found out how to do from searching on the internet. Which, obviously, I couldn't do from home, seeing as how I couldn't access the internet to learn how to do the hard reset.

Terry Pratchett put it best (as he so often does): it's like you need to open a crate, and the only tool for the job is the crowbar that's inside the crate.

Not too much to report. Got paid back for a big favor I did someone the last time I was stateside - nothing remotely illegal, don't worry - and I did something that five years ago I would have sworn I'd never do.

I got a game console. A Playstation 2, to be precise.

It's not what you think; what I was shopping for was a DVD player to play Region 2 disks, in case I ever wanted to poke my head into a video rental store (no Netflix here). I settled on the Playstation, frankly, because it's tiny. Smaller than a hardback book.

The only problem is, it didn't come with a proper DVD remote control, just a gamepad. And I can't seem to find a Playstation 2 DVD remote control in this country no matter where I go.

Ah well. Maybe next time I'm Stateside.

The other day, I got a message from my mother, saying she might not be able to be in touch for a while; her laptop's keyboard had stopped working, and the thing had been pronounced dead by a long-time friend, and did I have any suggestions?

Halfway into an email (because I thought she might switch over to my dad's old mini-laptop for the duration), I remembered that about five years back, I'd gotten a small USB keyboard for use as a backup, in case things went wrong with the keyboard on my desktop machine. I'd taken it with me from New Jersey to New York, but left it behind in my move from New York to Athens. I thought, if I'd stashed it someplace easily accessible, that it might make a halfway workable stopgap replacement for my mom.

The next day, she told me that the thing was perfect. Fit over her laptop keyboard almost flawlessly, didn't block her track-pad, and she's back up and running again.

(She's going to use Dad's mini-laptop during travels, because the thing weighs a lot less, though; she and Dad will be doing lots of travelling in the next couple of months, including a trip to Florida, one to Utah, and a trip to Australia where Dad got invited to a conference. After that, she's going to look into getting a new laptop. Even if her current machine isn't dead yet, a failed keyboard indicates that it's about time.)

On occasion, I've been criticized for getting a small piece of kit because I thought it might be useful in the future, even though there wasn't a current pressing need.

And then there are the times when an addition to my spare-parts pile saves someone about seventeen tons of grief.

Via Penny Arcade, the following popped up:

A computer that Rockwall County District Attorney Ray Sumrow says he built as a backup server for his office contained documents related to eBay sales, personal e-mails and a cheat sheet for a computer game, an FBI computer expert testified Monday morning.

...

The computer – equipped with two hard drives, seven fans, high-end video and audio cards, a wireless Internet connection and cables that glow under ultraviolet light – is designed for playing video games, prosecutors say.

Half right, I'd say.

• Two hard drives? I can see that, for data backup or a redundant disk array; heck, having multiple hard drives saved my bacon enough times that I've lost count.


• Wireless Internet connection? That's practically standard for a computer these days; if you're in an apartment, it's often the only choice for getting online.


• High-end video and audio? Well, maybe a little less justifiable.


• Cables that glow under ultraviolet light? Occasionally, those are the only cables available when one goes looking; I went to replace an 80-millimeter fan in my old PC case (the fan was making a godawful racket, probably out of balance or something), and all I could find were UV-glow fans and LED-glow fans, so I went for a UV-glow fan because it was the cheaper option, and it wouldn't glow without a black light.


• Seven fans? Either the rig's going to sound like an aircraft, or it's going to be the size of an aircraft.

If I were the DA's attorney, I'd ask whether his rig had a black light; if not, the UV-reactiveness of the cables would be a secondary concern. If he'd mounted a black light in his case, I'd look into pleading out and make sure he paid me my fee.

Here's Penny Arcade's take on the case.

My aunt (seventy plus years old and somewhat technophobic) decided to get a DSL connection, because it would cost her less than the Internet connection she had in her apartment and would also work faster than the ISDN line that was in place. The problem: she contacted OTE, the phone company, and instead of them sending a technician to set it up for her, they sent her a box with the materials in it, and a set of nigh-incomprehensible instructions in Greek for how to set it up. She did what I suppose one would have to call the logical thing.

She called me to set it up for her.

Problem one: I didn't know whether she'd had DSL set up on her regular phone line, or on her ISDN line. Problem two: I didn't know whether the DSL modem/router OTE had sent was for a plain old phone line, or for an ISDN line. Problem three ... the instructions were all in Greek.

I tried for half an hour to get it running, not knowing if the failure was my plugging it into the wrong outlet or whether it was that OTE hadn't turned on the DSL, or whether there was some obscure setting (I remembered something like that from setting up my own apartment's connection) that I'd simply flat-out missed. A call was placed to OTE's tech support line.

Twenty minutes on hold, and I got handed the phone. Tech support guy, who knew Greek but very little English, asked for the phone number of the ISDN line - something my aunt didn't have handy. As we struggled to find it, the phone cut off. We tried to call again, and never got back the DSL tech support people.

My aunt called the main OTE support line, and after another twenty minutes, got someone on the line, who said they'd send someone out to look at it ... who would charge forty euros for the visit ... and would simply check and see that it was plugged in properly, but wouldn't check anything with the computer (that's another department, apparently).

It was at about this point that I started to see glittering prisms cutting a crescent into my field of view, which I recall is a warning sign of an impending migraine.

The problem, I think, is that I came in at the tail end of the plan, after all sorts of decisions had already been made that I couldn't understand. Normally, I'm pretty good with tech, but I suspect that part of my comfort with anything technical I've been mucking around with is that I built it up from the ground, so to speak. My desktop computer, for example, is one I built myself from parts. And come to think of it, I've replaced just about every part of that machine at some point or other.

Actually, that reminds me of the anecdote from the Discworld novel The Fifth Elephant, about the axe of the Low King. It had been in his family for five hundred years, passed down through the generations. Of course, there were times that it needed to have its handle replaced, and times it needed a new head, but it was still the same axe.

I'm gathering information for the building of a new desktop datavault/game machine. I think I may call it Rhys, after the Low King, in honor of that axe...