Daikatana

Last night, on the drive home after dropping Omaha off at the studio for her weekly radio show I stopped by Half-Price Books to see what was new. What I'm really looking for is a copy of Return to Castle Wolfenstein, which the software dealer said he'd seen quite a bit of, but none recently. Under the heading of "when the price is right," I picked up a copy of Daikatana for three bucks.

I can already tell you that Daikatana is a silly game. The premise is ridiculous, even sillier than the justifications for Doom, which is saying a lot. The mouselook feature is excessively sensitive, making it very hard to get a good sense of the world around you. The opening movie is done with the game engine and fancy camera moves cannot erase the fact that the body models do not compare favorably to Quake II (even though it's supposedly based on an upgraded Q2 engine). The opening levels are murky and annoying, and your task of keeping your compatriots alive would make more sense if they weren't as dumb as a bag of hammers. No amount of lovely lighting will compensate for this idiocy.

The Power and the Pain

Wow, when Omaha gets cool she gets way cool. While the initial frustrations with the now motherboard she bought for my computer were substantial, it is now a power tool of great proportion. Last night while hacking around in my junk box I found a card and said, "Hey, what's this?"

It's an IEEE1394 interface card. I'm not sure where it came from. I remember Shaterri gave me a handful of cards once upon a time when he was cleaning out his closets in preparation for moving down to California. I managed to find the cable for our old video camera too. After installing the card and rebuilding my kernel (a serious pain in the neck task because neither the sound nor the video card drivers are in the build, meaning I have to install them by hand at the end of every major rebuild), I plugged it all together and watched as I transferred down seven minutes of Kouryou-chan when she was just a few months old.

Seven minutes of film at double television resolution requires nine gigabytes of diskspace!

Here's hoping that after running it through the mpeg compression routines it's a lot smaller! It would be neat to have VCD collections of our family albums; there are plenty of DVD players out there that understand the VCD format.

Except (and here's the "pain" part)-- my CD-R/W, which was so faithful under the old system, has burned three coasters in a row. I'm getting distraught. I'm hoping that it was a combination of the disk type (a cheap pheno brand) and the fact that I was foolishly running X and lots of other things during the burn. I mean, I had to bail out of X when I had a P2-266 to get a reliable burn, but I'm running an Athlon/2700 now!

It's an old 2x burner, a Yamaha brand that Y doesn't even supply the drivers for anymore. I'm hoping it hasn't died on me. The other (more terrifying) possibility is that with all of the cards in the box, including the GForce4, and five drives, I'm straining the 350 watt power supply into unreliable territory.

I started a burn before I left for work this morning-- Maxcell disks, inittab 3, no X. If that doesn't work, I'll try one last time with the speed dropped to 1x. After that... *sigh*. Dunno.

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The initimitable technoshaman asked us what music we like that nobody would suspect us of liking. Okay, well, I'm going to confess: Lawrence Welk. Yes, that's right, ladies and gentlemen, right here on our stage, with the champagne bubbles and the elegant dancers and the too-right tuxedo. My uncle used to watch it for hours and for some reason the world of Welk was so different from where I was living that it had a mysterious, compelling quality to it.

Say WHAT?

Prosecutors in the Martha Stewart securities fraud case are now saying that if they get a conviction on securities fraud, Miss Stewart will automatically be eligible for a subsequent conviction for proclaiming her innocence

What the FUCK? I thought innocent until proven guilty was the law of the land. Even if someone is ultimately found guilty of a crime, you don't go on to punish them for insisting that you treat them in accordance with all the respect and rights accorded the innocent before the establishment of guilt.

The prosecutors claim, "Well, this is different. In an era of non-stop news coverage, Miss Stewart's pronouncement of innocence amounts to an attempt to manipulate her stock price further." No, it is not different. Martha Stewart is a citizen of the United States and has every right to proclaim her innocence, in public, as loudly as she wishes, and nobody should have the power to punish her for doing so. She has not yet been found guilty. She is assumed to be innocent, and she can say so. That is her right.