UNDERDOG of PERFECTION

In case you didn’t know (and why would you, since I’m sure you don’t own a Zune), there was a big problem on New Year’s Eve for 30 GB Zune owners (dubbed Z2K9), all of which apparently suffered a simultaneous failure on that day.

Apparently, a bug in a driver for that model caused it to choke on the 366th day of the year. In other words, the 30 GB Zune cannot comprehend the concept of a “leap year.”

According to Gizmodo, Microsoft’s official “fix” was simply to wait it out until January 1, 2009. Nice one. But this begs the question, glaringly omitted from the FAQ on Gizmodo, of what will happen to these Zunes on December 31, 2012, since there’s no mention of Microsoft actually attempting to eliminate the bug from the software. I have to assume Microsoft just expects all of these Zunes to have arrived at their eternal home in a landfill by then.

Another question omitted from the page: Who actually owns a Zune anyway?

Oh… um… that is… what I meant to say was… uh… the Zune is… a… uh… a wonderful device and… um… I’m sure lots of people own them. (Can I go now?)

This is really just an experiment at this point — a chance to try out bbPress, a new open source forum tool from the creators of WordPress, my favorite blog software.

So… if you’re a registered member of room34.com, you can jump right over to the Room 34 Forum and participate. If you’re not yet a member, you can register now and sign in instantly.

Back at the beginning of the month, as I ranted about, I had to go to the Hennepin County Government Center to apply for a duplicate title for my car.

Joy of joys, through the ineptitude of various government agencies (and/or specific employees therein — and believe me, I want to believe in good, efficient government, so it pains me to have cause for criticism), I had to go back today to apply to have my application expedited (now? after 4 weeks?) because for whatever reason, it hasn’t been processed yet.

This time I did not park in the privately operated parking garage directly across from the government center. I parked in a city-operated garage right next to it. The two are physically connected. I had to walk approximately a total of 100 extra feet, indoors, as a result of this parking choice.

The city garage charges $1.50 per half hour. I was there for an hour and a half, so I paid $4.50. But if I had been there for three hours, as I was during my trip downtown at the beginning of this month, it would have cost $9. $9, instead of $23. So for the convenience of avoiding a few extra steps of walking, and the privilege of feeding your money into a talking machine (it’s the wave of the future!) instead of interacting with an actual human at the exit of the garage, the private company charges a premium of $14 for three hours of parking.

Maybe the government isn’t so bad after all.

Speaking of the government being bad or not, on the way to the car I saw one of my favorite old Skyway buskers — the guy who looks and sounds vaguely like a mustachioed José Feliciano. He was singing an original composition, “Let’s All Throw Our Shoes at the President.” Now that’s something I’d have paid $23 for.

A former coworker tipped me off to this video, originally posted here. It’s a video review of the author’s choice for “game of the year,” and it’s not what you might think.

Well, OK. I know you’ve read the title of this post. So yes, it’s probably exactly what you might think. He makes a compelling case for what is so unique and revolutionary about this game.

As I mentioned in a recent post, I got Prince of Persia from my parents for Christmas and have been playing it for the past few days. I’ve gradually been coming to realize on my own what this reviewer is talking about.

At first I was kind of shocked (and a little disappointed) when I realized that you couldn’t die in the game. Too easy! I thought. But I have had many game experiences in the past like what he describes, where if you screw up you have to start over at the beginning of the level. Extremely frustrating. With Prince of Persia, I was initially somewhat put off by the discovery of this “no death” policy, but as I played on I realized that the developers built in the proper challenges and rewards in other ways.

When you’re battling a boss for instance, when you do something that would have caused you to die in another game, in the few moments while you’re being rescued by the princess who accompanies you on the adventure, the boss regains some of its energy. So, in other words, you do still get “punished” — it will now take longer to beat the boss — but you’re never thrown completely out of the experience and forced to repeat your steps again and again until you just happen to get it right.

That’s the thing that’s really revolutionary about this game: it allows you to keep on with the necessary trial and error until you learn what to do, not in a pathetically easy way, but in a non-frustrating way. You still have to figure out what to do, and develop skill with certain maneuvers, or you’ll never get past certain obstacles. But unlike with other games that force you to go back to well before the point where you’re currently stuck, and then repeat several minutes of things you’ve already done, you can just keep at it until you get it right. Imagine having to do that “repeat several minutes” thing 10 or 15 times when you’re up against a challenge you’re particularly struggling with, and you’ll see why I’ve left so many games unfinished. And I’m an “experienced gamer!” Sort of.

I have a pair of old Macs that have been sitting unused, or almost unused. The “hemisphere” iMac G4, dating back to 2002, has been the kids’ computer, sort of… except for the fact that they don’t really ever use it. And the “toilet seat” iBook G3, from 2000, has been gathering dust in our bedroom closet for the past year or so, since I tried and failed to install Ubuntu 7.10 on it.

Today various factors came together to lead me to bring the iMac, and the desk it was sitting on, down from the kids’ bedroom and into my office. Now that I have it, I might as well do something with it. And that something is installing the PowerPC version of Ubuntu 8.04. And as long as I had set up desk space for antiquated Macs, I lugged out the ol’ toilet seat and decided to, at the very least, get it back up and running with an OS it was more comfortable with, that being Mac OS 9.1. (I’m working on upgrading it to 9.2.2 at the moment, but 9.1 was the most recent “Classic” installer disc I had on hand.)

And all of this leads to the following, most improbable of photographs. What’s the point? Well… I got to take this photo! Is that point enough for you?

What’s next for these two old beasts? Well, I’m going to boot up the Ubuntu Live CD on the iBook, just to see if 8.04 is more friendly to it than 7.10 was. If so, I’m going to install Edubuntu and make it the kids’ new computer. If not, well at least it’s got a stable OS now, and I’ll still make it the kids’ new computer. I can probably round up some pre-OS X kids’ software for them, and they can always use it to watch DVDs.

Meanwhile, the iMac is possibly going to turn into a local file/media/web server, or at least be another system for me to play around with Linux on. I do have Ubuntu 8.10 on my main MacBook, but having to reboot into it is usually more trouble than it’s worth.

Update, a few minutes later: I went for it with the Live CD on the iBook. Good news. After a few fretful minutes watching the display do some very weird things during the boot process, I stepped away to deal with some kid antics. I came back to the iBook to see this: