Modem… so… slow

My mom can’t get DSL, she’s too far away from the station. It’s a shame, because she would have had it ready for Thanksgiving. Now I’m reduced to about a 40kbps connection. Good enough to IRC and play Simcountry, but that’s about it.

The drive down was a typical Thanksgiving weekend drive down I-5. Of course, it took me almost as long to get from Magic Mountain to home than it did to get to Magic Mountain. Gosh, I love L.A. traffic. Have I ever mentioned that? (never moving back, never moving back)

As tempted as I am, I think we’re avoiding the shopping tomorrow. A surprising amount of the conversation at dinner today was around computers, and how little it costs to upgrade today, especially when dealing with 4 year-old computers.

Why do I have a feeling that this mood is going to be used throughout LiveJournal more than any other today?

Happiness is…

November 19th. Of course, once again, one minute after I get the two FedEx boxes in my hand, I get the email from ebgames.com telling me that they shipped. Way to go, guys!

In another videogame-related coincidence, on Sunday I dragged the old Super Gameboy and SNES out of storage to play Metroid II. Part of the conversation with my roommates ended up on “I wonder if they’ll ever make a way to play Gameboy Advance games on the GameCube,” to which I said “probably not until after the GBA goes away”.

But then today, this was announced. Weird, huh?

boooooring

I got the wrong gamebit last time. Won’t screw up this time, new one in mail. Of course, if I ever need to open up my N64, SNES, NES or any one of their associated game paks, I’m set. This may prove useful if I ever decide to mod my GameCube as well.

Metroid Prime and Fusion soon. Soon soon. I’m just about halfway down my video game list.

I’ve also realized that my last few entries have been rather boring. To remedy this, I shall do a little dance for you now:

*dance* *dance* *dance* *dance* *dance*

*bows*

Soldering Maniac

So, I finally got my Lik-Sang order yesterday: a replacement GBA Afterburner cover and a new Afterburner kit. During the process of re-installing the kit, I realized a few things:

  • I had accidentally left a protective sheet on before, this is why it looked grainy (but still had lots of bubbles).
  • Even if you’re very careful, you can still get bubbles in the film. I have two thumbtack-sized ones on the screen now. It’s still a lot less than before, but still noticeable.
  • The replacement cover’s holes were not pre-threaded, as I discovered as I completely ground out one of the screws, rendering the GBA unre-openable. The gamebit screws, which previously I could screw by cramming a small flathead screwdriver in, require more torque than I can deliver by this method, so I have to buy a gamebit screwdriver just to tighten the thing up.
  • I accidentally left a piece attached to the old cover, but didn’t realize it until I had ground the screw down as above. So now, I’ll have to deal with the fact that the power LED glows from within the GBA, and doesn’t appear as a dot on the cover.
  • With the brightness dial installed, the protective film not in there, and ignoring the bubbles… it looks SO NICE.

Temptation

So very tempting.

I looked on eBay. At the moment, I could probably sell my laptop for about $2000.. maybe a bit more if I transferred over the Apple Care service.

If I then bought a new laptop via the KeroKero Apple Employee Purchase Program… I could have a 1GHz Tibook with SuperDrive for about $2600.

So very tempting.

Chain chain chain… chain of conference calls

Just got off a 59 minute conference call, which basically started with me talking to person A… realizing we need to talk to Person B, conferencing them in… realizing we need to talk to Person C, conferencing them in… realizing we need to talk to Person D, conferencing them in… Person A has a meeting, so she leaves, and an hour later realizing that the problem we’re having has fixed itself for some reason, oh well, on with life.

In other news, I got my copy of Final Fantasy III in the mail today (used, of course). I now own at least a part of a copy of each domestically released Final Fantasy game. (For reasons I won’t go into, I own one third of a copy of FF7.)

Found money.

I just cashed in the $75 I had sitting in my epinions.com account. Yes, I wrote a few reviews, and they got used quite a bit. I actually got money.

Well, we’ll see if I actually got money if the check actually gets to me. (And actually clears.)