pokitty.com blog

LJ crosspost fail

Sat, 05 Jun 2010 21:20:09 +0000

What's the deal, Tabulas? I know that some things don't crosspost to LJ, but what on Earth was in my last entry that borked the crosspost? I don't remember typing any multibyte characters.

Blargh. I'm genuinely glad Tabulas tells me that the crosspost failed. I'd rather know than think it went when it didn't. But in the last few months, LJ has choked on about half my crossposts. It's getting old. I don't have a clear enough idea of the problem to bring it up in LJ support. I don't think LJ gives a damn anyway, but if I knew the problem, I could at least bring it up at Dreamwidth. Probably they either have already fixed it or are interested in knowing the exact problem, to help them get it fixed. LJ, well, LJ just likes money.

I don't think the problem is on Tabulas' end, but I don't know where to ask for information about that, either. The forums are down (or at least not at the old URL), the wiki was never for one-to-one communication in the first place, Roy's not the owner anymore, I don't know who the new owner is or if they care....

Bah. Copy, open LJ tab, paste, post, find less vexing thing to do. Done.

Ah, it's this little guy: ♥ I forgot it was in there. I'd written the last paragraph first and then went back to build up to my point. That means the problem was a multibyte character, just as before, and I have an addiction to the stupid things. At least it's not some new problem.

little things

Sat, 05 Jun 2010 20:59:19 +0000

Oh hey, I still have an online journal! Who'd've known, right?

I haven't had much to report. Sun goes up, sun goes down. Same as ever.

There are little things. My little strawberry patch had only tiny little red nubbins last year; this year, I clawed up trenches in it to aerate the soil and dislodge dead plants. It paid off. Yesterday's production filled two margarine tubs, and this morning's, another one.

Finished modding my SNES Game Genie. Now I can play Japanese (SFC) games on my US console—no costly adapter required! I love good 16-bit graphics, and Romancing SaGa 3 delivers in spades. Also, I opened up an electronic device and did not break it. Go me!

My boyfriend took me to a carnival, where he won me a plushy and a sword. The plushy is a little green ball, because he remembered my favorite color. D'aww. The sword blade lights up in four colors at once, like a disco lightsabre, because we are great big geeks and that is awesome. It (brightly) lights my way to the kitchen when I wake up in the middle of the night, craving a snack. Of strawberries. OM NOM NOM

Upshot: My life is so freaking good. It's not perfect—what is?—but it's good and I am treasuring that. ♥

Force healing

Wed, 12 May 2010 20:43:26 +0000

Yesterday my brother Happy bought a used Xbox. It was missing a power cord, but the price was very, very right. He found a replacement power cord within the hour and for less than a dollar. Happy is awesome at this used videogame stuff.

He got it home, plugged it in, and got it running, but it didn't recognize any discs. A healthy Xbox can play Xbox games (natch) as well as audio CDs and, if you have the DVD kit, DVD movies. This ailing Xbox didn't recognize any. It took hours last night just to get the disc drive to open.

So today I coaxed the drive open again, held it open while powering it off, and carefully cleaned what I could of the drive. I used cotton swabs, a mix of equal parts rubbing alcohol and water, and all the natural dexterity I could muster. Then I let it air dry for an hour.

That let it read a music CD without incident, but it still didn't recognize an (admittedly somewhat worn) Xbox game. We ran a CD/DVD lens cleaner disc through the system and now it all works. Happy's been living up to his nickname. And I? Am awesome.

(Why "Force" in the entry title? Because I cleaned it while Happy played Star Wars tabletop, after which he played today's purchase of Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith for his newly-acquired Xbox. I found it amusing enough to force the wordplay.)

encoding and crossposting

Tue, 23 Mar 2010 01:42:25 +0000

I have discovered something fascinating.

My previous entry posted without problem, but stubbornly refused to crosspost to LiveJournal. I kept trying; no luck. I tried the only other service I had set up in Tabulas, DeadJournal; same result.

I wrote a concerned little note to Roy and a rather less cheerful one to my LJ page, explaining my problem. Then, I think, I went to bed or otherwise distracted myself.

Tonight, with nobody to babysit, I returned to my task. A new revelation dawned: perhaps the Song of the Cebú was to blame! Rather, its title, complete with accent. Some things just can't grasp UTF-8 encoding, which I think is what Tabulas uses.

So I removed the song title from my "Currently listening to" box and tried again to crosspost. Success! I hadn't actually expected that. After so many failures, I assumed the problem must be entirely out of my hands, but here we are.

Presumably this entry will not crosspost nicely either. Oh dear. I didn't think of that when starting out. Now that I know the issue, I can always edit the entry to omit the accent, crosspost, then replace the accent on all versions of the post. Tedious, certainly, but much better than a failure message.

Aha! Yes, more failure. Hilarious, now that I know the cause. My plan B worked nicely.

my nephew is awesome

Sat, 20 Mar 2010 22:09:09 +0000

I'm watching my little (not yet school age) nephew this weekend and he is adorable.

He wanted chocolate milk. He got chocolate milk and a little teasing: "You'll turn into chocolate milk!"

"No I won't," he told me seriously.

"Well, it might take a little while to kick in."

A little afterward, I asked him questions about days of the week. "What do Nana and Ree and Happy do on Sunday?"

"Go to church!" He's right.

"Are you going to come to church with us tomorrow?"

"Yeah, unless I turn into chocolate milk!"

So cute!

taking the nephew to church

Fri, 12 Mar 2010 05:35:17 +0000

I just do not have energy this week. I babysat the nephew on Friday and Sunday, and it's only today (Thursday, very nearly Friday, according to my computer clock) that I can walk without an ache in my elbow and calf.

Yes, about that elbow pain: The nephew came to church with me Sunday morning. He ran all around the building, with me a few steps behind. When it came time to actually enter the sanctuary, he flung himself on the floor with all the ardor of a Byronic hero.

Nephew's mom can't pick him up anymore. (Medical issues - nothing dire.) He must be used to exploiting that. Unfortunately for him, I don't have that limitation. I handed my purse to the nearest bystander, hefted the little brat, and carried him into the pew. Buwahaha! It was worth the ouch!

He's usually a very good kidlet, but he gets crabby when he's hungry. He perked up considerably after a cookie and lemonade. No, much more than you're thinking; I have never seen a child so excited to sing "Hallelu, hallelu, hallelu, hallelujah, Praise ye the Lord!" Except that's not how he sang it. Let me try something.

Hallelu, hallelu, hallelu, hallelujah;
Praise ye the Lord!!!!!

Yes, that's more like it. The director of the little kids' choir sounded very pleased. :)

I hope he never loses his white-hot enthusiasm. He could sometimes stand to bank the fires a bit, mind, but he's young and has plenty of time to learn that. Such an awesome little guy. Not that I'm wrapped around his little finger, except that yes, yes I am. :D

As for me, I banged up some Ree toes in the course of writing this entry. Mild pain, my old friend, I thought you were just leaving and here you are. Again. Yeah. But if that's the worst I can say about my situation, you know I'm doing fine.

poem #60

Thu, 04 Mar 2010 00:24:53 +0000

Our South Dakota weather:
It’s cruel as you can get!
It takes a lovely springtime
And bogs it down with wet.

You pray for something drier?
Dakota has that too!
It boils away the moisture;
Humidity accrues.

So sweaty South Dakotans
Wish back precipitation.
We find, upon our winter,
The most snow in the nation.

Be careful what you wish for
Within our South Dakota.
H₂0 from heaven? —
We’ve already had our quota.

old and new

Fri, 12 Feb 2010 06:16:04 +0000

The longer I go without writing, the more the blank white box mocks me. You may think I'm updating, but really I'm taking crayon to the whiteness.

I let the end of January pass unremarked; with its passing, I have kept some form of online journal for a full decade. I think the white box spooks me a bit because it makes me worry that I'm the same sad, frustrated young thing I was back then. It also makes me fear that I am getting too old for this journal thing, having been at it for a decade without getting markedly better at it. Logically, the pair of them should cancel each other out, but I find that distress rarely answers to logic.

I like reading my old comments, though, and I'm glad I backed them up. It's very silly, but one-line notes from years gone by saying "You are loved" do me a world of good, even now. I wish I'd worked harder to keep in touch with these people.

Maybe I should try some of those old email addresses and see if anything gets through.

sequence of stress

Wed, 02 Dec 2009 18:23:28 +0000

Alas, I've not been kicking back and relaxing with my video games the way I said I would. No, I've been kicking myself.

To start with, I found myself wanting a certain video game related product. I found just one site that had it for a reasonable price.

Yeah, that should have been my first clue. After trying to place an order, my account was billed but their order form returned an error message. Swell. Their forums are down, their help pages 404, and their public email address bounces. Twenty-five dollars I'll never see again. As a bonus, when I did a search on their Paypal email address, I found an eBay account that shared the username and has been suspended. There's no way I could have known that until after I had already lost my money.

Next, my brother decided to cheer me up. He bought me a copy of a video game (Knights of the Old Republic) that he'd been long enjoying, knowing I too loved the subject matter. Yay! My computer's specs were all enough or more than enough, so the framerate might stutter but it'll all be fine.

But I installed it and it turns out that KOTOR hates the Sithly daylights out of my laptop's graphics driver (ATI Radeon Xpress 200m, no longer supported or updated). I can play the game - at one frame per second. Not even joking. I counted. One frame. I stayed up all night that night, trying various alternate drivers, searching for more clues, but nothing has helped. One driver did let me play the game enough to actually move around and enter a new room, but something terribly wrong caused characters' facial features to not actually be on their faces. It was creepy and disturbing and new topic!

Today I've been running System Restore to at least render my laptop usable for non-KOTOR activities. I attempted to alleviate a little stress by playing Earthbound Zero on my DS Lite while I waited. I got completely stuck in a maze of caves, but that was okay; I have the DS browser and Starmen.Net has an EB0 walkthrough with maps. Finally, something I can actually do!

Except it turns out that the PNG maps won't load in the DS Browser. At all. Not even a little. Which is weird, because my own site uses some PNGs and I'd swear they worked in the DS Browser, even had transparency, but these maps won't render even a pixel.

At this point I am afraid to even touch my NES for fear of it managing to explode or something. Also I think I may cry, because the frustration keeps building and I keep running out of ways to ease it.

The worst part is the KOTOR situation. EB0 can wait until my computer is available again, and $25 is not so terribly much to pay for an unfortunate learning experience. (All the same, I sent an email to that site's Paypal email address, and if I don't hear back, I'm filing a dispute in Paypal. No reason for more people to get suckered the same way I did.) But my brother did a very kind thing for me and I'm crushed to be so ungrateful. Why can't my reasonably recent laptop run a game as old as KOTOR? Something to do with poor OpenGL support, I gather, but there's still no excuse for that!

Have decided to read a book. If it tries to fall apart on me, I shall swathe it with enough packing tape to mummify a cow.

playing catch-up

Thu, 24 Sep 2009 23:54:44 +0000

I got a PlayStation 2 so um yeah.

No, that's not a typo: a pea ess two, not three. Yes, I am behind the times. What else is new?

A PS2 wouldn't be huge news for most people, but the last time I've been able to rent a video game, it was for the Super Nintendo. (I have a PSone but I got it used, well into the PS2 era.) I went to the rental place today and was shocked at the number of PS2 games they still rent out. I think I'm going to have some fun. (I was also shocked that they want $40 for their old, rented-out GameCube copy of The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess. I bet I could get a better-condition copy for $25 or less, and that's including any shipping fees.)

You guys, I was able to swing a copy of Persona 4! It's been out in America for less than a year, and I'm playing it, and I own it, and there are swears and other things to earn its M for Mature and that weirds me out like whoa. I grew up under the diktat of Nintendo censorship, so with every "bitch!", my eyes dart sideways and I wonder how this slipped past the censors. Heh. I guess I'm just too set in my ways.

Persona 4 is lovely, by the way. Turns out some of the things I liked in EarthBound, like enemies visible on the field (as opposed to random encounters) and gaining advantage in battle by sneaking up behind enemies, are alive and well here. I may go back and snag a copy of Persona 3: FES as well, before the prices get out of hand. I sort of want to get further in P4 before committing to another game in its series, but sealed, reasonably-priced copies of P3 and P3:FES won't be available forever...

On another note: I have two PS1 games with bad scratches. On my PSone, the first will play haltingly until a certain, unskippable cutscene, where it will hang forever; the second won't run at all. On my PS2, however, the first shows no problems at all; the second, a fighting game, will let me configure options and select fighters before hanging on a "CD Error" screen. I have no idea why this should be, but I'm very impressed with the backwards compatibility. My PSone is now in storage since my PS2 does everything even better! :)

ReeToes is a happy ReeToes. If nobody hears from me for another month, assume I'm holed up with Persona 4, GameFAQS, a case of Cherry Coke Zero, and a huge, dippy grin on my face. You won't be far wrong.