Checked my email this morning and found nice form letter from HP’s Customer Escalation Manager letting me know my laptop would be delayed. Wait… Customer Escalation Manager? What the hell is that crap? Wonder how many meetings it took to come up with the idea of creating a management level post in charge of sending out completely non-informative form emails?
Though they did offer me a $50 gift certificate (well, online coupon code) good at the HP Home & Office online store. Looks like I’ll get a new laptop bag out of it for my trouble.
For the past few years I’ve been, rather naively, buying games for my Nintendo DS and scouring eBay for old Gameboy Advance games since I never had a GBA. It seems while I wasn’t looking a few thousand developers and consumers snuck an entire flash drive market out onto the series of tubes without me noticing (or was it that I just didn’t care at the time? who knows).
Turns out these little things are pretty fuckin’ sweet. A card the same size as a normal DS cart is required to be placed in the DS game slot to boot a decondary flash drive in the GameBoy Advance slot. The flash drives in the GBA slot have either internal memory or accept memory cards of various formats and sizes which actually store the games.
I’ve got my DS pimped out with a R4DS slot-1 flash cart loaded with a 2gb microSD and 43 DS games as well as an M3 Perfect Lite slot-2 adapter with a 2gb microSD card and 220 GameBoy Advance Games.
I’ve found that the GameBoy Advance was the PS2 of the mobile world as the vast majority of the games released for it are complete crap, but out of the 2600+ I have, the 220 I’ve narrowed it down to are solidly decent. Given all of the Final Fantasy and in-depth Nintendo first party GBA games and the ever changing lineup of DS games, this thing is going to keep me busy for years. Even after Nintendo releases a new portable system I know I’m going to have my trusty DS loaded with all the greatest games to keep my occupied on the can.
Just placed an order for a new laptop. I was in the market for a desktop replacement notebook. Not that I’m in any way dissatisfied with my main desktop, but when the motherboard in my linux box failed I was surprised how easy it was to fall back on my rather underpowered XP laptop. This also reminded me how much I loathe windows. I considered upgrading my current laptop to linux, but I knew selling it for a decent price would be necessary for getting a new one. Reinstalling XP isn’t my idea of fun so I just toughed it out until I found a buyer… thanks Sean.
I opted for a custom 17″ HP Pavilion dv9000t. Intel Core 2 Duo and 2GB ram with a free upgrade to a 120GB SATA hard drive. From my research it looks like pretty much all of the available options on the dv9000t are supported by linux with little hastle. Minus, of course, for the more windowsey, multimedia functions like the HDTV tuner/remote and the built-in webcam, without with one can easily shave nearly $200 off the price tag.
They say it’ll be finished and shipped by the 28th so I should get it around March 5th. Which means I’ll have slackware installed on it by the 6th.
Finally used the tattoo gift certificates that Amanda got for me. A traditional style left forearm piece inked by Shane Montie of Rebirth Tattoo on C St. My last tattoo was done at the same shop, but when Vinny was running the place.
Overall I have to say it was a wholly better experience. The guys there rock and Shane does some fantastic work. I was able to make an appointment for the next afternoon and had my forearm done (lined, colored, and shaded) in just under two hours whereas my spiderweb took over two hours with just some thin linework and shading. It’s completely up to the artist, but this much more complex design only cost $25 more than my elbow. Have to say I’m more than happy with how well Shane was able to translate my design to skin, the speed and fantastic pricing I got. I’ve definitely found my shop.
I’ll post pics later…
After a long break (to say the least) I’m back. Mainly because my linux box has been down for a while with a motherboard that crapped out on me just before x-mas. The replacement I got didn’t work so I’ve moved most of my linux box’s functionality over to my laptop which has since become my primary machine. I’m getting a refund for the bad replacement board and attempting yet another replacement from another vendor. If that doesn’t work I’m just going to have to start over with a new machine or seriously consider upgrading to a desktop replacement laptop.
