So, a few days ago Progressive sent me the information for my bi-yearly renewal. I didn't really look at it any until today when I noticed that the renewal cost seemed a bit high. I looked back at my previous renewal in June and saw that the cost had gone up by $143 or almost precisely 27%. I called up Progressive to see what the deal was and they told me that it was a statewide rate adjustment. When I informed them that I would be comparison shopping the rate, they put me on with a "rate specialist" who was able to get my rate down by $52 dollars which still equates to a 17% rate increase.

Needless to say, this is not the sort of rate change that I was expecting when I hit 25.

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The last two years, I have spent my Thanksgiving at home and have made something simple for the occasion. It wasn't particularly interesting one way or the other. This year, however, a friend of mine invited me to his place for Thanksgiving. Having nothing else that would prevent me from attending, I accepted.

Jem's place is over in Riverside. Despite being still in the LA sprawl, it was about an hour away via interstate. When I arrived, he introduced me to his housemates and we played a few games of Magic: The Gathering in a sort of sealed-deck format. Despite not having played the game since I was in middle school (or perhaps early high school), I managed to make a strong enough deck to beat both him and his housemates at least once. Apparently, in the time since I last played, black has gotten counterspells--several of them. That made my black-blue deck really, really annoying. Also, black has picked up a Wrath of God equivalent which happened to be in my sealed deck.

After that, we had a light lunch of ribs and rice, after which I taught them how to play Dominion. They took to it rather quickly and before the night was over, we'd probably played nearly a dozen hands of the game.

At some point, there was turkey and it was tasty. There was also watching of Big Bang Theory, which was sort of fun. I eventually left at about 12:30--foolishly leaving behind my tupperware full of cookies.

All in all, a much better Thanksgiving than last year.

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Today is the second time that a random strange has said that I look like the "crazy scientist" from the movie Independence Day. For the record this character is portrayed by Brent Spiner, better known as playing Data in the Star Trek: The Next Generation. Personally, I don't get it at all. I know that I am rather pale, but I think I am generally more composed than this:



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For some time, the shoulder buttons on my DS have been acting up. In general, they tended not to respond consistently or would (individually) fail to respond at all. I ordered a tri-wing screwdriver a few weeks ago with the intent of taking apart the DS and cleaning the contacts on the shoulder buttons to improve behavior. The screwdriver arrived today and so I took apart my DS. It was relatively easy to pull most of it apart, though I didn't have an appropriately sized phillips-head screw driver for taking off the main board, I was able to fake it with a flat head screwdriver. Overall the operation was very successful. In addition to cleaning the shoulder contacts so that they worked as well as they ever have, I also cleaned off the interstitial space between the touchscreen and the lower LCD proper which had picked up a bit of dust that was annoying. I also seem to have inadvertently cleaned out the DS slot injection mechanism so that it seems to work better than it had previously. It hadn't been operating poorly before, but it now has regained the "multi-foot ejection" capability it had when it was new. I suspect that there had been build-up of dust on one side of ejection track that was acting as a cushion.

Overall, the only downside seems to be that I've lost all of my saved settings (due to pulling the batter). Mostly this is just the saved time and, but luckily it seems not to also include wireless networking settings. I'd say it is a small price to pay for returning functionality to a like-new state.

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The following scheme code calculates the chance of succeeding at a skill challenge in fourth edition D&D at a given DC by a character with a certain skill. It assumes that you must get succ successes before getting fail failures.

(define fourth-ed-skill-contest
  (lambda (dc skill succ fail)
    (letrec ((pds (/ (+ 20 (- dc) skill) 20))
             (n (+ succ fail -1))
             (fact (lambda (n) (if (= 0 n) 1 (* n (fact (- n 1))))))
             (cn (lambda (n k) (/ (fact n) (* (fact k) (fact (- n k))))))
             (msum (lambda (i accum)
                     (if (>= i fail) accum
                         (let ((iprob (* (cn n i) (expt pds (- n i)) (expt (- 1 pds) i))))
                            (msum 
                            (+ i 1) 
                            (+ accum iprob)))))))
      (msum 0 0))))

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The following post qualifies as You Should Know This Already for the Kingdom Hearts series of games. If you want to avoid spoilers, avert your eyes.

============================

Very few characters in the Kingdom Hearts universe can be said to be tragic. For the most part, everyone tends to eventually get their happy ending even if there are some odd paths they must take. There are two notable exceptions to this, however. The first is Axel. In Kingdom Hearts 2, although he is generally shown as an antagonist, he contends at every turn that all he is attempting to do is bring his friend back. He even goes so far as to give up his existence in order to protect the mere vessel in which the only remaining pieces of his friend resides.

The second tragic character is that of Roxas. He, like Axel, is a Nobody--the remnants left behind when a powerful person is turned into a heartless. In the first Kingdom Hearts game, the main character, Sora, is temporarily turned into a heartless in order to save his girlfriend. Sora eventually gets better, but the transformation leaves behind Roxas as a Nobody of unique pedigree. Chronologically, players first see Roxas at the beginning of Kingdom Hearts 2 where he is, in a sense, the tutorial character. Eventually, Roxas gives up his being in order to restore Sora's memories that were lost during the events of Chain of Memories. In this 7 day prologue, basically all we learn is that Roxas must be destroyed in order for Sora to be destroyed. Over the course of the game, we learn that Roxas had been friends with Axel and a member of Organization XIII. He'd fought Riku and won and at some point left the organization for reasons that aren't made clear.

Kingdom Hearts 358/2 Days fills in the time period beginning with Roxas' "birth" and continues through until the events of Kingdom Hearts 2 proper begin. In this, players see his interaction with Organization XIII and find out various things that were left as open questions in KH2. Moreover, players are given a chance to see the real tragedy that is Roxas' short life. I would say that, because of the relatively large amount of information given, this game is "required reading" for fans of the series.

Gameplay wise, I generally enjoyed it. There are some interesting ideas floating around in here. I was especially fond of the "equipment" system--though to call it such would be highly misleading. Essentially, everything your character can do is decided by what "panels" he has equipped. Panels are Tetris-like blocks of various sizes and shapes which get arrayed into a grid which increases in size over the course of completing missions. Everything you want to have accessible to your character--keyblades, magic, special abilities, even levels--must fit within the available grid. This leads to you playing a sort of packing problem game as you gain new abilities and slots.

I found the controls a bit clunky. This is especially noticeable near the beginning of the game before you have access to all of the available movement powers. Trying to platform using the rather poor D-pad on the DS is rather frustrating.

Ultimately, I had the game on preorder and thus paid full price (less a $5 pre-order discount). I do not consider my money wasted. If you're not a fan of the series (and thus a Commie Mutant Traitor), there probably isn't much for you here. If you've not played the other games in the series, expect to be very lost. They explain some of what is going on, but sufficient context to truly understand is lacking.


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Earlier today, I beat Borderlands. It was a relatively fun game--sort of a cross between Diablo and Fallout 3. I played through as the Siren class which was probably the incorrect choice given the fact that my playstyle was basically to always use a sniper rifle. Mostly, the game consists of collecting all avaiable missions, carrying them out as quickly as possible, and then getting the next set. The world itself doesn't really provide much reward for exploration aside from possibly money or items. Since I ended the game with well over a megabuck and the most expensive item I ever saw for sale was on the order of a few hundered kilobucks, this isn't terribly appealing. My main complaint about the game comes from the my choice of weapons: I could never find good sniper rifles. I would routinely use the same sniper rifle for extended periods of time due to the lack of improved ones ever showing up. I also found the late game annoying when the standard enemies began to be able to survive 2-3 headshots before going down.

The game does have a decent sense of humor that I found enjoyable. For example, some enemies are identified as "badass". This generally means that they are tougher, deal more damage, and have more health than their level and type would otherwise imply. If you kill one without taking very much damage, the Siren character will remark "Well, they seemed tough" as if to call into question the badass identification. Another instance of their sense of humor comes in their way of introducing major foes. One of the first bosses is named One-Eye and his introductory cutscene parenthetically informs us that he also has three balls.

I picked up the game for the PC for about $30 and would say that such a value is probably about right for the game.

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Today, Amazon had a lightning deal for the new Ratchet and Clank Future game. I had the page open and was waiting to see what the deal was going to be. When it rolled over at 9am, I saw that the deal was for the game at $29.99 and immediately clicked the "Add to cart" button. The timer on the page showed that the deal had been active for 3 seconds. It was already sold out. What the heck? A deal that can't be supported for more than 3 seconds? How is that helpful?

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Some time ago, I decided to pick up a copy of Justice League. I went to Amazon, and seeing that they had both a Justice League: The Complete Series and a Justice League Unlimited: The Complete Series, ordered them. It turns out that the former was actually a preorder and it finally arrived yesterday, this caused a bit of surprise as I discovered that it apparently also contained a copy of Justice League Unlimited. I thus have an extra copy of Justice League Unlimited that I'm willing to give to whoever wants it. I'll probably eBay it if I don't get any takers.

Now, I do have some issues with the Justice League: The Complete Series package. Firstly, the discs come packaged in a tin box containing two smaller, multi-disc dvd cases. These two cases are labeled "Justice League Season One" and "Justice League Season Two". This sounds completely reasonable, but is incredibly wrong. The "Season One" box contains seasons one and two of Justice League Unlimited which was the second of the two series chronologically. The "Season Two" box contains seasons one and two of Justice League which was chronologically the first series. Therefore, we have packaging which is, at best, terribly misleading. That caused me to have to reload my entire 5-disc changer. Now, as for the discs themselves, I have my recurring complaint about work coming out of the Warner Bros. Animation studios: they don't include English subtitles (disc one seems to have French and Spanish) and they don't provide sufficient chapter points (disc one only has chapter points at the beginning of episodes). These were the same problems that I had with the Teen Titans discs that I got earlier this year, and I suppose I shouldn't be terribly surprised by the issues. I just find it frustrating that most live action TV and basically all anime seems to have properly mastered discs, but WB can't seem to get its act together. Subtitles should be trivial because they are have closed captions for when the episodes are shown on television. Setting proper chapter points--episode start, after opening, after break--should be a minor increase in work during mastering. My only thought is that they must have gone with an absolute minimum budget for the production of the discs.

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So, I tried to install Borderlands last night. After it had gone through the entire install process, it attempted to install Securom and rejected it, presumably because I had Daemon-tools installed. What did it do then? It completely uninstalled the game. How can that possibly be the correct decision? I can see it preventing me from playing (even if I think that is ridiculous since I bought the damn game), but I cannot abide by it wasting my time. I hope someone is fired at 2k games for designing such a thing, especially when the full install takes nearly half an hour in the first place.

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So, often times when I'm going from place to place on lab, I walk along the tops of various retaining walls. Today, I jumped down off of a short wall (about 2.5-3 feet tall) like I do much every day when I had a sudden pain in my foot. I am unsure what I did, but my left "ring" toe was injured. I don't really understand: 1) how I can injure myself from a 3 foot fall when I routinely take 6 foot falls without injury, and 2) how I can only injure my "ring" toe without damage to the adjacent toes. I ended up going to the doctor later on in the day when I realized that it had turned a rather unpleasant shade of purple, but they told me that there was probably nothing to be done except sending me to get it x-rayed to verify that there isn't a nasty fracture. Given that I can still walk on the foot, I'd be a bit surprised to discover such a fracture.

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So, I've lately had various issues with my Vista machine. It has always given me problems when I try to do video driver updates, but it has recently developed a new annyoing behavior. Currently, whenever I connect to JPL via the Cisco-supplied VPN client, my entire screen goes blank. The machine isn't shutting down, it is just deciding not to provide any video signal. If I use a VNC client to connect to the Vista machine from one of the others, I can get it to reactivate the monitor by doing various things that shouldn't fix it such as opening up the display adapter properties menu. There is no legitimate reason why this should fix the issue; nevertheless, it seems to. Honestly, I think it is part of the continuing graphics card issues, but can offer no rationale as to why these two completely unrelated things interact in such a way.

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My father's wife is apparently running for a seat in the Indiana House of Representatives. Since I no longer am a resident of Indiana, I cannot vote against her. As such, I encourage all of you who might still be capable of not voting for her to do so. Terri Austin isn't exactly my favorite person either, but I'd prefer her to Kim.

I should be perfectly clear: I do not endorse Kim Builta in any way, shape or form.

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"Grits is the reason that the South won the Civil War" - My grandmother (fraternal)

"It seems like there is something wrong with that; I'm not sure that the South won the Civil War" - My father

"Well, they thought they did" - My grandmother (fraternal)

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So, this weekend I came back to Indiana. I left on Friday morning at about 6am local. I arrived in Indy at about 7pm local (after a delay in Dever), and my father picked me up as had been planned. We headed back to Anderson, but stopped at an upscale eatery to eat (my father did the choosing). Looking over the menu, I chose to have the 14oz filet mignon. I generally don't choose such a cut of meat, but there was little on the menu that was lean and I figured why not. I've had this particular cut before, but I have to say that this particular steak may be the best that I've ever had. It was exquisite.

We then headed home where I spent the night at my father's home. This morning, I got up early to visit both my mother and my (now-institutionalized) grandmother. We visited for a few hours, and my grandmother seemed relatively lucid, but the effects of her stay in the hospital and nursing home were immediately apparent. She had lost a tremendous amount of weight--so much that I barely recognized her. She nevertheless seemed to be able to get around alright, even if she was still quite forgetful (she asked at least a dozen times over the two hours about when I was going back to California). My mother and I then went out to get some lunch before she dropped me off again with my father.

My father and I next drove to Lafayette. Here, we planned to meet with my brother, my (other) grandmother, my uncle and his wife, my aunt, and two of my cousins (the youngest two). We sat around and talked for a few hours about various things. It seems as though both my cousins have become quite snarky since the last time that I saw either of them, so we all had fun being unkind to our parents: the girls to their mother and I to my father. Once that wrapped up, I drove my grandmother back to her assisted-living facility and then took off for Terre Haute.

The drive down to the Haute was quite harrowing. I was quite tired at that point and nearly fell asleep several times. The trip itself took quite I while, but I managed to arrive around 11:30 local and so didn't miss Rounders. There were a suprising number of people at the Halloween party that I knew. I saw Tom and Trevor, Luann, Curtis and Phil as well as some of the younger alumni. I managed to sign a proper subset of the associate members' copies of The Quest, so good luck to them on that. After hanging around at the house chatting for a few hours, a handful of us went out to Steak 'n Shake for some 1 am food. Incidentally, due to the time shift and our careful consumption of riboflavin, the food actually arrived about 5 minutes before it was ordered. I tooks some pictures of people and will possibly upload them to flicker when it isn't 5 in the morning.

I then proceeded to drive back to Lafayette where my father had a hotel room for the night. His car had been the one that I used to get to TH earlier and so mad my presence here a necessity. The trip back was much easier for some reason and I was never fearful of falling asleep. I got in at about 4am local and then wrote this post and then it was now and then I don't know what happens.

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