Write, geek!

Words are spe­cial things to me, and when I was a smaller geek and would try to fig­ure out the mean­ing of unknown words, I would often form a men­tal image of a word’s mean­ing based on, often times, another word it sounded like (regard­less of whether the two words actu­ally had any­thing to do with each other). Some­times, I’d actu­ally use con­text to help deci­pher the mean­ing of the mys­tery word, but that wouldn’t always lead me to the right answer.

From time to time, I’d be unable to shed this first impres­sion of a word, which would stick with me even after I would learn the word’s actual mean­ing. I’d have these false images some­times pop into my mind when I’d hear the word itself used else­where, even know­ing full well what it really means.

So when I found myself, in more recent years, find­ing the word calamity to be, of all things, bizarrely amus­ing, I began to seri­ously ques­tion how this could be. It’s not like I find calami­ties them­selves funny. And the word is not one I hear used much on a day-to-day basis, and it cer­tainly isn’t one used to describe things that are sup­posed to be funny. It’s not nearly as well-used as its syn­onyms cat­a­stro­phe, dis­as­ter, or even tragedy. So why would I find it dif­fi­cult to sup­press a smirk when hear­ing or read­ing about some­thing that some­one described as calamitous?

Here’s what truly brought my strange rela­tion­ship with the word to a head: I used to work for a com­pany with pretty strong ties to the Philip­pines, so when the rather deadly Typhoon Ondoy (a.k.a. Ket­sana) rolled through the coun­try dur­ing my time employed there, the storm, and its effects, were more than just the head­line or two that they may have been to most Amer­i­cans. Read­ing pretty exten­sively about the storm, both through news reports and first­hand accounts from many of our cus­tomers, I noticed, a hand­ful of times, many pinoys using calamity to describe what had hap­pened there. To what we owe their word choice is not some­thing I under­stand or am really con­cerned with, actu­ally. More impor­tant was the invol­un­tary smirk­ing effect the word had on me.

That I could find myself amused by some­thing so strange, in the face of tales and pho­tos of death and destruc­tion, was some­thing I found unset­tling, so I later thought hard about where this feel­ing likely came from. I can’t quite remem­ber how I made the con­nec­tion, but it even­tu­ally hit me.

That cute lit­tle guy to the right is Calamity Coy­ote, a char­ac­ter from the early-90s ani­mated tele­vi­sion series Tiny Toon Adven­tures, a show that may not have made as last­ing an impres­sion on me as oth­ers from the era did, but is one I def­i­nitely remem­ber watch­ing. (I remem­ber the theme song very well, for what that’s worth.) Calamity is also a rel­a­tive of Wile E. Coy­ote, or something.

Lack­ing any other con­text to explain to my single-digit-aged self the mean­ing of the word calamity, I must have assumed that it meant… well, some­thing funny! Because, you know, the show was made up of funny char­ac­ters doing funny things, so this unknown word must mean some­thing funny.

It makes per­fect sense to me, and feels like the expla­na­tion, the true cre­ation myth I’ve been look­ing for. I can’t imag­ine where else a younger Everett would have come across that word, and it’s not one I’ve seen enough times in the inter­ven­ing years, mak­ing this one of those wrong def­i­n­i­tions I still just can’t forget.

Do you have any words that have a spe­cial mean­ing to you, one that’s com­pletely dif­fer­ent than what the word really means? Or per­haps that even tickle your funny bone in an equally irra­tional way? (I really do want to know.)

Write, geek! gets a fair amount of spam replies. This sur­prised me at first, when it began hap­pen­ing almost imme­di­ately after the blog was set up and con­tent was posted. I should have known bet­ter; there’s almost no cost to spam­mers in spam­ming even unpop­u­lar blogs, so why would they make an excep­tion for mine?

I’m using the Akismet plu­gin for Word­Press, so it’s not like any of these com­ments actu­ally make it to my blog. In fact, I’d never even have to see them, if not for the fact that I reg­u­larly clean these com­ments out of my spam folder by hand. I do this partly to ensure that noth­ing legit­i­mate gets fil­tered incor­rectly (which hap­pens some­times) and partly because I like to sort of keep tabs on the cur­rent ‘state of the art’ in spamming.

The cur­rent state of the art in spam­ming is this: the com­ments are get­ting bet­ter. No longer are com­ments jam-packed with dozens of links com­mon­place (one par­tic­u­lar default Word­Press set­ting prob­a­bly made those almost 100% inef­fec­tive), but they’ve been largely replaced with com­ments that mas­quer­ade as… actual comments!

The idea of noise dis­guised as sig­nal is noth­ing new if you’ve used e-mail in the last 15 years, but that the noise is get­ting bet­ter (read: more dif­fi­cult for humans to detect) is some­what sur­pris­ing. Of course, these com­ments are no match for a large, dis­trib­uted sys­tem like Akismet, which all-knowingly sees what’s being posted to prob­a­bly mil­lions of blogs, but the well-disguised, largely pseudo-flattering com­ments are prob­a­bly now designed to get human blog authors to click the “Not Spam” but­ton, free­ing them the com­ments the spam box so that they can do their SEO-based dirty work.

Of course, gen­tle read­ers, I’m far too smart to fall for that, but not so blinded by my hatred for spam to be unable to appre­ci­ate a well-crafted work of author­ship, like this one I just found:

Sure, it’s not per­fect, but some­one out there put some mod­icum of thought into it, which is the least you could ask of the author of a work that’s going to be dis­trib­uted on a mas­sive scale.

Plus, it’s a lot bet­ter than this anti-gem I also just found:

Can you get more unin­ten­tion­ally self-referential than that? (No, you can­not… and yes, that was a challenge.)

A few days ago, I found a Flickr group thread that was prac­ti­cally beg­ging for my input. It read some­thing like “Hey Everett, you’re sur­pris­ingly enough not the only per­son out there with these two inter­ests (one obscure and the other semi-so). Would you be will­ing to help out quite pos­si­bly the only other per­son in the world who cares about these things?”

Not only was I like, “Heck  yeah!,” but I decided that this was wor­thy of blog­ging, in case a third indi­vid­ual hap­pens to develop these inter­ests. (If this is you, welcome!)

So, in case you find your­self want­ing to get crappy pho­tos—a term I use most affec­tion­ately — like these:

off of one of these:

and you use Linux:

(I kid!)

…like I do, read on.

The hard­ware I’m using to down­load pho­tos over USB is Smart­Boy USB car­tridge reader (which is made by these peo­ple). And there just so hap­pens to be a great open-source pro­gram for facil­i­tat­ing this task using this device (or a sim­i­lar car­tridge reader): gbcflsh.

So what’s the prob­lem? gbcflsh is only dis­trib­uted as source, and the source fails to com­pile under recent releases of Ubuntu. I con­tacted the devel­op­ers of gbcflsh, and one gave me some sug­ges­tions for fix­ing the source code. They have yet to pub­lish the fixed source, so I’ll doc­u­ment how I got it to compile.

(If you don’t care about this, just grab the binary I made: gbcflsh, 32-bit, 1.1 MB, md5sum: 85b185706c3d5fe45b7787787f8510bd)

1. Down­load and extract the source code.
2. Install the fol­low­ing pack­ages:
   gcc 4.3.3, qt4-dev-tools, libftdi-dev
3. Focus on the fol­low­ing files:
   src/Logic.cpp
   src/ReadFlashThread.cpp
   src/ReadRamThread.cpp
   src/WriteFlashThread.cpp
   src/WriteRamThread.cpp
4. Add the fol­low­ing to the bot­tom of the #include sec­tion of each file:
   #include <cst­dio>
5. That’s it! Com­pile it like you already know how to do (which I won’t get into here).

When you run gbcflsh (you’ll need to do so as root, by the way), it’ll look a lit­tle bit like what you see to the right. Select the vis­i­ble options (USB, Auto, Ram: 128 KB) and click “Read RAM.”

If all goes well, you’ll end up with the con­tents of your camera’s RAM in the form of a .sav file. Great! The hard part is behind us, but we’re not quite done yet.

Next, you’ll need a pro­gram that will extract pho­tos from the save file. I believe there are a few, but they all seem to be for Win­dows. For­tu­nately, the one I use works per­fectly under Wine. It’s called GBCameraDump.exe, and it can cur­rently be found here. Down­load it, run it via Wine and select the .sav file you got from gbcflsh. You’ll have some­thing that looks like this screen­shot (except hope­fully with bet­ter photos).

I would also advise you to — if this sort of thing mat­ters to you — check the order of the saved images. They’re likely to be out of order due to, it seems, the way Nin­tendo decided to han­dle the sav­ing of images to the car­tridge. (Also, you’re likely to find some pho­tos you thought were deleted, which may come as a surprise.)

So there you have it: how to get pho­tos off of this cam­era of the past, using the oper­at­ing sys­tem of the (sigh) future.

The old adage (which I think I made up) about spend­ing more time geek­ing around with a Word­Press instal­la­tion than actu­ally writ­ing in the damned blog holds true, ladies and gentlemen.

I just fin­ished upgrad­ing this fine blog to the newly-stable Word­Press 3.0.

In case you were won­der­ing and/or sit­ting on the edge of your seats, I took great care to:

1. Dis­able all of my plu­g­ins
2. Dump a copy of my Word­Press MySQL data­base using the aptly-titled mysqldump
3. tar a copy of my Word­Press directory
4. Do the upgrade!
5. Re-enable the plu­g­ins one-by-one, mak­ing sure each works (or at least doesn’t break anything)

While I know not every­one is so lucky, I’m glad to see that every­thing appears to work here, because I’d be deathly embar­rassed if, you know, Google or Bing’s webcrawler came by and things weren’t look­ing up to my usual standards.

There is a cer­tain class of video game whose exis­tence I’ve been slowly dis­cov­er­ing over the last few years. Let’s call these fine wine games.

My idea of a fine wine game¹ is one that is best expe­ri­enced a bit at a time. You know, enjoyed in mod­er­a­tion. The kind you only pick up and play every once in a while… because it’s just that good.

Does that sound counter-intuitive? Why would you want to take it so slowly with some­thing so great? Well, here’s other side of the coin: this sort of game also has an ele­ment of rar­ity, or scarcity to it. It’s not the sort of game that prints money, sell­ing mil­lions of copies, so the chances of a sequel being made aren’t very good.

So enjoy the game itself. Savor it as you go. Don’t cry because there won’t be a sequel; think of how lucky you are to play it in the first place! Wring every drop of enjoy­ment from the expe­ri­ence that you can.

Here are a few games you’ll find in my cask:

Zack & Wiki (Nin­tendo Wii) The orig­i­nal fine wine game in my book. Crit­i­cally acclaimed; sold quite poorly. Chance of sequel? Slim-to-none. Thus, I decided that I’d only play Zack & Wiki sparingly.

With save dates as my basis, I’d esti­mate that I would pick it up every cou­ple of months, play for a day or two (enough time to strug­gle through my cur­rent level feel­ing like the world’s biggest moron until finally feel­ing like the world’s great­est genius, which is what this game does to you). And then, back on the shelf it would go, to wait for the next time I’m in the mood for savory gam­ing greatness.

Thus, despite hav­ing bought this game in 2008, I only com­pleted it this past week­end. $40 so very, very well spent.

Soul Bub­bles (Nin­tendo DS) While I bought my copy from an Ama­zon Mar­ket­place seller, this game was released in the U.S. as a Toys R Us-exclusive title. If this arti­fi­cially lim­ited its audi­ence, that’s sim­ply unfor­tu­nate, because this is a beau­ti­ful game… one that I tend to for­get all about for months on end before redis­cov­er­ing it anew every time.

I’ve been tak­ing my time with Soul Bub­bles, and have more than half of it (read: years of enjoy­ment) left to go!

Mother/EarthBound series (Nin­tendo NES/SNES/GBA) Enough has been writ­ten about this series of quirky, rather un-RPG-like RPGs, which have attracted a cult-like fol­low­ing. Thus, I’ll offer only this quick assess­ment: the fact that English-speaking gamers have the oppor­tu­nity to play any of the three games should be enough to make a fan thank their lucky stars.

While it could be said that three games released over the course of fif­teen years effec­tively nul­li­fies any sup­posed rar­ity… hey, you know what? Fuck you. Nin­tendo trans­lated Mother and then promptly shelved the Eng­lish ver­sion, Mother 2 (Earth­Bound) received one stinker of a U.S. mar­ket­ing cam­paign, and the Eng­lish trans­la­tion of Mother 3 had to be under­taken by a team of incred­i­bly devoted fans.

Mother games in Eng­lish are some mighty fine wine.

Cave Story (Win­dows, Wii­Ware, et al.) Cave Story is the work of one ded­i­cated ama­teur over the course of five years… work that was sim­ply given away for free as a Win­dows game, and later ported to a hand­ful of pop­u­lar plat­forms by fans.

I started Cave Story a few times over the years, but the lack­lus­ter Linux port kept putting me off of it; I knew I should wait for a good port to be avail­able for a plat­form I use. The Wii­Ware ver­sion was released a few months back, and the rest is his­tory. After years of antic­i­pa­tion, I swilled this one down in a decid­edly non-fine-wine manner.

Whoops.

Whether games or other media, what do you con­sider to be your fine wine?