Anaheim Arsenal: Playoff Seeding Spoilers?

It’s possible — they’re now on a 5-game winning streak after their impressive victory over the Southwest Division-leading Toros. The Arsenal’s remaining games include three games against the Los Angeles D-Fenders (currently vying with the Idaho Stampede for West Division supremacy) and a game against the Utah Flash, who are still on the edge of the playoff bubble. If they win out, they’ll be at .500, but I don’t anticipate that happening. I will say, though, that this last stretch of the season has been way kinder than the start of the season, when I was wondering if the Arsenal would be challenging the Bakersfield Jam for worst record honors.

The D-League Power Rankings do a pretty decent job of breaking down the playoff situation. The games against the D-Fenders are most likely to have an effect only on playoff seeding — however, the game against the Flash (if they are still in contention) may be make-or-break for them. It should be exciting to watch.

Left-Handed

I’m not actually left-handed, but a few years ago, I decided that it might be a good idea for me to learn to use a mouse with my left hand, to give my right hand a much-needed break during the work day. I figured I wasn’t the first person to try this, and a quick Google search confirmed this with a couple of related results for “learning to use the mouse left-handed.”

This article by one of the cofounders of Blogger.com echoes my experience with learning to mouse left-handed. I believe I started shortly after starting work on Secret Weapons Over Normandy in 2003 — a fairly low-stress period during which I could afford to spend more time becoming familiar with the ins-and-outs of the process. It probably took me a couple of weeks before I was as productive doing day-to-day stuff as I was when I was using the mouse right-handed — I was actually surprised at how little time it took before I felt reasonably comfortable. I didn’t need much encouragement to keep going through the process — I almost immediately noticed improvement in the condition of my right hand and wrist after starting, so I was definitely very receptive to the benefits.

I also tried to utilize keyboard shortcuts more frequently — even more so than I already did. I found this Coding Horror article about printing a list of Visual Studio keyboard commands to be useful, although I found through the use of the free Command Spy SlickEdit gadget that I was already using the most common ones out there.

Interestingly, I also find that my keyboard’s alignment with my body “feels” better when I mouse left-handed. This article titled “Keyboards Are Backwards” makes this point clearly with photographs — the numeric pad is a waste of space for righties, and forces your hand to kick out much further than it should in order to use the mouse. With the mouse on the left-hand side of the keyboard, the overall range through which your hands need to move is reduced.

I still need to use the mouse right-handed for any sort of precise activity. For example, I still play most games right-handed (with turn-based games being a possible exception, due to the slower pace). Any activity that involves a lot of precise clicking, or especially dragging, can be difficult for me to do left-handed. Additionally, I feel that my keyboard usage is still “unbalanced” and biased towards my left hand, since I use my left pinky for holding down the Shift and Control keys. I also depress the Alt key with my left thumb — both of these motions require slight movements of the entire hand, and I believe that this may place more stress on it as a result.

I made an attempt awhile back to try and correct this by using my right hand for pressing Shift/Alt/Control in certain situations, but slacked off. (The heuristic I used was to hold down the modifier key with the opposite hand as the letter/number key being pressed. I didn’t consult any research or anything when I came up with this — it just seemed like a fairly sensible way of doing things.) Perhaps I’ll give that a whirl again, to try and ensure that my hands remain healthy and usable for years to come. I’ve used a Microsoft Natural Keyboard Pro (which is no longer made, but similar to this) for years now, and between that and my Habu mouseI feel my setup is ergonomic enough such that if my usage habits are sound, I shouldn’t develop any RSIs.

Eating Paste

My brother recently got me a free subscription to Paste Magazine, a “music, film, and culture” magazine, with the “damning with faint praise” comment of, “Well, I like the music sampler CD that comes with each issue.” I have now received two issues of this magazine, and am prepared to pass judgment.

The content of the magazine is, well, pretty bad.

When you have a magazine that devotes half a page to this “poet” (anchored by a really terrible photograph of generic white indie dude with glasses performing a hadouken), you have some serious problems. The “poetry” produced by this gentleman has a striking resemblance to the dialogue of the Orz from Star Control — the crucial difference is that the dialogue of the Orz happened to be attached to a really fun game, whereas the page of “Reveler @ Eyelevel” merely has a ton of broken links under the “*And who wrote these riots?*” heading. Shtick does not equal substance, although I suppose it can get you your 15 minutes.

The overall aim of the magazine appears to be to supply busy or indecisive people with cultural sound bites to be dispensed at cocktail parties. The neatly-summarized “for fans of” in article summaries provides the easily-swayed with not only something to be purchased, but another name to be dropped into a “what does XYZ sound like?” or “what are you listening to/watching/reading?” conversation. The ordained soundtrack of the New Yorker crowd right now includes folk, singer/songwriter, electronic, and “accessible” rap and hip-hop — accordingly, the pages of Paste are filled to the brim with not simply reviews and advertising for such, but breathlessly-worded justifications for their superiority and importance. This article, and the rest of the hilarious Stuff White People Like site, is a pretty good summary of the Paste mentality.

I think my decline in interest in following music really accelerated around the time when I saw the term “electro booty” used in an article to describe a genre of music. “Electro booty” is the taxonomic equivalent of undocumentation — a phrase that is so meaningless as to be completely useless as a descriptor. When something has been dissected into such meaningless classifications (or classifications meaningful only to a select few), people have lost sight of the most important distinction in music (or, about anything, really) that really matters: whether or not it’s any good, and whether or not you $*&!ing like it. Needless to say, Paste often wallows in this genre-based navel gazing — recitations of a set of adjectives and artist names associated with each particular micro-genre, with no noteworthy commentary or insight.

So, at the end of the day, what I’m really left with is a monthly sampler CD that I can stick into my computer and enjoy for a little while. Not bad (particularly for the price of “free”), but certainly not what it could be. Still, thanks, Ray!*

 

(* I feel compelled to spell this out, because otherwise, my brother will think that I’m ripping on him or his music tastes when that’s really not the case. He still bears psychic scars from when I mockingly asked him if he cried when he listened to a certain emo band…)

Two Impressive Wins…

Over the weekend, the Arsenal took back-to-back games from the Idaho Stampede (93-86 and 113-107), extending their season-best winning streak to 4 games. They were impressive wins, the first being a come-from-behind effort from 16 points down, and the second being a gritty effort in a see-saw battle. Considering that the Stampede were 5-1 in the season series up until this point (with a couple of blowouts in there), I’m pretty happy about this. I’m trying to figure out how much of an effect the roster changes since their earlier meetings have had — Mike Efevberha and Mo Charlo had two great games for the Arsenal, and Idaho was missing Lance Allred, Mickael Gelabale, and Mouhamed Sene, but it’s hard to gauge the relative changes in talent level.

The D-League also announced the playoff structure for this year, with two single-elimination rounds followed by a 3-game Finals. The Arsenal, still under .500 for the year, won’t be in the playoffs, but with the season winding up, they could still affect the final seedings. They finish the season with a game against the Austin Toros, a game against the Utah Flash, and 3 games against the Los Angeles D-Fenders (currently vying for the West division crown with Idaho). The game against Bakersfield to finish out the season, though, might as well be a scrimmage…

Pulled the Pin

I finally got around to ordering a bunch of new music CDs, including Stereophonics‘ most recent album, Pull the Pin. In the process of doing so, I made a few interesting discoveries:

  • For purchasing a single CD, it is now essentially cheaper for me to order CDs online and have them shipped (even with a $3 shipping and handling charge per CD) than to drive to a music store and purchase it. A combination of my car’s mediocre fuel economy and, bizarrely, the lack of decent record stores close-by in one of the more densely populated regions of the country, are responsible for this.
  • It is much, much faster to browse by artist online than it is in a store. Additionally, since you can get audio samples of CDs online, the old advantage of being able to preview CDs in-store vanishes.
  • The only area where brick-and-mortar CD shopping still makes a lot of sense is if you are either buying a lot of CDs at once, or if you are just browsing for random things. Since many of the bands I like do not get wide/timely releases in the US, the “day 1 advantage” of buying things in a store is essentially gone.

As far as the album goes, I have to say it’s not as strong as the previous album (Language. Sex. Violence. Other?). The album is pretty front-loaded, with the latter half being fairly drab. Also, Bank Holiday Monday is so Oasis-inspired as to be almost tacky (compare the choruses to this and Bring It On Down and see if you don’t agree). But hey, it’s not too bad, so I’ll sit back and enjoy it while I wait for the rest of my newly-ordered CDs to arrive in my mailbox…

Hanging by a Tether

Yesterday I started having some issues with my cable modem (a nearly 4 year old RCA DCM-305) that resulted in me being unable to access the Internet. In my attempts to resolve the situation, I wound up tethering my trusty phone and its 3G wireless connection to my PC so I could research the problem online. I must say that I’m really impressed with the performance — given the sometimes sluggish web browsing experience on the phone itself, I was afraid that the wireless connection was the bottleneck. It’s actually the phone/OS/web browser itself, not the connection. I was able to browse web sites on my PC at a reduced, but still entirely usable speed, without having to disable images or engage in any chicanery like that. Shockingly, even streaming videos such as the ones on my ISP’s home page worked. Color me impressed.

The one down side to tethering my phone is that it gets pretty hot when doing so — enough to make it a little uncomfortable to use for a phone call. Also, it sucks up so much power that it doesn’t really recharge while it’s tethered.

In the course of diagnosing the cable modem problem, I somehow got it into my head that my router (a Buffalo WBR2-G54, whose firmware was replaced by X-WRT) might be going flaky. Since my brother had recently installed the Tomato firmware and recommended it, I decided to give it a try and installed it. Of course, because I wasn’t really thinking things through, I wound up installing it via my personal PC over the wireless connection, which is not recommended, mind you. It worked, but the router still had problems getting an IP address from the DHCP service on the cable modem, which cemented in my mind that the problem lay with the cable modem.

Talking to the technical support people for Road Runner was interesting. The tier 1 or 2 guy that I talked with yesterday seemed more knowledgeable than the tier 3 person I talked to today — however, because the cable modem was intermittently working (after being remotely reset), this led him to believe that the problem was with my router. After discovering that things were still flaky this morning, I called again and asked about doing an equipment swap since I was pretty sure the problem was not with my router. Lo and behold, I swap out the cable modem (for a much more svelte Ambit model), everything works correctly, and I can finally stop using my phone as my primary Internet connection.

I have to say that so far I’m pretty impressed with the Tomato router software. It seems much more responsive than X-WRT/OpenWRT, and the UI is much better (very AJAX-y, in a good way). The only disadvantage that I see is that it doesn’t appear to support any VPN capabilities, which might be fun to tinker with. I guess I could always go back to X-WRT if I want to mess around with that some more…

Bad Release Practices

I recently ran into some issues with installing PHP on an IIS server, and, in the process of tracking down the problems, came to the conclusion that the PHP Group doesn’t do enough (any?) release testing, and still treats the Windows platform (regardless of whether or not Apache is used) as a second-class citizen. Why? Let’s see:

  • The installer will allow you to install modules for which you don’t have the prerequisites installed. This wouldn’t be an issue if the PHP interpreter handled this gracefully, but it doesn’t — it simply spits out a bunch of dynamic link errors and self-combusts. I agree with the last comment in that bug report — it may be a case of “pilot error,” but the expectation on the Windows platform is that, barring any warnings or errors that are clearly explained to the user, a complete install should just work.
  • The current released version of PHP was completely busted on Windows Server 2003 — it doesn’t read its configuration file correctly. (For the benefit of those who may be Googling for a similar problem, this would result in Drupal, a CMS I was installing, reporting that “Your web server does not appear to support any common database types.”)
  • Separately from that, the released version of PHP also didn’t set itself up correctly in IIS as a document handler. For some unfathomable reason, it used 8.3 file names, which have not been necessary in the last 13 years. This would cause the document type handler to fail, and 404s to be returned when accessing a PHP file through IIS.
  • The documentation for the mysqli module (as well as the similar-but-different mysql module) recommends adding the PHP directory to the Windows PATH variable, for the express purpose of getting the libmysql DLL bundled with the installer to load correctly. This is terrible advice, in my opinion, because, depending on where the user adds the path, the bundled version may take priority over a more recent libmysql installed by MySQL itself. There are additional DLLs in the PHP directory, too, for SSL support, and the same situation could arise there.

    While the library vendors may not have a side-by-side versioning scheme for their DLLs, it’s still no excuse for advocating a dangerous practice.

For a product that is so widely used, these kinds of problems are really inexcusable, and only contribute to the flaky reputation PHP has.

Finally Beat Culdcept Saga

Last night, I finally plowed through to the end of Culdcept Saga. I discovered, via GameFaqs, the concept of the “symbol deck” — one that has absolutely no items or creatures in it, and instead focuses on spending as much money as possible through the symbol system, and controlling the board and pace of the game via spells. The computer AI is typically not prepared to handle this style of play — the items in the AI’s deck will be completely useless (because you don’t spend any time in combat), and AI-deployed creatures tend to help you by pumping up symbol values. The lack of combat also results in a nice benefit — the pace of the game is sped up quite a bit, which is nice because it can drag in some of the later 4 cepter battles.

Cards such as Refuge (sacrifice a card to get 80 magic and Refuge back in your hand), Fairy Light (you get magic every turn based on the number of cards in your hand), Aurora (boost symbol value 20%), and Pressure (drop symbol values 30% — good when you want to “buy in”) are key for this strategy, since they generate money and control symbol value. In addition to these, I stock tons of dice-control spells and mass/direct damage spells in case I need to take out a menacing creature. Battles against the AI using this deck tend to snowball fairly quickly into routs — on the last level, at one point I lapped the AI opponent even though I spent a couple of turns bouncing back and forth between a fort and a temple (to buy symbols).

The story payoff at the end of the game, like the story itself, is poor. Furthermore, you don’t really get anything special (in terms of bonus cards, etc.) for winning the game — instead, you have to replay certain levels to get additional “E” cards. I am still missing a lot of cards, although hopefully I can pick up some of those by playing against the AI. I may go back and try and clean up some of the achievements in the game — in particular, the ones that involve using decks with particular creature types should be easy to get using a symbols deck. Some of the other ones might be too difficult to get, though. Note for all achievement fanatics out there: this game is pretty stingy with Gamerscore. You could conceivably beat the game and only get 115 Gamerscore — I barely passed the 500 card mark for the Worldly Scholar achievement by the end of the game (and that’s with a fair amount of versus play), and the other achievements I have are not necessary to complete the game. The game is also super-long — it could easily take you over 40 hours to finish the 30 levels of the game, and while that’s a great value from a “cost-per-hour” perspective, it’s not a great time investment for achievement hunters. 🙂