Andrew Underwood

Funday

This fun day took place on Saturday, it all started with me going to the mall and buying a boat load of things I needed.  Coincidentally I bought some jeans and then later in day the older pair of jeans I was wearing ripped.  Almost as soon as I got back my roommate Michael came home too, at which point we ventured back to the mall.  City Center Mall is really close and thanks to pedways we are only required to walk outside to cross the street.  Thus going back and forth to the mall is really convenient and sometimes justified.

This time we went to the video game store to get an extra Xbox 360 controller.  During our time there we tried out the new Nintendo Wii.  A off-road racing game was loaded, and the steering is done by physically tilting the controller.  It’s fun, give it a shot next time you’re in one of those stores… if you’re ever in one of those stores.  It’s the cat’s pajamas.

Upon arriving home we started playing the new Gears of War game in co-op mode for the Xbox 360 with the newly acquired controller.  This is quite possibly the most cinematic game I have ever played.  It’s not cinematic in the sense of the cut-scenes so much but the actual gameplay itself.  The whole game is based on hiding behind objects and then reaching out and shooting out over them.  Then there’s the rodeo run, the crouched sprint with the the camera following at a low elevation behind.  The story line is really lacking, but this obviously wasn’t a focus during dev.  What ended up happening was an eight hour marathon of gaming only stopping for a short lasagna break.

We finished the whole game on hardcore difficulty in that time.  The credits rolled at about 2:30 am, way later than either of us though it was.  I haven’t played a game the whole way through in one day since the days of the Turbo Grafix 16.

In other news I finished my last university lab every today creating a few different types of digital circuits.  More importantly I finished my third last final exam ever.  I’m not going to talk about that right now.

CD/MP3 Player

I’ve had my CD player for three years now and I dropped it tonight while out running.  It exploded sending parts everywhere.  This is most likely due to me taking out all the screws two years ago and never bothering to put them back in.  The reason I was trying to take it apart was that I had dropped it before and the only thing that broke was the spring on the open/close slider.  I wanted to fix it but never was able to since I couldn’t even seem to get it open.  Thus the reasoning that it doesn’t need screws.

I picked up all the parts after it was dropped tonight and went home.  I’ve been thinking about MP3 players for a long time now but I wasn’t going to buy one until my CD player gave out.  This is because it plays MP3s too.  Storage was cheap, just writable CDs and it had great battery life. The biggest downside was the large size of it, even though it’s small for CD players.
When I got home I spent some time surfing around different MP3 player sites.  I didn’t really find anything that I liked that wasn’t really expensive.  Finally I had a look at my broken CD player and amazingly I was able to put it back together.  I put a CD and it works fine, it just has one more dent.  So it looks like I won’t be buying a new MP3 player quite yet.

Smash

Monday night my car got broken into. It was parked along 105th ave to avoid paying the 50 bucks a month to park in my building’s parkade. The police called me at about 2am to tell me this. The stupid thing is that there wasn’t even anything in my car to steal. The only thing that was taken was a small LED flashlight that was in my glove-box. Earlier that night I was walking through Chinatown, a ‘bad’ part of town and I saw two dodgy guys walk into a dark area where cars were parked with a flashlight. I sort of chuckled and says, look at those guys, they are going to break into cars. Karma, kuh kuh karma… Incidents like this inspire a sense of vigilance in me.

Now my car is parked in my Grandad’s parkade, I can’t really drive it anywhere. I’m taking it home to my the ‘rents place next weekend so it can hopefully be repaired with the parts car that was just sold. Going to have to track down the dude who bought it.

First Aid

On Saturday and Sunday I took a St. John’s Ambulance first aid course. It was a brand new course less than a week old. The last time I took the training was back in grade 10 as part of CALM 20. This course was much more extensive than what I had previously taken. They tell you not to check for pulses anymore, just check for breathing since their logic is if the casualty is breathing, they must have a pulse too. I got 100% on the first day’s test and one question wrong on the next day’s. I haven’t seen test marks like that for a while, it was refreshing.

The Printer

I mentioned before that my Brother Multi Function Centre (MFC 4420C)stopped working. I actually got it going again for a little while before it started displaying the infamous error 41, effectively crippling it. The really annoying thing is that it can still print decently because it was doing fine right before it stopped and refused to do anything. From printing tests before it went sour I could see that three or four squares out of 100 were bad. I really don’t think the entire machine needs to become unusable, like the fax, scanner, memory card reader. Those functions don’t need a print head to work.

So I called up Brother and they gave me the number of a company in Edmonton that repairs them. I phone and find out it will cost $106 to get fixed. The lady informs me that this is a very common problem, confirming what I had read about it on the Interweb. She also tells me that I’d probably be better off just buying a new printer since even if they replace the print head, it has a mean time to failure of about 6 months.

I’ve owned about three different ink jet printers and they are really a pain in the neck. They seem to require multiple cleanings every time I go to use it. I’m fed up with ink jets, with their expensive ink, and seemingly made to be disposed of at the first sign of trouble.

This is why I’ve decided to get a laser printer. I’ll avoid the headaches and be able to enjoy the soothing warmth that comes with each freshly printed page which is characteristic of laser printers. So I’ll be without fax and scanning capability for a while, which is no biggie. I can use my digi cam &&/|| email to replace those functions.

Moving again

About a month ago I got a note under my door from the landlord saying that everyone had to be out of the apartment building by August 31st. The reason? They are turning this 30 year old building into “luxury condos”. So I’ll be moving at the end of July, choosing not to wait until August so I can stay ahead of the University rush. In the meantime I’ll continue to live in this building of limbo, under renovations. I’ll be somewhere in between affordable student housing and fancy rag-dabbed walls, chandeliers, huge entry paintings, and thick like your thumb baseboards.

I’d like to move to a single bedroom place, but I’m also attracted to the low rent/roomates option. Wherever it may be, it needs to have a balcony or back yard for my BBQ.

Upgrade

I just upgraded my blogging software Wordpress to the latest version.  I hadn’t upgraded through the last few releases since I couldn’t be bothered.  The new version has cool features like category modification on the fly.  It was really easy to upgrade, the hardest part was copying over the new files… but that more tedious than hard… and all that involves is a single click and drag.

In other news Peter and I ran the stairs on the river valley for an hour yesterday.  These are the stairs you can see from the LRT bridge, on the west side of the high level, north side of the river.  There were a few others doing the same thing, including this one guy with huge thighs.  He looked really weird, like it was the only exercise he ever did.

Whyte Ave Hockey Hooligans

I live in the center of the Whyte Ave party zone and when the Oilers took the western conference champions title on Saturday, 30000 people descended upon the area. Looking out my window you could see lots of people climbing all over the building accross the alley from me and a couple of people atop the Southpark car dealership sign, about 30m tall, waving Oilers flags around. I knew I wasn’t going to be able to sleep for a while from all the noise so I went out with my camera and took lots and lots of pics and vids. I put the best ones up in my Gallery here. I think most of the troublemakers were just out for the destruction and aren’t really hockey fans. It seems almost the whole city is sickened by what happened here Sat night. Windows were broken, 2 phone booths were knocked down, and almost every street sign was torn up. People kept making bonfires in the street, then the firefighters would put them out from rooftops, then a couple of mins later anotherone would spring up 10 m west of the last one. That happened nine times.

I don’t know what’s going to happen the next time they play. I would suggest not having the games on the weekend. This isn’t going to end well either way, I’m forcasting more property damage, and/or police induced injuries.

Here is a movie of a phone booth coming down:

Well, here is one for now

We went swimming in the Adriatic Sea today, and yesterday for that matter. After staying a night in the next island over, called Pag, we are taking a night train to Nice, France. Travel is really cheap here, like 28 Canadian dollars to go from Venice to Ljuljana, a four hour train ride.

I can’t get the pic location on this net cafe computer but here is a link

Swimming

We are well in Croatia

We’re currently on a small island off of Croatia called Pag, in a town called Novalje. We’ve been saying that we are living like kings because things are so cheap. We are paying €20 each for an a fully decked out appartment including kitchen. Tomorrow we are heading to the next island over. Things are just rediculously cheap. I just wanted to say we are ok but we are paying for this internet so that’s it for now.