The first, and only, time I've traveled internationally was 7 years ago when my wife and I honeymooned in Cancun, Mexico. Obviously, the travel landscape has changed significantly since then. We entered Mexico with nothing more than our birth certificates. Now, we have passports and the required travel visa to enter China.

With the latest restrictions on air travel and the items you're allowed to carry on-board, I've given more thought than normal to what will occupy the space of my carry-on(s). With this fresh in my mind, I was quick to catch the headlines of many recent articles detailing the lengths at which the US government is willing to go to categorize and inventory US citizens as they travel to and fro. To wit, it appears that the NSA / FBI / CIA / DHS is concerned with the reading materials of passengers.

Reading happens to be one of my passions in life. It's rare that I don't have at least one book on my nightstand at home and a queue of several more waiting in the wings to be read. Naturally, books are a staple of my carry-on luggage in every flight (and long car ride) I've ever had the pleasure of taking part in.

And why have I gone to such lengths to write all this up, you're asking?

The book that I'm currently reading, which will most likely be finished while I'm somewhere in the middle of the Pacific en route to Beijing, is the science fiction classic The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress from Robert Heinlein. The front cover of the book states it to be "(h)is classic, Hugo Award-winning novel of libertarian revolution." It is a book following the revolution to free Luna (the Moon, which has become a futuristic version of early 19th century Australia) from the oppression and tyranny of its token ruler (the Warden) and his puppet-masters on Terra (Earth).

I suppose now would be a bad time to also state my support for Ron Paul's campaign for President?

Oops. I suppose a print-out of this entry will also find its way in to the database detailing my reading habits.

For the most part, I've never been a big fan of upgrading things just for the sake of it. If something isn't broke, there's no reason to fix it. That's not to say that every software title installed on my computer is running the same version that I first installed. I like new features, improved interfaces, and more eye candy as much as the next guy. I certainly never miss a Windows Update, but one could easily make the argument that Windows is exempt from the aforementioned adage as it's fundamentally broke and therefore always requires fixing.

However, upgrading something like Movable Type isn't as cut-and-dry as it might sound.

Next on the list of concerns is that a major upgrade like this can make a long-time user feel like they're using an entirely new piece of software. Indeed, Movable Type 4.0 introduces an entirely new control panel with drop-down menus and a redesigned composition window. I like the familiar. If there's one thing I don't like, it's now knowing how to do something. Especially, if I used to know how to do it. Still, it's the price you pay for progress. Nobody gets things 100% right the first - especially user interfaces - and when it comes to web technologies, there's always something new.

So it was with grudging acknowledgement of these facts that I went forth with the upgrade to Movable Type 4.0 on Saturday afternoon. The astute reader will notice that the right sidebar still proclaims "Powered by Movable Type 3.34". That's right, I had to rollback the changes. I followed the upgrade instructions on the Six Apart web site, including removing obsolete files and plug-ins. I backed up the entire existing installation. I verified that Friday night's database backup was successful and the file wasn't corrupt. After logging in to the control panel, upgraded scripts were detected, and the upgrade process began. The database was upgraded without any errors, and before I knew it I was staring at the very new and unfamiliar control panel of Movable Type 4.0.

I took a moment to explore the interface and look for the familiar configuration pages to ensure nothing obvious was out of place. I marveled at the unnecessarily complex user account privileges setup. I appreciated the streamlined navigation links and menu system. I noticed that certain templates had been rendered obsolete and were automatically removed from the system. All seemed well, so I proceeded to the compose page to blog about the experience.

And therein lies the reason that I am still using Movable Type 3.34. The compose control was disabled. I could not click inside it and start typing. The format buttons all appeared to work as normal, however the composition control refused to acknowledge any user input. I thought maybe it was unhappy with Firefox, but I encountered the same problem when using Internet Explorer 7.0.

I began searching for answers starting with the community support forums. There were several topics addressing this issue, however none of the proposed solutions worked for me. This thread suggests reinstalling from scratch. I already did that once a few months ago when I migrated the server from separate daemon packages to a unified WAMP installation. I didn't much like the prospect of doing it again and I didn't see how that would fix a problem that clearly resides in client-side scripting. Another poster solved the problem when he realized that his mt.js file was becoming corrupted whenever he made a post since he stored all his mt-static files in the root server directory. Not only am I not doing this, but my mt.js file is identical to the one inside the installation archive.

That pretty much exhausted what I was able to find in terms of support. The browser did not log any JavaScript errors on the page and I could find nothing else to solve the problem. I briefly considered the fact that I could use w.bloggar as my sole posting mechanism, but immediately rejected the idea on the grounds that relying upon third-party software because of faulty first-party support is a risky venture. So I did what any other sensible individual would do - I rolled back to the last functional version of the software. It's a good thing I backed up the old installation before attempting the upgrade. Rolling back was a simple matter of removing the installation directory, renaming the back-up folder, and restoring the DB from the nightly back-up.

I'm not sure when I'll attempt the upgrade again. Perhaps I'll keep an eye on the relevant forum threads and see what kinds of suggestions continue to flow in. It's unfortunate that the official Six Apart presence on the forums is rather sparse. This type of problem strikes me as one that might require more than the usual community tinkering to solve. Perhaps another upgrade in the pipeline will inadvertently address the issue.

In the meantime, perhaps it's time I took a closer look at WordPress.]]> tag:www.FutureViperOwner.com,2007://5.305 2007-06-26T00:37:55Z 2007-06-26T00:46:47Z

As much as I'd like to say that a lot of preparation went in to the planning of this trip, that's not true. It's just not me to study the course, anticipate and plot potential problems, and make out contingencies. I searched for directions on various online map sites (namely Google Maps, Yahoo! Maps, and Windows Live) to ascertain that they all agreed on the route to take (they did). As we were leaving on a weekday, we planned to leave in the evening and drive through the night to make it easiest on the kids and avoid traffic in the metropolitan areas (e.g. Chicago and Cleveland). The return trip was scheduled for a Sunday making traffic a mostly moot point, especially since Chicago traffic would be normal that evening after the Cubs and White Sox played each other that afternoon. Therein lies the extent of my cross country driving plans.

So, five days later, my brother has graduated cum laude with a B.B.A and I've returned from my trip. What follows are my observations...

With the kids in tow, we considered driving my wife's minivan for the convenience factor. With a third row seat available for the passenger to snooze in, additional leg room, and a built-in VCR, it was a compelling idea. However, with a 24 mpg highway rating, we would have consumed 33.57% more gasoline or 16.493 more gallons. The highest gas prices seen were home in Wisconsin and next door in Illinois at $3.59 / gallon. The lowest price was $3.07 / gallon in New York. In other words, by taking my car we saved between $50 - $60 in gas money. And that's just the cash savings - don't forget the environmental savings of not burning that extra 16.5 gallons of gas.

Speaking of gas money, my credit card receipts show that I spent just over $160 on gasoline for the trip (approx. $3.25 / gallon). Ouch. It's a good thing I don't travel long distance very often.

Tolls, tolls, and more tolls. Wisconsin does not have any tolls. In Ohio, our route took us on the Ohio Turnpike (tollway) until shortly before Cleveland where I-90 turns north towards the tip of Pennsylvania's tail (the tollway continues east in to the heart of Pennsylvania). Since we only passed through a slice of Pennsylvania, we avoided any of their tollways. That left us with tolls to pay in Illinois, Indiana, half of Ohio, and New York. The round trip tolls broke down as follows:

• Illinois: $7.50
• Indiana: $8.80 (includes an extra $0.50 since the first toll stop ate my money without opening the gate)
• Ohio: $12.00
• New York: $4.24 (This is either incomplete, or all E-ZPass tolls for the day are deducted from my iPass account as a single toll. My usage history only shows 2 tolls while I was in NY, despite the fact that I passed through 4 toll gates - 2 each way.)

Illinois has the iPass system. New York is a part of the E-ZPass system. Both systems now accept each other's transponders which made for an easier toll "experience" than in the two states on the trip without electronic tollbooths (Indiana and Ohio) where you had to worry about losing a ticket and ensuring you had enough cash in your pocket to pay the fees. Wikipedia says the Ohio Turnpike is going to start accepting E-ZPass. Unfortunately, it won't be fully functional until 2009.

In a strange twist, the worst drivers encountered did not call any of the states we traversed home. Around here, Illinois drivers are consistently maligned for their aggressive driving nature that pushes the commonly accepted boundaries for exceeding the speed limit. There's a reason Urban Dictionary has 13 entries for FIB. My exposure to New York drivers was fairly limited, but I found them to be straight "right-of-way" drivers: if they've got the right of way, you'd better get OUT of it. I can live with that. Ohio, Indiana, and Pennsylvania drivers resembled Wisconsin drivers. It's the Michigan plates you have to look out for. They're like Illinois drivers on crystal meth.

Shortly after beginning the return trip home, I turned 60,000 miles on my car's odometer. It now stands at 60,767 miles. I bought this car in November 2002 with 7,600 miles on it, which means I've driven it 53,167 miles in 54 months for an average of 11,814.84 miles per year or 984.57 miles per month. That's right in line with what automobile manufacturer's think is "normal", but is low compared to everyone else I know.

But of course, not every company out there sees it my way. One of the worst offenders of this dictum has always been Apple. It's difficult to enjoy all the media offered on the Internet without installing Apple's QuickTime media player. As an iPod owner, it's virtually impossible to go without installing iTunes, which requires installation of QuickTime as well.

As I was saying about Apple's blatant disregard for ownership of their user's desktops, it never fails that QuickTime ALWAYS adds a shortcut to my quick launch toolbar and ALWAYS inserts itself on my system tray. Why do they do that?? Is it really too much to ask for them to ask me if I'd like that done rather than force me to delete it every time it's installed? When it comes to the system tray, they don't even need to do that! They can check if it's running at installation time and if it is, keep it running in the system tray after the upgrade (which is what my company does with our applications).

Every computer I've ever serviced for a friend or family member has the ridiculous QuickTime system tray application running. None of them know what it is, where it came from, or why they need it. "Why does anyone need it?" is a better question, I think. Sadly, QuickTime is not the only icon in their system tray that they have no clue about. It's usually accompanied by something for their mouse drivers (especially on notebook computers), Windows Messenger (on computers running XP), an nVidia or ATi graphics driver application, and any number of a half dozen other ridiculous programs that come pre-installed on any store bought computer. And people wonder why the first thing I do with a new computer is wipe the hard drive and start all over?

The problem here lies in the hands of the application vendors. As an employee of such a company, I obviously have strong feelings about how it should be handled. In almost all cases, the user does not NEED to have my software installed. They chose to install it. As such, I should do everything I can do to ensure that I give them no reason to seek out an alternative that causes them to uninstall my application. Needlessly cluttering their desktop, system tray, and quick launch toolbar is all the motivation I need as a computer user to do just such a thing.

I hesitate to use this word in describing the problem at the risk of sounding corny, but I think it's about respect - respecting the user's space and not assuming that permission to install your application is the same as being granted permanent residence to make yourself at home. It's about respecting the fact that not all user's want the same things from your application and giving them the ability to configure it, and I mean configure it a SINGLE time, to behave the way they want it to. It's about finding and deploying a basic set of installation features that is unobtrusive and follows acceptable norms and standards.

In case you're wondering what started all this, I installed the critical updates from Windows Update this afternoon, including the security roll-up for IE7. After rebooting my computer, I was appalled to discover that Microsoft must have begun taking their installation queues from Apple. Gracing my quick launch toolbar was a "Launch Microsoft Internet Explorer" shortcut.

Sorry, Redmond. But I've already got a browser's shortcut placed there.

• A rumor out of a Chinese publication, Commercial Times, states that production on Xbox 360's containing the scaled down 65nm processor could begin this May in time for a Fall release. A less power hungry, cooler-running Xbox 360 would be the straw that breaks this camel's back. Cooler internal temperatures translates in to more reliable hardware, which allays my great fear of the investment. A redesigned main board to take advantage of the changes means an eventual price drop. (via Ars Technica)
• On my way to work every day, I've been watching a new building get constructed on the side of the road. It's finally completed and looks like it's been occupied by an entrepreneur. The name of the store is "Forgotten Treasures" and the windows of the store are filled with dated clothing, old knick-knacks, and other various tchotchke. The store's superficial similarity to Leland Gaunt's Needful Things is rather eerie.
• I rented another movie through Amazon Unbox for my TiVo. It took 2 hours 35 minutes to download a 1 hour 55 minute movie. Until I can watch a movie as it downloads, I still don't see the value of this service. I guess I'm not as opposed to driving to a rental store (or, more likely, skipping the rental altogether) as most people.
• The movie we rented was Man of the Year. We thought we were renting a comedy about a comedian that gets elected the President of the United States. What we got was a not-even-remotely-funny comedy crossed with a thriller about buggy software in a company's electronic voting machines that elects the wrong candidate (who happens to be a comedian) and their subsequent attempts to silence a potential whistle-blower. It's a good thing nothing like that could ever happen, huh?

With that in mind, here's some advice to the job hunters out there. My advice is being given from the perspective of a small, technology oriented, Web-based business.

Spell check your resume
Why do I even have to mention this? The number of spelling mistakes I've seen in resumes is astounding. Yes, I understand that when you apply for a technology oriented job, Microsoft Word is going to put a red squiggly line under every protocol, programming language, certification, or industry acronym you type out. That does not mean you should assume you can ignore every one of them. If I see you've misspelled Cisco while expounding upon your proficiency in configuring Pix firewalls, I'm not going to think too highly of your attention to detail. Misspelling a word is the most easily avoided mistake. Along those same lines...

Try to avoid using webmail services
I don't have any problem with someone using Yahoo, Hotmail, or Gmail when communicating with me. If that's your preferred email account instead of your ISP or university account, I can accept that. The problem is that unless you're using Mozilla Firefox 2.0 as your browser or composing your messages in an external editor, you're prone to spelling mistakes in your messages. When I'm doing a preliminary interview through email with someone applying for a customer service position that uses email to fulfill the majority of their duties, bad spelling and grammar is a poor reflection on your qualifications for that job.

Research the company
One of the first things I ask applicants is whether they've heard of our company and its products. If you haven't, the correct answer to this question is not a simple, "No." The correct answer is "Not until recently when I saw your open position. Since then, I've checked out your web site, downloaded your products, tried them out...." and so on. You're looking to start a career with a new company. Some people look at jobs as a necessary evil. I don't want to hire one of those people. The type of person I want to hire is interested in the work they do and it matters what kind of company they do it for. If you can't be troubled to learn something about the place you sent an application to, I'm going to return the favor and skip putting forth the effort to get to know you. The more you know about my company beforehand, the better you'll be able to impress me with your ability to relate the questions I'm asking you to operations of our business.

The interview is a two-way street
Obviously, the primary goal of the interview is for you to sell yourself to me and convince me that you're the best candidate for the job. However, and this ties in to my previous point about researching the company, I like for an applicant to come to the interview prepared with questions for me. I don't care what you ask me as long as it's relevant. You want to ask about the growth of the company over the past 5 years? Please do. Do you want to know about the long-term goals of the company? I'd love to tell you about them. I don't like it when I get to the part of the interview where I ask if you have any questions for me and the best you can muster is "How long is the lunch break?" This again shows a distinct lack of interest in the company, the job, and the culture surrounding it all. From the moment you first step foot in our offices, there should be a dozen questions bouncing around in your head that you're dying to know the answers to before committing to making a career with us. Share some of those questions with me and let me know just how serious you are about your career.

While I stated that my advice comes from a specific perspective, I think this advice is applicable to most jobs in general. This isn't rocket science at work here. But it is your livelihood, and through our potential connection as co-workers, my livelihood at stake as well. The effort you put into creating your resume and researching my company prior to the interview will be evident to me. If you're serious about the job, then that's exactly what you should be striving to achieve.

The notice from TiVo came along with a $15 credit to the Unbox service if I signed up by April 30. If you have a TiVo connected to your home network, you've still got a few days to sign up and get the credit, too. Who doesn't like getting something for free? So I signed up so I could try out the service at a later date.

My wife and I decided to try out the service this past Sunday evening after a long (but fun) weekend entertaining a family member staying at our house for a few days. Since neither of us felt like making the drive to a video rental store and I had the $15 credit, the Unbox service seemed like a perfect solution.

We browsed the Unbox web site and settled on renting The Devil Wears Prada (obviously, her choice). It was here that the first potential problem with the Unbox service on TiVo was discovered. Not every movie is TiVo compatible. It seems most new movies are compatible, but you have to keep an eye out on the listing page for the "Also Works with: TiVo" tag. It appears that most new movies and television shows are compatible, but I'd hate to get burned on this the one time I forget to explicitly check.

After making your first purchase on the site, apparently all future purchases are done with "1-Click". As far as I can tell, there is no way to turn this off. I really don't like this. I don't like 1-Click. I don't like anything that doesn't let me confirm purchase details before being charged. I'm human and I make mistakes. What kind of person is in such a hurry to rent / purchase a video that they don't have time to make a couple extra clicks in order to review their order? Forcing Unbox users in to using a "feature" that's optional on the main Amazon.com web site doesn't make sense to me.

The Unbox on TiVo FAQ states that new purchases should show up in your TiVo's "Now Playing" list after about 15 minutes. I don't know the exact amount of time I had to wait, but it was probably between 15-20 minutes. Unfortunately, I was soon to discover the biggest drawback of the service.

You can't watch videos while they are still downloading to your TiVo.

To me, this is an inexcusable limitation of the service. Your TiVo is constantly recording live television and allowing you to pause, rewind, and play the resulting video data. Content that is being recorded from your cable or satellite signal can be watched while it's being recorded. So why on earth can't I start watching the movie I'm in the middle of downloading???

The web site claims that it can download a typical movie in about an hour and a 1-hour TV episode in 30 minutes. The Devil Wears Prada is a 1 hour 49 minute movie. It took 2 hours and 38 minutes to download. According to the information available from TiVo, the video file of the download was 2.37 GB in size. That means that the TiVo was downloading at a rate of about 250 KB/s. My Road Runner cable modem service usually clocks in at about 5 Mb which is capable of sustaining a 600 KB/s transfer rate - a speed I regularly attain during BitTorrent downloads or well-known sites where server-side bandwidth limitations aren't in play. In other words, with my broadband connection, I should have been able to download this movie in a little over an hour.

Being able to purchase the movie through a web site in advance and have it waiting on my TiVo when I get home is a nice idea. However, the big draw of being able to purchase content electronically is its immediate availability, which facilitates a more impulse driven decision making process. Now that I know I must wait for the delivery of this content to be complete before it can be consumed, my impulse purchase decisions will be on a much slower trigger than it should be for such a service. Coupled with the fact that the prices on the site are pretty much comparable to acquiring the physical media from a store and I fail to see much of a benefit to the service outside of the convenience factor it offers when planning ahead. Perhaps I'm in the minority here, but it's not often that I plan ahead on a movie rental.

Amazon.com Unbox on TiVo:

Pros:

• Allows me to purchase videos from a remote location and have it delivered to my TiVo.
• Good video quality (no pixels were visible when pausing the movie unlike content recorded from my television - even when it's recorded on the Highest quality setting).
• ....um....I got $15 in free purchases??

• Not all content on Unbox is TiVo compatible.
• Can't watch a video until the download is complete.
• Download was slow considering available bandwidth of my connection.
• No price savings despite electronic delivery of content.

• Allow me to start watching videos while it's still downloading to minimize the wait time for those times when you didn't plan out your purchase in advance.
• A progress indicator while downloading - if you can tell what percentage of an update is downloaded when I initiate a connection to the TiVo service, you can do the same thing here.
• Faster downloads!!!

Now that StyleCatcher is properly configured, I can appreciate how streamlined and simple the process can be. Unfortunately, it took a fair amount of tinkering to get to this point and it's still not behaving properly under all circumstances.

The second hiccup involved the StyleCatcher plug-in settings. Apparently, you can't specify a full path for the "Theme Root URL". Or at least, I couldn't get it to behave properly with a full path. The individual blog sites continued to use the system-wide path (which was invalid for the individual sites) until I specified a relative path instead. I don't see anything in the plug-in's documentation about this, which was rather frustrating.

The final problem is one that I continue to experience. It seems that the images accompanying certain styles are not downloaded when they are applied in StyleCatcher. I don't know if this is a plug-in problem or one involving the packaging of the style in the repository. All I know is that about half of the time when I apply a style that includes images, none of them are downloaded forcing me to manually download and install them, which completely negates the advantage of using StyleCatcher in the first place. I'll have to make a note to investigate this issue further to see exactly where the problem is. The Firebug extension for Firefox should make this process a bit easier.

Finally, and this once again seems to be an issue with individual styles, it seems that the style specific stylesheet likes to import "base-weblog.css". Since the style is downloaded in to it's own unique directory, "base-weblog.css" isn't in the same directory causing the import to generate a 404 error. Making this error even more silly is the fact that the main stylesheet in the template ("styles-site.css") imports both "base-weblog.css" and the style specific stylesheet making the erroneous import redundant. I hate seeing the 404 errors stack up in my logs, so I have to manually edit the CSS file to remove the import (once again reducing the usefulness of StyleCatcher).

For those that are looking to do the same thing, here's the parts list:

• Broken Klipsch ProMedia 2.1 speakers
• Replacement 5-pin DIN plug (scavenged from a 6ft. MIDI cable)
• Klipsch DIN plug wiring diagram
• A digital multimeter (highly recommended)
• Soldering iron & solder
• Wire strippers
• Electrical tape

Now, snip the MIDI cable leaving as much extra wire as you want spliced back in to your speaker setup. Use your DMM to identify which color wire corresponds to each pin as indicated on the DIN plug wiring diagram. If the colors are different, make a note of it on your diagram next to the color that corresponds to the same wire on your Klipsch speakers. You now have identified the wires from the two cables that need to be soldered together.

If the wiring for your control pod is the same as mine, you'll see that there isn't a regular "wire" for the ground. Instead, it's spread out as many small, thin wires contained within the cable body. Just twist them all together so that you have one solid wire to connect to the other cable's ground wire.

Use your wiring diagram to twist the wires together connecting the corresponding colors. Use your DMM again (can't be too careful!) to verify that you've identified the wires correctly and matched them up accurately. Now you can solder the connections to make them permanent.

At this point, I put two coats of liquid electrical tape over the exposed wire. Once that had sufficiently dried, each connection was wrapped in regular electrical tape before bundling them all together for a final wrapping.

If you've done everything right, you should now have a solid DIN plug that fits snugly into your subwoofer.

I read Needful Things for the first time about 15 years ago. It was the second book I had read that was written by Stephen King (The Shining was the first). Although I have enjoyed reading both of these books, I never read many more of his books after this one. Looking through his bibliography, it would appear that the majority of his books that I've read since are those with recent movies based on them, including The Green Mile and Different Seasons (a series of 4 short stories with 3 having spawned movies - The Shawshank Redemption, Stand By Me, and Apt Pupil). I've never read either of his two most popular books (It or The Stand). Perhaps I should do so.

While searching my bookshelf for something to read a month ago, I decided it was time to revisit Needful Things once again.

On the surface, Needful Things is a new curio store run by Leland Gaunt. Opening in a small town where changes are measured in terms of decades, it is an event that captures the attention of everyone. However, there is more to the store and its proprietor than meets the eye. Needful Things is a conduit through which people shun reality in favor of believing something their eyes and heart know not to be true. But the mind is a powerful and manipulative device. In the hands of a shrewd, supernaturally gifted "entrepreneur," it is capable of overriding the senses and regular thought processes of a human being.

The items for sale in Needful Things are the innermost desires of people everywhere - whatever they may be. When dealing with items of such esteem, most consumer's are prevented from purchasing them due to their price tag. However, Leland Gaunt is not in business for financial gain. He does not sell items straight up for cash, choosing instead to bargain with patrons by charging them what they can afford and requiring them to perform a deed (just a harmless little trick) on his behalf. While visitors to his store are shopping for something they don't expect to find or be able to acquire, he is searching his customers for something more. To Gaunt, each visitor to his store is a piece on a chessboard. His goal is to identify what chess piece each person is and the moves required to take them off the board.

The story centers around 5 key characters with another dozen or so minor characters of varying importance. Each character is provided with enough background to indicate their importance to the main plot. Care is taken that when a new character is introduced, it is not done with a cursory introduction before moving on, leaving the reader to flip backwards in the book the next time they become the center of attention.

Once events are set in to motion, the book becomes hard to put down. Leland Gaunt is good at what he does and has a blueprint for success. As such, the book is broken up in to 3 parts: Grand Opening Celebration, The Sale of the Century, and Everything Must Go. The first part introduces you to the town, its inhabitants, and the first two pawns meeting in the middle of the chessboard. With Part two's sale of the century, more pieces are brought in to the fray with each passing chapter. By the end of part two, the pieces of the chessboard are all out of their starting places and negotiating their way across the board towards their target. Part three is the smallest of the parts (~20% of the book) and encompasses the climax of the story until its ultimate conclusion.

Most of the stories by Stephen King that I've read or read about seem to deal with supernatural forces of some sort or another. Needful Things is no different. As much as I enjoyed the ride this book took me on, I think it could have been better. Like Cujo, I think King could have done this story without the aid of supernatural devices. Was there embellishment of the effects of rabies on a dog in Cujo? I don't know; I think it's probable. But embellishment still preserves a person's natural fear of an event or action. Upon finishing Needful Things, I had the feeling that I had just finished reading a good story. Had King achieved the same story without the supernatural assistance, I believe I would have been left with an unhealthy fear of antique shops and individuals wishing to bargain on the price of new electronic gadgets and gizmos.

There were some problems getting the remotes to function properly at first, which I was told was very odd considering that no problems of that sort had been encountered for the past couple weeks. I seem to have this kind of effect on hardware of all sorts. Monitors wear out prematurely when it's my desk they call home. Removable DVD drives refuse to be recognized when notebooks are booted up in my docking station. Devices that work flawlessly 99.9% of the time refuse to function as intended in my presence.

It's a gift; what else can I say?

Since my time with it was limited, I only played Wii Sports. Seeing as how it comes bundled with the console, it's a great way to introduce new owners to their Wii, why it's different, and how it's played. Kudos to Nintendo for being the only one of the big 3 to include a game with their console - even if it's more tutorial than a full-blown AAA title. You can play baseball, tennis, bowling, boxing, and golf. I was able to play all of them except for golf.

Being the baseball freak that I am, we started there. You can just flick your wrist to throw the ball or go through the regular baseball throwing motion. The faster the wrist flick, the faster the ball is thrown. I thought this added a nice bit of variety and depth to a simple game - through this technique, fastballs ranged from 65mph up to the high 90's. Holding down the A, B, or both buttons while throwing resulted in throwing a curveball, screwball, or splitter. The control pad is used to change pitch location.

The batter simply had to swing the remote at the appropriate time to hit the pitch. That's all the players do - pitch and swing. Traditional fielding of the ball is not done. Ground balls fielded in front of outfielders or balls bouncing off the gloves of infielders results in a single. Balls that get over or past the outfielders are doubles. My co-worker had yet to see what it took to get a triple, although we guessed a ball off the wall might get it done. A home run is, of course, self-explanatory. Runners on base move the same number of bases as the batter on a hit. There are no double plays.

The one game we played was 3 innings. I ended up winning 3-0 as I was able to string together a few doubles in the 2nd inning. The game was definitely simple, but also satisfying and fun to play. Being a fan the pleasure derived from playing a game offering a cooperative mode, I found that Wii Sports does a great job of satisfying gamers in the same way.

Next on the list was bowling. Here's a good example of how it's played. You "bowl" the ball using the remote. You can control where on the line your Mii stands as well as adjust their rotation. How hard you throw controls the speed of the ball as well. I got the hang of it after a few frames, but we stopped after about 4 frames to move on to something else. It wasn't anything spectacular for me and didn't have the same competitive fun factor as the other games we played.

We then moved on to tennis, which plays as you might expect it to after reading how the baseball game played. It was a doubles game where you don't control the Mii's movements; you only tell them when to swing. Being a timing based exercise once again, you could control the location of the ball by varying when you swing at it.

We played probably a half dozen matches of tennis. Despite not winning any of them, I still enjoyed playing this one as well.

We wrapped it up with boxing, which I was also terrible at. I couldn't seem to get the hang of it. I would assume my timing was simply off as I wasn't able to string any combos together (intentionally) and was repeatedly on the receiving end of such combos that drained about half of my energy. For me at least, this one would take a bit more practice to get the hang of.

All in all, it was a good time. It was enjoyable, I worked up a light sweat (although I was overdressed for today's temperature), and it was fun playing with another human being in something that didn't involve shooting one another. I look forward to trying out a few more games on the Wii and forming a more complete opinion.

If only the changing of seasons was that clear-cut.

It's currently snowing throughout most of the state of Wisconsin. My little corner of the state is forecast to accumulate 4"-6" of snow when all is said and done. As it's been snowing for the past 10 hours or so, I'd say they're right on target. Since the temperature is hovering between 30-32 F, it's a very dense, heavy, wet snow. The last time it snowed like this, my snowblower didn't handle it very well. Of course, there was also about a foot of it on my driveway, which is still of the gravel variety. Fortunately, the expected temperatures of well above freezing over the next few days should eliminate the need to be proactive about its removal.

For now, I guess I'll just have to dream of a forecast like this.

In other words, I rarely cave in to my obsessions. My approach has always been to deny myself the latest gadget or gizmo when the urge strikes. If, after a sufficient quantity of time has passed, the urge continues to surface and cannot be ignored, I begin to entertain the idea of the purchase and determine whether or not it makes fiscal and functional sense. Is it affordable? Will it do something for me from an entertainment or usefulness standpoint that can be easily justified? Are those reasons sufficiently persuasive that they can sway the keeper of the bank accounts?

As you may or may not have noticed, I recently added a new sidebar entitled "Wishful Thinking." No, it's not a vain attempt at flattering myself in to believing some random surfer would give a rip about my Amazon.com wishlist. It's a current listing of those things that are occupying the section of my brain susceptible to obsessions. Topping the charts at the moment is an Xbox 360, the desire for which is fueled in no small part by the recent release of Guitar Hero II. Contributing to this unhealthy mental state are games such as Gears of War, Dead Rising, and Crackdown. Combined with the marvel that is Xbox Live, the pending promise of IPTV support, and the need to see more HD content on my HDTV and you can tell why this obsession continues to rear its ugly head almost 18 months after it first surfaced.

Conspiring to work against me in fulfilling this desire is nothing more than the very essence of who I am: logic. Honestly, I got burned with my early adoption of the Xbox. I had problems with my DVD drive from the get-go. It was shipped back to Microsoft less than two months after it was purchased for repairs. Six months after that, it started acting up again and degraded over time to the point where it will not play a game anymore (hooray for software based methods of getting around this nuisance). The reliability of the Xbox 360's hardware has been well documented from the start. Microsoft's upgraded warranty for the 360 speaks volumes to that fact as well (although I commend them for doing it anyway). There's no way I'm going down that route again with another console.

Questionable hardware, a $400 price tag (the $300 Core system is NOT an option), and the expected Fall release of a cooler running, less energy consuming, and potentially more reliable 65nm processor Xbox 360 (and the expected price drop to accompany it) conspires to make me wait even longer.

This is one of the tougher obessions I've fought off over the years and it's recently become stronger than it has been in the past (for whatever reason). I've all but given up on PC gaming as I can't afford to continue to upgrade my PC every couple years in order to get the most out of the latest and greatest. This frustrates me, but I've come to accept and even embrace the fact that console gaming targets my market segment for this very specific reason. If Microsoft can introduce the 65nm Xbox 360 this fall along with this generation's first official price drop to coincidence with the Halo 3 release timeframe, I doubt I'll be able to resist the temptation any longer.