Adventures

Worst (best?) drinking game ever.

A couplea years ago we decided to play a drinking game to an awesome movie, on St. Patricks day.  What could be better?  Two excuses to drink excessive amounts of beer (5 cases of Henry Weinhardts if memory serves… which it may not, given what happened).  Plus, the movie fit in perfectly with St. Paddy’s day, Boondock Saints.  Not the second one… although that was basically the first one with a hot chick instead of William Defoe.  Not that he isn’t hot… no.. no.. he really isn’t.

So, we had our veritable pyramid of beer, an awesome movie, great friends, and the perfect holiday to drink to.  Now all we needed were some rules.  Many drinking games require you to drink a certain number of shots / sips when specific things happen, for instance “2 shots whenever Dwight mentions animals” or “1 shot whenever the Minister mentions God”.

This, however, leads to massive confusion the more you drink.. one shot or two when Bambi’s mom bites the dust?  Do I down my drink when Barney in the Simpsons drinks?

So, we decided to simplify things.  Just one drink whenever one of the following happens, with ONE instance of downing everything…

Down your drink when the cat dies – A gun goes off – Someone dies – Someone swears

Simple, right?  Too simple actually… Those of you who’ve seen this movie know what we were in for… For those of you who haven’t seen Boondock Saints recently (or ever), here’s a short clip that will help you understand the insanity of our proposed drinking game.  (Note : violence and profanity warning). (for a longer and more painful drinking experience, check out this extended clip http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gd3Sl7P0IOA, which has MORE violence and profanity).

Just in that scene alone we counted something like 300 shots fired, a dozen or so deaths, and a flood of profanity.  We were counting on BOTH hands AND our toes (mind you, there was already a bunch of drinking before this scene…) and quickly ran out of digits.  Assuming each beer is good for… 20 sips… that’s still 10 beers a person.. 12 beers per case means we only had 60 or so beers.  It was bad.  Oh, and the rest of the movie, while not as saturated with lead, is still violent and profane.  Terrible idea.

A Clear Choice

A couple of months ago, we talked about boosting our WiMax internet signal by using aluminum foil. Getting home internet from Clear was a very hit-or-miss affair, with the signal fading or dropping in poor weather (keep in mind that we’re in the Pacific Northwets, and no that’s not a typo), but by constructing a sort of tinfoil reflector dish around our WiMax modem we were able to improve both signal strength and reliability… at least at first.

The signal was noticeably stronger after construction of the aluminum dish, and this fact impressed us enough that we were excited to share this news with the blogosphere. The idea that one could take a common household material like aluminum foil and build a device to boost one’s wireless internet service seemed so cool, so… taboo. It gave us a geeky feeling of resourcefulness, like we were on the verge of discovering a plethora of other cheap, alternative ways of improving our quality of life.

You mean all I have to do is eat vegetables and I'll never have to get a flu vaccine again?

However, our inventive euphoria did not take long to fade, and within a couple weeks of building our aluminum dish we noticed a severe drop in our signal strength. I should note that our internet service was still technically better with the tinfoil than without, although at its worst the signal had become so weak that the difference was hardly noticeable. Bizarrely, this drop in service quality coincided almost exactly with a timetable given by Clear in previous weeks to improve signal strength in our area by building new towers nearby. Despite their promises to the contrary, however, our service began an extreme downward spiral in the weeks following our last post on the subject. It appears that our failure was not to trust in tinfoil to improve on Clear’s hardware, but to trust Clear to provide a reasonable service in the first place.

Had we zoomed in closer on Clear's service map we might have noticed the tiny gray area over our 800 square foot apartment.

The service actually got worse and worse, as if the Clear Gods were punishing us mere mortals for attempting to exert some control over the realm of invisible WiMax signals, with our pagan aluminum technology. In the last couple of weeks, it was taking up to 2 hours to load a 10-minute video on Youtube. At one point, attempting to download a multi-gig file, we determined that it would actually, literally be faster to buy a plane ticket, travel to the home of the person who created the file, load it onto a flash drive, and fly back. Even at it’s best, our service was rarely better than that offered by a dial-up connection with a 28 kbps modem. I nearly jumped for joy when my download speeds peaked at 30 or 35 kbps, a fact to which no human should ever have to admit in this day and age. We were paying $35 per month for service that was slower than dial-up. It was clear that something would have to change.

How many people under 20 even know what this is?

Unfortunately, in our folly we had agreed to a long contract with Clear, and in order to get out of it we had to set up an appointment with a service technician whose job seemed to consist entirely of (1) asking us stupid, generic, and insulting questions over the phone, to the tune of “Is your modem plugged in?” and (2) asking us stupid, generic, and insulting questions in person, while simultaneously ignoring our responses because he was right goddamn there and could see with his own eyes how shitty our service was, through no fault of our own. It was a hassle, but by the time the Clear representative had actually come out to our apartment and verified the lack of a reasonable internet experience, getting out of the contract wasn’t really far off.

The moral of the story? Even creativity and tinfoil can’t solve every problem. Unless you need internet access on-the-go and you plan on “going” mainly through large sunny fields within range of Clear’s towers-or-whatever-it-is-they-have, just go with Comcast, Verizon, Qwest, or one of the other umpteen Cable or DSL internet providers in your area. It may cost a little more, but we’re willing to pay $10 a month extra for download speeds which are literally 750 times faster than what we had with Clear.

Lipstick on a pig

A Better Internet Experience Through Tin Foil?

When the time came for us Disciples of Bloggism to move into our new home in Beaverton, Oregon, back at the end of last year, one of the first decisions we had to make was choosing an internet service provider.  Now, we had a ton of different choices, and since Rob and I are the kind of people who need reliable, nearly 24/7 internet coverage when we’re at home, this was a relatively important decision for us.  When we last lived together, a couple years back, we had bundled a home phone line and broadband internet together through Qwest.  It wasn’t terrible service, but we weren’t exactly blown away, and our main motivation for going with Qwest last time was the relatively cheap price when you bought the phone line with the internet service.  However, this time around we both agreed that a landline would be impractical, since we both have our cell phones on us 99% of the time and our coverage in that area is great.  Comcast was an option, although we had heard plenty of horror stories from friends and acquaintances with Comcast whose internet connections were less reliable than they would have liked.  After some shopping around, we decided to try out Clear, a relatively new service here in Portland, from the Seattle-based service provider Clearwire.

If you’re not familiar with Clear, they offer what they refer to as “mobile internet” through their “WiMax 4G technology.”  Expanding on the “access the web through your cell phone” trend that’s been driving the development of new phone hardware and software for the past few years, Clear provides relatively high-speed wireless access to the internet remotely in several cities around the country.  They started out in Seattle, then added towers in Portland, and have begun expanding their reach beyond the Northwest, with plans to peddle their wireless wares in almost a hundred more cities over the next year or two.  Besides offering wireless-receiving modems for home internet use, Clear provides the option of purchasing little receivers you can plug into your laptops to connect to the Web almost anywhere around town – this mobile option, and the relatively low price of their service plans, were a couple of the main reasons we chose to get our internet access through Clear.

However, this is starting to sound like a paid endorsement for the company’s internet service, so let me get to the point: Clear’s coverage offers both the benefits and downsides of any major cell phone service provider – if you have a mobile access receiver, you can supposedly go all around town with a reliable internet connection, but the service is very spotty once you leave the heart of downtown, and lots of things can interfere with your signal strength, trees and buildings included.  We have yet to make use of the supposed mobility offered by Clear, and have only set up a home modem for our local internet needs – and since we’re out West of Beaverton, somewhat in “the boonies” relative to the heart of downtown Portland, our connection has usually been questionable at best.  Review after review has said more or less the same thing – that the ability to access the internet at a reasonable speed all over the city is an awesome feature, albeit one with a cost at this relatively early stage of the technological game: put a couple of walls between you and the open air, and the signal goes to shit.  Bump the modem or turn the antenna on the receiver the wrong way, and the signal goes to shit.  Hell, if you even walk across the street from a high-signal area you may find yourself in a proverbial dead zone.  Still, the potential mobility may be worth it for some, especially if you’ll be spending your time mainly in areas with moderate-to-high coverage.  We have yet to be so lucky, even though Clear’s map of coverage in the Portland area clearly (no pun intended) shows that we should be doing just fine:

If we put the modem in its most natural position in our home, out of the way of normal foot traffic and out of sight, near the wireless router and next to similar home electronics, our signal is at best one bar out of a possible five.  Put the modem right next to a window, practically up against the glass, and our signal increases, perhaps to a peak of two bars, occasionally three (in the best of weather conditions) – however, it is unfortunately unreliable, even peeking out at the blue sky through an open window (and our apartment is on the second of two stories).  This has been a significant frustration in the past month, especially after purchasing our brand new Xbox (see a few posts down), and dropping often and unexpectedly from our Halo 3 matches on Xbox Live.

Frustrated, I refused to accept that there was nothing we could do to cheaply and easily increase our signal strength at home, and so Rob and I tried to come up with possible solutions.  Perhaps, I suggested, we could rig some sort of antenna with a coat hanger or similar object and attach it somehow to some internal part of our modem, and run the contraption out the window.  However, this idea was quickly vetoed, due to equal parts (1) uncertainty about how exactly these electronic thingamajigs work; and (2) unwillingness to go fiddling around with something we’d probably have to pay to replace (especially if the fiddling around presented the potential to burn our apartment down or cause grievous bodily injury to ourselves in the process).  Perhaps we could buy a commercial signal booster or other such item, but if we were willing to spend money on one of those, we might as well spend it switching service providers.  Was there nothing we could do?

Then, an idea came to me in the middle of the night (as ideas are wont to do), fueled perhaps by a few fingers of Scotch and an evening of cheesy 1950s Sci-fi movies.  What if I made a deflector dish of sorts out of aluminum foil, and placed it behind the modem, facing out the window?  Could such a thing work?  I had never heard of this sort of thing being done before, but based on my rudimentary understanding of scientific principles, I figured it was worth a shot.  I resolved to try out my crazy scheme the next day.

After heading out to meet with some friends over coffee the next morning, I returned home and hopped online, finding the signal as finicky as ever.  It looked to become a dreary day, with some potentially serious weather looming on the horizon, and apparently the signal had been iffy all morning.  As I sat at my computer, testing the signal strength and testing my patience for about an hour, the best our modem was able to manage that day was a measly one bar, and even that for only a few minutes at a time, before going out again and searching for a signal.  I decided that now was the time to test my idea, and so I bounded into the kitchen seeking our handy roll of aluminum foil.  Admittedly, I felt very silly tearing off sheets of foil and shaping them ever-so-carefully around our modem, and I’m glad no one was around to see.  It felt like superstition, pseudoscience, but I felt that it had potential so I had to give it a whirl.

It keeps the gub'ment from reading my mind!

Lo and behold, as soon as I put that tinfoil dish behind our modem, the signal jumped from an unreliable one bar all the way up to FOUR BARS, higher than I think we had ever received before, and it didn’t go down all day.  Had my crazy idea really worked?  Could three cents worth of aluminum foil really give us such a drastic increase in signal strength and stability?  Our connection remained strong the rest of the day, but I was still unconvinced – it could have been a coincidence, or there could have been a hidden variable I was failing to notice.  That night, around midnight, as I was preparing for bed, I decided to carefully and delicately remove my two-sheet addition, doing so without touching the modem, and see whether its absence would affect the signal.  As soon as that foil was away from our modem, the signal strength immediately dropped down from four bars to two.  Eureka!

Since that night, I’m still working on perfecting the shape/placement of our tin foil dish for maximum effect, but I have to say I’m generally impressed with the results of my crazy experiment.  Our signal is still often at four bars, a strength we never achieved before, and although there are still occasionally days and times of weak connectivity, in general I think I can show that we do better with the foil than without.  And apparently other people have come up with similar ideas:  Science is so… fucking… cool.

Xbox Adventures

The Xbox 360 is to gamers what the Ferrari is to car enthusiasts.  The graphics are amazing, and the feature it offers are really cool (watching movies through it, Netflix, linking your computer to it).  Not to mention it has some really, really good titles (Halo, Gears of War etc).  The only downside compared to a PS3 is that there is no Blu-Ray player, and to be honest, I don’t really care about Blu-Ray right now… especially since the TV we have is 20 years old.  But moving on.

Having finally decided to get an Xbox 360 we ventured out to purchase one.  Figuring that it would cost the same everywhere (MSRP for the Elite is 299.99, for the Arcade it’s 199.99) we went to Fred Meyers to purchase one.  First, a little about the differences between the two.  The Elite comes in Black (it looks cool!) and has a 120gb internal hard drive.  This allows you to download content from online, save more games etc.  It is also backwards compatible with more games than the Arcade.  The Arcade, through cheap, only comes with 256mb of internal memory, which doesn’t allow you to do too much as far as downloads go, plus, it’s white… not nearly as badass as black.

Fred Meyers, or Freddies, being the closest store, we drove down and spoke to a clerk about getting one.  We asked a few questions about the differences between the Arcade and the Elite, including whether or not the heat sink (keeps the machine cool so it doesn’t overheat) is bigger on the Elite.  This led to the Associate hunting down someone else, who had some.. interesting.. ideas on how to cool a 360.  First he recommended that we mount it vertical and put a cheap desk fan blowing up through it.  That, being the cheapest way, seemed simple enough.  Then he told us about some guy who used liquid Nitrogen to cool his xbox, which seems very expensive.  Then we went to liquid hydrogen, followed by dry ice.  All of that to answer the question “Does the elite have a bigger heat sink?”.

So we purchased a 360, along with a second black controller and a new copy of Unreal Tournament.  Then we went home and had a grand olde tyme opening it up and turning it on.  I gotta say, it was qutie exciting opening the box and plugging it in.  Setup was a snap, very reminiscant of setting up a Wii (the other 7th gen console I’ve played).  Then we popped in Unreal and blew each other up for several hours, but only after about an hour trying to figure out how to play.  Not a bad game, we’ll have a review for you all on that one later.

The next day we ventured out (after another 6 or so hours of gaming) to find use a gift card to get more games.  This is where things get… odd.  The Associate at Fred Meyers assured us that we wouldn’t find a better deal on a 360 in town (I asked specifically if he could throw anything in or if they had any specials, they had none).  Then we got to GameStop and we saw this.

They were having a special, running from January 16th through the 21st.  They give you a $50 gift card for every 360 Elite you buy.  Now that sounds like a MUCH better deal than what Freddie’s had.  I took several photo’s of the fliers (they had no paper copies), and got a business card from the employee there.  Aside from research we also picked up a copy of Gears of War for 9.99 and Ghost Recon : Advanced Warfighter 2 (we had played the original Ghost Recons and loved them) for 4.99.

Freddies has a policy that if you would like to return an item, you may do so for any reason within 30 days.  They also do price matching.  So we went home, unplugged our new Xbox, got the receipt and went back to Freddies.  I told the guy at customer service what happened (we found a better deal, and had pictures and a phone number about it) and asked if they could match it.  He called his boss, who said that unless we had a paper copy of the ad, they wouldn’t match the deal.

Now lets do a bit of math.  We had purchase $349.99 worth of gear at Freddies (an Xbox + controller).  We were going to return it all unless they matched the deal Gamestop had (a $50 gift card).  So all-in-all they’d be out $50.  Instead they lost our business, we returned the Xbox and the controller (they’re out $349.99), and they now cannot sell that Xbox since it is “used” (it will get returned to Microsoft, refurbished and sent to be sold as “Used”).  Instead of keeping two happy customers, Freddies decided to inconvience (having to drive everywhere and lose all our saved game data) AND lost $350 in sales.  Very weird.

T

We went back to Gamestop and bought an Xbox there (we’re out $299.99 again).  Then we bought a used controller, and 2 additional games (Halo 3, and Gears of War 2 : Collectors Edition).  The sales clerk also hooked us up with The Edge, which gets us 10% off used stuff and 10% more when we trade it (cost us 14.95, but saved us 8 bucks and got us a subscription to a sub-par magazine).  Our total, including all that was only $333.  Notice how that’s $16 LESS than Freddies price.  I know that I’ve ranted about Game Stop and it’s buy back practices (Halo : ODST new is 59.99, used it’s 54.99… wow, GREAT deal).

After we scurried home we hooked up our new, new Xbox, and played Halo 3 until we went blind.  Well, not that bad, but we stayed up until we beat it on “normal” (which is actually quite easy..)  And so concludes the Xbox adventure.  Let this serve as a cautionary tale to all, always check around for good deals… otherwise you might lose your save files and waste time trying to convince an associate to match a competitors deal (not to mention listen to theories on how to cool something down…).

Trip to the Mall, Part 2

Andy and I ventured to the mall again.  This time to Llyod Center, a vastly different mall than Washington Square.  Less upscale, and much larger.  Plus, it has an ice skating rink.  Although, we’re constantly creeped out by all the seeming pedophiles that skate with the kids. And we’re also creeped out by the Scientology “Stress Test” booth that is set up on the ground level.  (Ron L. Hubbard Institute?).  How a sci-fi writer got an Institute named after him is beyond me.  The only upshot of the “Stress Test” (Andy actually took one once.. they use “E-Meter“, some bullshit device that only really measures galvanic skin response to determine your stress level.  Apparently Godzilla stresses us out) is that it is right across from the Pirate store.  Yes, Llyod Center has a store devoted entirely to Pirates.  Or rather, people who want to BE pirates.  They have just about everything to deck out your pirate ship, plus appropriate garb.  The only thing missing is the Grog.

The parking lot at Llyod Center is.. interesting.  The first level, “1″ has a Fish next to it, 1a has a bird, 2 is a cloud, 2a is a star and 3 is the Sun.  It kinda makes sense, low to high, but I’d switch the Sun with Stars since I’m pretty sure every other star in the sky is further away than the Sun.. at least that is what Science tells me.  Also, where did they get the idea for the pictures, Lucky Charms?  Where’s the heart and clovers?

Like all good malls, Llyod Center has not one, but TWO gaming stores, both of which happen to be EB Games.  I guess the only upshot of having two of these is that if you’re on one level you don’t have to over-exert yourself by standing on an escalator for ten seconds to get to one.  I love this store, but I do have a problem with the used games, which I am sure many people also do.  A quick search of Google turns up hundreds of people pissed at this.  Here is just one example.  As a gamer I appreciate the ability to recycle games, but I constantly feel the burn of selling something for $5 only to see it being sold for three-four times that…  Fortunately I have found CD Game Exchange in Portland.  I’m sure these guys use the same scheme as EB, but at least they’re (more) local, plus they have a great selection of music and games.. much better than EB’s.

Llyod Center has a great little remote control (RC) shop… although it is a bit creepy.  The front has dozens of different RC toys, from helicopters to tanks (they actually shoot things!) to trick cars.  They even let you play with some of them, and come on, who doesn’t love an RC car?  The rest of the place is devoted to more random, creeptastic shit.  It feels like they didn’t know what to add, so they threw in some sports memorabilia,  generic plastic toys (GI Joe ripoffs, miscellanious dinosaur toys etc.).  It’s kinda like being stuck in China Town.

Hockey Trip : Portland Winterhawks vs. Seattle Thunderbirds

Last night I went to a Portland Winterhawks game with some friends.  And it was one helluva game.  Well, the first two periods weren’t really anything special, unless you’re a Seattle Thunderbirds fan (not many of the 8750 people there were…). In the 2nd the Winterhawks were getting trounced, it was like they lost their steam.  But in the third, they definitely bounced back…. I lost track of all the fights that broke out, but there were quite a few, especially after a Winterhawk “accidentally” tripped up the Thunderbirds goalie.  One of the T-birds defenders went off and slugged the Hawk… which ended up in 17 minutes of penalties for the T-Bird.  Then there were the two guys getting in a fight with a Linesman in the middle (YouTube has nothing, so here’s a link to another Winterhawks fight.)  Then there was a sucker punch to the back of the head… LOTS of penalties on both sides.

But, the highlight of the game wasn’t all the fighting (although it was fun to watch two guys beat the crap outta each other), it was the hat trick by number 12.  Actually, no, that wasn’t the highlight.  With 2.6 seconds left in the game and 6 men on the ice (1/3 of the fans had left at this points) and down by one point everyone KNEW what was going to happen… but they also HOPED something different.  And this time, they hoped right! The Hawks scored with 1.5 seconds to go.  I almost felt sorry for the T-Birds.  That was the highlight… random people hugging, hi-fiving, cheering, and generally going crazy.  The Winterhawks ended up winning in the shootout (here’s a pic from my camera… which explains why it looks like nothing).

Other than the game, I was highly amused by the nachos.  My friend got some nachos… but they forgot the cheese!  Without cheese are they really nachos?… aren’t they just chips?

They also had a “dash for cash” in the second intermission.  I was not really sure what was going on, but basically they threw a whole bunch of coins on the ice and then two teams of people (black and red?) scrambled to collect as much as they could in under 2 minutes.  I know the Winterhawks matched the red teams booty for a donation to the Oregon Humane Society (roughly $2400 total last night… good for them!), but I have no clue what the money actually went too…  here’s a picture anyways… must be a bit embarrassing to scrambled around for coins for everyone’s amusement.  It reminded me of the scene in Shaun of the Dead when they use Zombies for game shows (link to YouTube).

Anyways, the Winterhawks took some names and kicked some ass and it was good.

Trip to the Mall, Part 1.

Andy and I went to Washington Square the other day looking for some Halloween costume ideas.  We ended up in the Excaliber Cutlery store and started bugging the clerks.  No, no one has ever gotten in a sword fight in the store, yes they sell lots of swords (including something that looks like it’s from Star Wars), no we can’t get in a sword fight.  That last one really got our attention.  We figured what better way to get some great free advertising than to have a sword fight going on outside their store?  I mean, how else can you see how their product will perform until it’s been in an actual fight?  The store clerks pointed out that, aside from being illegal (comeon! it’s just one sword fight..) it would likely drive people AWAY from the store.  My counterpoint was that we could have the fight across the way, and drive people INTO the store seeking shelter from the sword-wielding maniacs.

On the way out, we realized that Excaliber is the PERFECT store… it has poker, golf stuff, booze (well, flasks), chess, backgammon knives (we offered to get in a knife fight instead of a sword fight for them… no dice), and, if we move the blowjob booth from across the hall (ok, it’s really a kissing booth, but check it out and tell us what you think) we’d have everything we need.  Andy argued that instead of the sword fight, we should really just move the BJ booth, because blowjobs are better than swordfights…

On the way out, we passed a Victorias Secret.  They had a sign saying they are hiring.  Our job interview would consist of something like “So,/ why do you want to work here?” “uhh.. I like boobies….” all while slightly drooling.. kinda like that seal over there.

Also, for those of you wondering, you can now follow Washington Square on Facebook AND Twitter!  here’s the proof!  Oddly enough, you can only follow them if you want to update your fashion status…. so all you fashionable people are just SOL.

And so ends our trip to the mall… there was more that happened, but i’ll save it for another post.  I’ll leave you with this funny poster of monkeys sword fighting.