weill aspects

originally posted october 08, 2003

the cheap crap i buy

Temperatures are nearly freezing in the morning but warm in the afternoon. I feel like I'm walking to work in January on the way in, and it feels like summer on the way out. At least half the time, the weather serves as a reminder of just how long I've been in Pittsburgh as a full-time worker.

I took more than a dozen flights last year as part of school, vacations, and recruiting. It's October of 2003 and I haven't stepped on a plane yet this year. I've been trying to plan vacations with friends, but nothing has come together. My car has seen much more use this year from two 600-mile drives to New England, a couple of trips to and from home in New York, and miscellaneous drives in and around Pittsburgh.

This week has been good: I saw Good Charlotte play with Something Corporate and some local filler band at the Petersen Events Center with Rebecca on Tuesday evening. It's a bad sign when two out of the three bands had to give detailed instructions to the floor audience on how to create a proper circle mosh -- and only one succeeded. Insert generic hypocritical comments about young whipper-snappers who wouldn't know punk if it gave them the finger. Say what you will about the crowd's age, but they really got into the show. As with the internship-sponsored Blink 182 concert I attended two summers ago, most of the crowd shout-sang the lyrics to every song and professed their love for the band members at every opportunity. Fortunately, I was able to pick up the two requisite pop-punk concert moves: jumping and pumping my fists in time to something like the beat. The earplugs Rebecca gave me were much more useful for blocking out the crowd than for the loudspeakers.

Now on with the whining.

compaq, you're in; sony, you're out

After I mailed my laptop in for service, it spent just a day in the repair depot before being shipped back to me. I expected the worst, but the laptop works fine so far. Despite HP's cutbacks in telephone service, I actually got decent repair service for my laptop. Now I just pray that nothing else goes wrong in the next year, since I don't want to get caught up in more phone tag with call center drones from around the world.

Not long after that, DDR Max 2 was released. I picked it up one Saturday afternoon, popped it in my PlayStation 2, and... nothing. The dreaded "Disc Read Error" screen replaced what would have been my game. I exchanged the disc, but the error reappeared on the replacement as well. The game would eventually boot after all orders of black magic: rotating the system from vertical to horizontal and vice versa, trying different discs first, and flicking the power switch repeatedly.

The problem eventually fixed itself after a week. I chalked it up to the changing weather; maybe condensation on the lens. After trying some simple solutions and reading about some needlessly elaborate workarounds, I'm convinced that this problem's going to come back soon. I made the mistake of buying a refurbished PS2 off eBay this year; after the price of a new unit went down to $180, that decision seemed even worse. Even the paltry 90-day warranty wouldn't have saved me here. The guy who sold me the unit hasn't returned my call about a replacement. In hindsight, I should have bought a brand-new PS2 from Circuit City along with an extended warranty of some kind. I've read about so many horror stories, but also from some people who have seen their PS2s sustain horrific abuse. I know one guy at CMU who uses a knife to pry open his drive door as part of a scheme to circumvent the PS2's region lockout. Although his PS2 looks absolutely mangled from the front, it still works.

My beloved George Foreman grill, which I use once or twice a week, is also suffering from "cheap plastic crap syndrome." I noticed that the white plastic is turning a sickly brown color around the edges. Fortunately, I can replace this device for about $20.

Nothing much else to report. As long as all the electric devices around me work, I'll be sane.

Back to October 2003, or to the year 2003.

Where am I?

This is Weill Aspects, the official news archive of Jason Weill Web Productions. All articles posted to the front page end up here. This page was generated automatically by a series of Perl scripts.

Articles in Weill Aspects are organized solely by date. You may find the Google search in the left column to be useful if you are looking for an article but do not know the date on which it was posted.

Weill Aspects is composed of static web pages generated as appropriate when a new article is posted. It was developed in May 2001 as a way of managing the content on this site. I also used it extensively while in Japan, during which time I did not have continuous access to the Internet. I was able to write daily updates during July and August 2002, pack the files onto a CD-R or memory device, and upload them from the Internet-connected computers at school.

These scripts are all hacked together in less than elegant fashion, and I don't plan to release them. Some of the design that went into Aspects also was used to develop Livestat, a suite of Perl scripts to process statistics for academic competition tournaments. Livestat is available freely.