It was a couple weeks ago when I first realized that this June marks the ten-year anniversary of my graduation from high school. My high school days were tumultuous to say the least, with my entire four-year stint representing little more than one miserable experience after another — with the exception of occasional successes and shared camaraderie, not unlike those shared by a soldier and his squadmates in the course of a brutal war. When my friends and I finally graduated, it was one of the happiest days of our lives.

Ten years ago, after that graduation ceremony had ended, I embarked on what I fondly dubbed “The Long Summer,” so named because I wasn’t starting college until October. I chose the late-fall starting date because I figured I deserved an extra month or two of relaxation, after the four years of hell I’d just been through. That summer turned out to be everything I had hoped. Looking back, it’s become my Woodstock, my “good old days.” I’ve experienced even more wonderful times since, but you know how it goes — nothing will ever quite recapture 1998 again, when gas was 89 cents a gallon, I had a brand new girlfriend, a brand new Trans Am and a whole calendar of lazy days stretching before me.

(Actually, without much creative license, the preceding description of my heyday could easily pass for that of a guy much older than me!)

In a recent email conversation with my high school buddy Pooch, I remarked that I’d planned to dive into my old Oddball Update archives and post a commemorative entry, featuring some snippets of journal entries I’d written back in those days surrounding our graduation. Unfortunately, my busy schedule kept me from getting around to it, and now the anniversary date (June 7th) is nearly one month past. Despite the belatedness, I thought this opportunity was one too good to pass up, so here we go.

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OK, so the PlayStation 3’s raison d’être — Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots — has finally been released, bringing the legendary Metal Gear franchise to a close. As I started to read the reviews of the latest installment, I remembered way back in 1998 when I bought Metal Gear Solid at the Orlando Fashion Square Mall, completely on a whim. It was one of my most memorable PSone gaming adventures — I spent hours playing it.

While Metal Gear Solid 2 was a disappointment to me (and to many others, apparently), and I never touched the third game in the series, I am starting to become interested in the final installment. The reviews are through the roof, and the gameplay videos look captivating. The problem is, I would have a hard time appreciating most of the story in MGS4 because I’ve only played a small fraction of the games that came before it, and the storyline is of utmost importance in this series.

Deciding to remedy this, last night I dug through boxes in my closet until I found my original PSone copy of Metal Gear Solid, the same one I bought ten years ago, and threw it into my PS3. It looked pretty dated, but I was surprised at how much of an improvement the PS3’s “smoothing” feature made on the picture. Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to find my copy of MGS2 — I think I probably traded it away for something a long time ago.

Today, though, I discovered that Konami has released a Metal Gear Solid: Essential Collection, which, for a mere $30, gives you Metal Gear Solid, Metal Gear Solid 2: Substance and Metal Gear Solid 3: Subsistence in one box. The perfect primer for Metal Gear Solid 4.

Now I’m seriously thinking about buying this.

I complained about their mishandling of my TiVo’s CableCARDs, but I can’t fault them for this. In fact, I can only thank them — profusely. Comcast has upgraded all broadband customers to 1 megabit upload (if you were on the 6/384 tier, like me), or 2 megabits (if you were on the 8/768 tier) — at no additional charge. Finally, the dad-blasted 384k upload cap is gone.

Not only that, but I’m actually getting closer to 2 megabits in real-world speed on FTP uploads, even though I should be getting 1. Now that’s service! (Actually, that’s PowerBoost - a Comcast feature wherein you get double your cap for the first 10-30 seconds of an upload or download.)

It was a hard road getting here, though. The upgrades supposedly went out to all areas a few days ago, but by this afternoon I still hadn’t seen them and was starting to become concerned. I discovered that Comcast has tech support guys on Twitter who actually respond to questions and problems with your service, so I actually got a Twitter account just so I could message them and ask when we were gonna get the upload speed bump. They responded with an email address to send my account info to so they could look into it.

To my surprise, a Comcast “Digital Media Outreach” executive actually called me personally not 30 minutes later and told me he had actually looked at my modem and confirmed that my signal levels are good and that I have the upgraded speeds. This was great customer service, but it still didn’t explain why I wasn’t seeing those speeds. The Comcast exec suggested a few things to try and told me to give him a call on Monday if I still hadn’t resolved the issue, and he’d get the local Florida techs involved.

I remained thoroughly perplexed throughout the rest of the day. I was too busy to deal with the problem further, but it remained stuck firmly in the back of my mind until I could no longer take it. Already feeling a surge of energy and industriousness after some other events that occurred today, I laid around in bed tonight for a while, thinking about the problem, before I decided to get up and try some experiments.

In the end, I solved the problem and learned it had been my own fault from the very beginning. I run a custom firmware on my wireless router that does QoS; this ensures that important data packets from my VoIP phone and Skype aways receive priority over things like BitTorrent and FTP. At some point in the distant past, I had manually set my connection’s upload bandwidth limit at 330k for QoS purposes — which actually limits throughput at the router level. What an idiot!

Long story short, the self-imposed cap has been removed, my router firmware has been upgraded for good measure, and I am now flying along at 1.5-2 megabit upload speeds. Fantastic!

This, I suspect, will provide the catalyst I’ve been needing to convert and upload the videos we shot in Thailand, so our family there can see them. I can also toss some more photos up on my Flickr account, enjoy far greater responsiveness when working remotely with terminal services at my office, and, of course, treat my peers to faster shares of Torrents if the need arises.

Now I can go to bed satisfied.

Thanks to my mom, a copy of Grand Theft Auto IV for the Xbox 360 was already waiting for me on my desk chair when Apple and I returned from Thailand. Although I’ve ramped up my side work to near epic proportions since coming home, I’ve carved out some spare hours during evenings and weekends to get a taste of this game. Well, okay, more than a taste. I’m fully engrossed.

In short, GTA IV tells the story of Niko Bellic, a Serbian immigrant with a troubled past who arrives fresh off the boat (literally) in Liberty City Harbor. He’s come to America looking for something — or someone — very specific, but he finds that his demons are already waiting for him here. Things don’t look very positive for Niko or his naive cousin Roman as they constantly run afoul of Russian mobsters and other enemies from the old country.

GTA IV changes little about the “sandbox”-style gameplay of its predecessors. And as usual, the voice acting, plot and level design are all AAA-quality, almost transcending the “game” realm and entering the “film” realm. But old hats like myself were expecting all of this. What I came in looking for were the details, the little things the game developers have added to make this game really special. Those little things that make you go “Oh, COOL AS HELL” and cackle like Dennis Nedry from Jurassic Park’s Dodgson scene.

I wasn’t disappointed — GTA IV is absolutely brimming with little details, many of which are made possible by the current generation of console and computer hardware that didn’t yet exist when the last GTA game was made. Here are some of my favorite “little things” that I noticed…

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During my last trip out in the GTO, I realized that it’s been months since I actually changed the CDs in the car’s 6-disc changer deck. As if to prove the point, when I cycled through the discs to see what was what, I found half of the catalog was still left over from last October’s road trip to Michigan. I was feeling like some new tunes, so when I got home I ejected everything and went into the house to whip up some new mixes.

I don’t know if this ever happens to you, but when I get started on one of these personal projects, one thing leads to another and then I find myself completely sidetracked and into something else. On this particular day, I was assembling a disc of my favorite latter-day Genesis tracks when I realized I wanted more of the “B-side” stuff from the Invisible Touch album, specifically “Domino,” “The Brazilian” and the full album cut of “Tonight, Tonight, Tonight.” It was also right about this time that I realized the tracks from my old CD of Invisible Touch sounded like garbage compared to the remastered tracks I was pulling off the Turn It On Again: The Hits album.

So that got me wondering, is there a remastered version of Invisible Touch out there? I’d sure like to have it.

Off to the Internet I went, and learned that only just last year, Genesis’ entire catalog from 1976 on was digitally remastered and re-released in dual-format CD & DVD packages. Awesome. But I really just want the songs from Invisible Touch as a start, so I went over to iTunes to buy and download them.

But of course, there was a problem.

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Over the last week, during which I have been extremely busy working with Windows night and day, I have repeatedly had the feeling that certain portions of this OS were designed by a bunch of toads.

I just did a search for some work-related files I haven’t used in a long time, because I need them again now. First of all, unless you open up Vista’s “Advanced Search” panel, you will only be searching in “Indexed Locations.” Query: Why does the concept of “indexed locations” even exist? If I want to search for something, that means I don’t know where it is. Either index the whole fucking hard drive by default, or just search everything by default. Why does the search system default to “indexed locations only” if Windows only indexes a tiny fraction of your data unless instructed otherwise? Why do I even have to waste time setting indexing up in the first place?

Okay, forget indexing. Let’s say you actually get some search results. You browse to a folder within those results, decide this isn’t the right folder, and then hit “Back.” You’d expect to be taken back to your search results so you can continue browsing, but oh no, Windows is too stupid for that. It can’t do anything intelligent like, you know, cache the results of your last search as long as the window is open. No, it has to repeat the stupid search all over again. Real efficient.

The process for making a copy of a file in the same folder where it already lives has gotten less convenient for me since Windows Vista. In XP, when you did that, the copy of the file would be renamed to “Copy of [original filename]” so that it did not conflict with the original file. Now, in Vista, the file gets named “[original filename] - Copy”. That in itself isn’t so bad, but here’s the worst part. Now, Vista alphabetically resorts the file list automatically, as soon as you perform any file operations like copying or renaming.

This makes it really hard to just do stuff quickly. Like, make copies of 10 files within a folder containing hundreds or even thousands. In XP, those 10 files would have appeared at the end of the file list in a nice group so you could rename them or mess with them in a contiguous unit. In Vista, as you start renaming them, they start zooming to whatever place in alphabetical order they belong, and the view scrolls with them, so you have to keep going back to where the rest of the copies are. And don’t even get me started about unzipping a file into a folder where other files already live. The zipfile contents, which formerly would also appear in a nice group at the end of the list, now get sprinkled alphabetically all throughout the list. RAGE!

But my absolute favorite Windows stupidity crisis is the one where the OS will conveniently forget the view settings you wanted for a particular folder. Yes, this is STILL HAPPENING in Vista, and it’s been happening since Windows 2000 if I remember right. You know how this goes: You expect all of your folders to display in “List” view, and then one day you go into a folder that you go into a hundred times a day, and suddenly it’s in “Tiles” view for no reason. Because Windows has ostensibly “run out of memory” to store all the folder customizations. Except that I didn’t customize any of these folders, I just changed all folders globally to display in “List” view until I set otherwise. Are you telling me that this sets a customization on every folder in existence? And is it so hard to dynamically adjust the allotted memory space for these customizations so that it, you know, never runs out? It’s not like I don’t have dozens or even hundreds of spare gigabytes on my hard drive. Why can’t Microsoft just fix this shit?

Gah. Sorry, had to get that out.

Following our trip to Thailand, we’ve been back in the U.S. now for just over a week. It seems like much longer. Not that I’m surprised; the first full week of work after a wholesale change of environment like that always seems a little drawn-out. But this time…I don’t know. You could say that I rather swiftly got “settled down” once I got home, but I think I settled too far down. Now I’m trying to settle back up a few notches.

The trip home was…well, what can I say? Long trips by air just don’t suit me, and they suit Apple even less. Despite our best efforts to make the nearly two-day journey home as comfortable as possible, including renting a day room at Tokyo Narita Airport so we could catch a nap for a few hours, it was really not a pleasant experience. In fact, the closest one of these trips has ever come to “pleasant” was when we bought the Premium Economy tickets on Thai Airways last year, but that was expensive.

To be honest, I didn’t have that bad of a trip home. It was Apple who had a hell of a time. Not only does she hate flying to begin with — not out of fear, but out of boredom and discomfort — but in addition, on the trip back she had an allergic reaction to something that gave her a very uncomfortable case of hives. It was not good at all!

For me, going to Thailand was worse — Continental’s food made me mildly ill, the little girl in front of me had her seat reclined 100% of the way for the entire 14-hour flight, and I was typically uncomfortable in the seats due to my long legs. (To their credit, Thai Airways’ coach class is easily the most comfortable anywhere.)

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I don’t often write about politics on this blog. Okay, to be more specific, I never do. One post does not a trend make, so I haven’t created a “Politics” category or anything, but this one post simply had to be written. And I’ll warn you upfront, it’s a long one.

For most of my life, I had absolutely no political aspirations or even opinions — it was a subject best left for others to discuss. It seemed to me that politics were created as a way to describe the inability of national leadership to agree on anything. To make matters worse, my paternal grandfather, who himself was so deeply invested in conservative politics that he kept a portrait of fatherly Ron Reagan at his bedside, drove the rest of my family so crazy with his rantings that I decided the subject matter could never be anything but a homewrecker and a hindrance to good family values.

Well, as I’m sure you know, with the march of time you get older, your priorities change and things that never affected you start playing important roles in your life. At the age of 28, now I find that the political game does affect me. Of course, it affects us all, whether we know it or not. And here, in what is perhaps the most monumentally overblown election cycle the United States has ever seen, we’re not just finding out who our presidential candidates are, we’re discovering how the American political system has both contributed to and resulted from the decline of our own society.

A bit provocative, eh? The mere idea that American society has declined would, no doubt, touch off an incendiary argument on any one of the various “World Shouting Entertainment” matches masquerading as television debate programs. It’s my opinion, though, that the moral, political and intellectual fabric of America has declined, in at least some fashion, over the last forty or fifty years. Whether this is a product of our increasingly controlling, increasingly wasteful and increasingly asinine elected officials, or whether they are a product of us, is an interesting question. Perhaps, in a perversely cyclical sort of way, both are true.

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I have a ton of stuff to say on so many different topics, there is absolutely no point in trying to name this post after any of them. So I’m going for the “mash-up” theme. This entry will be about anything and everything that’s come to mind over the last week or so, with the exception of the United States presidential election, which is so utterly and completely FUBAR it deserves its own, forthcoming, entry.

Time has been passing with astonishing speed, particularly this past week, which seems to have lasted about three and a half days instead of the usual seven. Our trip, which started out chaotically as you might recall (just read my previous post if you’ve already forgotten), has gotten steadily better since, and has become one of the best trips I’ve taken to Thailand (surpassed only by that time we went to Phang Nga…man, was that place beautiful).

Apple’s surgery went perfectly, and she has greatly recovered from her ordeal already. She will have a follow-up appointment with her doctor on Sunday to make sure everything is OK, but judging by her condition and appearance, we’re all more than confident. The jury’s still out as to whether Apple will come back to the U.S. with me on our original schedule; I’ll keep you all posted.

Regardless of who returns and when, it’s definitely decided that we’re going to return to Thailand in late September or early October to begin our fertility treatments. Since this will likely require us to stay here for several months, I’ve already started making preparations to set up a more semi-permanent home for us here. Apple’s parents have graciously allowed us to stay at their new home for the entirety of the trip so far, and it’s made a world of difference. Last week, I bought a desk and office chair to put in the bedroom, transforming it into a sort of office suite. It’s really quite “de-luxe.” In fact, the chair is nicer than the one I have at home — far nicer. It reminds me that the next time I buy a chair, I should really dispense with the OfficeMax Blue Light Special and order a real chair from someplace that knows how to build them.

Additionally, I’ve decided that when we come back in the fall, I’m going to get a real desktop computer with a pair of monitors so that I can get back to my regular working speed. My typical warp speed touch-typing with a laptop keyboard is “seriously not on,” as the Brits would say, and being confined to a single monitor…well, that’s just not on, either. Additionally, I’m going to see if I can make enough money doing side jobs this summer to buy myself an Xbox 360 to keep in Thailand, so I can enjoy some game time while I’m here. Ironically, just as the side job subject came up, I had four contacts whom I hadn’t heard from recently all email me asking for help on new work. It’s like “ask and ye shall receive,” without the “ask” part.

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