Here's why we should keep the Daylight Saving Time changes

I understand the Senate has drawn up and proposed legislation to make Daylight Saving Time a permanent thing by Fall 2023. This is a bad idea and here's why.

1. Persons affected by Seasonal Affected Depression are greatly affected by the change in sunlight hours for the daytime hours they are typically awake and active. They are at risk if they experience less sunlight hours during the Winter months. There may be light therapies which try to take the place of sunlight but it's no guarantee to actually work.

2. Who's going to update all the obsolete technology still in use because they still serve a vital role and have the time change hard coded into their systems? How much will that cost? Who's going to force companies to 'fix' all of that? Not everything gets their time from Atomic Clock signals or wireless networks.

3. The time change is also a reminder to check your smoke alarm batteries and replace them. Not all safety alarms make noises when their battery is low. What better reminder could there be?

Nearly everyone who complains about setting their clocks and watches every time are selfish people who don't want to admit they don't know how to set their clocks or watches and don't care who else benefits from Standard Time or Daylight Saving. President George W Bush thought enough of Daylight Saving Time for him to get it extended 2 weeks during his tenure.

Our planet dictates how many sunlight hours we get at any point in its orbit around our sun and while the tilt affects seasonal change, it's not going to straighten up during our time. It's our job to recognize what we're given and make the best of it. Keep the time change practice the law of our land.

A quick and dirty "Chess" program in Atari BASIC

Since firing up my 600XL and archiving my first few floppies, I've been hanging around the AtariAge forums. I ran across one person's post about a small chess program they wrote when they were 8 and over 30 years later they rewrote it from memory. I grabbed the screen captures and in Altirra, revised the code into just 10 lines. They were from Spain methinks so the pieces have different names. 

This is also me testing my Alcatel 4G data connection to send photos and posts to my blog again. For some reason the previous phone lost that ability.

A Productive Night with my Atari 800XL

For the first time in over 18 years I finally hooked my Atari 800XL up to my TV via composite video from a monitor cable and a power supply from The Brewing Academy. The last time it had been powered on was August 2003 when we were moving out of the Euclid Avenue house which my mom lost due to foreclosure from taking out a 2nd mortgage after running up her credit cards while suffering from Bipolar Manic Depression. She had been injured on the job and was waiting for disability to kick in while fending off People's Credit Card filing a lawsuit against her in Alliance Municipal Court over $3,000 she owed them. There's a much longer story to be told, some of it involving an evil sister thief who stole from their own family.

We moved into my grandparents' house to hide / wait things out. It was the last time I had used my Atari 800XL for translating manga and lots of other various tasks which I managed to do with it. It got disconnected and boxed up.  What happened was my mom buying a Windows XP Dell desktop computer. I still used WebTV and then I got the Toshiba Satellite 440CDX Windows 95 laptop to use. 

It was also the last time I got to use an Atari 1040ST which I somehow sold to a friend.

There were things about my 800XL which I forgot about and will hopefully fix like the Joystick ports. They're loose and probably need the solder reflowed. I haven't opened it up since I installed the 256K RAMbo XL upgrade. And after testing a box of software cartridges, I have a cartridge slot to clean out. They all eventually worked, but only after going through them all a couple times. I will likely clean the cartridges, too.

I miss using my Atari 8-bit. Thankfully I also found AtariArtist to go with my Touch Tablet. Hopefully I also have the light pen software. Computereyes became obsolete for capturing images off analog video. I feel bad for ruining our first VCR using it.

At any rate, it was good to see it turn on and work again. Though one of the dome switches I soldered to one joystick PCB will need to be replaced. It got obliterated in testing.

It would also be nice if The Brewing Academy would include a card indicating while the yellow plug is Composite (come POZ zit) Video, Black is audio.

My grandfather wasn't always that great

During the time I worked at Long John Silver's, I learned to be careful with what I told my grandfather over the phone especially after work when I'd come home in pain all tired and exhausted. Mom learned quickly not to tell him all about her suffering because he'd sit there on the other end just chortling away, gleeful at our suffering. I made that mistake once and then Mom would talk to him later and hear him laughing as he talked after hearing from me. That's when she advised me to be careful with how much I told him because as she put it "He's just sitting there being entertained by hearing you saying how much you're tired." 

Rather than tell me (or us) how proud he was (he wasn't) we had jobs and were working hard, his toxic retired ass sat there enjoying his delight over our misery. He put in a lot of years at Minerva Wax Paper and had a good pension in his retirement so he was living rather comfortably. But being supportive and nurturing wasn't something he did. He wanted people dependent on him and our financial independence was a threat to that.

He was at least a toxic father, didn't much appreciate being a grandparent (at least not that I could tell), but somehow embraced being a Great Grandparent when my first niece came along. 

I still remember the one time he left a message on the answering machine (a shame I don't think I still have the tape) calling me a "Goddamn sonuvabitch b@stard." Gee, thanks, Grandpa. Love you, too.

Rurouni Kenshin to get a new anime

I hope this is successful and popular and it pisses people off because those are the ones who need to get a life.

I'm not a fan of Kenshin so I won't be watching and everyone is sick of the vitriol which gets dredged up. You don't like what he did? Go away, don't comment, go on some other forum and spew there. Lots of web space everywhere else. It's like parking too close to the driver's side door of the only a car in a parking lot just to annoy the owner.

Atari 2600 for Christmas: 40 years on

40 years ago, my mom crossed a labor picket line to work the presses at Merit Plastics in East Canton along with her friend Frances R. She did this for several months until she had saved up quite a bit of money, then went to Service Merchandise in Canton, Ohio to buy our first Atari 2600 and 2 games, Combat and Space Invaders. I know these details because I recently came across the sales receipt for that 2600.

It would be awhile before we would get more games. I got Kaboom! for my birthday. Pac-man was bought at Electronic Service with funds kindly provided by some guy she was seeing though he didn't know he was paying. Hehehe!

Finally, the great North American Video Game market Crash happened and the local Fisher's Big Wheel had a container display full of marked down cartridges. $9.99 each! What does a kid do? I went out and collected aluminum cans to recycle. One summer, Hershey had this rebate program where you send in candy bar wrappers and they send you a check for $5. Only thing to it was there was no limit to how many times you could do it. I collected those wrappers out of garbage barrels at the parks, took them home to iron flat, then stuffed envelopes. I read the directions very carefully. I don't remember how much money I earned this way, but judging from the cartridges in my collection, it was quite a lot! I can still tell you which games I got at Fisher's.

We were hard on that 1st 2600. The power supply needed replaced at least once. I remember rebuilding the old one. Then we had to get another 2600 because of the stress of use but by then they were much cheaper. The Atari Club sent their Atari Age magazine and they sold the popular Joystick Repair Kit. We also ordered a few games direct from the club. The Saturday spent playing and solving Raiders of the Lost Ark was a good one!

Mom would later say she regretted buying that 1st Atari 2600 because I stopped going outside to play for the most part. I had enough of the neighborhood bullies and brats. I'm fricking glad I found something I could be good at. Video games made my clumsy child age a lot better.

64-bit Atari Jaguar CDROM Braindead 13 Easter Egg

Troy Cheek used to host this little nugget on his website (now gone) but here it is thanks to the Way back Machine.

Andy Floyd of Fidonet ATARI_ST says...

1. Start Braindead 13 with the Memory Track cartridge installed.
2. When the game begins to play the intro animation, skip it by pressing a fire button. (Not necessary but hey, you've seen that before, right?)
3. Select a New Game.
4. When the scene begins with that shot of the fireplace, immediately press OPTION and Save your game, then Continue.
5. Play up to the point before one of the witches (usually the one to the left after you get past the Conservatory).
6. Instead of pressing Right or Left, you should see an Elevator and press UP.
7. This transports you all the way to the showdown with Fritz, and then the Brain Chamber.

I have done this at least 3 times and always works.

Data Existentialism

This is the sort of thing you don't want at 5 a.m. You're using your device and looking at pictures when it suddenly decides to stop recognizing your micro SD card and now shows only what's on the internal storage.

Yeah, my Alcatel device decided to do that. I had deleted 2 images off, and I was just looking around when it decided to do its own thing and blam. Settings said by not showing it there was no SD card. It decided on its own to unmount it. Yikes.

So I fully get up, get out a flashlight and open up the back, remove the battery, and then get at the card. Contacts are gold plated and clean. What the fudge. Put it back in and together, still not acknowledging the card.

This is NOT happening. Make the effort and turn on my Windows 7 desktop. Get out the Micro SD adapter. Make a backup directory. Insert card into the reader slot. Windows says there are errors and should it scan and fix? I say no, let's just see what's on there. And up pops the directory of the card. So yes, it still works.

Grab everything and drag to copy into the backup directory. And it goes well, except for one imgcache directory with an error. I tell it to skip it. No other read errors. But I notice while browsing in My Computer there are a few images not popping up a thumbnail and same with a few video files. The images won't load at all, the video files at least play. One looks like there's some bad data. Hhhrrmm...

I forget to scan it and pop it back into the Alcatel and boot it up. It once again sees the microSD card! And as expected, Gallery isn't fully populating all the image folders. So that may be that imgcache error. Stop Gallery, clear cache, delete application data. Let it rebuild its thumbnail database and it does. So it seems to be OK.

But I still made that backup of 3.7 gb of data and photos.

When I actually buy candy

I just realized there are only 4 times a year when I actually buy candy for personal consumption:

• Valentine's Day - if I can find a special KitKat variety

• Easter - $1 solid Chocolate Bunny or 2. This will always be chocolate regardless what I buy.

• Halloween - again, special KitKats apply

• Christmas - something chocolate

Always cheap, at least 1 bag of something. It's enough.

I found my game online!

Years ago I had toiled away writing a conversion of Spectrum Holobyte's Soko-ban ("Warehouse Guard") game on the IBM PC for my Atari 8-bit. I had dumped all the levels in hex on printer paper at college, so all I needed to do was figure out the game.

I used a powerful font editor called Envision, published by Antic Magazine. It made creating an animated font very easy. I designed a smoothly animated font for Push It! which I called my game as well as signed my name into the font.

At one point it bogged down even in compiled TurboBASIC, so I pulled out MAC-65 and began putting together a machine language subroutine to check the screen. It was the most important piece of my game and the program self modified it by inserting the screen address and my string table of screen addresses which needed checked as well as how many. It returned a number equal to the boxes put on solution squares. You completed a level by pushing the boxes onto the solution squares.

And I wrote it, finished it, played some levels, and basically had it on a disk and thought not much of it until I uploaded a Diskcomm file of it onto an Atari user group BBS in Arizona. And then I forgot about it.

Some time later, I was contacted by that user group how they went nuts over it and how 6 levels were "unsolvable." So I went back to those the printouts and reentered them and a few I had made mistakes. But I made sure to play those 6 levels and surprise - I solved them! I sent them a new disk but the user group still insisted they were unsolvable... 

I thought as a lark to search for my game online, and I was surprised to see someone uploaded it!

http://www.atarimania.com/game-atari-400-800-xl-xe-push-it_4178.html