So now my younger sister uses the Aspergers excuse...

So anywho, my younger sister shows up so she can do some stuff in the
kitchen as far as getting the walls scrubbed so they can be painted.

She sits down and talks about some stuff with my mother. I'm nearby
trying to do one of the daily crosswords in the paper. Heck, I'm in the
same room.

Then she gets to talking about some "meal swap" thing they do (I guess
in relation to the church they go to) and complaints about other people
in this thing complaining about the quality of the meals each other
gets, and add to the fact that they'll be getting some deer meat in the
next month or so (and some of the people in this swap thing claim they
don't like it), they'll have to take a break from it. That and the
presence of MSG in stuff that the other people make, even though she's
been telling people that if they swap dinners with her family not to use
things with a whole lot of MSG in it.

My sister, for some reason, is on a big Anti-MSG kick. She says there
was some book my father brought to their house that she read about all
the things that MSG causes. But I've been on Snopes, and as I remember
reading, MSG doesn't do all the things people claim. My father is nuts
and will find anything to support his claims of anything, whether or not
it actually has properly researched scientific proof behind it. I don't
know what book it was. I don't particularly care, either.

Glutamates are in lots of food. Milk for one. Soy products. The
Monosodium form comes from Yeast processing. It occurs naturally
otherwise.

And of course I'm ready to point out the bufoonery of that belief that
it causes fatigue, depression, etc. Just like artificial sweetners can't
be causing so many unrelated conditions, the same is for MSG.

She comes back with the "Asperger's excuse" like my older sister did,
and of course that puts me on the defensive and I get annoyed and angry.
I fight back with "Don't invalidate me with that excuse" and it doesn't
go well. So rather than talk it out or something (the computer
downstairs was on, someone could just as easily gotten on it and loaded
Snopes to settle the discussion), my younger sister gets mad and leaves.

So while she's out, and before she gets back home, I call her up and
leave a message. I tell her she owes Mom an apology. And I deserve one,
too. For her and my older sister to use Aspergers as an excuse to
invalidate me as a person, and my opinion as well, I deserve better
treatment, and that it's not fair. It's not fair.

I get better treatment from my friends and the BVR people than I do from
my own family! heck, even the counselors I've seen!

She called a while ago before I completed writing this posting,
apparently she and my mother spoke for a while, maybe things are going
resolve themselves. I don't know. At least one person here might have
gotten an apology.

My first house call?

Got to work on someone's computer today at their house, my first since
getting A+ certification. Actually, it was a daughter of one of the
ladies who come in to help my mother with her personal care and stuff.

From what I was told is that it just stopped working and wouldn't boot
past the Windows XP logo screen, and would reboot after a while. Some
other bit was about her Symantec AV reporting she got some worm or
something before things went bad, but then her "subscription" to that
had expired. But in the meantime, they had hooked up the computer of the
lady I had helped with earlier this year.

Without AntiVirus software on it. Yeah, Not Smart, in spite of how much
this daughter thinks she knows. I promised the lady I helped that when
they're ready to put it back on the net, I would finish what I had
started and put in security it needed.

So anywho, before I take a look at the problem system, I get to
installing the security stuff I think will help them with little problem
and worry. Since her RAM is 1G and dual channel, and a nice beefy AMD
Athlon processor, I decide that AVG Free 8.5 is going to work well for
them. After running scans (nothing major thank goodness), I get
Malwarebyte's tool going and it finds stuff. Spybot Search and Destroy
goes in, adding its resident TeaTimer and it finds a few more things. Ad
Aware AE goes in, and this time it doesn't find a whole lot, which is
extra good.

I put in a few more goodies. Firefox 3.5.3 goes in to update what I've
put on there already and then slip in all the security and other goodies
I like and show her how to use NoScript and FlashBlock as well as Ad
Block Plus. With NoScript, when you load up a page and nothing is going
on, allow any of the currently blocked scripts. Note which domains have
blocked scripts (like ad serving domains), and carefully allow or
temporarily allow stuff until the page works. Some pages you temporarily
allow things when you're not going to be there much, some you Always
Allow if you are going to be there much. Just allow enough to make the
page work. I showed her a few examples of what to allow.

Also turned on Cookie handling so she can get to training Firefox what
to block. Same with Ad Block Plus.

Media Player Classic Home Theater edition went in. And then created a
desktop shortcut for her Microsoft Works word processor. She forgot I
put that back in on her HD.

Had that finally nicely locked down and onto the problem computer. Dummy
me though, I took my extra monitor and forgot the power cord... I was
hoping to set up both systems and use the net connected one to look up
solutions while I worked on the other.

Only it didn't get quite that far. I got the problem system hooked up.
one thing I forgot to bring was the diagnostic CD for various things, so
I grabbed a copy there and burned it to a CD.

Her drive was a 200G Seagate, a few years old. It's been across the
country and back. It's probably been left on for long periods without
actually needing to be on.

It was showing its age.

Ran SeaTools off the diagnostic CD. The drive was unable to pass the
Short Test. So I ran the long test. Sector Read errors started popping
up. I could hear a lot of activity by the drive as it ground through the
errors. SeaTools eventually clicked up 99 errors before it stopped. I
ran it a few more times, trying to get it to repair problem sectors. One
early sector it claimed to have fixed resurfaced a bit later as being
bad again.

I had managed to check only the first 4% of the drive (about 8 gigs)
before concluding that any more work on it would not yield anything.

Actually tried to boot the drive into its Recovery partition, and it was
unable to recover. Tried to boot into XP on the primary partition and it
did exactly what she described. Well, the boot process was unable to
complete because it couldn't read part of the drive!

The error pattern was odd. It would get to LBA 74000 or so before it got
errors, would grind through a bunch, then hit a patch it was able to
just sail right through until 17400000 (something like that). So the
entire drive wasn't bad. After some of that, I tried to boot XP on the
drive and it attempted to fix something with the file structure on the
drive, but the actual system files it was still unable to successfully
load.

She'll have to buy a new drive, and she just goes and says she knows a
few people in the service (somewhere, I didn't catch where) that do this
as part of their job (family relatives) and she'll send the drive to
them to see what they can do with it.

About the only way this drive will have any data recovered off it is if
the drive is taken apart and the platters put into another device.

The problem being faced here is her system had a working DVD burner
drive. It wasn't working anymore though. She had pictures on the drive
copied off her camera's memory card. No backups. No burned CDs, no flash
drives, nada. Photos from Italy where they had been for about a year or
so. Not to mention resumes, financial info. Stuff that should at least
be on a thumbdrive!

It would take intensive forensic work on that thing to get anything off
it. IF she's lucky, with a big IF, that drive is put into another
system, any important info should be quickly copied off because that
drive is on its last days. I don't know what kind of damage happened to
it, but the chances of getting things off it aren't very high.

I kinda got the idea that maybe she didn't think I knew what I was
doing, but then I did get the front off her system and pulled the drive
out through the front of the case. ^_^

If anyone else seems to think as I do that her drive is likely done for,
by all means leave a comment saying so. Some drives last a long time,
some don't, it's all relative.

Oh yeah! Almost forgot about the printer! They had tried to hook up an
HP Photosmart printer to it via USB but without installing the drivers
for it. I mean, if you can't find the CD, why bother hooking it up?
Anywho, someone did. And it wouldn't print. I solved that by going to
HP's support website and finding the XP package of basic software and
drivers for the printer. Shut down the 'puter, unplugged the USB cable.
Start it back up, run the driver install, and turned on the printer and
plugged it in when the installer said to. Device was detected and it
prints now. That seemed to surprise her. ^_^

About the only other thing I was unable to work on was a JVC mini
digital video camera. It had a USB plug as well, but they didn't have
any CD of software for it at all. The camera DID have an SD Card slot,
but no card. I told them to get a card (2G would be kinda nice) and use
it with the 'puters many card readers. That would solve the other
problem until they got a CD or whatever for it.

Lucky Star OVA DVD

Oh man, I don't know. Bandai looks like they're getting ready to get out
of the U.S. anime DVD market or just really trying to cut corners or
save money. Special Edition release for Lucky Star v.6 was cancelled so
that just the DVD was released, and now the OVA DVD is Sub Only. The
menus are sparse - no animation or music. It's like bare bones
everything. Kyon must have done this during an all-nighter. A stark
difference between this and the TV series DVDs which are very nice.

At the end of the main part, there's a frame before it ends that shows
they could have put on Japanese TV commercials as extras but they
didn't. What is nice is the end part with the Live Action Lucky Channel
is shot on video, also included as a no-credit extra but with subs. I
can now delete the video file I grabbed to preview the OVA, since I've
heard the audio goes out of sync and isn't subbed at that point.

I could have ordered it from Right Stuf at a slightly lower price, only
to have shipping compensate for Best Buy's price. So in the end, it
evens out.

I enjoyed the OVA, good to see more Misao!

I've been ordering the Lucky Star manga from Bandai, so hopefully
Diamond will ship V.2 and future books when / should it be published.

More Big Lots Goodness, "Otaku Encyclopedia", Blue BGC VHS

After Passing the CompTIA IT Tech Exam (and earning CompTIA A+
Certification), I celebrated with... shopping for Anime!

Wow, my local Best Buy finally stocked the Lucky Star OVA. Surprising to
say that I had bought School Rumble #3 last Monday after passing the
first part of the CompTIA exam and actually filled out the questionnaire
online and complained that the store I shopped at is lacking in the
anime DVD dept, and hadn't stocked that particular DVD yet, and then
next Monday (today), lo and behold, 2 copies of it on the shelf.

Then I stopped at Big Lots. At first, I was going to get the Sam Kinison
DVD set, but noticed... What??? There's some Anime DVDs I hadn't seen
here before!

School Rumble "Extra Class" OVA

Negima! 501 (Viridian ed.)

Shuffle! V.2

Tsubasa V.7

xxxHolic V.4

and Ragnarok V.2 because it gets mentioned on 4chan from time to time.

These shipments come in on Wednesdays, as the cashier told me while
ringing up my purchase.

There were some others, but these got my vote.

Out recently is a book called "The Otaku Encyclopedia." It's chock full
of goodness, though your mileage will vary. A few nitpicks include the
misspelling of long O sounds, like in Shouko Nakagawa's name.

And finally... I found 5 Original Release Animeigo Subtitled VHS tapes
of Bubblegum Crisis 4,5,7,&8 and Crash V.2 at a local flea market a few
days ago. I just need 1,2,3, and 6 to finish the set (and maybe Crash
V.1). These have different artwork than releases we're used to seeing.
I'm thinking ultra 1st Editions here, clamshells and all. The previous
owner tossed the liner notes. (I think they have them on their website
anyway.) I prefer their VHS editions to the DVDs because of the control
they had over subtitle placement. These tapes may be 18 years old, but
they play just fine. Blue cassette shells (except for #7). A buck each -
and I'm not leaving these babies sit for the next person! Not a classic
like Bubblegum Crisis.

Yay me!

Nothing more annoying than looking for something you don't have

...but didn't exactly realize it right away.

So yesterday, I passed the CompTIA Essentials exam with a score of 736.
It has a maximum of 900 and 20 questions don't count. They don't tell
you which 20 questions, so be sure to answer them all! I would hope the
first 20 questions you got wrong they would throw out, but who knows.
Some questions and answers didn't exactly match the info in the online
classes I took, so I tried my best to answer them as best as I thought
they should be answered. I might have answered some incorrectly based on
how the question was worded and what answers were presented. I had taken
a practice test that said I should be able to pass it OK.

To celebrate, I went to do a little shopping. I went to Best Buy and
found School Rumble #3 for $10, so I bought it, but not after talking
with another anime fan for about an hour. He came from Wooster to our
Best Buy for stuff he can't find there. At one brief point, there was
this Weeaboo (a Voltron fan - not all Weeaboos are Voltron fans) but we
just went on talking and he went away. It might have been fun to see
what he had going on in his head though. Might have been Autistic or
something.

Anywho, after there I went to Bed, Bath and Beyond and got a new paper
towel holder to replace the one that was damaged during the kitchen
ceiling remodel.

I thought about going to Borders, We B Toys, and a few other places, but
instead made my way home, having had enough.

Then I got to finding all my School Rumble DVDs, and got them together
with my newly acquired #3, and realized I couldn't find #2. I did some
digging then looked in a couple of my notebooks to find out I still
needed #2, and that my last order with Right Stuf showed it was #4 I
bought of that series.

It's annoying to look for something you don't have.

But it was nice to see School Rumble 2nd Semester out as a set. There
are some still unreleased-here OVAs.

SO... DVDs I would like to find to complete the sets:

Lucky Star OVA - might be the next thing I order
Scrapped Princess #5
School Rumble #2
Solty Rei #3
Kanon 1 and 5
Shuffle 2, 3, and 4
Fancy Lala 3, 4, and 5

I have lots of odds and ends of various other series that I probably
won't bother to finish, like Bandai's release of Digi Charat Nyo, and
then xxxHolic, Galaxy Railways, Zegapain, Clockwork Fighters: Hirow's
War, Mai-Hime, Eureka Seven, Trinity Blood, Basilisk, Glass Fleet, Burst
Angel, Tenchi Muyou GXP, and Tsubasa.

Don't know if I want to finish the Negima! original series on Funi's
DVDs, which all trigger Macrovision which I have to use a magic box to
remove so I can watch them as fed into my VCR.

Pre-test jitters, PC Engine emulators

I have pre-test jitters. Tomorrow at an early ungodly morning hour, I am
to undertake 1 of 2 CompTIA tests for CompTIA A+ certification. I know
my weak areas include networking, some amount of managing user accounts,
and laser printers. It's just some stuff I've never done anything with.
Most everything else I know, even if the specifics about what a
connector is called or the specific name of a standard of something are
just picayune stuff. I hope I do well enough and not have to waste more
time and money getting another try.

I had tried for an early afternoon time at a spot closer by, but for
some reason they're suddenly not holding CompTIA tests anymore. So why
the heck was I allowed to book a test there? It's closer by, less stress
getting to it, and the days and times were so convenient since they had
more spots open on more days.

PC Engine emulators actually do work once you have the right system card
ROMs for use with the emulator. In fact, it was the first time I got
Mednafen to run and actually do something. But it's processor-heavy and
games do not run smoothly since the motherboard I have isn't beefy
enough. (The included docs to get it to run aren't very clear or helpful
either. I found one page that told me more about Mednafen as a PC Engine
emulator than the help files that came with it! Things you need to know
that they don't tell you.) I found another emulator that once I had the
right system card ROM in place, it ran one Ranma 1/2 game just fine. In
fact, one set of files for another Ranma 1/2 game got correctly written
out to CD thanks to Daemon Tools and on CD duplicator software I had on
hand. Read from the emulated disk to an ISO and CUE files, then got
burned from those files to an actual CD, and the game worked in the
emulator from that CD.

It was a bunch of hoops to jump. First, the audio tracks had been
converted to MP3, so they needed to be 16-bit stereo 44.1Khz WAVs. Edit
the cue sheet to reflect the right filenames, and Daemon Tools Lite did
its job. I uninstalled it since I don't like virtual devices like Daemon
Tools, and since I don't intend to use it much, it made sense to me to
remove it.

The problem I ran into first was that InfraRecorder doesn't seem to want
to pad out a WAVE file so its length is some multiple of bytes for a
complete CD audio track, sector-wise. Daemon Tools did that for me.

I may have to see what cheats I can find for these Ranma 1/2 games that
work in the emulators, like turn off some parts of collision detection
or infinite health, infinite lives, or something.

I'm also looking to find another Sega Genesis Sega Mega CD emulator. The
one I have now doesn't seem to be able to find the ASPI layer to boot
CDs, and I have one installed.

I'll figure it out...

Trying to get audio into my computer to record with Audacity wasn't
exactly the easiest thing to figure out. I have an actual computer
Microphone, and it works with the computer downstairs. But when I tried
it on my P4 tower's soundcard, all I would get off it was some hum. Line
out to the speakers works, and Line In from a powered source also works.
Maybe I need a mono plug microphone?

At any rate, what I ended up using was my videocamera. It passed through
audio from its microphone to its mono audio out RCA jack on the side. I
patched this to a stereo input plug to the computer's audio card Line In
and it worked perfectly. Very few times have I seen an actual microphone
plug in and work, so I will experiment a bit to see if the microphone
input is indeed mono.

The reason for this tinkering about was for a video clip I plan to put
on Youtube asking for help in identifying 4 Japanese songs from those
CDs we found years ago. I managed to put it together last night.

Posted that bit too soon

I shoulda updated this sooner.

I was out and about yesterday while onto one stop of many when I noticed
the Check Engine light had gone out.

However, the next time I started the damn car up again... It's back on.
So whatever is going on shows some sign of it possibly turning that damn
light off again by itself. This happened after I got an almost full tank
of gas, btw.

T.T

Thank goodness!

Relief! The Check Engine light went out after getting almost a whole tank of gas moments ago. YATTA!