"Ax me a question"

I can't believe it's already been a week since my last post. Last Tuesday I did indeed go to work at a nearby office and helped replace at least a hundred HDDs. I usually take longer than everyone else to learn stuff but once I do learn it I know it really well.

For the next part of the job I was supposed to go to Livermore, California for the next step in HDD replacement. I have relatives nearby so I arrived at their house Wednesday afternoon to get ready for the job that was supposed to start at 3:00pm. I left early to find the place and had some lunch since I wouldn't be eating for 7 hours. Then I ended up with an hour to kill so I chilled walking around a Wal-Mart. Finally I called the project lead around 2:45 to see where we were going to meet and I was told everyone was attempting to contact me to tell me the project had been cancelled for the day and possibly the next day (but not for sure). So I went back to the relative's house.

I spent the night once more and after waiting for what seemed like quite a while Thursday I finally recieved the call saying "cancelled for today" so fine, I worked one whole day last week. Better than nothin' I guess. Seems like employment feels a lot like unemployment.

For projects I still have the "Super VCR Mod" and my theoretical new bootable 98 project. I'm going to set up yet another subdomain for this one. This time instead of "merely" booting 98 from a CD using the method I learned and covered in this blog I will extract the \windows and \program files directories to a USB device thumb drive.

This will allow me to make changes to the system and hardware detection. When that's all done I can use the installed software on the system to make a new ISO image and burn it to CD. Kind of a convoluted way to make a customized Win98 CD for a new computer, theoretically without the need of a HDD in the system.

That's basically it, I'll save the rest for the new sub domain.

Of course there's my first sub-domain, "Mystery Short Story". I haven't worked on that in at least two months but I still think about it constantly. That's kind of the way it works with me, I do more work just infinately looping things in my head than I do actually working on the thing. I do plan on working on it more. I even got as far as reading the whole thing once to catch up on it and start it back up but I never got there.

Also lately after work on the weekends I've been going to this local famous flea market/swap meet to see what I could find. I don't know why I would find such a thing so much fun. It had been a few years since I had gone to this particular flea market and was struck by how much it had apparently changed. It seemed like 5 to 7 years ago when I went it was pretty much all yard sale type people selling stuff. But any more it's more like vendors who are businesses trying to make a living and hard-selling. In a way it's lot like the transition EBay went through, from individuals doing yard sale type stuff to groups or individuals making a living and the whole thing getting commercialized. But there are still a few yard sale types left.

The other thing that struck was the number of old video games for sale. Whether NES, SNES or Genesis those games and systems were EVERYWHERE. May as well replace cash as the currency of that place. I also found PS1 games, Gameboys and some really off-the-wall stuff like Tiger's Game.com and some special "web computer" that must have gone away 4 or 5 years ago. And of course the cult favorite, the Sega Dreamcast. I bought one, albeit without TV hook ups, an AC adapter or game controllers. So have no idea if it would even turn out. I did talk him down from $15 to $10, which I think is probably too much anyway but I thought "why not?". I'm sure I could use it for something.

Also I have officially taken up a new albeit expensive new hobby. Actually it's pretty cheap as hobbies go but I should be saving money not spending so it's expensive: I'm collecting Atari 2600 games. So far I have 7. Have to start somewhere right? Related to this I found an Atari web site, Atari Age, which has everything you could possibly want to know about the 2600 and all the other Atari systems including a list of all known games and how rare each is on a scale from 1 (very common) to 10 (impossible). Now I know I could just download all the ROMs and play them on an emulator, but that's not really the point. I don't even want to play them, I just want to collect them. As a hobby.

I was searching the flea market for a system and couldn't find one. Finally it was about the end of the day and I saw one last lot set up seperated from the rest. I was about to skip him but looked anyway and holey crap he had a bunch of video game crap. A dreamcast (with hookups), an SNES, NES, N64, and under a bunch of stuff an actual 2600 with hookups, controllers and AC adapter along with 14 games. I asked how much, he said something like $35 or $40. I asked him to go lower, he didn't really budge. He didn't speak very good English but I finally got through that I wanted the system without games and how much he finally said $20. So then I though I may as well have some games so asked how much would $25 get me and he said 7 so I took it. Knowing full well the system may not work. I was willing to take the gamble.

When I got it home I realized the thing only had one wire coming out of it and it looked like a famous "RCA" jack. But that couldn't be right because you need at least two for those to work (one video and at least one audio) and besides that this system was too ancient to be RCA-only. So I looked it up and found out that I had to buy an extra little converter to make it work (another $4). So I went and purchased that, got it home and found I couldn't get it to work still. So I apparently spent $25 for 7 games and a fancy paper weight. Unless I'm missing something. But it's all the adventure anyway, right?

I do have work tomorrow at the same place as last tuesday but this time at 7:30 in the morning. It's now 9:30pm, which means I have to get up in 9 hours. That means end of entry :).


  ¶ 11:26 PM