Got the last of my stuff into the dorm this afternoon. Other guy hasn’t moved in yet.

Checked in to the dorm this morning. Got a haircut. More later.

I noticed something this week that I thought was interesting. Last week I bought a couple games off of eBay - imported copies of Final Fantasy VI and Chrono Trigger for the SNES. As soon as they came in Thursday morning, I examined them both to make sure everything was intact and all that. he following line of text was on the back of both boxes:

希望小売価格11,400円（消費税別）

That may not mean anything to you just by looking at it, but you’re already well aware of the concept - it’s a suggested retail price of 11,400 yen, not including tax. I got curious as to what that would have cost back then and found a site containing exchange rates for each month back to about 1970. In March of 1995, when Chrono Trigger was released in Japan, the exchange rate was about 90 yen to the dollar. Do the math, and… this game’s MSRP in 1995 is $126. For one Super Nintendo game!

I guess the sands of time and Square’s love of remaking old titles are good for something, though - back about 10 years ago these games would still have fetched a stiff price on eBay, but I bought them for under $20 each just last week because the demand for that sort of stuff just isn’t there anymore. Oh well, either way that’s a bunch of cheap reading practice packed up in games I enjoyed the hell out of in English years ago. Right now I’m working on Final Fantasy V and I’d hazard a guess that I’m comprehending about 75-80% of the game’s text, which is a noticeable improvement even from just a few months ago.

Got the test back tonight, and I pulled through with a 93.125%, or 186.25 out of 200 points. Almost 4 points were lost due to stupid mistakes, and another 7 or so were lost to not realizing that several questions in one section of the test had two answers, and I needed to supply them both. So yeah, I could have had a 95% or better, but my ability to avoid stupid mistakes is going to need some serious sharpening first.

With that out of the way we’re down to the last four weeks of class. Eleven months ago I walked back into the classroom looking for language credits and what I ended up getting was something a little bit bigger than that. Computers were fun for years, and to some degree they still are, but now I feel fully confident I’m doing the right thing by keeping them limited to just being a hobby and pursuing other interests full-time.

I’d still be hard-pressed to say what I’ll be doing five years from now, but that’s fine.

This one was a full 200 points, 1/5 of the total for the quarter. The big item for this chapter was giving and receiving. As it is in English, the verb you use depends on who the subject is - you wouldn’t say your parents received to you a present for your birthday for example - but you also have to watch out for what situations call for what level of politeness, and that’s a study in Japanese society all on its own.

For example… you would use politer forms when referring to your boss at work:
Shacho-san ni biiru wo katte sashiagemashita
I bought my boss a beer.

Contrast with your friend:
Tomodachi ni biiru wo katte agemashita
I bought my friend a beer.

Your friend is socially on the same level as you are while your boss is a step up, so while you did the same exact thing for both people, and it’s worded exactly the same way in English, the verb changed in Japanese.

To make things a mess though, pretend you’re at some meeting with another company - now you can’t “promote” your boss, you have to refer to him more or less as your equal, or at least not as some revered figure you have to answer to on a regular basis:
Shacho-san ni biiru wo katte agemashita
I bought my boss a beer.

Either way, the good news is I think I pretty much destroyed that test. We hammered on that one chapter literally for a month and a half, and it got to the point where studying for the test almost seemed useless to me because the material had already been beaten to death.

After 16 years of wearing glasses, I moved to contacts this last weekend. In the beginning I was breaking glasses at the rate of about one pair a year - a nose pad would break off, or an arm would break off, and it would all be in some freak accident usually involving a second person and a dodgeball at recess.

The regular breakage finally subsided after I got out of junior high, but random annoyances kept popping up. The lenses would never stay secured, and the frames would gradually bend under the stress of about 20 hours of headphone use a week. And worse - the freak accidents kept happening. I stepped on a pair in 2002 and while I was able to bend them more or less back into shape, they never fit quite right after that. Then in early 2006 I snapped a pair clean in half just while I was cleaning them. The next pair actually lived long enough to reach its retirement more or less intact, but I did drop them on a tile floor once, resulting in a visible chip on one of the lenses.

The short version of this tale is that I am apparently incredibly destructive towards my glasses. After 2 days with contacts, I’m not sure if things will be better or worse. Yesterday I dropped a contact in the sink trying to put it in, then when trying to take it out later in the day I ended up just crumpling it in the corner of my eye. Maybe those are just newbie mistakes, or maybe I’m doomed to destroy every pair of contacts I get my hands on too.

Anyone want to spot me $4000 so I can go get Lasik? Hopefully I won’t find a way to break the laser in the 30 minutes it takes to get the procedure done.

I almost completely douched the Footbaw category because the overwhelming majority of the posts were weekly matchups and predictions, but I left four posts in place. They all deal with different topics and personally I think they were pretty well-written. And by well-written, I mean I had diarrhea on the keyboard for an hour.

Also, I forgot to mention last weekend that the weight loss is continuing more or less on schedule. I’m down to 236 as of yesterday morning, which means I’m down 59 pounds over the last 25 weeks. I’m still planning to start biking on the trails around the neighborhood, but I need to buy a bike first.

89 in total. Yes, I counted. That’s for one chapter.

Vocabulary’s a bitch!

Now the bad news:

1) My financial aid for the year got pulled. Basically, I was dismissed from school 9 years ago for failure to maintain satisfactory academic progress - an assessment I don’t dispute - and that came back to bite me in the ass when the school went to audit who all was receiving aid this fall. The kick is, although I am technically in good standing with the school for having successfully applied for readmission, I didn’t actually do anything to reverse the situation I was in on campus. The on campus/off campus distinction is important - although I have a full year’s worth of credit transferred in from the community college in Omaha, that does nothing to either help or hinder my progress in Lincoln.

So the short version of this little story is that I rushed down to Lincoln the day after finding out and filed my appeal. I stated that in the interim, I had been slowly racking up transferable credits at another school and that the situation would simply correct itself after 3 months now that my head’s screwed on straight. The committee who oversees these things looked at my appeal and approved it on the condition that I take at least 10 hours’ worth of classes in the fall and pass them all. Fine, they’re all softball classes anyway.

In the meantime I’m looking at private options for the fall term as I think it’s going to be a little tough for me to scare up $7000-$8000 between now and the fall, and I think I’ll be okay in that department. This is just a giant pain in the ass to deal with.

2) The price of the new iPhone. Ok, first of all let’s get something straight here - I realize I’m not the target audience for this contraption. I greatly prefer text messaging to phone conversations, I don’t care one way or the next if I can surf the internet and/or check e-mail when I’m on campus and probably 5 minutes away from a public terminal anyway, and most of all I don’t want to pay $50 or more a month for phone service. Especially when I can get a Skypeout account for like $3 a month. I just jumped on Sprint’s SERO plan, which gets me 500 minutes of talk time and unlimited text messaging for $30 a month. In the whole quest for cell phone service to replace my company phone which is soon going away, that is hands down the best deal I found. By far. That’s the kind of cell phone customer I am. So having said that…

The new iPhone is going to cost $199, whereas the old one used to be $399. Basically a 50% discount. This looked like a really sweet deal, and I was just about ready to take the plunge… then the details started coming out. To wit: the data plan is going to be $10 more a month, and you have to pay $5 extra to get the 200 SMS package that used to be included. Do the math - or better yet, don’t, because it’s already been done:

(Click to view in a new window)

Steve Jobs himself said the primary reason people weren’t buying iPhones was because of the cost. In response, Apple’s and AT&T’s bean counters diligently moved beans from one pile to the next until they could come up with the biggest crock of shit farce I’ve seen so far - a phone being advertised as “half as expensive” that carries a higher total cost of ownership than its predecessor.

Steve, you are one crafty son of a bitch, but do you really think that’s going to make people jump in line? The iPhone was too expensive before, so now that it’s even more expensive that should fix the problem?

Really, come on.

Uh, I guess the only other thing I don’t like this week is that somehow the Yankees managed to climb out of the AL East cellar. Pinstriped bastards!

Good news first I guess:

1) I really like the new Judas Priest album. I consider myself little more than a casual fan of the group, but Nostradamus is right up my alley as far as the style of music goes. This is a two-disc concept album documenting the life and death of Nostradamus, with a fairly even mix of traditional up-tempo heavy metal, slow-but-punishing metal, ballads, and interludes leading from one song to the next. It all carries a very operatic feel too, which strangely seems to fit just fine. As I mentioned to Steve yesterday, the material is a fairly solid B+ - no stinkers, and a couple songs worth hitting the repeat button for. It’s a real shame that musicians have to build up enormous amounts of capital with their record labels in order to get the greenlight to work on material like this, because I really wouldn’t mind seeing more of it.

2) Living at home again for a few months. No rent, and no morons revving their engines outside at 1130 at night. The noise is probably the one thing I liked the least about my apartment.

3) This video:

You may not understand it, but that’s ok. Just skip to the 2:00 mark and wait for the hilarity to ensue.