I had always been intrigued by the PlayStation Portable (PSP), because (a) humongous, beautiful screen, and (b) WiFi. OK, fine, it can do pictures/music/movies, but lets face it, everyone but Sony knows that Memory Sticks are never going to take over the world, and neither is this goofy new optical media format, UMD. Number of movies I will buy on UMD instead of DVD: zero. Maybe someone will rent them to me ha ha.

But that being said, I'd kept my desire banked, since I wanted to see some reviews, get some sense of battery life, etc. But then two things happened:

• I discovered Thursday that I'd be on a plane to Cupertino on Sunday.
• I read this comic.

By Friday evening I knew I must have a copy of Lumines for the plane. But what to do? As any friendly EB or Gamestop associate would tell you, if you hadn't pre-ordered the thing months ago, you'd have to -- snicker -- wait until late April. I mean, golly, how are you going to get into the club if you haven't waited in line and gotten on the list?

By now, I hope everyone knows that EB and Gamestop and the like survive by creating an environment of artificial scarcity: they live and die by the pre-ordered game and the launch day extravaganza. Being obsessive, sometimes I like this: I like that I can pre-order a game and then forget about it until it is ready for pickup, at which point I mingle briefly with my gaming brethren as we share the common experience of new loot, before we all retreat suspiciously to our caves.

But sometimes, I decide I must have something on the day of, or the day after, such a massive launch. And then what do you do?

Answer: you go to Target. Target does not give a crap about artificial scarcity and revving you up. Target understands how to stock. Target will have ten freaking PSPs behind glass on the Saturday morning after you have been filled with an unquenchable thirst for new technology, and they'll have copies of each and every game you desire. Target will set you up, because Target will always be there, and Target would like to have your money at the very moment you decide you are ready to part with it.

So.

I got a PSP.

Some thoughts:

• The screen is in fact amazingly awesome. In time the backlight will dim somewhat from the earth-illuminating torrents of photonic deliciousness it is currently capable of emitting, but I will not notice until the next time I get some other LCD device, and note sadly how time fades all things.
• The thing just looks nice. It's sleek and black and shiny. It's kind of like what I imagine that escape pod in Restaurant at the End of the Universe might have looked like, with the obvious caveats. The controls seems well placed, and overall execution and usability is good.
• The battery life is excellent for something that lights up like a small star. I got four hours of play and a reported hour left from my day of travel, all for the weight of an extra PowerBook battery.
• You can put the damn thing to sleep at any time. This works GREAT.
• The WiFi works like a charm. For maximum airplane friendliness, there's a switch on the side to turn it off. I was misled into thinking that a web browser has already shipped for the thing (although there's apparently one hiding in one of the games you can get, although you have to go through DNS stupidity to use it for anything other than its in-game purpose). If they ever do ship a browser/e-mail app as is rumored, I will be delighted indeed.
• UMD disks kind of blow. They encased them in carbonite, to be sure, but there's a little gap in the plastic casing that I'm convinced I'm going to stick my finger in. Also, they don't reseat in the game case very well, and I have no small portable way to carry them around. I've heard reports that they have slow read times, and I have noticed some delays in game play when accessing the disk. But there's nothing deal-breaking about this nit.
• Lumines is in fact a kind of crack. Two-player wireless Lumines is a kind of supercrack.
• I also picked up the generic hack&slash game, Untold Legends, which plays exactly like, and has exactly as much personality as, the Baldur's Gate console series, and all of their derivations. Dylan will mock me for picking this up for the PSP when I can't get excited about finishing up the Everquest hack&slash we've been playing on the PS2, and all I can say is I guess I have more ability to freak out on these kinds of games when I'm trapped in a giant metal tube careening above the earth at thousands of miles an hour. That and I'm almost at level 60 dammit, and after next weekend I'll be able to pay more attention to other games again that aren't WoW :).

That is all. Carry on.  11:01:09 AM  (comments [])   

I got this Subaru Outback as my rental car, which as bizarre little station wagon/SUV hybrids go, seems OK. Last night, however, as I was driving away from the rental place, I was ready to have it nuked from orbit. Why?

It's got this freaky hybrid automatic/stick shift system. There's no clutch, so I assumed, "Hey, it's an automatic, no problem!" I start to drive away, and notice the RPMs are revving up past 4000, and it's clearly not shifting out of first. I also notice that while my headlights are on, and I can see my RPMs, etc, I can't actually see any lights on my environment controls, radio, etc. I drive this way for a minute until I find some place I can pull over and work out what's going on.

Once I'm stopped, I discover that there are two settings for the automatic lights: no interior lights, and normal interior lights. In either case, the exterior headlights automatically come up if it's dark enough outside. I'd apparently switched off the interior lights when I was trying to verify my headlights were on, but I gotta say I prefer my Saturn, which automatically turns on interior console lights at the same time it senses it should turn on the exterior lights. I'm having trouble imagining where this other setting would be useful except to freak out someone driving their rental car for the first time.

I also notice (as you can see in the photo above) that there are little + and - icons above and below the D setting, and you can rock the shifter up and down into them. This turns out to be how you manually shift the car. This baffles and infuriates me: why would you design a car that looks in all ways like an automatic, and yet you STILL HAVE TO SHIFT? And then rent it to people who've never encountered it before? On a dark rainy night? Murder death kill etc.

But fine, I wrap my head around it and move on. This morning I'm driving over to Apple, and notice that I am not having to shift. I finally discover that: (a) if you don't slot all the way over the left on the D row, it stays in automatic mode. And (b) even if you do move it over to the left, it still stays in automatic until you rock it up or down, in which case it goes manual and stays there until you rock back to the right.

In the light of day, with some understanding of the system this is in fact kind of cool. Not getting enough pickup from the automatic system? Downshift your ownself using the little rocker and take full manly control of your (cough) station wagon. Done with that? Flick it back into automatic. (And, as far as I can tell, the automatic system is stupider than my Saturn's, so I actually did need to do this morning to get more pickup than I was getting.)

But, that being said, the system was completely incomprehensible on first blush, in the dark, in the rain. Making it look like an automatic but having an easy to accidentally do magic gesture that turns it into a stick -- that just seems like bad design to me. But I'm old and grumpy.  10:33:53 AM  (comments [])