Return of the mad eBayer!

Yes, it is I, insane Matt posting inane items on eBay! For those of you who don't know I am the creator of such infamous items as the "Common Cold" and the "Darth Vader Pancake". However, this eBay auction is a little more sane... just a little. At the very least I'm selling more or less a legitimate item... an e-mail address. That's right, loz.twilight.princess@gmail.com (yes, I actually managed to snag that address). I'm hoping there are plenty of Zelda fans out there who'd like this address and after an Xbox 360 gmail addy went for $570 how can I lose. It'll only be a quarter if I do :-P. But, anyways...

Thursday is pay day again. I've made up a spreadsheet to keep track of my hours and take out all the proper taxes and according to that this paycheck will be about $316.60 (54 hours worked). I've also calculated my current schedule through to the 15th and I'll have just enough to pull out my laptop! YAY! :-D

Later :-)

The Xbox 360 is here...

Because I work at Wal-Mart now I get to witness all sorts of interesting things: people putting peanuts (yes, the food) on layaway, burly guys throwing canning jars all over the place, etc. etc. But yesterday was probably the most interesting, if not incredibly stupid, thing I've seen yet: people waiting hours and hours to get their hands on a freakin' game system. Not only that but they would pull pillows and blankets off the shelves to lay on... and then we gave them free soda and cookies! But anyways, I was also able to see the supply before just about anybody else in the store (working so near the security cage ihas it's nice points ;-)).

Ah, but anyways. I did get my paycheck on Thursday. Because it only counted towards a week and a half it was $190 as opposed to the post-$200 figures I was figuring. But now I'm going to be working close to 35-39 hours a week so that number should be close to doubling by next payday.

I also got my extra 10% Christmas discount with that paycheck. Stinky thing is it had to be used before December 4th. So I went ahead and stuffed my laptop on layaway. It has to be out by the 15th (though I may be able to get that changed) but I think that since I'm working the longer hours I will be able to pay the thing off and maybe even have a little extra left.

Well, I guess I should wrap this up. I hope everybody out there has a good Thanksgiving! :-D

Another reason to hate cats

Now it may be a fairly unkown fact about me, but I can't stand cats. Mainly, if for any reason, it is because at our old house there were cats that made a permanent residence there. And when the males went around marking their territory, it wasn't pretty.

But, anyways, I have another reason to hate cats: It seems I'm allergic to them. Yesterday I went to an allergist to see what the heck I'm allergic to because I have nasty allergies at certain times of the year (and I've got asthma so we were there for that too). Well, I went in and they poked my back with all sorts of pollens and stuff. It appears I'm not allergic to anything organic (as in trees and such), just cats and dust mites (apparently I got a huge welt from the dust mite test). They also put me through a treadmill test to test my lung function and I got another surprise there. I'm not asthmatic enough to even be labelled with having activity enduced asthma. So I'm testing that by laying off my inhaler whilst being active and seeing what gives. I made it through bowling last night without a problem. Tomorrow when I go to work I won't "deasthmaize" and see how I do there.

Speaking of tomorrow it's my first payday (yay!). It's driving me insane to see how much I've made in the last two weeks. I'll probably have a picture of me and my check stub up for you people :-)

In the land of NES development I've gotten two opcodes interpreted but now I'm stuck on something else: it seems I'm not interpreting the ROM data right. I've run my test ROM through a couple of disassemblers and they're reading the first four bytes in as something else (actually, the two disassemblers had different results. Go figure :-P). I'll have to do more research to figure this out. In the mean time you can read a blow-by-blow run-down of development here.

One Week Anniversary

As of today (or yesterday now :-P) I've been working at Wal-mart for one week. I've done probably about everything, now, and seen just about everything put on layaway (except groceries). I'm not sure what my standing is now, but I was already getting high praise on Monday (can't let it get to my head). Also, yesterday, the other layaway boy had his first day and I showed him the ropes. He'll be mainly working when I'm not. Just some interesting stats that I'll be updating regularly. To date I've boxed/binned the following:
4 GameCubes
1 GameBoy Advance SP
2 Xboxs
2 PlayStation 2s
1 Laptop

Quite fun, eh? Also, at the request of SeniorUSB, here is a picture of me in my "little vest":


One day after work I went to the electronics dept. to take a look at their laptops because apparently I'll get an extra 10% cupon for Christmas bonus. I didn't really expect to find anything aside from budget systems, but I found this. With the exception of hard drive space it is more powerful than my desktop (which will become a file/web server). A feature I thought was kind of interesting was the fact that it can play DVD/CDs without even booting into Windows (save on battery life I'm sure). But it will be nice to have a portable computing solution, not to mention just downright cool :-).

In programming land, I'm currently working on trying to write an NES emulator. This is pretty much just for the learning experience to help understand the behind the scene ops of computers/game consoles. I hope that by learning that stuff I'll have a better understanding of current systems (GBA, GCN, etc.) and thus develop for them with little or no learning curve. I've found a bunch of handy info at NesDev.com which is helping quite a bit and I more or less understand how the whole internal system works, but figuring how you load things in from ROM sill escapes me. Hopefully this time next week I'll have my mock 6502 running a few opcodes. I'm mainly trying to get the thing to the point that I can run the original Mario Bros. which is fairly basic but it'll be a mighty cool feeling, I'll tell you now :-).

My First Day

Well, I made it through my first day working in Lawaway. Overall I think it went pretty well (except all the women's underwear I had to handle :-P). However, it'll be nice when I can go in there and know what to do instead of hanging around more seasoned coworkers and have them coach me through everything.

I just did the math and my first paycheck should be about $326.20. Figuring I get about that much every week (and those are only 25 hour work weeks, mind you) by the time Christmas is over I'll have around $1300! Enough to by myself that laptop :-D

In non-job related news, my Episode III DVD arrived today. I'm not sure if I've said it already, but I got it completely free all because I took a survey :-D. It doesn't get much sweeter than that. I'll probably watch it tonight and watch all the extras over the next few days. Ought to be a nice break from work :-).