My cashier days are almost over!

Firstly, yes. I've been a bad boy and haven't blogged in over a week. So sue me :-P.

Anyhoo, as the title so clearly states I will no longer be a cashier at Wal-Mart the day after tomorrow. That's right, I've been fired :-(. Just kidding, ha ha! I'm being moved over into the "overstock manager" job and my first day is Saturday starting a 4am :-) (yeah, that's a close paren, not a P). I'm looking forward to it because now I will be able to spend the rest of the day at home doing whatever which'll be nice. I should probbaly use some of that time to clean and organize my desk :-P.

My emulator is coming along pretty sweet. Metroid and Mario are basically completely playable, but Zelda and Stinger are still having some scrolling problems. I'll be looking into these as soon as I'm done with a new project that's come up.

My Uncle Dave (hey dude :-D) was kind enough to give me his old Handspring Visor (circa 1999) which will now be my new programming toy. The only app I have in mind at the moment is a bowling scoring thing which I will take to, duh, bowling. If I ever get proficient enough I'd even like to try to get it graphing averages and such, which'd be cool. I may also try to write a game or two for it (NES emu perhaps?). We'll just have to see.

I can now say I've done everything, including playing Doom on my iPod. Yes, last week I put Linux on my iPod (because I could) and played Doom (because it was there). However, it seemed to be borking up my music so I uninstalled it and now it's back to it's music playing goodness. I even bought 23 tracks worth of SpongeBob stuff off of iTunes yesterday and also the Hitchhiker's theme (originally performed by the Eagles for you old timers out there). I've been getting into listening to podcasts as well, my favorites being this WEEK in TECH, RevoGaming.net (the place where my bro "works"), and Diggnation (gotta love Kevin Rose).

I've been re-envisioning my site design again (some things die hard, let's face it). This time, however, I'd integrate my blog into the design. Also, I've had an idea for a cartoon about Goldy and the 3 Bears (old-skool style), but we'll see where that goes.

Well, I believe I have sufficiently updated you all on the ins and outs of my life at this point. Just remember, if you vote for Pedro your wildest dreams will come true :-).

Hi ho, it's back to work I go.... Hoover Dam it!

Ah, but at least it's just today and I do get off at a reasonable time tonight. Then I got tomorrow off and it's also payday, so life is good B-). Also, it appears that the new job is secured because they've got my hours on the schedule as being 4-9am starting the 18th (yay!). But enough of that, on to the good stuff.

I'll start out with last night's bowling. Remember how I said I was going to get my 600 series? Well, I didn't... I was two pins shy :-P. I had my best game to date, 249, which could have been 300 hundred if I hadn't choked in the seventh frame :-P. But either way, that's enough to get me my 100 pins over average watch. So I should have a coaster, a patch and now a watch coming (and maybe more :-P).

I haven't said much about my emulator in a little (mainly because I hadn't been working on it), but last night inspiration struck and now I have some delicious screenies for everybody:

Balloon Fight is quite playable...
Things are finally starting to look right in the Mushroom Kingdom.

Speed is stll an issue and I haven't got the attribute tables working quite like they should, but overall it's starting to take shape rather nicely :-).

I still haven't gotten Paper Mario yet which kind of bums me, but luckily I did have some Netflix stuff to watch, Firefly and Lost in Space. The latter was a terrible, terrible movie. It's like they never really got started, or they started and then stop to switch subjects. Not to mention there was a whole lot that just really didn't make sense and then the ending was bad, so overall just spare yourselves and don't watch this movie. Thank heavens there's Firefly. For the uninitiated, Firefly is/was a TV series on Fox that is more like a western in space than Star Wars could ever be (complete with horses, train heists and everything). An incredibly good TV series and the movie, Serenity, was great to. I highly recommend watching these if you haven't already.

Well, I must go eat some lunch now, so I will shut up and let you people live your lives... until tomorrow. Bwaa ha ha!!

And I thought cart pushing was bad :-P

The last few days I've been hoping for a departure from the normal routine of taking money from people. Well, last night I got my wish. I guess GM recieving is shorthanded so they've been pulling people in to help back there and I was one of the lucky ones. Now I've gone back to GM for truck unloading before, but last night I was actually dragging big palettes of junk around the store and I tell you, palette jacks are evil. You know those movies where a kid/group of kids tear up a store? Well, if you're not very, very careful that could easily become reality when auling a quarter ton of water :-P. Luckily, I didn't actually destory anything, but I did bump a few things out of place (and lose my cargo taking turns too fast :-P).

Tomorrow is Tuesday again and we all know what that means... BOWLING!!! WHOO! I'm still shooting for a 600 series and it'll happen one of these days. I've had at least one two hundred gqame every week for the last six weeks straight, so it has to happen soon.

I'm hoping my copy of Paper Mario: Thousand Year Door will come today (getting sick of waiting). I'm not sure why, but I've been having the weirdest craving for playing some Paper Mario again (go figure :-P). It'd be nice to come home tonight, kick back, watch some headlines on Jay and then play some Paper Mario. Yeeaaahhh.

Well, I'm getting a bit long winded again so I'll wrap it up here. Firstly, however, I want to congratualte my brother Chris on nabbing an editorial staff position at RevoGaming. Apparently his Revo-News blog got some attention ;-). Way to go, dude :-)

Of Sin and Sacrilege

I did something that would have me from about a year ago saying "Burn in Hell, you heathen!". That's right, I bought an iPod.

Yes, on the same day that good ol' Pope Benedict got his, I am now the proud owner of a black 2GB iPod Nano, and I tell you... it's pretty freakin' sweet. Now don't think that I've suddenly grown a soft spot for Apple, 'cause I'm still a die-hard Windows fan. In my opinion when it comes to software MS rocks, and Apple would be the MS of the hardware world (except when it comes to mice and keyboards).

So with that I end my spending spree. I now have a laptop, DS, and an iPod so I'd like to say I am now equipped with all the tech I need... that is until the Revolution comes out ;-). With all that out of the way my savings should grow even more than it already is (I won't say the number in a public place like the internet ;-)).

Ah, well, I need to get my music library synced up :-).

Vacation... WHOO!

After a long six day, non-stop (almost) run at work I finally get a well-deserved two day weekend :-). And while I'm on the subject of work I should probably say it look like I'm not going to be cashier anymore. Charles (daytime manager) created a new job and apparently I was the first person suggested to fill it. So if this all works out I'll be keeping track of/putting away groceries overstock in the wee hours of the morning (4-10am). Despite the hours I'm really looking forward to this and I hope all goes well.

My emulator is coming right along. Today I got some basic PPU stuff in and now I can get a monochrome picture. There are apparently some bugs in the CPU core yet, but overall things are already running much better than my other emulator. I'll post some pictures once I get color support in.

It seems there's something else I was going to post about, but I've since forgotten. So, for now I'll just fart in your general direction. :-D

Such stupid, stupid people

I'm going to break from the formula today and talk about an issue that's been driving me insane lately. Here goes: Zelda: Twilight Princess will not be a Revolution game for crying out loud! Why? Here we go:

1) Firstly, people have been preordering this thing (the game) since before the Revolution was anything more than a name. That'd be a lot of ticked people when it came down to the wire and suddenly the game is for Rev. A lot of fivers thrown out the window for those who don't want to spend the extra couple hundred.

2) A quote from series creator Shigeru Miyamoto states that this will be the "last Zelda game as you've known it". Obviously he was talking about how the new controller is going to affect future games. The switch over to Rev and a new control scheme would fly in the face of that comment which also leads us to...

3) They have a working demo, for crying in poo! A GameCube one. For use with a standard controller. Which they've been parading around the States, too :-P.

4) Nintendo keeps explicitly denying that the game will be on the Rev or that it'll even have special Rev-unlockable features. Now Nintendo doesn't usually lie. They might say odd, mysterious things or say nothing at all, but when they talk it's usually the truth. Here's the Reggie-Man himself saying so.

5) Finally, it'll work on the Rev because of the GC backwards compatibility. So people could pick up both, or those who didn't want/couldn't get a Rev would still be satisfied. It's not like sales would be hurt in any way (quite the opposite in fact).

So there you have it. Quit being stupid, okay? :-)

In for the long haul

After having nearly five days off within eight days, I'm in for a six day, non-stop work-athon. I hope I survive. Luckily I'm not working past midnight on any of those days and I get a two day weekend at the end. Tomorrow is also payday, so that's another perk.

In other news, I've decided to scrap my NES emulator... and move it to C++ ;-). After having the usual battles I have when developing with C++ things seem to be on track. I have a bunch of opcodes implemented (hopefully I can finish the entire set by tomorrow evening). We'll see where I am in reality :-P.

Well, I suppose that's all for now. Ta ta :-).