RPG Articles

So, imagine you’re me. Only better looking and richer, since you’re imagining it all anyway you may as well be happier.

Anyway. You get this POS station all setup and ready to go, everything tested except the receipt printer because, duh, it’s been in use. Big deal, what could happen?

Jesus fucking christ. I plug everything in, and it won’t print. Not even when I use a raw text driver. So, I muck about for an hour or so. Cables are swapped, powers are cycled, ad nauseum. Finally I become convinced the com port has gone splodey or something, so I hope Hyperterminal and just see if I can hit anything on com1. It gives an access denied error.

“What the hell ass?” I think, suavely.

So I remove all the backwards Epson drivers from the Subway site, reboot, and try again. Now I get a message that another program is using the device. Being Windows there’s just no damned way to figure out what is using this port, or at least no way I could find with my brain thinking of nothing more than sleep.

I diddle, I spelunk, I delve, I wanted to commit suicide with the TurboChef. Finally it stumbles into my beaten brain that the touchscreen was initially connected to the com port. Very interesting. So I go through the Elo setup, specifying usb only and… dammit, same damned problem.

In one of those moments where you desperately don’t want to come back, and the brain overloads itself, sacrificing joyous memories and 10 years of non-diaper wearing old age, I was struck with the idea of deleting the com port, then re-configuring the driver.

Stunned as anyone, it worked.

The moral of the story? Kill at least one random stranger, on the off chance he or she may have been involved with developing a shitty driver.

Now, the power jack is an Achilles heel for a lot of laptops/notebooks, but this one takes the cake. The jack is totally unsupported aside from the the posts on the board, which while crappy is also normal, but for the connection it has a springy lump at that top, causing the insert to cantilever the whole thing a little, especially when stressed at all, and pop the negative terminal post, which is the one towards the back.

It’s also a pain to get apart, but I found this great writeup on doing it. The model is different, but it’s 90%+ the same.

Is bitchin.

Give it time to load. So worth it.

But if you’re a creationist, you aren’t a scientist. Or, very likely, worth anything.

Aaron, the most awesome roommate/landlord in the world, bought me a 19 inch Hanns-G lcd monitor, and it looks lovely.

If it weren’t for the dip in my desk, from the heavy assed CRT I had, this would be perfect.

Thanks Aaron!

Wow.

I mean, holy hell wow.

Ok. So, anyone that get’s to know me soon realizes I’ve disowned my family a long time ago. However, it’s always been tough for me to really explain why, because frankly I can’t describe how messed up they all are.

Tonight, I saw a missed call from a Phoenix number which wasn’t familiar to me. I googled it. Wow.

This is my sister (biologically my aunt, yeah, long story). If that link is down, try searching online for 602-423-1244. She seems like a very busy lady, so I’m sure you’ll turn up some weird stuff.

So, I read this little gem, and my first thought was “What about human children?”. I’d have to dig up information on the actual study, but from this article it doesn’t sound like any human child/human adult comparisons were made, or human child/chimp adult comparisons for that matter.

So… you know, what the hell damned guy? It’s interesting stuff, but I don’t really agree with the presented argument of us losing eidetic memory, as a common trait anyway, because of language. That’s putting the cart before the horse, and the position is further weakened by the study results saying that adult chimps tested about the same as adult humans.

I’m calling shennanigans on this, barring further study yielding anything to offset this news piece.

Half of it’s just plain broken, the rest is embarrassed to exist, and at the center of it all is a chaotic black mass.

Oddly, this one feels more accurate-