I’m back! It turns out the “instant cancer” from the last update wasn’t the JB Weld’s fault, but rather the first stirrings of some kind of mil-spec flu bug. I’m mostly back together now. Sister Nyquil and Brother Toilet Bowl got me through the rough times.

PSP Review
So I promised myself that I wouldn’t be a total gadget-whore and run out to buy a PSP on release day (last Thursday). I kept that promise for about 8 hours. Then I went out and bought one. It really is something else. The most surprising thing about it is that Sony *didn’t* screw it up too badly.

First of all, some pictures. The front of the machine is fiendishly hard to photograph, so here’s some nice, high-rez shots from Ferrago.

Bummer number one: Sony simply cannot help themselves; they are hopelessly addicted to inventing new formats. They have a special love for wierd little disc-inside-cartridge things. Behold the Universal (uh-huh) Media Disc:

CD provided for scale. It’s basically a shrunken Minidisc without a shutter. It has a little access window on the bottom, otherwise known as “the part of the disc your fingers will instinctively be drawn to”:

They hold around 2 gigs, which is impressive. They’re read-only, which is annoying. Sony is supposedly going to use UMD for other things than shipping games; they’re planning to release full-length movies in the format as well. In fact, the box comes with a copy of Spiderman 2. I have a sneaking suspicion that plan is going to last about as long as pre-recorded Minidiscs (both of them). For game storage, and other purposes (more about those later), there’s a slot in the PSP for yet another Sony format, the Memory Stick Duo:

Okay, flash media is officially getting way too small. In fact, the manual warns you not to leave the Memory Stick in the reach of small children, lest they choke on it.

It plays games pretty well. I picked up Wipeout Pure since I’ve been a fan of the Wipeout franchise since way back, and Lumines (pronounced like it has a “ce” on the end of it, not like “loo-mines”). They’re both quite nice for launch titles, and pave the way toward some really good future gameage. Loading times aren’t horrible, either.

A couple features really stand out, at least in my nerdy brain. First of all, yes, the screen is as nice as everybody says. It’s lovely, bright, and refreshes quick without much ghosting that I can see. It’s actually a bit too nice for its own good – the highly reflective surface picks up dust and fingerprints like nobody’s business. The machine comes with a little cleaning cloth so that anal-retentives such as myself can spend ridiculous amounts of time keeping it perfectly spotless. Note: you can’t.

Second big thing – WiFi. You can play wirelessly with whomever happens to be standing around, in an ad-hoc mode; or you can attach to an access point and play over the Internet. I’m sure it will have other uses than just multiplayer gaming.

Big thing the third – you can run software from the Memory Stick. This is huge for the homebrew crowd. The first step in every game console reverse engineering project is to figure out how to get your own code to sit on the machine – on the PSP, there’s a folder on the Memory Stick called “Games” and a menu item to run stuff from the Stick. I’m guessing that whatever binaries go in there have to be blessed in some way to make the PSP approve of them (I’m guessing signed binaries – the “About PSP” credits screen includes a mention of “RSA BSAFE Cryptographic Software” – could just be for the web browser, could be for other stuff). Sony could make the homebrew community incredibly happy by releasing some details on how to get your own stuff to run, but realistically the community will figure it out with or without Sony’s help.

Big thing number four – media. Sony’s been frothing at the mouth about how the PSP is not just a game console, it’s a “convergent portable entertainment device”, whatever that means. Oddly enough, though, it’s pretty good at the multimedia stuff. You can dump MP3s onto the Memory Stick all day and play them (with a very nice interface I might add). A few years ago, a Sony product that could do this would have come with some ridiculously named “Sony Music Transfer MegaGateway” that you had to install to convert your music into some lamebrained format only their device could understand. As it stands now, the PSP manual tells you to make a folder called MUSIC on the Memory Stick and drag your MP3s in it. Amazing! It’s not just music though, you can do pictures and video, too. It will view ordinary JPGs, but it’s a bit pickier about movies. It only understands MPEG4. At least it’s a standard (and not a Sony “standard”). In fact, there’s already a very nice third-party application called PSP Video that easily transcodes any format video you might have into MPEG4 and copies it to the right place on the Memory Stick’s filesystem. Just for grins, I dragged a file from my ReplayTV onto PSP Video – in a minute or two, it had converted and copied it to the Memory Stick, resulting in the following nugget of portable depression:

Johnny Cash’s “Hurt”, copied from ReplayTV to PSP

Bummer #2 – you need a bigger Memory Stick to make this feature useful. That three minute music video fills up most of the space on the included 32 MB card. For a movie, or even a couple episodes of your favorite shows, you’re going to need a couple of these. Now admittedly, $110 is not too bad for a gig of flash, but it’s not chump change seeing as you just plunked down $250 for the console. This is probably the best strategic decision they could have made though; flash is going to get progressively cheaper as time goes by, and it has less of a size and power consumption penalty than, say, an ittybitty hard drive.

Overall, it’s pretty neat. It feels like picking up a piece of the future. I can’t want to see what the homebrew guys figure out what it can do. Recommended.

For tomorrow, a concert writeup, featuring Matter and Charlie Manson’s Happy Funtime Band (note: not actual band name).

Here’s a tip, kids. When you look at a tube of JB Weld, and it says “Don’t breathe this stuff”, don’t breathe that stuff. I think I got instant cancer or something.

Also, I got the new Kasabian CD. The package goes on and on about how the disc is copy-protected. Interest piqued. I went and looked it up. Turns out these assmasters actually install a new CD driver onto your machine that notices whenever one of their special, blessed CDs is inserted and refuses to play it correctly. This crap gets loaded on your machine automatically (through an autorun.exe) without asking permission and without a disclosed means of uninstalling it. Are you freaking kidding? I actually had to go hack my registry in order to prevent their stupid crap from infecting my computer.

Can a brother get a class-action lawsuit?

Anyway, once you protect your machine from getting diddled by some megalomaniacal record executive’s raging anti-consumerist hardon, it turns out that you can rip it just fine. Which I did. BMG can bite me twice.

Clearing out a few unsent camphone images.

Dad rolling clean in ‘da hood.

The “credits” part of the program of the SHS awards banquet a while back.

The start of a highly productive lunch hour.

I got invited to go see The Have Nots downtown on Saturday night. It was a little last minute, but I got ready and headed out. They were playing at the American Theatre on King Street. I’ve only driven myself downtown once before, and then there was somebody riding shotgun that knew where they were going, but I figured I couldn’t miss it, being on King Street and all.

Well, I didn’t get the chance to miss it. ‘Cause I missed King Street.

Somehow, and I haven’t quite worked out the topology of how I did this, I took a offramp from the Crosstown labeled “King Street”, and ended up somewhere that was not King Street. Hrm. In trying to circle my way back to where I started, I ended up somewhere…else. Somewhere around Hampton Park, eventually. Of course, at the time I didn’t know this. I meandered and orbited and randomly ping-ponged through residential areas, getting progressively more concerned that I was going to end up on the wrong end of somebody’s tire iron. Not to be insensitive, but there are certain regions in Charleston where, to be polite, being a skinny white boy is *not* to your advantage. I think I found one of these regions, or several. As much as I listen to and appreciate hip-hop music, which frequently espouses the grim realities of urban living, I have no compunction about saying that I am pretty much completely unequipped for ‘hood operations. I’m not exactly in my element, if you will. (As much as I’m in my element anywhere else, except even less so.)

Right about this time is when I noticed an angry indication from my car, telling me that it was about to stop running from lack of fuel. Bummer! (This was the central bit of experimental evidence I needed to determine that my fuel gauge is non-linear. From F to 3/4 does not represent the same amount of gas as from 1/4 to E). With a little added urgency, I decided to adopt a new algorithm. Instead of relying on my own (completely useless) sense of direction, I would simply drive until I came to an intersection. If the road I was intersecting with seemed bigger than the one I was on, I’d turn onto it. This method seemed to work pretty well, as in a while I came upon a road with a shopping center on it. This was an improvement from the roads I had come from that mostly had abandoned cars and houses with lots of broken windows and such.

I figured I could ask somebody at the shopping center where a gas station was. It was one of those ordinary sort of strip malls with a Food Lion and a dollar store and a Chinese place. Parking, I noticed a policeman walking into the dollar store. “Result!” thought I, “I’ll just ask this friendly neighborhood copper, and he’ll be glad to point me toward a gas station.” Except…when I got near the door of the dollar store, I noticed a few interesting things:

1. There was not one friendly neighborhood copper in the store, there were three, and they looked displeased about something.
2. Most of the lights were out in the dollar store.
3. The cashier of the dollar store looked quite displeased herself, and was expressing this vocally to the cops.

As I was noticing these things, one of the cops looked at me through the front door glass with a very particular look. His look said something to me. I think it said “get the fuck out”. That’s basically a quote, if you could quote a look.

Around this time I decided to try the Food Lion instead. Happily, there were no cops there, and I found out from Shawna at the customer service desk that there was a 76 right down the street. (“Skreet”, actually – Shawna’s voice was thick with that unique and beautiful accent that is particular to certain black people that live in Charleston. It’s a lovely thing to hear if you haven’t before.) I gassed up and was thusly fortified to continue wandering. Amusing side note: The display on the gas pump, which normally says something like “WELCOME TO BILLY’S FUEL N’ FOOD” or something, said “INSRTCRDTEXT”. A placeholder! How neat. I also found it neat that I was thinking about placeholder text in user interfaces while I was completely lost in an unfamiliar neighborhood on a moonless night, but that’s beside the point.

Anyway, my pathfinding algorithm turned out to work pretty well, because after another turn or two, I saw a sign pointing me toward the interstate. By this time, I had actually wormed my way back to King Street, and could have easily gotten where I was trying to go all along. Unfortunately, my rolling around in the various non-tourist friendly neighborhoods in Charleston had consumed a good half-hour, and I was already late to begin with. My friends would have already gone into the show. The obnoxious part of it all is that at several points I was incredibly close to getting back going in the right direction, but I kept screwing up somehow. So I said a hearty “screw it” and ramped back up on the I. There, I nearly got killed by some rocket scientist that decided to stop his car in my lane around a corner. But after that things settled down. I went and bought some beer and toasted to a wasted evening.

“The flavors in the meat, sauce is on the side.”

Wise words from a trailer with a pig on it. The exposure’s blown out as I was in a hurry and didn’t wait long enough for the camera to stop down.

Addendum – The new Mars Volta CD, “Frances The Mute“? Holy experimental concept albums, Batman!