Hindsight

Yes, I caved in. Selling a few of my older games will offset the cost.

Here’s a screenshot from last night’s co-op session with Mike.

I decided to start the on Heroic difficulty, and having a second human player help out made a world of difference.

I’m finding that Halo 3 has a fantastic set of extra features that make the game really fun to play and even review (screenshots, ’saved fiilms’, etc). The game does indeed look very, very solid.

Using the game’s ’saved films’ feature, the player can watch their entire co op level, play in slow motion and move the camera around the action to take a screenshot.

Since I’m on a budget, I decided not to buy Halo 3 and buy The Orange Box instead since I had a choice between the two. I feel like I missed a good hype train though!

This is all so very strange, but it happened to me, so for anyone who has had been unable to post while posting to WordPress, read up…

I had an entry that I wrote in Japan in 2002. The post contains the word “selection”. Many, many paragraphs later, the word “from” is also present. Apparently, the way my web host was setup, having these two words in the same document, or post, might be misinterpreted as something of a security breach. At first I thought WordPress might have a maximum character limit to posts. But after breaking down my old post, paragraph by paragraph, it turns out that a word (or rather two words in the right order) caused the glitch…

ModSecurity for Apache checks posts for, among other things, SQL injection.

In my case, having the word “selection” in a post, followed much later by the word “from”, must have looked like SQL to mod_security. I got the “Forbidden” error for posts.php.

Apparently, my server’s installation of mod_security was compiled with the -DDISABLE_HTACCESS_CONFIG switch, so I could disable the checking of posts in a .htaccess file in the wp-admin directory with:

SecFilterScanPOST Off

If you’re an ‘advanced’ user, do the following if you don’t have an .htaccess file in your /wp-admin/ directory:

1. Make a new, plain-text document (with Notepad - NOT with Word or any other word processor) called “.htaccess” (no file extensions or anything) if you don’t already have one in the /wp-admin/ diretory.
2. In the file, be sure to enter the line “SecFilterScanPOST Off”. Save it.
3. Upload the file to your WordPress blog’s “/wp-admin/” directory.

You can now post something like “selection from” without getting the boot from your web server and WordPress.

NOTE: Apparently, having the two words in the Post Title will form a “Forbidden” error as well, so if you do, change the “Post Slug” so that it doesn’t have those words in it. Will they fix this glitch in Version 2.3?

Earlier last week, I noticed that my laptop hard drive wasn’t accessing data as usual. Booting into XP took longer, running programs and accessing data took suspiciously long. Knowing how my hard drive “sounds”, I knew that something was up.

I took the cautious step of copying over all essential files and folders on the laptop over to an external hard drive two evenings ago. Yesterday, while transferring some last not-so-essential files, I got the classic BSOD. Over several reboots I witnessed the laptop crash upon loading into Windows, crashing before the interface even popped up and finally not even loading up at all (”Disk failure error”).

The laptop is a Toshiba Satellite 5105-S701 power laptop. It was purchased in 2002. The laptop had a rough start to begin with: it was purchased off Amazon.com and shipped from California to Japan (I was several months into the JET Programme). When it arrived, the hard drive had problems the first day I ran the laptop; a real downer when first receiving a brand new system. I’m pretty sure the laptop was thrown around hard during shipment overseas.

In just a few days, the laptop was shipped from Kitakyushu to Akihabara in Tokyo, where a Toshiba repair center quickly replaced the hard drive and got the system back to me. Since that time, I’ve put the laptop through quite a few paces: I brought it with me to the schools I taught at, kept it on for days on end as an FTP server. I made the Statement of Agreement website on it, followed by the video and wrote quite a few reviews for Gamecritics too. I’ve done a lot with it.

The laptop has recently acted as a side machine/internet laptop. The DVD-RW drive is spotty and the right speaker doesn’t work. Other than that, the machine has pretty much been my side for quite awhile.

It’s easy to wonder why I would be so attached to a computer. Specifically, a hard drive. But if you look carefully at the what and when of it all, the laptop has been around during some of the most interesting times of my life. It helped me create some very cool works.

After taking the hard drive out from the bottom of the laptop, I searched for the hard drive on eBay via the model number printed on surface. The cost ranges from $65 for the same drive to around $45 for smaller, 30gb model. I should be diving in for a replacement, but I’m waiting for payday to come around.

30gb hard drive, you served me well.

Megumi and Kaori at Joe’s Crab Shack!

The latest soundtrack release for the “Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex” series is a pricey, 6-disc package that should also have an equally long acronym: GITS SAC LE CD Box. I purchased mine from Amazon.com Japan.

For Kanno collectors, all previous soundtracks from Stand Alone Complex are included: OST Volumes 1, 2, 3, “be human” and the Solid State Society movie soundtrack. The sixth disc is really what you’re trying to get if you already bought the previous discs.

What do I do with my previous CDs? Do I keep them as a collector or sell them off now that I’ve gotten this box set? I’m still holding onto the former since all the individual discs have great art and inserts.

The sixth disc in the Box Set is authored as a single audio track and carries the title of “OST 4-” along with “Smooth in the Shell”. There aren’t any breaks to skip to automatically but I’ve seen fans online mention making their own .cue files to make a CD with 16 tracks (seen in a comment stream over at the fantastic GabrielaRobin.com blog).

It’s a great disc… mostly instrumental and ambient, but an excellent selection that was previously unavailable. Around the 40 minute mark, one of my favorite compositions played - I felt I got my money’s worth right there. I love the disc - I can let the entire soundtrack play on the train to work and back home.

Included in the package is a USB flash drive. It’s got a 256MB capacity and has a Tachikoma design to it, very cute. Wallpapers, sound files and some incidental music snippets are included in the drive.

If you haven’t purchased any of the previous GITS SAC soundtracks, this is a must-buy since it contains all of her work for the series. It can be purchased at CDJapan (www.cdjapan.co.jp) or Amazon Japan (www.amazon.co.jp).