Category: Miscellaneous

The Day The PS3 Died

March 1, 2010

Yesterday, at around 7pm EST, millions of Playstation 3 consoles worldwide just started acting strangely. They wouldn’t connect to the internet, they wouldn’t play games requiring trophies, or games requiring an internet connection, or any games purchased online and downloaded to the system. Certain Blu-Ray films stopped working, the date on the system was screwed up, certain types of data (dynamic themes) were corrupted and trophies had disappeared from trophy lists.

In short: There was something very rotten in the state of Sony PS3.

Very quickly the collective mind of the internet was able to deduce the culprit: the internal clock (hardware, not software) had ticked over to the nonexistent date of February 29, 2010. This in turn confused the software (which correctly realized no such day existed) which sent the entire system haywire. The internet of course exploded with the news, and it was quite astounding to log on to investigate an error code we experienced here in our own living room and read about people as far away as Greece, India and Singapore having the same issue.

Every internal clock in the affected PS3 systems (estimated to be over 25 million worldwide) is set to GMT, so they all failed at once irrelevant of the local time zone.

Sony failed utterly in crisis management. It was over 11 hours before they released any sort of statement about the problem, and until then had only confirmed it via twitter! Their statement confirmed an internal clock issue, but made no explanation of why it took them more than 10 hours to confirm what many had already deduced. They gave no indication of how it would be fixed, but advised owners of affected systems to simply leave it off for 24 hours.

Sony hopes when the internal clock ticks over to March 1 everything will be alright. That will be about 7pm tonight (so in a little under 2 hours). Based on past, similar events this may or may not work. And even if it does a software patch may be required to fix the time anyway (the PS3 will be a day behind the real world). If it doesn’t work it is likely the internal clock will need resetting, and lord knows how Sony plans that. Will they advise users to disconnect their PS3 from the wall for 30 days to let the internal backup battery (that powers the clock) to run dry?

To be honest I have found this event humorous. Sony’s apalling slow and ineffective reaction has not surprised me, and has only confirmed my suspicion that inside Sony HQ they literally had no idea what to do (so let’s do nothing!). The response of the thousands upon thousands of owners that have gone online to discuss this has ranged from bemusement (like me) to vitriol-filled rants about the evil that is Sony. People are screaming for compensation and apologies just because they lose access to their Playstation 3 for a single day.

In fact such is the strength of the response to this event – dubbed ‘apolcalyps3’ – that responses to the response have already started to crop up. They are many and varied, but all poke fun at the more extreme outbursts of anger from PS3 owners.

And in my opinion, there are none better than the response from Adolf Hitler himself:

(Fair warning: NSFW video, contains foul text)

(But watch it, especially you Dad – you’ll love it!)

Creeping Doom?

February 25, 2010

Last week I had a brush with cryptozoology. I saw what was, albeit briefly, an unidentified animal.

It happened about 5pm. I was walking past the living room window and noticed… something strange walking along the very edge of our backyard. It crept weirdly, and had certain unusual characteristics. It was fascinating and apalling, since it was not only an animal I had never seen before, it was one I could not immediately identify.

This photo shows the path it took as it strode – slowly – along the snow:

The thing was about the size of a medium cat, walked hunched over with it’s head down (like a rat), seemed to have something ‘wrong’ with it’s head (at first I thought it had a baby in it’s mouth) and had a… distinctive tail. As I said it was in no hurry, and followed the above trail until it reached the canoe, at which point it went underneath and was out of sight.

I went and grabbed my camera and dashed outside. I very much needed a closer look, since this thing was seriously alarming in a weird way.

Now I am a man of logic and a man of science. Therefore it is with no embarrassment that I say that I approached the back of our yard with more than a little trepidation. For I could not unequivocally rule out the possibility this thing was (for instance), a Hound Of Tindalos. After all, this was an undiscovered animal… wasn’t it?

I videoed most of my investigation, National Geographic style. Perhaps I will upload them one day.

The short version: I never found it. I kicked the canoe a couple of times to usher the thing out (to no avail). I even crouched and peeped (hesitantly, for fear of having my face ripped off) but the darkness was inviolable and the thing – were it still there – soundless.

It did leave ample evidence of it’s passage though, in the form of footprints. Here is a shot:

And though I was in the end unsuccessful in seeing it up close (or even capturing it as evidence of the existence of new mammalian life), I was able to collect enough evidence to have a reasonable guess as to just what this creature may have been.

Rather than just give my conclusion, I leave it to you, dear readers, to guess for yourself based on the available evidence:

– It had a body about 30-40cm in length
– It had a tail about half the length of it’s body
– The tail was naked, like a rat
– It walked on short limbs with it’s head held down, like a rat
– It’s head – from a distance – appeared bald, or at the very least a lighter colour than the body
– It travelled single file, to hide it’s numbers

Click here to see what I believe this animal was.

And if I am correct, it’s the first time in my life I have ever seen one in the wild 🙂

Great Queen Dodongo

February 23, 2010

The other week, the Great Queen went to the vet for some dental work. Who is this ‘Dodongo’ you ask? Well here she is, in all her glory:

Cat dentistry is (apparently) an “important but often overlooked” element of the total cat health regime. We often overlook it, and I can probably count on one hand the number of times we’ve sent a cat in for dentistry. In fact our beloved Ziggi once had a tooth fall out (yes, I found it on the floor one day). It bothered him not at all, but may have been due to us overlooking as aspect of his regime.

(And believe me, that cat had a regime!)

So our local vet (name withheld to protect the innocent) was having a cat dental month in February and we were suckered in decided to send Daisy along for a checkup.

Not to go off on too much of a tangent, but I went to the dentist myself the other day. I had a checkup, teeth cleaning, x-rays and a small battery of other tests such as ‘oral cancer’ and some sort of weird overbite thingy. My teeth were fine (as they always have been) and everything went well. Total cost: $96 (paid for by our insurance). I go every six months, and usually it’s a bit cheaper since they don’t do x-rays every time.

Anyway GQD went to the vet as well. She had a checkup, teeth cleaning, x-rays and perhaps a few other small things done. Total cost: $300…

…

In case you missed that the first time, the total cost was:

$300 God Damn Dollars!

Oh, but we got a big bag of free dental health cat food that we obviously paid for, some free toothpaste that probably cost us $20, a kit bag of free food samples including stuff for dogs we instantly threw away and some free flouride water supplement for cats that had a warning label on it so scary I wouldn’t feed it to Idi Amin.

< Note the flavour!

In short, we were ripped off north, south, east and west got good value for money.

What’s that you say? How do we even know they did what they said they did?

Well how’s this for proof (click them to enlarge):

Yep, they gave us printouts of the x-rays (and probably charged us $15 for the service)!

Yes yes, I can hear you all now: “Stop complaining Sir! You live a profligate lifestyle!” (that was a shoutout to Prof MacD if she reads this :))

But as Ueshiba never said: “Even the rich man values a single grain of rice.”

What that means in English is, that the god-damn $300 spent on Duckaluck’s teeth are better measured as the loss of (say) 60 used gamebooks on ebay. Or 42 Star Wars action figures. Or 5 Ps3 games. Or… well or just about anything!

Daisy I love you. You’re my Greet Queen and your fantastic. But after forking over $300 for your dentistry… well then after doing that my mental image of you is less the image at the top of this post and more like this one here:

Robot Claw

$300 God Damn Dollars!