This last week has been extremely frustrating. I spent most of my time at work trying to get dumb databases to work, and most of my time at home arguing with my sister about the scanning that got put off because of the time I spent on those databases.

Others are bitching about me being behind on scanning, too, but don’t have the courtesy to do it to my face.

I’m getting frustrated just thinking about the last week, so I’m just going to drop it.

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Saturday I carted a bunch of books that were gunking up my room into the Book Bin, and sold them for money. They actually accepted a good number of my old texts—something I didn’t expect at all—and all the manga I wanted to dump—which I guessed they would. I didn’t get a whole lot back (they have quite a racket, if they can sell the books they buy), but it was still more than I would have gotten otherwise.

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Last night I watched Brian bake a cake from scratch (as I told him, in my usual circuitous way, it could have been a lot worse) and chatted with Albert and Evrim. They all introduced me to the concept of Turkish Revenge (I forgot which movie it’s from, but I’m sure that Brian will be able to fill in that blank). In Turkey, according to this movie, stabbing someone above the waist is considered an attempt to kill them, and is thus forbidden. Stabs below the waist, in contrast, were just fine. Turkish Revenge, therefore, is stabbing someone in the butt.

This concept was news to Evrim, and she’s from Turkey.

[3/28 Update: Brian has reported in: the movie’s name is Midnight Express. Though “based on a true story,” Brian also notes that the movie apparently has some major differences from the book it was based on.]

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Last night Brian and I also watched a speed demo of Metal Gear Solid: The Twin Snakes. More impressive to me than the demo (which featured a couple hilarious “run right by the guard as he’s turning around” moments, and generally was impressive) was the fact that my powerbook could actually play it. I had never even bothered trying to play DivX files on the powerbook—an old Pismo (“old”) model—as I figured that it couldn’t decode them fast enough to be usable… I was wrong. It handled the file well (though, admittedly, couldn’t handle anything else at the same time), and I even managed, with no fuss, to mirror the display on Brian’s TV and output the audio through Brian’s receiver. Good times.

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Today Andy called, and the newly-released PSP came up in the course of our conversation. Andy pointed out that the PSP can run programs off of memory sticks—meaning that it’s only a matter of time before we have NES and SNES emulators for the PSP. (Three systems—at least—in one!) Combined with the gorgeous screen the system is supposed to have, as well as the drop in price that should occur before any emulators are bug-free… and we’ll be all over it. In a year.

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Lastly, I just tried opening my Access database on my dad’s PC. It seems that Microsoft’s idea of security is to make you navigate a maze of dialogs verifying that you really really want to open a file, before you can actually open that file. Each time I opened the database, I had to wade through three dialogs. The first was legitimate, but the second two were terrible: “Opening files can be dangerous. Do you really want to open this file?,” and “We’re not kidding about the danger of opening files. Are you double-damn sure you want to do this?”

I made the frickin’ file! If it trashes my computer, I have no one to blame but myself!