Of Work And Poetry (Not My Own)

Work's getting busy with no signs of slowing down in the near future and I'm moving apartments this weekend, so I doubt I'll get a chance to post anything of interest* for a while.

* Assuming, of course, that anything I ever post could be considered "of interest".

As an intermittent reading thing, I've been going through A Little Larger Than the Entire Universe, a collection of poems by Fernando Pessoa and his various heteronyms.  (The Wikipedia article's not that great, but it will at least give you an idea of what Pessoa meant by heteronyms.)

Given that I have, in the past, occasionally posted other bits of poetry (I was certain there were more entries than that)  that I found interesting, I thought I'd post one that caught my interest because it for some reason reminded me of some of the haikus that I posted a while back.

The moonlight seen through the tall branches
Is more, say all the poets,
Than the moonlight seen through the tall branches.

For me, oblivious to what I think,
The moonlight seen through the tall branches,
Besides its being
The moonlight seen through the tall branches,
Is its not being more
Than the moonlight seen through the tall branches.

—Alberto Caeiro, The Keeper of Sheep XXXV, translated from the Portuguese by Richard Zenith.

In Which I Question My Judgement

"Cruelest reading month" doesn't appear to be going so well, and I have no one to blame but myself.  I made the mistake of starting it with John Norman's Time Slave, and let me just say this: anything you may have heard about his writing is true.  (If you haven't, count yourself lucky and then go read the parody Houseplants of Gor.)

Rambling diatribes (almost an entire chapter could be summed up with "space/time doesn't make sense scientifically, therefore it may be different than how science perceives it"), awkward phrasings, terrible wordings, and repetition repetition repetition.  ("P was present. In the cubicle was P.").

When he's not busy making you want to reach through the pages and strangle characters until they finally stop speaking in circles and get to the point, the prose is at times unintentionally hilarious.  I nominate the following as the most pointless simile that I've read in ages:

"[…] the mind of Herjellsen was like the hand of a blind man reaching out in a dark room of incredible dimensions […]

Because there is such a difference between a blind man in a dark room compared to one in, say, a well-lit room, an overly bright room, or a room with subtle-yet-fitting mood-lighting.

…I knew I should have started with the Lindsay.  At least that would have been funnier.

Anybody Got An Old Super Nintendo?

(And by old, I mean even by Super Nintendo standards.)  Additionally, this entry gets rather geekish and may be of limited interest to most people.  You have been warned.

See, it works like this: I recently acquired a copy of Terranigma (aka Illusion of Gaia 2, aka Soul Blazer 3), the English version of which is (at least in North America) one of the holy grails of Super Nintendo games.  The reason for this being that Enix, who published the game, didn't have a North American division at the time — so the English-language version was never released outside of Australia and the UK.

Now, something most people might not realise is that the only major thing keeping SNES (and NES, and also likely N64) games from playing in regions they weren't sold in are a pair of chips known as lockout chips.  One exists in each game cartridge, and one exists on the console's motherboard.  If the motherboard chip doesn't get the proper input from the cartridge chip, the game doesn't run.  This is also why 3rd-party and home-brew games don't work in the consoles.  (Oddly enough, North American and Japanese games use the same lockout chips; the only thing stopping their use on the other console is a modification of the cartridge slot to accept a slightly different shaped case.)

The thing is, if the lockout chip gets temporarily disabled, the game will start up.  For NES carts other than those produced by Tengen (who built their own lockout chip), this meant sending a negative voltage spike to the chip — something that didn't work with later consoles after Nintendo redesigned them to compensate for this. However, if the pin that lets the chip know whether it's the master (console) or slave (cartridge) gets disconnected/grounded, the chip ends up in slave mode — at which point, according to Nintendo, "an unstable state takes place and no operations are performed at all."  Operations, in this case, referring to the console being reset by its chip, or the cartridge ROM being disabled by its chip.

So, de-solder pin 4 (master/slave) from the chip labeled UC8 on the PCB and I'm good to go, right?  Well maybe.

Universal adapters became popular during the SNES's lifetime, especially in Europe where some games never got released.  Generally they worked by making two cartridge slots available; into one went the game you wished to play, into the other went a game from the correct region.  The console's chip talked to the second cartridge's chip, thereby fooling it into thinking that the game you actually were playing was from the correct region.  You can make a guess as to how pleased Nintendo was over this.

Nintendo's solution to this, added to some late-life-cycle games, was to have the game check with the video chip to see what speed it was outputting at (50Hz for PAL, 60Hz for NTSC.)  If this didn't match what was expected when the cartridge's ROM was loaded, you got this:

There's a solution for that too; sending a +5V or 0V charge to a pin on each of the SNES's two PPUs (Picture Processing Units) changes whether they output at 50Hz or 60Hz.  There's one problem though: late revisions (from at least 1995 onwards) of the SNES motherboard integrated several chips, including the PPUs, into a single chip, for which there is no known way to change the video speed.  Anyone care to guess what revision my motherboard is?

So it's off to the flea-market I go on Sunday.  My goal? To find the oldest (and therefore likely grimiest) looking SNES there (after all, I have a decent case I can place the board in), and hope I get one with the double graphics chips.  This is turning into a rather large endeavour for a game that I could easily emulate if I wasn't so big into physical objects.

Lunch Hour Is The Most Boring Hour

It would appear that I'm not the only one for whom the phrase "Canada's new government" raises ire.  Fisheries Minister Loyola Hearn apparently refuses to use it.

I'm curious: given Harper's obvious desire for an election, will we still be hearing/seeing it afterward even if they do win?

I Hate To Say I Told You So…

…Especially when it's something as blindingly obvious as the fact that early DST didn't result in any noticeable power savings, but, well…

I told you so.

April Is The Cruelest Month

…and, in honour of this fact, it's "cruelest reading" month.  All the crap books that I've picked up on clearance because they're crap?  Yeah, you're on warning that it's reading time.

Hal Lindsay?  Bet you didn't see this coming in Revelations.

John Norman?  Well-ly shall I read you.

Pat Robertson?  … Ok, I still haven't quite assimilated that fact that Pat "Prayer Assault" Robertson actually wrote a novel, but dammit I shall read it.  And either laugh or cry while doing so — quite possibly both.

I think that about sums up all the crap that I know is floating around on my bookshelves, though there might be a few more hiding in the back and waiting to mug a naive work of literature that ventures out alone at night.