I heard one on the radio this morning, though, that stretched the truth just a little too far. It was advertising the radio station itself, a classic rock station, and was maybe twenty or thirty seconds long. It was a gentleman in his 40s or 50s offering a testimonial about how great he thought the radio station was. He sounded very convincing! He sounded like he was speaking on the phone, so the idea is you’re supposed to believe his message was recorded when he called in to the station to pay them a compliment. You couldn’t even tell he was reading  a script. Very convincing indeed.

Until, that is, you paid attention to what he was saying. Here is his message, paraphrased: “Your station is all I ever listen to. I used to have to download all the old classics, which was a hassle, but then I discovered your station and now I can just listen to them for free whenever I want. I chucked my old mp3 player and listen to [radio station] all the time now. You guys rock!”

So let me get this straight. Here’s a guy who made it to middle age without discovering the joys of FM radio? A guy who threw out his expensive electronic gadget — presumably already filled with the “old classics” — when he found out he could listen to those same songs on the radio, in between commercials? Really?

There’s been this big to-do lately about how so-and-so wants to legally force an FM receiver into the next generation of smart phones. I guess now we know who supports that nonsense.

See, instead of having traditional sick days or holidays, employees who deal with PTO actually stash a bank of hours. You get a few hours tacked on every paycheck, and you cash them in to take paid days off. If your pinky toe explodes and you need to take the day off to see a doctor and get fitted for a robotic one, you’d accomplish this by cashing in eight PTO hours.

Years ago Peanut had this pretty sweet gig where she was paid an eight hour shift differential each week. In essence, she was working thirty-two hours but getting paid for forty. This was the company’s decision, not hers, since they didn’t need someone putting forty hours into that particular position but also didn’t want to lose a valuable full-time employee. Only having four eight-hour shifts a week was pretty nice, but of course our budget was balanced on both of us earning forty hours.

If, for some reason, she didn’t work her entire thirty-two hours, she lost her shift differential. Say, if she went in one hour late? She lost that one hour (in PTO) and then lost another eight off her paycheck. If she ever needed a day off she lost the equivalent of a full shift’s pay in addition to the eight hours of PTO she had to cash in. She ended up having to find somewhere to work an extra shift at some point in that pay period if she wanted to make her bills. To get a “day off” she had to cash in her PTO and then work the shift anyway so as not to lose her shift differential.

It was the functional equivalent of just switching shifts with a co-worker, but the company wouldn’t allow that. They were bleeding off their PTO for no reason.

An even more devilish scheme is taking place where I’m at now. Because we’re a 24/7 call center we are open on all those nice little holidays the rest of the country takes for granted. Labor Day, for example. They operate these holidays with a skeleton crew, so what happens is they put out a Holiday Sign-Up sheet. Now let me compose myself a moment and see if I can explain this properly.

If you’re scheduled to work on the same day as the holiday, you by default get it off. You’re forced to cash in eight hours of PTO. If you don’t want the day off, you can sign up to work a shortened shift that day. They pay time-and-a-half on holidays, so you’re working four hours and getting paid for six, but you still need to cash in two hours of PTO to make up the difference. So really your options are “cash in eight hours of PTO” or “cash in two hours of PTO”. And that’s if you’re lucky enough to make it to the Holiday Sign-Up sheet before all the four-hour shifts are taken.

But me? I’ve lucked my way into this scheme where I beat the PTO system and come out ahead. Because I work such a nontraditional shift, I’m not subject to the whims of the Holiday Sign-Up sheet. If I’m scheduled to work a holiday, like I am today, I’m just expected to show up. I don’t actually miss the holiday in my real life, if I had something planned, because nobody celebrates holidays in the middle of the night. And I’m not forced to cash in any of my PTO, because I’m not actually taking any hours off. I still get that time-and-a-half, though — twelve hours’ pay for working eight.

So my PTO is just sitting there, quietly stockpiling, never touched by shift differentials or sign-up sheets. It can be cashed in for time off or, with some extra paperwork, for cold hard cash. So one day I’ll have enough to take a month-long nap, or at least buy myself one of those awesome robotic toes I’ve been hearing so much about.

And then the swirling nature of bananas, milk and ice cream caused my brain to dig up this old memory. Buckle in dudes, this is some straight-up Wonder Years shit here.

I wasn’t always the godless heathen I am now. Back in high school I was actually pretty involved with my church, and especially with the youth group. When I wasn’t in school or at church, I was working at a local ice cream store a couple miles from where I lived. This was before I had a car, so I used to rollerblade to work every day. One day, as I was sitting outside the church strapping on my skates, one of my youth group leaders came strolling up, with several of my church friends in tow. She asked if I wanted a ride.

I accepted, not only because it was really hot and I kind of didn’t want to skate anywhere, but also because I really liked this lady and very desperately wanted to impress her. I thought an excellent way to do this would be to show off how hard-working and responsible I was. I was very proud of myself. I was absolutely beaming when I climbed into the back of her van with the other kids, and she said, “Hey, maybe we’ll all get ice cream while we’re there.”

So we get to my work, and I zip in the back to clock in and affix my official ice cream store apron. I distinctly recall this part: the aprons only got laundered once a month or so, and I spent what seemed like way too much time very carefully selecting the cleanest one. I clocked in, went out to the lobby, made a big show of grabbing my ice cream scoops and said, in the most nonchalant-I-am-totally-just-doing-my-job-and-not-trying-to-impress-anybody voice I could muster: “Okay, what can I getcha?”

She said, “I’d like a banana, and a glass of milk.”

I was devastated. It’s like, we didn’t have milk, and we didn’t really have bananas. I mean, we had bananas, but they were for mixing into ice cream, not for just selling to people. And I had to explain this to the nice church lady, with everyone standing there watching me. I told her I could sell her a banana for forty-nine cents (which should only have gotten her half a banana, but I was feeling pretty bad about the whole thing), but milk was outside of the realm of possibility.

She said, very politely, “That’s okay, I don’t want the banana if I can’t have milk.”

Then she took the kids and left. They didn’t get ice cream either.

I was understandably bummed after that. I felt like I had let her down, and that in doing so I had embarrassed myself in front of my friends. I was really mad at my boss for not selling milk and bananas. It really seemed to me that milk was a thing we should be selling. Ice cream is made of milk. Milkshakes have milk right there in the title. You can flavor milk with chocolate or strawberry syrup, and probably a bunch of other things we had on hand.

Looking back, though, with some real adult life experience etc., I’m just really mad at that nice church lady. I didn’t think about it at the time, but why wouldn’t she at least buy ice cream for the other kids? Those kids didn’t leave the store thinking, “Wow, what kind of shitty ice cream place does Brick work at? They don’t even have milk. Let’s walk away from here, and laugh at him forever.” They left thinking, “Hey, wait — weren’t we supposed to get ice cream? What happened to our ice cream? We didn’t want bananamilk. We wanted ice cream. Ice cream? Ice cream!”

The least she could have done would have been to accept the forty-nine cent banana. That way we both could have saved face.

(Yes, Peanut already had a laptop. But it was too heavy, and not purple. Why do you ask?)

Let’s say you live near a lake. You know this lake intimately — you grew up with it, you visit it often. It’s in the news all the time. You say, “Hey, let’s go to the lake,” and everyone around you knows precisely which lake you mean. The word lake, to you, still retains that original definition of “a large hole in the ground filled with water”. You understand, intellectually, that there are lakes all over the world of all shapes and sizes. But it is forever tainted by your personal biases. You measure the essential lake-ness of all lakes, everywhere, by the lake you know. When someone outside of your little bubble uses the phrase “the lake” to refer to a lake that is not yours, it seems wrong and weird to you… if only for a moment.

I’m like this with the word “hotel”. Where I live, all the hotels are down along the beach. If someone comes to visit and is staying at a hotel, you have to go down to the beach to visit them. And why not? Our beaches are beautiful year-round, and most of the people who come to visit are here on vacation. It stands to reason, then, that all the hotels would be on the beach.

As a result, I’ve attached certain beach-like qualities to the word “hotel”. When I think of a hotel, I think of sand and sea. Paintings of seagulls in the living room, starfish-shaped mirrors in the bathroom. Balconies overlooking swimming pools, overlooking the Gulf of Mexico. Names that call to mind seashells or palm trees or ocean waves.

Upon arriving at our hotel in Washington D. C. earlier this year, there was a moment where everything felt very out-of-place. “That’s not a hotel. I don’t know what that is, but it’s not a hotel. There’s no beach anywhere.”

Similarly, there are words in my vocabulary that notably don’t have outside connotations attached to them. Like “river”. There are no rivers where I live, at least not within the radius of a tank of gas. I can’t even name a river anywhere in the state of Florida, if any notable ones even exist. I don’t think I’ve ever been to a river in my life, outside of driving over them from time to time while traveling out of state. So when I envision a river, what comes to mind is a very sterile, textbook image. You know, a map with a squiggly blue line drawn on it.

Ancient Egyptians revered their river as a god. My outlook on the subject would have been more than simply foreign to them; it would have been utterly alien.

The way we mold and shape our language to fit our own daily life happens automatically. You don’t even notice it happening. Thousands of words are rattling around in your brain right now that have slightly different connotations to you than they do to your next door neighbor. Thinking about it in these terms, it’s amazing any of us are ever able to communicate anything to anyone.

I’ll start by spelling out what I want, I suppose. I want a big red button which, when I push it, records whatever window I point it at for however long I want. I also want this program to record audio from my stereo mix. (Ideally I’d like it to record the game audio and my mic input as separate tracks, which can be adjusted individually later, but one thing at a time here.)

Camtasia is fairly resource-intensive, especially when you try to record lossless video like I do. It inexplicably doesn’t record some programs properly, and I can’t for the life of me figure out what’s wrong with it. The program’s worst quality, though, is that it doesn’t record in real time. When you’re done with recording and you press the stop button, it chugs along rendering a proprietary video file. If this process is interrupted in any way, say by a sudden power flash or random software glitch, chances are good that all your work is flushed. I’ve lost 45-minute-long recordings this way.

Camtasia’s editor is absolutely perfect for my purposes, certainly better than anything else I’ve tried to use. So the good news is, if I can get some other recorder to spit out an .avi or something it’s easy to load it up and work with it.

On the other hand I have FRAPS, which records great lossless video but absolutely crap audio. When I try to record narration through this software it sounds like I’m at the other end of a tunnel. I’d usually go in and start finnicking with settings at this point, see if maybe something’s wrong, but FRAPS doesn’t have any settings. Your options are limited to “record sound” and “don’t record sound”. So while FRAPS is chugging away getting my image I have to use some other program to get my sound, then stitch the .avi and .mp3 together after the fact.

Not a fat hairy deal, sure, but slightly more complicated than “I want a big red button.”

I’ve tried a few other programs, here and there, over the past few months. None of them are even in the same ZIP code as Bigredbuttonsville, though. As things stand now it’s a matter of using the proper tool for the job at hand, be it the nice flashy program that might lose everything because it hiccuped, or the weird background one that can’t be configured and doesn’t know what audio is. Don’t worry, I’ll make do. Sometimes these things brighten up a bit once you’ve bitched about them.

I’ve been getting this message several times a day for the past month or so. The date keeps getting pushed back every couple days, otherwise it’s exactly the same. I’ve tried blocking and warning AIM, but apparently they don’t stand for that kind of nonsense.

The whole situation is pretty amusing, honestly. What’s going to happen at midnight tonight, I wonder? Will my AIM program finally explode forever? Or will I be granted another stay of execution? Stay tuned.

Post-midnight udpate: Hahaha, in your face, AIM! I’m having pointless conversations with your old, unsupported software as we speak! Advantage: Brickroad!

Sometimes I’ll just occupy myself drawing squares within squares. It’s cathartic, in a way.

Once in a while a phone call will catch me unawares at the office, and I’ll end up taking down notes or numbers on graph paper instead of my regular note paper. When that happens I admit I die a little inside. What a waste of wonderful, glorious squares, you know? A heavy duty eraser helps, but it’s not the same. It’s never the same.

The primary use of graph paper this week, of course, has been planning out Minecraft stuff. Stuff I haven’t actually had time to implement. The server is still up, of course, and various pals and/or buddies of mine have built no end of great stuff. Naturally there is a heavy emphasis on vidjagame sprites:

In other news, the rewatching spree continues. I’m delighted to report that I didn’t notice any piddly little nitpick stuff that made me retroactively hate The Mexican.

I did the same thing with MIDI playlists of course.

The sad ending to this story is that my step-father could never appreciate the majesty of chiptunes, and would quickly get fed up listening to it. Sometimes he would make a compromise, matching me disc-for-disc in the changer by putting a Beatles album in alongside the soundtrack to Mario Kart 64. Other times he would shut it off altogether, muttering something about it being his house and damn kids etc.

For some reason it never occurred to me to buy headphones.

Anyway, I was living on my own at the height of the Gamecube/PS2 era, and I decided to capitalize on the old “vidja games ain’t real music” in-joke by making a mix CD full of tracks from video games that sounded like honest-to-god real music. In fact, that’s pretty much what I called it:

I know that cover looks like something designed by your 6-year-old nephew, but I assure you I was well into my 20s when I came up with it.

I had forgotten all about this CD (which must have been a gag gift for Christmas) until my step-dad dragged it back out of the closet the other night while we were over there visiting. We listened to the whole thing and I think it still holds up fairly well as something you could show to a music lover to say, “See? Game music is real music!”

I think my goals for selecting the tracks I did were to get a wide variety of styles, sticking to things with real instrumentation rather than samples/chiptunes, and avoiding Japanese lyrics altogether. Here’s the final track list, complete with YouTube links:

1. “Feedback” – Guilty Gear XX
2. “Snake Eater” – Metal Gear Solid 3
3. “Voyager” – Final Fantasy XI
4. “Hyrule Temple” – Super Smash Bros. Melee
5. “Main Theme” – Metal Gear Solid 2
6. “Que Sera Sera” – Katamari Damacy
7. “Fun and Mini-games” – Beyond Good & Evil
8. “Memory of Lightwaves” – Final Fantasy X-2
9. “Rainbow Road” – Mario Kart Double Dash
10. “Brave Sword, Braver Soul” – Soul Calibur II
11. “La Mer” – Suikoden IV
12. “Hikari (Orchestral Version)” – Kingdom Hearts
13. “PowerOne” – Breath of Fire: Dragon Quarter
14. “At Zanarkand” – Final Fantasy X

I had space left on the disc, so there’s a hidden fifteenth track which is just seven or eight minutes of “Pressing Issues with Maurice Chavez” from one of the talk radio stations in Grand Theft Auto: Vice City.

In conclusion, it makes me feel really, really old that games like FF10-2 and Suikoden IV have apparently been out long enough for me to have used their resources in a fun little project which was then completely forgotten about. Next you people will be telling me we’re up to double-digit Mega Man games.