November 2007 Archives

As Kasparov whined over Deep Blue, I ascend to my pulpit to gripe about how terribly irritating it was to get killed at arcade Tetris the other night. After all, with nearly 400 wins at online Tetris DS, how could this happen!?!

One problem is in the joystick. It takes a long time to get the thing over to the point where it actually moves the piece. If you need to move a piece over, say two spots, you have two options, smack the joystick over with two decisive thwacks, or thwack and hold for a second (Which I suspect is what the designers of the arcade machine had in mind). With a keyboard (or D-Pad), since the action is low, you can hit the key twice and know where you'll be at. Its kind of like if you had to pull a lever for each key on the keyboard when you're typing. Sometimes you have a double letter, but you don't press and hold a key every time you need to type a character twice... you just double-tap.

Listen up Canucks! If you live in the States, you've probably run into some stupid company that won't take your Canadian-issued credit card because their computer systems won't accept a postal code instead of a zip code.

Once, a Netflix customer service rep.was good enough to explain to me that we had "letters in there or somethin'." It wasn't quite as good as having an Apple Store employee get angry with me because Ontario is not in the United States, and therefore what I am showing her is not "state-issued  ID." In any event, I managed to punch my way through newegg.com's stupid system that wouldn't accept my credit card.

Story goes like this: I can't put in my Province or Postal Code into the newegg site, so I call them up. "We don't accept foreign currencies" they tell me. I ask if they understand how VISA cards work. They say "yes," but are clearly lying. Anyways, then I try to use my Paypal account, but doing this takes over your shipping address, and I can't put a US address into Paypal. I call them up, and they say I'll have to cancel my account, then create a new American one, but it'll take several days to clear or something. Feels very 1.0, so I decided to just barrel ahead.

Here's all you have to do to pay with a Canadian credit card (and get delivery to the USA):