dance games

It's all dr4b's fault. :-)

I've now tried DDR and Pump It Up. I can see how these would be addictive! Unless I get a home setup, though, I'll resist that. Arcades are both inconvenient and expensive.

Last week buoren brought his DDR stuff in to work. I played about five times (plus or minus one). I would have played more, but the parking lot was about to close and I didn't want to be locked in, especially on the night before a holiday. I let Kevin pick the dances and he knew I'd never played before, so I assume we played the easiest ones in the game. I did not fail the first time! (I got a D, but I didn't fail.) We were having a little trouble with the pads slipping, but my biggest problem by far was maintaining orientation. A shift of a few inches from center is enough to cause misses.

Last night after choir practice some of us went to Dave and Busters, and after eating dinner tangerinpenguin and I played PIU. That time I did fail the first time, as I did for at least half of the six dances I did with him. (Chris can do normal low-level stuff in his sleep, so he was acing these.) Two of those were level 4, though, so I don't feel bad. Again, my biggest problem was maintaining orientation. This time I noticed a spacing problem that I hadn't with DDR; the width you need to maintain to hit pairs of arrows is rather more than my usual stance. So I was missing a lot of arrows by being too close to the center. I wonder if the PIU board really is bigger, or if it just feels that way because it's using the diagonals. (Of course, if the squares are the same size then the PIU board is functionally bigger due to orientation.)

With PIU, I found that I was stomping on the board, not stepping lightly. (I don't think I was stomping with DDR, though I wasn't stepping especially lightly.) A lighter touch would improve speed and endurance; I wonder how sensitive the pad is.

The loud gawdy background images were not as much of a problem as I thought they'd be. I did not have trouble seeing the arrows most of the time.

I guess in one sense DDR might be easier: there are four pad positions, not five. (PIU uses the center; DDR does not.) DDR has the "step and hold" arrows to make up for it, but that doesn't seem hard (yet).

networking weirdness

Ever since the power surge (and resulting replacement of Linksys box and one other hub), we have been noticing sporadic weirdness on our network. We use DHCP to hand out IP addresses (doesn't everybody?). The Linksys box is configured (by default, if I recall correctly) to start handing out addresses at 192.168.1.100. The Linksys itself is 192.168.1.1. As best I recall, these are the same settings we used successfully on its predecessor for close to three years.

So now, every now and then, it will hand out the address 192.168.1.2. And that unlucky machine will be able to see the LAN but not the internet. Rebooting usually does not fix it, but creative sequences of reboots of all machines and power-cycling of the modem and Linksys usually do the trick.

We cannot find any common factor when this happens. Sometimes it just does.

Tonight, when I found myself the unwilling owner of 192.168.1.2, I decided to try an experiment: I gave myself a fixed IP address without changing anything at the Linksys end. I guessed that I should use 192.168.1.1 for the gateway and name service, rather than the "real" ones; after all, the Linksys box is supposed to resolve the interface issues between the local machines and the network, right?

This worked perfectly. In fact, in a rare Windows moment, I didn't even have to reboot!

I assume that as the other machines encounter the wayward 192.168.1.2 we'll make this adjustment on them, too, until nobody's using DHCP any more. Then we'll forget about this until some unlucky house guest wants to plug his laptop into the network. :-)

I feel like this is an ugly hack. I have not solved the real problem. But at this point I think I'm going to stop looking for it.

Because there is a strict quota on hardware happiness, I found that the 4-port hub we had lying around is really only a 2-port hub. (One is "uplink", which seems to be magic and does not work with anything I tried to plug into it, and one is just dead.) So I can't get rid of the cables strung across the floor just yet.