Spoilers for the major plotlines of recent seasons of The West Wing:
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I bought Myst V: End of Ages a few weeks ago, and I’ve been playing it since (alternating with the advanced levels of Marble Blast Gold, which I’ve been slowly working my way through for about a year). Very minor spoilers below.

If you recall my entries on Myst III and Myst IV, I have yet to finish a Myst game without help. I’m trying to solve Myst V myself, although technically I may have already failed: I was unable to get past the very first door in the game (not even a puzzle, really), without Laura’s help. That’s less help than I used for the previous games, though, and I’m trying to get it done by myself. What makes this both very hard and very easy at the same time is that I already own the Official Strategy Guide. For some reason, the standard retail edition of the game is Windows-only; to get the Mac program, I had to buy the Limited Edition, which includes the strategy guide along with some other extras. So if I wanted to cheat, it would be oh-so-easy, and in part, the ease of cheating makes it easier to resist.

I’m now about half done, or at least I’ve completed half of the items necessary for the task the game has given me. I don’t know how this equates in terms of time spent, or even of actual gameplay. But I feel like I’ve accomplished something. Of course, it gets harder from here, since Myst V is non-linear, and I’ve solved the half that I found easier. I’ve actually been stuck at pretty much the same place for almost a week now, but I finally made a breakthrough earlier this evening, which was very exciting: I decided to look at everything again, deliberately and carefully, and noticed a clue I hadn’t seen before, which made everything click into place. That’s what I love about the Myst games; when suddenly it all makes sense. The part I don’t like is the hours of frustrating madness leading up to that point.

I like the world of this game a lot, and the puzzles are closer to Myst and Riven than Myst III and IV, and that’s a good thing. But the game mechanics are a little challenging. The new exploration modes are cool, but I switch between them a lot, since none of them seems to be better (maybe that’s intentional). There are also some bugs in the game, and it’s much slower on my PowerBook than it ought to be. And in the height of frustrating, I once accidentally solved an entire age far before I was supposed to; I was frustrated and doing essential random things, and accidentally got close enough to the correct action that the game thought I had solved it. Luckily I had saved recently, and was able to immediately quit, reload my saved game, and try to forget what I had done. But that was rather upsetting.

Minor problems aside, I am very happy with Myst V so far. We’ll see how I feel when/if I ever complete it.

I previous detailed my experience with my first Cingular bill after getting the Treo. I’ve gone through two billing cycles since then, and although I have technically yet to receive a bill, there have been plenty of problems. The first one, of which, of course, is that I have yet to receive a bill.
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It’s now becoming that annoying time of year where it’s warm and sunny when I bike to the train station in the morning, but cold and dark in the evening on the way home. Invariably, this means I choose the wrong clothing and am uncomfortable during at least one of the two trips.

From a Usenet post by Michael Urban:

As a result, the two best Star Trek movies in the last ten years
have been “Galaxy Quest” and “Master and Commander”. There’s
something wrong there.

I must admit I haven’t seen Master and Commander, but GalaxyQuest is a darn fine movie.

On a personal aside, I was a little suspicious of the “last ten years” reference, since I liked Star Trek VI a lot. Then I looked it up, and realized that said movie premiered just a few months shy of fourteen years ago. When did I get so old?

BTW, I watched the first half of “Encounter at Farpoint” today. I was prepared for the first few episodes of TNG to be a little raw and unpolished compared to the show at its stride, but I was completely shocked at just how bad this episode seemed.

Over the past few months, I’ve been having Netflix send me Star Trek: The Original Series on DVD, which I’ve been watching, at the rate of about one a day. This morning, I watched the final episode (“Turnabout Intruder”), and put it in the mail.

It was interesting to watch the series. I haven’t seen any episodes of the show in a long time; I used to watch them in reruns sometimes when I was little, but once they moved to cable channels I don’t subscribe to, I ceased seeing them. There are also a lot of episodes I had never actually seen, although of course I had read all the episode descriptions back in my days as a teenage Star Trek fanatic.

I was surprised at how dated some of the series felt; some of the attitudes displayed about sex and race felt very out of place compared to modern day. It was also interesting to see how inconsistent the series was in terms of characterization and writing quality. A lot of the aspects that come immediately to mind when I think of Star Trek appear only briefly, but were probably intensified by pop culture references and the feature films.

Next up, Star Trek: The Next Generation.

It occurred to me just now that while it’s quite common for companies to put their logo on T-shirts, hats, pens, posters, watches, keychains, beach towels, plush dolls, jackets and even Christmas tree ornaments, but I have never seen anyone offering to sell or give away a logo welcome mat. Who wouldn’t want to have to step over their best-loved corporate brand on their way through their own front door. Wouldn’t you want visitors to see, even before they ring your doorbell, your favorite advertising slogan?

I think I may be on to something here.

The other day I received as change California and Oregon state quarters. It was the first time I had seen either, and looking at both at once, I noticed that they really rather look like two parts of the same scene. Thanks to the magic of Photoshop, I’m able to share it with you.

I guess it’s not all that surprising that they look alike. The quarters depit Yosemite Valley and Crater Lake, both of which lie along the Sierra Nevada mountain range. There sure is some beautiful scenery ’round these parts. Laura and I are going to be driving up to Ashland at the end of the week; I always like to drive past Mount Shasta. At the right time of year, it resembles nothing more than a giant marble cake.

Actually, glancing at the Minnesota quarter that was released—and the state admitted to the Union—between California and Oregon, it’s a tree-and-lake design as well. Is 2005 nature year for quarters?

I’ve spoken with Cingular customer service five times in the past two days. Six if you count the time they called (independently) to do a survey on how happy I was with my new Cingular service.

On Monday, I received my first bill since switching my account and getting the new phones. Even though my Treo is signed up for the PDA Connect unlimited data plan, they had charged me per-kilobyte for the data I had used. This, of course, made for a far larger bill than I expected.

My first call to customer service, Tuesday morning, was rather unhelpful. The woman I spoke to assured me that, in fact, I was not allowed to have the PDA Connect data plan on a FamilyTalk shared-minutes plan, regardless of whether or not the Cingular store sold it to me or that it was how my account was set up. She put me on hold and claimed to confirm this with her supervisor. She said the only way to fix it was to sign up each phone for an individual plan (at extra monthly expense), and did not offer to refund the extra charges on my bill.

I called back about two hours later, and spoke to another rep, who examined the notes from the first conversation and had no explanation for what the earlier person might have been thinking. She assured me that I was allowed to have a Treo with unlimited data on the family plan, and added a credit to my account. She also identified the problem that caused the billing error: Apparently, my account was set up with both the unlimited and pay-per-use data plans, and the latter was adding the per-kilobyte charges to my bill, even though I had the unlimited PDA plan. She removed the pay-per-use data plan from my account.

Unfortunately, after that, my phone stopped being able to connect to the data service at all. I called again Tuesday evening, but the customer service rep I talked to was unable to find anything wrong, and since it was too late for tech support to be open, suggested I call back the next data.

Wednesday morning I called again, and was transferred to the data support line. I spoke with a fellow who had me change some of the settings on my phone; I changed the GPRS APN and user name to different values that allowed me to connect, although he assured me that the original settings should have also worked. He said he had identified a problem with the account, and had made some changes that could take a few hours to take effect. He said to call back if I still couldn’t use the original settings after that.

By Thursday morning, although I could connect with the new settings, the old ones still didn’t work. Admittedly, no one had been able to explain to me what the difference was between the two, but since the original settings were supposedly the correct ones for my device and plan, I called data support again. I spoke with another fellow who was able to identify the problem—my account’s WAP provisioning had been disabled—and fixed it by adding back the pay-per-use data plan to my account. He assured me that this shouldn’t cause me to be charged for use, since I had the unlimited data plan, but said I should keep an eye on my bill just in case.

I sense another call or two to Cingular coming when I receive next month’s statement.

I finally got a Treo 650. First thoughts, in no particular order:

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I found this in a Google search.

Normally, I use Yahoo! Local to search for restaurants near my house; it’s very handy, as I’ve noted before. However, I’ve been using Google Maps more frequently than Yahoo! Maps recently (Yahoo’s driving directions are far better than Google’s though), so I figured I’d give Google Local a try.

It turns out that if you search Google Local for the “Restaurants” category, you get an almost completely different set of businesses than if you search for a category of “Restaurant”. This is, to say the least, not useful. It seems that if you search for “restaurant” (not as a category, just as a text search, and non-ppural), you get most of the restaurants, but this is hardly intuitive, and I can’t quite figure out why the “Restaurants” category exists, if not to include all the other restaurant categories.

I guess this is what Google means by “beta.”

…you see a roadsign marked “Santa Rosa Jr College” and wonder to yourself Who is Santa Rosa, Junior?

On January 14, 2005, Boeing announced plans to end production of the 717 jetliner. Obviously, this isn’t new news, but browsing through the Boeing Web site, I was rather surprised to discover that not only was there an aircraft I had never heard of, but that it was being canceled less than six years after first delivery. The aircraft doesn’t appear to have been a flop; the sales numbers I saw looked fairly healthy.

After reading a bit more about the history of the 717, I think I understand better. The 717 is really the McDonnell-Douglas MD-95, the successor to the DC-9/MD-80/MD-90. The 717 was designed and built in former Douglas facilities. I guess the aircraft was far enough along in its development prior to the 1997 merger—the first order was placed in 1995—that Boeing kept it around for a while before deciding to discontinue it with the other McDonnell-Douglas products.

I do find it amusing that the same Web page declaring that Boeing is concluding 717 production declares it “the world’s best jetliner specifically designed for the short-haul, high frequency 100-passenger airline market.”