::A Geek in Korea::

The games I play rarely get much of a reaction from my wife. Since I game on a handheld most of the time, unless I play it with her, she doesn’t know what I’m into at the time. Usually attempts to explain the plots to games go nowhere. She’s just happy if I stick to a new game for a few weeks before growing bored with it.

[video]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7oXx0qwe0wc[/video]

The game I get the most reaction out of when she watches me play is Resident Evil 4. This is mostly because of the Merchant character. Whenever I play, she’ll come in and repeat the overly gruff and ridiculous merchant character’s lines. In fact, I make it a point to visit the merchant just because she cracks me up every time she does this.

[video]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bOVLHsP9vak[/video]

(Warning: Graphic Video Game Violence and Hilarity)

Today, she doing her bead art on the couch while I was playing through a tough part of the game. I’d get trapped by some cultists, or would blast the heads off a chainsaw wielding maniac, but she didn’t pay much attention. I’d get killed, and she’d laugh.

She likes to root against me to get me riled up. But when she saw me visit the Merchant, she got ready for her lines. I don’t know what it is about that character. I really like Resident Evil 4, but I wish she enjoyed watching me play other stuff as much.

The last time I went to Europe, I wasn’t extremely well prepared for the trip. I had left Korea in the middle of a heat wave, and arrived in Europe to an unseasonably cold stretch of weather. I brought a bag, while perfect for the airport and mass transit travel of Korea, was bad for backpacking from site to site. I brought things to entertain me, like dominoes, video games with charges, and an mp3 player, that were much too heavy.  I didn’t have a bad time in Europe because of these mistakes, but this time around I’m trying to be much better prepared and want to share my experience with my wife.

Today, we did round two of our trial run pack for the trip. This time around, we had our stuff packed up well enough to see that we were going to be able almost everything a reasonable person would take with them. But this time, instead of trying to throw everything and the kitchen sink into our bag, we got a little more practical with what things we needed, and the amounts we would take with us.

For example, my wife packed a bottle of shampoo for me. She had saved an old shampoo bottle for this purpose, and filled it to the top for me. This was probably three months worth of shampoo. We’ll be traveling for one month. I told her that even if I wash my hair more than normal every time I get the opportunity, I couldn’t use the amount of shampoo she wanted to bring. A night in a sleeping cabin of a train means we’re going to miss a shower too. Even if she helped me try to use the shampoo, it was too much. She went back and found another disposable sort of bottle she usually used for contact solution that was one fifth the size to fill. We saved space, weight, and still can wash our hair.

Today was full of compromises like this. It was hard remember all those things that you only think about after you get back from a long trip and discover, “Man, I really didn’t need to lug that around did I?” I followed some advice I learned from my parents this time around and lightened up my travel book. I got rid of extra pages from countries I know we don’t have the opportunity to visit. The travel book is the single heaviest item I will carry daily, and I reduced it’s size by 50% percent! That frees up space for other things, spares my back, and keeps us travel light.

Checking our flight for Hong Kong to London, it turns out that there is only one Korean subtitled movie. Everything else is English, Chinese, or Japanese. We went to the bookstore to pick up a book to fight off boredom on the flight. I got a diary style book for a travel journal, and new ear plugs. We also got another LED flashlight, and some other odds and ends.

Other than some stuff we’re bringing for a Korean friend now in England, there isn’t much more we need to pick up before we go. We’ve set aside the clothes we’re bringing, and we’ve got a few more items in the process of getting washed that we need to add to the pile before we are truly ready to go. Of course, I only say that now. I’m sure by the end of the week when it’s time to go I’ll frantically discover I’m completely forgotten something I desperately need for the trip.

My wife doesn’t exactly share my love of geekery and computers. I am content to play with files, install and explore programs, and even maintain a website. She’s strictly a utilitarian sort of computer user. So far, I’ve got her logging in to her own account to check email or to browse the web using an installed version of Windows XP in a virtualization program. That’s good enough for now.

Today, I had this weird flash of inspiration. “Hey, I wonder of Rockbox works for the iriver H10 my parents bought my wife? That thing is a total pain in the ass. If it managed it’s own database, it might actually be worth using again. Plus, Rockbox is so cool to play with. I wonder what they’ve done with it since I last used it?”

When I went to check this morning, the Rockbox page was down. I wasn’t able to experiment setting up the firmware until after my wife got back home from running errands. The installation is unbelievably easy. Rename ONE file, place the bootloader, install the rest of the files by dropping a folder, fire it up and watch it go. No dangerous flashing of hardware or anything.

I love Rockbox because it lets you extend hardware. My wife’s mp3 player has a small 128×128 pixel resolution screen. Some bored hacker enabled video playback. Why? It’s like watching a movie on a postage stamp. This strikes me as awesome, if not pointless. It’s a “just because you can” sort of hack. Ogg Vorbis support? Custom themes? Games? DOOM port?! Who doesn’t want the opportunity to play DOOM on an Mp3 player? It’s completely impossible to try to beat, but it’s DOOM on an MP3 player. That’s just awesome.

I told her, “I’m going to upgrade your player. I won’t break it. I hope.

She willingly gave me her mp3 player to experiment on. I didn’t have to pry it out of her hands or anything. A lot of the improvements are “under the surface” and not as readily apparent as the streamlined GUI she is used to.  She doesn’t need to worry about building the database for the player, but I do. Anything that gets around the horrible software bundled with the H10 is good with me. I just hoped she was willing to navigate through some text menus instead of the id3 tag database she was used to.

Her primary concern was that since we moved to Linux, Korean fonts no longer work. This does sort of suck, since she listens to a lot of Korean music. She’d rather I go back to Windows XP just because her mp3 player isn’t working 100% correctly. Linux does 95% of everything else we need to do, and we aren’t going back, despite that annoyance. I’ll just have to figure that out some other way.

I’ve told her I’m on the lookout for workarounds. When I showed her Puzzle Bobble on her Mp3 player, she said, “That’s good. I can see it, so I can play that. Thanks!” While I still need to figure out how to get things working under Linux sometimes, at least there is a reason for her to understand why I am trying.