So lots of projects right now. I need, for obscure reasons, some high-performance 50-pin SCSI drives. I’m trying to find a nice new camera for my parents (DMC-LC70 on eBay, I’m looking at you), I’m trying to buy Eric’s camera, and there’s the usual fuzz of bicycle projects ranging from the sane (replace brake pads) to the insane (just about everything to do with the Auto-mini, a BMX for my mom…).

Regarding these, if you have any suggestions for a source of old SCSI drives, or a good camera in the $200-300 price range, I’m all ears.

My very, very stupidest project of recent days was the Katamari Damacy music project. Essentially, I loved and desired the music from this great little game. I searched high and low for some secret PS2 hacking tool that would give me access to the music tracks. The short answer is that it would probably have required hacking assembly code in the hopes of finding the entry and exit points to the music data.

Then, as I was ready to go insane (or possibly order the soundtrack from Japan), I discovered when you finish the game, you unlock clean copies of all the in-game songs. Oh. New plan: play songs through the receiver, run cable from the receiver’s headphone jack to the laptop audio-in.

Not to be ungrateful, but the sound room plays most of these tracks as a loop (interestingly skipping some sort of short start loop with most of these songs; presumably this is how the songs are looped during each level in the game) with no indication of where the songs end. So I can’t tell how long to record.

So other than that, the usual: bike ride in the morning, Katamari Damacy in the afternoon, dropped by Daniel’s house in the evening, coming up with a terrible parlour game: given a movie title, add another movie that shares at least one word with the first film, and then describe the mash-up plot before giving the film name.

Example: “I want to see that film about the kids who build a Russian nuclear sub in their back yards and then defect to the us side! You know, The Hunt for Red October Sky.”

Paul “won” the game with his description of the daring adventures of a group of WWII sailors who plotted to take over a German submarine by pretending to be crazy, U-571 Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.