Unwelcome Guests

The ides of war are upon me... since 3 months now, I'm waging a terrible war against a devilishly invader of my home. The dark brood Drosophila Melanogaster, also known as the common fruit fly.

Here is a photo of their common soldier:

Fear their evil gaze.....

This little siege of my home started 3 months ago when the clever villain of an insectoid smuggled it's eggs in an inconspicious tomato into my home. These little monsters have an infamous reproduction rate and over a night, I faced the first wave of their attack.
But I was ready to face this blatant assault of what is my hideout. Armed with swatter and vacuum cleaner I wrought havoc on these villanous wretches, the vacuum cleaner my frontline assault in my left hand, in my right, the swatter fighting down whatever escaped my onslaught. In a sucking which could only be described as an epic battle, a hundred unkempt members of their blackguard were smashed into oblivion.
But the plague did not stop with this... seeing their once strongly fortified foothold of my biologic wastebucket being crushed under the sucking power of my vacuum cleaner, clever agents went into hiding where I could not see them.
One week later, the black-brown scourge returned in all it's chitinous glory, for some reason taking a particular interest in the curtains of the room. While I can only guess what insidious mechanism they were planning to work from this, I decided ignorance is indeed bliss and vanquished their establishment once more with the aid of my trusty warhorse called vacuum cleaner, the swatter my glorious sword.
Yet, like the dog that didn't bark at night, the highly reproductive brown swarm keeps on reoccuring in regular pace out of nowhere it seems. After three months of wearing battle against the scourge, I've come up with a cunning yet distasteful weapon which can only be what the bomb was to Nagasaki. Under careful preparations I've gained access to a new tool of warfare. Named the project "Kärcher der Rächer", it will hopefully put an end to this reoccuring nightmare by vacuuming the places even my limited vacuum cleaner cannot reach.

It chills me to the bone thinking about their reproduction: These godless monsters, being reduced to a mere individuals every onslaught must have distasteful incestuous tendencies.
Furthermore, it are the words of old Darwin that add a certain despair to my situation.
"Survival of the fittest"... one can only lament about Darwin's Damokles sword over my head... I am certain it's only a matter of time till the ultimate superfly will evolve, horrors that certainly match the strange depictions of Dark Horse comic books.

To add a certain hint of bad humour to my situation:
I am studying Biology with aim on Genetics and Biochemistry. Drosophila Melanogaster is also known as the pet animal of the geneticists. Everybody who knows who Thomas Hunt Morgan was should know what I'm speaking of.
So whether this invasion here is a cruel joke of mother nature, a strange pointer of fate or merely coincidence is yet to be determined...

Night of the 100 Games

This weekend I pulled of a freak-nerd-stunt. Over the last couple of weeks i downloaded a nice package containing all 100 Neo Geo CD games via bittorrent. I won't say where, but i will give you a litte hint, with which you can feed google: "euroemu". Now I had all these games lying on my harddisk in iso and mp3 files. I wrote a little script to convert all the mp3 files in the current directory to wav files and afterwards burn them together with the iso track on a cd-r. Luckily all files where named in the after the same scheme, so my script worked flawlessly and all i had to do to burn a game was entering "burngame $gamename" in a terminal. To test and play the games I used the wonderfull Neo4All emulator for the dreamcast, one of the best emulators I have ever used. The userinterface is very nice and while still being beta it can play almost all games perfectly. Now that the set-up was done, the fun could begin. Since the burning process with converting some 30 mp3 files per game took some time, I had 5 to 10 minutes to check out every game. SNK clearly makes the best beat 'em up games. It's sad that most of them were only released to arcades or to the Neo Geo home consoles, which are extremely rare and expensive. Just check out what ebay has to offer if you search for "neo geo" if you don't believe me. :) The whole "perfomance" (I call it performance, because I felt like an artist juggling the whole night with cd-rs and a gamepad) lasted about 13 hours. Actually I should be writing my internship report, but pulling allnighters just for playing as many games as possible is more fun. Perhaps I should put one of these "motivation"-posters on the nonexistent wall behind monitors.

modding an old saturn

the saturn i bought a couple of weeks ago had one big disadvantage of which i got rid this week. it had no modchip, therefor it could only play original pal copies. to get rid of this handicap, i searched around the internet and quickly found some guys selling modchips. one in America, one in the UK and one in Hong-Kong. the guy in the uk had the largest selection. i emailed him to find out which modchip i should get, because i have a very old european model 1 saturn and most modchips are designed for the newer model 2. you can read about those issues in the segaxtreme forums. after some further research i decided to give it a go and buy the v1.1 modchip which rob recommended. since i also wanted to be able to play imports and have a memory expansion i ordered a special action replay module, too. shipping via priority airmail took only two days. when the package arrived i immediately pulled my saturn out of the shelf and headed with everything i needed into my workshop. the one thing i was missing though was an instruction on how to install this specific chip. rob only had one for the v2 on his site and said it would be similar. to my surprise the v1.1 i a lot easier to install. you can read here how i did it.

more anime

since i dont have anything better to do, except perhaps writing my internship report, which sucks and is therefor postponed until some other time, i checked out some new german fansubs. i do this quite often, but most of the time i only find stuff that i already have with english subs, but not this time. yesterday i stumbled upon two releases which made me curious: GUNxSWORD and Sousei no Aquarion
It's summary stated that GUNxSWORD plays in a dreamworld, but theres no such thing mentioned in the first episode. the setting has a wild west feel to it, but its not limited to that, there are also giant mecha, which look very cool and have colorful flashy attacks, furthermore the main character can heal himself and has a mysterious sword which can be deformed like it was a towel. the soundtrack together with the whole experience reminded me a bit of Hellsing.
now to the second one. again mecha and a post apocalyptic setting, but this time more like Neon Genesis Evangelion with different mysticial christian symbolism, with some borrowings from the atlantis myth and Power Rangers added. fast action sequences and a cool soundtrack, make this series very enjoyable. again i have only watched one episode yet, so this review is rather preliminary.