A DS Emergency Resolved

After approximately eighteen years of fruitless searching, I have finally found myself a replacement white DS Lite. Okay, it was only a week and a half but it's felt longer due to the amount of internet searching and shop searching I've been doing. Yes, I should get out more.

It was York HMV that came up trumps today. The last weeks have taught me one thing - HMV have DS Lites delivered on Tuesday morning. The first week I was too late. The second they only had pinks. This week I was in early at lunchtime and they had about 16 white ones in. Jackpot!

The downside was that the greedy b**stards wouldn't sell me one on its own, only as part of a "Mega Deal" which meant I had to buy two games and get a free accessory pack filled with things I don't need. Combined with my old ones, I now have five spare styli. That is too many. I've never lost one yet. Touch wood. Not that I need to touch wood when I have five spare ones.

I'll take better care of this new machine. The pack contained a case which I may use. It won't help if I drop it when it's not in the case though.

It also contained an "Emergency Battery Charger". Now, I love playing on the DS as much as the next small child but I find it hard to envisage any kind of real emergency where being able to charge a handheld games console would be some kind of solution.

Perhaps if you were trapped down a mountain crevasse and used up your whole battery playing Pokemon, and then suddenly realised that you had the internet browser cartridge with you. And then realised that, doh, you had used up all the battery. But then you realised you'd remembered the emergency battery charger and so you can charge the battery enough to connect to the internet and use email to send for help. And luckily, the crevasse you're in has wi-fi. In that sort of emergency I can see a real benefit. But not in any other.

Except even in that scenario, you'd probably have forgotten to put batteries in the emergency charger. So you'd die cold and alone.

I blame the parents

So my DS Lite is a little broken. Luckily, I still have my old DS original so I can continue to play Pokemon on its slightly dull rubbish screen(s) and unattractive case.

I intend to buy a new Lite asap but unfortunately this just isn't possible in the shops of York at the moment. Everywhere is sold out, even of pink ones. Obviously I'd never buy a pink one but I'd at least be mildly tempted if it was the only option. But its not even an option. That's probably a good thing as it removes the temptation to go pink.

It's been extremely hard to track the machines down round here for several months now. If anything, they were harder to find than Wiis before Christmas, and since then it hasn't got any better. I had reports from friends over the festive period that in other towns Wiis were gold-dust and DSs were ten-a-penny. But in York it seems the other way round.

The reason for the shortage is pretty obvious - it's f**king parents buying DS Lites for their f**king kids. In their thousands. I mean how dare they. I, as an adult, should be able to buy what I want when I want. If adults were going out and buying all the gin off supermarket shelves for their little darlings, leaving none for the actual grown-ups, there'd be outrage. If parents went out and bought all the jazz mags from newsagents for their tiny babies, there would be marches on the street from jazz aficionados like myself. And if they went out and purchased every single dirty magazine from the top shelf of all the newsagents (two shelves above the jazz mags) the grey mac brigade would be chaining themselves outside parliament and setting fire to their boxes of hankies.

But somehow it's alright for the idiots who have children, most of whom probably didn't even bother to go out and get a f***ing license, to snap up every bloody DS Lite off York's shelves (even the pink ones) leaving me, a tax paying man, deprived of what I deserve and NEED.

Arseholes. I hope they all die. And the kids too. And that the kids think of me in their wills and leave me an unbroken DS Lite. In white preferably.

Whoops

This probably isn't the cleverest thing I did yesterday:

Agents Are Go!

This is quite unusual but it's after work on a Friday and I'm at home and not in the pub. Been out the past two nights and had a fair few drinks so I'm not missing it too much. In addition I have a four hour drive in the morning so don't want to have too much tonight in any case. Will probably pop out for a while later on. It would be almost offensive to go to bed completely sober of a Friday.

In the meantime Elite Beat Agents is finally out on the DS so I'm having a lot of fun tapping away on that.

Wireless Notworking

A friend who lives in a nearby flat is moving soon and so arranged for his broadband connection to be disconnected. He gave his provider the one month's notice they required. Typically, they disconnected it straight away like idiots, leaving him without t'internet. So I said I'd let him share my wireless connection for a bit.

Now, my router was setup to use WPA security, but annoyingly this isn't compatible with the Nintendo DS - it can only use the inferior WEP. All my other wireless things, the Xbox, the Wii and the computers are fine with WPA. But not the DS. Curse you Nintendo!

So I figured I'd take the opportunity to downgrade the security to WEP so that a) I wouldn't have to give away one of my (oh so secret) passwords and b) so that I could use the DS online.

I should have learnt by now that it's not the cleverest thing in the world to change the wireless security settings on a wireless router whilst connected to it wirelessly. As soon as you change the settings you lose the connection and then things seem to start going wrong. This time I managed to mess things up more than normal and it took me a good half hour to get things working again and in the process I deleted all my keychain passwords. That'll no doubt annoy me for a few weeks.

And through all that I never managed to get WEP working - I just couldn't get the computer to connect with it. No idea why, as I know I've made it work in the past. This time I was a bit annoyed and worried that I might f**k things up even more so I just re-set up WPA with a brand new password and left it at that. Now I think I have everything working again...

Anyway, the connection is apparently working from my friend's flat, so he's happy.

If anybody knows a way to get a DS connected to a WPA network, please let me know!