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Gamecube price drop–a plot?

I’m starting to wonder if the huge Gamecube price drop at Dixons isn’t part of some cunning plot by Nintendo to just shift large volumes of ‘cubes in advance of their big game releases this year (Metroid, Zelda), or just to have a stronger claim at second place in the console market in the UK (getting the edge on XBox).

Dixons and Nintendo would have to be in it together. A rumour “leaks” out of Dixons to the effect that they’re about to drop the GC from their retail line-up, and have dropped their prices to shift all their leftover stock. Nintendo puts out a denial. Everyone who had been thinking about getting a ‘cube at some point in the indeterminate future now thinks, “Hey, now’s the time to get one at Dixons, but I’d better grab one before they run out.”

Dixons shifts a couple of thousand units in the space of a week or two. Then they put out an official press release stating that they never intended to stop stocking the ‘cube (confirming Nintendo’s official line all along), and that the price reduction was just a special offer. Presto, you’ve just hooked a bundle of customer who might otherwise have just let the ‘cube pass them by, and waited for the next wave of consoles.

That would be pretty cynical, wouldn’t it?

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GameCube on the cheap

Big Dave pointed out to me yesterday that Dixons have dropped the price of all their GameCube stock–both consoles and games. You can now pick up a GC and a game for a pretty amazing £99. (But only in their retail stores–not online, so it seems.) The Register picked up the story today as well. Rumour is that Dixons are dropping the GameCube from their product line. Nintendo denies this, of course. But bringing the bundle down to £99 is a very deep price cut. It’s hard to imagine that “special offerness” is all there is to it…

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Testing…?

If all went according to plan, This is me up and running with Movable Type on MySQL. It wasn’t nearly as terrifying an experience as I’d feared: run backup, run checks to make sure all libraries are in place, change configuration file to point to MySQL database, run mt-db2mysql.cgi, and then delete same to make sure I don’t accidentally re-run it.

I think I will leave the old Berkeley DB files in place for a while. Now that we’ve upgraded our web hosting account we have stacks of space anyway.

Our web host is still EZPublishing.com, but for the first time I’m not entirely happy with them. We used to have one of their “Entrepreneur” packages, which gave us everything we needed, such as a MySQL database, a subdomain, PHP, scripts anywhere, shell access, and a number of POP3 mailboxes. That package came with 100MB of file space and heaps of bandwidth. We were pushing up against the file space limit just before I went off to Boston.

Ideally, I would like to have upgraded our account with just some extra file space, but this turned out not to be possible. We had to upgrade to a “Corporate” account, which, as well as bringing our file space allowance up to 200MB, also gives us additional MySQL databases, more subdomains, more POP mailboxes, and more FTP logins. None of which we actually need.

Oh, I ‘m sure we’ll find a way to put all these extras to use (except the POP mailboxes…we really don’t need 30 of the buggers), but they’re costing us an extra $10 a month when all we wanted was some more disk space. With hard disks nowadays coming in at less than a £1 per Gigabyte, this seems kind of ridiculous. It also makes EZPublishing seem quite inflexible, and suddenly much less competitive in the hosting marketplace.

We’ve been with EZPublishing for about three years now. We know them and we trust them. With web hosting being such a commodity market these days, though, it’s inevitable that there are a lot of cowboys out there who will happily sell you a package, but run for cover when the shit starts hitting the fan. I’d be very reluctant to move to a different host without some very good recommendations, from people I trust.

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Alphasmart Dana UK edition

The Alphasmart Dana is now available in a UK edition (i.e. with a £ key, and the quote characters in the right place). If you’ve never seen the Dana before, Charlie Stross has a good first look at it here. It’s basically a lightweight laptop alternative that runs Palm OS. Tiny screen, full size keyboard. All gorgeous. I want one.

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Spring cleaning

Abi and I are both itching to do some spring cleaning. Over the course of the winter, our garage has been a dumping ground for all kinds of junk. Until we got rid of our old washing machine, you couldn’t even walk clear from one end to the other. We still have six wooden doors there that we bought two years ago to replace the hollow-core doors in the house. There are odd tables, packing boxes, toys and tools, leftover paints, varshishes and solvents from the last time we did any work around the house. Oh, and my drums, too.

So the garage is going to get a thorough overhaul sometime soon. We’ll definitely be doing the doors some time in the next couple of months. At the end of last year we were planning to put in a new bathroom suite, but we never got round to it: that’s now on our “must do” list for this year. We also want to put in wooden floors upstairs to replace the carpets, and redecorate the hall, and both of the big bedrooms. It’s not even out of the question that we might start thinking about replacing the kitchen, also. New double glazing to replace the existing windows and frames, which are starting to creak and draught. And if we get all of that done, we’ll probably consider getting bricking and glazing our porch.

I don’t think all of this will happen. For a start, it’ll cost a bloody fortune. But come May we’ll have been in this house for five years, and it’s time to do some serious work on it.

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Plans and updates

I’m still noodling around with ideas for changing the format of my home page. The main change I want to make is to raise the profile of my “quick reviews”. Right now they’re in the sidebar, but a few sections down from the top. If you’re viewing my page in a small window, they end up “below the fold”. Even if they are immediately visible, it’s not obvious when I’ve done a new review. Also, if you’re reading this in an RSS aggregator, you won’t see the quick reviews at all, because they’re not included in my feed.

My current thinking is that I’d like to include these quick reviews in the main body of the page. They would be interspersed with normal blog entries, but reviews (both the quick and the full kind) would show up with different formatting to show what they are.

This is a wee bit difficult in Movable Type, because my quick reviews, full reviews, and main diary entries all reside in different blogs. All of the blogs are part of the same Movable Type installation, though, and so are held in the same database. I had thought I might be able to use David Raynes’ OtherBlog plugin, which allows you to extract content from other blogs into your own, but it doesn’t sort the combined entries the way I’d like.

I think the proper solution is going to involve Brad Choate’s SQL plugin. With this in place, I can write SQL queries to extract exactly the entries I want, and sort them however I please. (It helps that I speak fluent SQL.) The downside of this is that this only works if you’re running Movable Type with a SQL back-end database, rather than the default Berkeley DB. And I haven’t made that move yet.

It may not be that big an upgrade, but I’m just a bit nervous about it. I’ll do a full backup, export all my entries, etc., but I still worry about irretrievably shagging the whole system, and having to spend days getting it back up and running. Especially when it’s working fine right now, and all I really want to do is make a few cosmetic changes.

If it ain’t broke…you haven’t been messing with it for long enough.