Chip Thrives at "Camp" / Hacking a Nintendo Wii / Seattle Trip / More Training at Work
In the three months since my last entry, our Pomeranian dog, Chip, has been living nearly full-time with my mother. Nicole and I live in an apartment (Hopefully this is our last year doing so) and Chip still has extreme separation anxiety so he can't be left alone. If he is left alone, he barks uncontrollably and won't calm down. We can't have that in an apartment with people living all around us, so he's been with my mom where if he is left alone he can bark to his hearts content without disturbing anyone.
It's been good for Chip. My sister, Val, has two Chihuahuas that come to visit almost every day so Chip has "cousins" to play with and it's been great. We borrow Chip back every other week for a few days, so we get our time in. It's not the situation we wanted when we got Chip almost a year ago, but it's the situation we have to live with because it really is what's best right now for the little guy. I often wonder what's going on in that little doggie brain of his. Does he still know who we are? Does he think we're annoying when we take him away from his comfortable life with my mom who dotes on him? The only solution is to get into a house where our anxious dog will have his space. We also believe the solution includes getting a second pet to keep Chip company. When Val's Chihuahuas are around, Chip is thrilled and at peace. I hope everything works out.
A fun project I've taken on in the last few months has been to mod a Nintendo Wii. I've always been into emulating old video game systems from my youth, and eighteen months ago, I got a Raspberry Pi to do just that. It was pretty slick to be able to plug this tiny box into any TV and play games, but the Pi was woefully under-powered. It's only capable of emulating up to the Super Nintendo console and video games through the mid-'90s. For me, the console I really wanted to properly emulate was the Nintendo 64. Sure, I could just get a real computer hooked up to a television and just play games that way, but I wanted a small, contained, inexpensive, and simple setup.
Enter the Nintendo Wii. With the success of the Nintendo Switch, Nicole and I have been seeing more and more Wii consoles showing up in thrift stores for as little as $10. I remember back in late-2006 when the Wii was released, they were the hottest ticket in history. Bryan and I even managed to buy two launch-day consoles by standing outside a Target overnight on a whim. Over 100 million Wiis were ultimately sold, and now that the console is being eclipsed by Nintendo's new offering as well as constant competition from other consoles and digital media, it's no surprise that we're finally starting to see the Wii being dumped wholesale onto the second-hand market.
I've been tinkering with modifying consoles for more than a decade. In 2005, my brother, Ryan, gave me a classic-era 2001 Xbox console which could be modded to run emulation software using a hardware chip. Years of enjoying that Xbox as an emulation machine led me to modding out a Nintendo DS in around 2008, then the Pi in 2016, and finally to today when we considered the Wii. I discovered that there was a thriving mod community for the Wii that existed for a decade. There were so many Wiis out there and so many people interested in it that hacking it became so easy to do that you could almost do it by accident. At the same time, GameStop began fire-selling their pre-owned Wiis that included a warranty and a bunch of extras for less than thrift stores. This was our chance.
It's taken about a month of tinkering and many tutorials, but we did it. The benefits of using a Wii to run classic emulation is that it's beefier hardware runs Nintendo 64 ROMs like a champ. Plus, it runs Wii and GameCube games native, which opens us up to thousands of modern games and experiences. The interface is slick, too. It displays all our games as a rotating fan of scanned images of the retail boxes. It's not exactly as portable as the Pi was, but it's not like I took the Pi anywhere anyway. Right away, Nicole got me into playing "Animal Crossing" for the GameCube. New addictions abound!
In April, Nicole and I took a trip to Seattle to hit a bunch of thrift stores and get out of Portland for a moment. While we were there, we caught a Mariners baseball game. The home team lost, but it was Nicole's first game, so it was still special. Gorgeous sunny day, too. And we got seats only 10 rows away from the field! It was incredible! The thrifting was interesting. The stores up there in Seattle are so different from what we have in Portland. Fewer electronics, fewer sales, higher prices, odd store layouts. Part of me is glad we don't live up there because I feel we'd have a tougher time finding things to buy for the eBay store. We'll probably have more trips as the summer begins.
My regular day job has been entertaining lately. All last year, we were in a big "ramp" as the level of work skyrocketed. At one point, the factory was operating for months at 150 percent capacity. It was madness and I was stressed out to the point of contemplating quitting. Since January of this year, things have died off and slowed down to such an amazing extent that we're now in a hiring freeze and laying off dozens of people all over the place. It's amazing. This slow-down has allowed us to work on projects and improve our methods. I've also trained a new person to be on back-end, so my little software installation department is continuing to improve.
The stress levels have died off but I think I've gotten so good at this job that I've become the "housekeeper" of sorts. There's a lot of paperwork involved with what we do and I've found that although I enjoy correcting a lot of my coworkers' mistakes, they're not learning from it. I need to get away from being the maid around here and let them learn by making mistakes. This frees me up to take on more projects and I sure have been assigned a bunch, it seems. I'm in meetings nearly every day I'm here. But it's been good. If the projects are large enough, I'm typically rewarded with bonuses and raises, so I'm comfortable... For now...