12 posts from June 2006

I was never a big arcade game player when I was younger. There were no arcades within walking distance of my house so the only thing I had access to was a couple machines in the front of the 7-11 (most of which were broken at any given time). The one that was usually working was Mortal Kombat (who really knows what version...) which didn't interest me at all because I was busy playing things like Lode Runner on my Performa 6300CD at that point.

The Oregon Trail

The first game that I recall playing was probably The Oregon Trail on old Apple IIes during the early days of elementary school. I don't think we had any real computer classes until 3rd or 4th grade (at which point we had "graduated" to a hodgepodge group of Mac Pluses and SE/30s on AppleTalk) but one of the only perks of my mother working at a school across the street was that I could go over there after my school day was over and poke around on all the computers the older kids got to play with. This is obviously lightyears away from ATARI game graphics but STILL! Check out that deer I just slaughtered - that's right, I'm feeding my FAMILY. Little Missy has the pneumonia and if she doesn't get this deer meat (or bear, or rabbit) soon, she's gonna kick it.

Sam and Max

2 comments

Back to the days of the Performa: Lode Runner came with the mac so I was rocking that, mostly just making my own levels and playing with the dynamics of entire levels made from explodable material (if you're blanking, the lode runner that I was playing had a type of surface material that desintegrated if bombs were placed on it - I'd create levels where you'd have to place a bomb at just the right location and everything would explode around your character, dropping him to some secret exit door below). I picked up 12-CD packs of shareware games for the mac which were mostly crap. Then I found the magic of SCUMM games in the form of a LucasArts pack with Sam and Max, Day of the Tentacle and Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis (+teaser demos for The Dig and that one about the biker). I burnt many an hour playing those games (enjoyed every minute of it, too!). In fact, I was just playing with SCUMMVM, software that allows you to play these games pretty seamlessly on newer hardware that doesn't directly support the software that originally shipped with the games. They were my "arcade games" since I sunk so much time in to them (no quarters though).

Cusack

Give the man some space, seriously.

Most of my 171 feeds in NetNewsWire are glancing material. I flip through new stuff a couple times daily and pick out interesting bits of news that I find interesting but very rarely do I read an entire post. A couple blogs have my eye recently with some really excellent content that I actually find myself excited to read when they show up. My most favorite blog at the moment is The Universe of Discourse which covers some really awesome math, logic, probability and perl stuff, most of which I actually have to think and use wikipedia to understand. I wish there were more blogs out there like this.

Anything extraordinary catching your eyes recently?

Hallow Voxies,

If you're in San Francisco this Sunday there's exactly one thing you need to do; ditch your father and show up for kickball! My roommates and I are having a kickball party on Sunday, June 18th that somewhat coincides with my birthday the week before and the birthday of one of the roomies a week before that. It'll be right near Speedway Meadows in Golden Gate Park. We're kicking some balls and cooking some food (both meaty and fake-meaty) so you really have no reason NOT to show up (unless you don't like fun, of course). Don't be sad if you didn't make it on the initial email list, I made it quickly and off the top of my head :P You'll get the last laugh though because I think I'm being forced to wear a wig and a tiara the entire time we're playing kickball.

Kickball Invite

You'll want to view the EVITE. RSVP because I need to know just how humiliating this is going to be.

This is a big day: more than a year an a half after I moved to California, I've finally felt an itsity-bitsity earthquake.

For whatever reason, I was barely awake at 5:24 this morning and this little ditty made everything in the room go buh-bump. I made note of it but I doubted that it was an earthquake since I'd never actually felt one before and was starting to really question their existence. Sure enough, I checked the USGS page this morning and there really was an earthquake around Gilroy last night at 5:24AM!

So I'll continue to celebrate with this meme!

June 10

Three Events:

• 1940 - World War II: Italy declares war on France and the United Kingdom.
• 1977 - Apple Computer ships its first Apple II personal computer.
• 2003 - The Spirit Rover is launched, beginning NASA's Mars Exploration Rover mission.

• 1803 - Henry Darcy, French scientist (d. 1858)
• 1953 - John Edwards, Former U.S. Senator, and 2004 Vice Presidential candidate (no, not the "I can talk to dead people" guy)

• 323 BC - Alexander the Great (b. 356 BC)

DSCF0983

Here's a picture that I took of my desk shortly after we moved around in the office and I got my macbook. Now, a perfectly acceptable use of a list:

• MacBook
• Thinkpad
• External Monitor (for iMac)
• iMac G5
• Sennheiser HD490 headphones
• Plants (hidden in the back, with the sun)
• Keyboard with no keyprints (closer)
  

Eight neighborhood pages later (and more click-throughs to see comments than I've probably ever clicked before), I can finally start a post. Yes, I can't start writing a post until I've finished checking my neighborhood for new stuff. The sheer number of posts (and interesting posts) showing up on my Vox neighborhood daily is really amazing but the thing that really impresses me is the amount of feedback that people are leaving on those posts. This is really a fantastic way to start Vox and exactly the kind of behavior that people are going to recognize as something they want to participate in.

WTF, Geno's?

Geno's now has signs explicitly forbidding trying to order a cheesesteak in any language other than english. Seriously. All you're doing is loosing business by deterring customers that have pride in their own language.

Fuck that, I go to Mario's anyway.