November 25, 2003

Super Mario Bros. 3

The only thing cooler than beating Super Mario Bros. 3 (WMV File) in 11 minutes, is how perfectly the levels are designed, allowing you to pass most of them just by bouncing off the enemies heads, which are all perfectly spaced to allow you to do so. I’ve always loved the levels in Mario games and some other 2D platformers. The attention to detail is amazing as far as that kind of thing goes, they take every little speed and placement into consideration and it all works perfectly. Some of the 3D platformers are also pretty clever, but a lot of them have so many controls and different maneuvers these days that you can’t even pay attention to the level, because you’re so worried about having the right gun selected or pressing the right combo. Not that that is all bad… I’m not just pining for the old days or anything. I just think most of the Mario games were absolutely perfect, given the technology they had available at the time.

A more recent platformer that has captured that spirit I think is Ratchet and Clank, which was one of my favorite recent games. I haven’t played the second one yet but the first one was very creative, with a great story, clever level design, a couple of fun mini games, and some very creative uses for the various weapons you have available. But most importantly the puzzles were fun and made sense, rather than a lot of games where a puzzle consists of “here is a red door, you can’t get passed it until you find a red key hidden in another part of the level!”. Plus Ratchet and Clank has really funny commercials. :)

November 22, 2003

TI 99 / 4A - My First Computer

I ran across a picture of this system on a forum somewhere this morning, and recognized it as my first ever computer! I could never remember what it was that I used to play with when I was a kid, other than it was a Texas Instruments machine of some kind. So it was really cool to run across this and remember the old games I used to play on it. According to Old-Computers.com it had a 3.3mhz processor, and 256 bytes of RAM. Wow! That’s an old computer. It could display 16 colors and had 16kb of Video Memory.

There are apparently emulators for it, which run on just about every modern operating system. Here are some screenshots of some of the games I used to play on it:

Parsec

From Michael Fox’s Homepage

“The player battles alien ships on a planet in outer space. The aliens attack in waves of different battle ships. The player guides the ship through the attacks and must successfully guide the vessel through refueling tunnels. Up to 7 different types of alien ships attack at different levels. The player must also guide the ship through an asteroid belt to advance to the next level. The game features speed/sensitivity control, pause capability, and female speech to tell you the current conditions. Excellent hit-map graphics, sound effects and never-ending action. Peripheral requirements: Joysticks are optional. Speech Synthesizer is optional.”

I had the speech synthesizer add-on, though I don’t really remember this game talking… But anyway this is a popular shooter type game and I played it quite a bit.

Alpiner

“This one or two player game is a “climbing” game of skill and challenge. There are a total of six mountains that one can climb; Hood, Matterhorn, Kenya, McKinley, Garmo and Everest. Climbers must face different animal hazards including lions, bears and skunks. They must also face natural hazards such as rockfalls, forest fires, and avalanches. And watch out for the Abonimable Snowman. This program features excellent color graphics, sound and color. Peripheral requirements: Joysticks are optional.”

I remember this one too! Again it’s hard to remember every detail, since I was like 4 or 5 when I played with it I think. But I do remember it looking like that, and I seem to remember the Abominable Snowman would kill me everytime and I couldn’t get passed him.

Carwars

“If you enjoy the excitement of high-speed racing, combined with the challenge of out-maneuvering a canny opponent, then Car Wars is your kind of game. Pit your speed and skill against the computer’s as you try to get your car around the track without getting “crashed” off the field. Various levels of difficulty allow you to add even more excitement to the action of this one-player game. The TI Wired Remote Controllers are optional.”

This one was kind of like Pac-Man with race cars in a way, but I remember playing it a lot and it seemed pretty fun. :)

MunchMobile

I remember this one the most of any games on that system… You drove down the road in this car, and extended our arm out to grab food from the side of the road. You had to time it just right though, or your arm would be extended and hit a garbage can or something and damage you. And when you got to the end of the level you parked at your house and it added up your score. It was a fun one.

Just thought I’d share my first computer experience… And post it here for my own info and nostalgia too.

November 20, 2003

OneWord: Thief

I was always interested in the game Thief on the PC… it focused on extreme stealth, forcing you to walk quietly, and in the dark so the guards didn’t see you. You had to think more than just have quick reflexes, time you moves perfectly so you could sneak into the next alley before the guard turned back around, dampened you footsteps with “moss arrows” put out torches with “water arrows”, etc. It was a lot of fun sneaking around in castles stealing stuff. I strangely never really played the game that much though, even though I liked it. Maybe because it was hard and it was not the kind of game you can just sit down and play for 5 minutes then come back later. Either way it was cool. I should find it again and play it some more. :)

OneWord

Dreamcatcher

Watched this over the weekend with a couple of friends… I hadn’t heard the first thing about it, no previews, no reviews, no trailers, nothing. None of us had actually, so we went into it without the first clue what it was about. To sum it up, this is the absolute strangest movie I have ever seen.

The following contains spoilers, if you haven’t seen this yet but plan to, quit reading.

So it started out interesting enough… It was shaping up to be a cool psychological thriller or something, showing that the four main characters have mostly similar psychic abilities, a mysterious and strangely strong bond, and later, the ability to read each other’s and other people’s minds. Mysterious things start happening to them at the beginning, making you wonder just what is causing them to have this connection.

The four friends shortly go on their annual hunting trip deep in the woods, where strange things begin to happen. Including a lost hunter stumbling to their cabin with a really bad case of indigestion. He burps and farts for the rest of the evening, and begins to show red splotches all over his face and body. His stomach is huge and bubbling, as if you can actually see the gas bubbles moving around in there. The hunter’s explanation for his illness is that he ate some berries in the woods.

At some point during this every animal in the forest starts migrating away from something, most covered with red spots similar to those on the lost hunter. So far my friends and I were really digging the movie, as it was very mysterious and intriguing so far. Then after the animals are done migrating, two of the four guys that were assisting the lost hunter turn around to see a trail of blood from the room where he was sleeping, into the bathroom. After trying to communicate with him to no avail, they decided to break the door down, only to find the bathroom covered in blood, all apparently originating from the lost hunter’s rear end. They hear something moving in the toilet, so one of the guys jumps on the toilet to keep it from getting out. This particular guy also apparently uses toothpicks as a kind of security blanket, so he tries to take one out of his case, only to drop them all over the floor. He has to reach to get it, and gets knocked off the toilet seat by the mysterious creature within. So far it’s still pretty good, as we don’t know what the hell is in that toilet.

But here is where the whole movie completely changes and feels like you just switched the channel to another movie, but with the same actors…

Out crawls this 3 foot worm, with a large tooth filled mouth, and some crazy stabbing pokey things on the other end. What? Where the hell did this come from? There was absolutely no indication of anything like this up to this point in the movie, and came as quite a shock to us, but then we just started laughing at the silliness of it. After the worm thing kills the guy, the other guy comes back in from getting some tape from the shed, to find his friend dead on the toilet with the worm crawling around. Then a shadow goes over him, and he turns around to find a big alien staring at him. What? I thought this movie was about psychic abilities and mind reading or something? Not aliens…

Anyway, it’s all down hill from there. A super elite branch of the Army called “Blue Team” or something like that is apparently in charge of destroying the alien scum. Oh yeah, and the “boss” of that group, Morgan Freeman, has been chasing down the aliens and killing them for 25 years. But there is no back story or history of that at all. It just seems to be common knowledge that we’ve been under assault for 25 years.

Then there is the ending… 2 of the four friends from the beginning die, and one is possessed by one of the aliens somehow. But he blocks himself off in a secret corner of his brain or “Memory Warehouse”, to hide from the alien in his mind. This is actually a pretty cool idea, as it shows his mind as a large library with his memories organized in crates and files, and you can see him shuffling memories here and there with a dolly cart. It’s a cool idea, but it is just another part that doesn’t really fit into the movie as a whole.

The ending involves the aliens trying to get one worm into the Boston water supply, which will apparently infect all of earth with the virus. The aliens have a big ass space ship though, and big scary teeth, so I don’t know why they hinged the success of their entire world domination scheme on one worm making it into a little manhole inside the oddly deserted and unmonitored source of all of Boston’s water.

Then there is the little retarded guy Duddits that gave the four guys their powers in the first place. I didn’t mention him until now because the movie really doesn’t ever explain what he has to do with anything… He is apparently supposed to be really important though, since he saves the day. But you never really understand why or why you should care.

Overall this seems like about 5 different movies that got rolled into one somehow. They all could have been interesting on their own, either the psychic thing, or the alien thing could have been a good action movie if that’s all it tried to be, etc. But it ended up just being a jumbled mess in the end.

November 19, 2003

Paradise Found

My “Precious” (the name for my new eMac) arrived on Monday, after days of waiting and hundreds of visits to fedex.com to see exactly where it was every step of the way. So that’s why I haven’t posted for a few days, been too busy exploring the new system and getting everything setup! Not that it was difficult to setup or anything, my wife had already cut the tape on the box, so that I could unpack it as soon as I got home, so I just pulled it out of the box and plugged everything up, then fired it up for the very first time.

The setup went flawlessly, asking me to set my time zone, passwords, internet settings, register, etc. My cable modem was recognized and setup immediately, even before the computer had completely booted to the desktop, because I registered online during the setup process.

After all of that I saw my new desktop for the very first time, hooray! :)

Since I had setup my email account during the setup process, I fired up Mail and it loaded all of my emails and folders (I use IMAP) immediately.

I then checked out Safari, setup my AIM account to work with iChat, setup a few people in the Address Book, etc. I had all of our digital pictures on a CD from the old PC, so I put that in and dragged the folders to iPhoto, which imported each one as its own album. They are all there and look great. Total compatibility!

I had all my MP3’s on the iPod already, and didn’t want to have to network the PC or burn CD’s to get them onto the Mac, so I used xPod to transfer all of the songs into my Music folder. After a less than ten minute wait, all 1,200 of them had been transferred to my new machine. Then a quick Command+O imported them all into my iTunes library. After that I used iSync to sync my iPod, which added my contacts and calendar to the iPod, as well as the playlists from iTunes.

I also setup my new .Mac account, downloaded Backup 2.0 and took advantage of the other Member Freebies that are currently being offered, then setup my iDisk and all of that stuff. It was all seamless, fast and easy.

After all of that I started downloading programs, Launchbar, Konfabulator, MSN Messenger (I know, I know, but all my friends use that one), ImageWell, Synergy, and more.

I also setup my MX700 mouse, which is great, and the PowerMate, which really does make scrolling fun!

Tonight is the first night I really feel at home on the Mac. The first couple of nights were good, and I was excited, but I just didn’t feel comfortable with the system yet. Today however, the third night of using it, I’m starting to feel pretty comfortable and am enjoying the system even more. I’ve burned CD’s, tried the audio chat on iChat (awesome), etc. My jaw has literally dropped several times tonight, finding new features that just blow my mind, having come from the Windows world.

Unfortunately I still have to use Windows all day at work, which is just heart breaking. It truly is depressing to have to leave the Mac World every day to go back to “Hell”. :) But hopefully that will change soon, as I am still planning on getting a PowerBook at work as soon as my boss is ready.

Speaking of MacWorld, Apple sent me a free 12 month subscription to the MacWorld magazine today. I opted for the electronic version, which you download, then read on a program called Zinio. The delivery is immediate, and it’s easy to store archives of the magazine on your hard drive, instead of having stacks of wrinkled magazines all over.

I just downloaded Kung-Log tonight, which is a program that interfaces with MovableType, letting you edit posts on your computer without having to do it through the web interface. The best part about this is that you can have realtime spellchecking, as opposed to, well, no spellchecking at all. So anyway, I’m using that to write this post and it is quite nice.

So that is what has been going on with me lately. I plan on posting thorough reviews of all my new stuff over the coming weeks, so expect a lot of nerdy Mac posts for a while. Well, forever probably, because I am never going back to Windows, and I’m always going to be excited about the Mac and be talking/writing about it all the time! :)

November 13, 2003

OneWord: Orchestra

At one point in my “professional” web design career, my dad and I were quoting a job for the Chattanooga Symphony & Orchestra web site. It would have been a fun project, lucrative too, if they had taken our bid. But they didn’t. But I probably didn’t know enough back then to do the site justice anyway, so perhaps it is for the best. It still would have been good experience though! Besides, the site they have now is pretty nice anyway! (they didn’t have that design when we were quoting on it though, it was pretty bad before)

OneWord

The Matrix: Revolutions

My wife has been asking when I’m going to post my thoughts on the last Matrix movie, so I guess I will even though I don’t really have anything enlightening to say about it.

We used Fandango to pre-order some tickets to the 5:00pm showing of the movie on its opening day, and I took off work early to go see it. I liked Reloaded, so I was looking forward to seeing the end of the trilogy, just as much as everyone else was I guess. I avoided reading any reviews on the web before I saw it, so that I could make up my own mind about it without influence from “critics” who I knew would be bashing it no matter what, just because it would be nearly impossible to live up to the hype.

So anyway, overall I thought it was a pretty decent movie. It was definitely not what I was expecting though, which made me a little disappointed, especially right after the movie, I didn’t like it at all. But as I’ve read other people’s opinions on the web, they’ve pointed out reasons that this or that happened, which made sense to me and helped me to appreciate the movie more. I was expecting a lot more philosophy stuff like in the second movie, but Revolutions kind of ignored all of that and focused on the battle for Zion instead. There wasn’t as much kung-fu ass kicking in this movie either, instead replaced by the battle at Zion with mechs and Sentinels. That battle was really impressive though, I think I stopped breathing for a while when it got really intense… :)

But this one did seem to have a lot more cheesy dialog than either of the first two, and I would have really liked to have seen things “wrapped up” a little more, rather than leaving most of it to your imagination. I mean sure I like imagining what happens, but what if what I’m imagining is wrong? I’ll never know for sure!

Anyway, it’s a great action film, just a little different than the first two Matrix movies. As long as you go into it with an open mind I think you can enjoy it quite a bit though. I’ve also heard some people saying they liked it a lot better the second time, so perhaps I’ll like it even more when it comes out on DVD and I can watch it a couple more times.

OneWord: Balance

I think I have pretty good balance, some people don’t. When I was a kid I was in gymnastics, and I pretended to be a ninja a lot, so that took some balance. :) Then there are other people that lose their balance just from turning around too fast or reaching for something. I don’t know any of those people, but surely they exist somewhere. I lost my balance sometimes when I used to rollerskate a lot when I was like 12. That was embarrassing… Falling down in front of all of those girls at the skating rink! Luckily I didn’t care about girls back then… Just video games and rollerskating!

OneWord

November 11, 2003

OneWord: Skills

I bought Final Fantasy Tactics Advance a month or so ago for the GameBoy Advance, and have played it about 25 hours so far. I thought I was getting pretty good at it until I skimmed over a game guide online, and realized that I haven’t even begun to understand all the strategy in this game. It truly does take some skill, or maybe time/experience is a more correct term. I’m beginning to find that I just don’t have time/interest to spend dozens and dozens of hours playing an RPG anymore. I really like RPGs, but most of them today require 50 - 100 hours to complete, which is just way too long for me. I’m starting to like simpler games like Super Monkey Ball and Pikmin which you can just pick up and play for a few minutes, then get back to work or whatever else you need to be doing. I think Nintendo is doing the right thing by trying to simplify their games. Most people seem to think they are doing it for kids, but as a 21 year old game player, I appreciate them doing it as well! I still enjoy playing games, I just don’t have the time to invest weeks of my life into mastering the controls of a game. I just want a quick break to do something fun to relax, or goof off with a friend for a while, and Nintendo provides this every time.

Oh yeah, the original point of this was to talk about the Skills/Jobs in Final Fantasy Tactics and what a complex system it is to learn, but I guess I got a little off track. :)

Today is the Day!

Today is the day I’ve been waiting for for over a year, at the least. The day I order my first Apple computer!

I’ve tried to get a loan to get one before, but my credit is bad at the moment, so today I tried with my wife’s info, and was approved, hooray! So I ordered the 1ghz eMac with Combo drive, and upgraded the RAM to 256mb and the hard drive to 80gb. I also signed up for a .Mac account. All of that was under $1000, including taxes and shipping.

The ordering process was extremely easy, in fact, it was almost too easy to spend $1000 in a total of about 3 minutes… I was originally going to place my order online, but due to an error on the site during my approval of the loan, I called in the order instead. My info was already in the computer from my loan application, so I just told them what computer I wanted and what options I wanted upgraded, got my total, and I was done! The customer service rep was helpful and didn’t try to sell me any upgrades other than just mentioning that they existed. I never felt pressured to buy more stuff at all.

But I did anyway.

After I got home and looked through the Apple Store for a few minutes, I decided to add on a few items, but found that I couldn’t add it on to my existing order, so I just made a new one.

Here are a few more items I picked up:

Klipsch ProMedia GMX A-2.1 Speakers.

I read a few reviews on Amazon.com and other consumer review sites, and all of the reviews seemed to be overwhelmingly positive, with most giving an overall score of 5/5 stars. And of course I am aware of the Klipsch brand name, as they are mentioned on the top of virtually every computer speaker list you will ever find. Yes, they are a little pricey, but I needed some good quality speakers, the built-in eMac speakers aren’t anything to write home about…

Logitech MX700 Wireless Mouse.

I’ve had a wireless mouse before, but stopped using it because the batteries would go dead every 2 weeks, and the resolution seemed very low, causing the cursor to be really jumpy and inaccurate. I’ve read good things about this particular wireless mouse though, many people saying it is just as fast and quick as a normal wired mouse. Plus it has a charging cradle, rather than AA batteries, so I won’t have to worry about buying batteries or recharging them all the time. And from what I hear I’ll also need to use USB Overdrive for the drivers, since Logitech’s own drivers leave something to be desired.

Griffin PowerMate

I just couldn’t resist picking up this little gizmo. I’ve talked about it before, and had it on my list of things to buy when I get my Mac, so it’ll be fun to use it finally and see how it really works. I look forward to messing with it and trying to come up with useful ways to use it. But even if it was just a big volume knob, it would still be pretty cool. :)

Well that is what has been going on with me lately. I should receive my eMac on Monday or Tuesday, according to Apple, but I’m really hoping it somehow magically makes it here before the weekend. Expect some lengthy reviews once I receive everything. :)

Oh yeah, the eMac is shipping with Panther pre-installed, so I guess that means all of the new macs are shipping with it now, as I’ve read that the Powerbooks are shipping with it pre-installed as well. It’ll be nice to not have to upgrade the OS as soon as I fire up the computer…

November 06, 2003

CSS Vault

Paul Scrivens has just launched a new CSS resource and gallery site, called CSS Vault. It’s only been online for a few days, but is quickly growing with lots of links to great information on CSS, as well as a gallery of the very best CSS based designs on the web. If you see something missing, feel free to submit a new link to a resource or particularly inspired site design. While you’re over there, be sure to check out his blog, Whitespace for some well-written thoughts on web design in general.

An iPod Moment

Normally I listen to my iPod the most in my car, thanks to the audio input on the front of my car CD player, then carry it in my pocket the rest of the day at work. I have a small collection of music on my computer at work, but it gets pretty old so I normally listen to iTunes radio which gets pretty repetitive as well. So today I realized that I could plug my iPod into the computer speakers, which I quickly did, and then enjoyed my own collection of music for the rest of the evening! It is so great to be able to keep your entire music collection in your pocket. Just whip it out and plug in headphones or a speaker system of some kind, and you have access to every song you own!

That was cool enough, but then when I left for the night I turned off my iPod and took it out to the car with me, plugged it in, and started listening to the same song I was listening to inside exactly where I left off! Now that is impressive… If you don’t have an iPod but are an avid music listener, you simply must have one! Don’t settle for any imitations either, nothing matches the simplicity, ease of use, or quality of the iPod. Hooray for Apple!

OneWord: Bank

I hate banks… They are always trying to screw you out of your money. My current bank, First Tennessee, is the best bank I have had though. I recommend them if you live in Tennessee. Mainly because they are open until 6:00pm every day, and shorter hours on Saturday, which is really convenient. Plus their online banking is pretty good, compared to other banks I have used. They also have the best logo and branding of any bank in this area, which is a plus… They also have free integration with Money or Quickbooks, which banks normally charge up to $10 per month for. So as far as banks go, they are pretty good.

OneWord

November 05, 2003

New (real) Sony PSP Pictures

Update: Here’s a good link to the some hi-res photos of the official Sony PSP. (updated on 5/11/04)

Sony has posted some real concept pictures of the Sony PSP online. I had earlier posted some pictures of the PSP which turned out to be fakes, but these are real concept renderings of the new PSP. Granted they are concept renderings, so it may look totally different by the time it is actually done, but it’s looking pretty cool so far! However it mentioned analog sticks in the original specs, which I still don’t see here, unless they just don’t look like normal analog sticks. As long as they keep it small and relatively cheap, this could really be quite cool!

November 03, 2003

I am le tired.

From the guys that brought you BANG BANG BANG! and Mario Twins, comes a hilarious new cartoon called End of the World. This is the funniest stuff I’ve ever seen, idioht. I’m going to go hang out with California and Hawaii… Alaska can come too. :)

Enjoy Schfifty Five as well.