Categories
Serious Stuff

The Christmas Invasion

Okay, people. Two houses on the drive between my place and, well, the rest of the world, have Christmas decorations up. I don’t mean tinsel. I mean major freakin’ department-store-scale displays.

Quick date check: it’s at least a couple of weeks until Thanksgiving. I remember seeing one of the aforementioned Christmas displays lit up on Halloween night as I drove little E home from trick-or-treating.

It’s bad enough that the stores decided that Christmas starts at 11:59pm on October 31st. When did the rest of us start buying into this? Since when does the average family in middle America take its holiday decorating cues from the retail giants?… Read more

Categories
Gaming

OVGE Update from the floor

All is going well so far – I uess I shouldn’t have worried so much about the “everyone’s selling, but nbodys buying” phenomenon. I’ve even sod some soundtracks and action figures (somewhat to to my surprise). Hooray for fellow geeks with more money than me!

I’m taking copious amounts of photos and video, will post later. TV Death Squad is playing right now – cool stuff, but I can barely hear myself think. 😆… Read more

Categories
Gaming

OVGE ’09 status report

OVGE is less than 48 hours away, and I’ve finally got the legendary OVGE price list ready for all the stuff I’ll be selling; you can read or download the PDF version of it here. Hey, it’s a PDF .pdf!

I’ve also gotten confirmation that the DVDs have arrived in Ohio for CCAG; if you’re going to be in Cleveland this Saturday, go see everyone at CCAG. There’ll be old video games aplenty, up and running (and for sale too, of course!).

I’ve spent this week and much of last week getting ready for OVGE full-time; literally all that’s left to do on my end is print the above price lists for folks to pick up from my table, pack up the car, pick up Kent at some ungodly hour of the morning, and head west. I guarantee plenty of fun for those who head west at a marginally more godly hour to visit the show. 😆

Leave your troubles and your swine flu paranoia behind, and catch some Pac-Man fever. See you there!Read more

Categories
...And Little E Makes 3

“Hi…dad”

Evan has this particular funny little way of getting my attention: “Hi…dad!”, complete with awkward pause in the middle as if he’s trying to determine if I’m actually mom or something. Some days he’ll actually beat me to the punch of getting out of bed, and I’ll wake up with him standing next to my bed, giving me blankie horse kisses. “Hi…dad!”

Oh yeah, it’s entirely possible for him to get out of bed before I do, even though it’s not really supposed to work that way. … Read more

Categories
Gadgetology Gaming

MAME a la MobilePro

Earl vs. MobilePro MAMEMost anyone who’s seen me in person in the past seven or eight years knows that I carry around with me, nearly everywhere, a slightly dated handheld PC that weighs in somewhere between the size of a modern netbook and what they used to call a “palmtop.” The NEC MobilePro, long out of production, was way, way the hell ahead of its time: it was a netbook, 5+ years before the concept of the netbook caught on with, if not the general public, then the general geek populace. It can get on the web via wi-fi with few problems. It has Word, Excel and Powerpoint on it, so I can write articles for my site while I’m away from my desktop, I can keep my inventory spreadsheets of my game collection on it, and so on. It reads PDFs, so I recently made it a bit of a personal crusade to figure out how to get it to play nice with my home LAN so it could access the huge number of ebooks I have on my home server. The MobilePros, at least the later ones, are touchscreen devices. You can use a stylus (provided with the unit), but you can also tap it with your fingers. I usually use my fingers, because how cool is that? To complete my journey to the dork side, I had a custom “DON’T PANIC” sticker made up for the “cover” (i.e. the reverse side of the flatscreen); admit it, if you had a portable device with a tiny screen that you could look stuff up on, you would do this too and you know it. The little machine has become something of a trademark of mine. … Read more

Categories
Critters

Moving the Kitten Kolony

One of the Tiger Twins says HIBoy, it got quiet in here. I went from blogging two, three times a day, replete with kitty pix, to nothing. The sad fact of the matter is that, as of Monday night, the kittens have gone “home” – they’ve returned to my sister-in-law’s place, where they have taken over a two-car garage (no joke!) as a training ground for stalking and pouncing and other kittenish activities. It was fun watching them get their first glimpse of a crawling insect – at first they jumped back, and then they started to pursue. And then they ALL started to pursue… one little beetle-esque thingie. Man, I wouldn’t want to be that bug.… Read more