Month: April 2007

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...And Little E Makes 3 Cooking With Code Funny Stuff Home Base Television & Movies

Road tripped

Tomorrow we’re headed to Little Rock to have Those Other Tests done since we had some alarming markers show up on the baby blood work. It’s funny how one of our local hospitals builds a whole extra wing supposedly devoted to the best pre-natal and natal care in this part of the state…and yet, still, you can’t do jack without heading out to Little Rock or Tulsa. Thanks to everyone for their well-wishes and advice on the tests – believe me when I say that your experiences and stories are pure gold at this point. Tonight we have to take Jan’s vehicle – or, as I’ve always called it, Happy Wagon Of Death 2K3 – to leave it with the dealership in Rogers to fix tomorrow so she can be back to delivering the mail out of it Wednesday. I swear to God, everytime she turns the wheel even slightly, it sounds like an angry, asthmatic Wookiee is screaming out his rage from below the vehicle; the dealership is hopefully going to make whatever fixes or remove whatever Wookiees are applicable. Happy freakin’ life day. On the way, we’re going to try to stop in Fayetteville so I can snap some pictures of the R2-D2 mailbox that’s up there. I can’t believe there’s actually one in Arkansas.

No haircut yet; I may just have to tie it back and tuck it under tomorrow. I’ve really gotten out of that habit when my hair gets long. Adrian Paul, I ain’t. Instead, my wife and I spent Sunday night preparing prodigious quantities of food and then wolfing 90% of it down. I did the steaks and she did…well…all the stuff that actually tasted good. She even did the brownies, though at one point she cracked an egg open…right over the drain at the sink. In it went. We both stopped and looked at each other like “WTF?” She’s said that both her mother and her sister have warned her that expectant mothers apparently start donating brain cells to baby in large quantities during pregnancy, and I guess I really didn’t grok what that meant until I watched that perfectly good egg go from the shell straight into the garbage disposal. Just between you and me, I’m gonna milk that moment of comedy gold for months to come.

Hopefully everyone likes the latest main menu illustration for the site; as time consuming as these things are (that one was a 3:00am special), I’ve been trying to look for ways to tie everything together conceptually, even if I have to just flat-out invent the connection. 😆 (On the other hand, the process I was using to treat the pictures made Evangeline Lilly look positively hideous, which is something that takes quite a bit of effort, so my apologies there.)

And speaking of Lost…spoilage ahead if you haven’t seen it: … Read more

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Gaming Home Base

Singing the praises of pants

Anyone who’s hung out with me over the past five or so years knows that my wardrobe isn’t exactly…well…diverse. I’m down to a couple of pairs of shorts, three pairs of sweats that I seem to wear incessantly, and one pair of jeans. I haven’t had a pair of slacks that fit me in ages. Tonight we went out in search of some new pants for me, and damned if I didn’t fall in love with the pair that we wound up getting. I’m gonna be goin’ back for more of those puppies as soon as the present budget squeeze lets up (more things to fix on Jan’s vehicle – I’m starting to wonder how close were getting to having shelled out enough moulah to have bought the damn thing twice over now). In the meantime, to celebrate the finding of the aforementioned pants:
[audio:https://www.thelogbook.com/earl/podcast/wideworldofpants.mp3]

The reason I wear the sweats so much is that they’re comfy. They don’t slide off me, they don’t cut me in half when I sit down, and they’re not too long. Once I get more than one pairs of these slacks…well, frankly, you probably won’t see the sweats too often. I also sliced all the foliage off my face today, and tomorrow it’s time for the bi-annual haircut. 😆 One of these days I might almost pass for normal.

Colecovision Super Action ControllerA lot of today was spent on housework, but I did get in about an hour or so of gaming time. A while back, I finally got a working Colecovision Super Action Controller, which, if you haven’t already seen or held one, is like an arcade joystick and keypad mounted atop the hilt of a sword which has four triggers on the hand grip. It looks like it should be bulky and diffifcult to manage, but it really is a great controller, and you’re just not getting the most out of a Colecovision without one. (When it comes to holding a controller for an extended period of time, I rate the default Colecovision joysticks lower than either the 5200 or Intellivision, two consoles whose controllers seem to wind up on everyone else’s pet hate lists.) Tomorrow I’m going to try to set aside a little bit of time to hook up the Roller Controller I got at the same time and get some Slither action going. Needless to say, you can expect some Colecovision reviews (and videos) pretty soon, as well as more Vectrex fun. Hopefully you’re enjoying watching/reading the reviews as much as I’m enjoying…uh…researching them. 😉

Almost done downloading The Shakespeare Code, so all in all, not a bad Saturday. Not bad at all.… Read more

Categories
Critters Gaming Should We Talk About The Weather?

Cold snap

I guess I really haven’t been paying attention to the forecast (amazing how my concentration on such matters slips when I’m not actively working around it), so stupid me, this cold snap caught me completely by surprise (and here I was thinking my friend Kevin was crazy for complaining about where spring went on the DP forums). To give you an idea: it’s already close to freezing outside, the wind is blowing ferociously outside, and Xena’s in for the night, something which hasn’t happened much recently. I’ve also got the game room lights on to warm the place up, and it’s time to play!

Or at least it was after I rewired the RF output for the Colecovision. A couple of nice trades have recently brought some Colecovision goodness into my collection that I haven’t gotten to try before, including working Super Action and Roller controllers, and a few games I hadn’t really expected to acquire anytime soon. But the console itself was out of commission…because I’ve got kittens who like to grab dangly cables and pull. One new RCA cable later, I’m basking in the 8-bit goodness (and badness – one game which shall remain nameless until the review pops up was a real stinker!). It’s becoming clear that, in light of the next new addition to the family, the current system is going to have to be rethought rather drastically, and rewired rather drastically too. One possibility I’m looking at is taking some more-or-less briefcase-sized plastic tubs with hinged lids that I already have, and setting things up so consoles or computers can be stored that way, and (barring adding on something like an expansion or voice module) left in the tubs and plugged into some kind of patch bay in the game room. Machines that get the least play will be stowed away like this, and only a few frequent flyers will be left out on the shelves as they are now.

It’s a sad day when even the game room’s gotta grow up a bit, but just think, I’ll eventually have someone else who might want to play a round or two with the old man. 😀… Read more

Categories
Gadgetology Television & Movies

Blessed are the MIDI makers

So I’ve got a new phone. This one’s only my second cell phone in three years, so I think I’m doing good on the whole not-switching-phones-every-three-minutes thing. To me, cell phones are like cars: if they do what they’re supposed to do, who cares how blingy they are? Still, this one’s got some nifty options, and I’ve been playing around with a couple of them this morning, shooting .MID files over to it via Bluetooth to use as ringtones. So yes, for a few shining moments, I’ll be joining the annoying ringtone crowd…and I’ll probably switch ’em off after a few days and go back to a plain old ringer sound. But it’s fun to mess around with some of the free MIDI files I’ve downloaded – I’d seriously consider assigning different ones to different callers if this phone could do that (bummer, my old phone could do that until it met with that Unfortunate Accident this weekend). Right now, anyone calling me sets off a boisterously loud (and really good) rendition of Ben Folds’ “Steven’s Last Night In Town”. Though I can think of individuals who I’d rather have setting off, say, The Prisoner, Doctor Who, Katamari Damacy or Monty Python themes, or Alan Parsons’ “I Wouldn’t Want To Be Like You”. Ah well – I’m sure the fascination will wear off pretty soon. It’s still just a bleedin’ phone. I’ll probably get more mileage out of making kitty wallpaper for it.

I see in this news item that BBC America is bringing Torchwood to the U.S. at some unspecified future date. I wonder just how chopped up it’s going to be – I haven’t had Dish in over a year now, so I’m not sure what BBCA’s standards are on language, nudity, and big damn gay space heroes. The press release also says something about BBCA showing an “all-new season of Doctor Who” – eh what?? Are they ripping it out from under Sci-Fi? That’d be a bummer, simply because BBCA is still satellite-only fare in a lot of places.… Read more