A Nueva York Cari and I spent the 4th of July weekend in New York at her sister’s house. My mother-in-law has been staying with us since early March (she came down for Dominic and Elvira’s wedding), and it was finally time for her Florida vacation to come to an end. She won’t fly, doesn’t drive, and is getting up there in years, so a solo train ride isn’t happening either. So, driving is the only real option. Here’s a run-down of the trip: Wednesday, July 1: Dominic and Elvira picked me up around 5:00pm and dropped me off at the rental car company, which has a branch in the Brandon mall. I got a black Mazda CX50, which is a crossover SUV. For a road trip with three people and a bunch of luggage, it’s decent. After driving it back to the house, we all packed and prepared to...
Category: Video Games
Archiving and Organizing
The Annals I've officially added an archive feature to the site. It's VERY early and there's only a single, silly item in there, but if you want to check it out, visit the Annals. As new things get added, they'll be mentioned in the Miscellany section of this blog. Video Games Another Atari ST boxed game arrived this week: Droid: The Definitive Collection published by Bitmap Soft. Although the original Droid and it's follow-up, Droid II, were released back in the '90s, there's recently been an enhanced version created of the first game by Jamie Hamshere that adds support for the Atari STE hardware as well as provides quality-of-life improvements to the gameplay. All of these are bundled into this boxed release. All of the materials for the box have been scanned, so I just need some time to get it into online archives. Studio Organization A while back I...
Flopping and Thrusting
I'm going to try to do a weekly round-up. Try to establish consistency and all that... Retro Computing As part of trying to do my small part in preserving Atari ST history, I figured that it doesn't take too much time or energy to find batches of floppies out there in the world and see if there is interesting source code or software that needs to be preserved. I recently won an online auction for very cheap that had 200+ disks. The shipment arrived this week. It looks like the majority of the disks are ST-related, with some being Windows/PC-related. I hooked up my external floppy drive/Greaseweazle enclosure and imaged the disks to my hard drive. I still need to go through each disk to see their actual contents, and from there, will determine if there's anything that needs to be archived online. The Adventures of Johnny Thrust I've begun...
Slow Day
Was a busy week at work, so I didn't get much done. The only thing creative that was accomplished was in Minecraft. I created a redstone circuit that allows me to turn on and off the iron farm I built a while back. The massive output of that farm was making so I had to tend to it every few days, whether I wanted to play or not. Now, it's off until needed. I've been relaxing all day today, and will likely be doing a bunch of reading to catch up on some magazines. I have five flight magazines, three Raspberry Pi magazines, and another miscellaneous one on the docket (won't read them all today, of course). Added to movie library today: Big Trouble in Little China, Enter the Dragon.
Barn Built
Played a little Minecraft today. I realized that my horse, Tinkles, has been holed up in my base, tied to a hitching post for a long time. He needed a nicer place to live. That, and I wanted to collect and breed some useful animals. So, I built a barn. My barn as seen from the NE corner at ground level. The barn as seen from the NE corner from the sky. The barn as seen from the SE corner. The rear of the barn as seen from the SW corner. The inside of the barn from the upper loft. The ground level of the barn showing the sheep pen (l.) and the pig pen (r.).
Discs
Stopped at Best Buy this morning and picked up a copy of Uncharted 2: Among Thieves: Game of the Year Edition and started to play it a bit. Gotta say: I didn't think this franchise could get any better. I've only made it three chapters into the game, but it looks and plays amazing. I hope Naughty Dog continues this series beyond Uncharted 3 (due in November). Added it to the Museum too. Got a copy of National Lampoon's Vacation on Blu-ray too. Think I'm going to watch Kick Ass on NetFlix in a minute.
Lost Another One
Was able to get a bunch of sleep last night for the first time in quite a while. Feel a lot sharper mentally today, although the coffee I have will no doubt help that along. Last night I tested the fish tank and found the pH to be around 7.6, which is high. This may explain the recent die-offs I've been having, including another victim this morning - an orange tetra. This guy had been sick for a bit, I believe, as he had some weird molting going on. This weekend, I'm getting rid of the plecos and getting some new algae eaters along with a kit to bring the pH down to a more acidic level (6.8 or so). I played through some Uncharted: Drake's Fortune last night since I didn't have any work to do. With the PlayStation Network being hacked recently, I also spent some time changing...
Evolution
I made a lot of progress on a website that Jeff and I are developing. Most of the work I’ve been doing is Adobe Flash-based, which I’ve never really done a lot of. The next step is to figure out how to make a Flash file data-aware. I’ve set up an entire development environment to test this. Devin sent me this just a few minutes ago: Some people...have the idea that evolution is a fucking system of... "oh i need flippers, i'd better grow some" type bullshit. :P It's more like "Oh shit look at that freak over there with the flippers hahaha OH SHIT I AM DROWNING OH GOD SAVE ME FLIPPER BOY". - Quote #95326 by Anonymous (Bash.org) I played World of WarCraft a bunch last night for quite some time. I’ve been trying to devote a few hours a week to it. The monotony of it all...
High Definition Reappearance
I recently made the jump to an HDTV. My old TV, which was a Philips-Magnavox 60” rear projection, was really starting to show its age, and with devices like my AppleTV and the HDTV cable box, I was starting to feel that I was getting behind the times. So, I picked up a Mitsubishi WD-65734 65” DLP monster. I’ve had it for about a week now, and I’m thoroughly impressed. Very vivid colors, tons of inputs, and great 1080p performance. Of course, I had to go into the settings of my first generation X-Box and set it for 1080 and continued the trend with the AppleTV, cable box, and Wii (well, the Wii I was able to just set to widescreen because it only supports 720). I then decided to get a PlayStation 3 from my local Rent-A-Center to see what it was like and Oh. My. God. I’ll have...
Games and Music
I went out today and picked up a copy of Resident Evil 4:Wii Edition for the Wii (duh) and Animal Crossings: Wild World for the DS. Both games were quite cheap, so I figured what the heck. Resident Evil 4 is basically the same game that Capcom released for the GameCube (which I've never owned nor played) except it's adapted to utilize the Wii Remote and Nunchuck and it has some new content. I got Animal Crossing just because I heard it was a good, mindless game and I wanted to have a persistant game on the DS that used the Wi-Fi. I also wrote a Nugget for Super Paper Mario for the Wii today. On the music front, I picked up a copy of Fergie's The Dutchess. I also grabbed the soundtrack to Tarantino's Death Proof (makes me smile just thinking of it). Both albums have been ripped to MP3...
