Tag: games

  1. Lyssa unboxing Starcraft 2 on Sunday at lunch.

    03 August 2010

    At long last, Starcraft II.

    The front cover folds out to reveal more about the story.

    DVD-ROM in its sleeve and what passes for the manual.

    Bonus: a notepad bearing wanted posters for Jim Raynor.

    We also ran into something all too common at lunch that Sunday whilst leafing through the contents of her just-purchased copy of Starcraft 2. I happened to be leafing through what passes for the game's manual (which is largely a recap of what happened during the origial Starcraft and Starcraft: Brood War). At one point our waiter came up to refill our drinks and made …

    Read more...

  2. Linux? Linux. Linux... Linux. Oh, and user interfaces.

    22 April 2009

    ObDisclaimer: I don't design user interfaces for a living.

    Originally, I was working on a post about Linux - about why I switched to it, and pontificating about why more people haven't. After writing about half of it I let the article soak for a while and returned to the text later, and I realized that I was having an un-earned grey beard and suspenders moment. There is no point in talking about why I started using Linux because the reasons for it are, in truth, not particularly relevant in this day and age of plentiful processor cycles and disk space …

    Read more...

  3. Merry Christmas, everyone (a couple of days late, but still..)

    31 December 2008

    The powers that be saw fit to give everyone at work an opportunity to go home four hours early on 24 December 2008, the better to go home and get ready for Christmas Eve. To that end, I sniffled and honked a bit and set course for home where Lyssa was still hard at work. I sat down to fill out my paperwork for the week (such is the life of a professional contractor), packed a duffel bag for the weekend, and slowly came to the conclusion that I'd somehow caught the beginnings of a cold earlier in the day …

    Read more...

  4. Remember when I said "'tis the season?"

    22 December 2008

    Lyssa took sick last week. On Thursday she woke up having trouble breathing while I was in the shower, which threw our plans into a tailspin. I took a sickday and drove her to urgent care (where I seem to spend far too much time in the waiting room these days), only to discover that she has a sinus infection. Lyssa spent the bulk of the weekend in bed pumped full of antibiotics and anti-inflammatory drugs, with the odd sortie to get food in some form or go shopping.

    This also meant that I was running solo when I went …

    Read more...

  5. Still catching up on last week.

    04 November 2008

    Given everything happening in the days since Lyssa and I got married, I'm still catching up on lots of things, most of them work-related though there are a few things rather closer to the homestead that were unfortunately pushed to the back burner. I covered last Monday, but not what happened during our second day off... because we have neither the time nor money to take a proper honeymoon at this time, we decided to spend the day as tourists in Washington, DC. Though we live so close to the nation's capital it's a rare day that we actually take …

    Read more...

  6. Maybe I should write about things other than myself for a while.

    11 October 2008

    If you're involved in the retrocomputing or PC history scenes, chances are you've heard of double-sided floppy disks that are formatted for one system on side A and another system on side B. For example, I've got a copy of the game Ninja which had the C-64 version of the game on one side and the Atari port on the other. At the time this was a pretty straightforward thing to do because drives only read one side of a disk at a time. A couple of weeks back, PC historian Trixter came across a highly unusual 5 1/4 …

    Read more...

  7. Getting down to the wire.

    25 August 2008

    Time's getting down to the wire and there's no escaping it. The wedding is now two solid months away and Lyssa and I are scrambling to get our plans in motion. Last week the invitations came back from the printer, the directory of local hotels came back from Kinko's (I'll mirror them here to make it easier), and the custom printed stamps that my mother had made up for were put to use. Last week, parts of Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday were spent writing names and addresses, stuffing envelopes, and sticking things together. I spent a goodly amount of Friday …

    Read more...

  8. Happy (belated) Fourth of July, everyone.

    07 July 2008

    Contrary to most years, my Fourth of July weekend was far lower in impact and more relaxing this time around than it usually is. I've been running short on sleep for a while now and made up for all of that by sleeping as long as I possibly could, over thirty hours in total spread over three days (plus a two hour power doze (like a power nap, only I never actually fell asleep but instead elfnapped, the way I do when I'm on the road) on Saturday afternoon). I actually feel refreshed and clear-headed for the first time in …

    Read more...

  9. I'm stuck in Tuscaloosa three million years in the future, and where the smeg did I get this traffic cone??

    06 February 2008

    Well, not so much. I was hoping to riff off of a famous Red Dwarf quote or two to make this post more entertaining, but after a few revisions it's just not coming together the way I'd hoped, so I'll spare your delicate sensibilities and optics the horror and push on.

    As the title to this post suggests, I'm in the heart of Alabama on assignment. Granted, it's not too bad... the people down here are quite friendly, and the stereotypical southern hospitality isn't a stereotype, it's a way of life. People down here are so nice, polite, and helpful …

    Read more...

  10. When sufficiently motivated by boredom, there is no limit to what I can accomplish.

    30 December 2007

    I've spent most of the day hanging out at Laurelinde's house with Lyssa and the family, and after fixing my watch fob, practising with my new fountain pen (thanks, Laurelinde!), eating dinner, opening gifts (a walking stick with a handle depicting what appears to be the Roman deity Janus, a copy of The Doctor Who Pattern Book, and a copy ofFlame Wars edited by Mark Dery), and doing a bit of reading, I decided to try to install some of my favourite games on my new laptop - yes, my addiction to Infocom games has reared its ugly head once …

    Read more...

1 / 2