Grew up hanging around arcades in the early 80’s like me? Feel the occasional jones for some twitch action? these enterprising fellows have put Xevious, one of the classics from the early 80’s, online for you to play. Go play, says I.

Years ago I used to subscribe to a foreign press review journal so I could get a handle on how the rest of the world saw things. Today I stumbled across this piece and it reminded me of how completely different viewpoints can be, and how important it can be to have a balanced view of things. The citizens of our strongest allies have come to see us as the second greatest threat to world peace behind Israel. Is there any clearer proof that the Bush junta needs to be overthrown? Good lord, it’s going to take us a decade or so to rebuild the trust we used to have with our putative allies. Cross your finger/pray/sacrifice a chicken to your pagan gods in the hope that the US wakes up to this disaster and gets these clowns out of office poste haste.

I noticed something slightly depressing about myself yesterday. I used to be one of those people who took stairs in leaps and bounds, 3-4 stairs at a time on the way up and basically a controlled fall on the way down. I was trudging up the stairs to work yesterday morning and realized that it had been literally ages since I had last done that in either direction. Without even really noticing I have been slowing down. Of course I forced myself to bound up and down stairs for the rest of the day and subsequently managed to screw up my knee taking a long set of marble stairs. Aging sucks I tell you, we need to get Bush out of office quick so the gene therapy/embryonic fetus researchers can get to back to work 😉

Check out this most excellent visual iq test. Be warned, this could take a while depending on how high your visual IQ actually is, in my case it took almost 30 minutes to complete, and to be honest the last 5-6 questions I had no clue what the connections were. But I scored a very respectable 117. No mensa society for me, but nothing to be ashamed of either. I’m a little relieved actually, given what I do for a living if I had scored poorly I would be off to the mall to look for a job in retail 😉

Or not. Seen those eye-catching new tv ads for Apple’s iPod, with the folks getting their groove on in silhouette on a bright candy colored background? Note how spastically they rattle their ipod around. I challenge anyone who owns any brand hard drive based mp3 player to violently jiggle their player around like they do in those commercials. I guarantee what you’ll have after a few minutes of that is one dead music player. It’s really kind of absurd. It’s a shame too because on one level the ads are actually pretty cool.

Check out these babies. RC tanks with IR guns? Imagine a pitched battle on the kitchen floor with maybe a few cats around to act as force majeure. Fun, says me. I’m going to order a couple.

One in three children born in the year 2000 will develop type 2 adult onset diabetes. 1 in 3. I don’t know what it’s going to take to wake folks up to this epidemic – news like this is occurring on a weekly basis and yet we see nothing in terms of a concerted response to the problem. As one who suffers from this I can tell you while it’s not the end of the world, it is the end of the pizza and pasta, and it’s no cakewalk. Spread the word, get people off their asses and off their high-carb doritio and McDonalds french fry diets.

Of course on the positive side, since an ever-increasing number of folks are suffering from this, there’s hope that increased funding and research will lead to a cure for me. Got to look for the positives after all 😉

I just had one. Got up Saturday morning to nasty wet rainy miserable weather. Ok, stuck in the house, I’ll work on a few niggling computer projects. First up, fix this tablet pc I got. Go to boot it, stylus is stuck in it’s recepticle and I manage to break it off such that the business end is stuck inside the tablet, rendering the thing useless. Doh! Time to dissasemble.

Meanwhile, I’ve been charging my new toy and it’s time to fill it with music. I start transferring mp3’s from cd archives onto my main desktop because it works sort of like iTunes does on a mac, you need a computer based music archive to synch it with. I note that this seems to be taking an inordinately long time but I’m engrossed with the tablet. I manage to disassemble it and retrieve the business end of the stylus without too much trouble, but when I puncture the lead seal on the end of a new tube of crazy glue it pops like a zit and splatters minute but annoying quantities of crazy glue around my work area, including quite a bit on my fingers. Which of course stick together. At least it narrowly missed splattering on the tablet’s screen, but now I was pissed.

After some cleanup I check up on the mp3 process and realize something isn’t right, file transfers are going really slowly. I flail around and decide ehh, it’s windows, reboot usually clears up these indsiduous issues. One reboot later I have a pc that….won’t boot? Wtf? Now I am fully angry, the technology is collapsing around me.

An hour of digging later, I conclude that one of the drives on the system, a 120gb maxtor, is on death’s door. How do I conclude this? It won’t reliably mount, and at one point during this process I discover that when it won’t mount, if I pick it up and drop it on my desk from an inch or so up, it mounts. I spend the rest of my Saturday trying to find drive space for about 80 gigs of stuff, (mostly mp3s), a process that’s constantly interrupted by system lockups and long silent ‘i’m just trying to mount this drive again’ pauses by the PC as it struggles to work with the dying drive.

To cap the day off, by Saturday night I can tell from my swelling glands and scratchy throat that I’m coming down with the cold that’s been making the rounds. Oh…and though I finally coax the tablet pc into running chkdsk, it still won’t shut down without locking up. Sigh.

I guess on a slightly positive note, the cold leaves me with Monday off, so there’s something 😉

So, it’s time for a website redesign, a process which I will begin this weekend. Got a favorite website or a particular style you’re fond of? Post a link and maybe I’ll use it as inspiration as I hack together the new version of Daves-Place. One word of caution, I think I’m going to go full bore on the standards compliance this time around, meaning those few of you who are still showing up using Netscape 4 in my logs (you know who you are, mom 😉 need to get busy with the upgrades.

It’s really rather impressive. Want to vote for him in the upcoming election? Read this and perhaps you’ll reconsider. Tell your friends – get out and fricking vote. The apathy of the american people led to this guy getting in, we desperately need to make sure he doesn’t get back in.