Mac Book Air

i didn't make this, i just love it:



from these guys

Games I'm Playing Right Now

these first two are via playthisthing.com:


this is FINAL VISION, a delightful low-rez side scrolling fantasy rpg. i've just started it and i love it. definitely not to far into it, but it's proving fun and addicting.



this is battleships forever, another excellent find via playthisthing.com. it also sports a custom ship maker. i'm not getting anything done now... :D

and i found this at a thrift store:


MECHCOMMANDER 2!! one of the most excellent games ever. i really enjoyed playing this at a friend's house when i was a kid and now it's MINE! MUAHAHAHAHA!

all in all, i'm doing lots of (ahem, research) gaming to get ready for... something...

On Not Using Anything But The Manufacturer's Power Pack w/My Very Valuable Exhdd

yeap. that's what happened. perhaps not so dramatically, but that's what it felt like. i stupidly tried to use a third party variable-voltage power pack in one of my exhdds. nothing happened at first, which is bad, then i tried the one manufacturer's pack i have that has a europlug and the led on the front of the drive casing just flashed weakly. it was the tech equivalent of the death rattle. the damage is all the images i had. everything. work, photos, play, miscellaneous stuff. most is on the web, but some isn't. especially older stuff. and i have no backups. i'm so dumb. after trying numerous things with the aide of pascal, my studio mate, we/he came to the conclusion that it is dead dead dead. there is maybe one recourse left to me, but pursuing it depends on the cost. there are firms that can open the hard drive up and place it in a new casing and see if the drive will work. keep your fingers crossed.
i am a virgin no longer. do i get a t-shirt now? or a special decoder ring?

I'm not a Pusher..

i don't usually push my vegetarianism on others. it's my choice, not theirs. i even go so far as to eat most non-veg meals that friends and loved-ones make, especially when i consider my recently accredited status (by the u.s. dept of edu) as an economic hardship (i'll leave that one alone :D) or was it as "suffering" an economic hardship? either way. but then i found this. so, i'm pushing for a day. we, as a species, really need to reconsider our relationship to...well, pretty much everything.

link to the humane farming association petition to investigate HKY, Inc., a pig production facility in Wausa, Nebraska.

Rupert, why is the news all lies?

via boing boing via the technologyreview.com:

"The most memorable reporting I've encountered on the conflict in Iraq was delivered in the form of confetti exploding out of a cardboard tube. I had just begun working at the MIT Media Lab in March 2006 when Alyssa Wright, a lab student, got me to participate in a project called "Cherry Blossoms." I strapped on a backpack with a pair of vertical tubes sticking out of the top; they were connected to a detonation device linked to a Global Positioning System receiver. A microprocessor in the backpack contained a program that mapped the coördinates of the city of Baghdad onto those for the city of Cambridge; it also held a database of the locations of all the civilian deaths of 2005. If I went into a part of Cambridge that corresponded to a place in Iraq where civilians had died in a bombing, the detonator was triggered..."

Link to the rest of an article by a former journalist-now-MIT-Media-Lab-critter John Hockenberry on why news sucks.

Home

oh wow, it's been almost a month between posts. i've been a busy boy. the last three weeks of december i spent getting ready to leave, finishing projects, inadvertently starting a new project, coming to some sort of less-murky clarity with my thesis-thingy, starting another new project, christmas dinners (3-4ish) and finally almost 36 hours spent trying to cross the atlantic. albeit, 27 of those were spent twiddling my thumbs in schipol, amsterdam's airport.

let's see, what's new.. in reverse, i spent 4 days at summerhaven with mon's (and soon-to-be mine) family, had a small hockey accident (i can skate... i can't stop), was given some excellent books, gleefully ate way too much and just as gleefully won a game of munchkin! >:) before that i spent christmas at my grandparent's with my family. it's always fun to see everyone together. my family dynamic works a bit like the new york stock exchange, lots of loud talking, frantic hand gestures, odd quiet moments and feverishly renewed gesticulating. i love it. :D

i haven't spent as much time relaxing as i thought i would. mon and i have gotten some movies and game playing in, though not much. and i've spent time with the cats, who acclimated quite quickly to me, thankfully. i was a bit worried that the youngest wouldn't remember me.

mainly it's just been good to see and spend time with them.

now i'm taking care of all the things i've yet to take care of. getting ready for a class i'll be TA-ing at UNO next semester, "games as art" or something similar. reading like crazy to get ready for my assessment/research defense on the 23rd and when i get back to GRO i'll be making like crazy for the same goal.

and sometime during all this i turned 27. :) happy birthday, me.

i hope your holidays were fun and safe. a more-less-christmas-letter-ish post will be forthcoming. cheers!