The last installment of the 5 things series: 5 people we tag

Tag! You guys are "it" to do the 5 Things next!

• MadThoughts
• KittyKittyBangBang
• M.
• AlienTime
• The Cautious Librarian

Dr. Whatnow?

If I learned anything today, it's that Washington needs to discover the greatness that is Dr. Horrible.

Only a few people recognized my costume as the one worn by Neil Patrick Harris. And those who tried to guess the character I portrayed today with my lab coat, boots, gloves and goggles often misfired. I was thought to be the bad guy from the "Hostel" horror movies, the main character from the "Dexter" television series, and even an Oompa Loompa from the new "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory."

I also was thought to be the Gene Wilder version of Dr. Frankenstein, as seen in the classic "Young Frankenstein," and a military sergeant. One person oddly guessed that I was a watch repairman. (Pause.) Yes, a watch repairman. Because, you know, those thick gloves I wore would be just perfect for the precision work that watch repair demands.

Most interesting, though, was that one woman thought my costume wasn't a costume. After seeing me on my Metro ride home, she told me flatly, "You must have an interesting job." Well, yes, but it has nothing to do with these goggles.

Of course, the nice thing about all these missed guesses is that they proved to me the costume's components are incredibly versatile. The coat, expertly crafted with great detail by Annie's mother, is certain to see use in any number of future costumes, perhaps even including the mad scientist from "Robot Chicken."

Anyway... I hope your Halloween costume is more recognized than mine. Have a great night!

Pumpkin carving, part 2

Here's a pumpkin I carved at work yesterday! Pretty neat, huh?

Josh's latest article

Most new Democrats back gay rights in Congress
HRC scorecard gives good marks to freshman class

Pumpkins! Carved! Awesome!

In honor of the day, here are some images of pumpkins that were carved at the Halloween party Annie and I attended last weekend. Can you guess which one was ours?

Happy Halloween!

Well, this is just...neat!

One of my favorite Buffy episodes, which conveniently takes place on Halloween. Enjoy!

Grrr, arrrgh II

That ding you just heard was the timer for Halloween. It's almost ready. But despite my best efforts, my goggles are not.

My hand was forced Saturday when I donned the goggles for my first Halloween party for the year. I could tell the goggles weren't ready to wear, still feeling slightly sticky to the touch, but I'd given them a full six days to dry after spray painting them and couldn't wait any longer. It was time for me to become Dr. Horrible -- horrible goggles and all.

Actually, I'm being a bit melodramatic. The goggles worked out better than I feared. You can see in the picture above that not all the paint held, but most did. The parts that faded away were along the rims by my cheeks and eyebrows. Granted, I kept the goggles atop my forehead for most of the evening, so it's possible that extended wear would have done further damage, but it generally worked well enough for my purposes.

It should be noted that as the evening wore on, people at the party began to notice the paint residue that transferred to my cheeks, nose and forehead. The residue wasn't atrocious, though, and proved easy enough to wash away. But it was something that detracted from the evening and my costume.

So be aware that while Krylon Fusion for Plastic does a passable job, it isn't the perfect method to turn green goggles grey.

5 things we would do if we were millionaires

The second-to-last of the 5 Things series...

5 things Annie would do if she were a (multi)millionaire:

1. Donate large sums of money to gay rights and women's rights organizations
2. Get a nice house and install a state-of-the-art in-home movie theater with plush seats, and a party room with hardwood floors and a jukebox for dancing
3. Sock away plenty for retirement while allocating a good amount toward starting my own work-from-home freelance business
4. Travel to all those places I've dreamed of going, starting with a month-long tour of Europe
5. Hire a part-time gourmet chef, personal trainer, chauffeur, maid, and masseuse

5 things Josh would do if he were a (multi)millionaire:

1. Buy vacations for my closest family and friends and hire personal translators for them if they're traveling to a non-English-speaking country
2. Sock away plenty for retirement while allocating a good amount that allows me to either stop working or work part-time
3. Buy a small video game company and license the "Maniac Mansion" franchise from LucasArts
4. Travel to all those places I've dreamed of going, starting with a month-long tour of Japan
5. Hire a part-time gourmet chef, personal trainer, chauffeur, maid, and masseuse

How's about you?

Halloween treat

A Halloween treat for you...my favorite MST3K invention exchange.

5 things on our to-do lists today

Yet more 5 Things...

5 things on Annie's to-do list today:

1. Work on tidying the apartment
2. Continue working on content migration for new kaboom.org
3. Cook dinner
4. Collect nice things said on blogs about the KaBOOM! Playspace Finder for marketing dept.
5. Work out

5 things on Josh's to-do list today:

1. Meet deadline.
2. Meet deadline.
3. Meet deadline.
4. Meet deadline.
5. Meet deadline.

What's on your list?

New web goodies!

Goodness flows from the Interwebs like manna from heaven!

• MTV's new supposedly every-video-ever catalog (but we could only find two videos by Tool - what gives?)
  UPDATE: ZOMG They have 86 Pop-Up Videos on there!
• New Dr. Horrible merchandise!
• Hahaha - science FAIL

5 places we've lived

More 5 Things!

5 places we've lived:

1. New Hope, Minn. (Josh)
2. Rochester, Minn. (both)
3. St. Paul, Minn. (both)
4. Brisbane, Australia (Annie)
5. Silver Spring, Md. (both)

Tell us five places you've lived!

The Big BLAH Theory

I've expressed my love for "The Big Bang Theory" previously. And Josh and I are both frustrated the network isn't giving the show its due on DVD. But despite that setback, we continue to enjoy the show.

After last year's Halloween episode, easily the best in the season (where Sheldon dresses up as the Doppler Effect), I was really excited to see what they'd do for this Halloween. So we marked the calendar and turned on the show tonight, the last night it would air before Halloween, to find...a repeat from last season. What?! And it wasn't even a repeat of the Halloween episode!

Come on, you couldn't think of enough nerds-in-costumes jokes to fill two episodes? What gives?

I'm calling shenanigans on CBS.

Yep, you heard me.

SHENANIGANS!

So while I do that...enjoy this highlights reel from last year's Halloween episode.

...

You're welcome.

5 jobs we've had

More on the 5 Things meme!

5 jobs Annie has had:

1. Babysitter
2. Cashier at an organic bakery
3. High school reporter at local newspaper
4. Front desk security at residence hall
5. Manager of online content and community development at KaBOOM!

5 jobs Josh has had:

1. Janitor, Northridge Nursing Home
2. Corporate communications intern, Jostens
3. Computer lab supervisor, University of St. Thomas
4. Alumni Office assistant, UST
5. Reporter at: Aquin newspaper, Brooklyn Park Sun Post, Faribault Daily News, Rochester Post-Bulletin, Washington Blade

Your turn!

5 snacks we like

The 5 Things meme continues!

5 snacks Annie likes:

1. Triscuits with cream cheese and olives
2. Cheese. Just in general.
3. Cocoa and toast
4. Microwave popcorn with real melted butter
5. Fruit - especially apples, green grapes, nectarines, peaches, raspberries, blueberries, and bananas

5 snacks Josh likes:

1. Graham crackers
2. Toast
3. Raisins
4. Yoplait Light yogurt, especially vanilla, key lime pie, strawberry, and lemon cream pie flavors
5. A single spoonful of peanut butter

Now you! Tell the world your five favorite snack foods!

"Canada: What went wrong?"

That was one of the infamous "Five Questions" from the Craig Kilborn Daily Show days. (Mike Myers' answer: "I seem to remember a certain War of 1812 where we kicked some Yankee butt.")

I heard about the 5 Things meme and got a bit jealous I haven't been tagged yet, soooooo...we're going to start answering the questions anyway, because they're interesting.

5 Things Annie was doing 10 years ago:

1. Starting my first year at the University of St. Thomas in St. Paul, Minnesota
2. Taking swing dancing lessons to imitate those cool kids in the Gap commercials
3. Obsessively searching for .wav files on the web in my spare time to constantly change my system sounds scheme on my ginormous Gateway PC (which I'm sure didn't bother my roommate at ALL)
4. Helping with the Cretin Haunted House in the dorm next door, which became an annual tradition for me
5. Dying my short, spikey hair colors never seen in nature (cranberry and then fire engine red)

5 Things Josh was doing 10 years ago:

1. Serving as news editor for the Aquin, the University of St. Thomas newspaper
2. Organizing and running Star Wars CCG tournaments, operating under the official designation of Gold 69
3. Questioning the sanity of George Lucas after learning from the February 1999 issue of Vanity Fair the title and opening text to Star Wars: The Phantom Menace. Seriously, trade route taxation?
4. Taking a course in newsroom management, thinking "I'll never need to know this" (ah, time makes fools of us all)
5. Ignoring comics, as I was about four years into a seven-year hiatus from comics brought on by the infamous Clone Saga in Spider-Man

Now for the "crowd participation" part. First, what 5 things were you doing 10 years ago? And also, what "5 Things" questions do you want us to answer next?

Google Maps tells you where to vote!

Check out this spiffy new thing, via Lifehacker.

The election is less than two weeks away, and Google's 2008 US Voter Info Map has just updated with a new map layer that shows you where to vote on November 4th (just give it your address). One of our top 10 web tools for this election season, the site still offers other useful information, like how many days you have left to request an absentee ballot (5 in California).

We try not to get political on this blog too much, but we will say this. For the love of God, people, VOTE. We don't care if you're not in a swing state. We don't care if you don't care. We don't even care WHO you vote for. Just get out there and vote. Thank you.

Search a global library catalog

New discovery: WorldCat. It's essentially a global card catalog. You can search for books, CDs, DVDs, and other materials and it'll pop up information about the item and a list of libraries closest to you that stock it.

It's pretty slick. There are some nifty Web 2.0 features built in as well. For instance, if I share, say, one of my favorite books with you in this blog post (or on Facebook, Digg, etc.), when you visit that page it won't show you a list of the libraries closest to me that stock the book, but the list of libraries closest to you. It automatically finds your location based on your IP address. Neat, huh? And you can post reviews of the book, too.

Go check it out! And then check something out from your local library!

"Born Standing Up"

I was such a Steve Martin fan as a kid, for extra credit in fourth grade I wrote a short story about what it would be like to meet him.

(Yes. I was pretty much a huge nerd. Still am.)

Listening to Wednesday's episode of Fresh Air on my iPod yesterday, I was reminded of how much I like and respect Steve Martin as a comedian and as a person. He was promoting his new book "Born Standing Up" and talked about his stand-up career in the 60s and 70s. It's a fascinating listen if you get a chance.

Mass Action Team is...BOOOOOOWWWWWLLLLLL!

We had a three-hour team meeting today, which ended up being a surprise bowling trip to Lucky Strike! Too cool. We had a ball! Thanks to Mike C. and Jim H. for a great time.

Grrr, arrrgh

In my continuing effort to pull together a decent Dr. Horrible costume for Halloween, I spray painted my disappointingly green goggles with silver paint yesterday. The results are, well, somewhat mixed.

At the advice of someone who works at arts and crafts store Michaels, I used Krylon Fusion for Plastic paint. Touted as "the no-prep, superbond paint" that "bonds to plastic," I was told this was the best option to recolor my goggles. I applied several coats of the "nickel shimmer" paint, spraying the goggles from every angle after I carefully disassembled the eyepiece and vent components from the plastic goggle frame. (I also covered the elastic strap with tape so it wouldn't be painted.) I then let it sit outside to dry for about five hours before I brought them in for the night.

I thought I'd done well. The paint looked like it had adhered well to the goggles, and the color was closer to what I'd originally wanted. But after I brought the goggles inside and set them on the counter, I found when I tried to pick them up minutes later that they were sticking to the countertop. It seems that they weren't done drying -- despite the product's pledge that painted items would be OK to "handle after 1 hour." I carefully pulled them free, leaving some paint blobs behind, and hung them on a rack. I used De-Solv-it to quickly and easily remove the fresh paint stains from the countertop.

But the fun didn't end there. Soon thereafter, Annie began complaining of the paint smell and said she was developing a headache. I moved the goggles and drying rack into our bathroom and left the fan on overnight. That helped, but when Annie went into the bathroom this morning, she said the smell was still bad and prone to make her ill. I'm now planning to move the goggles outside for the day in the hopes that they'll air and dry further.

I'll keep you posted on what happens, but at the moment, Krylon hasn't exactly provided me with the quick-and-easy solution I was seeking.

Further proof that age doesn't matter

Rohit Bhargava, author of "Personality Not Included," writes about how "only stupid marketers use age as a demographic." His most compelling argument - "The top end of a demographic (34) has almost nothing in common with the low end (18)." Relevance, in other words, is more important than age when determining the reach of your message.

See where our visitors are from!

We just added a new little widget on the blog that shows, in real time, where our visitors are coming from. It's right below the new "Top Commenters" section on the right side of the page. (See screenshot below.) Neat, huh?

Do people actually watch these?

How do you celebrate a golden birthday?

So this year is my Golden Birthday, which, according to Wikipedia, is also known as my Grand Birthday or Star Birthday.

In other words, I'm turning the same age as the number of the day I was born (29).

I remember being all excited about this as a kid and so upset that it wouldn't be till I was such a ripe old age when I would be able to celebrate it.

But now that I'm there, I have no idea how to celebrate it. Am I supposed to do something special?

I'll admit the concept is somewhat silly - anyone born before the 5th of the month is unlikely to remember their golden birthday, and because of the range of ages in which you could celebrate it, there probably isn't any one tradition associated with it.

But I admit I'm curious. I always love birthdays with a gimmick. Heck, I even made one up for when Josh turned 27 (it was his "3³ birthday"!).

So, does anyone know? Has anyone celebrated a golden birthday before? Share your thoughts, ideas, and stories in the comments.

Turning purple?

I'm for public transportation. It's inexpensive, environmentally friendly and helps alleviate traffic. But I'm not for public transportation that runs through my apartment complex.

According to maps in this study, Maryland officials are looking to run the area's next rail line, the Purple Line, past or through the apartment complex in which Annie and I live. Because it's an early planning document, it's unclear whether line construction would require the seizing and demolition of our apartment complex.

The Washington Post article about the document lamely says some Silver Spring apartments will be razed, but it doesn't say which ones. Grr.

So it looks like I'm going to have to activate my powers of civic participation and crash one of the upcoming public forums concerning the Purple Line plan. And I'll have to hit one of the early ones so I can storm a later meeting with my neighbors in case our complex's days are numbered.

Because I'll be darned if I'll let my complex go without a fight.

Josh blogs for the Blade

Honesty amidst smoke and mirrors

Join my team for a chance to win a $100 Visa gift card!

Hi everyone!

I am looking for teammates to join me in finding every place to play in North America.

If we add more playspaces than the other KaBOOM! teams by Dec. 15, each member of our team will get a $100 Visa card!

Will you join me?

Yes?

Great! It’s easy to participate!

Step 1. Let me know you're interested in joining. Either comment or email me with the link in the upper-right corner of the blog.

Step 2. Register by clicking ‘join’ at the top right on the KaBOOM! Playspace Finder

Step 3. Send me your KaBOOM! Playspace Finder username

Step 4. Start adding playspaces to the KaBOOM! Playspace Finder**

Step 5. Keep adding as many playspaces as you can until Dec 15th.

**Once you have filled out the ‘add a playspace’ form, look at the map in the right column. If that has markers - your listing might be a duplicate. NO duplicates will be accepted. If you think you’ve accidentally added a duplicate, please contact nsaini@kaboom.org for immediate removal.

**A valid listing must be a NEW listing and include at least 1 picture, the playspace address (street intersections are OK), and a rating OR equipment listed.

Let me know if you want more info, and if you're interested in participating. You can invite your friends, too! Our team consists of two KaBOOM! staffers and up to 28 non-KaBOOM! staffers, so there's room for lots of people to join in the fun!

Credit where credit's due

Whether it's seemingly absurd security measures or rising ticket prices, airlines have become a favorite punching bag of disgruntled travelers. But I have to give them credit for one thing they're still doing right: bereavement discounts.

I learned Saturday that my uncle Larry died. Plans for his Wednesday funeral were set Sunday. But it wasn't until Monday morning that I was able to get permission to miss work to be a pallbearer.

With only hours remaining until I had to depart, I had prepared myself to face some awkward travel times and hefty price tags. But I needn't had feared. Northwest Airlines had my back.

The carrier was able to book a direct flight from Washington to Minnesota for Tuesday evening, after I'd left work for the day, and get me home at a reasonable time Thursday. And due to the circumstances, they cut the ticket price by 68 percent. A ticket that would have otherwise cost $1,719 was discounted to $559. Still expensive, but a bargain by comparison.

So my thanks go out to Northwest. They did what they could to make this difficult time a little easier for me.

And while we're discussing FAIL...

Slate posted an interesting article on its prevalence.

What's with all the failing lately? Why fail instead of failure? Why FAIL instead of fail? And why, for that matter, does it have to be "epic"?

Optional FAIL

Google Maps = infinite source of humor

From xkcd (click to see the full comic)

Optimus Prime is still dead

For those keeping track, it's been one month since I contacted Glu, creators of my notoriously buggy "Transformers" cell phone game. Still no response.

So there's $6.99 down the drain. Thanks, Glu. Thanks for nothing.

Between you and Michael Bay, I sometimes wonder why I even try to cling to my happy childhood memories of those Robots in Disguise.

Yes, Doom shall.

Via madthoughts (and because Josh went "squee!" when he saw this on his blog)...

My digital life, part 3 - The early flavors of the Internet

My folks got Prodigy when I was a pre-teen. Prodigy, for those who weren't around or don't remember, is sort of like today's Internet on training wheels. There were a very limited number of pages, and you had to access them through "jump words," which were kind of like the concepts of a URL and a search engine combined. You had to know the "jump word" for the page you wanted to go to in order to get there.

Mainly I used Prodigy to play the aforementioned MadMaze and participate in Darkwing Duck-related message boards. But it also gave me my first taste of the Internet's dark side.

I was emailing some other kid about Darkwing Duck when his older brother got hold of my email address and sent me several extremely inappropriate emails. I was confused and ashamed. I went to my mom in tears, and we got rid of Prodigy shortly thereafter. A couple years later we got on AOL, and later, Juno, but my Prodigy experience made me much more guarded in how I approached the web.

In 1996, when I was taking classes at Rochester Community and Technical College, we were taught how to use Gopher, chat, newsgroups, and search engines, including WebCrawler and Lycos. I got into ICQ and started spending a lot of time chatting online with my classmates. When I got my own college radio show that year, a friend of mine (who was later my boyfriend) set up my first website.

In the first half of 2000 I studied abroad in Brisbane, Australia. I wanted to communicate with people back home without having to tell the same stories over and over, so I set up a free Topica listserve and taught myself HTML so I could create an online journal and share pictures as well as text. It was essentially an early blog, but in addition to keeping a very detailed and regularly-updated journal, I posted movie reviews, cultural observations, and a large photo gallery (I didn't have a digital camera so I had to develop the film and laboriously scan each photo in at the library).

I've got to say, blogging is SO much easier now.

So there's my Internet story, in a nutshell. What early web experiences shaped you?

The very definition of 'meh'

Longtime readers of this blog should know that I'm a fairly enthusiastic Nintendo fanboy. I love my Wii. I appreciate the free goodies the company gives away. And I was determined to get my copy of "Smash Bros. Brawl" on release day.

So I had high hopes for the press conference Nintendo gave Oct. 2. Perhaps too high. Because nearly two weeks later, I still roll my eyes every time I think about it.

• Nintendo's big revelation, the Nintendo DSi, is a less-than-impressive successor to the popular Nintendo DS. The new system unwisely drops the Game Boy Advance cartridge slot to add two cameras and a slightly larger screen. Bad move, Nintendo.

• I was more receptive to news that Club Nintendo would finally jump the Pacific Ocean and come to America, but then I realized that the awesome goods available in Japan probably won't reach my hands. As our good friends in England can attest, Nintendo isn't big on exporting their exclusive collectibles.

• What the company is big on, apparently, is porting old games. Nintendo also revealed it would repackage several GameCube games for the Wii, tweaking the controls to work with the newer system's unique input devices. I appreciate them giving "Chibi-Robo" another shot, but this strikes me as little more than a quick cash grab.

• Finally, I thought I could take heart in Nintendo's announcement that they would soon resolve problems stemming from the system's limited memory. Nintendo's plans to enable systems so they could save downloaded content to SD cards seemed like a good solution. Instead, it's nothing more than a stopgap measure. A more permanent solution is still needed.

The whole press conference had a decidedly "meh" taste. You know the kind. That dry, overcooked taste of something that's not worth spitting out, but you have to resign yourself to swallowing.

Yeah. Eww.

Thanks, Nintendo.

More on the G1

Here's some more info on the G1. Check out a comparative analysis of the G1 v. the iPhone 3G here. And check out a video from CNET below:



(I like how the host has to define what "bronze" means. Hee hee!)

My digital life, part 2 - The valuable lessons I learned from video games

I remember the Christmas I received my first video game console - the Nintendo Entertainment System. It was either 1987 or 1988. (I tend to get my wires crossed on years, because my birthday is fairly close to Christmas and I think, "Now was I 8 years old, or was it 1988?" Either way, there was an 8 involved. Perhaps my parents remember and can post in the comments.)

I've had an on-again, off-again love affair with video games ever since our first PC, but that love deepened with the NES, and later with the SNES, with their controllers so much friendlier in the hands of a kid than a big, unwieldy keyboard. I still played PC games quite a bit, though, including the "educational" ones my parents bought to teach me reading, typing, geography, etc.

So without further ado, here are some of the valuable lessons I learned from the video games I played as a pre-teen:

Super Mario Bros.: If you can't beat it, warp beyond it.

SimCity: Public transit is king. (No matter how elaborate your street system was, people would complain about the traffic. So I just built railroads and let them exclusively use public transit, and they seemed happier.)

Maniac Mansion: Never put a crazy person's hamster in the microwave.

Batman, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Who Framed Roger Rabbit?: Just because a game is based on a cool movie or TV show does not mean it will be fun. In fact, it usually means the opposite.

Chip n' Dale's Rescue Rangers: An exception to the rule above. Man, that game was satisfying.

All iterations of Megaman: Sometimes the price of fun is near-infinite suffering.

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles 2: The ability to hook up four controllers to a system should have started with this game. While super fun on the console, it was even more fun in the arcade.

Claymates: I should never have sold my SNES, because this game will never, ever return to a console. And it is AWESOME.

MadMaze: Sometimes what seems to be the right thing to do ethically will get you slaughtered. By a lion.

Kings Quest IV: Never go into a dark cave, or the last thing you hear will be scary music and the last thing you see will be the glowing eyes of some horrible cave beast. Also, it's really hard to climb up a whale's tongue.

Battletoads: Evil queens are HOT.

Tetris: When we took the California Achievement Test (CAT) every couple of years in elementary school, guess who scored just above super-awesome in spacial acuity? And guess why? Yay, Tetris!

Post your video game learnings in the comments!

One more thing...

It occurs to me that I forgot to mention something about my trip last month to Baltimore Comic-Con. I forgot to mention that DC Comics is trying to make sure the fate that befell Jimmy Jams won't befall any other comic shops.

During an open Q&A session at the con Sept. 27, I told the DC Comics reps about what happened to my favorite comic shop and asked them what they were doing to stop such things from happening again. Here's the exchange, as reported by comic news site Newsarama...

Q: From a fan whose favorite comic shop was closing today due to online sales, what is DC doing to make sure people keep going into brick and mortar stores, rather than find their comics from online retailers?

A: Wayne noted that DC has done a number of things to encourage people to make the weekly trip to their stores, from publishing weekly comic series to participating in Free Comic Book Day, which is designed to get new and existing customers into their shops. That said, Wayne added that it’s the consumer who ultimately decides where they will buy their comics, and DC cannot encourage or promote one kind of shopping over another.

DiDio stressed Wayne’s point about weekly comics, as well as pointed to the coming Superman storylines which will see a tight interconnectedness between Superman, Action and Supergirl, which, he feels, will pull readers in week after week thanks to the momentum of the story, and readers not wanting to wait for a monthly shipment to find out what happens next.

Will that be enough? Only time will tell.

My digital life, part 1 - My first computer

I was recently described as being a part of the "digital generation." The title seemed appropriate, yet something I've taken for granted for years. The person using the title (@frandallfarmer) encouraged me to blog about my digital upbringing, as it were.

It's a long story, so I'm going to post several little vignettes instead. Here is part one.

My first computer
I was four years old when the first IBM PC landed in our house. It was cutting-edge for the early 80s: it had a color monitor! My dad worked for IBM, and I was lucky because he and my mom not only permitted but encouraged me to play with the family's new toy. Even then they recognized the level of importance computers would play in my life as I grew up. 

So I quickly learned the few DOS commands necessary for me to play Reader Rabbit, Frogger, a Q*Bert knockoff called J-Bird, and the infamously keyboard-destroying Olympic Decathlon game. They ran on 5 1/4 inch floppy disks and you first had to start a program called BASIC to get them to run. There was no Windows or graphical user interface of any kind. So I got used to C: prompts fairly quickly.

I was learning how to type around the same time I was learning penmanship, which made me unique among my peers and confused the heck out of my teachers. I vividly recall arguing with one of my elementary school teachers when I tried turning in an assignment I'd typed up and printed on our dot matrix printer. He made me handwrite the whole thing over again because they valued penmanship skills over typing skills then.

So that's the story of my first computer. In future entries I'm going to talk about my early gaming experiences on the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) and my early experiences on the Internet.

Post your early computer experiences in the comments!

3 x 0 = Awesome

The problem: I want a new video game, but I have no money to spend.

The solution: Free games on iTunes.

Huge props to Hudson for giving away three games this week on iTunes. Through today, you can get "Aqua Forest," "Neo Same Game" and "Catch the Egg" for free. The three games usually cost $16, but to celebrate Tokyo Game Show, the company has temporarily made them free downloads.

After spending some time with each game, I can wholeheartedly recommend "Neo Same Game," which has ridiculously simple gameplay and a great quickplay function. I also give a thumbs up to "Catch the Egg," which offers a fun and interesting way to play with your iPhone or iPod Touch. I'm still trying to get the hang of "Aqua Forest," though, which is more befuddling to me.

Still, three games for free? That equals awesome.

Wait, I lost HOW much?

I hope your day is going better than mine.

The mail I'd feared receiving arrived today. And the news was bad. This damn economic crisis has claimed 14 percent of my retirement savings.

I know I'm supposed to think long term. I'm supposed to keep telling myself that markets are cyclical and things will eventually improve. But I gotta say, the underside of my mattress is looking pretty good right about now.

The new T-Mobile exclusive G1 with Google cell phone

O. M. G.

It has Google Maps' "streets view," G3 technology, and basically blows the iPhone out of the water because ANYONE can write an app for it.

Long story short...WANT.

Spaceballs: The Animated Series

How did I miss this?

I was just checking iTunes for the second episode of season two of "The Big Bang Theory" (which they don't have) and I randomly saw free episodes available for "Spaceballs: The Animated Series."

How did I miss this? Has anyone seen it?

I've downloaded the free eps and will watch en route to Sonoma tomorrow. I'll let you know what I think later this week.

No business cards? No problem.

My friend madthoughts pointed me toward this today, and it's so awesome I just had to share it.

This has happened to me on more than one occasion. I meet someone interesting and want to swap information. But I open my business card case to find it empty. Which means I have to scribble my information on a scrap of paper, or promise to email them my info later. Neither option is great.

But now, if I have my cell phone on me (which I always do), I can simply send a text message to dropcard that includes that person's email address, and they'll get an email with all my business contact info, including my Facebook and Twitter accounts. If I'd rather give that person my personal contact info, I can do that instead by adding a "p" to the end of the text I send.

Saves time and gives people my social networking info in easy-to-use hyperlink form. I wish I'd had this at BlogWorld Expo, but I'll definitely be using it at the Online Community Summit I'm attending this week.

The only downside is that the free plan currently only lets you use the service 15 times per month. After that, it's $4.99 a month for a plan that gets you 100 messages, plus a photo or logo to include in your profile, and then there's an unlimited plan for $9.99 a month.

I think 15 messages a month is a bit chintzy - and totally unworkable if you plan to use it for conferences. I would suggest a happy medium - either up the quota to 30 messages per month for the free service, or let people do a free yearly plan. I go to maybe 3-4 conferences a year and might use it 50 times per conference, but that hardly justifies paying for 1200 messages per year. 200 messages a year would suit me just fine.

Still, a solid idea that works. Kudos to dropcard!

That's one Super cake!

From Cakewrecks...



Check out the blog post about this Super Mario wedding cake for more detail. Wow!

How's our blogging? September 2008 edition

September 2008 stats for the Think Lynsen blog

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A long time ago...

Smart Girls at the Party

Amy Poehler of SNL fame is launching a video podcast celebrating young girls doing great things in the world, called Smart Girls at the Party.

I'd embed the promo video but OnNetworks, the same company that failed to update my favorite video podcast Play Value for four months, for some reason doesn't have embed code available for the promo. Grr.

If I had known this rule earlier, I would've stopped reading "Hyperion" at chapter one.

And would've been better for it.

From xkcd

Stephen Colbert immortalized in Spider-Man comic

Thanks madthoughts!

McCain talks to the Blade!

It's the first time a GOP presidential candidate has been interviewed by the LGBT media. Go Blade!

Read it here.