Wednesday, September 24, 2008

Booger & The Dr Pepper

     I got my bottle of Dr Pepper this morning.  Checking the cap, I saw that it was a winner so I hurriedly plugged the code into the website.  I wondered if I were going to win another screen saver?  Maybe the same wallpaper I’ve already won?  Would it be a ringtone I couldn’t use?

     No!  None of those things.  I won a Dr Pepper keychain!  Now I have to wait ten to twelve weeks to get the thing.  Sheesh!  I want it now!

 

    For anyone interested, my Pet Society pet, Booger, has hit upon some sad financial times.  He sure could use your help, if you were so inclined.  Could you let this poor dog bear animal live on the street with nothing more than a tin can, a tire, and a rubber ducky?

     It looks like Playfish has a new game out now, too, called GeoChallenge.  I’ll have to take an in-depth look at that one, too, pretty soon.

Tuesday, September 23, 2008

Facebook Games Review III: Pathwords

     Pathwords is one of those games that’s great if you have a good vocabulary and a pretty good eye.  It also helps if you’re playing with friends that don’t have a good vocabulary or good eyes.

     When Pathwords starts up you’re greeted by a hexagonal grid that’s covered in letters.  The object is to start on a letter by clicking on it and then dragging your mouse over the other letters until you form a word.  The letters you have selected are also reflected on the bottom of the screen and are colored red, if you don’t have a valid word, or green if you do.  When you release the mouse then the tiles you used are destroyed and new blocks fall to take their places.  It’s a timed game, too, so you have five minutes to find as many words as possible. 

     Overall it’s a pretty good game.  There’s nothing spectacular about it.  Really, it’s quite utilitarian.  I

can’t recommend playing it on a laptop with a touchpad, though.  Sometimes the cursor can go all over the place and you end up trying to spell a word just to get gobbeldygook out of it.

     Like most Facebook games, Pathwords keeps track of your score and taunts your other playing friends with how great you are. 

     There is some strategy that comes into play.  If you see a big word coming up but you can’t quite get to it yet then you will need to settle on lesser words to let the other letters fall into place until you can get your big word complete.

     So, grab your dictionary and try it out for some interesting times.

Monday, September 22, 2008

Facebook Games Review II: Pet Society

     Pet Society is another SIMS kind of game.  Or maybe more like Little Computer People that’s more interactive.  It’s a side-view game where you make a “pet” and name it then let it loose in a house.

     And this is where a grown man should stop if he wasn’t totally

crazy.  I, of course, pressed on. 

     If Pet Society has a goal, that goal is to amass trophies.  You get trophies for visiting friends, playing ball, buying clothes and other things.  The secondary goal is to amass money so you can get the trophies for buying things.  Along the way I suppose you can also buy furniture and flooring and stuff to personalize your house.

     Essentially, Barbie with quasi-animals.

     Your pet isn’t just stuck in his house, though.  He can wander

around town.  Passing through trees can net you an occasional coin.  There are stores to visit, like a grocery store and furniture store.  There are also empty lots where, if you’ve got friends and invite them to play, a construction marker marks there spots.  If they actually join then the spot turns into another house.

     Walking into a friends house gives you a menu where you can engage in activities with your friend’s pet.  Dance, tell a joke, or whatever and you can earn points to level up (giving you money and different goodies) and money. 

     Also in town are two areas that aren’t active yet.  One is a coffee shop which, I guess, will be a place where you can interact with other players.  The other is a stadium.  I’m hoping this is where pets can battle to the death for fun and prizes.

     There are a couple of things I don’t like about Pet Society.  One

is that it’s harder than Hell to make money unless you have a lot of friends or cheat somehow.  The easiest way to get serious coinage is to buy it with your PayPal account.  Even in Yoville, you can “work” for $200 or so every six hours. 

     The other thing kind of disturbs me.  If you hold down the mouse button and rub the cursor over your pet, they make some weird purring noises.  If you keep rubbing then a coin pops out of their head.  Ummm…  Kind of phallic, you know?

Thursday, September 18, 2008

Random Crap

     I’m using the new Windows Live Writer Beta now.  I’m not seeing much of a difference and I still can’t figure out how to change the default font.  And the ‘tab’ key still puts it into block quote mode instead of giving me a damn indent. 

     It’s actually sometimes raining today!  I haven’t seen rain in forever.  I’ll have to write it in my journal so that future archeologists will know what the weather was like today.  Yeah.


     Despite the fact that I’ve been using computers forever, sometimes I just never get around to figuring out what stuff is on the internet.  I’m still not totally sure what a “podcast” is supposed to be.  I’ve only recently gotten around to using Twitter.  You know, stuff like that.  My photo albums on every site that use is an absolute mess.  I’m afraid to see what my Picasa site looks like.  It all makes me feel so behind the times.  But at least I have a Facebook and MySpace account. 


     Tomorrow is Talk Like A Pirate Day.  I don’t think I’ll be able to participate on account of me not being good at talking like a pirate.  It would probably be a good day to release future “Pirates of the Caribbean” movies, though.

Tuesday, September 16, 2008

A Daily Dairy Diary

     Are you one of those people that keeps a journal?  An adult version of the diary?  If you do, do you ever write in it while thinking that someone in the future, like a thousand years in the future, might read it one day?  Does that affect what you write, like make things clearer and document stuff better or do you sanitize it just in case some futuristic academic decides to judge your life?

     Or are you one of the people that does keep a journal but doesn’t give a hoot who reads it or when?  Or maybe you don’t keep a journal at all.

     During those times in my life when I do keep a journal (which I never keep up on and abandon at some point) I can't help but think that someone is going to read it in the future.  Like, some archeologist in a few hundred years is going to dig up my notebooks and read through them.  I wonder if the language will still be the same, or if it will change significantly that my writing is unreadable (which it would be anyway because I've got sloppy penmanship penpersonship). 

     So, I think should I put in a bunch of details about the weather is stuff, just in case the future would find it interesting?  Should I explain any idioms or let them try and figure it out?  Will my diary journal be a Rosetta Stone for future generations?

     In reality, though, they'll probably all end up in the dump.  Or, more scary, be recycled.  Why would recycling be scary?  Think of it this way, if the ancient Egyptians or Greeks were keen on recycling, what would we know about them today?

Thursday, September 4, 2008

Attending Mass.

     Since the infamous events on 9/11 I haven’t been very keen on flying.  It’s not because I’m afraid something is going to happen to the plane, but because I hate going through all this security stuff they have in place.  I remember what it was like to fly in the late 1970s and 1980s. 

     But my nervousness about something going wrong was mostly in vain.  Sure, I had to nearly strip down to get past the metal detector but the people in Austin were quite pleasant about it.  For some reason we weren’t allowed to bring our $2.00 Dr Pepper bottles through the checkpoint.  I didn’t know they were so dangerous.

     We flew on Jet Blue airlines.  After reading about the things a lot of airlines were doing, I wasn’t very keen on flying at all.  But Jet Blue rocked.

     The flight took off ten minutes early (sucks to be you, Late Guy!).  The seats had TV’s in the headrests, which also had XM satellite radio (which I don’t like as much as Sirius but I guess that won’t matter much longer).  They didn’t give away headphones, but you could use your own or buy theirs for $1.  They had free snacks (blue potato chips being the company mascot, I guess) and stuff to drink.  Oh, and it only cost $15 to check your first bag.  The crew was awesome.  It was easily one of the best flights I’d ever had.  Oh!  And the seats were nice and roomy. 

     So we land, wait in line for 45 minutes to get the rental car, then puttered over to the hotel.  As soon as we got the keys to the hotel room, the fire alarm goes off.  We waited outside the place for another 45 minutes waiting for the police and Fire folks to show up.  45 minutes!  Thank God the place wasn’t on fire.  Scuttlebutt has it that someone was microwaving popcorn and left it in too long.  Anyway, all that got sorted out.

     The room is great.  Because of all the inconveniences we got upgraded.  We’re now in a two bedroom suite with a full kitchen.  Sure, that sounds awesome, but there’s only two of us and we’re only staying for two days.  Still, it’s pretty cool.  But their wi-fi coverage SUCKS!  I’m lucky to keep a connection at all, and it’s really slow when it is connected.

     Now that I’m on the East Coast, there’s some things that I’d like to do.  One of them is to go to Dunkin’ Donuts.  Oh, for a donut!  And coffee!  There’s a store right down the street.  Everything is stupid expensive around here, though.  Dinner ended up being two expensive bowls of soup. 

     Time to get this day rolling.  There’s a lot to do, and most of it needs to be done early. 

Tuesday, September 2, 2008

Tragedy In Trailers (movies)

     Anyone who reads my blogs should know that one of the reasons why I love going to the movies in a theatre is because I really love watching the movie trailers.  One of those reasons is because I more or less grew up listening to the guy who reads them.

     Sadly, Don LaFontaine, the guy that did all those movie trailer voice overs, has died at age 68. 

On Shopping

     I have a long history with shopping.  When I was a youngster, back in my formative years, most of my shopping time was spent in the company of my mother, my sister, and my grandmother.  Three females.  And me – a boy.

     At an early age I learned to cope with traveling in a band and hanging around clothes stores, and shoe stores, and the like.  Most of the time it involved using my mind to go to a happy place, filled with candy and video games.  If I was very lucky the store would have a toy department.  You’d be surprised, though, how many clothing stores don’t have a toy department.  Or video games.

     So now I’m an adult male and while I don’t get ecstatic over the idea of going shopping with the woman-folk, I go along because it’s not that bad.  Do I look like the harried husband, dutifully following his wife carrying shopping bags and boxes?  I sure the hell do.  But, thanks to my early training, it doesn’t bother me and I can carry a handbag around without feeling like everyone in the store is laughing at me.

     See, it’s not all bad.  For one thing, there’s the lingerie department.  Any man who feels embarrassed walking through a lingerie department or Victoria’s Secret or the like is a fool.

     But I also go because my wife makes me feel important.  She constantly asks my opinion, you see.  And I learned, long ago, that not having an opinion is a Bad Thing.  Not having an opinion means that you don’t care.  While the male brain has a ‘positive’ and ‘negative’ not caring mode, women always see it as the negative version.  You need to care, to have an opinion, and to be able to provide some kind of input even if you’re spreading around the bullshit.  That may sound bad, but you never know what you can find in bullshit. 

     Women’s shoes are a world in themselves.  And this is my horrible secret:  I don’t know what makes a pair of shoes ‘cute.’  To me, they’re foot wear.  They come in different colors, materials, and styles.  Show me two pairs of shoes and I may think they’re identical only to find out that one pair is hideous and the other pair is cute.  What makes that difference?  I have no idea.

     But every once in a while I’ll point out a pair of shoes that’s acceptable.  Or find a pair of earrings that match the target ensemble.  Sometimes I can even find the shirt that matches.  And, strangely, that’s a pretty good feeling.  An “I done it right!” feeling.

     Oh, yes, one more thing.  Thanks to my dad, of all people, I can also do things that might be too embarrassing for other men to do.  My dad has been known to do some pretty traumatizing things to me in the interest of fun.  Things like, buying play sand and telling the check out girl that he’s making a sandbox for me (at 19 years old) and would she like to come over and play sometime.  Or having me pay for training bras for my little sister at Bradlee’s while he was “in the bathroom.”  You know, stuff like that. 

     Yesterday I was asked to go through a table full of panties.  I don’t know if she meant it as a joke or what, but while she was trying on clothes I was going through the panty bins looking for undies.  Was I embarrassed?  Nope.  I just rooted through the stuff looking for the right size.  I did get confused as to which way was up on a few items, but I managed to get through it.

      So, while I wish I was like James Bond or Jason Bourne (huh, I never noticed that the two fictional Super Spies had the same initials – how original) and could assess a woman’s proportions and accent her make up professionally, I just muddle through the best I can without the help of government training.  And even if I don’t get it right, she makes me feel like I did.