Which is not Mexican Independence Day.

Written Friday, 2 May 2008

Today I decided to upgrade my Mythdora to the latest verison, 5.0. I downloaded the CD media and booted into the install. I had to do a text install to be able to watch it on my TV. Then I just needed to yum install the kmod-nvidia drivers. (Although, first I had to uninstall the previous nvidia drivers - they were neither automatically upgraded nor uninstalled) I started at about 1930 and was able to be completely up and running by 2055, just in time so that I didn’t have to missmy 2100 recording of “Best Week Ever”.

Ever since I first started playing computer games in elementary school there have been three categories of games that I’ve loved: puzzle games (eg Lemmings, Tetris, Puzzle Bobble), simulation games (eg Sim City), and real-time strategy games and the related turn-based strategy games (eg Command and Conquer, Warcraft, Civilization).  I play other types of games periodically, but these are the ones I always return to.

There are essentially 3 main RTS games and all other games usually license their game engines.  These are Command and Conquer (C&C), Warcraft (WC), and Age of Empires (AoE).  I cut my teeth, so to speak, on C&C with a disc a friend lent me so we could play against each other over the net.  I then played a shareware version of WC and a demo version of AoE.

If this story is accurate, then Micro$oft has withdrawn their offer to buy Yahoo!  This is great news because I love the guys at Yahoo and the programs they run, such as Flickr and delicious and I love the fact that they use FreeBSD for their servers.  You can bet that Microsoft wouldn’t have been having any of that and would have made them switch to the inferior Microsoft IIS.  Plus, they probably would have wrecked my Flickr!

One of the new features of Gnome 2.22 is the fact that Totem now has a plugin to access your MythTV programs. I installed the plugin and found myself wondering what to do next. I checked on Google for totem mythtv and didn’t find anything until today when Google finally got around to indexing a forum post about it on the Ubuntu Forums. I followed the directions about editing Gconf and had success!

To all the heathens on the hill back at Cornell!  Hope the weather’s nice and the entertainment is fun.

It’s time once again to empty out my AIM quotes into my blog. Enjoy:

?“You’re, like, my concierge to the Internet Underworld” - T to Chris at work

“Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me. Unless you throw a dictionary at me.” - Colbert 8 April Colbert Report

“They’re so much cuter tasting” - Lauren about airline pretzels

“In science one tries to tell people, in such a way as to be understood by everyone, something no one ever knew before. But in poetry it’s the exact opposite.” - Dirac

Last weekend, it had been a few days since the latest Ubuntu hit the net and I hadn’t heard of any major upgrade SNAFUs so I decided to upgrade. I wanted to record my absolute first impressions without doing much, just to see how I felt.  The upgrade went by without anything bad happening.  My wireless connection still works and nothing major seems to have gone wrong.  I went through each of the things I’d heard hyped about in Ubuntu and checked to see how they had changed.

I’m writing this Sunday, but I am trying to limit my blog posts to one a day so that there can be something for my readers each and every day.

I couldn’t wait for Mario Kart Wii to come out. The Mario Kart series has been my favorite on the Nintendo and Mario Kart Double Dash is the reason why my wife bought a Gamecube. We’ve had countless hours of fun playing and when the release got post postponed until today we were pretty bummed. So today we were at Best Buy right when it opened to make sure we’d be able to get a copy. There were enough, although I wouldn’t be surprised if they sold out by the end of the day.

Joost recently (within the last couple of weeks) came out of Invitation-only beta.  It’s a program developed by the same people who brought you Kazaa and Skype.  Like those programs it also harnesses the power of peer to peer (P2P) technology.  (Another reason for advocating net neutrality!)  Joost is meant to replace cable TV and provide the viewer with programs on demand.  There are a lot of other people trying to work on the same goals, but a key difference is that Joost actually has deal with content providers to legitimately provide content.  Both The National Geographic Channel and Viacom Channels are available.