Reminiscing of an older age of computer games - Part II

Well....I thought I'd moved on from this subject that I posted back in April but something in me this morning made me just do a quick Google for Kings Quest. Let me just say I came back with much more then I had planned on.....

For starters I found a website named Sarien.net- Instant adventure gaming. Let me just say that this is flippin' sweet. They have the following classic adventure games all available to play right on their website:

• Gold Rush
• Kings Quest I, II, III
• Leisure Suit Larry I
• Police Quest I & II
• The Black Cauldron
• Sarien Studio

I've already tried out Police Quest for a little to long today. It is just out right amazing. I did run in to a couple small bugs but nothing that disturbed game play. Heck from what I've read on their website there is even multiplayer they've added to these old games so that you can see other players playing the game and talk to each other. Plus you can change to different avatars. The people over at Q42 (the makers of Sarien.net) did an amazing job porting these games to the web. I definitely give my kudos and recommend any of my readers to take some time and read the "about" section of their site and how these ports came to be. Sounds like a really awesome company.

Also, I just found another site that is dedicated in taking the old Sierra classics and remaking them with a change to graphics & sounds/speech: AGDInteractive Studios.

From what I've seen so far they have Kings Quest I & II, and also Quest for Glory II. They also have an in house title named Al Emmo and The Lost Dutchmans Mine. I only had a few minutes to try Kings Quest I but it seemed very nicely done. I'm looking forward to digging more in to their ports as well.

I just cannot express how happy I am to see these classics sticking around so many years later and am very appreciative of all the hard work the people of these companies have done to keep them alive.

Let me know what you think of these....maybe we'll meet up on some online Police Quest or something :)

Telecom & IT....the North vs. the South...

A friend of mine asked me a few weeks ago why I hadn't been posting any new blogs. The answer came to me fairly quickly...."I don't feel like I've got anything to really offer readers that hasn't already been said somewhere else". Well after a short discussion and some questions from his side about some telecom information I began to realize that there is actually plenty I can give to readers. Most is likely out there somewhere but hopefully I can give a side to it that perhaps will help people.

I have a unique presence in today's telecom and IT world. I literally work in both of these worlds on an every day basis. I don't necessarily believe I'm an expert in either field but I do believe that I have a moderately strong amount of knowledge. I've been working with computers in some sort of way since the late 1980's and in 2000 I started working for a wireless internet provider. In 2003 I moved on to a CLEC where I was lucky enough to be trained in the world of Bell Standards by some really great old Ma Bell techs. Over the years I've taken that training they provided and applied it to different positions I've held from being a field tech, to a lead trouble screener, and now to an engineering position.

Even though with SIP, IP-PBX's, etc the IT and Telecom fields have been merged together for quite some time I've come to see that there is still a thin gap. A North vs. South so to say. Many times I will hear fellow telecom workers tell me "well you can tell that system was designed by a computer guy". And then I've heard the other side as well. Problem is that many times though both sides are trying to accomplish the same thing there is still a cultural gab between the two that sometimes creates issues in how things should really work.

Now with many IT administrators in today's world also being requested to take care of telecom equipment things just get that much more complicated.

So.....the point going forward on my front. I am going to try and get a post out weekly that has to do with things that I believe are necessary to be known both on a telecommunications side of things and the IT as well. Things going from simple cabling guidelines to deeper explanations of things like QoS on data networks and how they apply to voice IP networks.

I don't have a full schedule of things I'm going to get posted but I'd love to hear any feed back you the readers have on this subject and even better things that maybe you'd like to have addressed. I know I don't have a large amount of readers at this point but please...pass the word along if you know someone in a situation where maybe they've been thrown telecom equipment they have to figure out or maybe are just looking for some general information and I'll do what I can to assist in answering any questions you all have.

Plus I'm going to work on getting a couple of past Bell technicians to possibly write up some small blogs to help get some of their infinite knowledge out on the web.

Reminiscing of an older age of computer games

I was reminiscing the other day again about the "good old days". I still remember drooling when 16 color games came out. Heck, I was plenty happy with my Tandy Color Computer 3 - TRS 80 on my black and white TV :)

Back in 2008 I wrote a blog on my personal page talking about old adventure games that I favored back in the late 80's/early 90's. I thought I would copy that blog and bring it over here for discussion.

Games on the top of my list that come to mind are:

Kings Quest





















Space Quest




















Police Quest


















Hero's Quest / Quest for Glory series




















Leisure Suit Larry










Loom:




















Monkey Island:

There are so many games I used to play back in those days. I still play some games a little these days but I just never get the feel like I did back then. It seems to me looking back that about the time 16 color games came out was the time that I really was taking off with computer gaming.

Sometimes I feel that way about computers in general. It was a different time back then. A lot less people dabbling around in the IT field.

So what's your thoughts on games from this time period compared to the past? Any others that really ring a bell to you when you look back?

Otterbox MOT4-DROID Commuter Series Case

As stated in my prior blog I recently purchased the new Commuter Series case by Otterbox for my Motorola Droid.

So far my experience has been good. With the Commuter Series you get a descent level of protection while not giving me such a large case that I cannot fit my phone in my pocket.

Below are some pics I took once I received the case:

Below is a pic of the bottom part of the case showing its size compared to a pencil:

And the following is a pic of the top of the case:

I compared the Otterbox case to the case my wife got for hers from the Verizon store (I don't have the exact model in front of me) but the Otterbox was much thinner. When possible I will try to take a picture of the two phones next to each other to show the size difference.

My phone can still easily fit in my pockets of my jeans, shirt pocket, etc.

The case seems to give a good amount of protection from small drops or bumps but I still wouldn't want to hit on it to hard. It would be nice eventually for something like their Defender Series to come out for the Droid but with the slide out keyboard that may be difficult.

Below are a full list of specs:

Motorola Droid:

Weight: 6oz
Size: 2.4 x 4.6 x 5 in

Otterbox MOT4-Droid:

Weight: 1.06oz

Size: 4.77 x 2.63 x .75 in

Drop a line if you have further questions or any opinions on this case. There's not many reviews out on it yet and I'm sure many people will be interested in hearing what you've got to say. Otterbox has been my brand of choice when it comes to cases for cell phones, and other misc. cases for a couple years now.

Below are references where I obtained the specs:

Motorola Droid: http://www.motorola.com/Consumers/US-EN/Consumer-Product-and-Services/Mobile-Phones/ci.Motorola-DROID-US-EN.alt

Otterbox: http://www.otterbox.com/motorola-cases/droid-by-motorola-cases/droid-by-motorola-commuter-series-case/

April 1st....how I love this day

In the IT/Telecom world I feel that sometimes things can get a little blaw... And when I need a little excitement I sometimes feel the need for a prank on fellow co-workers. Nothing to harmful...usually :) but just something to get a rise out of people to remind us that we are still alive.

I personally believe April 1st is a day that we all should celebrate in some small way.

For instance, I've got a co-worker who still has a tendency to look at his keys while typing. So a simple swap of the letter "M" and the letter "N" created some confusion this morning. The conversation went something like "Hey AJ what is wrong with this database, I keep typing in the password and it's not working. Looks like someone changed it". I responded "hmmm...let me try here. Nope working fine here, you must not know what you're doing". After some harder typing for a minute I laughed, advised what I'd done, and that was that.

Over the years I've pulled my share of pranks. That was a simpler one. What kind of pranks have you pulled? Maybe we should compile a list of pranks that we've all pulled throughout the years!

P.S. I told my wife last night that I was planning some pranks today for April fools...then of course I wake up completely forgetting April fools and she got me right off the bat with the classic "I'm pregnant". She had me good to. Though I advised she'd better watch out on that one, things have a way of coming back on you :)

Motorola Droid - Android 2.1 Update

Looks like the Android 2.1 update is finally starting to hit the Motorola Droid's! Personally I have been fine with 2.0 though some of the features & graphical changes in 2.1 should be nice. I've not yet gotten the update and have no plans on manually installing till the update hits my phone automatically.

Below is a release schedule per the droid geet [dot] com:

-At noon on 03/30, 1,000 users will receive notification of the update.
-At 11:59 PM on 03/30, 9,000 more users will receive the update notification.
After the first 10,000 users receive the update on 03/30, there will be a 24-hour period when no additional upgrades will be delivered.
-On Day 3 (04/01), 200,000 users will receive the update notification at 11:59 PM. This schedule will continue each day thereafter until the update has been delivered to all users.

A full list of features and changes in 2.1 are listed from Verizon Wireless:
http://support.vzw.com/pdf/system_update/moto_droid.pdf

Motorola Droid - Otterbox

To all of you fellow Motorola Droid owners out there that are in need of a case Otterbox has just released a case for the Motorola Droid out of their Commuter Series. I am a huge fan of Otterbox products as they've always serves me well. I've used their products for my ITouch and my Palm Treo Pro. It just came out on their website today as being available and I just ordered it. I'll post a small review once it comes in.

http://www.otterbox.com/motorola-cases/droid-by-motorola-cases/droid-by-motorola-commuter-series-case/

Hmmm....CD/DVD Drive Dead...What to do? Answer: unetbootin

With what little free time I have these days I've slowly been trying to get my Mame cabinet back in order. For any of you that don't know the history of my Mame cabinet I purchased the Mame cabinet completely built already but outdated. It had an old arcade monitor with severe burn-in from years of Ms Pacman. And the computer inside was an old Pentium I that was running DOS. Without going to far in depth in this particular post I took out that old box and replaced with a much more advanced PC. It was running Windows XP. The other night I decided that it was time to switch back to an old friend: Linux Mint.

No big deal, just downloaded the latest distro of Mint and burned a copy to a CD. After some extended reaching inside of the cabinet trying to reach the DVD drive I found that the computer would not boot on the CD. After a few minutes of trouble shooting it became fairly evident that the drive was not working. It would start to read the disc but just give up.

So, I went to my key chain and pulled off my 2gig memory stick that I keep with me for emergencies and decided to go with putting Mint on it instead. Did a quick bit of research and looking in the BIOS to confirm that my motherboard supported booting to a USB device which it would.

Next, since it's not something I really deal with much I had to find how I was going to put it on the USB drive. Did a quick google and the first thing that came up was: unetbootin

Now again I don't have a whole lot of experience looking for software like this but I was very pleased with what I found. Not only would it take an ISO and put it on a USB drive but it comes with built-in support for automatically downloading many different Linux & BSD Distro's. Ubunta, Debian, Mint, OpenSUSE, FreeBSD, and many others. I noticed such as in Mint that maybe one or more are a version behind but I just thought that was an outright cool idea. They also allow direct installation straight on to a local hard drive. And of course you can you pretty much any distro that you can find a ISO for.

http://unetbootin.sourceforge.net/

http://sourceforge.net/apps/trac/unetbootin/wiki

Bought some Droids

Well, I am happy to say that my wife and I both are happy owners of Motorola Droids. And I can honestly say from both my experience so far and what I've heard from my wife that we are both very happy.

I'm not going to get in to a big review on the Droid because trust me there are plenty out there. But as I said in my prior blog I was really stuck in a dilemma as to whether or not to get the Droid or wait for the Nexus One or Incredible.

The reason we finally pulled the trigger on the Droid is this:

1) At the time I'm writing this there is still no 100% guarantee as to when the Nexus One or Incredible are coming out. Though I'm seeing from a lot of sources the Nexus One will be next week it's still not gospel.

2) Bang for the buck: We both knew that we were going to stay with Verizon. Where we live and travel they generally have much better signal then AT&T or Sprint. So we didn't mind signing a new contract with them. That being said with our new contract we basically are getting one of the two Droids for free. That was a big deal to me. I knew the Droid would do what I needed in a smart phone and my wife who is not so much on the technical side is really interested in starting to get that way. She's a nurse and she has friends that have either Iphones or other types of smart phones with all kinds of cool nursing apps and she felt that she wanted to give that a try. So getting a deal where one phone would be free was definitely an incentive.

3) The screen: It's a little large screen then the Nexus One. Not much but if you search around the web you'll find that it's enough to make a difference when looking at web pages. Also the screen type on the Droid is supposed to be much easier to see outside. I watched couple videos and saw that the Droid next to the Nexus One there was a noticeable difference outside. Which mattered quite a bit to me as I plan to use mine for GPS related stuff and also I'm a big outdoors person and I will definitely have the phone with me.

As I use the phone more I'll be sure to share anything that I come up with. But in the end when it came to buying these phones yesterday I just knew that I'd had enough with my old smart phone which was costing me $30 extra a month to have a data plan on a phone that I had no interest in using. So it was time for a change. No the hardware may not be quite what the Nexus One is (at least without overclocking after rooting) but I don't really care. From where I came from it's a dream and in another year there will be phones out that will make the Nexus One and Incredible look slow.

Being happy and productive was the end result of this choice.

Happy St. Patrick's Day

Just wanted to wish all of you fellow Bloggers out there a Happy St. Patrick's Day!!!

I highly recommend to all of you out there to take a break and have a drink (alcohol or non-alcohol doesn't really matter). The point is to just try and relax a little bit this evening.

I think in the IT &/or Telecom fields we get so wrapped up in our jobs that we can sometimes forget that we just need a break from time to time. So why not use this St. Patrick's Day as an excuse for that break :)

Just be safe this holiday and don't drink and drive :)

Pulling the Trigger on a Purchase

So, the time is coming soon for me to buy a new cell phone. What I know I want is a phone running the Android operating system. Also, I am on the Verizon wireless network so you would think that would help me determine which one I am going to get since there aren't a whole lot of options yet in the Verizon network. Pretty much I've got the HTC Droid Eris or the Motorola Droid.

But here's the thing. The rumor out there right now is that the Nexus One will soon be available for Verizon. More specifically the rumor is March 23rd 2010. Then there is the rumor that the HTC Incredible will also be sold by Verizon soon and will also be running the Andriod OS.

Since late last year I wanted to buy a new smart phone. About this time last year I bought a Palm Treo Pro that is running Windows Mobile. To say the least I've not been real impressed. Though it has a lot of functionality the phone itself has locked up more times then I can count and has always been slow to respond to commands.

But I'm not writing this blog about the likes or dislikes of the different phones. More to the point I'm trying to express a problem that I find myself in quite a bit when it comes to buying technology. I see something I want so I do a lot of research on it. No big deal there, researching a product is something I'd recommend when buying any product for the first time. But what happens to me is that I read the pros and cons then I find that there is another product that will be coming out soon that will be even better then the product I first started researching.

This was true for me when I was considering the HTC Droid Eris. I heard about the Motorola Droid coming out soon so I thought "hey...I should wait and see what this new phone is going to be like". So I waited and it came out and I started doing even more research on the Motorolla Droid. After a while I ended up finding out that there was a possibility of the Nexus One coming to the Verizon network and I thought "hey wouldn't be even better to go all the way and get an actual Google phone?". So I started doing research on the Nexus One when I found that the HTC Incredible would eventually be coming to Verizon as well and there were some benefits to this phone over the Nexus One.

My point to this drawn out blog is that I constantly find myself not buying but just waiting. So I still have my old Windows Mobile phone that I am not happy with. And what will happen when the Nexus One or the Incredible come out? Will I actually own one of those or the Motorola Droid? Or will I suddenly find a phone that may come out later in the year that will be even better then any of those options?

When do you finally just say "this is good enough for what I need it to do right now". I mean come on! There is always going to be something better coming out soon. Especially in regards to technology anything you buy on the market is already out of date because they are already building another product to replace the one they just sent out.

I just have a really hard time spending money on something knowing that 6 months from now something better will be out. And unfortunately I don't have the capital to just go out and replace what I've got with something newer constantly. Also as many of my friends know when it comes to spending money I have a really bad habit of procrastinating.

How do you handle these kinds of situations? I'd be interested in hearing any of your thoughts on how you reason when to buy a new product.

Some links to the products I've been talking about:

HTC Droid Eris

Motorola Droid

Nexus One

HTC Incredible

Tron Legacy

This is a bit off topic but I had to post that a new trailer for Tron Legacy is out. It's actually been out for a couple days already I just was late getting it on here. I had the pleasure of going to watch Alice in Wonderland in 3D the other night and I got to see this trailer in 3D. All I can saw it "WOW!!!" I cannot wait.

I feel this movie is fairly relevant to this blog because I'm sure many of us who started in computers in the 70's or 80's were wrapped up in the first Tron movie. I remember watching it with such huge eyes in amazement.

Upcoming Topics - Desktops & Laptops

Over the coarse of the next week or two I am planning on writing reviews on a few new computers that I've recently gotten my hands on. I will be giving a full review of the products starting from the received shipment package all the way to the finished product.

Below is a list of what I'll be reviewing:

• HP Pavilion dv6t Quad Edition Laptop
• HP Touchsmart 600-1055 Series All-in-one touchscreen Desktop / HTPC
• Acer Aspire Revo AR3610-U9022 Nettop / HTPC

I'll be sure to include plenty of pics and hopefully some bench mark tests as well as a full list of specs for each machine.

I've been behind the times a bit when it comes to new computers so I'm looking forward to really digging in to these more while writing my reviews of the products.

Registered Domain

Just as an FYI I have registered the domain http://www.telecom-and-it.com

At this time it is just point to this blogger but I wanted to go ahead and have this domain saved for possible future growth. Plus help give me an incentive to keep things rolling here.

Professional IT Community Conference NJ/NY/PA/DE

Figured I'd go ahead and get the ball rolling.

My good friend over at Standalone Sysadmin is wanting to get the word out to as many people as possible about the up coming conference May 7th - 8th in Brunswick, NJ.

It sounds like it's going to be an excellent event to make if you can be in the area with some awesome speakers and training.

See any of the links below to get some further information about this exciting event:

http://www.standalone-sysadmin.com/blog/

http://lopsanj.org/events/picc10/

http://twitter.com/picconf

http://www.facebook.com/pages/Professional-IT-Community-Conference/305267512588

Wow....can't believe it's been a year.

Well I'm not sure what I can say other then "wow....that was a quick year". I was thinking the other day that I needed to get back to writing on this blog. When I made it to the site I was a bit surprised to already see a year go by since I last wrote on the blog. Trust me when I say that I was all not too proud to see that it had been that long since I'd been on here. And to make matters worse I read my last entry about studying for my CCNA and here I am a year later and still have not actually taken the test.

So...I'm back and planning on staying. In fact I'm making it a point to stay. I plan on doing a weekly blog, maybe sometimes a little more if I can come up with enough to talk about.

Not that I've ever had many readers but hopefully once I get this going again I can get some people back on here.