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.