Hello, my Name is Gary and I am.....

...addicted to the Internet.

My computer broke down last Wed around 1:00 PM. It froze up and when I tried to restart it, Windows wouldn't work right. I tried to fix it, and then reboot it and nothing worked. I was without internet access until I went to my parents' house around 1:00 PM on Friday. 48 hours without being able to log on. I nearly went crazy! My whole life was disrupted.

Yet 15 years ago, I had no internet access. I managed pretty well.

Stop for a few minutes and imagine your life with no:

Internet
cable or satellite TV
cell phones
game consoles and handheld games
MP3 player

Scary huh?

Rule 5 Sunday For Gaming Geeks

Gentlemen...I give you some luscious ladies of Warcraft...

Update: Linked by the Rule 5 godfather The Other McCain.

Feist

OK...I am far from being an Apple geek. In fact I love to make fun of them. I actually wrote a joke last week:

Q. How do you know Steve Jobs has been in your refrigeratior?

A. Suddenly the refrigerator costs $200 more, it shows movies, and it only accepts food from one supermarket.

It kills right?

That said, I have been obsessed with the song in Apple's new commercial. A little work, and I found it on Youtube. I give you Feist, and 1-2-3-4:

Too Good To Be True?

Read the following posts and comment threads:

here

and then

here.

Now tell me, can this David K character be real? Surely he is performance art.

And my jokes, they killed right?

A Brave New World......

Today is the 26th anniversary of the IBM PC. It is four years younger than the Apple PC, but quickly came to dominate the personal computer market.

Can you imagine a world without it now?

Computers Twenty Five Years Ago

Here is a link to an article written twenty-five years ago this month by James Fallows about personal computers and word processing. It really is an illustration of just how far we have come. He brags that his computer has 48 K of RAM.......my current (cheap) computer has 1 GB of RAM. He has an 8 bit processing chip...my processor is based on a 64 bit chip. He has a 12 inch green TV monitor. I have a 19 inch HD flatscreen. He begins with two tape machines for storage (and upgrades to floppys with 100 K of storage) I have a 320 GB internal hard drive, a 120 GB external hard drive, and my 3.5 floppys hold 1 MB. My flashdrive holds 2 GB) He has a converted IBM selectric typewriter as a printer. I have a cheap ($50) laser printer that is inconceivably better.

One of the dangers he talks about is becoming addicted to the computer. This is in the days before public access to the internet, the world wide web (WWW), ISPs and anything but the utmost basic of graphics. I wonder where he is today, and how he is coping? Well it looks like he is still writing, and still using new technology.

I'm Baaaack!

Well...my old computer died last Friday afternoon...or at least is in a coma. So I finally got the time today to go out and buy a temporary replacement...until I either get the old one fixed or buy a new one.

Light Blogging

The computer is on the fritz. Annoying screen artifacts, and it's not the monitor..I switched it. So it looks like the video card is dying. One of my disc drives is already dead, and the other one is beginnning to act up.

So I guess it's time to move on. I'm currently looking at Dell XPS..but the one I want is $5,000 and up...a little steep. There is one I could settle for, for a little less than $4,000...still more than I want to pay. I bought this one for $3,000 plus....I think 4 years ago. At the time, I paid more for it than I had ever paid for a car.

Taxes

Just got done filing my taxes this year...about an hour and a half, including 15 minutes of wait time on the phone to the IRS. I used Turbo Tax, and things would have gone even easier if my hard drive hadn't have been wiped this year, because I would have had the last couple of years worth of returns to help.

I'm getting about $750 back....That's about what I get every year.

Shogun Wars Redux

Help a brother out. Click on the banner and join the cause as one of my officers.

Shogun Wars

Shogun

There's a new online game/simulation concerning the warlord era of Japanese history. This is a real throwback to the early days of computer sims, with no fancy graphics or action scenes. It's called Shogun Wars.

Fantasy Football 2006

Well, after two weeks results are mixed.

In my three tier 1 leagues (two ESPN cash leagues and a yahoo league, all with my co-workers) I am 5-1. In the league I have a loss in, none of the teams in my division are undefeated.

In my three tier 2 leagues, I am 1-5 (three yahoo leagues with friends and former high school classmates) . That means I am .500 overall, not too shabby at this point.

Fantasy Football

Well three of my teams have drafted now. I have Larry Johnson on 2 of them. He'd better live up to the hype. I have a live draft on saturday, and then several online drafts next week.

The Corruption Continues

I have just registered a page on MySpace.


I feel so dirty.

Happy Birthday Modern World!

Over at Tammy Bruce's blog, they are celebrating the IBM PC's 25th birthday. Surprisingly, as I browse the internet, they seem to be the only ones doing so. This is a pretty historical occasion.
While there were PC's prior to this (among them Apple and Commodore) the IBM machine was to dominate the market. Today there are only two viable forms of operating system, the IBM type and the Apple type. Recently Apple was forced to include the PC OS in their newest computers, or risk going the way of betamax. Apple and betamax have interesting similarities...both are arguably better systems than the ones they were dominated by. However the fact that their rivals were open source, and thus adopted by a wider range of hardware producers and content producers, ultimately meant their marginalization.

As I've written before, even though I went off to college with a manual typewriter, I cannot imagine life without a PC and the internet anymore. I now possess a machine (the one I am typing on) that is more powerful than all of the computers NASA sent to the Moon combined. It boggles the mind if you think about it. It's almost scary to think about what is coming next.

There has got to be a better way

I just had my computer fixed, and they had to re-install windows. This wiped everything off my computer. I play an online game called City of Heroes (City of Villians also). This means that even though I reloaded the games from my CDs, I still have to endure hours of downloads (of the expansions and patches) before I can play. We are talking quite literally about days worth of downloads. I started the City of Villians downloads (the newer game and thus much fewer patches and expansions to download) at 7:00 PM last night, and they're still going. Hell I would have paid $10 to get expansion discs to avoid all of this. (the patches and expansions would load much quicker from discs .. less than an hour)

posting gap

Sorry again folks. Life intervened, and then my computer went down. (and there is a whole story coming about the Geek Squad)

I'll do my best to be more regular.

My Female Robot......

Those darn Japanese. look at what they have invented now. How long do you think it's going to be until someone crosses this with a real doll? Civilization is doomed! There are going to be generations of boys who will never leave the house again.

I know I'm not the only one who thought of the credit card commercial when they were reading this article....

Mr. Kirby (My current screensaver)

This is one of my toons in City of Heroes. It's my screensaver. This is supposed to represent me. (it's pretty close facially)