tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-30939192009-04-01T17:45:02.055-05:00Schnapple.comMy personal ramblingsTomhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06356159348640177783noreply@blogger.comBlogger284125This is an XML content feed. It is intended to be viewed in a newsreader or syndicated to another site, subject to copyright and fair use.tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3093919.post-9260592349760609692009-04-01T17:44:00.001-05:002009-04-01T17:45:02.065-05:00So this past year for Christmas my wife and I decided to get our immediate family books. Like, our "theme" was to get everyone a book.We came up with this idea, of course, on the Saturday before Christmas on Thursday.I figured we would just go to Barnes & Noble, pick up like 6-7 books and be done with it. My wife though decided to get online and make a wish list of the books we thought would be Tomhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06356159348640177783noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3093919.post-78717060416433724942009-03-14T12:00:00.001-05:002009-03-14T12:00:16.054-05:00Right now I have three posts which are epically long and that I've never completed. And it's been over seven months since I posted and some amount of the information in those posts is now out of date so I'm taking that as a sign and starting fresh.I am now one of the many people who own an iPhone. My wife and I both got one back in November.The phone blows me away, though part of that may be due Tomhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06356159348640177783noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3093919.post-59711954327987074112008-07-27T13:38:00.001-05:002008-07-27T13:38:48.216-05:00The greatest blogger on earth is Joel Spolsky. He has an article he wrote recently called Martian Headsets. In a very roundabout analogy way, he explains why the fact that Internet Explorer 8 is going to be standards compliant is both a good and terrible thing and why Microsoft is screwed no matter what they do. Now, it's not like Microsoft deserves sympathy for the mess they're in because they Tomhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06356159348640177783noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3093919.post-30976521025794396872008-03-12T09:15:00.005-05:002008-03-12T09:36:09.063-05:00Since my short and stupid posts tend to garner a lot of people liking them, here's another. Moe blogs about her kid. I don't have kids, so you get to hear about my cats.We have two Tonkinese sister cats, Liza and Sandy. We've had them since about 2001 or so. They're pretty different, personality-wise, so it makes for an interesting contrast. Liza ("my" cat) is fat and skittish, doesn't run aroundTomhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06356159348640177783noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3093919.post-76315574457968662052008-02-22T13:49:00.001-06:002008-02-22T13:50:43.002-06:00Earlier this week Slashdot ran a story on obsolete technical skills, and it inspired me to share my personal level of insanity with the group. So, if you like weird posts this one is for you. If not, tune in... whenever the hell I finish the other posts I have unfinished right now.Back when I was a kid, I grew up in a modest town of about 50,000 people. Too big to be a small town, not big enoughTomhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06356159348640177783noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3093919.post-77870761432257452492007-12-21T17:13:00.000-06:002007-12-21T17:13:33.432-06:00There's always been this conspiracy theory that Microsoft purposely made crappy operating systems over the years because then they could always sell us upgrades and patches. Besides being just way off base (we don't pay for patches, for starters), it's always had this one flaw - by the theory's own admission, one day Microsoft would actually get it right and then they'd be screwed. It's like the Tomhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06356159348640177783noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3093919.post-7383648470707998432007-10-22T06:48:00.000-05:002007-10-22T06:48:22.094-05:00On the first day of QuakeCon this year, I booted up my PC and was greeted with a nice message saying that I had made too many changes to my system and that I would have to reactivate Windows XP.Now, other than being a little bit annoying, this didn't concern me, both because I knew that this is a perfectly legitimately licensed copy of Windows XP, one that I paid full retail for back in 2001, butTomhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06356159348640177783noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3093919.post-23750058029585790552007-07-29T23:07:00.000-05:002007-08-28T10:51:58.424-05:00I finally got an iPod last month. It's something of a fitting irony that as soon as I get one, no one talks about the iPod anymore and it's all about the iPhone. Oh well, whatever.I got the 80GB model because, other than just being an iPod, the most important thing to me was storage space. Of course, Apple does like every other vendor of hard drives and advertises it as 80GB but it's only 80GB inTomhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06356159348640177783noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3093919.post-940336254469301112007-06-20T18:00:00.000-05:002007-06-20T14:34:08.021-05:00OK, I'm going to switch gears for a minute and make a different kind of post.Just recently, I changed jobs. The job I held before I had for four years. The one before that, for about fifteen months. Before that was darkness (aka College).The job change in question was a long time coming. I switched positions in the organization two years ago and started working from home (since the company Tomhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06356159348640177783noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3093919.post-61249469070168499512007-05-29T18:13:00.000-05:002007-05-30T10:22:22.180-05:00Several years ago there was this one (now defunct) page I would go to and people would post their webcams there. I think I went there because the Penny Arcade guys had their webcams there. Something about the time made webcams interesting.Anyway if you remember anything about webcams when they were "hot" (and no I don't mean the "dirty" ones) you'll remember the trend was to pose for some shot, Tomhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06356159348640177783noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3093919.post-3829822445361271442007-01-29T08:36:00.000-06:002007-02-03T17:53:49.699-06:00I've seen some upgrades recently.Back in October, I jointed the cult of widescreen LCD owners. LCD monitors are one of those deals where, once you make the switch, you wonder how you ever got along with CRT.Amusingly, I went back on some of the bold claims that I've made in the past. It occurred to me that I had spent a lot of money on a 20" widescreen monitor (native res of 1680x1050) and part Tomhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06356159348640177783noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3093919.post-1163021014385702942006-11-12T21:02:00.000-06:002006-11-13T14:33:10.207-06:00There was a point in time in which the group Guns N' Roses was the biggest band on the face of the earth and with the exception of groups like Led Zeppelin or The Beatles, the greatest band of all time. And this was after one album.Similar to my following of Van Halen , Guns N' Roses is one of the other groups I follow. Their first album, 1987's Appetite for Destruction is pretty much perfect - Tomhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06356159348640177783noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3093919.post-1160068484376020762006-11-05T17:10:00.000-06:002006-11-13T14:33:09.959-06:00A couple of years back I picked up a game called Metroid: Zero Mission for the Game Boy Advance.Metroid: Zero Mission is based off of the same game engine as Metroid: Fusion which for all intents and purposes was "Metroid 4".When the first screenshots of Metroid: Zero Mission came out everyone just sort of assumed that it was a remake of the original Metroid game. Nintendo had done this before - Tomhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06356159348640177783noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3093919.post-1151699099368135122006-06-30T15:24:00.000-05:002006-11-13T14:32:47.834-06:00Way back when I first tried Windows XP, I actually sorta liked the default "skin" that it comes preloaded with. I actually remarked at the time how it "felt" good, and not like it was for idiots or something.Yeah, that didn't last. I quickly grew tired of the bright green/blue contrast. I hated that the close/maximize/minimize icons were huge. And outside of "neato" apps, I don't like the roundedTomhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06356159348640177783noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3093919.post-1144066999955480322006-04-20T17:30:00.000-05:002006-11-13T14:32:47.560-06:00Back in November I went to a Microsoft event here in Dallas called "Ready to Launch", part of the launch "tour" for Visual Studio 2005, their latest development IDE, SQL Server 2005, their enterprise-level database (probably runs your bank), and BizTalk 2006, a product I've only heard about from job recruiters and apparently no one actually ever uses. There was a lot of cool stuff there, vendors,Tomhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06356159348640177783noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3093919.post-1138594967090509782006-01-29T22:22:00.000-06:002006-11-13T14:32:47.290-06:00A few years back I joined the Stephen King Library, which is essnetially a book club (it is in fact owned by Book of the Month Club, Inc.). Every six weeks or so they would send you a hardcover Stephen King book. The book is designed to look like the original issue but they were usually obviously newer printings. A few books were even exclusive to the club, like the hardcover version of the StormTomhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06356159348640177783noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3093919.post-1136495362668300992006-01-05T15:09:00.000-06:002006-11-13T14:32:46.831-06:00First, before you read the last part of this post, read the post under it dated December 22, 2005. I really did write that on December 22nd but for some reason Blogger is having issues with the ISP I use to host this. Me and the ISP have narrowed it down to a Blogger glitch and I've notified Blogger about it but to no avail (you get what you pay for I suppose) so I finally got off my butt and Tomhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06356159348640177783noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3093919.post-1135262783486973512005-12-22T08:46:00.000-06:002006-11-13T14:32:46.334-06:00The house next door to ours is a bit of a mystery.We bought this house in September 2004. There was a house there and occupied to one side. We met the people who lived there. On the other side of our house was an empty lot. I think there was maybe a slab but that's it. We were told that there would soon be a house going in and sure enough construction began fairly quickly. I literally went to Tomhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06356159348640177783noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3093919.post-1133230626899339132005-11-28T20:17:00.000-06:002006-11-13T14:32:46.019-06:00I've got my full-time job in check, so lately the rest of my life has been taking up the slack in making me supremely busy for most of the time. Also for some reason I'm unable to keep the beginning of a post made with w.bloggar on my hard drive, so I'll put off that post I was going to make and instead make this one.Yeah so another year, another console launch I missed, again on purpose mostly. Tomhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06356159348640177783noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3093919.post-1129399207251754612005-10-15T13:00:00.000-05:002006-11-13T14:32:45.771-06:00Earlier this year, and several months late, I wrote a longish post about the game JFK Reloaded. I was looking back over that post (which, due to the haphazard nature of my posts, is just like seven or eight posts ago) I clicked on the link for the game's site to discover that the site is dead, replaced with a terse message. This was last month, in September. The game was released on November 22, Tomhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06356159348640177783noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3093919.post-1128996640917721352005-10-10T21:10:00.000-05:002006-11-13T14:32:45.187-06:00I guess it's inevitable that the Christmas-driven retail industry and, vicariously, the Christmas-driven game industry, would pick one month to release everything. Between now and a few weeks before Christmas all the big game releases will be put out, but for games which will be popular but not 100% guaranteed hits, they apparently get released in October. Two games in particular I've preordered Tomhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06356159348640177783noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3093919.post-1127749544522774182005-09-26T10:45:00.000-05:002006-11-13T14:32:44.919-06:00Microsoft understands reverse compatibility better than just about anyone else (Xbox 360 nonwithstanding). Windows developer Raymond Chen has documented on his blog the heculean efforts Microsoft makes to make games compatibile with their new operating systems, even and especially if the developer doesn't care anymore. It makes sense that the developer doesn't care anymore. In the first few yearsTomhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06356159348640177783noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3093919.post-1126215609697654122005-09-08T16:40:00.000-05:002006-11-13T14:32:44.328-06:00Way back in the day my favorite magazine was Next Generation. It was a platform agnostic magazine that eventually was dissolved by its corporate parent. I lamented its passing years ago. Specifically, the thing I liked about Next Generation was the articles - they tended to be quite good and were amongst the first writing I ever read that treated gaming like a serious matter for adults. In the Tomhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06356159348640177783noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3093919.post-1120058386426350502005-06-29T10:19:00.000-05:002006-11-13T14:32:43.521-06:00One of my favorite shows of all time is Cheers. During the Kirstie Alley era, there was an episode wherein the bar was experiencing financial trouble and was in danger of getting shut down. An idea was hatched to save the bar by offering a promotial contest with a trip to Hawaii as a prize. The tactic worked, and soon the bar was full of people. In one scene barfly Norm grumbled to his buddy Tomhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06356159348640177783noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3093919.post-1122345808952097822005-03-27T17:48:00.000-06:002006-11-13T14:32:43.971-06:00Here's something annoying. At some point, Amazon.com decided to offer its services to other companies. If you go to Borders.com, you really get redirected to a page on Amazon.com. Same thing for Waldenbooks.com (which is a sister company of Borders). Another site which is really powered by Amazon is Target.com though, for some reason, it retains the "target.com" in the URL.Now this wouldn't be soTomhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06356159348640177783noreply@blogger.com