My car is nothing fancy. Its paint is peeling. The speedometer is broken, so I get to guess how fast I’m going. It doesn’t even have a passenger-side rear view mirror. The gas tank has a small leak in it. The engine mounts are probably all cracked by now.

But, it’s my car, and I need it for as long as it will last me.

I realize that most of you don’t want to register somewhere new, and I apologize for that, but if you would do it for me, I’ll be okay, because that means I have a better chance of having my wish granted by the [tag]Robin Hood Fund[/tag], compared to some of the wishes I saw in the list.

Thanks very much for your time and consideration.
- Xee

I want this blender. Can you imagine just how smooth the smoothies coming out of this thing would be?

When I was a kid, my uncle had left us his NES, with two or three milk crates FULL of games for safe keeping while he traveled with his wife to Germany. Between me and Mom (Dad never wanted to touch the thing), we spent all day playing things like Duck Hunt (Mom’s favorite), Super Mario Bros., and The Adventures of Lolo.

Moving forward, my love of puzzle games grew, as well as light gun shooters to a lesser extent.
Tetris became my gaming crack while I was in middle and high school, and I fell in love with it as well as many offshoots and variants. When I had my own Nintendo 64, Tetrisphere was perhaps one of my absolute all time favorite games.

Then, I got on the Internet, and what I knew about Tetris was blown away by one thing:
Tetrinet.

Imagine a frantic six-way competition, fighting with cascading blocks.
Add in specials that can be targeted at a specific person to give them a disadvantage, or an advantage.

For a while, I was in deep love with Tetrinet.

It was a simple to play, easy to learn online playable game that works well even on Dial-up, which is what I was on a long time ago.

I still love Tetris, and its offspring, but it’s not so competetive there now.

So few people remember my old friend. ;(

No one seems to want to allow a potential employee to give their current job a two week notice before quitting, and will pass over them for someone who can start now Now NOW!!! instead. This is pretty disappointing for me, because this is the first time I’ve ever held employment this long at one place, and I don’t really want to leave like these other children do. I’d like to make a respectable exit on good terms with my employer, if only because I may find myself heading back in their direction some day.

On top of this, my schedule at my current place of employment has a nasty tendency to flip-flop back and forth a *lot*. This makes just getting a second job rather difficult (as I experienced early in October).

I think I’ll spend a couple more days looking, before I consider actually doing something this drastic. I just need to do something. I can’t keep being short on my bills each month, and I can’t keep on borrowing money from friends.

Problem is, I need to wrap up some unfinished business at my current employer, regarding my knee, before I can move on.

What it is, essentially, is a form of On Demand videos, ranging from international television shows, to sports clips, to viral videos. I spent a couple of days just toying around with the application, to see how it handles.

The application takes a bit of time to load on my system:
OS: Windows 2000 Professional, Service Pack 4 (5.0 - 2195), Installed on: Sunday, September 24 2006
CPU: AMD Athlon XP 2400+ (Thoroughbred) 1.99 GHz with 64 KB of L1 Cache, 256 KB of L2 Cache.
RAM Usage: 505/1024MB (49.32%), Swap File: 545/2463MB.
Graphics Card: nVidia GeForce4 MX 440 with AGP8X on Monitor: Plug and Play | Resolution: 1280×960x32bpp 70Hz
Sound Card: Vinyl AC’97 Audio (WAVE)

When it loads, you’re greeted by the interface:

It’s fairly simple to navigate, though the number of channels available in tVadio at this time is fairly limited. Give them time.

Now, the application, while it’s easy to use… is actually a little “too easy”.
As a power user or administrator, I would love to be able to turn off the white and red title bar that stands out against the blue of a standard Windows install. It’s actually a bit irritating. Also, when watching a video, I don’t like being shut out of the media player’s options menu (accessed with a right-click on a video in normal cases), as sometimes, I’d like to kick a video up to 200% of its size, for when I want to watch videos, and chat at the same time. The smaller size is fine when I have too much on screen, but I just want to access WMP’s menu to kick it up a size, without having to go full size.

Part of me wonders if tVadio would even work if I hadn’t installed Windows Media Player 9 recently.

I do have to give them some credit, though: They remembered to give a button to allow for Always on Top, for the video window.

I find myself generally watching Sumo TV, which is a viral video channel. The repeat ratio is fairly low, though I *am* getting sick of “Stealth Disco”. However, the fact that I get these viral videos without having to peruse “j00t00b”, and dig through masses of Naruto / other anime uploads is pretty nice.

I think, honestly, that my feelings on tVadio are… mixed. I like, and yet, I hate the simplicity.

With the new offers they have (ones that are actually better than the offers I got stuck with), there’s no reason that someone in the USA cannot sign up and complete just one measly offer for me.
They don’t even spam your inbox, so that’s not an issue.

If you were looking for an excuse to get a copy of your credit report, use my referral link, sign up there, and take the offer they have.
Quite seriously, I want that free Nintendo Wii. I want it bad, and I have to avoid spamming for it.

Hook me up, okay?

Since this version of WordPress (it’s an Alpha-ha-ha!) doesn’t offer any control over the number of links displayed by a given category on my blogroll, I’m just going to trim it down pretty abruptly to 0, and just add people I have (tried to) read at least twice, or have met in person at least once.

My OPML file, as a result, is no longer an authoritative source for PayPerPosties, and should NOT be used.

Spanks.

- Justin

I don’t make enough there.

Someone hook me up with a phat job somewhere I’ll be happy.

I strangely like customers.

See y’all after work.

Shortly after my father died in 2000, I dug deeper into the video game emulation community, and got to watch a LOT of different emulators try to grow in the highly competitive soil of perfected emulation. I’ve watched emulators for nearly every non-Sony console pop up in many different languages. Some of these systems never became popular here in the states, which saddens me — there were a lot of good games that ended up as import only.

Incidentally, I even remember a NES emulator written in Java, called Nescafe. It had a lot of growing to do when I had seen it a bit back.

Today, while looking for free online games to play, I ran into Nescafe again, over at Excessively.net

You can emulate some of the classic games online, in your browser, using their copy of Nescafe. All you need is to have Java installed (and unless you’re running something before Windows 2000, it is very likely that you already have that in place), a keyboard (:)) and a mouse (or other pointing device) to get you going.

Fun times ahead for me.