Category: Personal

Stuff about me or my family.

Tabletop Day!

Personal
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tabletopdaylogoToday, March 30th, is International Tabletop Day!

It’s an easy day to observe: just get together with people you like (or people you might like) and play some games.  Old-fashioned cardboard and plastic, look-each-other-in-the-eye games.

Everybody has a game or twenty tucked in a closet or stuck up on shelves.  Get them out!  Better yet go to your local game shop and ask about the hundreds of awesome independent games available.  Whether you have kids or not, five minutes or five hours, want to think really hard or not at all there’s a game out there that’s perfect.  Go find it!

TiVo Sucks, Part 2

Human Factors, Rants
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As I’ve written before: TiVo sucks.  In that first article I lamented the lack of innovation and features for this premium product.  The worse thing I can say is that now, over a year later, every single one of my issues still exist.  In fact there hasn’t been a single truly significant upgrade.  Nothing that screams, “you can only get this here!”  The service today is, for all intents, the same service I challenged as not advanced enough for premium pricing then.  Hell, it’s been two years and they still haven’t completed the HD interface.

Now that my contract has ended I’m considering dropping Tivo and reverting to the stock offering from Comcast.  I went to the Tivo site to allow it to convince me not to.  I got the following “10 reasons you’ll love Tivo”.

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Personal Archaeology: Remember Prodigy?

Personal
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My daughter was cleaning out the family room when she came up with this and asked why it was addressed to me (at a very old, no longer valid, address by the way).  It had been bouncing around my belongings for at least two decades and was currently full of colored pencils:

Prodigy Gift Tube, 1990

When I was a kid of 19 years old (now that I’m in my forties that qualifies as a “kid”) I had a computer.  It was sweet: a Tandy 1000TL 286-based speed demon (here’s an internal sales video of how Radio Shack marketed and sold them).  It ran DOS applications and Tandy’s home-grown “Deskmate” graphical interface and, as you’re told in the video, could even remember the current date and time!

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Fun Sloth Fact!

Humor
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My favorite podcast, The Skeptics Guide to the Universe, had, as part of a segment, several facts about sloths.  As this one was a huge hit with the kids I decided to work up a little poster.  Since it made me smile I decided to share (click to embiggerize).

Sloth Poster

You might also be interested to know that sloths are surprisingly good swimmers and, thanks to extra vertebrae, can turn their heads up to 270 degrees.