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Last Saturday my friends and I had a going away party for my long time friend and cohort in crime, Mr. Jeff Martin. Jeff has accepted a position in Atlanta, approximately 900 miles west of where I am currently sitting.

(Click here to see Photos from the Party)

Jeff and I met back in 1985 on the first day of 7th grade. The two of us ended up in music class together, and shortly after class began our teacher handing out copies of the lyrics to the first song we were to learn: “You Can Be A Rainbow.” After receiving our papers this tall, lanky kid with thick glasses and an Ozzy shirt walked over to me and said, “Are you going to sing this crap?” I shook my head “no” and he responded with, “Me either. Hi, my name’s Jeff.” We were 12-years old back then, 27 years ago.

If you’ve read books or listened to any of my podcasts, you’ve probably heard me mention Jeff’s name. Growing up he was my Commodore buddy, my arcade buddy, my music buddy, my Photon buddy, my Dungeons and Dragons buddy, and once … my surfing buddy.

Yes, one time Jeff and I went surfing. In Corpus Christi. Where there are no waves. I think we were about fourteen years old in this picture. During this time the two of us would routinely spend the entire weekend with one another, spending Friday night at his house and Saturday night at ours. We spent one entire summer playing Bard’s Tale, and came up with the idea of typing our names backwards and using them for our characters’ names; mine was Eibbor, his was Ffej.

And that’s the two of us at our senior prom. Jeff still had his thick glasses back then. I still had my mullet.

One thing that I will always admire about Jeff is his forgiveness. A couple of times throughout the years I let my emotions get the better of me and said things I’ve lived to regret. Jeff gave me the time and space I needed, and gave me a second chance when, by all rights, I probably didn’t deserve one. Every day, I am grateful that he did.

In 1995 while working at Best Buy, Jeff called to let me know about an available position on the FAA help desk, where he was working. He even prepped me for the interview, letting me know what kinds of questions they typically asked. A couple of weeks later, in April of 1995, I started work on the help desk, alongside Jeff. Jeff eventually moved on, but I stayed behind. Seventeen years later, I’m still sitting in the same building. I have no idea what I would be doing for a living had he not called me that day.

As the years go by it’s easy to lose track of time. In 2009 I started “Nasty Pirates Night”. A few of my friends and I back in high school used to refer to ourselves as the Nasty Pirates. We all had old cars and CB radios and hung out together on a regular basis. Here’s a picture of the Nasty Pirates, some 20 years later.

That’s me, Josh, Andy, Jeff, and Scott. I lose track of how long each Pirate has known the other, but it’s been a long, long time. I met Andy around the time we started kindergarten, and Scott in either kindergarten or first grade. Suffice it to say we’ve all known one another for a long, long time, and Nasty Pirates Night will not be the same without Captain Ffej there.

In several ways, Jeff’s move mirrors my own. Several years ago — Jesus, 16 now — I accepted a federal job in Spokane, Washington. Like Jeff, I packed my essentials into my Dodge Neon, said goodbye to my family and friends and temporarily my wife, and drove 1,800 miles to a city I had only visited once before. For me it was an exciting adventure. I loved exploring a new city; had I never moved we would have never experienced Pete’s Pizza: The Calzone King, or Ichabod’s Tavern. I guess I never thought much about what it was like for others when I left. Now, I kind of know.

Right now I’m sadder than I should be. Unlike 1996, now we have cell phones with free long distance and unlimited minutes. We have e-mail, and Skype, and Facetime, and all sorts of ways to stay in touch. And 900 miles is a lot closer than 1,800. The next three-day weekend that comes along, if Jeff’s not headed this way, you can bet that I’ll be headed that way.

Anyway, I just wanted to take a moment to wish Jeff the best in his new endeavors. This is not an ending but a new beginning. Best of luck at your new job, Ffej. We’ll see you soon!

As a kid, I probably watched this tape at least a hundred times. I recorded the Huntington Beach Pro OP Skateboarding Championship off of ESPN back in 1986, around the time skateboarding began making a comeback. I can remember dreaming about building a half-pipe ramp just like this one in my backyard. That never happened, but Jason Meziere ended up with a quarter-pipe at the end of his driveway and those of us who were brave enough would build up much speed as possible in an attempt to “catch air”. I never caught any air, but I distinctly remember catching concrete (and a few splinters) once or twice. Anyway …

This tape is 25 years old and about to die. I recently picked up a couple of inline video signal boosters from the thrift stores, which I may use to try and boost the signal while capturing these tapes. If nothing it should at least boost the signal enough to control the color balance.

Okay, it’s probably not the “world’s largest” … but it’s the largest one I’ve ever owned.

I currently own literally thousands of vintage 5 1/4″ floppy disks. Over half of them are the same ones I accumulated back in the 1980s on my Commodore 64. The rest are ones I’ve picked up here and there since then. Up until recently, these disks have been stored in milk crates, cardboard shoe boxes, and mismatched vintage disk containers.

While roaming the stores a few weekends ago I ran across the following storage container:

It’s a Sterilite 3-Drawer Cart. They retail for around $20 and can be found at Walmart, Target, and Big Lots.

As you can see, the cart slid right underneath my built-in desk up in my computer room.

Each drawer holds 3 rows of floppy disks. Each row holds just over 150 floppies; if you pack ‘em in tight, you can probably get 500 floppies in each drawer. If you really wanted to, you could probably cut some cardboard “rails” to run in between each row, but so far I haven’t found it to be necessary.

In my defense, Big Lots has terrible lighting and I thought the cart looked black (and not purple) in the store.

If I had to guess, I would say that I have somewhere between 50 and 60 regular old PC power cords hidden somewhere in our new house — and yet earlier this weekend, I couldn’t find a single one when I needed one. This really irks me to no end. I once read that not being able to find a tool in your garage is the same as not owning it. Same goes for computer parts and cables, I figure.

Over the past week I’ve been dreaming of a set of shelves full of bins that I could store cables, cards, and connectors in. If all my things were in one place, I’d finally be able to find them! I hit the Internet earlier this week and this is what I found:

That’s exactly what I had in mind, and I found it at Lowe’s! Seconds later, my jaw almost hit the ground. It’s $212 bucks (Link). I’m sure these are industrial strength bins, which is more than what I want or need … so instead, based on the same concept, I built my own.

These metal shelves came from our old garage (I think they were in there when we originally bought the house, in fact). I then hit Dollar General and spent $9 on 9 clear plastic “shoe box” bins, and $3 for the 4 plastic bins up top. I also dropped $2 for a roll of white duct tape. I already had a black Sharpie, so I’m not counting that.

Right now I only have 13 bins total, but the shelves will hold 25 in all.

Along with having a place to put all my spare bits, the Organization Station serves a second purpose. With all my extra cords and cables consolidated in one place, I can actually see how many I have, which will then allow me to get rid of some. I found two PC power cables while unpacking one box, three in a second box, and five in a third box. I’ve allotted one plastic bin for PC power cords, so when it’s full, any others I find either get donated to Goodwill or go in the trash. Same for RCA cables, speaker wires, and whatever else I find lying around.

After spinning my wheels for the past several weeks, yesterday I sold five arcade games … and the funny part was, three of them didn’t even work.

One of the most important parts of sales and marketing is knowing your audience, and that’s something I’m definitely encountering in my efforts to sell these machines.

There are lots of reasons why people buy arcade games. Most regular people might think that the only reason to buy an arcade machine would be to play it, but there are actually several other reasons. Sometimes, arcade enthusiasts will buy a machine just for the parts. I just sold my old Robocop machine for $150. Even though it’s not a very desirable game to own, the buyer got a working monitor ($100), the Robocop board ($50), plus a Midway cabinet ($50) and all the other parts (joysticks, buttons, a power supply, coin door, etc.) For someone who needs and can use the parts, it was a good deal — and I made my money back on that one, so everybody’s happy.

Other reason someone might buy a game would be for the cabinet itself. Take for example my Rampart machine:

As you can tell by the marquee, this was originally a Gauntlet II cabinet. For comparison, here’s a picture of another Gauntlet II machine (that I used to own):

Back to knowing your market; if I advertise this machine to a “non-collector”, I would advertise it as a working Rampart machine, and leave it at that. If I were to advertise it to a group of collectors, I would refer to it as a working and complete Gauntlet II cabinet that currently has Rampart installed in it. A collector is much more likely to convert this machine back to play Gauntlet II than they would be to leave it as a Rampart machine. A non-collector most likely wouldn’t care about the cabinet.

And that explains how I was able to sell three games yesterday that didn’t even work. One of them was an empty Donkey Kong, Jr. cabinet. Even with no innards, the cabinet was worth something to someone who will likely turn it back into a dedicated Nintendo machine. I also sold an old gutted Atari Gravitar/Black Widow cabinet and my non-working Rampage World Tour. I don’t know what the buyer plans on doing with the former, but the latter will most likely be converted into a Multicade of some sort, with its existing parts either being sold or re-used on another project.

I’m just starting to figure out this business while trying to get out of it at the same time.

Yesterday at CES, Broadcom debut their new 802.11ac wireless network equipment. According to Broadcom, 802.11ac will deliver gigabit speeds, wirelessly.

The new technology is not without sacrifice; namely, that 802.11ac will operate in the 5ghz range, compared to 802.11n’s 2.4ghz (or dual-band routers, which use both). 5ghz means faster speeds, but less range. I suspect for the average home owner it won’t matter much, but it might make connecting to your neighbor’s router a bit more difficult.

Gigabit networking is not cheap. Not only do gigabit (1000 Mbps) routers cost more than older 10/100 Mbps ones, but you also need quality cables to carry information that quickly — old CAT-3 or even shoddy CAT-5 cables simply won’t do. Broadcom says its wireless router will cost less than $200, with cards costing less than $100. And, the new routers will be backwards compatible with 802.11n and even 802.11 b/g cards, meaning your old equipment will work until it’s time to upgrade.

I’m still don’t trust wireless networks enough to run a server off them. My own wireless network at home has to be reset on a regular basis to stay up and running. They’re also susceptible to interference, and I wonder how difficult (or simple) it would be to create a jammer to knock a production wireless network offline?

That being said, wireless gigabit would sove a lot of issues we have today with streaming media. All those “loading” screens you see with Netflix could soon be a thing of the past.

When Susan and I bought our first “real” house back in 1998 (the one we bought when we moved back from Spokane), we were thrilled to finally have our own “big blue” trash cart on wheels. For the year and a half we spent in Spokane, we lived in an apartment. When it was time for the trash to go out, we had to carry the bags of trash out of the apartment and over to the giant trash dumpster that sat not too terribly far from our front door. It wasn’t the end of the world, but the ability to put our trash into a giant plastic receptacle on wheels and roll it out to the curb seemed nice.

In 2002 when we moved in to our last house, we found out that you could get a second trash cart for free! Oh, the joy! Rapture! Amazingly enough, as our trash capacity doubled, so did our trash output. It doesn’t seem possible, but every week for nine years we managed to fill both of those dumpsters.

A couple of months ago when we moved into our new digs, we were again elated to discover not one, not two, but three trash bins at our new house! Now with one, well, any family of four can fill up one trash bin in a week. And two, well with two you can pretty much throw away all of your trash in addition to whatever else you might come across and not have to worry too much about filling them both up. Heck, there were times where we missed track pickup for a week and made it just fine two weeks. But with THREE … now we’re living like a boss! If I pick up fast food for dinner and eat it on the way home, sometimes I’ll throw my trash in one cart and my cup in the other one just because I can. Three dumpsters? It’s amazing! SO. MUCH. TRASH! Heck, if I ever need to dispose of a body … okay, let’s not go there. But yeah, I’m pretty sure I could throw a horse away, no problem.

Last week we discovered that we were actually being charged for that third dumpster, so we turned it back in. Oh well, back to roughing it with two dumpsters. I am so heartbroken. What am I going to do now if I have to throw away a horse?

Back in December of 2011, Ice Cream Jonesy and Roody Yogurt (yes, those are their real names) suggested holding a “Hugo Speed IF” competition. The “IF” stands for Interactive Fiction (aka “Text Adventures” for you/us old timers); “Hugo” is the language the games were to be programmed in, and “Speed” part refers to works created in a very short amount of time.

The “Hugo Speed IF” morphed into the “Hugo Open House Competition”. Originally I declined to participate for a number of reasons — the top three being I didn’t have the time to work on a game, I didn’t have an idea for a game, and most importantly, I have never programmed anything in Hugo before. That being said … after play testing Jonsey’s game on December 30th (the day before the deadline), the bug bit me and I immediately set out to write my own game.

I spent the morning of December 30th reading about Hugo. It’s a scripting language that’s pretty similar in syntax and logic to Inform, which I have written a few text adventures with. At a minimum, text adventures need rooms and objects and a way to interact with those things, and after skimming The Hugo Book and the Hugo by Example webpage, I figured out the basics of those two things. Saying that I can “program in Hugo” at this point would be akin to a person saying s/he could “speak Spanish” after learning the words to “Feliz Navidad”.

The next part involved coming up with a story. I came up with an idea for a short story that, if you’ve ever read “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge” or seen “Jacob’s Ladder”, well, the plot will not be particularly groundbreaking to you. I wrote enough of the story to know how and where things were going and then started coding the rooms and objects and custom verbs. Keep in mind that this was a mini-comp; unlike a formal game competition in which the goal is to release the best game possible, the goal of a mini-comp is to draw attention to a particular genre or language (in this case, works of Interactive Fiction written in Hugo) by writing and releasing small works of Interactive Fiction. At least, I think that’s the goal. If that is not the goal, things have gone horribly wrong.

Without giving too much away, the idea of my game was to tie together multiple scenes using common words and threads. For example, the first scene of the game ends with you (the protagonist) spinning, and the second scene begins with a record player spinning. This allowed me two opportunities. One, I could require the user to type in a command (“spin”) to move the game from scene #1 to scene #2. And Two, at least I hope, the somewhat interesting story and mystery as to what is going on would divert the player’s attention away from the fact that my Hugo programming skills are poor and that the game is (except for a few viewable objects and harshly-steered commands) essentially non-interactive.

One thing I found difficulty in was translating the story from first-person (“That was the moment I realized …”) to second-person (“That was the moment you realized …”). To be honest, I don’t know how well the game translates from first to second person. I specifically made the descriptions of the main characters vague in an attempt to allow the player to see himself in the main role. And yeah, in the game, you are a male. That’s just the way the story was written.

I didn’t officially finish in time (turns out, giving yourself 24 hours to (a) write a story, (b) learn a new programming language, and (c) write a game in said language) is not enough time, at least not for me. But, with an additional 24 hours tagged on to the end of the due date I was able to get my game submitted. Keep in mind that of that 24 hours, I was in the hospital with my wife for 7 hours, slept for 8 hours, and was watching my kids the other 9 hours. Not that I’m making excuses for the small stature of my game, but … those are my excuses.

Hugo allows programmers to insert pictures and music into their works of Interactive Fiction. I didn’t have enough time to explore those features, but I would like to in the future. Inform would be the perfect language if it were able to display graphics. Hugo would be the perfect language if it were playable through a web browser. As other ideas for works of Interactive Fiction come to me, I will have to decide which feature is more important for that particular work before deciding on which language to go with.

Once all the entries to the Huge Open House Competition have been publicly posted I’ll add a link to them here. For those who don’t care about playing Interactive Fiction games, I’ll probably just post a transcript from my game as well.

Susan and I have celebrated New Year’s Eve several different ways together over the past sixteen years, but this year will be a first for us.

New Year’s Eve, Susan is having surgery.

It’s minor laparoscopic surgery and shouldn’t be a big deal, but Susan wanted to have it done this year (2011) for insurance purposes, and so the doctor scheduled her surgery for Saturday — New Year’s Eve.

The original plan was to schedule the surgery at 8am; that way, if Susan was feeling well enough to go home later in the day, she could. The surgery’s been pushed back to 11:30am. Because of this, the doctor suggested Susan should “bring an overnight bag, just in case.” I don’t know how late doctors make rounds on New Year’s Eve, but I’m guessing it’s not very late.

“I hope she gets released early, Doc. Daddy needs his designated driver!” <- example of a joke doctors don’t find funny. At least not this one.

So, chalk a new one up on the list — resting in a hospital bed for New Year’s Eve.

Paul Revere wouldn’t have stood a chance against Mason’s remote controlled army.

By land, Mason is ready to invade with his remote controlled truck, complete with working headlights and taillights.

While I don’t know if it would stand up to the sea’s waves, Mason’s got the pond covered with his remote controlled boat.

Aha, but what about the air? Mason’s got that covered too.

Mason ended up with two helicopters. The one pictured here shoots missiles. I can attest to that fact. Also when it hits a wall, it careens out of control and buzzes toward my head and/or face. I can attest to that, too.