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Held in Viena, Austria, this year's Eurocon had a Medieval Mayhem tournament. Congrats to winner Sandra! Love the trophy

Heard Standing on the Shore while watching Entourage. Liked it so much I backed up the DVR and sicked Shazam on it

Their other video, Walking on a Dream, is pretty good too.

They remind me a bit of MGMT - Electric Feel and Time to Pretend

The Houston Art Car Parade started in April 1988, with 40 cars and a crowd of about 2,000. The parade now consists of over 250 cars from all over the country (and Canada), and is estimated to have been seen by 250,000 people!

Even though I moved to Houston in 87, this is the first year that I've made it out to see the parade. I had a blast and plan to watch it each year from now on.

Some of my favorites:

Bunny Slippers


The Crapper Car


Peep Mobile (yep, Peeps! Check out detail on the full size image)


Dragon


Blues Brothers Tribute


Ping Pong Balls - looks better in motion as they're all mounted on springy things and move around.


Wiener Dog - the feet were attached to the wheels so they looked like it was walking down the road


Peacock - tail feathers up


Peacock - tail feathers down


Dragon



The rest of my photos can be viewed in my gallery.

Great concert though the opening act Crocodiles didn't leave much of an impression for my buddy Keith and I. Sadly, Keith's fiance got sick and wasn't able to go with us. She'd really been looking forward to the concert.

Ladytron and The Faint are co-headlining. Apparently they're alternating and The Faint played after the opening act in Houston. I'd not heard of The Faint before finding out about this concert. I really enjoyed a number of their songs, The Geeks Were Right is the one that's stuck in my head! I will definitely be buying some of their albums. We were towards the back of the audience during The Faint's performance.









I thought the chandeliers looked neat with the colored spotlights shining on them. The candles glowed with the light, though it was a lot more vibrant in person than these iPhone photos show.






For Ladytron we moved up closer to the stage while they were changing out the instruments and background lights. I'd say we ended up 25-30 feet from the stage. I really enjoyed their performance and was worn out by the end. However, the crowd seemed to be a lot more energetic when The Faint were playing. Based on group t-shirts I saw, I suspect the crowd was more familiar with The Faint than Ladytron.

Ladytron's coming back to the US, and this year I know ahead of time!! They'll be in Houston on Monday April 20th (other Texas stops are the 21st in Austin and 22nd in Dallas). They're touring with The Faint, who sound pretty good.

Blitz, new album by KMFDM is coming out in 2 weeks. I've preorded the Blitz Bundle (signed CD, T-Shirt, etc) from KMFDM's online store.

New things I've been listening to:

Rainy Monday by Shiny Toy Guns

Mamma's Boy by Chromeo (link to high quality video at end of text)

Shorty the Pimp by Naked Highway

Love is Noise by The Verve

Frontload by Freezepop

Love in the Year 3000 by The B-52S

Bad Things by Jace Everett

Not a Love Song by Uh Huh Her

Bubblicious by Rex the Dog (link to high quality video at end of text)

I have an old Thinkpad T22 that I used to run OS/2 on, though it's run the Linux distribution Ubuntu for the past few years. I use it as an internet laptop. I dropped it last week and it landed on it's side, jamming the PCMCIA Wireless Network Card into it. While the laptop still boots, it no longer recognizes anything plugged into either PCMCIA slot. Needless to say, an internet laptop that can't access the internet is pretty useless...

This week I was looking at the February Specials for MicroCenter and saw Acer's Aspire One. It's a Netbook with 8.9" 1024x600 display, 1.6 GHz Atom Processor, 1 GB RAM, 120 GB drive, webcam and WIFI. Thought that could be fun, but I don't care for Windows. Did some googling and found installing Ubuntu on the Aspire One.

I went to MicroCenter and checked it out. Liked what I saw (the blue case was a plus!) so I picked one up. The salesman tried to up sell me by saying it wouldn't be fast enough to do anything useful, but I told him it would be plenty fast enough as it was replacing a 900 MHz P3 system.

There's no CD/DVD drive in the Aspire One, so the installation is done by making a "Live CD" on a bootable USB stick (an external USB CD/DVD drive can also be used, but I don't have one). Had a couple hickups with the USB drive. First it wouldn't boot until I ran install-mbr against it. Then when I used 64-bit Ubuntu (via Parallels on my MacBook Pro) to make the USB Stick, it defaulted to installing the 64-bit ISO on the USB stick even though I'd browsed to the 32-bit ISO. Turns out browsing to the ISO just adds it to the list of available ISOs, the 64-bit ISO was still selected . Once I got the 32-bit ISO on everything installed w/out a problem. The default install doesn't recognize the WIFI card, but the ethernet port was active so I was able to download updated WIFI drivers.

The system is much snappier than the Thinkpad, plus the video is fast enough to support all the "special effects" (the Wobbly Windows are interesting) and OpenGL that the Thinkpad didn't support.




When I did the install I left XP and the hidden 15GB restore partition on the drive. I did so as I thought I'd need to use XP to do firmware updates. Turns out firmware updates are done via bootable USB drives using FreeDOS.

I'm going to redo the install and wipe out XP - but I want to do some research on this first

If you care to look, I've got a few photos up on my site on the aftermath of Hurricane Ike. I may add more later today if I venture out in the neighborhood, though I'm still extremely tired and may end up taking a nap this afternoon.

I "hunkered down" for the storm in the NW part of the city with a group of friends. We stayed up all night and watched the news. We lost power around 11, but one couple brought a generator with them and the satellite dish stayed intact. Power is still out in that part of town. I called my neighbor and came back home as we have power, water and phone service in my neighborhood. My iPhone works in town, but not here - however my work cell phone has a signal.

There was a lot of damage in this area, though I was extremely lucky and my home survived with minimal damage. Some of my neighbors were not so lucky with large sections of the shingles gone and their ceilings inside collapsed due to the amount of water that came into their homes. Shingles are missing from sections of my house and water got into my study - weird thing is that even though my computer desk got wet there's no water showing on the ceiling - I suspect it made it's way in through the light fixture. I may have lost some peripherals but my MacBook and work laptop were with me so they're fine, though my desk is starting to swell up as it's made from particle board. Part of the fence was blown down. A window broke in my master bedroom but surprisingly little water got in, the carpet was wet in an area the size of a dinner plate. I put a fan on it last night and it's nice and dry today.

<rant>
I've been watching the news today and seeing people in Galveston complaining about lack of food/water/etc. I don't have any sympathy for them as they were under a mandatory evacuation and yet 23,000 people (40% of their population) didn't leave. Idiots.

I've also been seeing things around (even here at Atari Age) about people upset with gas prices - well 20% of the nations gas is refined here and is offline and who knows when it'll be back online as that part of the area was hit hard. Doesn't matter if we can get oil if it can't be refined and due to NIMBY you're now paying more because you wouldn't let the refinery capacity be built elsewhere. And don't forget, a lot of refinery was also knocked out in Louisiana just 2 weeks ago due to Gustov, and some of that isn't even back online yet.
</rant>

Update: more photos online and now I'm pissed at Nagin - after all Houston did for New Orleans after Katrina, his response for Ike - "ask for the Nagin Special at our hotels", a special which did not even exist.

Got back last night from the family reunion in Wisconsin. Weather was great, though all the Wisconsin folk were complaining about the humidity - while I was busy applying Burt's Beeswax to keep my lips from drying out

Took a lot of photos with my new camera, a Panasonic DMC-TZ5A(the A means it has the blue case, which looks much better in person than the pictures of it). Besides photos it also takes videos, up to 1280x720. There's 7 movies scattered amongst the photos.

The twins Mason and Logan were a handful - they'll be 2 next month on the 4th. I'm not sure how my brother & SIL keep up with 4 boys, though Justin(their eldest) helped out a lot.

Brandin(nephew 2) was sporting a mohawk when I got there, so I got him some hair color for it. We were planning to get blue, but they were sold out so he picked green instead. It glowed quite vibrantly in pictures if the camera's flash went off.

I picked up StarCraft BattleChest for Justin, and he's now addicted. He played on my MacBook while I upgraded their PowerMac G4 to Leopard. Had some issues with StarCraft on their system as StarCraft expects to be played on an Administrator account and Justin's on a managed account(parental controls). I figured out how to get it to work via sudo and wrapped it up in an Apple Script App so he can just double-click to start up a game. It took a while to figure out, so I'll be uploading instructions how to do it to my website later(I'm about halfway done with the page). By the time I left he'd finished the first 11 levels. We also played a couple games against each other.

The flights to and from were not much fun. On the way up the 7 am flight from Houston was delayed by an hour as the flight crew arrived late the night before(FAA requirements for rest came into play). Because of the delay I had about 10 minutes to catch my connection in Detroit, and of course we arrived at the extreme end of terminal A and my connection was at the extreme end of terminal C. I high tailed it over and thankfully the departure was delayed, so I had 30 minutes to catch my breath The return flight out of Central Wisconsin Airport was on time, but I had a 3 1/2 hour layover that was extended another hour. Since I wasn't in a rush, I was able to take a video of the really cool Light & Sound show in the tunnel that connects Detroit's terminals.

Yep, this review is out of order due to it having been the game for HSC Season 5 Week 42. If you're not currently taking part of the 2600 High Score Club then I highly recommend you check it out as you'll get exposed to a lot of really cool games! You can join in mid-season w/out any problems - there's no cost to join, just post a score in the current HSC topic. HSC Season 6 will also be starting up in the near future.

Oystron, by Piero Cavina
5/5

Space Oysters, Pearls and Bombs?!?! Oystron is definitely a weird game that would have fit in perfectly back in the day.

The game consists of three waves. The waves all look the same, but different things occur in them. Once done with the third wave you'll go back to the first, but at a higher difficulty.

In the first wave you shoot down the enemies and Space Oysters as they appear on the right. Each enemy has a different way of moving, making for some nice variety, and on top of that as you progress to higher levels the enemies can take on new abilities that will catch you off guard. When destroyed, the enemies will usually release a pearl which you need to collect and drop off in the Collection Zone on the left side of the screen. You'll be rewarded with a bomb(up to 6) for each filled row of pearls. Some of the enemies will try to destroy and/or steal your pearls, thus making the completion of rows more challenging than it first appears.

In the second wave the Oystron appears, and the only thing that can destroy it are the bombs you acquired in the first wave. The bombs are more like land mines in that instead of shooting them at the Oystron you are attempting to place them in the Oystron's erratic path.

The third wave takes place while warping back to the first wave. This wave plays like the first but is more difficult because it's faster and the colors of the screen flash so much that it's distracting. It's tempting to stay put in a a single row to minimize risk of death, but the points are worth more so it's to your advantage to keep moving.

The graphics are a little blockier than current homebrews, more on par with the initial Atari games(which makes sense as this is one of the earlier homebrew games). While they're certainly more than adequate, a little more detail in your ship would have been nice. The sound effects are great, and I really liked the background sounds which made me feel like I was playing in an arcade!

Label art was also done by Piero Carvina, and just like the game it also would have fit in perfectly back in the day.

I'm really surprised this game is not in the top 10 sales, it deserves to be.

Note: If you suffer epilepsy then this game is not for you because of the flashing in the third wave.

Next up, Crazy Balloon.

Found MM on You Tube with a tag of nexgam and categorized as Comedy for some reason. Might make more sense if my German wasn't so rusty.