November 27, 2007

I'm a die-hard Apple fan, but I must say I've had a run of bad Apple luck in the past month. My Mac Pro's ATI X1900 XT video card began to fail due to overheating. (The Apple Store at least took 1/2 off the price of a replacement - out of warranty.) My MacBook Pro is occasionally reporting -128 deg. C from the GPU heatsink (hmmmm...) and my iPhone had a little ear-speaker glitch. Oh yes - and my 4 year old 20-inch Apple Cinema Display just died.

My G5 used to sport dual 20-inch ACDs. When I replaced them with a 30-inch ACD, I took one in to the office and began using it as my primary work display. A nice improvement over my Dell 19-inch CRT. Well, the other day, upon arrival at my office, I was greeted with a dim upper-half of the display along with a blinking power LED (short-short-long), indicating a bad backlight inverter board. Bum luck.

A bit of Googling showed me that I could grab a replacement board for $125 and fix the issue with a little rolling up of the sleeves. This is what I did and, indeed, I'm now back in business. I thought I'd share the photo gallery documenting the swap-out. If you find yourself in the same boat, I hope these photos help.

November 20, 2007

It's got to be the case! You see, I've been playing Super Mario Galaxy fanatically (well, when I'm able, given baby duty and a recent (current) flu) since getting it last week. It's brilliant and sits, at least, in my "top 5" all time favorite games list. At any rate, I was playing this curious, one-star galaxy called "Bigmouth Galaxy" which involves dodging eels while attempting to collect star chips, when suddenly somehing grabbed my attention. It was the background music.

Have a listen.

It took me a few seconds to place it but that's all it took. It sounded to me almost exactly the same as the music playing during the eels / Cliffs of Insanity section of The Princess Bride (the finest movie ever filmed)! I was so certain of this that I wired my Wii's audio output to my Mac Pro and sampled the relevant section of the score. I came to find that it is not an exact reproduction of that Princess Bride melody, but seems to merge various pieces taken from here and there within the original track to produce a tune that, to me, is without question inspired by the soundtrack of that wonderful film.

Is it me? Am I just imagining things? Please share your thoughts, if you have any, on this matter.

November 14, 2007

My recent acquisition of Super Mario Galaxy has put quality gaming in the forefront of my mind. Surely due to this, it occurred to me it might be interesting to post a list of my single favorite game over every year for, say, the past 25 years. And so I have.

For what it's worth, I turned 10 years old in May of 1982, the first year on this list. And as this list would indicate, I've owned a few machines in my time....

1982 - Demon Attack ( Atari 2600 )
1983 - Parsec ( TI-99/4A )
1984 - Conan: Hall of Volta ( Apple //c )
1985 - Wishbringer ( Amiga 1000 )
1986 - Time Bandit ( Atari 520ST )
1987 - Starglider ( Atari 520ST )
1988 - Defender of the Crown ( Apple IIgs )
1989 - Hybris ( Amiga 2000 )
1990 - Shadow of the Beast ( Amiga 2000 )
1991 - Typhoon Thompson ( Amiga 2000 )
1992 - Spectre VR ( Macintosh LC )
1993 - Another World ( Amiga 1200 )
1994 - DOOM ( Intel 486 66MHz PC )
1995 - Descent ( Intel 486 66MHz PC )
1996 - Wipeout ( Sony Playstation )
1997 - Super Mario 64 ( Nintendo 64 )
1998 - Quake II ( AMD K6 225MHz PC )
1999 - Quake III Arena ( Blue & White G3 400MHz Macintosh )
2000 - Rune ( Blue & White G3 400MHz Macintosh )
2001 - Giants: Citizen Kabuto ( dual G4 800MHz Macintosh )
2002 - Rez ( Sega Dreamcast )
2003 - Unreal Tournament 2003 ( dual G4 800MHz Macintosh )
2004 - Super Mario 64 DS ( Nintendo DS )
2005 - HALO: Combat Evolved ( dual G5 2.5GHz Macintosh )
2006 - Geometry Wars: Retro Evolved ( XBOX 360 )
2007 - Super Mario Galaxy ( Nintendo Wii )

Game on!

November 12, 2007

Yay! I got it a day early!

Thanks to Game Crazy. Screw GameStop. I've owned it a little over two hours now but have I played it? No. The wife's watching TV. Maybe she'll go to bed soon. This is my hope. :-)

UPDATE [11.14.2007]: I finally got to play! And the game is just awesome! As I'd heard reviewers comment, it feels much more like a sequel to Super Mario 64 than the quite lovely, yet somewhat repetitive Super Mario Sunshine does. It definitely has the "spirit" of good ole' SM64 while looking better than any Mario before it.

Check out my "SMG on my 50-inch plasma" gallery - sexy pixels....

November 4, 2007

Apple marketing has long done a number on me. And not just in these flashy days of iPod "shadow dancers" and all that "hip" stuff. No, even back in the reserved, suit-and-tie days of 1986-or-so tidy product ads featuring the Apple Garamond font, I was held in thrall.

I purchased what I believe was the first Amiga 1000 sold in Virginia, way back in October 1985. The Amiga was amazing, but it did lack software for the first (many) months of its existence. I was loving the Amiga but lamenting the lack of software and then, as it turns out, romanced by Apple's straight laced ads for the early '86 Apple IIe bundle of goodies, consisting of an enhanced IIe, new composite screen with a "mono mode," UniDisk 3.5 drive, and the Mac-like Quark Catalyst desktop interface. Yes, those ads prompted me to sell the Amiga and go back to the 8-bit Apple II (I was a //c user prior to the Amiga). Kind of amazing to think about.

Part of it, I believe, was the Apple store I was familiar with. There was this great store in Williamsburg, Virginia called Next Generation Computers and later Connecting Point (or perhaps the other way around - I don't recall exactly). I've long loved the colonial feel of Williamsburg and it somehow meshed with Apple's target image in their ads. The two together was a proposition I could not avoid. And so I sold the Amiga and became an Apple II user once again.

I thought I would share this little twist in my computing history. Who says marketing doesn't affect the savvy few? Ah well. I still love the II, in part because of all that Apple Garamond goodness.