AC Capehart capehart

About 20 years ago, my grandfather “(Grand) Pop” died. I still remember packing up his model trains with my dad and some of the rest of the family. The specific bit of his legacy for me. They hadn’t been unpacked since. Instead, they followed me from place to place still in the boxes we packed back then. For the past several years, they were stored with the inlaws who recently kindly suggested that maybe it was time for them to come home.

This was sitting in my drafts for a long time. This is from the Berkeley Kite Festival a couple months back. Kite Ballet. Definitely impressively coordinated flying.

People have complained (or admired) Apple computer for its effective product launches and getting a great deal of excitement about upcoming or just released products. This has not escaped the watchful eye of the onion. Probably a quarter of the people in my office already have the iPhone. And yet truth is at least as strange as fiction as I saw this teaser at the top of another commuter’s paper today: “Apple ready to announce what’s next.

A friend of mine from work, Yoz, keeps introducing me (sometimes, indirectly) to addictive little shockwave games. Here’s another one of them: Desktop Tower Defense. The main problem is that it can take a good deal of time to get through. But like all good games, the time goes really quickly, at least subjectively!

In an effort to make it easy for friends and family this holiday season, I’ve decided to purchase a Nintendo DS Lite. This might also help a little bit with my commute, but really, it’s mainly out of consideration for others. That way anyone that wants to can find a convenient and not terribly expensive gift for me — a game for the DS! I’ve put a few on my amazon wishlist, but feel free to find other references and sources too if you’re so moved.

The Go-Kart racing. That was fun, but I’m still sore. A bunch of Lindens went down to Burlingame, CA where we went to GoKart Racer Where you do the racing (I guess at other GoKart places, your mom does the racing?)There were roughly 30 of us there for racing. The sign-in process wasn’t bad, but was a little slow as we all had to go through a process for which there are a few computers, and of course we arrived as a bunch.

I wanted to jot down some quick notes as I play Second Life about the nature of online relationships. As I started to write, I felt like I needed to include a little back story. Writing this intro paragraph, I realize that already what follows is too long for a single blog post, and I’m not even out of the back story yet. That said, I’m not going to break it up further.

We had a fun “First Friday” games night last night. If you weren’t invited, but should have been, send me an email. It was a small group because I announced it so late, but we had fun. We started with Fluxx, then played Kill Dr. Lucky and ended up with some Magic. I’m still yawning from the late night, though. And Sam kept Carolyn pretty busy, so she was unable to join us.

In response to this query, I ended up with a 15″ powerbook. It’s a pretty sweet machine even if they did just replace it with the “4-times more powerful MacBook.” I tried an Ubuntu install, but it failed to recognize the Superdrive as a source for the CD — apparently Apple made some change to the drive with the October(’05) model updates. There’s a patch in Gentoo, but not (yet?) in Ubuntu.

I meant to post this on the second instead of almost a week later. So, I’m going to back-date this one. Maybe you’ll see it, maybe not. Anyway, Gary Larson’s The Far Side is probably my second-favorite comic strip ever (behind Bill Waterson’sCalvin and Hobbes). During my junior year of college, I was an RA, and already pretty well acknowledged as a gamer much more than a studier. When this particular strip came out (10/15/90 apparently), some people thought it might resonate with me.