I found a cool site for Gameboy Advanced products called Gameboy-Advanced.net. Go figure! Anyway, lots of cool stuff on there. I'm especially interested in the "linkers" they sell. I'm still reading up on them, but it sounds like a good way to play old NES games on my GBASP. :)
Well surfing last night—to see if there's a way to tell how much battery life is left in my GBA SP—I came across this Uncle Clive's website—which is dedicated to gaming, with an emphasis on classic gaming.
I especially got a kick out of this old TV commericial:
I'm
about to show you something new for
Intellivision which will revolutionise the way videogames are played
and compared.
There's also a link to a game called Super Mario Pac—which was developed by Matt Verran of Hermit Games after seeing a spoof game that was on Uncle Clive's website a while back.
So, I was doing some recording last night on bass. I came up with a cool little line I really liked and figured I better lay it down before I forget it. I tried finding a drum pattern to lay down on top of it, and couldn't find anything I like. As a matter of fact, I've never found a good program for laying out drum patterns. Maybe it's my lack of patience with any tools, but I've just never found anything I like. If anyone has any recommendation for PC-based drum machines, let me know.
Ok, for all you sadist out there that who live their gaming lives "no pain, no gain" here's the game controller mod for you! Kevin Rose, from The Screen Savers, posted this mod for replacing one of the rumble motors in the XBox controller w/a pest controller shocker. This way you feel a small electronic charge every time you take damage in a game. I wonder how long it'll take for someone to seriously injury themselves with this one. :) Personally, my tolerance for electricity is very low. I've had to take several EGK to test my carpal tunnel and I hate the feeling of electricity running through my body. I find it very uncomfortable.
Well, I'm still at work—but I'm getting ready to leave the office. Jenn's been sick today—another bad migrane. She's probably going to kill me that I'm blogging from work instead of home, but I can post much faster from work. :)
Anyway, not much going on. Took Maddie to training class last night. She's still very easily distracted and for any type of "stay" action, I have to have a treat in hand to entice her to stay put. However, she did start picking up "High 5" and "Wave Goodbye." She does the "High 5" really well, but we still have some work to do before she'll get "Goodbye" done pat. I want to see if I can get her to wave goodbye when someone waves at her. I'm also working on getting her to sit up on her hind legs (with the front legs in the air.) If I can do that, then we can work on some more tricks.
I'm hoping we'll have band practice on Friday, but Todd was sick on Monday. Jenn was talking to one of her co-workers the other day and it turns out he plays drums. She gave him my number and she got his. I've been waiting to see if he calls me, if not I'll probably give him a ring to see if he's interested in playing out.
IBM's posted an article about sharing sessions between CFMX and J2EE components. It's obviously geared towards WebSphere, but the general concepts should carry over to other Java applications/classes.
Here's a good article with the author of Designing With Web Standards. I haven't read the book, but the article's worth reading—even though it is fairly long. The author discuss a lot of good points about browsers and developing for the large array of browsers out there.
If you're not aware, the FTC is creating a National "Do Not Call" registry. Here's the quote from their website:
Calendar for Implementation of the National "Do Not Call" Registry
The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) is creating a national "do not call" registry. Soon, the following will occur:
Telephone registration for the National "Do Not Call" Registry will be available to consumers coast-to-coast during July 2003. Online registration will be available nationwide on or around July 1. Telephone registration will open for consumers in states west of the Mississippi River—including Minnesota and Louisiana—on the same date. Telephone registration will be available one week later to the entire country.
In September, telemarketers and other sellers will have access to the registry. They will be required to scrub their call lists against the national "do not call" registry at least once every 90 days.
In October, the FTC and the States will start to enforce the national "do not call" registry provisions of the Amended Telemarketing Sales Rule. Violators are subject to a fine of up to $11,000 per violation. At this point, consumers on the registry should start to get fewer telemarketing calls.
The FTC's implementation schedule for the national "do not call" registry will be updated at www.ftc.gov/donotcall.
I can't wait until I can pick up my phone without having to monitor calls. Unfortunately, I have a feeling Telemarketers are going to find away around this problem. I haven't read the bill, but if it doesn't state so, it should state that before a Telemarketer can operate off a new list, that the list must be purged. I can just see some company opening up a new "business" every 89 days to get around this law if the bill doesn't explicitly state that new lists have to be purged before calling. Either that, or they simply will risk the fine—assuming nobody's going to bother taking them to court (after all not many people have the extra time or money to do this.)
Well, I updated my Photo Album today. I got the picture developed that I took at Salt Fork and converted them to jpegs. I also posted the pictures from my trip to Denver, CO and I posted another set of miscellaneous pictures—which contain pictures of Maddie with her "Buster Collar" on as well as some of my house.
I also moved my Photo Album off of www.pengoworks.com and moved it to blog.pengoworks.com. It made more sense to me to move my "personal items" from the consulting site to my personal site. I'm creating redirects from www.pengoworks.com/photoalbum/ to blog.pengoworks.com/photoalbum so that your bookmarks will work temporarily. If you have my Photo Album page bookmarked, please update your bookmarks.
Well I always forget this, so I figure I'd blog this so I don't spend 30 minutes messing around with the server trying to figure out what I need to get a servlet to execute on a virtual server in IIS5.
In order to get a servlet to run, you need to define your servet in the web.xml (which is in the directory CFusionMX\wwwroot\WEB-INF\.) A typical servlet defintion will look like this:
Well, I bought a Gameboy Advance SP this weekend. I was playing around with one at the store the other day and was really impressed. The GBA now had some really good classic arcade games game packs that where pretty cheap, so I bought the Konami Collector's Series, Namco Museum and I also picked up Yoshi's Island: Super Mario Advance 3.
I haven't played around with it enough to give a full review, but I had no problems viewing the backlit TFT screen outside in the sun yesterday while at the campgrounds. There's nothing like playing Rush'n'Attack while sitting in a lawn chair lounging around at the lake on a Sunday. :) I'd like to pick up one of those "eReaders"—there's a ton more classic arcade games for the eReader which are all under $5.
Well I heard some more of the new Spock's Beard album this weekend. I definitely will be placing my order for the new album. The stuff I heard sounded really good. I'm going to miss Neil Morse, but the new stuff did sound good. I'll post more once I get to hear the full album all the way through a few times.
Well, I'm tired as crap this morning. Jenn & I went to Salt Fork State Park yesterday to spend the day at the lake with her parents—and of course we took Maddie with us. We left around 9am and got back just before 10pm.
I was pretty excited about getting Maddie to some water again. The first time she was in water (about 10 weeks ago,) she didn't really care much for it. I think it freaked her out when she couldn't touch the ground anymore. While she did splash around a bit that day, she was very tentative. About two weeks after that, we took her back to Antrim park and she played around in the water with a lot more enthusiasm, but she was still didn't swim—as a matter of fact she'd get out of the water anytime she started getting too deep. Anyway, this had me concerned that I'd have to spend a lot of time with her to coax her into the swimming.
Anyway, we got to the camp ground area around a 11:30—we had a minor detour in Cambridge trying to find a Walmart (or some store we could get some dog treats and a disposable camera.) We sat around for a bit and had some BLTs—my version of a BLT consists of bacon, lettuce and turkey. :) We chatted for a bit and then loaded the canoe up and headed down to the lake around 1pm.
I recently blogged an entry about Microsoft phasing out the standalone version of Internet Explorer. Well, it now appears now that Microsoft is rapidly trying to recant that statement. That doesn't surprise me at all and I even alluded to the fact that they'd probably backpedal away from this announcement in my blog.
"We don't know what's happening," said the [Microsoft] representative. "There are a lot of different options, and it's too early to talk about any of them...Nothing has been decided yet."
Anyway, I'm sure this isn't the last we'll hear about the issue.
Disney/Pixar released a new teaser for a their upcoming film "The Incredibles." I don't know much about the movie, but the trailer looks great and I can't wait for this film to hit theaters next year!