kcw | journal | 2004 << Previous Page | Next Page >>
Today I skipped work so I could move more furniture around. I spent all morning assembling the television cabinet that my sister gave me (it was an old one she didn't want anymore). There were a couple of tricky parts but the instructions were all graphics only and for the most part easy to understand. Unfortunately the bits for the bookshelf section are missing so I won't be able to put books there. But that section is also just big enough for the printer hutch so at least it's not wasted space.

After assembling the television cabinet (which fits like a 30" television) I moved all the television, network, and server stuff into it and the cabinet is now at about the same place as the old television "stand" that I was using. I also moved the bookcase on the ground floor (which held my MechWarrior: Dark Age miniatures) up into my room and same for the small bookcase downstairs. Moved my "desk" to just in front of the television (which is a 13") so at least I can watch television ok. Also moved my bed away from the bookcases so it kind of blocks both the entrance to the bedroom and the entrance to the bathroom. There is still this 5 or 6 foot wide strip of my room next to the bookcases where I can put an exercise bike if my sister ends up buying one for me (as a gift).

Of course all the stuff that used to be in those bookcases had to go somewhere so now the game room is full of small piles of books and stuff. Very messy. Actually I have lots of books in the guest room too because I ran out of floor space. Should be ok since I'm not expecting any guests for a few months. At this point the master bedroom and bath are the only clean and tidy rooms in the whole house. Even the master bedroom is a mess of comics and videos.  I'll be slowy cleaning things up over the next few months, now that I'm done with this burst of activity.
On the Gamesome Mac host Sean Smith just talked about Apple II emulators and then went into Macintosh emulators (all for the Mac). Apparently Gerard Putter has a good emulator, Virtual II, which is easy to use and supports lots of cards. I like how the printer card outputs to a PDF file so you can print it from your Macintosh printer.

There are some really cool games that I played on Mike Leonard's Apple II+. Ali Baba and the 40 Thieves was this graphical adventure game. I remember that you could just add lots of characters, each taking their turn to move. So we had a couple of dozen PCs moving around the various rooms of the game. Of course the Ultima series were very popular, though some were also ported to the Mac. Hmm, can't think of any other games that I didn't play on my Commodore 64 in one form or another.

Anyway, back to Gamesome Mac. Sean spent the rest of his hour ranting about things. About 30 seconds complaining about the Presidential Election. Then a good 20 minutes complaining about disk space usage for game software installs. When Sean goes on a rant it gets kind of annoying. Too many examples and it can come off as being a bit shrill. Oh yeah, he also had a rant about how publishers should properly make sure that game updates are available everywhere.

The main guest is Andrew Tepper, creator of a MMORPG called A Tale in the Desert II. Eh, no matter how interesting it is, I don't want to pay a monthly fee to play a game. At least I don't have to worry about trying to win the 6-month account. There are a couple of MMORPGs that I may try. GURPS Online and there is a Star Trek one. But probably not though.
Copyright (c) 2004 Kevin C. Wong
Page Created: November 8, 2004
Page Last Updated: November 8, 2004