As you probably already know, the Nintendo Wii is a must-own video game system. The included Wii Sports game is an excellent family game that is practically worth the price of the system. But, in my opinion, the real reason to buy a Wii is:
For a mere six bucks, you can download the original TurboGrafx-16 version of Bomberman '93 and play it right on the Wii. The Wii has the best TG-16 emulator I've ever used. Grab your old GameCube controllers along with the Wii Remote, stock up on beer and chips, and have a full 5-player Bomberman match. This, my friends, is what video gaming is all about…
I recently did a couple of weeks of traveling. Over the years, I've learned to pack lighter and lighter, so on this trip, I brought only one kind of shirt: The REI Sahara Tech Tee. The tech tees are 100% polyester, but they feel as comfortable as cotton. They breath very well, and amazingly, keep you cool in hot climates and warm in cool climates. They don't wrinkle, and the polyester material means that they don't stain or stink. And they are so lightweight that you can roll up an extra in your day bag for sudden climate changes or spur-of-the-moment dining at a "long sleeve" restaurant.
I brought six of them, three short sleeves and three long sleeves, all black. For $25 each, they are an excellent bargain.
I guess this makes me a Star Wars sucker, but I bought all three updates of the classic Star Wars DVDs [starwarsdvdep1, starwars77, badstarwarspq] so I could watch the "bonus" inclusion of the original, unaltered films. But I was shocked to see the picture quality to be as bad as it is.
I've owned a DVD player since they were first released, and own several first-generation DVDs, but I have never seen a film that was encoded as badly as these original Star Wars films. Jaggy lines, macro-blocking, no 3:2 pulldown, etc. I've seen bootleg videos that are better looking than this. The films are practically unwatchable on a modern DVD player with a modern HDTV, and at this point in the lifetime of the DVD format, that is inexcusable.
Wow, two years really does fly by fast. I'm sure not posting blog entries as frequently as I'd hoped, but I plan to keep on keepin' on for the duration.
As I watch other bloggers struggle through upgrades, formatting issues, spam, and outages with their mainstream blog software, MikeyP.com is still truckin with the old and simple (and probably "obsolete") blosxom software. My home-rolled Rock Paper Scissors captcha system [morerpscaptcha, rpscaptchasandwich, rpscaptcha] has kept the comment spam at bay… at least for now. And along with the Tiki Formatting (wiki-style) to hide the HTML formatting hassles, I see no real need to switch to any other software anytime soon.
On my last two vacations, I've brought along a memory card backup system called Flash-HD to Go from MediaGear. It is basically an external USB hard drive with mem card slots. You pop in a memory card, select it with some buttons on the Flash-HD, and it backs up the whole card to the internal hard drive.
The Flash-HD has worked great for me so far. Each time you back up a mem card, it creates a new directory on the hard drive, even if it is the same mem card you previously backed up. I like that kind of simple redundancy. You can then plug the drive directly in to your PC and copy the files over (if you want).
That said, I would never trust a single backup source. I never deleted any files from my mem cards. Rather, I used the Flash-HD as a pure backup solution in case my camera (with mem card) was lost or stolen. For this purpose, it seems perfect. I just backed up two camera's worth of mem cards every morning before venturing out for the day.
I bought the Flash-HD from Computer Geeks without an internal drive installed. I think I paid about $15 for it, and I used a spare 30GB drive I already owned. It is somewhat bulky, and does not run on battery power, so you need to remember to pack both the drive and the power supply in your suitcase.
