Mario 64, Ocarina of Time, Mario Kart 64, Goldeneye, Perfect Dark, Turok: Rage Wars, Super Smash Bros, Jetforce Gemini, Bomberman 64, Mario Party. That's 10 absolutely amazing games for the N64. Some of them are unrivaled to this day by any current offerings (I have yet to play a console shooter that is as diverse and fun as Perfect Dark. The amount of weapons, levels, bots, options, etc in that game was staggering. Also, Bomberman 64 is the best bomberman game ever made and the only one worth playing, IMO). Some of these were only surpassed by sequels (Super Smash Bros), and many practically defined current/last-gen gaming.
Although from that list, 8 of the titles had multiplayer play as one of their biggest features (sure, you could play Perfect Dark, Goldeneye, and Bomberman single-player, and we did, but a huge part of those games was playing with/against your friends), so if you didn't have many friends that played video games back then the N64 probably wasn't for you. Me and my brother had 3 or 4 friends over every weekend, and there would always be at least 4 of us crowding the N64. We played every multiplayer game on that list for hundreds of hours. Every group of friends I hung out at the time had and played the N64, and every gathering would see 4-player of some game or other. To us, the Playstation was a laughingstock. There was absolutely no value in it. Sure, you could sit alone playing FFVII or whatnot, or you could all hang out and have insane amounts of fun playing the N64. So, it was the N64 for us.
I didn't even know that the PSX outsold the N64 until well into the Gamecube era. I started hearing that Sony won that generation and was very confused, because out of probably 15 or so people that we played games with regularly, only 2 had a playstation.
Its the same with the Gamecube for me. I have no interest in most single-player games. The only exception to that this generation has been Mario Sunshine and Zelda Wind Waker. Those are my two single-player games. My multiplayer games are: Super Smash Bros Melee, Mario Kart Double Dash, Wario Ware, Zelda Four Swords, Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles, some Mario Parties, Monkey Ball, F-Zero GX, Pacman VS, and so on. All the gamecube is missing is a decent shooter (the closest I know of this generation on any console is Halo, but Halo pales in comparison with Perfect Dark, so we play Perfect Dark on the 64 instead).
I used to be a very active gamer, and nowadays for those same reasons of "real life", I can't really play much. The little time I get to be home I preffer to spend with family, so I can't game in the evenings. My solution has been the DS. Its easy to pull out anywhere (I mostly play in the bathroom or at restaraunts or waiting for my gas tank to fill or when I'm on hold on the phone), and its really gotten me back into gaming in a big way. I've had the DS for a bit over a month now and I've probably gotten over 30 hours of play out of it. That's one hour a night. Nothing compared to when I was in college, but colossal compared to the 5 or so hours I'd played total in the months before getting the DS.
$210 for the console (average of the high and low prediction), $0 for the cable, $80 for the controller (lets be cautions and over-estimate), $600 for 12 (non-VC) games, and $40 tax? That's a whole freaking $930 for the Wii!! Even more than the PS3!
I am a parent (well, no, but I have cats) of a household with income considerably less than yours, and there's no way in heck I'm buying 12 games for the Wii at launch! But that's just mostly cause my wife won't let me...
Kirby's Canvas Curse is the first game I got for mine. Its really amazing and is the most unique platformer-ish game I've ever played. Just plain awesome.
From what I understand, that's how Mac OSX does it (just drop the software image on your computer and launch it). I haven't used OSX much, though, so I'm not totally positive. Gobo Linux also kinda tries to do this with Linux.
I think the point is that there was a rapid evolution of combat prior to Halo 1 (via natural selection), but once the combat evolved to a certain point and developed society, natural selection stopped driving evolution and so combat has stagnated and stayed the same. In fact, it sounds as if its devolving.
My wife and I use our Gamecube primarily to play games together. Neither of us really has much interest in single-player games. I got disillusioned with the corporization of the games industry and don't really play any single player games that were made after like 1995 or so (only exception being Super Mario Sunshine), and she just never had the exposure to them. However, we're both very avid gamers of multiplayer games.
We both got DS Lites this past week for the purpose of playing together. Spent a good part of last night playing Animal Crossing and we're planning to get Star Fox Command, Tetris DS, and all sorts of other games we can play together.
For us, the DS is definitely in competition with the other consoles. We use it for the exact same purpose. Only difference is that I'm finding myself more and more open to playing single player games with it as they seem less a blatant attempt to cash in on my hobby and more of something with an honest goal of fun. She's also finding single-player games that she's interested in on it, so it looks like the DS is getting us back into gaming in more than just a multi-player game, and is doing it better than any recent console has. I'm expecting a similar experience with the Wii.
Anyways, I rambled on a bit, but the point is that I think the DS is the first handheld that is really solid competition for the traditional consoles. The games are approaching the same depth, and the purpose is becoming the same.
Zelda Four Sword and FF:CC are two of the very best games for the gamecube. My wife and I played both. We're almost done with Zelda and kinda left FF:CC for it (we like Zelda better). Another game the GBA connectivity shines in is Pacman: VS, which we play anytime people are over, especially if these people are non-gamers.
I was very highly sceptical about GBA-GC connectivity at first and saw it as a ploy to suck more money out of people, but its really one of the best features of any current-generation consoles. Just awesome.
I got a wife, and not only does she like playing video games, she is a freaking rampart gamer. If you think girls liking jewelery is expensive, try a girl who FORCES you to go out and get Diablo II and the expansion and then makes you play it FOR FREAKING 20 hours over the course of a weekend!
If I got a DS Lite, and she wanted to play it, I'd probly hit her with it. No, J/K. I'd let her play, then I could get another DS Lite!
Um, you do know that nVidia is one of the companies with the very best trackrecord for Linux support? All their cards are fully supported, dating back to the TNT, and the Linux drivers perform as well as the Windows drivers do.
This issue alone has made me exlusively an nVidia customer (#1 feature of a laptop for me: nVidia GPU), and anytime a friend of mine that has even a remote chance of switching to Linux needs a new video card, I highly recommend nVidia over ATI.
My wife and I were in Bookman's yesterday and we saw a 3DO for $45. She was amazed they even sold one, considering the console's initial price. I can't help but think (and hope) that that's what will happen to the PS3. Very much looking forward to seeing a PS3 up there in 10 or so years and thinking "Oh wow, I remember how stupid THAT company was.."
Well, it'd be a setup like this: you get an email sending you to http://bonkofamerica.com/ (notice bonk instead of bank) telling you to login quick to fix something or other. You go there, enter your user ID, select the state that you got your account in, and click login.
BoA's servers haven't been touched yet, just the phisher's. Once the phisher recieves this info, they make a query to BoA's servers and input the info that you've given them (the username and state). BoA sees that you're logging in from a new IP and sends a question along to the phisher. The phisher then displays that question in the page that they send to the user. To the user, it just seems like his bank took longer to display the security question than they normally do. The user puts in the answer and sends it (unknowingly, of course) to the phisher, and the phisher sends it to BoA. BoA sends back the image, which the phisher sends to the user.
All the user sees is: Login Page -> Question Page -> Image Page. Perfectly ordinary, if slightly longer loading times. And since the phisher is the only one ever talking to BoA, there is only one security question ever asked. As far as BoA is concerned, the phisher is a perfectly normal user authenticating properly.
The few things that can stop this are:
- the user paying attention to the domain name - the security cert not being signed by a root cert authority and the user paying attention to the warning that pops up - some anti-phishing plugin (like the one discussed here or many others available)
Of course, I'm sure some string of vulnerabilities can disable all these protections. Not to mention plain incompetence on the part of the banks. It could be my memory playing tricks on me, but I think I've seen banks forget to update their certs for a day or two after they expire. At that point, you just use the phone bank until they get their act together I guess.
Re:Not so sure about the visit count being useful.
on
Dealing with Phishing
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· Score: 1
That's not what the number thing is supposed to be like, though. The idea is that you go to a login page (such as something claiming to be paypal.com, lets say), and before filling out the login and password you glance at the status bar and see that the number of times you've visited this page is 0. For me, that would be an instant red flag that its a phishing site cause I hit up paypal often (more often than I would like..). If that number is not big, then the site is likely a phishing site.
Even if the site was using an exploit that changed the url in the location bar or something, such a low 'times visited' number would prompt me to try it on a different browser/computer and enter the URL by hand.
See, the BoA approach always confused me. By the time you see that picture you've already entered your login ID, and your login ID is all it takes to see that picture. Now, if the phishing site already knows that ID (since there is no picture or anything to prevent you from entering it at this point), why can't the phishing site just hit up BoA for that picture and present it to you?
In some cases BoA asks you a security question, but that's the same problem with that. Phishing site hits up BoA for the questions, gets the answer from you, and sends it back to BoA to retrive the image.
I was lucky in a way because college forced me to take about an 8 month break from the game (well, that's my exuse. For real, the game is just damn hard and I got stuck at some point at like 80 shines. Then schoolwork came along and I just said "fuck it" and didn't pick it up for 8 months). When I came back to playing it, I had forgotten all about the backstory and just kinda sat down with the mindset that "this slime is my enemy and I'll kill it. Simple as that." No punishment, no princesses, no retarded island judges or mysterious squirtgun manufacturers. Much simpler and much more enjoyable:-)
The weekends are when we play with friends. Not the whole weekend, mind you:-). Together, we usually play to wind down after work and school. As for her playing games, I like it a lot for the most part. My single complaint is that she plays MMOs way too much, IMO. But then she could say that I have too big an irrational dislike of the newer Final Fantasies or something. And if we kept nit picking, we'd drive each other crazy.
So instead we just beat each other up in Super Smash Bros Melee, which solves the problem rather well. Lately its been Zelda 4 Sword, which is slightly less effective cause she keeps team killing (keeping it very fun, but less resolving-our-differences like). Grr.... And she always gets more flipping gems...
Super Mario Sunshine is actually a really amazing game. At first I was hostile to it because of the squirtgun too, but after giving it a chance, its one of my favorite platformers. Its a lot like the difference with Harvest Moon: AWL and the traditional Harvest Moons. Its very different, but when you stop comparing it to the previous games and evaluate it based on its own merits, it starts to look amazing.
The levels in that game are crazy large and detailed. I've spent days just running around looking for all the secret stuff. The experience is quite different than any other Mario game I've played.
Two years ago one of my friends had a party to celebrate his birthday and some of our friends' high school graduations. There were 8 people there, 4 guys and 4 girls. One of the guys brought his Gamecube and I brought mine. After playing the requisite Smash Bros games (we've had a Smash Brothers rivalry ever since the week the original was released), we networked the gamecubes to play Mario Kart DD. Well, unknown to us (as we were too involved losing races to the girls to notice), a huge Arizonan monsoon thunderstorm brewed up outside while we were playing.
It happened about an hour into playing; a match had just ended and we were about to start another. Us guys were all involved in choosing the track and such, and the girls were resting their hands. So it just so happened that every guy in the room was holding his controller, while all the girls had put just theirs down. Suddenly there was a huge clap of thunder as a lightning bolt hit (from what we've been able to figure out) the garage door outside (killing the motor there), got into the power system, traveled throughout the house killing various computers, televisions, and stereos, and finally found my friend's Gamecube (mine was on like four surge protectors since the second TV was across the room from any unused power plugs and surge protectors were all that we had for extension cords). It traveled through his Gamecube and split up. Part of the charge went into the 4 controllers hooked up to his GC, and the other part went through the network adapter, over the ethernet cable, into my GC, and out of the controllers. Now the way the GC controllers are built (and the way we hold them apparently), two of the metal screws on the back make direct contact with our middle fingers. As such, the four people who were holding their controllers (the guys) recieved pretty powerful electric shocks. The guys all jumped up, yelped, and dropped our controllers, right at the *exact* moment the sound of thunderclap reached us. All the girls in the room thought we were just scared of the thunder.
Of course, the Gamecubes, controllers, and network adapters (not to mention a few computers, TVs, stereos, and the garage motor) were all completely fried. Apparently though my friend had insurance for this sort of thing, and all our Gamecubes and accessories got replaced (I was hoping he'd get me a different color. Mine was silver and I had grown tired of that color. But alas, he got me another silver one). I'd since wondered if he really had lightning insurance or if he just shelled out to replace our stuff, but one of the girls at the party (now my wife) assures me that he did.
So yeah, that was a fun night. My wife still thinks I'm afraid of thunder, and will accept no explanation to the contrary. Sigh.
Slashdot Mirror
Mario 64, Ocarina of Time, Mario Kart 64, Goldeneye, Perfect Dark, Turok: Rage Wars, Super Smash Bros, Jetforce Gemini, Bomberman 64, Mario Party. That's 10 absolutely amazing games for the N64. Some of them are unrivaled to this day by any current offerings (I have yet to play a console shooter that is as diverse and fun as Perfect Dark. The amount of weapons, levels, bots, options, etc in that game was staggering. Also, Bomberman 64 is the best bomberman game ever made and the only one worth playing, IMO). Some of these were only surpassed by sequels (Super Smash Bros), and many practically defined current/last-gen gaming.
Although from that list, 8 of the titles had multiplayer play as one of their biggest features (sure, you could play Perfect Dark, Goldeneye, and Bomberman single-player, and we did, but a huge part of those games was playing with/against your friends), so if you didn't have many friends that played video games back then the N64 probably wasn't for you. Me and my brother had 3 or 4 friends over every weekend, and there would always be at least 4 of us crowding the N64. We played every multiplayer game on that list for hundreds of hours. Every group of friends I hung out at the time had and played the N64, and every gathering would see 4-player of some game or other. To us, the Playstation was a laughingstock. There was absolutely no value in it. Sure, you could sit alone playing FFVII or whatnot, or you could all hang out and have insane amounts of fun playing the N64. So, it was the N64 for us.
I didn't even know that the PSX outsold the N64 until well into the Gamecube era. I started hearing that Sony won that generation and was very confused, because out of probably 15 or so people that we played games with regularly, only 2 had a playstation.
Its the same with the Gamecube for me. I have no interest in most single-player games. The only exception to that this generation has been Mario Sunshine and Zelda Wind Waker. Those are my two single-player games. My multiplayer games are: Super Smash Bros Melee, Mario Kart Double Dash, Wario Ware, Zelda Four Swords, Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles, some Mario Parties, Monkey Ball, F-Zero GX, Pacman VS, and so on. All the gamecube is missing is a decent shooter (the closest I know of this generation on any console is Halo, but Halo pales in comparison with Perfect Dark, so we play Perfect Dark on the 64 instead).
I used to be a very active gamer, and nowadays for those same reasons of "real life", I can't really play much. The little time I get to be home I preffer to spend with family, so I can't game in the evenings. My solution has been the DS. Its easy to pull out anywhere (I mostly play in the bathroom or at restaraunts or waiting for my gas tank to fill or when I'm on hold on the phone), and its really gotten me back into gaming in a big way. I've had the DS for a bit over a month now and I've probably gotten over 30 hours of play out of it. That's one hour a night. Nothing compared to when I was in college, but colossal compared to the 5 or so hours I'd played total in the months before getting the DS.
I think it was called Daikatana.
See... I have mod points, but for the life of me I can't find "-1, Retarded" in the available mods....
A friend of mine had issues with Kapersky anti-virus doing this every few minutes. Do you have that installed?
Short answer: No
Long answer: Yes
Your statement is what I like to call independent bullshit.
Yeah, well, the Wii is just as bad! Check it out:
$210 for the console (average of the high and low prediction), $0 for the cable, $80 for the controller (lets be cautions and over-estimate), $600 for 12 (non-VC) games, and $40 tax? That's a whole freaking $930 for the Wii!! Even more than the PS3!
I am a parent (well, no, but I have cats) of a household with income considerably less than yours, and there's no way in heck I'm buying 12 games for the Wii at launch! But that's just mostly cause my wife won't let me...
Kirby's Canvas Curse is the first game I got for mine. Its really amazing and is the most unique platformer-ish game I've ever played. Just plain awesome.
From what I understand, that's how Mac OSX does it (just drop the software image on your computer and launch it). I haven't used OSX much, though, so I'm not totally positive. Gobo Linux also kinda tries to do this with Linux.
I think the point is that there was a rapid evolution of combat prior to Halo 1 (via natural selection), but once the combat evolved to a certain point and developed society, natural selection stopped driving evolution and so combat has stagnated and stayed the same. In fact, it sounds as if its devolving.
My wife and I use our Gamecube primarily to play games together. Neither of us really has much interest in single-player games. I got disillusioned with the corporization of the games industry and don't really play any single player games that were made after like 1995 or so (only exception being Super Mario Sunshine), and she just never had the exposure to them. However, we're both very avid gamers of multiplayer games.
We both got DS Lites this past week for the purpose of playing together. Spent a good part of last night playing Animal Crossing and we're planning to get Star Fox Command, Tetris DS, and all sorts of other games we can play together.
For us, the DS is definitely in competition with the other consoles. We use it for the exact same purpose. Only difference is that I'm finding myself more and more open to playing single player games with it as they seem less a blatant attempt to cash in on my hobby and more of something with an honest goal of fun. She's also finding single-player games that she's interested in on it, so it looks like the DS is getting us back into gaming in more than just a multi-player game, and is doing it better than any recent console has. I'm expecting a similar experience with the Wii.
Anyways, I rambled on a bit, but the point is that I think the DS is the first handheld that is really solid competition for the traditional consoles. The games are approaching the same depth, and the purpose is becoming the same.
Zelda Four Sword and FF:CC are two of the very best games for the gamecube. My wife and I played both. We're almost done with Zelda and kinda left FF:CC for it (we like Zelda better). Another game the GBA connectivity shines in is Pacman: VS, which we play anytime people are over, especially if these people are non-gamers.
I was very highly sceptical about GBA-GC connectivity at first and saw it as a ploy to suck more money out of people, but its really one of the best features of any current-generation consoles. Just awesome.
I got a wife, and not only does she like playing video games, she is a freaking rampart gamer. If you think girls liking jewelery is expensive, try a girl who FORCES you to go out and get Diablo II and the expansion and then makes you play it FOR FREAKING 20 hours over the course of a weekend!
If I got a DS Lite, and she wanted to play it, I'd probly hit her with it. No, J/K. I'd let her play, then I could get another DS Lite!
Um, you do know that nVidia is one of the companies with the very best trackrecord for Linux support? All their cards are fully supported, dating back to the TNT, and the Linux drivers perform as well as the Windows drivers do.
This issue alone has made me exlusively an nVidia customer (#1 feature of a laptop for me: nVidia GPU), and anytime a friend of mine that has even a remote chance of switching to Linux needs a new video card, I highly recommend nVidia over ATI.
Users are asses.
It's the socket the Wii plugs into that I need.
Man, if you're not liking the price of the PS3, just wait till you see the price of these sockets!
My wife and I were in Bookman's yesterday and we saw a 3DO for $45. She was amazed they even sold one, considering the console's initial price. I can't help but think (and hope) that that's what will happen to the PS3. Very much looking forward to seeing a PS3 up there in 10 or so years and thinking "Oh wow, I remember how stupid THAT company was.."
Well, it'd be a setup like this: you get an email sending you to http://bonkofamerica.com/ (notice bonk instead of bank) telling you to login quick to fix something or other. You go there, enter your user ID, select the state that you got your account in, and click login.
BoA's servers haven't been touched yet, just the phisher's. Once the phisher recieves this info, they make a query to BoA's servers and input the info that you've given them (the username and state). BoA sees that you're logging in from a new IP and sends a question along to the phisher. The phisher then displays that question in the page that they send to the user. To the user, it just seems like his bank took longer to display the security question than they normally do. The user puts in the answer and sends it (unknowingly, of course) to the phisher, and the phisher sends it to BoA. BoA sends back the image, which the phisher sends to the user.
All the user sees is: Login Page -> Question Page -> Image Page. Perfectly ordinary, if slightly longer loading times. And since the phisher is the only one ever talking to BoA, there is only one security question ever asked. As far as BoA is concerned, the phisher is a perfectly normal user authenticating properly.
The few things that can stop this are:
- the user paying attention to the domain name
- the security cert not being signed by a root cert authority and the user paying attention to the warning that pops up
- some anti-phishing plugin (like the one discussed here or many others available)
Of course, I'm sure some string of vulnerabilities can disable all these protections. Not to mention plain incompetence on the part of the banks. It could be my memory playing tricks on me, but I think I've seen banks forget to update their certs for a day or two after they expire. At that point, you just use the phone bank until they get their act together I guess.
That's not what the number thing is supposed to be like, though. The idea is that you go to a login page (such as something claiming to be paypal.com, lets say), and before filling out the login and password you glance at the status bar and see that the number of times you've visited this page is 0. For me, that would be an instant red flag that its a phishing site cause I hit up paypal often (more often than I would like..). If that number is not big, then the site is likely a phishing site.
Even if the site was using an exploit that changed the url in the location bar or something, such a low 'times visited' number would prompt me to try it on a different browser/computer and enter the URL by hand.
See, the BoA approach always confused me. By the time you see that picture you've already entered your login ID, and your login ID is all it takes to see that picture. Now, if the phishing site already knows that ID (since there is no picture or anything to prevent you from entering it at this point), why can't the phishing site just hit up BoA for that picture and present it to you?
In some cases BoA asks you a security question, but that's the same problem with that. Phishing site hits up BoA for the questions, gets the answer from you, and sends it back to BoA to retrive the image.
I was lucky in a way because college forced me to take about an 8 month break from the game (well, that's my exuse. For real, the game is just damn hard and I got stuck at some point at like 80 shines. Then schoolwork came along and I just said "fuck it" and didn't pick it up for 8 months). When I came back to playing it, I had forgotten all about the backstory and just kinda sat down with the mindset that "this slime is my enemy and I'll kill it. Simple as that." No punishment, no princesses, no retarded island judges or mysterious squirtgun manufacturers. Much simpler and much more enjoyable :-)
The weekends are when we play with friends. Not the whole weekend, mind you :-). Together, we usually play to wind down after work and school. As for her playing games, I like it a lot for the most part. My single complaint is that she plays MMOs way too much, IMO. But then she could say that I have too big an irrational dislike of the newer Final Fantasies or something. And if we kept nit picking, we'd drive each other crazy.
So instead we just beat each other up in Super Smash Bros Melee, which solves the problem rather well. Lately its been Zelda 4 Sword, which is slightly less effective cause she keeps team killing (keeping it very fun, but less resolving-our-differences like). Grr.... And she always gets more flipping gems...
Super Mario Sunshine is actually a really amazing game. At first I was hostile to it because of the squirtgun too, but after giving it a chance, its one of my favorite platformers. Its a lot like the difference with Harvest Moon: AWL and the traditional Harvest Moons. Its very different, but when you stop comparing it to the previous games and evaluate it based on its own merits, it starts to look amazing.
The levels in that game are crazy large and detailed. I've spent days just running around looking for all the secret stuff. The experience is quite different than any other Mario game I've played.
Here it goes :-)
Two years ago one of my friends had a party to celebrate his birthday and some of our friends' high school graduations. There were 8 people there, 4 guys and 4 girls. One of the guys brought his Gamecube and I brought mine. After playing the requisite Smash Bros games (we've had a Smash Brothers rivalry ever since the week the original was released), we networked the gamecubes to play Mario Kart DD. Well, unknown to us (as we were too involved losing races to the girls to notice), a huge Arizonan monsoon thunderstorm brewed up outside while we were playing.
It happened about an hour into playing; a match had just ended and we were about to start another. Us guys were all involved in choosing the track and such, and the girls were resting their hands. So it just so happened that every guy in the room was holding his controller, while all the girls had put just theirs down. Suddenly there was a huge clap of thunder as a lightning bolt hit (from what we've been able to figure out) the garage door outside (killing the motor there), got into the power system, traveled throughout the house killing various computers, televisions, and stereos, and finally found my friend's Gamecube (mine was on like four surge protectors since the second TV was across the room from any unused power plugs and surge protectors were all that we had for extension cords). It traveled through his Gamecube and split up. Part of the charge went into the 4 controllers hooked up to his GC, and the other part went through the network adapter, over the ethernet cable, into my GC, and out of the controllers. Now the way the GC controllers are built (and the way we hold them apparently), two of the metal screws on the back make direct contact with our middle fingers. As such, the four people who were holding their controllers (the guys) recieved pretty powerful electric shocks. The guys all jumped up, yelped, and dropped our controllers, right at the *exact* moment the sound of thunderclap reached us. All the girls in the room thought we were just scared of the thunder.
Of course, the Gamecubes, controllers, and network adapters (not to mention a few computers, TVs, stereos, and the garage motor) were all completely fried. Apparently though my friend had insurance for this sort of thing, and all our Gamecubes and accessories got replaced (I was hoping he'd get me a different color. Mine was silver and I had grown tired of that color. But alas, he got me another silver one). I'd since wondered if he really had lightning insurance or if he just shelled out to replace our stuff, but one of the girls at the party (now my wife) assures me that he did.
So yeah, that was a fun night. My wife still thinks I'm afraid of thunder, and will accept no explanation to the contrary. Sigh.