My wife is a moderate video game player so she isn't skilled in some newer games. When we play some newer games, like say fighting games I'll choose a character I don't know to even up the match.
What I found is lots of old school games even things out. I buy lots of compilations for the PS2 from old Atari games when we were kids to old school Capcom collections. I have about 4 or 5 of these and each one comes with 15-20 games so we have a large variety of games.
Since my wife isn't in to first person kill-em' games these work great! Even turned based games like pac-man work well.
I even have my old NES and SNES wired up and playing games like Donkey Kong Country, SMB and Dr. Mario are always a good time.:)
So recently my wife was pulling her hair out using her Dell Inspirion 1000 laptop running WinXP. She was having all kinds of problems with it crashing, things not working, etc. She had used Linux (Debian) on my laptop before and asked if she could give it a try. So I installed Ubuntu Linux (Breezy Badger) on her Dell Inspirion. Installing was a breeze, minus requiring the ndis wrapper for the fairly common Netgear wireless card, everything ran great out of the box.
Once set up I handed it over to her, gave her a quick 5 minutes tour of where everything was and she was on her way.
She now has been using it for about 2 months. She uses OpenOffice and GIMP for doing project plans and other classroom related stuff and has been tinkering around with a number of other things the platform offers.
Here is the downside. She has a number of smaller applications. One creates crossword puzzles, another does banner-art type stuff. These are obviously Windows programs and so far only one of them works under wine. Because of the lack of RAM in her machine I set up a WinXP system in VMWare on another system that she VNC's in to for using these programs. The windows system, once built in VMWare and everything installed was tar'ed up and burned to DVD for easy recovery when it dies and her Linux machine has been extremely stable.
She has a few complaints about the Ubuntu desktop, layout and what-not, but nothing big enough to prevent her from using it. She is really happy with it and proud of herself for making the switch. In fact, my intention was to dual boot her system, but her CD-ROM drive had died, it refused to read CD's, only DVD's. So Ubuntu installed, I had no Windows DVD's (does Windows come on DVD??) and she has never complained once about not having a local Windows machine.
I also love how IE, after 6 years is still finding numerous serious security flaws that are almost as many as FireFox's less severe flaws after only less than a year in the mainstream.
Heh, LSL is the first game I got where I really started to learn how to type.
I started off on a TRS-80 CoCo playing very few word games, mostly Zork and Dungeons of Daggorath. Plus the TRS-80 keyboard was awful. I did very little programming on here, probably because I was about 5 when my parents got it.
I then went to a Texas Instruments TI-99/4A which was an awesome computer for me. I did most of my programming in Basic on this machine because it was mine. My parents got it for me when it was at the end of it's life for fairly cheap. Unfortunatly I lost all my cassette tapes with the programs I wrote.:(
I started using PC's in 1987 on an 8088 with an amber monitor playing Lesiure Suit Larry 1:) First PC game I had ever played. I started to get away from programming when I switched to PCs because of lack of tools. Then around 1990 I got a 2400baud modem and that opened the world of BBS's to me. Shortly after that I downloaded a copy of Borland Pascal and started teaching myself. I started my own BBS and wrote a number of my own BBS doors in Pascal.
Around 1994 I got an internet connection, downloaded Linux and things just took off from there:)
Yep, I have the same one. I also bought it from best buy. I lug mine from home (NJ) to NYC everyday. I have my laptop, with charger and mouse along with two large books, an umbrella, PDA, cell phone, flash card reader, and a number of smaller items. There are lots of small pockets inside and out as well as a nifty CD/iPod player holder that allows your headphone wire to be routed to the outside of the bag quite cleanly. It is also pretty waterproof; I have been stuck in the pouring rain with it and the contents had remained dry. Also, it is very comfortable. It has large chunks of padding on the back and the straps are well padded. It cost around $70 at Best Buy, dunno if this was a greatest deal in the world but I needed it and it was there.:) I am very happy with my purchase.
He's been schizophrenic for a long time. I've known him since college and a few months ago he switched doctors and convinced his current doctor he no longer needs medication for it.
Well, he's started to really get weird. He thinks "crazy russion software developers" are trying to kill him. He thinks his house is bugged, people are breaking into his computer, etc.. When I ask him how this is all possible he either has no answer or an absolutly jaw-dropping response.
I don't know how to approach this situation without telling him "Dude, get back on your medication". He's fairly sensitive and isn't picking up subtle hints I have been dropping.
I don't know his family very well so I would feel weird hunting down his parents' phone number and calling them up "Hi, you don't know me but I am a friend of your son's. He's mentally ill and needs to get back on his medicine".
Any ideas?
I was at that large amusement park in Ohio, right on Lake Erie. I forget the name, famous place... Sandusky something, I forget. I am from the tri-state area, no where near ohio.
Anyway, I was waiting on line for a coaster as the power went out. One person ahead of me for the car. The other poor saps go stuck at the top of the coaster.
Oddest thing, after about 30 minutes, no one had a clue what was going on. They were escorting people down the coasters who got stuck up top then they just dropped the coasters. They just let gravity do it's job... crazy...
Cell phones wouldn't work either, which reminded me of another day I tried calling people... So it was starting to get a little creepy.
After figuring out that the power wasn't going to be coming back on we starte to leave, the line for a refund was longer than most of the lines for the coasters, so we didn't bother.
It wasn't untill we got into the car to fire up the good ol' AM Radio did we find out what the hell was going on.
For two years we were starting a business and the "office" I shared with a fellow employee also housed 40+ servers. This room was about 20x12. In the summer time the room would be 95 degrees at 7am, easily toping 110 by mid-day. This is in Northern NJ where outside temps never reached much above 100 very often.
Not to mention we had to turn off monitors if we had to print something to avoid tripping a breaker and there was the constant supply of wasps coming in the open window, being attracted to our empty soda cans. The contant hum of 40+ computers drove you crazy. Our desktops were on a work bench with rough cut edges that left indentations on your arms and was quite irritating. Only nice thing about that office was we had nice chairs:)
The building had A/C, or so it was claimed but it was impossible to keep that room below 100 degrees in the summer times. The A/C would frequently drip and the ceiling in the bathroom collapsed. We ended up covering the window with cardboard to prevent sunlight from heating the room up more and even setup an intricate scheme of fans to get heat out of the room to little avail.
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My wife is a moderate video game player so she isn't skilled in some newer games. When we play some newer games, like say fighting games I'll choose a character I don't know to even up the match.
:)
What I found is lots of old school games even things out. I buy lots of compilations for the PS2 from old Atari games when we were kids to old school Capcom collections. I have about 4 or 5 of these and each one comes with 15-20 games so we have a large variety of games.
Since my wife isn't in to first person kill-em' games these work great! Even turned based games like pac-man work well.
I even have my old NES and SNES wired up and playing games like Donkey Kong Country, SMB and Dr. Mario are always a good time.
So recently my wife was pulling her hair out using her Dell Inspirion 1000 laptop running WinXP. She was having all kinds of problems with it crashing, things not working, etc. She had used Linux (Debian) on my laptop before and asked if she could give it a try. So I installed Ubuntu Linux (Breezy Badger) on her Dell Inspirion. Installing was a breeze, minus requiring the ndis wrapper for the fairly common Netgear wireless card, everything ran great out of the box.
Once set up I handed it over to her, gave her a quick 5 minutes tour of where everything was and she was on her way.
She now has been using it for about 2 months. She uses OpenOffice and GIMP for doing project plans and other classroom related stuff and has been tinkering around with a number of other things the platform offers.
Here is the downside. She has a number of smaller applications. One creates crossword puzzles, another does banner-art type stuff. These are obviously Windows programs and so far only one of them works under wine. Because of the lack of RAM in her machine I set up a WinXP system in VMWare on another system that she VNC's in to for using these programs. The windows system, once built in VMWare and everything installed was tar'ed up and burned to DVD for easy recovery when it dies and her Linux machine has been extremely stable.
She has a few complaints about the Ubuntu desktop, layout and what-not, but nothing big enough to prevent her from using it. She is really happy with it and proud of herself for making the switch. In fact, my intention was to dual boot her system, but her CD-ROM drive had died, it refused to read CD's, only DVD's. So Ubuntu installed, I had no Windows DVD's (does Windows come on DVD??) and she has never complained once about not having a local Windows machine.
I also love how IE, after 6 years is still finding numerous serious security flaws that are almost as many as FireFox's less severe flaws after only less than a year in the mainstream.
Heh, LSL is the first game I got where I really started to learn how to type. I started off on a TRS-80 CoCo playing very few word games, mostly Zork and Dungeons of Daggorath. Plus the TRS-80 keyboard was awful. I did very little programming on here, probably because I was about 5 when my parents got it. I then went to a Texas Instruments TI-99/4A which was an awesome computer for me. I did most of my programming in Basic on this machine because it was mine. My parents got it for me when it was at the end of it's life for fairly cheap. Unfortunatly I lost all my cassette tapes with the programs I wrote. :(
I started using PC's in 1987 on an 8088 with an amber monitor playing Lesiure Suit Larry 1 :) First PC game I had ever played. I started to get away from programming when I switched to PCs because of lack of tools. Then around 1990 I got a 2400baud modem and that opened the world of BBS's to me. Shortly after that I downloaded a copy of Borland Pascal and started teaching myself. I started my own BBS and wrote a number of my own BBS doors in Pascal.
Around 1994 I got an internet connection, downloaded Linux and things just took off from there :)
Yep, I have the same one. I also bought it from best buy. I lug mine from home (NJ) to NYC everyday. I have my laptop, with charger and mouse along with two large books, an umbrella, PDA, cell phone, flash card reader, and a number of smaller items. There are lots of small pockets inside and out as well as a nifty CD/iPod player holder that allows your headphone wire to be routed to the outside of the bag quite cleanly. It is also pretty waterproof; I have been stuck in the pouring rain with it and the contents had remained dry. Also, it is very comfortable. It has large chunks of padding on the back and the straps are well padded. It cost around $70 at Best Buy, dunno if this was a greatest deal in the world but I needed it and it was there. :) I am very happy with my purchase.
He's been schizophrenic for a long time. I've known him since college and a few months ago he switched doctors and convinced his current doctor he no longer needs medication for it. Well, he's started to really get weird. He thinks "crazy russion software developers" are trying to kill him. He thinks his house is bugged, people are breaking into his computer, etc.. When I ask him how this is all possible he either has no answer or an absolutly jaw-dropping response. I don't know how to approach this situation without telling him "Dude, get back on your medication". He's fairly sensitive and isn't picking up subtle hints I have been dropping. I don't know his family very well so I would feel weird hunting down his parents' phone number and calling them up "Hi, you don't know me but I am a friend of your son's. He's mentally ill and needs to get back on his medicine". Any ideas?
I was at that large amusement park in Ohio, right on Lake Erie. I forget the name, famous place... Sandusky something, I forget. I am from the tri-state area, no where near ohio. Anyway, I was waiting on line for a coaster as the power went out. One person ahead of me for the car. The other poor saps go stuck at the top of the coaster. Oddest thing, after about 30 minutes, no one had a clue what was going on. They were escorting people down the coasters who got stuck up top then they just dropped the coasters. They just let gravity do it's job... crazy... Cell phones wouldn't work either, which reminded me of another day I tried calling people... So it was starting to get a little creepy. After figuring out that the power wasn't going to be coming back on we starte to leave, the line for a refund was longer than most of the lines for the coasters, so we didn't bother. It wasn't untill we got into the car to fire up the good ol' AM Radio did we find out what the hell was going on.
For two years we were starting a business and the "office" I shared with a fellow employee also housed 40+ servers. This room was about 20x12. In the summer time the room would be 95 degrees at 7am, easily toping 110 by mid-day. This is in Northern NJ where outside temps never reached much above 100 very often.
:)
Not to mention we had to turn off monitors if we had to print something to avoid tripping a breaker and there was the constant supply of wasps coming in the open window, being attracted to our empty soda cans. The contant hum of 40+ computers drove you crazy. Our desktops were on a work bench with rough cut edges that left indentations on your arms and was quite irritating. Only nice thing about that office was we had nice chairs
The building had A/C, or so it was claimed but it was impossible to keep that room below 100 degrees in the summer times. The A/C would frequently drip and the ceiling in the bathroom collapsed. We ended up covering the window with cardboard to prevent sunlight from heating the room up more and even setup an intricate scheme of fans to get heat out of the room to little avail.
Thank god those days are done with.