Tuesday, November 28, 2006

Thanksgiving

The Wii: fun!

The Thanksgiving: filling!

The Seattle: cold and wet!

The Zelda: fun!

The DVD player: broken!

The Nintendo DS-lite: neglected!

This post: exclamatory!

Monday, November 20, 2006

Wii-pocalypse

The Wii-pocalypse occurred on Sunday, and I was thankfully able to secure my ticket to the rapture.

We camped out at Target on Saturday night, and were 56th in line for 81 Wiis. We got there around 2:30AM and Tricia slept comfortably in my 20-degree rated sleeping bag with a pad, while I suffered some minor CBD (Cold-Butt Disorder) from sitting in my folding chair.

They handed out tickets for the people in line around 7AM and started letting people in to buy them in groups of 10 at 8AM. Finally we made our purchases and got home by 9:30AM. So, it was 7-hours wait in the cold, but so far from the scant hours I've played Zelda and Wii Sports, it was well worth it.

Oh, did I mention that my girlfriend is frickin' awesome to camp out with me?!

The coolest thing to happen during the whole ordeal was right at the end:

They passed out tickets at about 7AM, and then most people woke themselves up and de-camped, moving their gear back to their cars and taking breaks to get food and stuff. A few latecomers arrived occasionally, but at the news that there were no tickets, they all headed back home.

At around 7:45, this SUV speeds up, and a bright eyed kid jumps out and runs up to the line.

"Is this the line for the Wii?!" he says, breathless, stuttering in excitement. "Is this... are you waiting for the Nintendo Wii?"

"Yeah," someone tells him, "But they already passed out the tickets."

"Oh." You can see he doesn't really know what this means. "But, is that the end of the line?"

"Yes, but do you have a ticket?"

"No..." You can see in his eyes that his worst fear has come true: he didn't get there in time. "But, maybe I'll just wait... because... I don't know."

"Well, they already passed all the tickets out."

"Oh." Finally it sinks in and he realizes it's all for naught.

"You could try going and asking if there are any extra, but there were 81 tickets and they passed them all out."

"Ok." He turns, face drooping, and begins to run towards the front, still hoping that if he hurries, maybe, just maybe he can still get it.

Suddenly, a woman says, "Hey Kid."

"Hey Kid."

He turns and she holds out a ticket.

"Here's a ticket."

"Really?" He says, and it's like Charlie found the Golden Ticket. "You don't need it?"

"No," the woman says, "I already have one. I'm just waiting to buy some games."

The kid grabs the ticket and runs full tilt to the end of the line.

A while later he comes back with his Mom, who thanks the woman and makes sure she really doesn't need the ticket.

Thursday, November 09, 2006

Wednesday, November 08, 2006

Stikkit

Stikkit.com seems like a cool way to save notes, random thoughts, lists, todos and calendar items.

I made up a note about what I liked and didn't like about it here: stikkit

Update:

Since apparently you can't have public notes on stikkit, here is the content of what I wrote:

Cool things about stikkit

  • wiki-like
  • uses Markdown
  • tries to be smart about categorizing notes automatically
  • easy web/2.0 interface
  • has email interface for adding notes
  • rss feed for calendar items
  • sharing, history, and commenting

Not cool things about stikkit


  • Not fully wiki-ish - e.g. it's annoying to link to another note
  • no rich-text editing interface
  • handling of Markdown isn't 100% correct - e.g. multi-level lists, and links in lists don't work
  • No non-email stikkit one-liner to add a note (e.g. the Google calendar quick add firefox plugin, or a way to do a firefox keyword bookmark)
  • doesn't integrate with google calendar/ical

Rumsfeld resigns.

Boing Boing: Rumsfeld resignation summarized in Mac OSX screenshot