Fortunately I like to keep at least one spare piece of hardware in case the one I have breaks. You might have heard me mention a 2003 Dell computer used for emergencies.

I don’t know who owned this 4:3 monitor. Probably came free with a Dell computer my parents or sister must’ve bought at some point. It’s LCD but it isn’t widescreen. Two choices: 800×600 or 1024×768.

Very annoying. Windows are crammed and have to be resized. I’d have to reconfigure game settings and would rather wait for a widescreen to watch DVDs I just bought myself for Christmas.

Though I do see that xcopfly.com works with 4:3, as well as the “work-in-progress” version (not yet in a completely working state, but you can see my progress if you are clever enough to find how to turn it on And I guess that’s good.

A new monitor is on the way, probably tomorrow, weather permitting It’s LED backlit, and 16:9 rather than 16:10, gives me both DVI and an analog VGA port for the 2003 machine.

Well, the Consumerist (a blog I haven’t read in ages, it was just added to the blogroll) has linked to Cockeyed.com’s “Incredibly Depressing Mega Millions Lottery Simulator”.

Here is the commentary from The Consumerist:

There are lots of things that you would probably do if you won the lottery. Pay off your family members’ mortgages, fill a Jacuzzi with hot chocolate, buy a water park, or donate to your favorite blog. However, a basic understanding of math will force you to admit that there are much better places for your dollar than the lottery’s coffers. You can, however, simulate the experience of playing the lottery for decades at a time without ever spending money on a ticket. This handy web app simulates the experience of playing the same numbers in the multi-state MegaMillions game for as long as ten years.

Here are my results, using the time-honored lottery numbers passed down through one generation of my family:

You played 104 games of Mega Millions. It cost $104. You won $3.

Run the simulator

Also, I took out Diablo and Diablo II after about 10 years. I don’t think I ever or barely played Diablo II, but it’s the only option now, being the latest (an expansion pack called “Lord of Destruction” came later, and Diablo III is on the way), and Diablo I has been rendered totally useless by hackers. (Diablo II has spamming issues but nothing too bad.) I was never a “gaming” type, but I forgot how fun these games were.

So once these tapes are transferred I’ll be back to blogging (and doing other things) more often.

1. Started going to Bingo at my local church two weeks ago. Last week I won 3 games.

2. Went to a Tea Party march yesterday. I was surprised how many people honked and cheered for us on the street – it was in Monroe County, PA, traditionally Democratic. We had a cab driver stop by to disagree with us, maybe 1 other person, but everyone else in this Democratic county was on our side! Weird (in a good way)…

3. Been having a lot of problems sleeping lately. I found out what was causing it – I had started playing some games on Yahoo, and you can be up all night with those. So I cut back wasting my time, and hopefully tonight will start sleeping right again.

4. Also started using BOINC again. Now the software not only lets me limit CPU use, but suspend when something else uses the CPU. Currently running Enigma@home and OGR. I will no longer use SETI as it strangely and quickly dismissed a potential alien communication.

Damn there are like 3 gnats that hang out right around my computer right now. They’re not going anywhere but flying in my eyes. Late at night, when the lights are off and I might log on to the computer, the three gnats fly right on the monitor

Believe it or not the phrase “X-Cop Fly” has a similar origin. When I was in 2nd grade, there would be these brown gnats (much more than 3) that would fly around the family computer. The name probably derives from “XCOPY”, as it was a 286 MS-DOS machine, or perhaps an incident in school regarding one of those “kids club” things 2nd graders do. In this case, my friend had a club called CPC (“Central Police Club” I think), and after loser kids like me weren’t invited, I started my own NPC (“New Personal Club”). Didn’t work of course, but it might have inspired the name of the gnats, and almost 20 years later, a booming dot com

After weeks of being up at night listening to my favorite night talk radio host, I finally got it done. It is a great program, with three character classes, each with their own 6 levels of unique weapons and armor, 13 enemy types plus 5 bosses at the end of the game. All in less than 6K of calculator RAM.

Sounds good? Well, it turns out there was a lot more to that “ERR: MEMORY” I was getting on those games.

“It is practically impossible to teach good programming to students that have had a prior exposure to BASIC: as potential programmers they are mentally mutilated beyond hope of regeneration.” – Edsger W. Dijkstra, 1975

TI calculators include assembly programming and (in my case) TI-BASIC. If you’re familiar with BASIC, you know how completely unlike modern professional programming languages (like C/C++, C#, Java, and even modern MS Visual Basic) it is. Instead of storing data in an object or passing parameters to a function, BASIC is procedural – the code is read in the order of a page, from top to bottom. This result in you hopping all over the place with GOTO commands. Thus it was very difficult to program.

But there’s much more.

TI-BASIC has a major fault in it – unlike other BASIC languages, GOTO commands leave behind pointers with each step – causing memory leaks! It wasn’t about squeezing variables in on my calculator, it’s about a poorly designed programming language leaving allocated memory open – with no means of deallocation as with modern programming languages.

The only solution would be to redesign the whole thing. Having put off writing this program for probably almost a year, this is not likely to be done for a very long time.

All the wasted nights. I could have been screwing around but instead put all my effort into a pointless waste of time. So sad. And the TI Calculator Community is in desperate need of a program like this. We have great, simple hacking-related ones, but not working, complicated medieval ones.

Which OS are You?

Which File Extension are You?

How White and Nerdy Are You?

Which Caffeinated Beverage are You?

Which Nigerian spammer are You?

Which Programming Language are You?

Which Website are You?

This YouTube video, linked to by Ren & Stimpy creator John K’s blog, shows them side by side.

You may have also noticed that the calculator section was separated again. I plan on doing more programs under the X-Cop name, notably one of those quasi-RPG games popular with calculators where you buy gear and fight enemies (Hacker RPG, etc.). I want a medieval one which doesn’t suck or isn’t a memory hog. But right now I’m too much of a lazy ass. Stay tuned!

This server will run for at least three months.

I wish the site (GameTracker.com) worked with OpenArena…

See Downloads page for details & files.

I just deleted Mob Wars from my Facebook. There’s a Mob Wars and a Mafia Wars. The latter is more famous. And you just don’t have the time.

I’ve been getting back to offline, single-player games lately. What I used to play for years, when games were much more creative. Downloaded some of the newer Roguelikes. Maybe I’ll download some IF. (Probably not, don’t have *that* much time.) Card games, Boggle clones, all awesome. I’d play, but I’m really tired right now from working on what is “Almost finished.”

Dammit why is the position for the other place still up? It’s been almost 2 months!

Sucks right now. But when I play UrbanTerror or OpenArena, I have so much fun that I forget about these things…until the dog needs to go out and I’m stuck with reality again…