So I’m in the midst of a move to Holyoke MA. The server that runs this website will need to move to its new home, and that home is getting its network updated to support all the additional equipment moving into it. Metamusing will see some downtime as a result, probably starting Thursday night. It’s possible the downtime will last for several days or even longer, depending on how things go at Susan’s house. It shouldn’t be as bad as when I moved to Saratoga several years ago, when I was down for about 3 weeks (thanks, Time Warner) but it could be over a week. In the meantime head on over to the wonderful metafilter, one of the sites that got me going with my own site, to feed your news of whatever jones.

So Susan bought a new laptop, and it came with an ipod touch for ‘free,’ and we’ve been playing around with it. The thing is absolutely the coolest little device ever and now I desperately want one. Meanwhile though one of the things we discovered was that my old templates looked completely broken in the ipod browser, which got me started looking for something else. I’m going to stick with what you’re looking at now for the time being. Meanwhile, donations towards my own touch are welcome

Andrew pointed out to me that I ought to write up a recent study that showed a correlation between the presence of inorganic arsenic in urine and the incidence of diabetes in humans. Scary stuff - maybe it wasn’t the high fructose corn syrup after all, which is what I’ve been convinced is the primary cause of me developing type 2 diabetes in my mid-30’s. Here’s an article covering the research over on google, and here’s the article over on the Journal of the American Medical Association website.

549-5217. That was my phone number when I was a kid, something my parents presumably drummed into me to the point where I can’t seem to get it out. I’ve run into another example of that which is both humorous and tremendously annoying. I’m moving to Susan’s place in Holyoke next weekend. She lives on west franklin street. For ~7-8 years, I lived on west elm street in Yarmouth, Maine. Today I discovered that every site I thought I had typed my new mail address into when I was updating my contact info (ebay, citibank, paypal, newegg, amazon, plus others), I put the west elm street address in instead of the west franklin one. For some reason every time I start to write/type west franklin, my mind goes on autopilot  or muscle memory takes over or something and puts the west elm address in. Sucks to be me - I just spent a half hour going through trying to find all the places I made this mistake and fix them.

Susan doesn’t think much of the green in the right column, and I have to say I agree with her, but I like some of the functionality of this theme, particularly the stuff happening in the right column, so I’m torn. I can also work on the color theme, but also I’m curious as to what folks think. Let me know in the comments and I’ll choose whether to switch back, find something else, or tinker with the photoshop templates to get a better color scheme going.

Back in the day there was the sword of fargoal, a simple little role playing game for the commodore 64, and I thought it was pretty damned good - so good I’ve written about it several times. In college I ran across several similar games on the old classic macs, and this in turn led to the discovery of roguelikes, a class of computer role playing games with complex interfaces, deep and complex character enhancements, and randomly generated dungeons. I’ve played many of them over the years and written about them occasionally. Unfortunately due to the complexity of their interfaces and their spartan graphics I’ve had trouble convincing many of my friends to give them a try. This post is another in a series that’s attempting to correct that.

Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup is a riff on Linley’s Dungeon Crawl. They’re both of a mind when it comes to gameplay elements: strip it down to the core, diving ever deeper into a dungeon that’s overfilled with fiends out to get you on a quest to retrieve the orb of zot at the bottom. They’re similar to Fargoal in that regard, though they layer in a fair bit more complexity, adding things like character classes, a complex inventory system, spell casting systems, and more, but they’re still relatively easy to understand. Stone Soup has grafted on a mouse interface that makes the game mostly playable just using your mouse, and it’s why I mention it here - if you enjoyed Fargoal back in the day, give Stone Soup a try - it’s great fun. Head over here to get yourself a copy for any operating system you’re likely to be running - just make sure to grab a copy with ’tiles’ in its filename - that’s the graphical version of the game. The other files are the ascii (character graphics) versions for purists.

Larry Gonick is this fabulously talented cartoonist who’s penned a series of illustrated history and subject guides. He’s probably best known for the cartoon history of the universe books, but he’s authored much more than that. If you’re not familiar with him, imagine a fusion of The Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers art style, Carl Sagan’s careful explanations, and a dash of Mad Magazine style humor, then go try one of his books.

I bring this up because I stumbled onto some really cool books from an earlier time that are thematically similar in the Posner Memorial Collection. in the 1850’s and 60’s one Gilbert A Beckett published several illustrated volumes, including The Comic History of England and The Comic History of Rome. The Posner Collection has the entire volumes scanned at high resolution. I’ve been looking over a couple of pages a day during lunch for fun. The art is an excellent glimpse into an earlier time, in terms of style, in terms of how they conceptualized things, and it’s revealing in terms of their biases and predjudices. The interface to view it is a bit kludgy, but it’s worth suffering through so you can check out the cool art. You can get started here:

Rome

England

Or you can quickly check out a sample page here. Tell me - who does that roman centurion look like to you?

(meanwhile though, go check out some Gonick too, he’s excellent!)

Before I got Soolin, my awesome Golden Retriever, I spent a couple of years running regularly for my health. It was pretty great - I was as slim as I’ve ever been as an adult, and in absolutely superb cardio shape. I was running this ~4 mile loop at least 3 times a week, and sometimes as often as 5. The move to NY and Soolin moving in with me mostly got me out of the habit, though I’ve tried now and again to restart including this spring. I thought of this today because of this recent study from the Stanford University School of Medicine that basically concluded ‘running is really good for you, long term.’ It’s worth a quick look.

Here’s a great little friday fun link - a flash based puzzle game. Every level presents you with a golden totem sitting at the top of a stack of blocks. You can click to destroy 1 of these blocks every couple of seconds, which will cause the block to disappear. Your goal is to get the totem safely down without causing it to fall too far, and destroying the blocks can destabilize the tower the totem sits on, jenga-like, so you have to think carefully about where you remove blocks. Add in a few different block types and scoring based on how quickly you can retrieve the totem on each level and you have a simple little lunchtime diversion for your friday afternoon. Check it out!

Eat your broccoli. It’s already well known that broccoli is great for you, with its high fiber content, high vitamin c content, suggestions that it’s an effective cancer fighter. Now there’s evidence that it may be really helpful for folks with diabetes and heart disease. Eating green veggies in general is fantastic for your overall health - making sure broccoli is a big part of the mix is even better. Fortunately I love the stuff, cooked or raw, and already eat a lot of it.

Flash based, runs in your browser. Remember old side scrollers like double dragon or metal slug fondly? Add guns and grenades, effective graphics, and mouse and keyboard controlled run and gun gameplay and you have Ownage, a simple little game that makes for a great lunch break. Check it out!

I’m spending the rest of the week on Lake George, soaking in the lake, riding a boat dragged tube, and generally enjoying myself. I’ll be back in a week.

I love Rock Band - it’s one of my favorite videogames of the last year or so, and it’s turned me into an unexpected fan of ‘party games,’ something I’d been pretty skeptical of in the past (Mario Party? Super Smash Brothers? Pshaw!). Everyone I’ve turned Rock Band onto has loved it, and Susan and I are looking forward to Rock Band parties at her place this fall. The one fly in the ointment has been the guitars - there’s no way to sugar coat it, they’re simply unreliable pieces of crap. Why a Chinese or Taiwanese factory can churn out reliable DVD players for $20 but can’t produce a reliable $60 plastic guitar is beyond me, but it’s been a frustrating experience. I’ve had to disassemble the first guitar I bought at least a half dozen times in attempts to ‘tune’ it so that strums on the strum bar would register, using instructions I found online. This worked, but it would eventually creep back out of alignment due to what is in my opinion a flaw in the design. To the credit of EA, the publisher’s of Rock Band, they’ve had a pretty generous return policy on the guitars so far, but I basically concluded nothing they could do for me would permanently fix this issue due to the design flaw. Fortunately I found a link in the official Rock Band forums to Bytearts, who manufacture a replacement circuit board/microswitches/mounting hardware for $20 shipped. I installed this on Saturday and love it. The installation process was relatively simple, and the difference in the guitar performance is amazing. For the first time since I’ve owned the game I feel like I know for sure when *I* made a mistake when I’m strumming versus wondering if it was the crappy hardware failing to register. I celebrated this by buying the new Who pack and had a blast Saturday afternoon playing through all of it. It’s great.

Anyway, if you’ve got a Rock Band guitar that’s failing to register strumming reliably, consider checking out the Bytearts kit, it’s fantastic. Meanwhile, I’m on to the next challenge, which is finding a way to fix the unreliable Overdrive mode tilt sensor. I bought a second guitar and the thing came out of the box unable to reliably register Overdrive. Curses to the hardware designers at Harmonix - Great great game, shitty shitty guitar hardware.

Susan was invited to be one of the subjects of a public art project on campus last fall that involved having her portrait sketched by an artist, then allowing any member of the campus community to doodle on the portrait. The finished works were then publicly displayed on the outsides of campus buildings and around campus for several months. For most of that time Susan’s portrait was hung inside the Mead art museum, but for a little while it was hung outside the building she works in. They’re beginning to take the portraits down, so we quickly snapped a shot the other day. Witness Susan of the giant and not so giant head:

[edit]

Kirsten pointed out in the comments that Susan looks like Queen Elizabeth in that picture, so here’s a higher resolution shot of the actual artwork:

Andrew pointed me over to an entertaining thread about Action Park, the long closed and fabulously dangerous first person amusement park* that I used to go to a couple of times a year back in the mid 80’s through the early 90’s, and I couldn’t help contributing my favorite little vignette from my times in the park to the thread. The thread starts here on metafilter, and my contribution is here. As a teaser to incent the clickage, the story involves an unwelcome enema. How can you resist clicking through to discover how that could happen at an amusement park!

* first person because most of the rides featured you putting your body in some form of harm’s way, be it on a waterslide, alpine slide, running down rapids in a tube, or jumping off a platform on a bungie cord.

Spoiler below! Don’t read till you’ve read the metafilter story!

I should add that I didn’t tell the whole story over on metafilter because I figured no one would believe me, but the coda was, after Brian and I waddled over to the first men’s room we could find, we opened the door to discover a little kid who had absolutely exploded with diarrhea and was standing in the middle of the bathroom in obvious distress. We couldn’t figure out what to do about the kid, and after a brief mexican standoff we both retreated and waddled off in search of another bathroom, both of us unwilling to use the completely soiled one.

I knew the headline ‘Good Cholesterol dementia risk’ was going to be a problem when I saw it, and clicking through proved me right. Research in Europe suggests a link between a lack of “good” (HDL) cholesterol and poor memory functions. Anyone who knows me knows I have a terrible memory for details. What they may not know is I have a chronic problem with low HDL cholesterol. When I was first diagnosed with diabetes years ago, my HDL/LDL ratio was atrocious, and despite years of experimenting with various diet and drug regimens, the highest I’ve ever gotten my HDL is 20. Anything below 40 is considered a risk for heart disease. I’ve been as low as 12. The only good thing about all this is I probably won’t remember it’s a problem in a month or two

The article’s over here, for those who are curious.

So you bought Rock Band or Guitar Hero, and you love it, but your guitar broke/keeps breaking or you’ve heard there are modifications you can make to it to make it play better. You’ll find this thread really useful - it collects every known repair and mod known in one handy location. This helped me find a fix for my constantly breaking guitar. Screw Harmonix for paying the shoddiest factory on earth to produce these things, btw - I can buy a DVD player for $50 that lasts for years, but their $60 plastic guitars don’t last a month and cost me an extra $20 to get em working. Anyway, check out the thread, it’s great. I’ll write up the repair I used seperately since the folks who made it, bytearts, deserve every little bit of google-fu I can contribute.

Bioshock is the spiritual successor to two of the greatest videogames ever made, System Shock and System Shock 2. I rarely solve games, and while I don’t think Bioshock really lived up to its heritage, I did play it through to the end and agree with the generally positive reviews it got. This weekend Valve is offering it for only $15 over on Steampowered. If you like atmospheric shooters with some light RPG elements and great plots, there’s nothing else like it on the market and it’s definitely worth playing through. For $15 it’s a steal.

You’re a spider in a web, and bugs are flitting about, occasionally getting caught in your web. Your job is to eat captured bugs, build out your web, and repair the damage bugs inflict on it. Controls are simple - click to eat a bug captured in the web, click and drag between two points to spin a new section of web. You have to balance your need for food, which grants health and more fluid for web spinning, against your need to build out your web - the larger and more tangled it is, the more bugs you can catch. Sound fun? Check it out - it is. Requires a recent version of the flash plugin and plays nicely in the browser.

Some time ago I linked to a research study suggesting that eating curries helps stave off the onset of Alzheimer’s. Now there’s evidence that it can also help combat the effects of diabetes and obesity. Specifically, compounds found in Tumeric, a spice often used in curries, show promise. There are more details over on sciencedaily.com if you’re curious.