I credit my enjoyment of of classical music to cartoons. I'm not just talking about the wonderful "What's Opera Doc" Bugs Bunny episode, but more so the extensive use of classical music in the Saturday Morning cartoons of my youth.

When I say "Ewe for sale" I'm not talking about sheep... I'm talking Eeewwww! as in the creepy type of sale. Before you jump to judgment about where I found this ad, it comes (pardon the pun)  from a legit electronics company.

On my "About Me" post I talked about how Intellivision influenced my career in software. I recently came across some pictures of "my life with Intellivision" and thought I'd post them.

There are few things I hate more than spam. This  site has fallen victim to spam bots which add comments to posts. As a result I've added a quick and dirty "validation" field when posting comments. It's not fool proof but I needed something quick to prevent spammers. 

I was reading through the most recent issue of "Embedded Systems Design" magazine when an old DOS based compiler picutred in an article caught my eye. It reminded me of the first compiler I owned: Power C by Mix Software. What a great piece of software! For about $40 you got a well written book that included documentation, tutorials and sample code. AND you got a compiler with a very good debugger. That compiler serverd me well in college and when experimenting with C on my own.

I'm a sucker for ALife games. With my life long interest in AI and ALife, I just can't pass up a game that promises "real life interaction" with a game character. I've tried most of them: Fin-Fin, Creatures, Catz, Dogz, Black & White, Max the Parrot, etc.

I attended LinuxWorld in Boston this week. There were many great products to see and many free t-shirts to get. I talked to the people at QT, they make cross-platform development tools. They pointed me to a user of their product that created  "web browsing for people who have difficulty reading text". I'm not sure if this is for non-english speaking, dyslexic or otherwise challenged web surfers.

April Fools Day... you either love it, dread it, or are oblivious to it. I've been both the pranker and the prankee. You can find the latest on line april fools jokes here. 

More memory... that's all our software demands. What happened to the days when an application could run on 32K? While memory is relatively inexpensive, we dream of the day of almost infinite memory... well at least the big software developers do. For my money Microsoft Office 97 is just fine - quick to load and not a resource hog... but you can't buy it now. You have to get the "upgraded" version which for 90% of us DOES THE SAME THING. Except, the newer version have the added feature of lightening our wallet, hogging memory, and slowing our computers. I'll stop ranting before I go off on the MS Office Paper clip.

Anyone with even a passing interest in AI or robotics is aware of the DARPA Grand Challenge  -  the military sponsored autonomus vehicle challenge. Tomorrow night (March 28th at 8 p.m.) the PBS show Nova will focus on this race in "The Great Robot Race". This is true "must see TV" for the geek in all of us. It's amazing the progress that has been made in the 2 short years that this challenge has existed.