Speaking of kittens, I got a pair of them over the weekend. They’re siblings and cute as a button. A button that’s smaller than an ordinary button. Would you like to meet them? Of course you would!

Chobi is the boy cat. He is very playful, affectionate, and he is a world class sprinter, capable of running at speeds in excess of 50 miles per hour.  His superior leg muscles also allow him to jump incredible heights. He snatched a hawk out of the air earlier today.

Asker is the girl cat. She’s more reserved, but very talkative, and she is a super genius, having the human equivalent of a 175 IQ. She speaks Dutch, Italian, French and Russian fluently. I don’t know any of those languages so she might as well be meowing.

Here’s some pictures if you want to check them out. You don’t have to click the link if you don’t want to. This isn’t a forced wallet baby photo situation.

A few years ago, I went to school with a guy named Jeff Baker. He told me lots of stories. One of these stories was about Jeff’s great grandfather, Bill Baker. That is the story I will tell you in today’s Tuesdays with Flannel.

Bill Baker worked as a Delivery guy, and he was a bit of an animal lover. He especially loved exotic animals. He had two parrots, an echidna, and a lemur named George. One of the parrots, Keet, followed Bill around everywhere. Keet was fairly well behaved, so shops and businesses (that usually didn’t allow pets) let Keet come in and say ‘hello’ to everybody. Some people liked Keet so much that they would keep parrot treats and fruit around for him to munch on while Bill mingled.

One day, Keet and Bill were making a delivery to a painter who was deaf in one ear. Keet flew over, landed on the guy’s shoulder, and greeted him with a friendly ‘hello’. This painter misheard Keet’s greeting, and started painting with the yellow paint. The painter complimented Keet on his choice of colors, and fed him a bit of orange (the fruit, not the paint). Bill and Keet went to make their next delivery, and the painter continued to paint.

That painting would eventually go on to be purchased by Mrs. Maud Baum, wife of Lyman Frank Baum. The yellow bricks in the painting inspired him to write The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, and other books in the series (continued after Baum’s death by Ruth Plumly Thompson), which in turn inspired Elton John to write the song Goodbye Yellow Brick Road.

That’s all for this week. Come back next week for another fantastic story.

I’m sure everybody’s heard of the Sudoku by now. Y’know the one with the 3×3 grid of 3×3 smaller grids where you put in a number in each of the 81 squares so they don’t match any of the other numbers in their smaller grid, row, or column. Yea, that one. If you haven’t heard of it you really need to get out from under that rock and go to a book store or a magazine stand somewhere. Or you can use that fancy magical box you’re using to view my site to look it up. I recommend Google. Haven’t heard of that either, you say? YOU’RE HELPLESS!

Ok, for the Sudoku informed, there’s a few other number-pattern games that are really quite fun and you may find to be more challenging than Sudoku if you’re getting bored with it. Two of my favorites are Kakuro and Nurikabe.

Kakuro plays a lot like a Sudoku crossword puzzle. Each row or column is labeled with a sum (clue). The boxes associated with the clue (collectively a word) can each only be filled with one digit, and each word can not have repeating digits. Certain clues can only have one possible solution, like 17 with a two digit word can only have 8 and 9. Generally you can deduce which of the two squares gets 8 and which gets 9 by the intersecting clues. Here’s a daily Kakuro puzzle to get you started.

Still too easy? Nurikabe is quite a bit more difficult. There’s a lot of rules and strategy to solving them. Each number must be connected to an island (white blocks) of that size (including the square with the digit). No two islands may touch at any square. And the river (black squares) must be contiguous and can’t have a pool (2×2 black square). Islands marked ‘1′ can be marked black on all four sides because it’s an island of size 1. If there’s a black spot with only one edge that hasn’t been marked white, it is black because the river must be contiguous. Here’s a daily Nurikabe puzzle (with some easy smaller puzzles) if you’re up to the task of solving them.

Click the first link in the description paragraphs for a much better explanation of rules and strategy. Make sure you do some of these puzzles every day. Doing so will keep your brain exercised and healthy.

I look back on the last few years of my life, specifically with regards to video games, and I see a guy who spent a LOT of time playing them. I don’t consider it a waste by any stretch of the imagination - I had a shitload of fun and even met some of the coolest people I know through them. Since graduating from college and starting work at Dynamic Edge, though, I’ve grown apart from my beloved games. I’ve gone from a decidedly ‘hardcore’ gamer to somewhat of a more casual one. As much as I would have liked to fight it in my college years, it was inevitable.

In the past year we’ve seen two VERY different video game systems released. One focused on the top of the line specs: uber graphics chip, multi-core processor, Hi-Def movies, games, music, huge hard drive, etc - all of this with a giant price tag. The other system focused very much less on the specs - just enough to barely rival those of the previous generation graphics, with a price tag to match. The latter system chose to focus on a different area of gaming; something that could not be measured by specification sheets. With the Wii, Nintendo decided to focus more on innovation and breadth of gaming rather than depth.

When the PSP and DS were released, a similar situation arose. Sony went with a system that was, as far as specs were concerned, much more powerful than the DS, and included a lot of fluff to make it a ‘portable media solution’ - again, at an increased cost. The DS focused on innovation and changing the core of handheld gaming. The two-year-old DS has seen two releases (in true Nintendo handheld fashion) and has even gone through a recent Christmas drought, and the PSP is selling like month-old hotcakes. The cost of the system and cost of the media for the DS has made it the choice handheld among most gamers, and the exploitation of the ‘gimmicky’ touch screen by developers has produced some of the most entertaining games in the history of handheld gaming. The similarities between the handheld systems and the Wii/PS3 are uncanny and I’m betting on a repeat performance.

Back in my hardcore-gamer college days, I didn’t have to work 8-10 hours every day and I didn’t have a couple thousand dollars every month in bills. When the pre-release hype was being spread around, I was admittedly more exited about the PSP than the DS. Two years later, I play my DS for at least a few minutes every day while my PSP has been gathering dust for the last 6 months. Now that I only have a few hours a week to devote to games, purchasing a $600 PS3 just for those few hours is insanity. Madness, if you will. The Wii’s $250 price tag is much more reasonable, especially when I can live without the fluff, and the innovative controls should make for some seriously fun games when developers come up with some neat ways to use it.

Any game system that can get my dad (and mom, grandparents, aunts, uncles, etc) to ask to play it, has got to be doing something right.

A DS update: nothing. I’m not neglectful, just terribly busy at work. DS programming is easiest for me to neglect because it’s more difficult to pick up and put down after only 2-3 hours. When I get started on a programming project I usually get into the zone after an hour. Breaking that concentration soon after that is really frustrating. So there it is - on the back-burner until I’m finished at Borders, which is slated for early June. What I can start up and stop in my few hours of free time are movies; and I’ve partaken quite a bit in the recent past.

Read the rest of this entry »

In today’s Tuesdays with Flannel, I will tell you about Jeremy Tooter.

There was an average guy who lived in an average suburb. He was known to the people who lived in his neighborhood as “Walnut Willie”, which was weird because his name was Jeremy Tooter. He was never made fun of because of his silly last name because nobody actually knew his last name - they all knew him as Walnut Willie. How he got the strange nickname is an entirely different story, and you probably don’t want to hear about it.

Jeremy Tooter always thought the nickname was strange - he didn’t like walnuts at all. In fact, he was allergic to walnuts. His true love was peanuts. His father inherited a peanut farm from his grandpa, so Jeremy ate peanuts his whole life. He had peanut soup, peanut butter, peanut brittle, salted peanuts, and many other peanutty food-stuffs. He actually worked for a guy named Peanuts, but that’s another different story, I won’t bore you with it here.

Jeremy was walking down the street with a jar of Planters peanuts (his favorite). He saw a guy who was bent over a water faucet outside of a house. They exchanged greetings and Jeremy asked the guy, whose name was Mark, what the problem was with his faucet. The faucet was stuck in the ‘on’ position. Jeremy suggested to turn the water off inside the house, Mark did it, and it worked. Mark was grateful for Jeremy’s help so he invited Jeremy in the house for some beer, and Jeremy happily accepted. Jeremy followed Mark into the kitchen and caught a glimpse of three fifty-five gallon drums filled with peanuts in his kitchen. Why Mark had those peanuts is a different story, so I won’t waste your time with it.

Jeremy and Mark sat for hours watching TV and eating those peanuts. After they ate every last peanut in those three barrels, something very curious happened.

If you think they turned into peanuts, then you’re wrong. You can’t turn into a peanut from eating lots of peanuts. Jeremy did eventually turn into a peanut for different reasons, but I won’t bore you with that one.

DS development has been slow to say the least. What little time I’ve had to sit down and plug out some code has been spent trying to figure out why my player sprite won’t draw itself on the screen. I’ll pop what I have up on the DS Projects page and any of my developer-type readers can take a look and see what’s wrong. Do I have any developer readers? Do I have any readers at all?!? In other DS news, I learned that I’m actually a 9 year old girl. I’ve been playing the hell out of Pokemon and enjoying it quite a lot. This has nothing to do with me not progressing with IQDS, I assure you (OK, maybe a little).

AEOU? That’s ASDF in Dvorakish. For those not in-the-know, Dvorak is a lesser known alternative to the standard qwerty keyboard layout. I won’t get into specifics but it offers faster typing with fewer errors at the cost of having to relearn how to type. They say it takes a few months to regain your original typing speed - we’ll see how it goes for me. Jumping into a new keyboard format will slow down my typing considerably for a while, which may be frowned upon by the people who pay me to type fast.

I’d like to say I typed this whole post in Dvorak, but then I’d be lying.