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Things I found at my parent’s house: TMNT part 1

I spent the winter holidays at my parent’s house.  This is the house I grew up in and it still has quite a few of my things lying around; stowed away in boxes piled up in closets and the garage.

Every time I visit I go through a little more of it.  In 2009 I went through about ten boxes of books and ended up giving away more than half of them.  Last year I finished going through the books and “culled the herd” down to about a box of them.  (Which will be highlighted in future post, maybe?)  I also went through some of the toys from my youth that had managed to stick around this long and I found quite a few Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.

I believe all of these are first runs of the toys, though I’m not sure.  I never was too concerned about the collectibility or resale value of my toys.  I got them to play with them!  Beyond these figures I’m pretty sure there is still a box or so out in my parents garage that has the Blimp and the Party wagon in it.

Wow, you can really notice the dust with the flash on.  These things have been in boxes for over 15 years or so, I think.  They’re all in remarkably good condition though!  All the limbs are movable and the accessories still seem to be in good condition.  I thought with the heat int he desert they would have dried out and crumbled a little more.  Strangest thing I’ve noticed so far?  Several of the toys have a sticky residue from when they were covered in ooze?!

Next time:  Vidja Games!

2011 Goals

I didn’t put this up immediately for two reasons: first, everyone is doing new year’s resolution posts right now and I insist on being “different.”  Second, I wanted to put everything down on “paper,” let it sit awhile and then come back and take a another look at it before finalizing the list.

My goals for the year 2011:

1. Submit writing every month to a publicaton – with the implication being that someone somewhere will publish me

2. Develop, outline, draft and write two short stories

3. Participate in NaNoWriMo

4. Review Latin – Poetry and plays might be the best way to do this

5. Learn algebra – I knew this at one point I need to brush up on my math skills

6. Do the Lake Berryessa two mile swim

7. Bike a century

8. Buy as few new things as possible – this is an attempt to reduce, re-use, recycle, and repair more.

9. Do more with my hobbies (besides gaming) – I have a lot of cool stuff lying around that I could be doing things with, this is what this is here for.

10. Jump out of a plane – I needed something to round out the list!

There you have it folks!  How will I do?  Only 362 days until you find out!

EDIT – I forgot what the real number ten was supposed to be until just now.  I suppose it can be number eleven:

11.  Meditate everyday – I’m specifically thinking of Zazen.

2010 in review

The stats helper monkeys at WordPress.com mulled over how Di Mortui Sunt did in 2010, and here’s a high level summary of its overall blog health:

Healthy blog!

The Blog-Health-o-Meter™ reads Fresher than ever.

Crunchy numbers

Featured image

A Boeing 747-400 passenger jet can hold 416 passengers. Di Mortui Sunt was viewed about 4,700 times in 2010. That’s about 11 full 747s.

 

In 2010, there were 39 new posts, growing the total archive of Di Mortui Sunt to 301 posts. There were 67 pictures uploaded, taking up a total of 71mb. That’s about 1 pictures per week.

The busiest day of the year was June 13th with 51 views. The most popular post that day was Contra Vs Probotector.

Where did they come from?

The top referring sites in 2010 were facebook.com, gamespite.net, twitter.com, gamestooge.com, and smcox.com.

Some visitors came searching, mostly for scribblenauts, dark heresy, franz von stuck, sisyphus, and grimgor ironhide.

Attractions in 2010

These are the posts and pages that got the most views in 2010.

1

Contra Vs Probotector June 2010
2 comments

2

Analog Gaming – Warhammer and Warcraft June 2008
7 comments

3

Re-reading Camus: the Myth of Sisyphus Pt 3 June 2009

4

Old Stuff: Necron Warriors May 2009
2 comments

5

Thoughts on Scribblenauts… October 2009

Have You Seen the Chrome Web Store?

Unless you use Google Chrome you probably haven’t.  Just like Google there weren’t any announcements either.  Last week I powered up my web browser and instead of being greeted by screencaps of my eight most visited sites I see this instead:

except the only icon up there was the web store one.  So I clicked on it and found myself here.  Every morning now I find myself poking around the store.  I’ve only found two or three apps worth installing and I refuse to pay for anything, but it has been fascinating just browsing through everything.  Some of the highlights:

Dreams 2 – A high resolution spot the difference game!  With the custom artwork of Stephanie Herrera.  All this for only $1.99!  I didn’t know people did these things still, or that they’d pay money to do them in a special tab on their browser.

Pandora – This app is just a link to the regular old Pandora website!  A website that was in desperate need of a re-design when it was originally released back in 2007 or so.  This is actually quite common it seems many of the ‘apps’ popping up in the store are just links to existing sites.  I guess apps are the bookmarks of the twenty-first century?

Autodesk Homestyler – Let your inner consumer whore out and do some interior designer all from the comfort of your browser using real products!  This is currently a featured app in the store.  Beyond helping interior designers in the field with wireless capabilities I don’t see what this does besides feed consumer lust and neighbor envy.

Tweetdeck:  The first app I installed.  This app is just like the installable version of Tweetdeck. It turns a tab of your browser into a tweetdeck client letting you manage your social networking (twitter, facebook, buzz, and foursqaure) from one window.

Write Space:  A distraction free text wrangler.  Click the app and you’re dropped into a simple black screen and a text prompt.  Get writing!  I also installed this.

The store is only a few weeks old and it looks like it already has thousands of apps. I’m sure most of which are useless and/or garbage.  I didn’t understand why Google even created the store at first, but with the announcement of ChromeOS and Google sending out Google laptops to testers…  The store’s existence becomes clear.

Have any readers poked around in the store?  Have you found and apps worth downloading and using?  Let me know down in the comments.

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