It’s always nice going back home for a holiday. My parents thoroughly enjoy my visits, and it is always great to see friends that I have not seen for some time. It is also nice to see my toys that I have not seen for a while.

Recently, my mother has been going through a lot of mine, and my sister’s old things (perhaps to see what she can get rid of), and has happened across our old nintendo set. This brought back many memories.

I remember playing games together, like mario, or our crappy bible games. We had a couple of those obscure titles, like Bible Adventures, Joshua, and King of Kings – The Early Years (why they chose to focus on the early years, I will never know). My favorite of the bunch, however, was Bible Adventures. This consisted of a couple of separate games, the best of which was Noah’s Ark. In it, you play a busy Noah shortly before the flood is to arrive. It is your job to gather two of every kind of animal, which can be tricky at times. Some of the animals were obvious choices, like cows and goats. But things would quickly become trickier when you had to capture those wiley pigs and monkeys (Pigs and monkeys would have to be distracted first with fruit baskets and coconuts, respectively).

To further the monotony and frustration, the game mechanics followed the standard nintendo model which did not include passcodes. Passcodes may not seem like much, but trust me, they were a godsend. Since the nintendo console had no form of writable memory, games could not be saved. In order to combat this problem, some games added a passcode system which would allow the player to jump to a specific level and play the rest of the game from there (G.I. Joe had this feature). I think the Bible game developers missed the memo. You would play for hours on end, collecting animals, only to run out of lives and have to restart from the beginning. And of course you didn’t have lives in the form of hearts, you had stone Ten Commandments tablets (obviously). This formula resulted in frequent controller throwing and general grumpiness. Neither of which I think the developer had intended.

I forgot where I was going with this, so I rest my case… for now.

Is there anything better than being on the cusp of a long weekend? Perhaps being on the cusp of a long weekend for a holiday where you get to blow stuff up to celebrate your long forgotten independence from a former superpower. It’s always nice to get together with people, and enjoy some fireworks on a nice summer evening.

I’ve been thinking a lot about life in general lately, mostly because I am on the cusp of graduating. I have some big changes coming, and big decisions to make.

I hate making decisions, as most people who know me probably know. Easy decisions are mundane, and hard decisions are, well, hard. Why couldn’t the hard decisions be easy and mundane, and the easy decisions be hard? Perhaps in that scenario, the easy decisions would become hard by definition. Or, in a bit of good fortune, the hard decisions would become easy.

Easy is no fun though. When things become easy, they have a tendency to become mundane, and quickly so. It then becomes challenging to find a challenge when things become mundane, and aren’t challenging. So what is a mundane challenge seeker to do? Well, find a challenge I suppose. But it its often a challenge to find a real challenge. It certainly isn’t easy.

This summer I haven’t had much time to think. Perhaps thinking is a challenge. I think it could be; depending on what you are thinking. I don’t know what you’re thinking because I’m not you. But I think you might be thinking that thinking is not a challenge. Why, you might think something like, “Thinking isn’t hard.” But isn’t it? Thinking is the process of billions of coordinated synapses all firing in a highly coordinated fashion. A miracle some might call it. Sounds like a challenge to me.

And that is the challenge. When I think things through, often I’m left with more questions. Challenging questions. So what am I to do? Do I think the challenging questions, or do I leave it to chance? Can chance be relied upon to deliver the answers? How many licks does it take to get to the tootsie-roll center of a tootsie-pop?

Which brings me to my final question. Why is Charleston Chew so hard to find these days? And who doesn’t like the bold flavor of Charleston Chew? How could there not be demand for something so delicious?

These are the questions that keep me up at night, and most days. I really wish that the tough decisions were easier. Should I stay or should I go? What type of job should I pursue. Should I have to settle? Life after college will be a bit of an adjustment for me. Should I continue on with school then too, if I’m not to settle? So many questions, too few answers. I really hate to make decisions.

I just installed the swype beta, and I have to say that it’s pretty amazing. Swype is a keyboard application that allows you to type by sliding across the letters of the words that you want to type.

It uses some sort of magic prediction algorithm to determine which word you really wanted out of the possible combinations that it could be. This greatly increases typing speed by quickly allowing you to mash a bunch of letters into words.

From what I’ve seen so far, it’s very impressive. In fact, this whole post was written using it. So give it a try, check it out here.

I should probably do something about these before they hatch (I named the spider Shelob). This is a picture of my rear window, which is bordered by woods. There seems to be no shortage of arachnids there.

I’ve had this album for a couple of weeks now and have probably listened to it a thousand times already. I thought I might share it with everybody as it is something that I enjoy. Give it a listen, or a watch… or both. These are my two favorite songs from the album, although the rest of the album is amazing. A bad day for these guys would be a good day for pretty much any other band out there (thanks be to Tyler for recommending this to me).

… and …

Check out Sigh No More by Mumford & Sons at Amazon (CD || MP3 **DRM FREE**)

I have filled out what must have been 36 forms in the last 48 hours. I hate paperwork.

Between all the new hire paperwork that I have filled out for my internship and the various associated forms that I have to take care of for school, I’m dreaming in forms.

And now I find myself at the doctor’s office filling out more paperwork. I’m pretty sure that they have my records on file, yet here I am, filling out more paperwork.

If only there were some kind of device that could be used for scheduling and possibly, information exchange. Imagine a system where ten, maybe hundreds of these machines could be tied together into some sort of network, or internet. And data could be called up electronically instead of on paper. And mail could be sent electronically as well. One could only imagine.

Well, I’m off to my next stop, a shoulder X-ray. And I’m sure that no one there knows that I’m coming and there will be mounds of new paperwork for me to fill out. How exciting.

I am writing this post from my brand spanking new Droid Incredible. Jealous? I have been playing with it for less than 24 hours, so I hope to write a proper post about it within the next 48 hours.

I can, however, tell you this much. This phone is indeed incredible. The 3G speeds are blazing fast on the Verizon network as is the 1Ghz Snapdragon processor in this thing. I have yet to experience noticeable lag from either.

Anyway, like I said, I should have a proper review up in a few days time, so stay tuned for more updates.

I could only find this video on some sort of Romanian Youtube clone, but enjoy…

Vezi mai multe video din Animatie

Here’s some more news for you to use, or whatever you want to do with it.

• Climate scientists admit fresh error over data on rising sea levels
  via Hacker News
  Comments
• Head of Climate Research Center admits no global warming since 1995
  via Hacker News
  Comments

I was thinking today about how there are no blacksmiths around any more. Some would say this is because there are not as many horses as there once were, which I could agree with. But people also need horseshoes to play horseshoes. Where do you go to get good horseshoes these days.

I could go to a blacksmith, but where do you find a good blacksmith? Which brings me to my second point. There are a lot of people who have horses, so I suppose that the blacksmith is in pretty high demand these days. People have horses, need horseshoes, and therefore blacksmiths must be necessary.