I used to play video games a lot.

In our household, we have had some sort of video game console ever since I was little. The Atari 7800 gave way to the Nintendo, which led to Sega Genesis, then Playstation, and then the XBOX. We didn’t go for the Super Nintendo, N64, or PS2 though. (Although my brother and I once rented the n64 from Blockbuster with the Star Wars game Shadow of the Empire, which was awesome by the way.)

One of my favorite games on the XBOX was Splinter Cell. I loved how it wasn’t a straight shoot-em up but a game that required strategy and patience. Ducking in the shadows, waiting for the right moment to move, being discreet while climbing fences and knocking people out (and subsequently moving the bodies to the shadows), awesome.

These past few days, I’ve been missing the Nintendo Entertainment System. I miss the simplicity of just having two buttons, A and B, that have given way to a more complicated set of buttons on video game systems of late. I miss cheat codes, which were usually a combination of something like: up, up, down, down, left, right, left, right, B, A, B, A. Besides Contra, the Nintendo game I miss the most is Battletoads because I was never, ever able to pass it. I know, I know. Shock. Horror. I was unable to pass a game.
It was a pretty cool game but hard (according to Wikipedia, I wasn’t the only one to think it was hard). At one point in the game I couldn’t figure out what to do next. I seriously had no clue how to proceed from the predicament I found myself in and that’s where it ended for me.

I want another crack at it.

Alas, I don’t play video games anymore. I do have an XBOX 360, but I use it to watch DVDs. I can’t justify the hours I may potentially spend playing video games. That and how video game mentality would somehow spill over into the real world. While I was playing Splinter Cell, I would actually think at times that I had night vision goggles on me. I even had to suppress urges to climb fences. That’s not good.

I still miss it all from time to time though.

A long time ago, I thought it would be kind of cool to install Ubuntu on my laptop. I understand that one’s definition of ‘kind of cool’ may deviate from the path of installing an operating system but I figured it would be a good learning experience.

I bought the official Ubuntu book to get me started. The cover featured men and women of different races, smiling and obviously joyful with the happiness that was brought from using Ubuntu instead of Windows or Mac OS. I yearned to be that happy and yet even then I was not not able to find the time to install it.

I finally got around to it today (after about a year of talking about it) after I got a newer, more comprehensive book to help out. The plan was to install it on my old HP laptop, partitioning the main Windows drive so Ubuntu and Windows can pretty much live side by side. After I scanned the disk for errors and defragmented my hard drive, the installation should have been easy but instead, I got a ‘resize hard drive’ error both times I tried to install it. I couldn’t figure out why that was so I went on to the next best thing - installing Ubuntu within Windows with Wubi. Long story short, when I startup my laptop, I now have the option of booting up Windows or Ubuntu version 8.10.

The cool thing about installing Ubuntu is that it comes with a lot of open source applications to take care of one’s basic computer needs, such as an office suite, an email client, a movie player, a music player, an even an image editor. Of course, there are plenty more free open source applications that one can download and utilize.

I’m not saying I’m quite free of Windows and Mac OS (actually, while I rarely use Windows, I use the Mac OS on my Macbook) but that doesn’t mean Ubuntu doesn’t have a lot to offer. I look forward to messing around with it in the future. Maybe one day, I can be as happy as the people who grace the cover of the official Ubuntu book. One can dream.

Back in February, I bought my first Mac, a Macbook Pro. I had been following a lot of Apple rumor sites for months, read the forums, and knew that it would be updated soon. So when it was updated, I got it.

Like I said, it was my first Mac. I had been meaning to get one for a while but every time I thought about it, a newer model was meant to be released soon and I withheld my purchase. This time (February) I figured if I didn’t take the plunge, then in my effort to always get the latest model I would never get one. Technology will always be updated and one can only have the latest and greatest for just a short amount of time and Apple updates their hardware every 9-12 months. Only with acceptance can I buy a Macbook Pro.

So after I bought the Pro I stopped going on the forums, stopped researching the next release date. I didn’t want to be the inevitable forum poster that was upset because Apple was releasing a newer version again (”But I just bought one *whine* “). I didn’t want to regret my purchase at all.

The announcement came today: Apple updated the Macbook, Macbook Pro, and Macbook Air. Therefore, my Macbook Pro is no longer the newest one.

And I’m ok with that.

Last year, I wrote about how my camera broke . Today, I was going through my closet and found my old camera. The battery in it was still somewhat charged so I turned it on and took a picture (with my newer camera) of the cracked LCD screen.

Check it out: