I’ve moved my blog over to http://mrox.net/blog/ – and I’ve added content.  Huzzah.

The other day, for no apparent reason, I began to reminiscence about my old Prodigy days. Prodigy was a dial-up service, like CompuServe or AOL that offered message boards, news, reference information, games – and more! What differentiated Prodigy from the rest key was the unlimited usage for a flat subscription – when most other services where charging by the minute. That means I could waste hours in front of the PC, and not make mom and dad take out a second mortgage. Kid tested, parent approved.

I remember spending a good deal of time on the service, but most of the details are hazy. Aside from reading message boards about R/C cars and Sierra game tips, only one other thing sticks out in my mind. A game. A game where you wandered through a maze. Why? No idea.

Oh yeah, and there was a house with chicken legs. How did the house get chicken legs, and why is it in the maze? Again, no idea.

Fast forward to this morning. I was browsing through some of my less news feeds, when an article entitled “Prodigy Lives! Play MadMaze On the Web” on VintageComputing.com. Could this be the very game that has inexplicably risen out of my subconscious? And better yet, could I play it via the web right now? Tantalizing, indeed, but was this in fact the same game I remember from yesteryear?  It did match 2 of the 3 keywords – “Prodigy” and “Maze”, but was there a Chickenhouse?

I clicked the link in my newsreader to load up the full article and was greeted with a few screenshots of the game.  Of course I recalled the Prodigy login screen, and the Mad Maze start screen looked kinda sorta familiar – but I wasn’t sure.  Then, after a little fancy scrollbar interaction, there it was, just as I remembered it – the Chickenhouse.

I could hardly wait to play. According to the post:

MadMaze-II plays almost exactly like the original;

Awesome!

the only down side is that it requires Internet Explorer to play.

Opposite of awesome!

I guess I’ll have to fire up IE on my crash-happy old gaming box for this particular nostalgia fix. Thankfully, VintageComputing provided some sweet wallpaper to tide me over.

The Bicycle Coalition of Greater Philadelphia has posted a nice Google map of the Schuylkill River/Perkiomen Trail Network. The map has annotations for public transit, parking, and other areas of interest.

Another bicycle-related map site to pop up on my radar recently is Bikely.com. Bikely lets you create cycling routes using the Google maps API, and share them with others. Although I haven’t had much time to spend with it yet, I hope it proves to be as useful as it sounds.

After about 5 months, I finally got around to donating my old car, my beloved Nissan 240SX. Barnaby was good to me since I bought him back in 1999, but he was definitely showing his age and starting to become a bit of a money-pit. Back in March I replaced him with a gently used Honda Civic which I’ve been very happy with so far. When I bought my new car, I decided that I wanted to donate my old one, but due to business, procrastination, and a few other usual suspects in the bad excuses lineup, I never got around to it until last week.

For the donation, I went through donateacar.com, because it seemed stupid easy and they allow you to pick from, like, a kajillion charities. I filled out the web donation form Monday, got a call from a towing company Tuesday, and my car was picked up Wednesday. Nice turnaround, I say. The whole process was painless – from an organizational and logistical perspective at least.

I borrowed a digital camera and snapped a few pics before I said goodbye forever. Just for kicks, I thought I would try out one of these new photo sharing services instead of uploading them to my old site. Flickr seems to be what all the cool kids like to use, so I created an account an uploaded all my photos into a “set”. Also, I’ve heard good things about Picasa, and Google recently released a web albums feature, so I decided to give that a shot too.

Linkage: flickr set Picasa album

Both were simple enough to get set up. Flickr’s upload time seemed faster, but I had to upload the photos in two batches. Then I had to sort them into a “set”. I used the OSX Picasa Web Album uploader standalone app (because I don’t have iPhoto), which seemed to upload to my Picasa web album just fine. I don’t really have anything of note to mention about the two services yet, seeing as I’ve spent a whopping 5 minutes interacting with both of them, combined. Maybe I could post a nice comparison. Or better yet, maybe this guy can do it for me.

I came across a list of 10 Foods to raise your metabolism (via HealthHacker). Heres my breakdown of which of these foods I eat often, and which I don’t.

1. Water – yup, constantly
2. Green tea – yup, though less lately
3. Soup – yup, but more often in the winter
4. Grapefruit – nope, although I like them
5. Apples and Pears – yup, usually at least one a day
6. Broccoli – yup, its one of my favorite vegetables
7. Low-fat Yogurt – yup, I’m a big fan of the Stonyfield Organic Vanilla and Banilla
8. Lean Turkey – nope, not even on Thanksgiving
9. Oatmeal – nope, though l like it
10. Hot peppers – yup, perhaps too much

So I regularly eat 7/10 of the items on the list, and there is only one on the list that I don’t like. I guess that could partially explain my near two-dimensional physical characteristics.

I have been using unofficial Pitchfork RSS feeds from MartyDodoo.com for awhile now.  It seems today that everyone’s favorite online indie music mag is finally putting up official feeds:

• Pitchfork News
• Pitchfork Record Reviews
• Pitchfork Best New Music
  
• Pitchfork Free Downloads
• Pitchfork Track Reviews
• Pitchfork Features

Source: MarteyDodoo.com » Finally: Official Pitchfork RSS Feeds

It appears that the RSS upgrades are currently in progress, so some or all of the above feeds may not be working.  If all of the above feeds are implemented, it is certainly good news. The “Best New Music” feed sounds promising, and the Free Downloads will be nice if it can be made into a podcast.

Blogged with Flock

Wow.

Can you find fault with this 4 minute slice of genius? I submit that there is none.

I so taken by this clip that I had to learn of its origins. A little Googlin' led me to the following two artists.

The music is a track called "War Photographer" by Jason Forrest. This track, and 9 of its friends live on an album called Shamelessy Exciting. Jason also has a Myspace page, if you're into that sort thing.

The animation is the work of Joel Trussel. You can find more of his great work at his blog.

Rock on.

This is where I will write some things.