Month: June 2009

Tetris

All the talk about the 25th anniversary of Tetris last week got me feeling nostalgic. Tetris is one of my favorite games of all time. I think I first played it on my Amiga back in college. I’m pretty sure the version I played on the Amiga was a freeware knockoff, but it was a straightforward implementation of the basic Tetris game. I later played it a lot on my original black & white GameBoy.

So I decided to look for a version of Tetris I could play on my PS3 or Wii. Surprisingly enough, there doesn’t seem to be a version of Tetris out for the PS3. At least not anywhere in the download store, as far as I could tell. On the Wii, though, there’s a relatively new title under WiiWare called Tetris Party. I was actually kind of hoping there’d be a Virtual Console version of some old version of Tetris from the NES or something, but no luck.

I kind of vaguely decided to buy Tetris Party on Sunday, but I hadn’t used my Wii in so long, the batteries in the controllers were completely dead. I left them charging overnight, then put them back this morning, turned on the Wii, and went through the obligatory system update that was, of course, waiting for me. Then, tonight, I had to go through the silly ritual of buying more Wii points, so I could spend them on Tetris Party. Eventually, I got to the point of buying & downloading the game.

In a nutshell, it does, indeed allow you to play good old, regular, Tetris on the Wii, in glorious 480p. With cheesy music, and your Mii of choice dancing around on the side of the screen. I could probably do without the dancing Mii, but it’s a pretty good implementation of Tetris, and there are a lot of oddball variations I can try out later, if I get tired of regular Tetris.

fraud

I found out today that someone has been using my AmEx card number. They’ve used it for airline tickets, FedEx shipping, and opening up a couple of accounts for online dating sites, I think. AmEx identified the suspicious activity and called me, which is nice. I’ll have a new card in a week or so.

I think this was limited to just the AmEx card, and isn’t a full-blown case of identity theft. At least I hope so!

random stuff

Some random notes, since I haven’t been doing much blogging lately:

I replaced the hard drive in my MacBook with a new 500 GB drive a couple of weeks ago. It’s working pretty well. At first, I thought the fan on the MacBook was coming on too often, but that doesn’t seem to be a big problem now. I used Carbon Copy Cloner to copy everything from the old drive to the new one, then just switched drives. No problems. I did de-authorize iTunes before switching drives, just in case. I really don’t know if switching to the new drive would have caused me to have to re-authorize iTunes, but I thought it might. I got the drive, and an external enclosure from Newegg.

I upgraded the OS on my BlackBerry Storm to 4.7.0.148 on Sunday, when Verizon released it. I couldn’t do the OTA upgrade, since I didn’t have enough free space for that, so I did it through Desktop Manager. It worked OK, but I had to manually restore my apps after the upgrade. DM backed up the apps, but couldn’t restore them for some reason. It wasn’t a big deal to do the restore myself. All my application settings, though, apparently got lost in the upgrade. I had to re-enter user names and passwords into a few apps, and re-enter authorization codes into a couple of apps. I also found that QuickLaunch 1.x didn’t work right with the new OS, so I paid CrackBerry $2 to upgrade to 2.x. It works fine now, and the new features were certainly worth the $2, so I’m glad I upgraded.

I’ve been fighting a cold since Mother’s Day. The first week, it was pretty much a standard cold. In the second week, I developed a really bad cough, but all the other symptoms pretty much went away. I went to the doctor, and she basically told me that it was a post-nasal drip problem, and just gave me some samples of Zyrtec and Nasonex. I’m not sure if either of those did me any good. When I ran out, I switched back to Claritin (actually, a generic equivalent). I’m not sure if *that’s* doing me any good either, but I think it is, at least a bit. The cough, and the throat tickle, come and go. I’ve learned to keep my windows closed at home, with the air conditioning on, and (sometimes) my air cleaner too. I definitely sleep better that way. I’ve also signed up for allergy alert e-mails from the Claritin site, and from pollen.com. I’d like to see if I can really correlate my problems with any specific allergy levels, or particular allergens. I remember having this same problem last year, right around the same time, so I’m guessing it’s a seasonal thing that I might be able to manage, if I can figure out exactly what’s screwing me up, and learn to stay away from it.

Meanwhile, I’m spending a lot of time alone in my apartment, catching up on my reading! I’ve read all the Hugo-nominated novels that were in the Hugo packet. I’ve now started into the novellas. Honestly, I thought all the novels were great, and I’m not sure which one deserves the Hugo. Conversely, none of the novellas has stood out as really great so far. I’ve only finished two though.