Just another WordPress site

This Washington Post article continues our previous discussion of our French “allies”. Apparently, the Pentagon is not ready to start playing nice, “disinviting” France from participating in Red Flag exercises (the USAF version of Top Gun) next year. Also, U.S. aircraft will not perform aerial demonstrations at the Paris Air Show. Best quote from the article: “A defense spokesman said yesterday that slots for foreigners in Red Flag…in which France has participated annually since the 1980s, ‘are going to be reserved for those with whom we will likely be participating in operations in the future.’”

As of an hour ago, Ulana and I are now proud new homeowners, a fact that daunts me and hasn’t quite sunk in yet. We have moved from St. Mary’s County to Calvert County, MD and are now Lusbyans (insert obligatory joke here). Looking around at all of the things that still need to get packed and moved in the coming week or so, I’m a little overwhelmed at everything that needs to get done, but I think we’ll manage, especially with the help of everyone that has graciously offered to come down and help us in our move. For those of you that haven’t seen pictures of the place, I took some crappy digital pictures way back when we were first looking and made a web page of them here.

Besides buying such a beautiful home, we have also inherited a new member of the family, another black cat named PIA (short for Pain In the Ass; lovely name). It looks like for now I’m destined to not have the typical cuddly lap cat, because this cat is even more timid than Ozzie, our somewhat rotund cat that suffers from asthma. Hopefully the two of them will get along OK; if not, PIA will need a new home…

Anyway, I’ll post any interesting news and stories about the new house in the weeks to come, but for now we need to get packing!

The Commodore 64 and 128 hold a special place in my heart, as they were one of the first computers I really worked on, although I had also played around with such icons as the TRS-80, Ti 99, Apple ][, ZX-81 and others. Still, the Commodore was not only easy to use and program, but it also had a hell of lot of cool games in its time, and I still get a hankering for some of them every now and then. The Commodore Curiosity Page has some interesting ads and tidbits of information; click on the picture at right to see a larger version of the fairly bold 1985 ad that Commodore came out with. Obviously (and unfortunately, IMNSHO), their plan of domination failed, although their follow-on computer, the Amiga, made some revolutionary breakthroughs that still linger. I keep forgetting to grab that C128 from my parents’ house so I can play some of those cool games again on the real thing, as emulators just don’t cut it…

Curious what would happen if Lisa and Milhouse had children? Then visit this page and see some of funny, bizarre combinations they came up with.

Ari has been one of our favorite people to bust on here at DrikoLand. Well, apparently our criticism was just too much for him.

In other news, I finally graduated! I am now even more full of B.S., with a degree in Computer Information Technology from the University of Maryland University College. Although I nearly failed out of school 11 years ago, I managed to graduate Cum Laude and joined Alpha Sigma Lambda National Honor Society. Now all I need is a job. Hmmm, I think I would make a good White House spokesman.

I’ve been evangelizing a switch to Mozilla for some time now (search for Mozilla at right, and you’ll see how many entries I’ve made!), and I still maintain that it’s the best browser suite out there. Note the emphasis on suite, though. Some critics of Mozilla have pointed out that in an attempt to compete with M$ Internet Explorer, they’ve packed too many applications into their suite, thereby bloating what should be the fastest, most efficient browser out there. Well, whether or not that’s true is debatable, but an alternative has been around for some time in the form of Firebird (formerly known as Phoenix), the browser-only version of Mozilla. The new release of Firebird 0.6 is blazingly fast and is very stable; read the very informative article “Reasons to switch to the Mozilla Firebird browser” and give it a try. I did, and I haven’t been sorry.

OK, after careful deliberation and evaluation of some of your input, I’ve put back the comments. However, I found a setting that should allow them to be partially hosted on my server, so maybe that will help with load/down time. So far, things are running smoothly, but let me know if you encounter problems or page hangups.

The recent passing of Douglas Adams was quite a tragedy, as his surrealistic yet intelligent sense of humor resulted in some of my favorite books of all time. Does anyone remember the Infocom Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy game? I sure do! Douglas Adams was a big fan of the Zork text adventure game and had a large part in developing the computer game based on his seminal novel. This online version recreates the original to a tee, and although I’ve forgotten how to finish the game, it really brings back a lot of memories.

OK, here’s the second part of my QuickTopic test. I’ve removed comments altogether, which unfortunately means you won’t see any past comments, but I think the page loads a lot faster now as result. Try out the new handy dandy “Discuss” link below, and please let me know what you think about removing the comments, replacing them with QuickTopic instead. Thanks…

I’ve been thinking about adding a discussion board to my ‘80s page, as well as possible replacing the comment system on my blog with QuickTopic “topics.” Please try out this QuickTopic Test Post and let me know what you think. Thanks!