After a long blogging hiatus, Being Daddy is back. With a vengeance…
Take a gander at “I Am Elmo.”
Classic stuff…
Katamari Damacy Rules
Last week I picked up Katamari Damacy. I saw this game at E3 this year. Andy and I agree that it looked like the best game evar.
The game involves rolling a small sticky ball around, picking up objects along the way. As you get bigger, you can pick up bigger and bigger things. You need to get your katamari to a certain size to finish the level.
There is a very Japanese like theme involving the King of the Cosmos (your father, you being the Prince…) and a strange anime family that you see in surreal snippets.
To be honest, I speed through all the translated story line since it makes no sense…
Once you get to the requested size, the King of the Cosmos congratulates you and urges you to get even bigger. The size relationships are accurate, so when you get to be three meters tall, you can pick up people and other large objects. Nothing more satisfying than picking up a pair of large sumo wrestlers.
I love it, the kids love it, even Michele loves the game…
In addition to the single player mode, there is a head to head mode where you can compete. The best is when you can grab your opponent and drag them around.
You should run, not walk, to the game store to pick up this game.
It’s official
It’s official, the internet bust is over.
As of today, I’m cashing checks for doing nothing but making silly pages on a web site.
As I wrote about a few weeks ago, Google’s Adsense program appears to work. I have turned my site, an homage to a guy with too much free time on his hands, into a bonafide internet property.
Who would thunk?
When it rains, it pours…
Last week was geektacular. I was linked to on Slashdot about the GLAT and on Fark about the page on cleaning pennies. This has blown through any previous high number of visits to my site.
At last check, the cleaning pennies page has been hit so much I’ve burned up around 30 Gigs of data transfer. Yikes.
While it is nice to have lots of visitors and read nice comments about the page, the bandwidth management is an issue. Watching the spread of the link from page to page and from the US outward to the rest of the world is interesting.
In other news, the new Wired magazine arrived in the mail today. I was reading it in the bathroom while I watched the girls take a bath tonight. There were so many frickin’ ads it was hard to find the content.
I started ripping out the pages that were ads. I only ripped it out if it was an ad on both sides. I pulled out half the pages… Above you can see the pile of ads on the left and the remaining magazine on the right. Remember there are still a ton of ads inside that have content on one side.
How much would it cost to have an ad-free version of the the magazine?
New terms
A few days ago, Mr. P bought up a new blogging term. He wrote about it on his site.
The definition was:
“The condition where you have many items to blog about, yet lack the time or motivation to blog them.”
He wasn’t sure what term to use, blogjammed or backblogged.
It appears he chose to use blogjammed. What do you think?
Cleaning Pennies with Taco Sauce
When I was in high school back in the 80s, I worked at Taco Bell. Work was not really tough at Taco Bell, so I had lots of time to goof off. One of the things I discovered was that the hot sauce would clean pennies. I’ve showed the trick to people many times over the years, but never really understood why it works so well.
I finally took the time to find out, and now you can know why you can clean pennies with hot sauce.
Enjoy.
Four days in the hole
Howdy loyal Cruft readers, I’m back.
Thank you for the calls and emails of concern, the entire Cruft family is fine and this site has made it’s glorious return.
What happened was that on Sunday, a link to my entry about the Google Labs Aptitude Test got posted to the front page of Slashdot. Now for those that don’t know, Slashdot is one of the most popular geek sites on the internet. I read it daily and so do hundreds of thousands of other people.
On Sunday night, these people started clicking on the link and the demand on the server that Cruftbox lives on got huge. This is called the Slashdot Effect or simply, being Slashdotted. The web host that runs the server that this site lives on had to take action or all the other sites and servers that they run would be affected by the Slashdot hordes.
After trying a few things, they simply removed the cruftbox.com domain from the DNS server. A drastic step, but one that allowed all the other sites to be accessible. In laymen’s terms, imagine that a hundred thousand people all had your address for a party and started showing up at your house. The police decided so shut down the party, so they simply removed all the street signs that told people how to get to your house. People drove around looking for your house, but could never find it. That’s kinda what happened here. Cruftbox was here, but no one could find it.
The big problem, is that when the site was down, I could get no email and could not adminster the site. That was no fun.
Finally on Wednesday night, I got the web host to set things right and this morning, everything is in order.
In summary, being linked on Slashdot is great geek honor, but the consequences can be dramatic if you aren’t prepared for it.
Sports
The sports season is in full effect at the Pusateri household.
This morning was the the traditional start of the soccer season with the banner parade and the local speakers. It’s a big event and even our congressman, Adam Schiff, showed up to talk about playing soccer 25 years ago.
Michele made the banner for Mira’s team this year.
To get a feel for the chaos that goes on at 7:30AM, here’s a picture of part of the field. There are 100+ teams in the opening ceremonies.
Beside the soccer games on Saturday, it is also football season.
Yes, I am an NFL Widower. Once Sunday arrives, the TV goes on and the NFL is on-screen. Michele is a serious football fan and we have the DirecTV total package. Every single game.
Now I like football, but I rarely feel compelled to watch a half dozen games simultaneously. Michele on the other hand, it quite happy to do this and quilt at the same time.
The living room gets turned into football central with the TV at one end and Michele’s sewing & quilting station at the other. My job is bringing sodas and food to her while she sews. The girls are allowed in the room, if they are willing to watch football. If that want to watch something else, they are banished to our bedroom, where they can watch DVDs.
Sometimes I go up front and pretend to watch but actually take a nap. Michele is usually distracted and doesn’t notice and I get to avoid the usual “No napping” policy in place.
GLAT – Google Labs Aptitude Test
I saw this in one of my magazines at work.
The GLAT, a funny riff on the standardized tests that pervade academic life.
It seems Google Labs is trying to attract some high quality people into their ranks. If only I was a software guy, I’d apply…
The questions are a fun mix of items from “What’s broken with Unix? How would you fix it?” to a simple blank space you are expected to fill with “something that improves on emptiness.”
I scanned in whole test (it’s only 3 pages) for you perusal. Hit the more link below for the images.