that’s great…

Addictive Game

boom-shine — I played this for about 30 minutes, got up to level 12 and 196 points. Give it a try.

Nerdiness

I was looking at Ruminations of a Programmer, and saw this thing on the side. I had to look up the symbol for Mn on the periodic table, which surprised me… I should have known that. Luckily, this quiz accounts for that.

Adobe’s Flex 2

Adobe’s Flex 2 seems like the realization of some great RAD concepts. I’ve seen this for MS related products: Access, VB, etc. However, it’s my first time seeing it for a clean rich Internet application UI. The fact that you can use it along w/ Eclipse is pretty attractive. If ya have 12 minutes, check out this demo.

Some guy built a Commodore C64 Emulator. Here’s a screenshot below — you can actually play the games. If your interested, check some of the other projects Flex Derby developers built — for some contest Adobe held. Pretty slick!

The Cost/Benefit Ratio for Home Theater Systems

When I initially looked for a home theater system, I was not interested in spending too much money. So, I went on the cheap w/ some Koss system from Sears. Wow — that was a horrible choice.

In general, it was ok. However, with a maximum output of 300 watts, it could never really perform. I know an audio enthusiast would have know this ahead of time, but I didn’t. Later, I found myself changing the decibel level of the center channel based on whatever I was watching. After about 2 years of visiting friends homes and noticing they never had to change settings to get reasonable sound, I knew I had to make a change.

Now, being the miser that I am, I wasn’t about to purchase a Klipsch or Bose system. However, there are a few reasonably priced Phillips and Sony systems out there. I searched a bit and found this great Phillips system. 1000 watts, as you might assume, is a remarkable jump. All of a sudden, all media comes through without fiddling. Things like disruption on sudden loud sounds — gone. Also, I didn’t have the ability to read data of USB drives. That’s a nice addition. I noticed this system had 2 real settings: stereo or Dolby Pro Logic II (Dolby Digital, DTS – basically multichannel). The Koss system had these 2 and 5 other crap settings, that tried to hide the poor audio handling.

Well, I always knew if you bought an inexpensive system, it would only be a holdover for a more performant one. Now I don’t really want to go through all this for a flat screen tv… we’ll see how that works out.