I’m not dead. I just haven’t had the time or desire to update this site much. Mostly, my time’s been eaten up by my day job, my second freelance/part-time job, and Champions Online. I will leave it up to the reader to determine the exact percentages of my time eaten up by each item.

Finally got Master of Orion 2 to work, no thanks to Digital River and Atari. Instead, I requested a refund for the purchase, and ordered a used copy from Amazon. Add Dosbox, and the game’s working great!

I’m not a big fan of his in general, but kudos to President Obama for his support of new nuclear power plants. Granted, this isn’t so much an instance of his doing something right as an instance of his continuing a good policy that President Bush laid the groundwork for, but it’s still a good thing.

I’m also pretty pleased by recent moves to lift the stupid DADT policy. I may be pretty conservative and prudish personally, but I see no reason why an individual should be disqualified from serving one’s country simply because of their sexual orientation ^[a]

1. Incidentally, I also wouldn’t mind supporting homosexual marriages, if it’s a.) passed as an actual law, not forced into place by a judge with delusions of legislative power and b.) passed with language that explicitly states that a wedding officiant cannot be sued if he/she refuses to perform a homosexual marriage for whatever reason (I’m actually thinking of ethics/religious objections, but prefer to err on the side of freedom for the officiant here). [↩]

You can purchase Master of Orion 2 directly from Atari as a digital download for only $9.95. At the time of this writing, there’s even a 50% sale, meaning you can get a wonderful old game for a little less than five dollars.

I can’t tell you how badly I want to encourage people to do this. Unfortunately, I can’t actually do it in good conscience, since Atari (and their e-commerce vendor, Digital River) are apparently trying to sell games that are unplayable.

I anticipated problems playing the game – it came out in 1996, after all. It was intended to be played on Windows 95 (they don’t sell the DOS version, as far as I can tell, which means Dosbox won’t work). That’s six versions of Windows ago by my count. People have trouble getting software from Windows XP to run on Windows 7 – I never imagined that getting software intended for Windows 95 to play would be easy.

The problem is, I haven’t gotten that far.

I purchased both Master of Orion 2 and Master of Orion 3^[a]. I received a serial number for Master of Orion 3, but no such luck for Master of Orion 2. I contacted Atari technical support (as the confirmation e-mail from my order told me to do). Then, I waited. And I waited. And I waited.

The response? “Don’t bother us. This is a Digital River issue.”^[b]

So, I contacted Digital River, which led to another awesome round of waiting. Finally, I got an e-mail telling me that my order couldn’t be found, and that I’d need to provide several different pieces of information in order to help them find it before I could get a serial number.

In theory, confirming that I actually bought the game is reasonable, but are there really so many people trying to scam a free serial number for a thirteen year old game that was purchased for five dollars? This really doesn’t serve to combat piracy, it just serves to make reasonable people who actually respect the concepts of intellectual property think seriously about turning to piracy themselves.

In conclusion, I have to recommend that anyone who really feels the need to play Master of Orion II again just hit themselves in the head very hard. If you’re really, really lucky, you might have a dream in which you’re playing the game. At this point, that still puts your chances of being able to play this game again somewhere considerably above mine.

1. That makes the third time I’ve bought MoO3, and it still just isn’t really fun. I keep thinking that, this time, if I am patient with it, I will start enjoying it. It’s not worked yet. [↩]
2. Not a direct quote. [↩]

Rush Limbaugh was taken to the hospital with chest pains.

As an interesting little experiment, before I’ve seen any such responses, I suggest you go around the internet and look at liberal responses to this, then come back here and look at conservative (or conservative-libertarian) responses to hospitalizations of Teddy Kennedy and Robert Byrd (among others). Then see which side of the political spectrum is really “compassionate.”

My thoughts and prayers go out to Mr. Limbaugh.

Also, a quick, unrelated note: I have internet again, no thanks to the storm a couple of weeks ago. Just in time to get hit by a new storm this weekend. Yay.

As I mentioned a few weeks ago, my wife and I are fans of Mike Birbiglia. Our shared sense of humor does not, sadly, extend to Yoram Bauman, the world’s self-proclaimed first (and only?) Stand Up Economist. He’s considerably more leftist than I am, I think, but Bauman’s bit on the translated principles of economics makes me laugh every time I think about it.

Bauman has a book coming out early next year, The Cartoon Introduction to Economics. I’m looking forward to reading it.

Eric over at Classical Values links a video of a Volvo “Clunker” being destroyed (There are links ot additional videos in the comments), then describes his response:

Sadness (yes, I’m not alone there), because even though I’ve never been a Volvo driver (I can remember howling with laughter when I saw George Carlin ridicule them as “safe cars”), this was obviously a perfectly good car. A lot of technology and human effort (to say nothing of raw materials) went into it, and someone could have used it.

…

I see the destruction of that engine as symbolizing pure, naked, raw, disgusting abuse of power.

I realize it will sound harsh, but I think that car was more useful than the useless bureaucrats who ordered its destruction.

I have a tendency to anthropomorphize automobiles to what is probably an extreme extent^[a]. I treat my cars almost like pets a lot of the time, and both times I’ve taken a car to be traded in a dealer lot, I’ve been hit with a huge sense of guilt. These were both vehicles that had served me well (even loyally, to my anthropomorphizing mind), and I just took them to the dealer and abandoned them. The emotion was very similar to what I suspect I’d feel if I had to take a beloved family pet to a shelter because I simply couldn’t keep him anymore.

I won’t even discuss my reaction to seeing^[b] the remains of the minivan that I totaled after hitting a patch of ice.

In addition to all of this, I understand and share Eric’s reaction to the pure wastefulness involved in this program (ostensibly being supported by environmentalists, who’re supposed to be interested in conservation, for goodness sake!). Plus, while I’m not a “car guy”, I do have a fondness for older cars, and envy those who have the ability, patience, time and money to take an older car and restore (or remake) it. The idea that potential project cars^[c] are simply being unmade is abhorrent to me.

1. Oddly, I never named a car until I met my wife, but that didn’t stop me from immediately adopting the names she gave both of our cars. [↩]
2. Seeing on a regular basis, even, since it sat at the bottom of our driveway for a while before the truck came to haul it away as junk [↩]
3. Most of which are, as evidenced by the fact that they were driven to the dealerships, perfectly serviceable even without being restored [↩]