Like a good pun as much as I do???
So I got this funny e-mail about a class-action lawsuit against Classmates.com today:
That aside, though, I guess the part that really amused me was the notion that they want you to opt-out if you don’t want to participate in this class action lawsuit of theirs…
If you do not want to receive a cash award and want to maintain the right to pursue your own lawsuit against Classmates, then you must exclude yourself. To exclude yourself, you must submit a Request for Exclusion. That request must include your full legal name, mailing address, e-mail address, your signature (or an electronic signature consisting of “/s” plus your typed name), and the following statement, “I want to opt out of the In re Classmates.com Consolidated Litigation.”
Granted, I don’t really know much of anything about law and I know that our legal system certainly has its quirks, to say the very least, but I’d like to at least hope that people can’t just go around naming you in lawsuits without your permission! I mean, I don’t know how they would present it anyways, seeing as clearly they don’t actually have an official list of subscribers from Classmates.com or anything … “Your honor – we only received 10 opt-outs out of the 100 million e-mail addresses that we spammed with our class action suit, so they’re all participants!”
Best of luck with your frivolous lawsuit, boys – Classmates.com is a hopeless service that is probably on its last limbs these days thanks to Facebook anyways, but I hope they counter-sue you for damages and at least make enough to treat themselves to a nice dinner or something…
So this past weekend Sara and I snuck over to Disney for an early celebration of my birthday next week. We ended up spending most of Saturday over at Typhoon Lagoon, which even though also terrifying actually ended up being quite a lot of fun, too! Sunday was spent mostly just dodging the sun, between going to the movies and browsing gift shops around the Magic Kingdom resort monorail loop, eventually wandering back into the park once the sun went down for a couple of attractions and ultimately fireworks.
Anyways, I won’t go into tremendous detail so as to save that for another post on another site (coming…soon?), but here are a handful of quick pics that I think help to characterize the weekend!
The lazy river … now that’s more my style!!!
Stayed at Port Orleans Riverside – paid for a plain, ordinary room, but got upgraded to an awesome water view!
Finally got to spend some time exploring the new LEGO store – it’s definitely nice having a little more elbow room for a change!
Didn’t actually buy one of these, but don’t they look yummy?
Quite a while back I mentioned the discovery of the original Final Fantasy being available for the iPhone, admittedly with some reservations about the interface and having to play it on a 3” screen. Well, nearly six months later I guess I must’ve gotten bored with all of the zombies and other adorable aliens because I’ve now been playing this one for about a week and I think I’m coming around on it now…
I still vouch that the touch interface can be a bit clunky at times – sometimes it takes me a couple of attempts at clicking on a monster in combat for my attack to actually take, but so far the size of the screen hasn’t really been too straining as long as I play in shorter increments. This isn’t as big of a deal as I would’ve thought because they’ve waived the saving requirements to allow you to save basically anywhere, as opposed to only on the world map as in previous versions … an obvious, but unexpected necessity for playing a game on one’s phone that makes playing a couple of quick combats actually possible.
So far I’ve managed to get just past where I would’ve 20 years ago when I was renting the NES cartridge from the grocery store for a weekend of gaming – getting ready to explore the Earth Cave to hunt down the vampire for his ruby, then take out Lich to save the first orb of light. All in all I’ve put just under 5 hours into the game, and as long as I can remember to keep my battery charged (it does go through them a lot quicker than something like Words with Friends does!), despite my previous concerns I think I’ll probably keep it up and continue playing all the way through!
It’s kind of funny because earlier this week, I was actually thinking about picking up one of the more recent Dragon Quest or Final Fantasy games to play on my wife’s DS because she hasn’t really been using it lately, but for what it’s worth if I can get the same enjoyment out of the device that I already carry with me everywhere I go, I guess I should be good for a while! 🙂
This whole thing about the tobacco companies being forced to use discouraging packaging on cigarettes kind of confuses me. Today I read an article where they’re filing a lawsuit saying that it’s unfair, and oddly enough, I think that I actually agree with them…
I mean, yeah, I understand that this is in response to deceptive marketing practices from 20 years ago when they were employing doctors to tell how cigarettes are perfectly fine for people to smoke, even though technically they already were already fined $200 billion as a result of that. And sure, while you may not convert any of the existing smokers, seeing such graphic imagery may very well help to prevent younger and more impressionable stupid people from lighting up … I guess?
Still, I’m not buying any of it because frankly I just don’t see how anybody in their right mind could possibly think that sucking deadly carcinogens directly into their own lungs would be in any way good for them. It’s smoke, and I don’t need somebody with a PhD to tell me that smoking is bad anymore than I need to be reminded not to suck on my car’s tailpipe or stick my head in the oven! I’ll buy that people start smoking from peer pressure or because it looks cool – hell, that’s why I did it for a whopping three months back when I was in high school, and then I made the connection that if I was going to do a lot of scuba diving, maybe I shouldn’t corrupt my life support systems with a disgusting layer of tar, so I quit. I didn’t need a scary package to remind me upon every hit that having a lung collapse 35 feet underwater probably would be a “bad thing.”
I’m all for education and getting the info out there, but just like I wouldn’t expect my bottle of rum to come with a Girls Gone Wild tape to help dissuade girls from binge drinking, I think it’s silly for legislators to demand that the creators of a product be the same people advocating against its use on their own packaging. It’s a lazy attempt at education by simply trying to spook consumers, many of whom are going to continue doing horrible things to their body no matter what kinds of pictures you put in front of them.
I think we’d be much better off simply using all of that settlement money for classroom education and research, and for the ones who still insist on playing chicken with lung cancer, Darwin always seems to have a plan for them, too…
Oh, come on!
I’m not really sure what brought this about today, but somehow I came across this site that took on the herculean task of archiving Geocities when Yahoo! opted to shut the site down a couple of years ago. Being the programming geek that I am, I especially got a kick out of the play-by-play making of page where the admin walks through the steps that were made at the last minute to archive a site as incredibly massive as Geocities was … we’re talking 38 million pages (according to Wikipedia) and the guy was pulling upwards of 150 Mbps across a cluster of 5 servers at their prime – not exactly child’s play with the home cable modem, that’s for sure!
Anyways, aside from it being a neat tech tale just seeing what all went into the project from a homebrewed technical perspective, it also got me wondering about my own Geocities page(s) from way back in the day, probably circa 1995-ish or so. Although granted they didn’t have a lot of traffic so they might not have even gotten picked up for archival in the first place, it kind of sucks that I honestly don’t really have any way to check because I don’t even remember what the addresses were anymore! All of that was way prior to Google, so no such luck there, and the telnet-based host that I first used for e-mail cut my account off for 3-months of non-usage right around the time when webmail started becoming a thing, so no e-mail archives to sift through there, either.
Given how big a part of my life publishing on the web has become since then, it seems kind of weird for those first couple of years to just be lost forever, even though they’d be abysmally frightening to look at considering they were slapped together by a 15 year-old who was still in the extremely early stages of beginning to explore his own creativity in a public setting. I do remember that they covered a lot of really random stuff that I was interested in at the time – I had a page for The Muppets, some guitar tabs, links to the MUDs that I had been playing, and a bunch of stuff about Magic: The Gathering and D&D … although I guess you could say that I basically am still doing the same thing today, just with slightly different topics!
If anybody can think of a way to hunt down the address of an old Geocities account, do let me know! I have a vague recollection of what the “street numbers” might’ve been, but I couldn’t find anything under the couple of “neighborhoods” that would’ve made sense in the few archives that exist.
Update: I tried doing a Google search for my old Geocities e-mail address, but the only results I got were two hits where it was being passed around on a SPAM list… 🙁
I absolutely love this OpEd that Warren Buffett did for the New York Times about just how ridiculous it is that we don’t tax the super rich more than we do here in America today.
And just for the record, if you haven’t heard of him, Warren Buffett is the third richest man in the world, so who better than him to finally bring this to light?!
It’s hard to argue with the idea that despite making an exponentially larger income than even the other people in his own office, his tax rate was still roughly half that of the worker bees beneath him at 17.4%. Why should income be taxed different simply based on how it was earned (i.e. capital gains vs. regular wages)? Sure, the arguments are that people will just take their investments elsewhere if investment taxes are raised and that giving these breaks allows for these companies to create new jobs … except that as Buffett address both: “No, they won’t…” and, well, “No, they won’t!”
Our own local governor here in Florida, Rick Scott, is one of these guys hell bent on eliminating corporate taxes because he thinks that the companies will then pass those savings right on to us consumers. Funny, when the taxes to run the FAA expired a few weeks ago, did the majority of airlines pass those savings on and save consumers anywhere from $25-50/flight?! Nope – they pocketed the difference until everything was reinstated, hemming and hawing about how tough it is to be a big, bad corporation the whole way.
Now I don’t want this to get into a thing about how corporations vs. individuals except to make the point that most are only looking out for themselves and their own bottom lines. They’re doing what they do to make money, and in a time when layoffs and downsizing are tools to maximize profits (as opposed to innovation and moving forward), it’s silly to think that letting these guys off easy is ever going to actually help the American people. Instead, we should be taxing them as much as possible because boy, do we have a lot of ground to make up after subsidizing their businesses over the last several decades!
Ultimately it’s kind of sad that we don’t have more entrepenuers like Warren Buffett, eager to make boatloads of money but also patriotic enough to be willing to pay maybe a little more than his share just because he can. Of course, of the 400 richest people in America of which he speaks, no doubt only a fraction of those share his philanthropic views – likely the same billionaires who’ve pledged to give their wealth to greater causes in the future – with the rest clinging onto their money as a status symbol and a social differentiator. Call it socialism, call it acting as a society that supports and cares for each other – if the big guy isn’t willing to help out when the little guy is in trouble, then he isn’t really much of a member of society at all.
At least not one that I want to live in…
(Alex Rabe is the brilliant guy who created the NextGen Gallery plugin that I use for photos in WordPress. I came across this page on his site at random and thought it sounded kind of fun, so here’s my own compilation of video games that have had a big impact on me over the years…)
Mission Asteroid (some Apple IIe-clone, 1985)
I think this was the very first computer game that I ever played, albeit I probably didn’t actually understand it until years later when I actually figured out what I was supposed to be doing! But I remember writing down the correct instructions as I went – GET KEY, OPEN DOOR, etc… – and it really got my imagination working because you really had to fish for solutions because by no means were they just handed out to you.Donald Duck’s Playground (Amiga, 1986)
Probably a little more my speed, at least for my age, this was a great game not only for entertainment purposes, but also learning about money, matching and sorting, and also why it’s important to finish building the curly slide before letting your nephews actually play on it…Super Mario Bros (Nintendo, 1987)
Obviously, my very first console game and the one that got me hooked into a lifetime of Nintendo fandom – I won’t list all of the sequels here because they’d take up too much room, but let’s just say it’s safe to assume that they all pretty much made the list as well, between birthday cake and toys and dressing up as their characters for Halloween…The Legend of Zelda (Nintendo, 1988)
Quite possibly one of my favorite games of all-time, it’s one of the few that I can still play to this day almost entirely by memory…except for the second quest, mind you! The only other one from the series that even comes close to the original was Link to the Past for the SNES, but Link’s very first quest to find the triforce still holds a very special place in my heart.Defender of the Crown (Amiga, 1989)
I really got into this one because my Grandpa enjoyed playing it, so it started with me bringing my LEGOs over to his house and reenacting the catapult and sword-fighting scenes while he played and then eventually evolved into more of me actually playing myself. Always loved sword fighting, hated jousting.Rocket Ranger (Amiga, 1990)
An “adult game” that I picked up from my Dad, this one was cool because The Rocketeer was kind of a big deal at the time, and of course, rocket packs are just cool in general! We never could actually find all of the rocket parts in time to get up to the moon, however after watching the actual game play on YouTube years after the fact, it’s probably better off that we didn’t…The Simpsons Arcade Game (local arcade, 1991)
I honestly didn’t really go to the “arcade” in our small town much, but when I did I have fond memories of playing this game and have forever since sought a version that I can actually play today! The game for the iPhone is pretty close, but I’d still love to pick up one of the actual arcade machines some day once I’ve got a house that boasts its own arcade!Final Fantasy 2 (Super Nintendo, 1992)
Ok, sorry Zelda, but I suppose technically this is my favorite game of all-time – so complex and long, with rich characters and an incredible story – one of my friends and I logged countless hours after our scout meetings and on the weekends trying to figure this game out! Still to this day I get a kick out of going back to replay the battle between good and evil, and always find myself feeling awesome after watching Cecil become a paladin!King’s Quest 7 (PC, 1994)
LOL – the first Christmas gift I got that I couldn’t actually play because our computer didn’t have enough RAM! This was actually my first exposure to the Sierra empire and even though I couldn’t even get past the first level without a cheat guide (much more difficult to come by in 1994, by the way…), I loved the presentation that Roberta Williams & Co put into this – the storyline, the animation, even the soundtrack … it made me feel like I was playing a cartoon, which was a definite first for a video game.Space Quest 6 (PC, 1995)
I’ve since read that creator Scott Murphy actually hates this game because it was kind of crapped out during some of the company’s later struggles, but I thought it was hilarious and could explore for hours just to hear what the cool announcer guy had to say about each one. This was another game that I couldn’t beat without a cheat guide … in retrospect I guess most of Sierra’s games were like that for me, really!Leisure Suit Larry (the whole series) (PC, 1995-1997)
What can I say? Puberty … for a computer geek, these games were really required reading as I depended on Larry Laffer to teach me everything that he knew about sex. Oops. Well, at least they were pretty darned funny, too…Avatar MUD (online, 1996-1998)
My one and only foray into online gaming was spent exploring the text-based MUDs that predated World of Warcraft and Ultima Online. I had a lot of fun, although they did get frustrating near the end because the one that I frequented pretty much required you to participate in a group in order to level, whereas I preferred to play solo. The game did serve to teach me one lesson, however – that I pretty much needed to steer clear of WoW because I got really addicted to this game, keeping the phone line tied up for hours on end, getting up at 5am to participate in special events, etc… Honestly, I’m sure I’d actually love WoW, but it would dominate my life and as a married man trying to build a career, it could only end badly!Grand Theft Auto 3 (Playstation 2, 2003)
A pizza, a bag of chips, a case of Dr. Pepper, and GTA3 … that was my ideal Friday night as a 22 year-old guy still living in his Mom’s basement! This was such a cool game, though – the world just seemed to keep going on forever, there were tons of things to do, and even the radio stations were hilarious … I actually remember pulling over in the rain just to stop and listen to the talk radio station, as voiced by the hilarious Lazlow.Warcraft 3 (PC, 2004)
I honestly didn’t play the third Warcraft game for a couple of years after it came out until one night after work when I was particularly bored and single. I ended up playing for about 10 hours straight, to the point where I was about ready to drive out and buy the sequel except that I wasn’t sure if I could find it at that hour. I really loved this Warcraft experience, though, because it combined the hero and builder roles into a single game, which appealed to me.Dragon Quest VIII: Journey of the Cursed King (Playstation 2, 2010)
Probably my most recent “favorite,” I got into playing this last year and it lasted me a good couple of months of playing a few hours here and there when Sara was working on the weekends. Very reminiscent of the RPGs of yesteryear that I enjoyed – my only complaint was that once you had your four party members, they never actually changed again. I was still kind of disappointed when it was over, though – not of the ending itself, which was decent – like any good game, I was just really invested at that point and didn’t want it to end.
So wow – this post ended up being a lot longer than I had anticipated, but I still think it’s interesting to look back through time at the games that influenced me the most. Also, I think it’s kind of curious to see how my recent games have been few and far between – probably due to a combination lack of time to play in general and lack of exposure to new games. Plus, as you can see I tend to be pretty nostalgic, so it would kind of make sense that these days I’d more look for new games that mimic the things I enjoyed growing up … many of which simply aren’t being made anymore these days.
I wonder what will get added to my list in the next 10 years??? Mini-games on the iPhone like Plants vs. Zombies and Cut the Rope? Something like WiiFit, for actually saving my life by helping me to lose weight?? Maybe just more nostalgic games as I continue to pull out older titles that have long since came and went, but just never made it onto my screen up until now???
Despite the lack of somewhat newer titles, I think I’ve had a pretty decent run so far!
Sometimes I wonder if Disney is just messing with me when they send out some of these movie promotions of theirs:
See also: Disney Vault vs. Disney Trash Can