Axodys

While going through and cleaning up my trusty external hard drive this evening I stumbled across my copy of the old Connectix Virtual Game Station, the first Sony Playstation emulator for the Macintosh. It occurred to me that their must be a MacOS X playstation emulator by now so I did a little digging using google. After a few false leads I found out that there is a fairly new emulator out called “Mac PCSX”:http://home.macvaerk.dtu.dk/~gil/pcsx/. I downloaded it and after jumping through the hoops necessary to get the PSX BIOS, tried out my copy of EA Sports NCAA Football 99, probably my all time favorite PSX game. There were a few glitches, but overall the game worked like a charm and I was able to lead WSU to a 32-30 triple overtime victory over Michigan in the 1998 Rose Bowl. I think I’m going to have to play some games in dynasty mode now ;-)!

Cheney upsets West Valley”:http://www.spokesmanreview.com/sports/topstory.asp?ID=48714
“U-Hi Boys make certain”:http://www.spokesmanreview.com/sports/topstory.asp?ID=48709

Cheney 61, West Valley 59
University 56, Central Valley 36
*Gonzaga Prep 55, Ferris 52*
Mead 59, Lewis and Clark 49
Shadle Park 70, Rogers 44
Mt. Spokane 52, East Valley 38
University, Central Valley

Talk about a wild GSL this year. Ferris, Gonzaga Prep, Mead, Shadle Park (thanks to East Valley’s illegal player forfeit) and West Valley are all tied for 1st in league at 3-1. Five more teams are currently tied for 6th place at 2-2. There are still nine more games to shake things out, but I wouldn’t be surprised if the league winner ended up with two or even three losses.

“GU Big Guys Come Up Large”:http://spokesmanreview.com/sports/topstory.asp?ID=48377
“Cougars Cage Oregon State At Home”:http://spokesmanreview.com/sports/story.asp?ID=48340

Nice to see the Cougars off to a good start in the Pac-10 as they move to 3-2 so far. They’re definitely a team that gets it done on the defensive end under Coach Bennett.

The Zag big men played well last night, but other than Derek Raivio, the rest of the team seemed to be in a little bit of a post-SMC, first week of classes funk against LMU. Gonzaga played the most man to man defense I’ve seen them play in quite a while and held LMU to 3-19 from the 3 point line, but didn’t defend LMU’s center Matthew Knight on the inside very well. Still, I think it’s good that they had a game like this where they could tune up their man to man defense so that they have a different option for dealing with elite 3 point shooting teams like St. Mary’s.

We’ve been expecting sub zero temperatures all week, but they haven’t quite arrived yet. We’re hovering right around 17° at the moment, but the word is that the overnight low is going to drop below zero. It’s definitely fine with me if that doesn’t happen; the low teens are plenty cold in my book.

“Saxons use defense to bag Bears”:http://spokesmanreview.com/sports/topstory.asp?ID=47910

*Ferris 55, Central Valley 39*
Clarkston 53, Cheney 49
North Central 64, Mt. Spokane 61
West Valley 47, University 35
Mead 56, Gonzaga Prep 51
Lewis and Clark 54, Shadle Park 52
East Valley 56, Rogers 45

Well, today was every Mac users favorite unoffical holiday: MacWorld Keynote day. While a live streaming video feed was not available this time around, Steve Jobs had no problems delivering on all other fronts.

* “Mac Mini”:http://apple.com/macmini - This could be my mom’s next computer. I’d also like to repopulate the lab at work with some of these I think.
* “iWork”:http://apple.com/iwork - “Keynote 2″:http://apple.com/iwork/keynote has some nice improvements, but “Pages”:http://apple.com/iwork/pages is the coolest looking word processor I have ever laid eyes upon!
* “iPod Shuffle”:http://apple.com/ipodshuffle - Apple’s bid to corner the flash player market is a nice combination of form, price and function.
* “iLife”:http://apple.com/ilife - Apple has updates for iPhoto, iMovie, iDVD, GarargeBand and iTunes.
* Various “Tiger (10.4)”:http://www.apple.com/macosx/tiger demos.
* “Quicktime 7″:http://www.apple.com/macosx/tiger/quicktime.html which will be coming with MacOS X 10.4.

I think I’m most excited to play with the “Mac Mini”:http://apple.com/macmini and the updated “iWork”:http://apple.com/iwork applications. Maybe I can get work to pick up the tab for some Apple hardware and software research ;-).

I saw a couple movies on TV over the weekend: *Serendipity* and *Back To The Future III*. I think that puts me at five for the year so far or just about one every two days. There have been a few other movies that I’ve seen portions of, but not enough to qualify in my mind as a complete viewing. Additionally, I have yet to see a movie this year that I had not seen before. I’m going to have to work on that issue.

The fourth “24″:http://www.fox.com/24 season started tonight with the first of two day worth of special two hour episodes. Things are looking pretty interesting to say the least. Jack Bauer is no longer part of CTU and instead works directly for the Secretary of Defense, and further complicating things, is romantically involved with Audrey, his boss’s married daughter. It only gets more complicated from there, but there are several promising storylines developing and lots of questions to be answered:

* What was in the briefcase that was taken from the derailed train?
* Can Jack reach Secretary Heller and Audrey in time to prevent a beheading?
* When is the rogue computer virus code going to come into play? Is it related to the brief case in some way?
* Is there anyone competent left at CTU now that Jack no longer works there?
* Will Debbie be the downfall of almost 5 years worth of bad guy scheming?

Last week I downloaded Star Dragon, new hard science fiction author “Mike Brotherton’s”:http://www.mikebrotherton.com first novel when I saw it mentioned over at Boing Boing as being available under a “Creative Commons”:http://creativecommons.org license. I was pretty much hooked after the first chapter, but got busy with various other things and wasn’t able to read beyond the third chapter or so. Today while on a book buying errand for Mary I came across the paperback edition and decided to go ahead and buy it. Even though I could have saved $7 by continuing to read my downloaded copy, I still prefer the classic book form factor to my laptop’s screen and I definitely wanted to support Mike for making the book freely available. I wonder how many other people will end up buying the book because he made it available via the web?

We got around 4-5 more inches of snow overnight so all my shoveling from the previous 24 hours was erased when I got up this morning. I went ahead re-shoveled enough of our driveway to get my Element out so that I could go get some gas for our snow blower. I had no luck starting it until I completely emptied the tank of some old watery gas and refilled it with fresh gas; that did the trick and made clearing the rest of the driveway nearly painless. Looks like I’m going to need it again soon too as the forecast shows additional snowfalls through Wednesday. Winter is definitely in full effect now.