A month or two back, I might have talked about Mining and Crafting with Minecraft. As I said back then, Minecraft is an addictive little game where you mine out minerals, craft items from them, use those items to mine/fashion better items, and keep going until a zombie eats your brains.

Zombies are eating my brains fairly regularly these days.  Skeleton archers are shooting arrows at me.  Spiders are biting me.  Creepers are, um, creeping, I guess.  Recent updates have added an alternate dimension called the Nether.  In this world, game physics are altered.  New creatures are revealed.  Zombie pigmen squeal and ghasts shriek.  I have new ways to die.

Another thing recent updates have done is tweak the mobs.  "Mobs" is just a fancy name for the creatures of the world.  Given the blocky, 8-bit appearance of the Minecraft game world, I thought "mob" was a reference to the old name for a game sprite, the Movable Object Block.  Back in those days, most of the game screen was a set backdrop with just a few things moving on it.  Those moving objects were called mobs.  However, it's since come to my attention that various gamers have been using mob to refer to mobile game characters for years, even in games that don't technically have graphics.  Oh, well.

Anyway, the mobs are a bit smarter now.  They are slightly less likely to jump to their deaths trying to reach you.  Though the pathfinding is minimal, they at least recognize cliffs when they're about to walk off one.  They are also much better at swimming.  That's a problem for me.

While it was probably not intended by Minecraft's creator, mob farming has been a staple of gameplay for a while.  Since mobs are pretty dumb and predictable, it's possible to design a structure which they can enter but never leave.  You can construct traps which will attract and kill mobs with little/no user interaction.  This gives you all the benefits of killing monsters with little of the risk of facing them in open combat.  (The benefits are that sometimes mobs drop useful items when they die and that if a mob is stuck in your trap, he's not outside running around trying to kill you.)

Some people see mob farming as cheating.  They see it as rewards without risk.  However, I personally believe that anyone who thinks mob traps are cheats has not gone to the effort of designing and building one.  Hundreds of man-hours have gone into designing mob traps.  Even if you're using someone else's design, you still have to customize it to fit your particular situation.  You have to fight off mobs while you're building.  It's not unusual to be nearly finished with a finicky design, finally having everything just right, and having it all blown to pieces by a wandering creeper.

Furthermore, there's a bit of an arms race between Minecraft's designers and Minecraft's players.  The short version is that as soon as the designers introduce something new, the players come up with a way of using it in a way that the designers never thought possible.  The designers tweak the design so the players can't do that anymore.  Another player comes along and takes advantage of the new behavior.  More tweaks.  More traps.

Since mobs take damage from falling and don't always pay attention to where they're going, a primitive trap would be to dig a deep hole and stand at the bottom.  Mobs would rush to attack, fall to their deaths, and leave their drops where you could pick them up.  Mobs haven't been quite that stupid in several revisions, so traps have gotten more sophisticated.  Mostly, this involves using water currents to push mobs into pits, fire, cactus, or other things that cause damage.  My first trap involved mobs brushing up against lava, but I'd heard a lot about drowning traps.

Drowning traps work because in Minecraft even the undead (zombies, skeletons) and undetermined (creepers) need to breathe.  In the past, it was fairly easy to trick a mob into drowning.  However, about the time I decided to try building a drowning trap was about the time that mobs learned to swim a whole lot better (v1.2.2 or so).  In fact, some of these guys look like they're beach balls bouncing around on top of the water.  Mostly, they're bouncing around on top of the water in my drowning trap.  This was very annoying.  I tried to make the downward currents stronger, make the drop deeper, make the holes wider, but I still had skeletons dancing around on top of my trap shooting arrows at me while I tried making adjustments.  I gave up and went back to lava.  Sure, it was a pain to go all the way down to the bottom of the earth to collect it, and I kept burning myself and all my possessions, and it would incinerate half the good stuff that the mobs would drop when they died, but at least skeletons weren't dancing on top of it.

(Naturally, others tell me their drowning traps are still working perfectly and that I'm just doing something wrong, but I know better.  Minecraft is out to get me.  You hear that, Minecraft?  I'm on to you!)

Anyway, I wasn't the only one who noticed that mobs were floating around like party balloons.  TyrannosaurusHax noticed and used this new behavior to create a mob elevator.  In spite of all the people telling me that mobs still can't swim all that well and still sink to the bottom of the pool eventually, T-Hax demonstrates that these things have more buoyancy than Pamela Anderson.  His mob elevator (or mobavator) takes mobs from below and pops them out top, easy as you please.  It made me wonder why my mobs were still having to take the stairs.

I immediately went out to replicate his results.  I immediately failed.

My plan was to make a mob elevator so high that when the mobs fell off the top, they'd go splat.  Yes, I was going back to the fall trap of Minecraft's ancient past (a few months ago when I first started playing).  However, I discovered something interesting.  Most of my mobs weren't making it to the top.  As I built higher and higher, fewer and fewer made it to the top.  They were dying somewhere along the way, based on the items dropping to the bottom.  I tried to swim up the elevator myself and discovered the problem.  The mobs were drowning during the long swim up.  I started redesigning to create air pockets and way stations, but then it hit me:  I had been trying to drown the darn things before.  Why was I trying to save them now?

I was experimenting with how short I could make the trap and still drown all the mobs when I managed to get trapped under a poorly placed piece of cobblestone.  Experimentation showed that mobs got trapped under the same stone.  The mobs, with their new magical swimming ability that rivaled some famous swimming person, could swim up just fine, but couldn't figure out that they needed to swim down to keep from drowning.  Depending on the mob, you could drown them in a single block of water over a ladder.

Yes, I could drown skeletons with the equivalent of a bucket of water over a door.


Ahem.  Sorry.  I got carried away there for a a second.

Anyway, after entirely too much time building and rebuilding, I finally came up with the Skelespawner Float Trap 2000 as described in this Minecraft forum post.  Skeletons go in.  They don't come out.  The only thing that comes out is a steady stream of arrows.  I use the arrows to shoot at other skeletons.

I hope the video came out okay.  It's my first Minecraft video and only my second YouTube video at all.  I had pretty much forgot that I even had a YouTube account.  I created it when I was planning a machinima series a few years back.  That never went anywhere.  At this point I don't plan to do a Minecraft video series, but I am happy how this one turned out.  The YouTube user tools, especially the annotations, have gotten a lot better than I remember.

Anyway, back to watching skeletons drown!

Not too long ago, I had a few days off because of a holiday.  I thought it would be a good time to go visit my girlfriend, Kitten.  Of course, her name isn't really Kitten.  It's just that if I don't refer to her as a small, cute, harmless, ball of fluff, she tries to claw my eyes out.

Kitten asked me to "bring the tools" as she wanted me to "fix the baby."  In the case, "the baby" is the notebook computer I loaned her several years ago.  It's an old eMachines notebook running Windows 2000.  As I recall, I bought the computer so I could do some vital computer work (okay, game and browse and write) while on the road.  Kitten had a lot of computer work to do for her job but didn't have access to a computer at work yet.  She had to borrow my notebook for a few weeks until she got her own work computer so she could work on some project.

I was looking forward to working on it as she hadn't let me see it since.  I suppose she was afraid that if she ever let me lay eyes on it, I'd want it back or something.  I didn't, of course.  By that time, I'd gone out an bought an Acer notebook with Windows Vista.  (I had been careful not to let Kitten see it.)  According to Kitten, "the baby" wasn't working.  She had decided that it was a problem with the power supply.  She said she could wiggle the cord and the light would come on, but it would go off as soon as she let go to actually try to use the computer.  I'd mailed her a new power supply, but she said that didn't fix it.  I brought a universal power supply, voltmeter, soldering iron, and a few other essential tools.

Kitten handed me "the baby."

"This isn't the notebook computer I lent you," I pointed out as I set it up.

"Oh, you're worse than Mom," Kitten complained.  "'We need a new name for the new laptop.  You can't call every computer we own the same name.  It gets confusing.  Blah!  Blah!  Blah!'"

"Okay, then," I said, after making sure all sharp objects were safely out of reach.  "Where did this Gateway notebook running... um...  Windows XP come from?"

"Oh, we bought that at a pawn shop."

"And the power supply isn't working?"

"What?  No!  The power supply works fine.  It's the one you sent me to try to fix the baby.  It didn't work, so we bought another one and used it on it.  It works fine but it doesn't work so we need you to fix it so we can use it before you fix it."

"Duh."  I think my eyes crossed at that point.  "Without using any more nicknames or pronouns, explain to me exactly what is wrong with this computer right here in front of me."

"Oh, I don't know the password."

After just a few minutes of questioning, not counting the time Kitten spent deriding me for actually drawing a diagram to try to keep track of which computer we were working on, I discovered that she had bought the Gateway at a pawn shop.  The Gateway had no power supply, but the power supply I'd mailed her to try to fix the eMachine had worked with the Gateway.  Everything was fine until about three months after purchase, when Windows XP started asking for a password upon loading.  Kitten had gone back to the pawn shop to ask for the password, but they'd told her "Oh, we didn't set a password.  You must have that virus that's going around.  We've got a guy who can fix that for you.  He charges $50."

Instead of paying $50, Kitten had instead decided to do without a notebook computer for a while.  It was a wise decision.  That should have worried me.

Windows XP has a few security glitches.  Of course, I hadn't used XP in a while.  I had to break out my Acer to search the Internet for those glitches.  To do that, I had to connect to the Internet.  The hotel we were staying at advertised free WiFi.  All the connections appeared to be secured.  This struck me as odd.  Given the signal strength, you pretty much had to be inside the hotel to use the wireless.  Anyone inside the hotel was already a guest.  Any guest could ask the front desk for the password.  Why secure something if the only people who knew the password were the only people who could connect, anyway?

After getting the password from the front desk, I set it as my WEP (Wired Equivalent Privacy) key.  I still couldn't connect.  I tried it as a WPA (Wi-Fi Protected Access) key. Still no go.  WPA2?  Nope.  I forget the exact security setting, but it was the very last one in the drop down list.  Only after connecting did my computer recognize and display that this was the security setting I should have been attempting all along.

No matter.  Once I got on the Internet, I was able to look up the XP security glitch I remembered and had the Gateway password changed in minutes.

"Thanks!  You're a genius!" gushed Kitten.  Thirty seconds later, it was "You idiot!  It doesn't work!"

"What's the problem?"

"I can't connect to the hotel wireless!"

"They have some weird security settings.  You can't just connect.  Didn't you notice it took me 15 minutes to get my computer connected?"

"Oh, I just thought you were tweaking it so nobody else could see your computer files or something."

I let Kitten use the Acer to check her email while I worked on the Gateway.  It took much less than 15 minutes to find the problem.  Apparently, Windows XP pre-dates the invention of whatever security setting the motel wireless was using.  The only option I had was WEP, which I knew wasn't going to work.  That sucked.  Kitten was going to want to borrow the Acer.

I remembered then that we had stayed at that hotel before.  Back then, WiFi wasn't the big thing it was now.  The hotel still advertised as providing free Internet, however.  Every room was wired with an ethernet connection.  A quick call to the front desk revealed that the clerk had no idea what an ethernet connection was.  She was young enough that I don't think she realized the Internet came through wires.  However, after moving the furniture around a bit, I found a port that looked about the right size.

Never go anywhere without a spare network cable.  I had the Gateway hooked up in no time.  The Gateway said it was connected, but couldn't actually find the Internet.  In fact, after fiddling with it a while, it seemed that the Gateway said it was connected as soon as a cable was connected to that port, regardless of whether the other end was plugged into something or not.  I suspected that the wired connection wasn't connected to anything on the other side, but borrowing back the Acer showed an instant connection.

Acer can connect but the Gateway can't?  Different network cards?  Different protocols?  Nope.  Different versions of Windows.  The Acer had Vista while the Gateway had XP.  I stared messing with the network and workgroup settings in XP.  It was particularly frustrating because every time I made a change, I had to reboot for it to take effect.  I suddenly remembered why I'd upgraded all the computers on my home network to Vista.  After about the millionth reboot, suddenly the Gateway realized it could talk to the Internet.

I checked for Windows Updates and found that there were about 300 pending updates, upgrades, service packs, and security fixes.  "Why haven't you installed any of these?"

"Oh, well, you know, viruses and stuff.  You told me not to just install anything that asked!"

"So, you decided it was okay to install so many toolbars and buddies and helpers that your Internet Explorer screen is about half the size it should be, but you haven't updated your virus scanner since you got this computer?"

"I have a virus scanner?"

It took about two hours, but I finally got most of the unneeded crap uninstalled and most of the Windows Update crap up to date.  I even got it fixed so that loading a single instance of Internet Explorer didn't overload the meager 512MB of RAM the Gateway had, meaning that she could surf the web without endless virtual memory disk thrashing.  I never did convince her to let me install Mozilla Firefox.  She'd seen it on my Acer and had decided she didn't like it.

I let her start using the Gateway, still connected to the Internet by wire as it was faster and didn't conk out every five minutes like the wireless did.  The momentary interruptions were messing up her Farmville game.

"It's not working again."

"What's the problem?"

"It's slowing down again.  See?"  Indeed, Internet Explorer was slow and the hard drive was thrashing again.  I saw that she had several copies of Internet Explorer running.  I also saw that her solution to IE running slowly was to load up more copies.  After a reboot, I showed her how Internet Explorer had the same multiple tab feature that Firefox did, meaning that she didn't have to run multiple copies to show multiple websites.  It turns out that the tabs were the reason she didn't like Firefox.  I then showed her how Internet Explorer had the same multiple window feature that Firefox did, meaning that she didn't have to run multiple copies to show multiple websites.  She was finally happy.

She was so happy, in fact, that next time I visit, she's going to let me fix the baby.  I assume she means the eMachines Windows 2000 notebook.

Or maybe she actually has a baby she hasn't told me about.

My latest little obsession is a little game from Sweden called Minecraft.  Minecraft is a game about placing blocks while running from skeletons. Or something like that...  Currently in Alpha, but rapidly approaching Beta, Minecraft is an addictive little game where you mine out minerals, craft items from them, use those items to mine/fashion better items, and keep going until a zombie eats your brains.

You start out in the middle of a near-infinite world of blocks.  Each block is about one meter (or one yard for us old fashioned types) on a side.  While the depth and height of the world is limited to something like 64 blocks above and below sea level, the surface area can expand to something like 8x the surface of the Earth.  In spite of this, the world generates very quickly.  Since your top speed is walking, the game has plenty of time to generate new chunks of land on the fly as they come into view.  You can walk until you get bored.  Or until a creeper creeps up on you and explodes.

The terrain that Minecraft generates is quite interesting, even before you start building on it.  I've been known to create and destroy a few dozen worlds in a sitting just to see what it will do.  While there are always mountains and oceans, there are sometimes rolling hills, sometimes sandy beaches, and sometimes deep ravines.  Once in a while, you get floating islands, lakes, waterfalls, and lava.  That's just on the surface, mind you.  Underground, you can expect cave systems, mineral deposits, magma, and the occasional dungeon.  What's a dungeon?  I'm not sure.  I haven't found one yet.

If all you did was explore and build in this world, it would be interesting.  This game also features monsters, which adds to the fun.  So far, I've seen zombies, skeletons, spiders, skeletons riding spiders, and creepers.  What's a creeper?  It's a giant green exploding penis monster.  No, I'm not kidding.

Of course, not everything is out to kill you.  There are also chickens, cows, and pigs.  These can be killed to provide feathers, leather, and ham, but you'd never want to, because these animals are just so cute.  And you just know that they'd never do anything to hurt you.  Get away, pig.  I'm trying to type here.  No, I won't pet you.  Get away.  Hey!  Quit pushing!  I'm standing right next to a cliff!  Damn you, bacoooooooooon!

You start off the game with nothing in the way of tools or supplies, which is okay because you have the raw strength needed to tear trees apart with your bare hands.  With this wood, you can build a workbench or crafting table.  From here, your first primitive wood tools will emerge.  A wooden pick won't last long, but it should let you mine out some coal and chunks of raw stone.  A bit of coal on the end of a stick makes a passable torch.  You can use the stone to make a stone pick and other stone tools.  These will do nicely until your find some metal deposits.  Metal tools last longer and make your work go faster, but you can't always count on there being plenty of metal around.  Metal also makes the best weapons and armor.

When you die (and you will die) you don't really die.  You just go back to the very first place where you first entered that world.  Unfortunately, you do so without all your equipment and supplies.  Anything you were carrying on you at the time of your death is now scattered around your place of death.  The first impulse is to run right back to that place, but whatever killed you is likely to still be there.  You might need to stock up on supplies first.

This adds a bit of strategy to the game.  You can only carry so much with you at a given time.  You don't want to carry everything you own with you, as you don't want to loose it all down some deep hole.  On the other hand, if you have to go back to your base every few minutes to get more supplies, you'll never really explore the world in which you now live.

Of course, with a name like Minecraft, naturally you're expected to do a lot of mining.  Some players like to dig a mineshaft near or even inside their bases.  From there, they dig down deep into the bowels of the Earth, sending shafts in scientifically-determined patterns, searching for every last mineral deposit.  If they don't see a lot of the world, well, that's the price you pay for being a good miner.  Other players like to explore the countryside looking for natural caves and caverns.  These players spelunk through the caves looking for minerals.  If they miss a few things or get eaten by spiders, well, that's the price you pay for being an adventurer.

Me, I get bored too quickly to be a professional miner, but I'm way too chicken to go exploring.  I tend to just mess around until I get killed or something goes horribly wrong, then I generate a new world and start over.

The crazy thing is that I never intended to play this game.  The game was free for a weekend a while ago, so I tried it.  It was okay, but I couldn't see actually paying money for it.  I figured I'd play until the free ran out, then forget about it.  Then I decided to watch a few Minecraft videos.  The next thing I knew, I was shelling out $15.  (Actually, the price is 20 Euros, but it's half off right now, which in American dollars is about $15.)

So, unless you have 20 Euros and a lot of free time to kill, I suggest you most definitely do not run over to the official Minecraft site and buy the game.  Do not under any circumstances read through the Minepedia.  Do not watch the entire series of X's Adventures in Minecraft.  Do not browse through the Official Picture Thread.  And, whatever you do, do not check back here for updates.

I'll be too busy pushing pigs off cliffs.

HandBrake is great for video conversions.  However, I'm having problems with A/V sync, so I'm posting some logs here to see if anybody can figure out what I'm doing wrong.

Using the old HandBrake CLI 0.9.3, the file converts properly.
Using the new HandBrake CLI 0.9.4, the audio and video get so far out of sync that the show is unwatchable.

The following logs were created using the command line options:
handbrakecli93 -i test.mpg -o test93CLI.mp4 -e x264 -q 0.6 --deinterlace=fast -v 1 >>test93CLI.txt 2>&1
handbrakecli94 -i test.mpg -o test94CLI.mp4 -e x264 -q 0.6 --deinterlace=fast -v 1 >>test94CLI.txt 2>&1
handbrakecli99 -i test.mpg -o test99CLI.mp4 -e x264 -q 0.6 --deinterlace=fast -v 1 >>test99CLI.txt 2>&1
where cli99 is actually the latest SVN version.

Imagine, if you will, that you're watching your favorite epic science fiction movie or series or direct-to-video and some truly spectacular special effects kick in and, for just a moment, you feel like you're really out in space watching cruisers the size of aircraft carriers soaring majestically while blasting each other with ionizing death rays.  Of course, that feeling comes to a sudden halt the next time you go to commercial or switch back to whatever's happening down on the planet or, heaven forbid, there's a bit of character development.  You suddenly miss that feeling.

Gratuitous Space Battles is all about that feeling.

Gratuitous Space Battles (hereafter referred to as GSB) comes to us from the good people at Positech Games.  It turns out that the good people at Positech Games are actually this one guy named Cliff, but I like that turn of phrase, so I'm not changing it.

While many space games have exploration and exploitation as their goals, all GSB has are battles.  You don't go out and find resources, spend money on research, build up a fleet, then battle to defend a planet or something.  GSB skips all that.  GSB has three basic stages:

1. Ship design.
2. Deploy and assign orders to ships.
3. Watch ships blow each other up.

Ship design uses a drag and drop interface where you choose the basic hull, then add weapons and shields and engines and other doodads.  There are tons of doodads.  There are beam weapons which look like your basic Star Trek phasers, pulse weapons which look like your basic Star Wars lasers, plasma blasts that look like your basic Star Trek photon torpedo, missiles/torpedoes/rockets that look like something out of Battlestar Galactica (reimagined), and I forget what else.  There are several different types of shields and armor, repair systems, EMP weapons and shields, and carrier bays.  Basically, if you're ever seen it in a science fiction spaceship combat movie, it's in here.

Once your ships are designed, you can deploy them.  Each mission has different limits on the number of pilots available, the number of "points" available to spend on ships, and the equipment available.  If you only have a few pilots, you might want to go with a few large cruisers.  If you only have a few points, you might want to go with a squad of small frigates instead of one cruiser.  If you have lots of pilots, you might want to look into deploying a huge swarm of fighter craft.  And, of course, as soon as you learn to depend on a certain weapon or defense, supply shortages will force you to do without it.
Assigning orders to your ships is important because, once the actual battle starts, it's strictly hands off.  The individual pilots will carry out the battle itself.  The best you can do is give them general guidelines before the shooting starts.  You might order a cruiser with long range weapons to blast away at other cruisers from far away.  Order fast cruisers with short range weapons to close quickly before engaging.  Order fighters to concentrate on enemy fighters or ignore them and go for the frigates.  You can also order ships to coordinate fire, concentrate on ships already damaged, retaliate against ships attacking them or their comrades, maintain formation with or escort other ships, or to retreat when damaged.

While the battle plays out, you have complete control of the camera.  You can zoom in on anything interesting.  You can also speed up or slow down the playback.  I think the idea is that you're not watching the actual battle but rather some kind of post-battle analysis.  Regardless, you can't do anything during the actual battle but watch.  That's when you feel like you're watching one of those epic battles from your favorite science fiction series.

After the battle, you might get "honor points" depending on how well you did.  The fewer points you spent winning the battle, the more points you get for winning it.  Points can be used to buy new hulls, unlock other races, or purchase the designs for new ship modules.  Most of the included battles have multiple difficultly settings (though higher difficulty is usually accomplished by simply throwing more/bigger ships into the mix) so there's lots of replay value.  Successfully completing battles will unlock others.

I found myself replaying each battle over and over with fewer ships in my fleet until I determined the very minimum number of points I had to spend for a victory.  This maximized my reward points.  With these points, I could buy new hulls and modules.  I then had to go back to fight those earlier battles again with the new ships and weapons I'd just designed.  I have just started trying to win those same battles again with other races.  The different races supposedly have different strengths and weaknesses, not to mention unique weapons.

When you get tired of the dozen or so included battles, you can go online and play challenges posted by other players.  There are also a couple of "infinite" battles where you face wave after wave of attackers.  You can't possibly win those, but you get points based on how much damage you do to your enemies before your inevitable demise.

The battles are depicted in a pseudo-2D overhead view.  Ships can pass over and under each other, but the battle is mostly played out in a single plane.  While that seems primitive in today's 3D gaming world, this allows the game to produce very good graphics on any relatively recent computer.  To top that off, there's literally an entire screen full of options you can enable or disable to give you the best possible gaming experience.  Don't like to be distracted by blasted hulks floating through the battlefield?  Turn them off.  Don't like seeing those escape pods fleeing the battle?  Turn them off.  Trying to play the game on your ancient notebook computer?  Turn them all off.

While the game is 2D, it's beautiful 2D.  The ship models may be pre-rendered sprites with animated sprites overlaid (or however the actual graphics are produced) but the results are very pleasant to look at.  I am not exaggerating when I say that I have paid money to watch movies with space battles that didn't look this good.
While I think GSB is a great game, I do have a few minor quibbles.

First of all, the various hulls and modules and races seem a bit generic.  Intellectually, I know that this hull has a speed bonus or this race has a shield bonus or this weapon hits with 20% more force for just 10% more in price, but I just don't feel it.  Even the first expansion pack, which adds two new missions and a whole new race with some unique hulls and modules, just feels like more of the same.  That didn't keep me from buying it, mind you.

Secondly, the pilot AI can use some work.  Sure, I'm the admiral and I can't micromanage my fleet.  I understand that.  But if I order my big, slow, ponderous cruiser loaded with shield breaking, armor cracking, massive weapons to concentrate on enemy cruisers over fighters, I expect it to concentrate on enemy cruisers over fighters.  Instead, I can set priorities something like 1% fighter and 99% cruiser, but still for some reason I might find my cruiser stuck in some far corner chasing fighters, firing ineffectual laser beam after ineffectual laser beam at things it has a 0.0005% chance of hitting but which are slowly whittling away at its shields while enemy cruisers are carving big chunks out of the rest of my fleet.  The alternative is to remove the order to attack fighters altogether, which means that while my slow cruiser is creeping across the battlefield to get into range of its preferred targets, its weapons are inactive instead of at least trying for the occasional lucky potshot at a fighter.  It also seems that my ships will occasionally fly right by unshielded, damaged enemies while chasing their preferred targets (which are still out of range).  If there's a setting to pursue your favorite target while blasting anything that moves in the mean time, I haven't found it yet.

Thirdly, there's a bit of rock-paper-laser going on.  Some weapons are better against some defenses.  There are various weapons.  There are various defenses.  Some weapons are more effective against some defenses than others.  You either have to guess correctly or field a mix.  Fighters can get under shields, so you need lots of armor.  But the only defense against plasma launchers is speed, which is hard to come by when you're packing armor.  It sometimes comes down to fine tuning your fleet to defeat your enemy, then having to come up with a completely new fleet to defeat the next enemy.  This is kind of the point, and I won't deny that it increases replay value immensely, but it is just a bit frustrating to come up with the perfectly balanced cruiser and then have to scrap it.

To counter all that, the game is mod friendly.  Most of the configuration is in plain text files.  While the graphics are a little more complicated, there have already been new ships added to the game.  I really like playing with Stargate SG-1 ships.  A friend of mine is really looking forward to a naval warfare mod.  I've even tweaked a few modules to make them more balanced.  Well, more balanced in my fractured view.

And for those who aren't convinced to buy it (though some people pre-ordered based solely on the name), there is a gratuitous demo version available.

So, give Gratuitous Space Battles a try.  Your inner sci-fi geek will thank you for it.  Your eyeballs are another matter entirely.
Update:  While I was writing this, Cliff came up with some neat banners and asked that we spread them around.  Please do so.  And before you ask, I'm not getting paid for this.

...which is a technological malady and not the latest dance craze...

Every so often, I find myself the victim of what I like to call the Upgrade Cascade.  This is when you buy a new product but discover that to get the best use out of it, you must update or outright replace another product.  This brings to light some other deficiency, which brings about another purchase.  Before you know it, you have all new equipment and a distinct feeling of being out of control.

I understand that women suffer this quite often.  At least, my girlfriends tend to do so.  A simple purchase of a pair of shoes on sale leads her to discover that the purse she intended to carry when wearing those shoes is "the wrong shade of white."  The new purse doesn't match any of her dresses.  The new dress doesn't go with any of her necklaces.  The new necklace only really works with one style of earrings, of which she has none.  The new earrings make her makeup look washed out, so she needs to go back to the store again.  She's allergic to the new blush, so she needs an appointment with her dermatologist and a new prescription.

This is all because she found a nice pair of shoes on sale.

Since I'm a man and pay no attention to what I wear (black and white go together and with anything else), my problems tend towards the technological.  Recently, my youngest brother, T3 (our sainted mother gave us all names starting with "T" so we'd be easier to remember or something like that) bought a notebook computer with Windows Vista Home Premium Bacon Ranch Edition installed.  The rest of the family liked the way that Vista worked (my fault for keeping them on Windows 2000 for all these years) and wanted it on the family computer.  Since Windows 7 had just came out, Vista was a little cheaper than it had been.  Also, Vista had matured (been patched and updated and generally "fixed") so I figured I couldn't go wrong

The Family PC had an old single-core 1.7GHz processor (CPU), 1GB of memory (RAM), about a 10GB IDE hard disk drive (HDD), and a 32MB video card (WTF) .  All I was really concerned about was the processor, as I'd heard that Vista really prefers dual-core.  However, I couldn't find a drop-in replacement for the CPU that would work with the existing motherboard.  The new motherboard came with a new CPU, new RAM, and onboard video.  I found a 40GB drive laying around, so at least I didn't have to buy a new one of those.

At least, I didn't think I needed to buy a new one of those.  After installing Vista and trying to use it, I realized that Vista does a lot more to the drive than 2000 did.  The old 40GB drive was rather slow and, more importantly, rather loud.  While I can overlook a certain amount of noise in the name of performance, this was louder than I liked and suffered somewhat in the performance category.  Another trip to the store had a new SATA II drive which buzzes along quite nicely.

Since I didn't want to take apart the existing Family PC before the new one was operational, I ended up using a different case.  This case was donated by one of my spare PCs.  The down side is that while checking this spare PC, I found that it was still fully functional and could be usable with 2000 or XP if only I bought it a new case and power supply.

Once the Family PC was replaced, my other brother, T2, mentioned that he was looking for a new PC...

In the end, I couldn't even remember what I'd spent on those Vista licenses.  Whatever amount that I'd spent on that was completely and utterly overwhelmed by the cost of the new hardware I'd bought to run them on.

If the story ended there, it might be considered funny.  Unfortunately for me, it continued on into "pitiful" territory.  You see, my favorite computer system, Uncle Troy's Computer, the main Cheek PC and DVR and media server and firewall and whatnot, was still running XP.  Everything else in the house was running Vista by then.  While it is true that I'd sworn off of "keeping up with the Joneses" years ago, I found it more difficult to resist the temptation to keep up with the rest of the Cheeks, especially since I was the one who had shoved them ahead of me.

Besides, I'd just experienced a network connectivity issue between XP and Vista.  Sure, it was solved by a simple reboot, but my XP installation was a bit long in the tooth by then (nearly two years old) and if I was going to reinstall the OS anyway, why not use this other Vista license I had just laying around?

My boot drive was an old IDE, so I bought a new SATA one.  However, the motherboard only had two SATA ports, both of which I was already using with a pair of 500 GB drives.  These constituted by DVR storage.  I'd always mean to RAID them or something, but I was kind of glad I hadn't.  Them being just a plain old pair of disks meant that I could buy a SATA card to fit into an unused PCI Express slot.  This card had four (4) SATA ports and supported all kinds of RAID options.  I hooked the DVR drives to the card and hooked the new boot drive to the motherboard.

The card didn't work.  Well, it worked in that once the system finished booting, Windows saw both the drives and I was able to read and write files on them.  It worked perfectly well in that respect.  It didn't work before Windows loaded.  Due to some incompatibility with my motherboard or something, it just couldn't see the drives plugged into it before Windows loaded.  Since the way the RAID on the card worked was to set up the RAID prior to Windows loading so that Windows saw the RAID as just one disk instead of its components, this meant I coulnd't RAID the drives.  Not that I really wanted to, mind you, until I realized that I couldn't.

Also, there was the minor problem that the SATA card would halt the boot process for one minute (and by that I mean exactly 60 seconds) looking for drives which it would ultimately not find.  At that point, I was rebooting a lot as I was installing other software and device drivers and Windows updates and whatnot.  In the end, I replaced the two 500GB drives with a single newer, faster, 1TB drive.  The 1TB drive initially did not work, but I fixed it by replacing a slightly defective SATA cable.  After I copied everything over, I removed the SATA card and the old drives.

Sometime during this process was when I noticed that Vista seemed to be eating up an awful lot of memory.  I bought some more.  That's when I discovered an unpleasant truth about 32 bit operating systems:

• 1GB of physical RAM = a little less than 1GB of Windows RAM
• 2GB of physical RAM = a little less than 2GB of Windows RAM
• 3GB of physical RAM = a little less than 3GB of Windows RAM
• 4GB of physical RAM = a little less than 3GB of Windows RAM

I had installed 4GB and had use of 3GB.  Actually, once I removed the SATA card, I was up to about 3.25GB of RAM, which I understand is about the best I can hope for without switching to a 64 bit operating system.  I've held off on doing that because I understand that one of my TV tuner cards doesn't work with 64 bit Windows and 4GB of RAM.  If I have to replace that, I'm afraid it will set off yet another cascade.

Oh, at the same time I was ordering the 1TB SATA drive, I discovered that my existing motherboard, with a minor BIOS update, could support a quad core CPU instead of the dual core it was currently running.  Not the fastest, latest, greatest Phenom II X4, mind you, but the 2^nd fastest, slightly older, much cheaper original Phenom X4.  I ordered one of those.  It even came with a free heat pipe heat sink cooler thing which looks hella cool.  Technically, this is not part of the cascade, but I'm blaming the purchase on the cascade so as to avoid responsibility for it.

The BIOS update sucked because after I downloaded the latest version of the BIOS, I couldn't find any way to flash it.  The included utility was a 16 bit application that just refused to run under Windows Vista 32, causing a crash in whatever little automatic translator program which was supposed to allow Vista to run 16 bit applications.  (This is another reason why I'm in no hurry to switch to 64 bit.)  I had to find a native 32 bit BIOS flash application.  Once I did this, it was the work of a few minutes to swap the dual core CPU for the quad core CPU.  The only problem was the heart attack I suffered when the old heat sink didn't just pop off of the old CPU like every other one I'd ever removed.  Instead, with just the slightest bit of effort, pulling the heat sink off brought the CPU with it.  Apparently, the CPU had welded itself to the heat sink or something.  I haven't gotten up the nerve to try to pry it off just yet.

Curiously enough, having ripped the CPU from the socket without lifting the little lever first doesn't seem to have damaged the socket in the least.  The new CPU fit in just fine and seemed quite snug once I put the lever back down.  The cooler went on without a hitch.  Aside from another minor heart attack when the computer froze during the first boot, the new quad core CPU has been running without a hitch.  Windows is noticeably snappier and video conversions are noticeably faster (and utilizing all four cores).

To top it all off, my two sticks of 2GB RAM are now running in unganged mode thanks to the new CPU.  I have no idea what unganged mode means, but apparently it's better than the regular old ganged mode.

I hearby declare this upgrade cascade to be completed.  Which is great, because I've got this problem at work.  It seems that the word processor software there saves files which aren't quite compatible with the software on my home computer...

Every PC in the house is upgraded to Vista now.  Actually, most of them came with Vista pre-installed, but I've bought upgrade disks for the rest so we all match.  This happened just in time for Microsoft to finally release Windows 7 aka the Vista Killer.  This is normal for me.  I think I've always waited until the next operating system was out or at least until a service pack or two has been released for a particular operating system before I would try it.

I actually started Vista pretty early.  I bought a notebook computer a while back with Vista installed back when Vista was still the latest, greatest thing ever.  It was, however, Vista Home Basic, which I'm told is the redheaded stepchild of the Vista family.  I used it mostly to watch DVD movies and check my favorite websites when away from home.  I didn't really get too deep into the guts of Vista.  It didn't seem that different from XP to me at the time.

One thing I did find different, and one thing that I disabled as soon as I figured out how, was User Account Control or UAC.  Or, as I like to call it, Unnecessary Annoying Crap.

UAC is supposed to be for my protection.  If a virus or trojan or other malware program tries to install itself or change settings or erase my hard disk, UAC is supposed to stop it or, at the very least, ask me if I wanted the action to continue.  That's what it's supposed to do.  What it actually does is try to stop me from doing what I just told the computer that I want to do.

I mean, seriously, I can click through half a dozen screens and pages and dialog boxes looking for the setting I want to change, starting with "Click here to learn how to change these settings" and ending with "Apply these changes" only to have UAC pop up and say "Are you sure you want to change these settings?"  Why, no.  I didn't want to change those settings.  I guess I looked up the topic in the Help files, clicked to that particular control panel, set all those options, and told Windows to apply the changes all by accident.  Thank you, User Account Control!  Without you, I might have actually changed my desktop wallpaper to something that doesn't make my eyes bleed.  Thank you!

And, of course, just because I changed that particular setting three times in the last five minutes couldn't possibly mean that I really wanted to change it yet again.

I had forgotten all of this because, shortly after getting that first Vista notebook, I turned off UAC.  I told myself at the time it was just temporary.  Once I got all the applications that I used regularly installed, I'd turn it back on.  I'd even create a regular user account and not use that Administrator account for daily activities.  Those were the plans.

Plans like that never work.  It seems that there's always some new program or update that you have to be Administrator to install.  There's even the occasional application that needs Administrator access just to run properly.  UAC stayed off.  Eventually, UAC was forgotten.

Then my youngest brother, T3 (my mother gave us all names starting with the letter T so we'd be easier to remember), bought a new Vista notebook with a better version of Vista installed.  Vista Home Premium probably has a zillion very important advantages over Home Basic, but the one that caught everyone's attention was that Aero thing.  That's how I came to buy a couple of upgrades and install Premium on the family PC.

As I was the one that the family came to when it came time to change settings or to install a new application, I was the only one who dealt with User Account Control on a regular basis.  In fact, I trained the family to come find me any time UAC popped up.  This actually worked pretty well, as UAC was flagging the exact sort of changes that the family really should have been leaving to me.  I should be the one installing new software, deciding which updates to install, installing drivers for new hardware, etc.

Flush with my own success in customizing T3's notebook and installing Vista on the family PC, I decided it was time to take the Vista plunge myself.  I installed Vista Ultimate on my main PC.  I won't bore you with the story of the 12 hour ordeal of swapping hard drives, hacking BIOS settings, and tracking down custom hardware drivers only to realize that Vista had already found and installed drivers itself.  As to that last one, in the end, only my ancient Belkin UPS (when did Belkin stop making UPS products?) needed a driver and its own software.  I installed manufacturer drivers for my video card and tv capture card anyway, just because they were newer.  My old HP printer didn't even have Vista drivers, so I had to use Vista's generic drivers anyway.  I soon had a Device Manager without any little yellow warning signs, which I'm told is the goal of any new Windows installation.

Now that hardware was taken care of, it was time to mess with the software.  This was when the UAC problem reared its ugly little head.  Since I wasn't sure what software worked with Vista, I ended up installing and removing quite a few programs.  I ended up moving quite a few files around.  I ended up using System Restore a few times.  I can't remember ever using System Restore before in my life.  The main thing is that I saw the UAC prompt so many times that I could move the mouse to "Continue" and click on it without even looking at the screen anymore.

Still, out of redneck stubbornness or geek pride or just the fact that I'd paid an unreasonably large sum of money for this operating system and was dead set on using every single solitary feature it provided so I could somehow get my money's worth of satisfaction out of it, I kept User Account Control turned on.  I was going to stick this out and get used to it.

Right about then was when I noticed that I'd just started a particular application for the tenth time and had to type in my name and 16 digit registration code for the tenth time.  It seemed to be forgetting me every time I exited the program.  In fact, it was going back to the factory default settings every time.  This concerned me because this was one of those applications that I use every day.  If I couldn't get this to work with Vista, I was going to have to dust off that old XP disk.

I went to the company website and actually found an article entitled something like "Where does this application store its settings files?"  It seems that in Windows 95, 98, Me, 2000, and XP it stores its settings in the same directory where the application resides.  In Vista, however, it stores them in another place entirely because User Account Control won't let it change files in the application directory.  Actually, it tries to store them there, but Vista shifts the files to another place call the Virtual Store.  This is great, except that for some reason Vista wasn't shifting future reading of the settings files to the Virtual Store, so every time the application started again, it was reading the factory default settings from the original installation.

I turned off UAC about that time.  I don't forsee turning it back on anytime soon.

A while back, my nephews received an old computer from some kindhearted souls they knew from church.  These kindhearted souls had heard my nephews' laments that they didn't have a computer with which to do their school assignments.  They were completely and utterly computer-less in an age when computers were a necessity for their education, perhaps even for life in general.  These kindhearted souls dug into their closet, dusted off an old computer, and generously donated it to my nephews.

What my nephews had left out of their tale of woe was that Uncle Troy had a perfectly good computer located just down the hall which they could use at any time for any legitimate purpose.

Upon receiving said old computer, naturally the nephews brought it straight to Uncle Troy to get it working again.  After blowing some dust bunnies out of odd places, moving some wires around, and tweaking some settings, I got it running.  They could now play Big Buck Hunter 3 or whatever it was and look up stuff with the interactive CD-based encyclopedia.  While the computer worked, it was old and slow, and as Uncle Troy just happened to have some less-old and less-slow hardware left over from some of his own experiments, it was only natural that the nephews' computer began a long and painful transformation.  Like the faithful old ax which had been in the family for generations ("We replaced the head three times and the handle five.") eventually the only thing remaining of the original was the idea.  I impressed upon the nephews the importance of glossing over these details when discussing the computer with the kindhearted souls who had donated it.  They were instructed to say "Oh, yeah.  It works great.  We use it every day.  Uncle Troy has souped it up a little, that's all."

In the process, I had replaced the Windows 3.11 which had come with the computer with an old Windows 98 I wasn't using anymore and later with an old Windows 2000 I wasn't using anymore.  What would generally happen was that I would buy myself some new hardware or even an entire new system, pick up or have included the whatever OS was popular at the time, and install my old OS on the old hardware that I put in the nephew's computer.

Somewhere along the line, the nephew's computer became the Family Computer.  As in, everybody in the family used the computer, except for Uncle Troy who had his own downstairs which no one else was allowed to touch.  The parents and the cousins and anyone else living in or visiting the household used the Family Computer.  Uncle Troy did tech support.

Uncle Troy hates doing tech support, by the way.

The entire family was quite happy with the Family Computer until my youngest brother got his new notebook computer.  I shall refer to him here as T3.  Our mother gave us all names starting with "T" under the assumption that this would make use easier to remember or something.  What actually happened was that we were always getting called by other brothers' names and eventually started using numbers.

Anyway, while the Family Computer was working quite well with Windows 2000 and Troy's computer was cruising along with Windows XP, T3's new notebook came with Windows Vista.  T3 spent quite a bit of time bragging about this and showing off to the rest of the family.  Troy had bought a notebook with Vista a year or two earlier but had somehow never gotten around to showing it off to the family for some reason.  T3's notebook showed everyone what Vista could do, which was mostly what the Family Computer could already do but with fancy graphics, a shiny new interface, and most things built in instead of downloaded and set up separately.  The family suddenly started asking why the Family Computer didn't have Vista.

The reasons were simple:

1. I'd never installed Vista from scratch before and didn't even know if I could do it.
2. Vista is a resource hog compared to 2000 or XP, and the Family Computer didn't have enough memory, disk space, or processing power.
3. I'd gotten most OS versions free or greatly discounted while buying my own hardware, but nobody seemed to be selling Vista that way.

This kept me out of hot water for a few months, but then we stumbled upon Vista for a decent price about the same time the local computer store had a nice deal on a motherboard/CPU/memory combo.  Due to some other recent projects, I had more spare parts laying around than usual.  I even found a couple of websites which could walk me through installing Vista on new hardware.

What could possibly go wrong?

Things that went wrong:

1. The combo came with only 1 GB of memory.
2. The hard disk I'd scavenged was a 5400 RPM IDE drive.
3. I somehow missed that I'd need a working DVD drive with which to install Vista.

Last problem first, I didn't want to strip parts from the working Family Computer to build a new one until I knew that the new one also worked.  I did some research and found out it was possible to install Vista from a USB drive.  That kept me from having to pull a DVD drive from a working system.  During installation, I found that one of the front USB ports in the case I was using apparently provided power but no data connection.  I don't know if that was by accident or design.  I've heard of such a thing on notebook computers, that some USB ports are for charging only, but had never seen that on a tower case.  Anyway, I was eventually able to get Vista installed from USB drive onto the IDE drive.

The second problem was that Vista apparently likes to thrash the hard drive quite a bit.  Some of this I could stop by changing settings, but it became obvious that I needed a new, faster hard drive.

The first problem was that with only 1 GB of physical memory, Vista was using 60-70% of available memory just sitting there idling.  While I've read that Vista only caches some data when there is sufficient memory to do so, I was still concerned that once the family started using it, Vista would spend more time swapping out memory to disk than doing real work.

A quick trip back to the local computer store and I had a new SATA hard drive, SATA DVD drive, and an additional 2 GB of memory.  Even after installing all that, I still re-installed Vista from the USB drive just to be a smart guy.  While Vista still thrashed the hard drive, it was now much quieter, much quicker, and didn't seem to lag the system.  Vista's memory consumption changed to 30-40% of available memory when idling.  This is more than the 1 GB I had originally, but it seemed to stabilize there.

After that, it was just a matter on installing the drivers that came with the motherboard, copying over some personal files, and installing Firefox.  Once I had the pictures and music files in place and all the Firefox bookmarks restored, everybody was happy.  Mom could view her digital pictures, the nephews could organize their music collections, and Dad could go from clicking on Firefox to actually viewing a site in half a second.

I was the hero of the family.  Everyone agreed that the new Family Computer with the new Vista operating system was perfect and would meet all our computing needs for years to come.

Two days later, there was a tap on my door.  "Uncle Troy, the new computer can't..."

Well, the state from 1985 to 1993 or so...

Several years ago, I would have told you that I would never own or maintain a website. I was against the entire concept of websites. I would have told you that the World Wide Web was a passing fad that would never catch on. I would have told you that there were more important things to do with the internet.

As my friend Greg likes to point out, I'm old. Greg also likes to point out that I was using the internet before it was even called the internet. Starting in 1985 or 1986, I was dialing in and connecting to the local university's VAX/VMS mainframe using a 300 baud modem. It was also known as a 300 bps (bits per second) modem, because back then modems only encoded one bit per baud. It was slow, but sufficient to display the 40 column, 24 line screens of text information that made up a user interface back then. It was also slow enough that I could read along as it was being displayed. By the time it said "Press ENTER to continue" I'd already pressed ENTER and was reaching for a sandwich.

What did we do back then? Mostly, we'd send and receive email. You'd recognize it even today, though you'd laugh at the lack of extra features. My outgoing email still looks the same as it did back then. I tend to avoid fancy electronic stationery, background images, file attachments, etc. Back then, those weren't even options.

We also sent instant messages, though back then we called them interactive messages. They were sent with the SEND command (naturally) to one or more other users who were logged on at the time. Some genius came up with XYZZY which automated the process somewhat, and some other genius created central hubs where people could register, meet, divide off into rooms, etc.

You could send and receive files. You could encode them into email, though that was frowned upon. There was a variation of the SEND command that took care of files. If you wanted a file, you'd send an email to somebody asking for it, and they'd SEND it to you.

This process was also automated to a degree. You could send email to robots which automatically processed it, found the commands inside, and would SEND you the files you wanted. More often, it would send you a list of valid commands, and you had to figure out where you went wrong.

If you had enough people of similar interests, you could create an email discussion list. People joined by sending an email with the proper commands inside. Emails sent to the discussion list would be sent back out to everyone on that list.

The internet wasn't called the internet back then. Instead of the internet, we had a collection of independent nets that didn't share data easily. What we today call the internet is actually a collection of independent nets that do share data easily, but that's a topic for a future article. I was connected to a thing called BITnet.

BITnet short was Binary Information Transfer network or Because It's Time network or something like that. None of the people in my circle knew exactly what it meant and none of us knew who to ask. It connected mostly colleges and universities and research centers, officially for the sole purpose of furthering academic advancement.

I used it mostly to talk about Star Trek and arrange meetings with young women who were attracted to men who knew a lot about Star Trek. Those were the days.

BITnet was supposed to be used for academic purposes, but I never met anyone who actually used it for such. Some colleges gave all their students access as a matter of course. At my college, you had to take a class which used computers and then claim that you had no home computer to use. After they set you up with an account on the mainframe, you'd just dial in with that home computer you didn't have and check your email, send files, etc.

Oh, and occasionally you'd do those assignments that required a computer.

I also got hooked on a game called MORIA back then. One of the other students compiled the program and uploaded it to his filespace, then twiddled the permission bits so that other students could run it. Run it on that mainframe, but send the display over to my home computer. The Mines of Moria was a D&D-style game based loosely on Tolkien's Middle Earth books, with heavy emphasis on said Mines. The goal of the game was to fight your way down 50 or 100 levels of the mine and eventually kill the Balrog.

I couldn't play at first. It used an 80-column display, and I only had a 40-column display on my Atari 130XE. I was able to find a terminal program which faked 80 columns using a special font. It was just a tad hard to read. How hard? Well, for the first few months, I was wandering around the Mines of Moria collecting "magic hands." It was sometime later when I realized that they were actually "wands."

I eventually got an Atari 1040ST which had a true 80 column display, and enough housepower to handle my new 1200 bps modem. I could read easier, and also found that I could read faster than 1200 bps, too. It would not be until I picked up that 2400 bps (600 baud at 4 bps per baud) modem that I'd start falling behind.

I'd play Mines of Moria, I'd exchange files with my friends, I'd write articles on Star Trek and Atari computers, I'd even write some original fiction. All thanks to BITnet, now part of the internet.

Life was good, but then of course college ended and I had to get out into the real world. Back then, you couldn't just dial into the internet for $14.95 a month, especially if you didn't live in a major metropolitan area, which I most certainly didn't. Instead, it was closer to $50 a month and a long distance call to use Compuserve or Delphi or one or two competing services.

I tried signing up for one, I forget which. I quickly discovered that, in spite of what the salesperson told me, the local access number was not a local call. I also discovered that my local bank will honor requests for electronic fund transfers without my having authorized them to do so. They also don't let little things like my not having enough money in my account to cover the transaction stop them from putting it through.

Once that was cleared up, I honestly tried to make the best of the situation, writing an automated script which could log on, download my email, upload my replies, then log off. This cut down on my long distance charges, but no more instant messaging, and no more playing games online. I eventually gave up. I sent in an email to customer service requesting that my account be discontinued. I sent several, and then finally broke down and called by phone. Turns out that they don't accept requests for changes in service by their own email service because, get this, "email is not a reliable means for doing business, sir."

I ducked out of the internet scene.

During all this time, I'd been using a network called Fidonet. It got its start, and its name, from automated scripts that just went out to get the mail. Unlike BITnet or Compuserve, Fidonet was a collection of amatuer computer enthusiasts who provided mostly free access. It had email, files, and discussion groups. Plenty of local access, though some functions did require long distance calls, but rarely. I had connectivity with people, so I didn't feel too badly. I had also skipped the 9600 bps modems and gone straight to a 14.4 kbps modem, or 14400 bps. Life was good.

But by then the internet was being called the internet, and the World Wide Web had made its debut. Eventually, I'd have to get back into the game.

But that's a story for another day.

I think that I shall never see a Search Engine as lovely as a tree...

The phone rang, so of course I answered. "Hello."

"Troy, I'm planning to download the Internet tonight. I need you to protect my children," the voice said.

"Okay, I'll bring my shotgun," I responded, quite cleverly, I thought.

"Not that kind of protection," the voice rasped in a tone that indicated my response was not found to be clever.  I get that a lot.

I recognized the rasp as belonging to an old friend of mine, half of my favorite married couple, Bob and Barb. "Bob, perhaps you'd best start over from the beginning."

Bob took a deep breath. "Barb finally talked me into getting the Internet. We signed up and I was going to install the software tonight. But then Barb saw a special on Internet pornography on the evening news and we're both scared to let that kind of thing into our house. We have kids, you know."

Being a godparent to one of them, I did kind of have that impression.

"Bob, calm down. It's not that bad. There are a lot of bad things you don't want your children to see on the Internet, but there are also lots of bad things you don't want your children to see in the real world. You just have to work to keep your kids away from those places and teach them right so that if they do stumble across one, they'll know that it's not a place for them. Besides, you're right there with them when they use the computer anyway, aren't you?"

"But but but," Bob replied. "Won't the Internet just kind of shove the bad stuff into my computer all by itself?"

"Bob, it doesn't quite work that way. The local news team tried to condense 6 hours of information into a 30 second sound byte. For the most part, you have to go looking for pornography to find it. Most of what you find for free is comparatively tame, and I don't think your kids have credit cards to pay for access to the really sick stuff. You will get some pornography advertisements via email, but your kids are young enough that they don't need to be sending and receiving emails by themselves, either."

"So I should?" Bob wondered.

"So you should treat the Internet just like you do television. Don't let them surf over to the adult channels. Don't let them view something until you've checked it out yourself. And, most importantly, don't leave them unattended while playing on your computer."

"Pretty much what I did when I got the new DVD player?"

"Exactly!" I was pleased that he'd gotten it. "I'll even come over this weekend and install some software I've been working on. It will keep your kids from viewing any website that you haven't reviewed and approved. I think I can hack up something similar that will let the kids receive email from Granny or whoever while keeping out the sexual enhancement advertisements."

"Thanks, Troy. See you this weekend!"

All that reminded me that I hadn't checked my email that day. While I was online, I thought it might be wise to do a little research. Strictly to help out my friend, mind you. I wanted to make sure the information I had given him was correct. I fired up my favorite search engine and typed in UNDERAGE NUDES. Strictly to help my friend, mind you. In fact, as I'd been hearing a lot about her lately, I added BRITNEY SPEARS.

My research quickly showed that approximately 14% of the Internet was devoted to showing naked pictures of a young Britney Spears.

I tried a few sites -- strictly to help my friend, mind you -- but discovered that, like I'd told Bob, they wanted a credit card, either for payment or just to verify that I was old enough to have one. Based on the credit card application one company sent to Hank the wonderdoG, two years is old enough for a credit card.

Though I wanted to help out Bob, I didn't want to give Hank's credit card number out to people who made a living showing naked pictures to people. So I altered my search parameters to look for FREE UNDERAGE BRITNEY SPEARS NUDE.

Only 13% of the Internet was devoted to showing free naked pictures of Britney Spears.

Again, I tried a few sites. They were free, but that didn't mean they were easy. Most were just lists of other sites that hosted free naked pictures of Britney Spears. And when I clicked on over to those sites, I found that they were also lists of other sites. After a few clicks, I'd end up back where I started.

I also found sites that said "In order to keep this site free, please visit our advertisers, after which you will be allowed access to the picture area." I visited advertisers until I was blue in the face. No matter how many I visited, for some reason I still couldn't access the pictures. Also, many of the advertisers were advertising sites which had free underage nude pictures of Britney Spears, which turned out to be just lists of other sites, ad infinitum.

After four hours of looking -- strictly to help my friend, mind you -- I came to the conclusion that nobody in the entire Internet had any such pictures, at least not for free. Shortly after that came a thought: Hey! I could do that!

An hour later, I'd downloaded and slightly altered a dozen or so images of Britney Spears. It's easy to make a perfectly innocent picture look obscene; you just have to mark in black squares over the assumed naughty bits. I had half a dozen interconnected webpages which claimed to have the "uncensored" versions of the pictures of only you were willing to visit advertisers, vote my site "The Best Free Underage Britney Spears Nude site on the Internet," and click just one more link. Now just one more. Now one more. Last one. No, this is the last one. No, this one. Okay, you made it! Now just one more...

After much soul searching, I declined to ask for credit card numbers. I was too afraid that people would actually send them.

If you were very persistent and clicked all the links like you were supposed to, you'd eventually gain access to the forbidden file area, which was actually just another page on the site that explained that it was all a joke. If you found this joke funny, please pass the link along to your friends. Comments and questions to the following email address. Yada yada yada.

I added a few "advertisements" around my site pointing to the entrance to the joke maze, had a few friends do the same, and submitted it to a couple of search engines. The response was immediate. About half the people writing in were deeply offended that I was offering such pictures and told me I should be ashamed of myself. The other half were offended that they'd done all that clicking and still hadn't seen the pictures; could I please email them to the following address? Maybe one in a hundred thought it was a funny joke and couldn't wait to spring it on his friends.

Responses petered out, and I pretty much forgot about the joke. Until the company that hosted my website contacted me and informed me that they were canceling my account.

"Why?" I asked.

"Hosting pornography," was the answer.

"I don't have any pornography on my website."

"Yes you do. There are adverts for it all over. We got a complaint. Um. I mean, we got lots of complaints. Yeah, that's the ticket!"

"And you investigated these complaints."

"Um. Yeah, we did! Those pictures are offensive and we won't host them for you!"

I hit 7 on my phone's touchpad. "I am required by state law to tell you that I am now recording this conversation. You're telling me, for the record, that you followed the links on my site and actually found underage nude pictures of Britney Spears. Is that correct?"

"Um. Yeah, it is!" Pause. "You pervert!"

"Okay. Cancel away."

The next webhosting company I did business with, I checked with them before I uploaded the joke pages. They didn't have a problem with it. In fact, the guy I talked to thought the whole idea was hilarious.

But after a while, I kind of got tired of the hate mail and deleted the joke and all reference to it from my site. That was a couple of years ago. But when I pull up the error log for my site today, just to see if I have any dead links that are interfering with my visitors' surfing pleasure, I find that the Top 10 or 12 errors are the missing pages and pictures from that joke.

Why are these people trying to access these nonexistent files? Because search engines never forget. I'm in their systems as having free underage nude pictures of Britney Spears and, apparently, I always will be.

Nice thing to be known for, huh?