Read books on the Nintendo DS

Nintendo and Harper Collins are working on an e-book reader cartridge for the Nintendo DS. And they're using the free Project Gutenberg books to do it.

There are several things to be excited about here:

- The Nintendo DS is a neat gadget, and every time I look at my son's, I want it to be able to do more than just play games.

- This project involved dropping a simple reader app and 100 free classics onto a cartridge. That's a great idea that gets around the lack of ways to copy info onto the DS.

- It sparks a related idea: there are systems you can buy to write your own DS content. I believe there's a cartridge you can buy that takes a rewritable memory card. It would not be hard to write a reader app for text files; so a homebrew project like this would be doable, and that would make the DS into a pocket reader for any files on a SD-like card. That would be useful.

However, it's probably not enough to get me to shell out money for a system like that. My impression is that I'd be spending about $100 to get going on homebrewing DS stuff. Which my son would love, but I recognize that I'm unlikely to find the time to write much in the way of games. Maybe I should be thinking about this and some other applications for it. I can certainly find the time to adapt someone's text reader, maybe add a few other readers, to make a more general file-viewing application. Heck, I want that on my phone.

150 rides replaced this year

I've been too busy to find time to crow about it, but on Thursday I reached my year's goal of replacing 150 commutes by working at home or riding my bike. 

I usually just say 150 bike rides, but I count days worked at home, because I want to do more of that and don't want to create a disincentive there. But there were less than ten of those. It's mostly bike riding. :) 

You might ask me what I attribute my success to. And I would tell you that's there's one thing, more than any other, that you can do to make it possible to keep after the biking thing, day after day, rain or shine. And that thing is, live 2.4 miles from work.

Yes sir, if you can just manage to live only 2.4 miles from work, then I can tell you from personal experience, that you can stick with a serious biking program. :) 

Frankly, I'm so close, I'm not sure there are any health benefits to speak of to this program. I can get to work in 20 minutes. I have to really hoof it to break a sweat anymore. :) 

Nonetheless, I'm darn happy with this year's biking. That's a big proportion of my workdays. Next year I expect to do even more. I'd kind of like to go down to one car, but it's hard to be able to cope with family situations and not have another car available. It's worth thinking about though. My car is in pretty sad shape. :) 

Fred 1 and Fred 2

More detailed pics of my recent sculpey monsters. Fred 1 is the smaller, lighter-green of the pair.

Sculpey monsters...group shots

I worked up a bunch of monsters in sculpey for a craft show, and here are the group shots of them.

Wargame scenery

Photos of some wargame scenery pieces I made a while back.

Halloween 2008 Photos

It would be nice if I could figure out how to format photos on Blogger, but I'm not spending any time on that today. Here you see the modern family decked out for Halloween. We have, top left and moving clockwise, Dr. Horrible from Dr. Horrible's Sing-along Blog, a Funny Hat, a Viking Pizza Delivery Man, and Cinderella.

I'd like to point out that at least 3 people recognized me as Dr. Horrible, and not just a mad scientist. This is a first among my obscure costumes. However, I enjoyed the fact that even folks who didn't get that I was doing a specific mad scientist could appreciate that I was a mad scientist.

It's all in the retro goggles (cut from an army surplus gas mask that I got in a garage sale). Neither the coat nor the gloves nor the goggles are truly accurate to the Dr. Horrible mold, but the goggles give people the right idea.

My older daughter's Hat costume makes me feel giddy, and I enjoyed how my son put together a mashup costume from stuff he found in our dress-up box. They both seemed to enjoy handling it themselves.

_Ready, Okay!_ by Adam Cadre

Excellent book of odd characters in high school. The book tells you very clearly up front that a big tragedy is going to happen by the end and lots of people will die, then it goes on to make you care tremendously about these characters. The tension is unbelievable. 

After I saw a post on Metafilter about Adam Cadre's writing, I read one of his stories online (see here) and I requested Ready, Okay! from my local library. I finished it today. 

I think I'm going to put this one on my short list of books to get as gifts. It ought to appeal to anyone. I wouldn't have said the high school setting would have caught me, but the characters and the looming doom did.

There are many surprises along the way. Vonnegut said throw suspense out the window and tell your readers everything; this fellow has done something similar, but he does keep some secrets right up to the end. 

A lot of books about youngsters seem to use the idea of a precocious narrator, but I like it here better than most.  The main character develops some great insights along the way; most importantly, he learns that people aren't usually who they seem to be on the surface. 

Highly recommended.

She's a cat with backstory

My youngest daughter, at three years old, has been crawling around pretending to be a cat a lot lately....ever since we added a Siamese to our family. 

Today she crawled into my lap and told me she was a cat with no family. "Bad people killed my family," she said. That's more backstory -- and more morbidness -- than I'm used to hearing from her. 

Might have something to do with our recently losing our outdoor cat to a neighbor's dogs. There's a trauma. I don't think the dogs even quite knew what they were doing. I think the cat usually gets away, but our outdoor mongrel cat was getting on in years and couldn't make the jump to hyperspace in time. 

So proud

My wife was gone for four days, and I didn't resort to eating out once. 

Of course, I also forgot to send the boy to Scouts, and the girl to her Dragon Dance lesson. But still. There were three kids when she left, and three when she got back. Victory!