Today our family dog, Bailey, turned two years old.  Thanks to the power of the Internet and Facebook we have been able to keep in touch with Bailey’s siblings. Here’s Bailey with my daughter:   and in the snow:   and last summer with her ball:   Bailey’s Brother with his ball:   Bailey’s sister with her toys:   Bailey’s sister with her ball and at Halloween: (Scout) ...

Two takeaways from the PS4: 1. GDDR-5 memory. This means a lot of bandwidth to communicate between assets and the CPU. A pretty big deal as it ensures that their CPU will be more fully utilized. 2. 64-bit. This is huge. Means you’ll be able to support megatextures and have vastly richer worlds to play in. More specifically, it’ll mean that it’ll support types of games that you couldn’t realistically do on a mobile device which keeps the iOS/Android games away. It also means that the g...

So I have a 20KW solar array. Love it.  But it has one big problem for me that is surprisingly hard/expensive to solve: If the grid power goes off, so does the solar array. That’s because the solar array feeds into the grid with me taking what I need first.  But if the grid isn’t up, the solar array has to shut down because it is no longer connected to the “circuit”.  Besides that, you wouldn’t want to run your house where the power could go on and off randomly based on cloud...

My dog Bailey turns 2 years old this week!   Bailey when we brought her home   Bailey recently   Do you have a pet? What do they look like?

I was reading a forum discussion regarding a car shop owner who lost his temper with a customer and berated them (hurled a bunch of profanity at them). The customer filed a suit against them for emotional distress. I couldn’t find a link to verify if this is even a real lawsuit but the discussion itself was illuminating. One of the participants said that they hope that the car shop owner “gets taken to the cleaners”. Really? This is the society these people want to see? Someone being ...

I sometimes wonder how many misunderstandings occur online due to people who don’t speak English as their native language interpreting dry humor as literal statements.  I recently saw on a forum a discussion that quoted banter back and forth between myself and our PR rep. It goes something like this: PR Rep: Got a 4.5 out of 5 on Game X! Me: Oh no! That’ll wreck the Metacritic score – we want it to end up at 79. High enough for sales but low enough so we don’t have to ...

This morning I brought my dog Bailey to work.  As I was talking on the phone while she scampered around, she went out on the “frozen” pond. Moments later, I heard a crash and looked up and saw that she had fallen in.  For a moment, she struggled to get out of the water back onto the ice but then slipped and fell further and got stuck under the ice. Without thinking (and now I understand better how people end up getting themselves killed when this happens on lakes), I jump...

GameSpy’s Katie Williams has a terrific blog on the real misogyny that exists in the game industry. You can read it here: http://alivetinyworld.com/2012/11/27/too-many-reasons-why/ In the article she writes: I’ve been watching the #1reasonwhy hashtag on Twitter with an anxious kind of understanding. Like, part of me wants to jump right in and post a dozen of my own experiences, but I’ve also learned what happens if you say that shit publicly: you’re berated,...

As a side-hobby, I run the Facebook Entlebucher page . Entlebuchers are an amazing breed of dog.  They’re closely related to the Bernese Mountain Dog and the Swiss Mountain dog.  What sets them apart is size, life span, and hair length.  Entlebuchers are about 50 pounds, they have short hair and live around 14 years.  Personality wise, Entlebuchers (pronounced Ent-Lee-Booker or Ent-Lees) are velcro dogs. That is, they want to always be with you.  There is a s...

Stupid Thanksgiving sale.  It’s too late for me.  Save yourselves!

We’re babysitting Paul (Mormegil) and Kristin’s (Kristin was my partner on PowerUser.TV ) dog. She seems to be surviving:

My wife is addicted to Christmas.  And so this year we decided to line the trees up the drive way with Christmas lights.

I’ve been watching the fall-out from the destruction of Hostess. I’m not going to get into the “blame” game other than to say it’s kind of dumb for people who go on strike to be shocked that they lose their jobs. What I will get into is the never-ending stupidity of complaining about CEO pay.  Americans have no problem with paying athletes and entertainers tens of millions of dollars annually. But they rage about people getting paid a couple million for running a multi-billion dol...

The Genius at Oatmeal does it again. Here is a tiny snippet: http://theoatmeal.com/comics/making_things Read the whole thing. And now a message to the hateful, degenerate scum of the Internet:   Dear soul sucking trolls, If you’ve publicly posted that you won’t buy stuff from my company because you don’t like me then I say to you: Thank you. The last thing I want are horrible stupid people benefiting from my work.  I realize that things I p...

You can see the full results here: http://www.cnn.com/election/2012/results/race/president#exit-polls Here is what I found interesting: Obama won the youth vote 60% to 37%. Romney won the retired vote 56% to 44%.   Obama won the high school graduates (and dominates those who didn’t finish high school) and also won decisively amongst those who pursued postgraduate degrees. Romney won the college graduate vote.   H...