Back in the day, 300 baud was the bomb. Hmmm, actually, I'm not sure 300 bps was ever the bomb... but 1200 or 2400? Definitely da bomb. I guess there's enough of us 30+ year-olds who remember the old days of the Toys R Us home compuer that had an OS that didn't need upgrading... ever... until the machine was fully obsolete.

Previously: Old Computer Memories, 8/10/01

Buying a new house means we need some new furniture. Not a lot of new furniture, but we have a dying futon (that I never should have tried to move 6 years ago without disassembling it -- duh) and a couch looks so much nicer in a living room to begin with. Running on the assumption that a couch indeed would be good we've looked at the few furniture stores there are here in C-U and seen a few couches we'd like, all while running up against the hard reality that couches are fucking expensive. Sure, I'm a big boy and I knew this somewhere in the back of my head, but now it's in front of my eyes. But on top of that we haven't found any couches we love, just ones that are pretty nice.

At first I chalked this up to the relative dearth of furniture stores here -- new or used -- and so set about looking for couches on-line, to see what I might be able to find in a big ol' metropol like Chicago. No problem finding couches I really like, but they're even more fucking expensive. Hmm, drive 120+ miles, spend $1500+ and have it shipped. Yikes, no. Sure, we might find a nice used one, but that will require scouring the city, which is fun, but also time consuming.

Then, today, the Ikea catalog arrives. Oh, god love the Swedish Industrialists, those masters of mass production. Couches for $300, couches for $500 -- and if you wanna go for it, couches for $1000. We could have a couch and a couple of chairs and crazy lamps for the price of that sleeper we saw at Famous-Barr. And then, look at those footstool/coffetable/chair thingies.

Is it so wrong to get all hot and bothered by the Ikea catalog? Now I understand in a very special way why home buying drives the American economy (not to mention gas consumption).

Now plotting a 136 mile trek to that shopping mecca of Schaumburg, where strip malls, apartment complexes and cul de sacs are king. Just don't try to walk out of the damn Ikea parking lot for chrissakes.

I mentioned that I'm buying a house, right? Well, we had a house inspection last Thursday, lasting about 2 comprehensive hours, which turned up some imperfections, including a lightly leaking roof section. My partner and I decided we'd ask the sellers to either fix a few of the problems or give us some consideration in the price, maybe $1000 or so. Yesterday we spoke to our real estate agent, who is quite the dealer, and she recommended more like $2200, based upon her former-contractor husband's estimates of $1500 to do the necessary work, plus some breathing room. She figured that the sellers would probably come back with a counter-offer somewhere between the two numbers. But, strangely, they accepted the offer off the bat. Which means only one thing... we're actually and truly gonna buy the damned thing.

And I was able to carry off the various communications and negotiations yesterday solely by cell phone and hotel fax machine. Sure, for most cyber-business-wheeler-dealers this is no biggy, but since I'm used to being home or in my office most of the time -- not in some hotel is suburban Dayton -- it's quite a wonder for me. Gawsh, technology is cool.

Last Fall I saw a crazy retro video game console advertised on QVC and somehow got sucked in. I'm not a big video game player -- I'd say my peak gaming years were around 1982 - 89 on my Atari 2600, TI-99 and Commodore 64. After that I dabbled with some DOS PC games on my IBM PS/2-286 and the used Nintendo (first generation) my roommate and I had in college, but it pretty much fell off after 1993. So, suffice it to say that I like simpler 2-D games rather than the massive 3-D mostrosities that rule the roost these days. I want games that you can learn to play in minutes and not have to invest hours in order to enjoy. Thus this console that advertised over 64 retro games like Galaxian immediately appealed to me, as did the $29.95 price. These things were selling like hotcakes on QVC (doesn't everything) and I thought that $30 couldn't be too much of a risk.

My Power Joy, as it's called, arrived several weeks later. It looks like two super cheap-ass plastic game controllers, wired together, with a very cheap plastic game cartridge that looks like an Atari or ColecoVision reject. All the hardware is crammed into the main joystick, which is just a bit bigger than a typical modern game controller, with a cartridge slot on the bottom, a game pad and and a joystick, and a light sensor on the front. Believe it or not, the damn thing runs on batteries.

From the hard-sell on QVC I was expecting the games to be the arcade favorites of the 1980s, and that's partially true. What they actually turned out to be are what look like the Nintendo ports of arcade favorites. That's right, I'm convinced that the Power Joy is actually an 8-bit Nintendo with 64 games crammed into a plastic joystick. What's funniest about these 64 games is that many of them appear to be the same game, just with different names and different looking main characters. For instance, there's 3 or 4 different versions of Dig Dug, but with names like "Kittie." And most of the games have pretty bad Engrish or are just labeled in Chinese... with no directions enclosed. What do you want for 30 bucks?

But what really matters is game play, right? Well, it pretty much delivers there, if you like the game play of an old Nintendo (and I do). The only limiting factor is the fussyness of the cheap-ass plastic joysticks. Too bad you can't connect new ones, since the damn console is actually the controller.

You can order you're own Power Joy from their UK website, but you'll pay $49.95 US, and have to get it shipped. Too much, I'd say. $30 is my limit.

Wait! A quick Google search confirms my suspicions that the Power Joy is actually an NES rip-off. The Famiclone website documents the phenomena of Nintendo Family Computer (Famicon -- as it was known in Japan and Asia) clones, and confirms the Power Joy as one of them.

After starting to write this I realized that some pictures and more game info would be interesting, but I want to hit publish already.

More on mp3 newsgroups... my pal John A asked me where to get to these newsgroups if you're ISP doesn't carry them. The key is to use open news servers. There's better info on the web than I can give you on the subject -- read the FAQ or this nefarious page on
Accessing Banned Newsgroups, Open News Servers & Newsreader Sources. The news reader/binaries downloader that I like is NewsGrabber, though I haven't exactly tried many others.

So, I'm buying a house, along with my partner, Ellen. I can only just barely believe that I'm entering the world of the landed. It's a great brick ranch in central Champaign. I won't publish the address so as to avoid flocks of mediageek-stalkers. Of course, after finally signing off on $90,000 of debt, then I actually have to move, the process of which I'm not looking forward to. But I will be happy to finally stop throwing money down the well known as rent, even though I otherwise love the crazy house I live in on the edge of downtown Urbana. If I'm feeling motivated, maybe I'll entertain y'all with pictures.

The fun part will be arranging and decorating. At the moment we're squeezed into about 800 sq. ft. and two bedrooms, with almost 300 sq. ft. of our apartment in the kitchen, where only about 1/2 is really usable. In the new domicile we'll get to spread out into 1600 sq. ft. and 3 bedrooms, with a living room and office. For the first time in about 9 years I'll feel like I don't have enough furniture for the space -- which is something I can actually live with right now. For some fun and practical DIY ideas on decorating and such I've been enjoying Digs Magazine on the web. I've also read a little of Ready Made magazine, though it can be a tad precious at times. The challenge will be to stay away from Ikea and the furniture section of Target for a few months -- made a little easier by a distinct lack of funds.