Ken Newquist It’s been a tough two weeks, with a lot of long hours at work, which caused me to fall back on my old bad habits … namely skipping lunch (or rather, eating at my desk) and not exercising. The excuses are legion — working too late, exhausted from wrangling the kids into bed, tired from … Read more
Despite the fact that I’ve been buying comics regularly for over a decade, I’ve only rarely reviewed them on Nuketown. That changes starting this week with the debut of my “Top of the Pile” column where I’ll be running down why I’m reading … and in what order. Almost every geek I know shuffles their … Read more
Later this month I’m going to be giving a lunchtime-presentation on Web 2.0, updating everyone on the latest web sites and apps that have been released since my last talk on the topic a year ago. I’m looking for suggestions and recommendations about sites to talk about this year. The audience is college faculty, staff … Read more
Yesterday was too frantic to write a proper Game Day column, but The Order of the Stick Adventure Game was too much fun not to write about. Published by APE Games, The Order of the Stick Adventure Game allows 2-6 players to take on the roles of the heroes (ok, adventurers) from The Order of … Read more
My gaming group is thinking about restarting our long-slumbering Battletech campaign, in which we play a group of mercenaries known as the Hellfire Aces. In the campaign’s earlier iteration, we didn’t go much deeper than that — we were the Aces, we were for hire, and we blew things up. This time around we’re looking … Read more
I had the oddest sensation last week. I felt like myself. Like my old self. Like I was in college. No, I’m not nearly as spry at 35 as I was at 22, but my waistline is now nearly the same, and it’s the strangest sensation to “remember” how it felt to sit in a … Read more
News of the new science fiction webzine SpaceWesterns.com opening for submissions leads off Radio Active #47 as I’m not only a fan of the zine, but one of the volunteers helping to read through its slush pile. The mail bag has responses on my debate over getting a notebook vs. a desktop computer, and as … Read more
Technically, there’s no Game Day for me this week — while the guys are getting together for some Battletech, I’ll be joining some friends from work for a Tivo-fueled Battlestar Galactica marathon. I don’t know if we can get caught up in one night … but we’re going to try. At some point I want … Read more
Despite having written Game Day columns the last two weeks, I haven’t actually played much. Two weeks ago I was sidelined by pink eye, while last week a March snowstorm destroyed our plans to conquer the world with Risk 2210. This week it’s raining, but unless the Delaware and Lehigh Rivers rise up to devour … Read more
JMeter is a cool open source tool for evaluating the load performance of web servers. You can setup scripts that have computer-controlled users login to a web site, do something, and then log out, and log the results while it’s doing it. This allows you to easily simulate a few hundred people hitting a site simultaneously, which is something I need to do at the day job.