Ken Newquist 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.
Things take a horror tinged turned in this week’s podcast with reviews of Midnight Syndicate’s retrospective horror music album Out of Darkness and the horror-movie inspired board game Betrayal at House on the Hill by Avalon Hill. Elsewhere in the podcast as for feedback from geek parents about the merits of getting a notebook computer … Read more
My autumn reading jag, which saw me tear through a half-dozen novels, petered out this winter as I ran into the slow, meandering text of The Difference Engine, a book that promised a steampunk revolution but got bogged down in its own minutiae. I haven’t done much better on the audio front, after a preachy … Read more
Game Day may be cancelled due to snow — freaking Pennsylvania spring weather — but that doesn’t mean we can’t still dream of what might have been. Tonight’s game was/is supposed to be Risk 2210 (check it out on Amazon) the science fiction re-imagining of the classic Risk board game of old. The game retains … Read more
I’m going to be upgrading Nuketown to the latest and greatest version of Drupal at some point over the next two days (hopefully tonight, given that I’ve laid in supplies of Mountain Dew and fried chicken, and the family won’t be home until late). I’m testing it on local version hosted by ye ol’PowerMac first, … Read more
Baby NeutronLad learns to crawl and joins me as a guest host of the latest edition of Radio Active. In addition to news about our littlest geek, I’ve got news about a new “Game Day” column that’s running on Nuketown, a review of Gears of War, and audio feedback from Doug of the Geek Acres podcast. In … Read more
We’ll never get to explore along side John Carter on Mars, but it’s always nice to know that worlds as weird as anything Edgar Rice Burroughs might have imagined do exist … minus the warlords and Martian princesses of course. NASA’s Cassini space probe has found good evidence of large seas on Titan, Saturn’s moon … Read more
Hat-tip to Joystiq for this Reuters story which notices that hey, parents like to game … and they’re likely to get their kids to game as well. They dub these strange creatures “Nintendads” since many grew up on Nintendo systems and are now happily doling out $250 to buy Nintendo Wiis for their kids (and … Read more