January 01, 2005
About me: the AWVC whistle-stop tour
Hey there! I’m Oliver, a minor public official with ambitions my life to date has failed to justify. I’m Irish, born in Dublin in 1976, and still living there.
This is my own corner of the web. I’ve a selection of interests so the website is set up accordingly, in case those of you interested in reading the Gadgetry entries have no interest in the Ephemera or Random word collisions sections:
Ephemera
Day-to-day accounts of events of little importance to anyone, really, though I think it’ll be fun to read them back to myself in later years.
Gadgetry
Despite what my girlfriend might tell you, I’m not a massive purchaser of handy little electronic doodads that I foolishly imagine will make my life easier. I’m not!
Er, that said, I do have a small collection I’m quite fond of. Among these are:
- an Apple iPod
- an Apple iBook
- a Sendo X mobile phone, replacing a Nokia 6310i
- a Psion Revo
See? Not that many. The thing is, having more than one gadget means wanting to get all of these gadgets talking to each other. The Apple stuff works together perfectly, (though I used to use XPlay so I could drag stuff from the internet home to my Mac from work). So, any new gadgets have to work with all the old gadgets I have. This network effect is what stopped me using the Revo, though it’s a fantastic piece of hardware, as there’s no chance it and the iBook will ever start talking to each other. Hopefully in the future gadget makers will think about interoperability more. At the moment Palm, Symbian, Mac OS X, and Windows are essentially walled gardens once you want to do more than just synchronise contacts. Bluetooth does help, of course.
Anyway. Entries in this category are reviews of gadgets and tales of my experiences when using them.
GayMing
Man, I didn’t realise it at the time, but my parents buying my family a Commodore 64 when I was twelve years old changed my life. I mean, presumably I would’ve encountered games eventually if I hadn’t at that point. But playing them at such a young age wasn’t all that common for my generation. Some of my friends have never gotten the hang of using a control mechanism to move an on-screen character, as they can’t stop staring at the controller… hmmm. Remind me never to let those people drive me anywhere.
Over the years I or other family members have owned:
- the Commodore 64 (actually, we had three at one time or another, not to mention assorted disk drives, printers, and other doohickeys)
- a SNES
- a Sega Game Gear
- a Pocket Gameboy
- a Playstation
- a Gameboy Color
- a Playstation 2
- a Gameboy Advance
- a Sega Dreamcast
- a Gameboy Advance SP
- a Nintendo GameCube
- a Microsoft XBox
- a Nintendo DS
We had 300 games for the 64 at one stage. I’m fairly sure that’s more than all the games we have for the rest of the systems combined. But then, you could buy games for the Commodore on impulse; the budget games only cost three or four pounds. If you want me to start ranting, ask what I think about budget games costing thirty euro today.
Entries in this section are articles about games, game systems, and my experiences and memories of them.
Homebrew
A catch-all category for creative stuff that doesn’t handily fall into the next two categories.
Random word collisions
I used to be quite an avid writer for college newspapers and literary magazines. If I ever get round to it, I’ll put a selection of these up here. I also have the fond hope of writing something new, at some unspecified point in the future.
Soft software
I’m something of a bedroom coder, and though I’ve never programmed for money, I do have pet fantasies about setting up my own software company, being riotously successful, and winding up so rich enough to never have to be put on hold for anything. Yeah, me and the rest of the internet, I know… I did run my own games company for a year, before having to fire myself.
Various software projects will be discussed here.
Steam valve
Ventings.
And that’s Award-winning virtual classroom, in a large roomy nutshell.
Posted by Oliver at January 1, 2005 12:00 PM
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