Yeah, me to. When Sim City 2000 came out, I stayed up until 3:00AM on a school night making my metropolis. This isn’t it, but you get my drift. It extended into a 3D space something that I had done since I was a kid. I used to draw cities on graph paper, inventing streets, geographies, metropolis’ and more. Then I’d draw the macro view of a country naming geographic features after those that I had studied.
Sim City 2000 was a singular experience in isometric beauty. It showed a commitment to vision by a brilliant designer (Will Wright) and focus as a company (Maxis, at that time independent).
Sim City has stagnated since Sim City 4. At some point before Sim City 3000, screen shots were floating around that had an entirely modeled 3D city scape. None of that came to be. It’s sad that Sim City, something that could benefit entirely from the massive parallel processing today’s computers have, not to mention the video capabilities, is doing nothing of the sort.
I stumbled upon the DVD for Sim City 4. I might just have to install it.
In the continuing journey toward our new house, this week I setup our new phone system for the house. I decided to move away from Vonage and go toward a solution that was more flexible and less nickle/dimey than Vonage has been. Not to say we’re even high users of voice lines (we use cell phones), but I wanted to make sure that the house had a good and extensible voice system.
We chose OnSip, mostly based on Fred’s recommendation and those of others I know. I paired it with a SNOM M3 and a Linsys ATA router, the SPA3102.
Setup of OnSip was very easy. Amy and I have our own extensions and I setup a group for our mobile numbers and our extensions. The main lines are in simultaneous ring and the mobile in “hunt group”, so it’ll try us both. Incoming calls go to the internal group, and then during specific hours route to the mobile group before reverting to voicemail.
I also setup extension aliases, so Amy can just dial my work extension to call my office.
The setup of the SNOM M3′s was painless, while the setup of the Linksys was not, mostly because OnSip doesn’t have documentation for it. However, some of their online documentation (which is excellent) had similar configuration help, and those ended up working.
Our new house has the entire phone system wired into a VOIP box currently, so we’ll use the SPA3102 to make sure the whole houses RJ11′s are on the VOIP network. I plan on getting two more SNOM M3′s for the house and a Polycom desk phone for my office, Amy’s office area and possibly a conference pod for the living room.
Pretty much my opinions regarding cell carriers. It’s just lesser evils, but they all kind of have shoddy service and contempt for the customer. Sadly. It’s easy to demonize the one you have, but the alternative isn’t very good either. Just better.
[From Marco.org - A Verizon reality check ]
How is Apple increasingly closed? I think they’ve been closed all the while.
[From Android Froyo Is a Slap in Apple's Face]
Interesitng, as we took a very similar approach.
[From Drupal Data Mining for HolaMun2.com | Achieve Internet]
As we get set to start the move, I was going crazy trying to itemize what needed to get done in every room. We had taken a ton of photos in the new house, and I had started a list, but visually the list and my photos weren’t matching
Backpack (from 37 Signals) ended up being the perfect solution. I can itemize room by room, with pictures and start listing what needs to get done/purchased/redone.
Here’s a small example from the outside.
