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Arrow to the knee? Not today.
Photo Credit: John “Pathfinder” Lester

I just finished the main quest line in Skyrim. I bought the game around Christmas and have been playing it a bit at a time since then. It took almost 157 hours of playtime to finish (including side quests, which I am pretty obsessive about), which works out to about $0.38 per hour of entertainment. Emily played through it too with a similar hour count, which just about halves the cost per hour. Hard to find a better deal than that.

Now, maybe I can find something more productive to do with my time.

… I doubt it.

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I’ve never been a huge Android fan, preferring more “open” or “Capital-F Free” systems like Maemo. However after watching Maemo and its free siblings being consigned to the bit bucket one by one I have to admit that Android is looking more and more attractive.

With that in mind I pre-ordered the Google Nexus 7 on the day it was announced and it finally arrived this afternoon. I’ve had a chance to play with it a bit and I must say I’m very impressed.

I have a few thoughts about what I’ve seen so far.

  • I’ve never been a fan of onscreen keyboards and while the Jelly Bean incarnation isn’t bad for quick IMs or status updates, typing something longer (like this post) is still rather painful. I think a setup with a Bluetooth keyboard will be a necessity for any serious creation effort on this device.
  • The fonts on this thing are the most readable by far of any device I’ve seen. I already prefer using the N7 to catch up on Google Reader over my desktop and laptop machines.
  • The N7 is perfect for reading/chatting/looking stuff up from the couch while watching TV, which is a primary use case I was thinking of when I bought the thing.
  • The WordPress app for Android suffers the same annoyance as the Maemo version, which is the combination of a limited keyboard with an editor that doesn’t help you out much. It sucks to have to type a bunch of HTML manually on a phone/on-screen keyboard because they don’t give you shortcut buttons beyond bold/italic/underline. As I said above a real keyboard is going to be a must for writing anything longer than a haiku.
  • The N7 comes with a copy of Transformers: Dark of the Moon but not the accompanying Rifftrax. way to drop the ball, Google.

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One of the problems with having a bit of disposable income is that occasionally you will head to a Gallery Crawl, peruse some of the vendor stalls, and end up coming home with one of these:

Coffee Can Robot
Isn’t he the cutest junk sculpture you’ve ever seen?

This baby was made by Don L. Jones, whose work has been seen quite a bit around Pittsburgh lately. I remember seeing his Recycling Bots at the Three Rivers Arts Festival this year and thinking I wanted to bring one home. This time he had a little stall up at one of the pop-up markets at the Gallery Crawl and I decided to make my dream a reality (after getting clearance from my very understanding wife).

A couple of our friends also came away with a robot that was a bit squatter made from a single tea tin and some similar candlestick parts and we had a grand old time walking to the bar as a big group with two little robots in tow.

The big question now is, what do we name it? We welcome any suggestions.

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Emily is finally back from her trip to China, and she brought me the one thing that she knew I’d be almost as excited to see as her… BEER!

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Last night I had a dream in which I was waiting in line to get into a club when I saw Bill Pullman being attacked by a vampire. I immediately sprang to his rescue, but when I killed the vampire Mr. Pullman became my friend Ted, who was sad that I’d killed a vampire he was rather fond of.

Next thing I knew I was at an open grave where MacGyver’s (not Richard Dean Anderson’s) frozen corpse had been split in half, with the bottom half missing. As the corpse began to thaw his gore spilled out and formed new skeletal legs. Then he got up and started walking toward me and I could tell that the look he was going for was that his whole body apart from his head was a skeleton, but it just looked like a really bad prosthetic (I could see his real arms behind the skeletal ones, etc.)

So my question to you, gentle reader, is what the hell did I eat last night?