Lightly Organized Chaos

I’m a tiny bit of a wristwatch fan, and I have a couple of decent watches. This has made Kim a little unhappy, and not just because it’s one more thing I can collect (though that’s an issue too). It’s that there doesn’t seem to be much selection of “cool” watches for women.

By “cool”, Kim means self-winding watches, and particularly skeleton-ized watches with visible movements. She occasionally hunts for them on Amazon, but doesn’t find watches meeting her aesthetic (and financial) requirements. It took some doing, but I managed to find a (discontinued) watch that fit the bill (pictured above). After a lot of searching on eBay and paying really close to retail price, I snagged one used. Kim’s got her “cool” watch at last. That particular model is from Kenneth Cole, but I suspect it’s a version of a Chinese watch from Seagull.

During the search I came across a terrible site for those (like me) who love to shop for watches. If you have a hankering to kill some time staring at different ways to blow up a bank account, check out Watch Recon.

I’ve been getting some older games working again courtesy of Boxer. Boxer allows modern Macs to run games from the DOS era with a minimum of fuss. I happen to have a few programs left over from that era since some mac games included the DOS versions, and some I just bought for my (infrequent) DOS systems.

Mostly, I’ve moved over some adventure games from Legend Entertainment and Infocom, and the Pro Pinball series from Cunning Development. Timeshock and the Web both worked flawlessly, but Pro Pinball: Big Race USA needed a little tweaking. Specifically, the DOSBOX configuration needed to have the abstract volume name set and the amount of memory had to be raised. Here’s what the DOSBox Preferences.conf file looks like:


[cpu]
core=dynamic

[autoexec]
ABSTRACT Pro_Pinball_3


With all the evictions of the Occupy movement lately, I was thinking about the Riot Act. While I have occasionally been “read the Riot Act”, I had never actually read the Riot Act. To wit:

(Courtesy of Wikipedia)

So I just started up my Xbox 360 for the first time in 6 months to try out the new Metro UI and media features. First stop, the Netflix app. After downloading the app and starting it up, I get told I need an Xbox Live Gold account to use Netflix.

Now I have a free XBL Silver account which is free, but I don’t play enough multi-player games to justify $60/yr. for a Gold account. I do currently spend $8/mo. for Netflix streaming — now Microsoft wants me to pay for Gold access just to get at content I already pay for.

To be clear:
I paid for the Xbox 360.
I pay for Netflix.
I pay for my broadband connectivity.

So all I want is for Microsoft to let me use the app (that’s already on my Xbox) to use the things I’ve already paid for. For this they want $50 each and every year (subject to price increases).

Fail.

For the record you can buy a Roku as little as $50 (one-time purchase) and get more currently available apps.