During a meeting today, I got to wondering: do today’s kids even know what the commonly-used save icon represents?

Is this confusing to kids? Or do they just learn that this thing, whatever it is, generally represents saving? Surely the percentage of people under the age of fifteen who have ever used a floppy disk must be less than five percent, but I wonder what percentage even knows what one is.

In years past I have mentioned my birthday on this blog, in one way or another.  Since I haven’t posted anything since Halloween, I figured why break the tradition.

Over the weekend Stephanie and Emma headed out of town for my sister-in-law’s final wedding shower, which meant I had the house to myself Friday evening and almost all day Saturday.  So what did I do with the time?  I played BioShock until just after midnight, went to bed, then got up at 8:45.  Now, compare this to the Kip of six years ago, when I would play Smash Bros. until 3am, go to bed, and maybe set an alarm clock if I would need to get up by eleven the next day.  So the following has changed: I go to bed earlier and get up earlier.  The following has remained the same: I love video games.  So I can only conclude that decades from now, when I get some time to myself, I will play video games till seven or maybe even eight, go to bed, wake up at five, have a glass of prune juice, and fire up whatever latest and greatest murder simulator the world has to offer.

On my way into work this morning, I heard a story on the radio about how back-to-school spending is supposed to be down this year.  One statement in particular, I felt, was worthy of blogging about.  This quote comes from one Patricia Edwards, an analyst at Storehouse Partners (whatever that is):

The trends, especially for the teens which is where a lot of the spending happens for back-to-school, they’re the same!  The only thing they’ve really added is plaid.  And, ya know, you go out and buy one or two plaid pieces of clothing, and you’re set.

Allow me to translate that to how it sounded to me:

KIDS THESE DAYS!  What is wrong with this generation?!  They care nothing about fixing the economy.  All they care about is saving their parents’ money.  We are in a financial crisis, people!  This is no time to watch your budget!  And to top it all off, they are too lazy to change their fashion styles all the time.  When I was a kid, if you wore the same outfit to school twice, you would have been ashamed of yourself.  And we made it a point to change what we wore every year, so that we could make fun of the poor kids that couldn’t keep up.  Now, all of a sudden, it’s like everyone thinks it’s cool to be poor, just because their parents all lost their jobs.  Sheesh, I don’t know where this country is heading, but we’ve got a long road to travel if these penny-pinching hooligans don’t go into debt soon.

Protip: don’t forget who your friends on Facebook are.

Let’s say you’re a guy that is going to be laid off from his job in, let’s say, five days.  You probably have a lot of business cards sitting around.  What are you going to do with these after the job is over?  They have your work number on it, which won’t connect to you soon, so it’s not like you can give them to anyone.  Technically they might be considered company property, but it’s not like the company will want them back (what are they going to do, hire another person with the same name and assign him your exact job title, phone number, and e-mail address?).  I suppose the Al-Gore-approved answer would be to recycle them, but that’s not fun enough for me.

The idea that I came up with?  Playing cards!  After a few hours of tedious craft work, I managed to create a complete deck of cards, complete with stick-figure face cards (including the suicidal King of Hearts).  Much to my surprise, they can be shuffled and used pretty well, although they are not water-resistant so they may not be that useful long-term.

Anyway, check out some hot photos of the result:

I recently discovered Pandora.com.  Basically, it’s internet radio.  You put in some bands or songs that you like as seeds to your “stations”, then it plays stuff it thinks you’ll like based on those seeds.  As it plays songs, you can give them a “thumbs up” or “thumbs down” to let it know further what your tastes are.  And it’s all free and legal and the only ads are on-screen ads (i.e. no audio ads that you have to listen to).

I was skeptical at first, but I’ve been using it for a while and I’ve been surprised at the number of times it has presented me with a song from a band I’ve never heard of but which I actually liked.  For someone who hasn’t purchased a CD (or acquired new music in any form, really) in something like three years, this is a pretty great way to find something new to listen to.  And it’s much better than real radio.

(I’m going to start ranting now.)

I really don’t understand why radio stations insist on playing the same twenty or thirty songs over and over again.  With the internet being around, music distribution is so much different than it was even ten years ago.  The industry can support so many more bands, because music can be recorded, produced, and distributed digitally at a fraction of what it used to cost.  It seems like a radio station could easily fill a 5-hour rotation with only music recorded in the last year that is decent that fits the station’s genre, without repeating any songs.  Not that I have anything against music that is more than a year old; I’m just saying there is lots of music being made all the time which is at least decent, so I don’t see why I have to hear crappy Nickelback or Papa Roach songs every time I turn on the radio in my car.

Seriously, who really wants to listen to Chad Kroeger sing about his sex life?

I created a Facebook profile.  I sent friend requests to a few people.  If you’re not one of those people, feel free to send me one.  I’m not promising that I’ll use or update it any more than my MySpace; however, the fact that Facebook doesn’t look like the internet threw up on it makes me more likely to log in some as opposed to none.  Plus I think it’ll repost my blog posts from my feed, so that those of you who use Facebook all the time but don’t want to have to check this website (ahem) should be able to keep up with, let’s say, photos of Emma.

Bill Cosby has shown conclusively that kids say funny things.  But if you’re not convinced, here is further proof...  A few months ago we had some friends over, and they had their kids with them: Julia, going on 3 at the time, and Ethan, about 5 and a half years old.  When the kids got bored (very shortly after they arrived), they began looking for things to do.  Ethan very quickly found our DVD/video game rack.  He started looking through our games, with no regards to alphabetical order.  I suppose the fact that he can barely read at this point makes alphabetizing difficult, and it also makes identifying the game from the binder side nearly impossible.  He was drawn to the robot/cyborg looking character on the cover of the Metroid Prime 2 box, and asked to play that.  I thought the controls for a console first-person-shooter would be a little complicated for a five year old, but we let him try any way (sorry ESRB, I know you rated the game “T for Teen”).  I was surprised when he managed to pull off a screw attack, one of the harder things to do in that game.  He could have just gotten lucky with the timing while mashing the B button repeatedly, but I saw him do it more than once.

He ran around for a while, shooting stuff and turning into the morph ball and back, but he didn’t really know what he was supposed to be doing so he got tired of the game and went back to the rack.  Then I heard him say “Mario Paint Cleaner!”  By which he meant, of course, Super Mario Sunshine, which involves cleaning graffiti off of walls.  This was a game he had played before, but I was nonetheless impressed by this five-year-old’s skillz.  I saw him jump on a tight-rope, then jump off of it and use the hover nozzle in mid-air in order to reach another rope.  Not too shabby for a five-year-old.

Of course, I refuse to play him in Smash Brothers.  I don’t need to risk being humiliated by someone who was still in diapers when I started playing the game.

Dane Cook has a stand-up routine where he addresses the misconception that all men care about is sex.  As counter-example, he points out that every man in the world would like to be a part of a heist, running down main street with a machine gun yelling “Where’s the van??  The van was supposed to be here!!”  Even more than that, he says, every man wants to have a monkey.

This is all good, but there are other things that should be added to the list.  In particular would be to have someone break into your house, and then defend yourself with awesome ninja skillz.  (I heard in a movie once that girls like guys with skillz).  For that reason, I name Damian Fernandez, who waited in his bedroom for an intruder to enter and then stabbed him in the chest with a ninja sword, the coolest fifteen-year-old ever.

Note: you can follow this link to listen to the Dane Cook bit I mentioned.  But that link is not in any way an endorsement of the extremely not-funny-or-interesting Halo machinima.

The top ten best-selling video games of 2006 (as reported by NextGen):

10. Need For Speed Carbon
9. Fight Night Round 3
8. Call Of Duty 3
7. Kingdom Hearts II
6. Gears Of War
5. New Super Mario Bros.
4. NCAA Football 07
3. Lego Star Wars II: The Original Trilogy
2. Cars
1. Madden NFL 07

Cars was the 2nd best selling game in North America of 2006.  Seriously.  I was surprised too.  But Madden is no surprise, selling two-and-a-half times more copies than Cars.  I don’t understand the drive to play the same game over and over again every year.  I know someone who didn’t get a new system last time around until they stopped making Madden on the N64, at which point he bought a GameCube (as it was the cheapest).  He will probably buy his next system when they stop making Madden for the Cube.  That makes no sense to me.  I’m also kind of surprised to see Gears Of War in the top ten, not that I’m implying it is a bad game, I just didn’t realize there were enough 360’s for it to be a top-ten game.  The full article is interesting but kind of long (16 pages long), so if you’re bored you should check it out.

On a side note, why do online news article insist on using “pages” anyway?  Nine out of ten dentists agree that webpages can now scroll vertically without negatively affecting their usability.