Get your motor runnin'

So today Graham tells me that, inspired by Jowen's discovery of Oregon Trail online, he's been playing an old DOS version of Cross Country Canada. The main things I remember about this game are:

• I loved it;
• I never made a successful delivery ever;
• "I don't know how to [blank]"; and
• the food you got at diners was always either greasy meat pie with greasy fries or tourtiére with poutine, probably depending on whether or not you were in Quebec.

Recently I was telling Dave S. about Oregon Trail online, and talk turned to this game I played when I was a kid. It was just a sub-game of one of those educational games, but it was a tonne of funne: the idea was that you are in some little room and you can grab all manner of logic gates (even buffers and flip-flops). On one side of the room there are four outputs that turn on and off in a certain rhythm, and on the other side you need to generate a certain rhythm. It's up to you to combine the gates in some way as to match the rhythm on the other side. In any case, I don't remember the name of this game, but I think that this game is the single most important reason for me eventually going into computer science. (Dave rightly pointed out that this is pretty sad.) Does anyone know what this game was called?

But back to Cross Country Canada. It's funny that Graham should bring this up tonight, because just last night I saw a rather amusing piece (click on the one called "Public Enemy Number One") on The Daily Show about... uh... trucking. Yeah, trucking. Somehow I don't imagine that Cross Country Canada knows how to "drop truckerbomb", but if it did, oh man I would send the programmers money.

As an aside, I'm still looking for a decent colour scheme for the blog. I changed everything to be darker, but it was a little too dark for my tastes and it didn't project the happy, welcoming image I've grown accustomed to. But now with most of the colours changed back, it looks too bright again; back to the drawing board. At least I'm getting better with the GIMP (it's like Photoshop, only it's free and legal) -- before you know it, I'll be cutting pictures of your heads onto pictures of barnyard animals and the pictures will be so realistic none will be the wiser.

I'm also considering, inspired by vintage stevekwan.com, putting a translucent image of myself right over the middle bit where the writing is. Wouldn't that be weird?

But back to driving and urine: Jimothy pointed me to this article on Conan O'Brien. It's really quite long but it's a good read, and on the third page it includes the line "Later, the NBC censors will prevent him from airing Chewbacca Stuck in a Glory Hole, and O’Brien won’t like that one bit."

Current Music: Wolf Parade - Apologies to the Queen Mary

EDIT (1:25AM, September 29, 2005): I've got it looking approximately how I want it to look... in Firefox. Those of you using IE will have issues, but just out of principle I'm not going to fix it for you right now. I hate IE, and not just as a computer guy who has used Netscape/Mozilla forever: I hate IE as someone who has developed a website for money. I'll fix it if I feel like it. (I'll probably feel like it tomorrow.)