Erik Novales

It has taken 17 years for me to think about the game again, but yesterday I finally realized that the “sodoff” (sawed-off shotgun) in Bad Blood is a play on the British piece of slang, “sod off.” Kind of appropriate — I remember the sodoff being a pretty effective weapon in that game.

[Read more →]

There’s a BBC News story up about a contest-fixing scandal at the BBC. One of the contests whose results were changed regarded naming a cat who would be joining the cast of a children’s show. Vox populi demanded Cookie — they got Socks instead. The kids who voted for Cookie got a life lesson in [...]

[Read more →]

The last couple of days have been spent contemplating the ideas of mileage runs. These are plane trips taken explicitly for the purpose of racking up frequent flier miles. Crazy? Perhaps. But when you take into account the perks and bonuses that are accrued by frequent fliers, it starts making a little more sense. Free [...]

[Read more →]

I downloaded the Visual Studio 2008 beta and started messing around with it. I was particularly curious about the .NET Compact Framework, and poking around with writing programs for my fancy new AT&T 8525. First impressions of Visual Studio 2008 are positive. It’s basically a refined version of 2005, with support for newer versions of [...]

[Read more →]

I bought this game awhile ago on the cheap, and promptly forgot that I had actually purchased it. I uncovered it while I was rummaging through my collection of Xbox 360 games, and decided to play it since I have free time now. It’s a nice upgrade from the first Top Spin game, although I [...]

[Read more →]

I saw a link to a website whose purpose is to organize a gathering of players for NBA Live 07. Not to play the game, but rather to hang out in the lobby, in the hopes of getting the “Online with 1000 People” achievement. Their attempt (last Saturday) failed, but what’s astounding to me is [...]

[Read more →]

A little over a year ago, I got an e-mail about a black kitten that a co-worker (Patrick) had found huddled underneath his car as he was leaving for the night. He took the kitten to a local veterinary emergency clinic, and discovered that he had a broken leg, which was then put into a [...]

[Read more →]

Sources: Goodell determines Pats broke rules by taping Jets’ signals This is an interesting story to me, for a couple of different reasons. First of all, the Patriots have been a very successful franchise over the last few years, with three Super Bowl wins in the last six seasons setting themselves up to be enshrined [...]

[Read more →]

A few weeks ago, my cell phone started acting a little flaky. Nothing fatal, but strange things like charging problems, and getting stuck in a strange “not on, but not off” state, which made me think that its time was nigh. I’d had the phone for about three and a half years, so it’s not [...]

[Read more →]

Someone started an aggregated list of music videos seen on 120 Minutes. Pretty cool — I spent a lot of time just wading through and watching some of the ones I’d never seen before. A lot of the styles shown in the videos make me laugh now, but of course, they were cool back then. [...]

[Read more →]