I was recently inspired to give blogging another try. If you've known me long enough, you're probably perfectly aware of my two previous two-year-long attempts that eventually ended up going nowhere for one reason or another. I hope to remedy that this time around. After all, third time's the charm, eh?
I have a few major reasons for taking up blogging again:
- Another one of my online acquaintances recently put up a blog.
- Some real-life friends have been pestering me to get a Facebook. My aversion to social networking in general ultimately told me not to go through with it, though with the growing number of professional-sounding blogs on the rise, I suppose this isn't so bad. In other words, I suppose this is a good way to meet their requests halfway.
- I have opinions, particularly on the state of the Internet as it's being managed by the RIAA and MPAA through resolutions such as the DMCA. What really got the ball rolling on this reason was a proposal in the Italian government to levy a "blog tax". To the greatest extent possible, I support free speech on the Internet. The World, the nation's first public ISP and coincidentally my own first ISP, labeled the Internet a "public information utility", something which I feel is still true of the Internet today.
- There are, quite simply, occasions that I feel like writing things down and sharing. Communicating over the HardwareHacks 2000 front page or the forums is strange, while this is tailor-made to the very thing.
Anyway, to recent news. My Hewlett-Packard nx6325 spontaneously decided to, while I was using it, shut off and not power back on. The unit's only a year and a half old, and a three-year warranty came standard, so I've had to send it back to the repair center a bit prematurely. By comparison, my older Hewlett-Packard Pavilion ze4200 took three and a half years to exhibit the same behavior, though by then the sheer number of other physical problems with that unit prompted me to buy the nx6325. Unfortunately I can't explain what I was thinking when I bought another HP notebook after a ride like that.
If you want to add a fifth reason to the above list: sheer boredom. The soonest the nx6325 will be returning to me is sometime in mid-December, according to the tech center's estimate. Meanwhile I've been running a Pentium 3 tower at home and a 386 for portability (how's that for an oxymoron?), neither of which are well-suited to gaming. Given, I did have Solitaire running under Windows 3.1 (booted off a floppy, no less) on the 386, though despite years of having played the game from time to time I still haven't managed to learn the colors of the cards, and the black-and-white LCD screen doesn't help. Other than that, I've been making a few more passes on various The Legend of Zelda titles on the GameCube and have made heavy use of the PlayStation 2 CD player.
We'll possibly be recording Episode Nine of Nostalgia Gaming Podcast on Wednesday. As I don't have any suitable recording hardware available right now, I'm planning on taking a
ride up to Mark's place to record and edit with his monster of a PC. Until then, I'm not sure how frequently I'll maintain this blog, though I'll definitely make an effort to do so this time around.