One of my recent eBay purchases has been an old Microsoft game called ‘Deadly Tide‘. Granted, it’s not a brilliant game but I have fond memories of playing it at my friend’s house and being blown away by the graphics which were incredibly impressive 10 years ago.

Now contrary to popular belief, I’m not a Microsoft hater. I can respect Bill Gates as a good businessman, whilst at the same time disrespect him for his business style and sheer lack of creativity. I can appreciate some good things about the Windows operating system and heck, I was brought up on DOS and Windows 3.0 before discovering the Apple Macintosh somewhere around the late 80s / early 90s (thanks Matt!).

The reason I’m often negative about Microsoft is because they lack creativity and originality. They come up with good ideas but often don’t know how to implement them, and a lot of features (especially in the upcoming Windows Vista) have already been around for a few years on Mac OS X and Linux to the point that Microsoft don’t really have anything to defend themselves on when attacked besides being known as a good gaming platform – even though that’s mainly down to a gamers ability to choose their hardware configuration.

However, I will admit that I simply hate and detest Steve Ballmer! In my opinion, of what I’ve read of and seen of the guy in interviews and in public appearances, he’s a loud, stupid kid who thinks that he’s the most popular person on the planet and if I had my way, I’d subject him to extreme torture involving giant lizzard-squids who eat toast for breakfast and human livers for dinner. I normally would subject him to the bears outside but they only have an appetite for human brains and eroding the human soul, of which he has neither.

Which reminds me – I was at the theatre the other week working backstage and one of the props we had was a newspaper. I read a shocking headline that has made me realise that things are about to get far far worse for me;

The picture quality from my phone mixed in with little light backstage made the original picture not that great to I’ve tried to enhance it slightly in iPhoto, but I swear, honest-to-God that that picture is real! It’s obviously mating season for the bears outside and so it appears as though I’m going to have a lot more bears after me once the little cubs have grown old enough.

I’m just a little worried as to why that article is on the sports page? I didn’t read it because I didn’t have time and I knew I was going to have enough nightmares about it without wanting to know the details. And in hindsight, now that I know what sex sounds like I’m glad I didn’t!!!

Anyhoo, you’ve probably gotten this far and wondered two things; why I went on so much about Deadly Tide and “who the hell is Lisa?”

Well this should give you a clue;

On Thursday 19th October 2006 at about 4:45pm, I booted Lisa up to find that the display was incredibly wobbly and looked like a mixture of loads of interference of some sort with Lisa’s attempt to display an image on the screen as though it was taking twice as much energy to do so than normal. And then suddenly she was gone.

I smelt the same burning smell from the power supply as I did with Woz many months ago and sure enough, she wouldn’t turn on any more. So I replaced the power supply with a spare I had lying around. She turned on, couldn’t detect her hard drives and then her new power supply blew aswell.

She’d been revived long enough to say goodbye to, but then she was gone forever. And I didn’t even get to say goodbye.

Today I finally got around to performing an autopsy. I would put the picture below but I’m aware of the sensitive nature of some people and I certainly wouldn’t want to put you off your meal by showing you detailed photos of the autopsy. Chris (Dave’s twin brother) certainly couldn’t handle it this afternoon when he saw it, so please view at your own risk…

My suspicions were correct; a couple of the capacitors on her motherboard had blown, which explains the display problems, the hard drive problems and most of all the damage to both power supplies. In which case, she’s well and truly gone – forever.

But what actually caused it? My only thinking is that upon seeing the arrival of Deadly Tide and realising that it was a Microsoft game that I was about to install, she committed suicide. Twice.

I can’t really blame her for that though, I suppose. Although I do admit that 1996 did have a couple of surprisingly good Microsoft games released, such as Monster Truck Madness and Deadly Tide – but she’s never seen those.

However, on Friday after telling this sad story to the people in my local computer store they gave me a fully working windows 95 machine for me to continue playing my old DOS games on. It won’t ever look as good as Lisa, won’t be able to run Windows 98 games, but for free, I’m not complaining.

By won’t look as good, I mean that I won’t be able to skin Windows 95 to look like Mac OS 8 anyway near as good as I can with Windows 98. I still hadn’t finished on Lisa to be honest (still had to add the running program to the menubar for instance) but click below for a screenshot;

Incase you’re wondering, that’s Apple’s webpage as of the late 90s (back when Mac OS 8 was around) thanks to the Internet Archive. That’s also Mozilla Firefox themed as Netscape. Anyone familiar with OS 8 will notice things that need improvements which I was going to work on. One thing I was proud of, but which the screenshots only exist on Lisa’s hard drives (which I’m yet to discover if they’re working or not) are modifications I’d made to Windows such as the copy dialog box to match that of OS 8, etc.

She was a computer that belonged to my Dad (I never would have bought a computer from TIME Computers) but I’ve rebuilt her a couple of times – especially when she gave up on floppy drives and refused to start up with any inside her that I tried.

I’m gonna miss her.

The strange thing about Deadly Tide though is that it being a Windows 95 game, it won’t run on Windows XP. I know because I tried it on Andy, and it didn’t work. I then tried running it on Andy in Windows 95 compatibility mode, and it ran but very poorly.

Thankfully my iBook, Professor Snugglesworth saved the day – for some reason it works exactly as I remember it under VirtualPC emulating Windows XP in Windows 95 compatibility mode… You’ve just gotta love the irony that it took a Mac to get a Microsoft game working.

Anyways, even though I’ve suffered the loss of Lisa {sniff} I’d like to introduce you to the latest member of my iFamily;

Notice the engraving on the back near the top? Yeah….

And yes, I know that the term “iFamily” is lame but I don’t care and I’m going with it. What?!? Fine, sue me! I’ll only sue you back with my insanely great lawyers who incidentally don’t exist and won’t exist until you sue me but once you do sue me I shall make them out of play-doh and they shall plead my case and then together we shall sue you for suing me. And if you want, you can sue me for suing you for suing me, but we all know that that will get ugly and the court will stop proving cheesy snacks and no-one will be happy especially once I’ve sued you and you end up on the streets licking lepers for money in Mexico.

Can’t we all just get along? Good. Now where were we before you rudely interrupted me with all your suing talk? Ahh, yes..

Why “Drifter”? Well, basically not only can I drift from place to place listening to music (granted, I had a crummy Packard-Bell flash player that did that, but the sound quality wasn’t as good, it was big and bulky, the screen was terrible, and it was only 256mb). But the main reason is because that was the codename for the original iPod Nano and no-one’s as of yet given me a better so alternative, so ner.

It’s a 4GB 2nd generation aluminium iPod Nano, and it is truly sweet. I’ve always wondered aswell what the fuss was with the white earphones – now I know. They’re the most comfortable ones I’ve ever worn! My ears are an odd shape and every pair I’ve used are uncomfortable, fall out often and after 10 minutes use start to hurt. These are amazingly comfortable. I’m also converting all my music to AAC (because it’s higher quality than the ageing MP3 format and the file size is smaller – meaning more songs woo!) I’m doing it with Andy who’s not the fastest of machines, so my whole collection should be converted by Tuesday. Only reason I haven’t done so till now is cos my Packard-Bell player can only play MP3 and the awful WMA format.

That player doesn’t even have a name. It’s not even really worthy of a name. It even messed up most of our recordings during our Road Trip edition of The Choad Show! The only name I could ever think of was Bell-end, and that’s not really a suitable name at all. Especially as I’ve had to ask my Dad if he’s seen it on occasion – and asking “Dad, have you seen my Bell-end?” isn’t the best of phrases to say to one’s parents.

Although granted, asking my dad if he’s seen Drifter will probably lead him to think that I hide homeless people in my bedroom. :erm:

I’m really scared about the bears outside having rampant sex….