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I have been in the mood for a classic style RPG to play for the last week. I ended up trying “Lunar: Dragon Song”, and was horribly disappointed in the game. Next I tried Magical Starsign, which seems to have promise, but could not keep me interested for very long. Some small points started to annoy me, but it looks like a decent game to come back to. Thats when the realization set in that for a classic RPG game I would have to look back to the classics. To much 3D and more complicated combat systems get in the way off a good classic RPG feel.

Last night I started up a copy of Dragon Warrior III for the gameboy color. I have logged about 2 hours into the game thus far, and still feel like getting more time into it. I am guessing 30 min of that time was just grinding to level up the characters and farm some gold. The story line so far is as basic as it can get… I am a 16 year old boy who is now old enough to go out on a journey. My father died on a journey to defeat The Baramos, when he fell into a volcano and burned to death.. My people are now passing that journey onto me. The game has a classic over head view that we see in most the old RPG’s of the day (Final Fantasy). Graphically the game is prob the best I have ever seen for the gameboy color. Loading times are next to none and going from room to room is instant. I was going to actually play the 3rd remake of it for the SNES (was originally a NES game) but after looking at the comparison of graphics for all three I decided to go for the gameboy color version.

The battle system is very classic but stripped down more than I expected for easy controls on the gameboy. When you are fighting more than one creature of the same type it will group them as one. An example of this is if you are fighting 3 slimes and 2 ravens it will show up as attack “3 slimes” or “2 ravens”. Once you pick it seems to sort out the attacks on its own to best eliminate the monsters you picked with the characters you used. It would have been nice to have more options when attacking, but it seems to do a pretty good job.

Like I said the story line is not the most exiciting thing I have ever heard, but I am hoping something more will happen in the game and give it a little more direction. In any case is nice to have a large selection of classic RPG’s I can go back to for now till some developers realize that a market for classic 2D RPG’s still exists.

The Stp show last night was amazing. Prob one of the best shows I have seen in a while. Our seats where really good (Hard to tell from that cell phone image), but other than one drunk dude who keep shaking the boards we where all leaning on everyone/thing was cool. I am trying to remember for the life of me all the songs they played, but they didnt have a bad one in the set list… Although I also can’t think of a bad song they have. Crash Karma opened for them, and it was not to bad. Kinda sad the biggest applause for them was when they played a Tea Party song, but I guess that is to be expected since they have one EP out right now and only getting one song with radio play.

About a year back my old shredder went to the great silicon heaven in the sky and I have been with out one for this whole time. Cleaning out the Crawl space and basement over December has left me with a large amount of paper I need to dispose of securely.

The first this I did was look into what features I really wanted in my new shredder.

1. A few sheets are a time (3 to 5 min)
2. Auto and Reverse (should be standard on all them)
3. Ability to do CD’s
4. Ability to do Credit Cards.

Staples and paper clips I dont really care about since I can just rip the corner off a pack of paper pretty easy.

After looking at the weekly flyers and online a fair amount I ended up getting a Staples Mailmate Shredder Item Number 649935 for $68.72.

It has the following features:

* Features: Shreds 10 folded paper sheets, CDs/DVDs, credit cards, staples & small paper clips
* Heavy Duty Cross-cut: 51-100 uses per day
* Finish: Stainless Steel/Black
* Light weight, pull-out bin and rubberized handle make emptying easy
* Throat Width: 6″ (152.4mm)
* Shred Size: 0.2″ x 1″ (4mm x 25mm)
* Basket Capacity: 1.5 Gallons (5.5L)
* Overheat & Power LEDs
* Overload Protection with Auto Reverse Feature
* Digital Control Switches
* Auto Off Feature: powers down after 30 minutes
* Non-skid rubber feet
* Shred Speed: 5.6 ft/min. (1.7 m/min.)
* Dimensions: 10.2″L X 11.8″W 11″H
* Weight: 15.2 lbs

It sounded like it had everything I wanted out of a shredder, but this was not to be the case. After getting it home I shredder for a few min and then waited a bit and did some more. In no time the unit powered off (the over heat light did not come on). Looking in the manual it said if this happened to leave it for 25 min and then plug it back in and try again. Not a single light would come on….

Back to Staples the next day with my broken shredder.. I didn’t really want to spend much more on a shredder, but also was not feeling the love of this model and didn’t want to get the same kind again. After looking over the remaining options I went with a Staples D-Shape Diamond-Cut Shredder Item Number 703283 for $99.21. So I paid the difference and left with my new shredder with the following specs:

* Features: Medium-duty ultraquiet shredder with up to 50 uses per day
* Basket interlock switching (machine shuts off when shredder basket door is opened)
* Separate slot to shred CDs/DVDs
* Reverse/forward button with red “attention” and “bin full” LEDs
* Overheat/overload protection
* Nonskid rubber feet
* 12-sheet capacity
* 9″ throat size
* 1/5″ x 1-19/50” shred size
* 6-gallon basket capacity
* 1-year manufacturer’s limited warranty, 7-year on cutters (details with product)12-sheet capacity.

So far it seems like a way better unit and I hope it will last for more than the MailMate did.

I didn’t end up getting out of bed this morning very early so the day is just starting off for me here. About all I have been able to get done this morning is the creation and completion of a pot of coffee.

I don’t think I mention the new phones that I picked up a little while back. I was looking for something small, cordless, stylish, and had a answering machine built into it. What I ended up finding was the Phillips DECT 225. Its actually turned out to be a nice set of phones. One thing I would like to see added to a system with the base station is a central address book. Each hand set can have an address book, but they are stored on the handsets. I really would like it to saved on the base station and be avail to any registered handset attached to that base station.

It has some pretty kick ass built in ring tones and I have been using the one that sounds a lot like the original Ninja Gaiden music from the NES.

In the search for a nice IDE that covers multi languages I have always ended up back at using gedit. It has always just stuck because its simple, clean, fast, and low on dependencies. Over the past few months with me doing more than normal amounts of coding at work, I started to want some of the extra features I have felt it was missing.

Enter geany..

On first look at geany you can tell that this thing is made to be light weight, but still has a little more going on that I like in most cases. It looks like a lighter version of most IDEs I have tried. Your main coding window is on the right side and includes line numbers which are always handy and supports multiple open files via tabs (even my toaster has tabs now). It is important to note that you can drag the tabs around and reorder them on the fly.

To the left of the tabs is the “symbols tab”, which right now some people might wonder what that is and I will cover later. Next to the symbols tab in the same frame we have the pages tab… This seems pretty redundant with the other tabs to the right, unless you have a mass of tabs open and want a quicker way to get around. At the bottom of all this we have some other standard IDE type options. Of these I tend to only use the terminal (yep its a terminal), and the scribble pad. The scribble pad allows you to take down quick notes and is not project or page specific. It will also save this on exit and reopen of the IDE. I did some digging around and it just stores this in the config file for geany (~/.geany/geany.conf).

Geany supports a large amount of file types and provides syntax highlighting for each. This is handy if you happen to work in more than one language but don’t want to have to change IDEs depending on what you are working on.

The main reason I tried out geany in the first place was the support of code folding.

As you can see above the code folding works as expected and really helps clean up some messy complex code.

Another interesting little feature to geany is the ability to add what I call “markers” to your work (I didn’t look what they call them). If you click to the right of a line number it will mark that line. This is handy for working in long files. I use to just put comments in my code for this and still would if I plan to come back to it later. For quick changes this comes in handy and will let you jump around the page quicker. It will not save these when you close the file.

Now what about that little symbols window I almost closed to get out of my way when I started this thing up… It actually turns out to come in useful after all. :) It can be used to locate variables, functions, classes, and more in a page quick. Click what you want and it will jump to that section of the page. If that section is folded it will unfold the needed section for you.

These are just some highlights that I found while playing around with geany, and is by no means everything great about it. It supports a fair amount of auto completion that in most cases would bother me, but has not the past few days of using it. In all geany is a nice IDE with a light feel, and tends to stay out of your way when you are working, but brings some quick little tools to your finger tips.