It hardly seems relevant now, but that’s never stopped me in the past – one of the key elements I totally forgot to refer to in the Arcade Gaming story was the 3-letter-nicknames thing!  As with most computer games, arcade games always had a High Score table – the difference between the modern setup and the games I was reminiscing about is that whilst nowadays you’re accommodated with lots of space to write your name in, back in The Old Days you were afforded a fairly mean 3 character limit.  …

This post was sort of inspired by reading Wil Wheaton’s recent piece reminiscing about arcade gaming.  It was a particularly memory-inducing post, because as a child of the 80’s (or more accurate, a child of the mid-70’s, growing up in the 80’s), arcade games were a fairly present part of childhood, and who doesn’t like to reminisce about that stuff, right?
Mention of arcade games is still, I think, enough to make my Mum’s pupils widen in fear*.  I don’t remember now how it was I went about securing an income …

The ever wise and relevant Rob piped up on Facebook the other day with the age old question, prompted by the statement: “Captain America is the weakest of the super heroes”.  The more astute of you will notice that that doesn’t present a question at all, and you’d be right.  The posing of the question was implicit following my immediate and convincing rebuttal of Rob’s statement.
The elusive question, of course, is “Who is the weakest of the super heroes?”.
The answer, unquestionably, is The Green Lantern.  I didn’t come up with …

About 2 months ago I had this seemingly brilliant idea to start a new blog containing all of the hilarious stuff which I stumbled across on teh Intertubes (www.piecost.net): the primary purpose being so I could stop emailing crud out to people and instead provide them with a place to come & check at such time as they had a spare minute.  Initially it was all rather good fun and I collected quite a neat selection of funny stuff.  Visitor traffic figures were looking quite good, and I decided that …

Whilst in the seemingly endless queue tonight at Wembley Arena tonight for The Prodigy (I shit you not – it was 1h 07m from the point we joined the line outside the venue until we were actually standing inside the venue, by which point we’d missed Dizzee Rascal.  Narrow escape there then…), we spied one of the posters for the tour, which only listed April 17th as being the Wembley concert date.  This meant that tonight (16th) was an extra date thrown in after the 17th sold out.  We got …

There hasn’t been a good razor-related marketing whinge on this blog in a while, so whilst combing through the back catalogue of emails that’s built up in my inbox over the past week I’m extremely surprised and shocked that I didn’t pounce on Toby’s message regarding the new-if-inevitable offering by shaving boffins Gillette, in the form of the Gillette Fusion Power Gamer.
It’s the natural progression, really — sort of like the bastard offspring of the visionary M3 Power model (the one which claims to use “micropulse technology”, but in fact …

As it’s the last day that our dear friend Connie is running The Coach & Horses in Longborough, the lads & I thought we might scoot up the A44 and give her a farewell dance or two.
Thanks for all your support over the years Connie!

Prompted by events which I don’t really recall, my learned colleague and co-mastermind Paul sent me off on a retrospective journey thinking about the various mobile phones I’ve owned in my life, and I thought it might be interesting (in this case possibly exploring new extremes in the definition of “interesting”) to record the results here for your reading pleasure.  By which I mean MY reading pleasure, as I’m still not convinced there’s anyone else out there reading this.
I thought I was a little late to the party as far …

On our recent voyage around parts of Germany, Austria, Switzerland & Liechtenstein, K & I were quite pleased at the ease with which we negotiated rail travel. Everything was timely and spacious, and for the most part well connected (excepting finding a way out of Bregenz).
Currently, however, we’re taking some weird elongated diversion back from Stoke-on-Trent, via Birmingham International and Coventry. We got on the train at 15:10, and our arrival into Euston is presently estimated at 19:50 (assuming the rails don’t get covered in fluff from Saturn, or any …

Having lived here in London for over 4 years now I think I’ve gotten used to many of the local customs & behaviours, and to some extent modified my ludicrous Australian behaviour patterns to fit more closely with some of the English sensibilities presented to me on a daily basis.
One of the aspects of social interaction here I’ve never really gotten my head around is the near-constant discussion had with everyone you meet revolving around current weather conditions.  But even more baffling than that, at least in my mind, is …