When I was still in high school, my very odd cousin Damien (real name) asked me if I wanted to play a game. I stepped back slightly and eyed my clad-in-black cousin carefully. “What kind of game?” I asked.

“It’s a new card game, called Magic the Gathering.”

I was reluctant, but nodded yes anyway. Little did I know that I would fall in love with the game and continue to play throughout college, right until the Ice Age expansion came out. I remember playing game after game in the basement of the service fraternity while my friends waited for people to ask for an escort home. I pretty much stopped playing immediately after graduation. Most of my friends who played moved away, and I never considered venturing out to a game store to find new players.

Fast forward ten years. My friend Stilts had been playing again and kept bringing his cards up when he would visit me. We stated by playing a few casual games, then we’d play all day, and the next thing I knew I was going to “booster draft” style events sanctioned by the DCI.

I wanted to buy some cards of my own, and possibly introduce some of my friends to the game. The problem with that plan was that I had been out of the game for a decade, and even when I was playing the game I was pretty casual. I wasn’t sure if anyone else would want to learn how to play, either. As such, I was reluctant to spend a ton of money on something I might never play outside of my time with Stilts or sanctioned events.

Under Stilts’ recommendation, I checked out the Wholesale section at Star City Games. I plunked down $20 for 2000 cards — 1000 basic lands, and 1000 common and uncommon cards from various sets over time. Star City Games didn’t make any promises about receiving unique cards, but they did assert that there would be some variety. For $20, who cares? And like I’ve said before, at least it would make for an interesting Gibberish entry.
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I’m going to take a job that puts me back in the Washington, D.C. area. I’m not 100% sure I’ll be moving, but chances are very high. Having three dogs makes searching for a place to live more difficult, especially when most of the places nearest to where I’ll be working are high-rise apartments. I searched properties for about two hours and walked downstairs to find this:

No matter how big of a pain in the ass it is to find a rental that will allow three dogs, or to find a home with a fenced in yard, damn they are worth it.

One of the day-to-day annoyances of riding a motorcycle is traffic lights. Some lights are on timers, but most of them use an electrical loop buried beneath the asphalt. The loop detects when a metallic object is overhead, and starts the light change routine.

Unfortunately motorcycles have a hard time triggering such devices, especially when the bike is mostly aluminum and plastic like Cylon. A clever member of the FZ6 forum I belong to mentioned that he used rare earth magnets to cycle the light. I was skeptical, but after sitting at a left-turn signal for five minutes on evening I decided to try it.

Like most off-the-wall Gibberish purchases, at least it would make for an interesting post.
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Earlier in the year I posted How fast can you type? I hit 98 words a minute, which seemed pretty realistic. The test took two minutes and used a combination of letters, numbers, and case (take the test here, Java required).

Someone on Ars Technica inquired about typing on the Asus Eee’s keyboard. The diminutive sub-notebook has a very small keyboard. I can’t find any direct information about it, but I read that it was about 85% the size of a regular keyboard.

Would a 15% smaller sized keyboard result in a 15% drop in time? I revisited the TyperA testing site to see.

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I have owned some apparently very nice clad stainless steel cookware made by Cuisinart. I bought them on the advice of my (at the time) boss, who swore up and down that stainless steel was the best way to go. I shouldn’t have listened him, about the pots and pans or about buying a home, as the cookware proved a pain in the ass for day to day cooking, and he laid every last one of us off four months later.

I spent a pretty penny back then. The Cuisinart set was great at conducting uniform heat, but sucked as far as stuff sticking to the pan. I had to use a fair amount of oil or butter to keep even simple things from adhering to the surface like a mother of nine to her welfare check. Sure, the pots looked pro but the burnt remains of food did not.

I wanted something different, something non-stick, and most importantly, something cheap. I asked Starbuck for help in picking something out. She’s my go-to-gal for anything cooking related. She thumbed through some of her cooking magazine back issues and scoured a few culinary Web sites. She sent me links to a few sets, and I finally decided on the Wearever hard anodized non-stick cookware set.
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I have participated in the Ars Technica Sekrit Santa event ever since it was started four years ago. Every year I got something awesome: niche coffee from Honduras, very nice tea, and a Gnomad, Gunpowder tea and tulip glass teaware, and an Italian stovetop coffee maker complete with homemade instructional DVD.

Those were all great, but I got something so totally unexpectedly awesome that I thought I’d post about it here on Gibberish, and recommend it to all of you.
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I put this bad boy out last year and enjoyed seeing it so much every time I came home I kept it out a little too long. There won’t be a lot of holiday decorations at NORAD this year, but this Santa globe will put a smile on my face well into 2008.

Once a year, a mighty battle is waged at the DrFaulken abode. The forces of man clash with the forces of nature in what can only be described as a fight to the death of epic proportions. The combatants: me and seventeen oak trees in my front and back yards. Last year I disposed of nearly 4800 gallons of leaves, and this year the photosensitive scourge was back with a vengeance. I was determined not to repeat the days upon days of work required to pick up and bag the leaves by hand, and the gnarly aftermath of ripping the bags open at the town dump. I had a secret weapon up my sleeve this year: a trailer-contained leaf vacuum.
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The BBC is reporting that a Chinese man whose son died from an H5N1 infection has also died, raising concerns that the avian flu might be transmittable from person to person. All previous documented cases of human H5N1 infection has been due to contact with birds, or animals who have come into contact with birds, such as cats. The World Health Organization is still researching the two fatalities. If this was indeed spread by HTH contact, expect some reactionary legislation in the US that probably won’t amount to any increased safety.

I made a few posts in the now-defunct GIMPS forum about N95 respirator masks. This thread deals with a group buy on some masks, but there is good information about how there will be a shortage in the event of a major crisis. Should the two deaths in China become linked to HTH, I would not be surprised to find a run on good N95 masks.

I am going to write a more lengthy review of the Asus Eee super-small laptop after I’ve logged some more time with it. In the meantime, I wanted to post instructions on how to fix what I considered the most annoying design flaw of the unit: the position of the right shift key on the keyboard.

In its stock configuration, the Eee’s arrow keys are laid out such that the “up” arrow key is where the right shift key normally resides. As a touch-typist, I found myself hitting the up arrow key when I needed to type a capital “d,” and the next thing I knew I was up one line and two letters off. Something had to change, or I was going to have a serious problem with the Eee.
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