I was driving on the highway last week and someone entering from the on ramp cut me off, and they got away with it.

Awhile back, my car horn stopped working. At the time, I equated this type of automotive failure to a turn signal light going out or spilling a drink on my floor mat.  You really don’t realize how much you miss some things until they’re gone.  When you think of all of the situations in which you use your car horn, it’s easy to see how this is something we all take for granted.

The intended use for a car horn is safety.  It’s there to inform someone who is about to feel the wrath of your bumper from what direction their impending doom is originating. The  car horn gives other motorists, pedestrians, dogs, cats, raccoons, the homeless, and utility poles a chance to look up and comprehend just how wrecked they are about to be.  Most of us, however, use our car horns to exclaim our hatred for the very existence of those who impede our daily commute.

Without a car horn, someone can cut you off, like they did me, and never know just how mad you are about it. The accused continue driving, thinking, “I may have just cut that person off.  Well…no horn, everything must be okay.”  Meanwhile, you’re inventing curse words inside the soundproof bubble of your car’s interior.  Not only this, but your anger is heightened more when you have no means with which to get their attention to show them your middle finger (Figure 1).  At this point, you have no other choice than to pull up beside them and run them off the road.  If you have nothing better to do, you might follow the perpetrator home to urinate on their freshly seeded lawn to express your disdain.  It is easy to see what an important safety measure a car horn is.  Car horns prevent accidents and keep lawns green.

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Hats off to Sony, as they’re finally starting to get this stuff right.  Recently, PlayStation.com has enabled viewing your Playstation 3 trophies online. Sony’s European PlayStation site has already implemented this further, allowing player cards to be generated for use in forums or otherwise.  North American players can also use this site as well. Playfire.com is already leveraging the data, and I can assume it’ll only get better from here.

Now maybe someone will actually care that I got the platinum trophy for Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune and the play trophy for LittleBigPlanet…

[Update 7/14/09] It appears that Sony’s North American site is supporting the Portable IDs as well now, but they’re still leveraging the data from Sony’s European Playstation site based on the generated HTML.  Not sure why, but at least it’s a little more convenient now.

Okay, so it wasn’t as simple as someone ignoring the post showcase showdown message of “Help control the pet population, have your pets spayed or neutered,” (Figure 1) and just like that I have cats. I had wanted a household pet for sometime.

Last year, we had to put our family dog of 13 or so years (Figure 2) down to prevent further suffering as she was losing her sight and suffered from cancer and debilitating arthritis. Being in my mid-twenties, I hadn’t lived at home for years, but that didn’t make the loss any easier.

As any pet owner knows, a pet is a member of the family, and our dog Jessie was no different. When my grandfather died, my dad stayed back a few days extra to help my grandmother out.  A few weeks before my grandfather died, my uncle’s Collie had given birth to a litter of puppies.  As one family member left our lives, another entered as my dad returned with a pint-sized version of Lassie that we named Jessie.

Jessie was the most recent casualty among our history of family pets. There were cats, hamsters, and the occasional jar of bugs…though those didn’t seem to last as long.  It had been almost ten years since I had owned any cats, but I had decided that if I was to get any pets at this point in my life, it was going to be a cat.

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I’ve never been good at shooters, at least on a console. Back in college, I could hold my own in a frag fest in the dorms, but that was on a PC, with a mouse and keyboard, and I was rarely the top scorer.  That being said, I never would have thought that my first platinum trophy on PlayStation 3 would come via a shooter.  For those not aware, a platinum trophy is attained when all other trophies for a game have been achieved. This holds true mostly for retail games only, as games available on the PlayStation Network for download are usually too small in scope to warrant one.

Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune is not only a great game and a great buy, but it might be the best game available for the PlayStation 3. Developer Naughty Dog has come a long way from Crash Bandicoot.  The reason why I usually find myself failing at shooters is that I don’t find myself immersed in the story, characters, or game play. These qualities aren’t typically the strong suit of shooters, and thus I’m typically not the target audience.  Uncharted is more of an adventure game in my opinion, with the mechanics of a third person shooter used as a mechanism to tell the story.

Another reason I find shooters difficult is that they require precise control and reaction time, rather than skillful decision making.  Uncharted employs a cover system, much like that seen in the Gears of War series, forcing a hybrid of these traits from the player in order for the player to be successful. The game also features likable characters, an entertaining story, and stunning graphics.  The game play is seamless and immersive, containing platforming elements and a linear environment that never quite seems so.  The game doesn’t even display a static HUD on the screen, which is almost enough to make you forget you’re playing a game.  These are the reasons I not only gave the game a try, but completed it many times over.

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I’ve decided to fight back for the sanity of web developers everywhere. Anyone visiting 2Lincolns with an 800×600 resolution will now be redirected to this page.

I spent a decent amount of time designing 2Lincolns.com catering to those users who may visit the site with a resolution of 800×600 and those who may be using Internet Explorer 5.5. After awhile I asked myself, why the hell am I catering to the 1% of people stuck in the age of free Geocities web pages and animated GIFs? Many web developers feel my pain. With the quirks and periodical noncompliance of older browsers, as well as the display restrictions a resolution of 800×600 imposes, these internet users can be a hindrance to progressive and compliant web design.

It is my duty as a member of the internet community to discourage the usage of primitive technology for the sanity of web developers everywhere.  People, update your display settings or GTFO.  If you insist on browsing the internet in 1996 style, I’ll give you the internet circa 1996. That being said, if someone is visiting 2Lincolns with a resolution of 800×600, tough shit, they don’t get to see the page everyone else does.  Instead, they get served the following page:

Click here to time travel to 1996

I’m thankful to see that the majority of my visitors are using modern browsers such as Firefox and larger display resolutions, so the negative nature of this post doesn’t apply to most of you.  Just sit back, saavy internet user, and enjoy this walk through memory lane.  Table layouts, animated GIFs, horrible color schemes, and just overall HTML hell.  You know, kinda like Myspace.