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About this siteFor six years, the Internet Nexus served as my technology blog, but I've since started blogging at the SuperSite Blog instead. If you're looking for the blog, please head there. --Paul Friday, December 26, 2003All I want for Christmas is...Well, Christmas is for the kids, and on that note, it was a classic time. But I got a few geek oriented gifts you might be interested in:Hauppage WinTV-PVR-250 personal video recorder. I'd heard the Hauppage was the one to get for Windows XP Media Center Edition 2004, which I'm running now on my main desktop PC. I guess we'll find out if that is the case. STAR WARS: Jedi Knight: Jedi Academy. I've been into first-person shooters since the original "Castle Wolfenstein 3D" (and coincidentally just finished playing through Ultimate DOOM and DOOM II yet again), so this was sort of a natural. At least it will keep me busy until DOOM 3 and Half-Life 2 ship. The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers (Platinum Series Special Extended Edition Collector's Gift Set). What can I say? As a Tolkein geek dating back to the 6th grade, when we read The Hobbit, the Lord of the Rings, Beowulf, and The Odyssey as part of an accelerated English class (I've read the trilogy at least a dozen times), Peter Jackson's live action movies were much anticipated and much appreciated. The DVD versions, of course, are better, because they include dozens of scenes that were cut or cut down for the theatrical releases. Anyway, The Two Towers is the weakest of the movies, but I have few complaints. The Art of UNIX Programming. I'm not a big fan of Eric Raymond at all; in fact, I think he's a bit dangerous. But this book is simply a must-read regardless of your OS orientation. Highly recommended (I've already read 100 pages of it). Quicksilver (Volume 1 of the Baroque Cycle). Neal Stephenson is, of course, a guru and a god, and one of the most influential people I've read (in fact, his excellent "In the Beginning Was the Command Line" [here] was an inspiration for this blog). In recent years, Stephenson has turned from writing about modern and futuristic technology to historical novels such as the excellent Necronomicon and Quicksilver, which I'm eagerly looking forward to. Xbox. We got a second Xbox for the TV room I'm in the process of finishing in the cellar. Mark has sort of taken control of the other one and I want to get going with Xbox Live, which I joined a year ago but barely used. Drop me a note if you'd like to kick my ass virtually. :) There was more--a Best Buy gift card, a case of my favorite white white (Oak Knoll Pino Gris; from Oregon), a new set of wine glasses, an excellent tawny port (Warre's Otima), and so on. We also got a second Sony DSC-P72 digital camera for Steph, and a Microsoft Wireless-G PCI card for a remote computer in the corner of the house (it had been connected via 802.11b previously). I hooked up my wife's van with a decent Alphine CD player that support MP3 and WMA CDs, and an automatic car starter (kind of key in this part of the country). My son got a couple of Xbox games and a Nintendo GameBoy Advance cartridge. All in all, it was a high-tech Christmas at the Thurrott household. [ Posted at 5:31 PM | Permalink ]
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