I recently picked up the game Magnetica for the DS.  I think it’s a lot of fun, and I’d score it a solid 8/10.  You can check out the gamespot review here.
It’s a tetris like puzzle game that I find really fun.  In fact, it’s the game I play the most, these days.  The general setup is you have to match coloured balls as the go down a track.  Colours are attracted to each other.  3 or more cancels out that chain. Pretty simple formula.  It’s also a multiplayer game (for 2 people) and has a number of different play styles.
The first mode, they call a “challenge” mode.  This is your typical style of play where the machine just keeps going faster and faster, and we’ll see how long you can go for.  The difference is there seems to be a high level.  Of 4 possible stages for this mode, I’ve hit level 99 on both, which seems to be the highest it goes to.  The latter two stages are quite difficult … which explains why I haven’t hit 99 on them yet.  The third stage involves 2 tracks, and is pretty intense.
There’s also a Quest mode, where you try to accomplish harder and harder sets of tracks and balls.  Last is a puzzle mode, which I find quite fun - you have to solve complicated puzzles involving the magnets.  That’s harder to explain, but probably the highlight of the game after the inital challenge mode wears out it’s fun.  You’re given a certain number of magnets on the track, and a certain number of magnets to add.  Your goal is to use up all your magnets exactly to clear the track.
I find you can pick this game up just about anywhere and have a few games.  It’s great to play when you’re waiting for your car to warm up, actually - a game lasts about 5 minutes.

Brent clued me into 2 wicked things today:

Calgary was blessed with a new radio station!   Check out their site.  They’re playing some great music - Indie, alternative, punk … just some great music.  Very nice to have another station to listen to.  We all know Calgary’s radio selection isn’t exactly … varied.  They’ve got an online stream if you want to check it out, whilst you work.
Then, as if that wasn’t enough, he found a camera tutorial!   What’s great about it, is that it’s a great tutorial.  I highly recommend checking it out, if you’re into the photography scene.  And here’s the link!

Bored? Check this out … it’s a cool little flash toy that let’s you play around with magnetic fields. You can move the “attractors” around, and angle the boards to make some pretty neat effects. I found this setup quite fun to watch:

Also, I thought this was pretty neat. It’s a website whose sole purpose is to manage your web-id’s for you. Using this “openID”, you can log into multiple sites that support this, without having to go through all the user/pass stuff. It will store your openID as long as your browser session exists, so it makes interacting with websites that require your ID pretty seamless. Of course, you can have multiple IDs. Check out a web seminar about it here.

Before I start this list, I want to say that I realize that not all of these albums came out in 2006. Some could have been release in 2005 and took some time to find me. Either way, this is what I have been listening to for the past year.

1. Rise Against - The Sufferer and the Witness

This is the best punk album released in a while. I liked the record before Warped Tour, but after I saw this band live, I absolutely could not stop listening to it.

2. Arctic Monkeys - Whatever People Say I am, That’s What I’m Not

There is something about the lyrics and delivery of the singer that makes this band cool. I like the angular guitar arrangements, too.

3. Brand New - The Devil and God are Raging Inside Me

First listen: Meh, I’ve heard this before….
Second listen: It’s OK, I probably shouldn’t have bought it though.
Third listen: I love this record! I must tell everyone!

4. Death Cab For Cutie - Plans

I like it. It’s not as good as Transatlantacism, but no one thought it would be. That would be unfair.

5. Gomez - How We Operate

Sort of an eclectic band that I got turned onto in the summer.

6. John Mayer - Continuum

John Mayer albums used to be my guilty pleasure, but since everyone loves Justin Timberlake’s stuff, I have no problem going public with my John Mayer love.

7. The Beatles - Love

1966 has never sounded so fresh thanks to this remix/remaster/mashup.

8. Joshua Radin - We Were Here

Cat Stevens meat Damien Rice.

9. Saves the Day - Sound the Alarm

OK - I admit, we are getting down to the filler of the list. With the exception of a couple of tracks, this is very listenable disc.

10. NOFX - Wolves in Wolves’ Clothing

More of the same: “The Marxist Brothers”, “USA-holes” and 16 more play-on-words titles.

Disappointments:

1. Heavens - Patent Pending
2. Incubus - Light Grenades
3. Thom Yorke - The Eraser

Heartbreaker of 2006:
AFI - Decemberunderground

The days of Black Sails in the Sunset are long over. I was really looking forward to this albums release. And I really tried to like it. I listened to it over and over, but I could not like it. It is just such a departure from their old stuff. I wished they have dissolved AFI and started a new band. I think a lot of people bought this expecting something else.

Much to the pleasure of anyone who’s had to endure my home, I am now in the process of renovating it. This renovation is fairly extensive, and involves ripping up all the flooring that I have in my upstairs, and painting numerous vertical structures I like to call walls. This process means that I have to move pretty much everything on the floors to somewhere else. Elementary, my dear Watson.

An added bonus is I finally have a good reason to dismantle and get rid of the entertainment unit that I own. The thing is big - about 5.5 feet high, 6.5 feet long and 2.5 feet deep. It’s been there since I bought the house … in fact, it came with the house. I’m guessing that’s ’cause the previous owners couldn’t destroy it. A detail about my setup: My marine aquarium is to the left of the unit, and that spans about 3 feet to the wall. Then there’s about a foot or so between the aquarium and the entertainment unit, where a speaker hides. These details become important quite soon.

Mr. Agile helped me take apart the thing, and in the process of doing so, I found a shell. Inside the shell was a hermit crab from my salt-water aquarium. It managed to climb out of the aquarium, then climb all the way under the entertainment center - what I would guess to be 8 feet - over carpet. This was no easy journey, as I have 2 guardian sabres that would have enjoyed messing around with it. After making it under the entertainment centre, I guess he died. But I have a picture of the crab, and this post is meant to honour it’s brave trek to the unknown side of the living room, in search for what I can only assume would be some sort of hermit crab utopia.

A few days ago, I noticed my main server was making noises. Some weird, unusual, scary noises. The server is in fact this server, and I didn’t like the idea of it dying. So, upon further investigation, I found that the CPU fan was deathly ill and about to die. Taking emergency measures, I opened up the case and started getting some better air flow into it, with the plan of getting a new fan for the box the next day.

Well, that day was Sunday, and I was busy, so I didn’t get around to it. That night, however, the machine died. I woke up, turned on the machine (we can’t have IRC and email not working for a day), and stuck a floor fan pointing at the machine. Then I went to my local computer store and asked for a socket A heat sink and fan that will do a good job.

The dude at the counter hands me over a nice looking sink/fan and assures me that it’ll work with my mainboard. As you can tell from the description, it can’t, as it’s for socket 478. I didn’t notice that until I got home, though, and opened up my case to install it. So, another night goes by with the system limping on.

The next day (today), I go back to the store and explain the error. They were really apologetic, and gave me a nice discount and stuff like that … including the replacement. So, I get home and start to install this puppy. It was actually right, and looked pretty good in the box.  The thing is actually pretty huge, it can’t physically be any bigger on that board.  As you can see from the depth of field in this pic, it towers over the teensy components:

However, when I turned on the box, the fan wouldn’t turn. So, I stopped the thing, and started to investigate. It turns out that the fan is broken. The thing is actually broken in 2 places. I fix that, and as I’m putting the whole thing back together, I notice that the fan was installed upside down. After fixing that and turning on the machine, things work fine. For the record, the CPU fan should be blowing into the heat sink. If you’re installing a new heat sink/fan, make sure you check the fan so that if anything is broken, you can find that out before you’ve done all the work.

I also picked up a hard drive fan, which I hope will cool my main filesystem drive down. Those puppies run HOT. It’s pretty cool (what a delicious pun) and just plugs into the same power cable you use for a HDD. I will show you:

That’s all for this upgrade. I hope to get the computer store to give me a replacement fan tomorrow with this one still running, so that I don’t have to turn off this machine. I mean, if I turn off the machine, how will you read this awesome post?!