That’s really the name of the site there, Birmingham: It’s Not Shit.

I’m still looking for reasons, but already I’ve found a great discussion over what the ‘ardest pub in Brum is. Also, the secret of whether or not there really is a beach under Spaghetti Junction. I lived right next to it for 2 years but I couldn’t tell you if there was. Exploring the area was the equivalent of running through Central Park at night with a laptop and sausages.

Here’s some fine comedy writing for you:

People underestimate Birmingham as a holiday destination, those looking for ‘sex, sand and surf’ especially – but anyone who’s seen the sunrise over Acocks Green on bin day can understand that Birmingham is God’s chosen holiday destination.

Found a great comment on a cNet Australia opinion piece about why it’s not enough that Macs can now boot into Windows. The writer believed that few Windows users would be enticed to move over. Why trouble yourself with dual-booting when you already had Windows XP on a PC?

Of course, his point was ridiculous and he’s obviously never used a mac for any extended period of time. Some readers took the time to educate him and make a great analogy:

Found a web annotation service, My Stickies, while looking for a way to make notes about websites for work. They’ve got the dreaded buzzwords “Web 2.0” on their front page, but it could be a useful and free web-hosted solution.

I’ve got c’iensomnia. Have been waking up at 3am for the past few nights, and can’t sleep when I want to. How long can one last on less than 4 hours of sleep a night before falling ill? How long can one blog from work without being caught? How long before short posts make me sound stupid!

Has anyone else noticed that the Progress Package website doesn’t work (can’t check my allocated amount) in Firefox? So much for progress!

Here’s a Rube Goldberg machine to end all machines! An absolute must-see testament to Japanese madness.

I bought Tetris DS last night, for my Nintendo DS. So far it has been superb entertainment, and I’ve had my ass whooped online and dealt some whoop-ass myself with kids (and many adults, I’m sure) from all over since. It’s a great game and I think I’ll be playing it every morning on the bus to work.

I actually stood in the store awhile, trying to choose between that and Metroid Prime: Hunters, a game with the exact same score on Metacritic (86%). I decided that I would eventually buy them both, but it was Tetris’ pick-up-and-play gaming that I had the most time for these days. Metroid has simple online deathmatches, but the single-player component sounds like it could consume weeks that I don’t have right now (until July). That’s really a key thing about the DS. It straddles both casual and hardcore gamer dichotomies. Outside the store I heard a little girl say to her mother that she wanted to buy a DS game before they left. The DS, and Nintendo as a whole, has the kind of wide appeal Sony and Microsoft would kill for. This recent story linked on digg shows the DS Lite outselling both the PSP and PS2 in Japan last month!

Kim and I got home from dinner and decided to drag my old NES FamiClone out of the closet. It’s called a Micro Genius, model IQ-701, and still worked perfectly! We took some photos. We played Tetris, Super Mario Bros. 3, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles 3, Batman, Duck Hunt, Wild Gunman, Hogan’s Alley, Street Fighter 2 (a clone by “Yoko Soft”), Yie-Ar Kungfu, and some others. While they could never live up to the memories I have of them, the whole experience was a lot of fun, and I wouldn’t say no to sitting down for a couple of hours again.

An understanding of what makes classic gameplay still viable today is the reason why Nintendo still makes the best games in the world today. It’s the reason they’ve made so much money from their back-catalog, the GBA (70 million sold), and the DS, and will likely make with the upcoming Revolution. As you may have heard, the Revolution will connect to an internet service not unlike the iTunes Music Store, and you will be able to buy/download hundreds of classic games from Nintendo and Sega, and play them on the machine.

Ecto is working with Blogger again. I got a job in IT, as an Information Architect. The Gospel of Judas surfaces. Scientists find the missing link. Windows on a Mac?!