Not into NCAA March Madness? Time to rediscover a classic old game!

Never having been very much into basketball, March Madness just does not do anything for me. I would not know the first thing about trying to pick my way through a bracket pool, and would rather not spend the next several weeks glued to my TV or streaming games to my iPhone. Alas with some extra time on my hands - why not get fully emerged into a great graphic adventure game.

I suppose I can thank my brother Peter for getting me hooked on great adventure games. I distinctly remember back in junior high when he brought home his first Apple Iic computer. One of the most amazing things you could do with it was dial up the Mountain Bell main frame with a 300 baud modem and play Zork! The game was something HUGE (at the time) like 300-400k and with the Apple's 64k - you needed a mainframe space to support it. I would spend hours on the text based adventure game, drawing maps and solving the puzzles. Still a classic today - you can plait in HTML on this website.

Cyan Worlds took up the baton with Myst and its trilogy, including one of the best games ever produced, Uru. I have never been much into first person shooters. There where a couple that where fun, Wolfenstein and its follow up Return to Castle Wolfenstein. I remember when my kids were little they would sit on my lap at the desk and my wife would look sideways at me while I killed Nazi's. "Nice parenting influence there dad," she would say. The current generations of first person shooters just doesn't thrill me.

Enter Riven:

One of the Myst series produced in 1997, this adventure is completely immersive and had some of the most stunning graphics produced at the time. 15 years later, they still stand up well and the game is still as intriguing as ever. One of my favorite things about Riven and the entire series as a whole, is the inability to die. No one is trying to kill you and there is no requirement to get good at some cryptic series of keyboard combinations in rapid succession just to advance in the game - rather just a simple, strait forward interface while you explore strange lands, solve puzzles and waste time - Careful -  if you start, a week or two of your life will be gone before you know it (fair warning).

Because the game is so old, it is now available for download from Steam for just $5.99. If you have a Mac running Lion, you will also need to download this piece of free software from some enthusiasts who created an engine to run it on OS X.

So turn the lights out, turn the speakers up and sit back for a great adventure. I just started it again myself. …. I'll see you sometime in April!

Screen shots below.

Cool Free iPhone App-O-The Day: Pedometer Free

Recently I started working several medic shifts at the Colorado Convention Center. This mammoth of a building has more than half a million square feet of space on one level, and has three levels! After about two weeks of being here I started to wonder how much I was actually walking in a day. I found myself wishing I had one of those little plastic pedometers so that I could track if I was getting my requisite 10,000 steps a day or not. I suspected I was probably way over on shifts where I had to respond to the convention floor several times, like the recent statewide volleyball tournament.

Then I realized - hey I have an iPhone… I wonder what is out there.

Pedometer Free is a very cool app that not only tracks your steps, it then converts that to miles, calorie burn rate, and average speed. It seems to be relatively accurate based on my simple little test of counting my steps vs what it said. If you enter your height and weight the 'step' distance auto calculates for you making the mileage more accurate and best of all it tracks the whole thing on GPS so you can see a map of where you have been.

I was able to determine that one lap around the 'ol convention center was 981 steps or 0.534 miles.  I walk at 1.7 miles an hour and burned about 83 calories a lap. Pretty cool!

I believe the paid version (only $2.99) maintains a longer history, integrates Facebook or Twitter posting, and allows CSV data outputs to other physical activity tracking applications.

I'l let it run here for a few days and let you know what my average daily walk consists of… Should be interesting.

Pretty cool way to create a personalized info-graphic, and support a good cause at the same time.

My Social Strand is a new website that recently launched to support the 'Be the Match' campaign. A national database of bone marrow donors. The site, with your permission, will cull your Facebook activity, ask you a few questions and create a very cool personalized info-graphic. The picture includes info about your name, how prolific you are at posting, compared to the world and your friends, as well as various other tidbits of info usually found in the 'at a glance' communication style that has become all the rage. It will provide some fun information like the name of the number one song when you were born - while playing it in the background.

The site was created to promote the national bone marrow donor program - a pretty cool cause.

What was the suprising thing I learned?  Apparently ALL of my friends on FB have identified themselves with the republican party - how can that be?  there has to have been some kind of glitch in the program….