Terrible Analogies

So, instead of doing some much needed housework, prepping the guest room to make way for baby, or doing any number of constructive tasks around the house this weekend, I shirked my responsibilities and opted to back up anew my music collection to five external hard drives.  I’ve made so many changes to my master library as of late that simply copying over the changes to my various backup hard drives was not an option.  Turns out that pushing 196+ GB over a USB 2.0 line takes six hours.  Due to my lack of SATA / FireWire cables I couldn’t daisy chain the lot of them together and make just one big rapid push.

After a few failures, stops and starts, and a Blackberry falling from the heavens and hitting a unique series of keys that killed one backup job (Heh…I swear it wasn’t me!) I finally got all of my backups completed.  In the end, I felt stretched and spent, just like Peter Griffin after he watched The Ring:

I’m now in the process of making duplicates of my MAME games for a co-worker.  I’ve completed copying five of the 14 DVDs.  It’s a hard core collection of games to be sure, and the duplications will continue throughout tomorrow.

Whilst in the midst of this Herculean, marathon backup undertaking, I’m reminded of what Tyler Durden once said.  ”The things you own end up owning you.”  I feel as if my data is pimping me out, slapping me across the face with the back of its hand while screaming, “Where’s my money?!”

Ahh, but there I go again, anthropomorphizing my computer.  Next thing you know I’ll be dressing up as a vintage Macintosh, attending furry conventions, and looking for the nearest yiff pile to dive into (God, why do I know such things?).

Nothing more than that. Taking a day off from blogging…

Is it just me, or does the new Iomega external hard drive look an awful lot like a flask?

I was playing Michael Jackson’s Moonwalker on my MAME arcade machine the other day, deftly fighting my way though wave after wave of knife-wielding rednecks, skulking mobsters and deadly robots, armed with nothing more than my crystal-encrusted glove, my chimp buddy Bubbles, and my electric personality, when something struck me as a bit…odd.

Attacking our fearless hero Michael is a surprisingly well prepared army of “roaring 20′s” style gangsters, cloaked hit men, gas-tossing chemists, as well as manned and unmanned robots.  Amid this cast of characters there seemed to be a subset of baddies who appeared to not be wearing any pants.  By all indications, they were coming at Michael “commando” style, fully cocked and ready to rock:

Okay, I can understand if this was a poor color choice for pants, yet  I still question the developers for what I can only assume to be design input from MJ himself.  I was going to let this slide until, later in the game, another strange thing began to attack our lone champion:

This mini-boss has eyes for our intrepid smooth criminal.  His weapon of choice: A metallic battering ram that repeatedly thrusts in and out from the waist area.  Long, hard, and green, this boss wants nothing more than to repeatedly violate Michael about the face with his protruding tool.  If our slide glidin’ adventurer doesn’t beat this foe off quickly enough, miniature golden bosses are spawned, each with a similar rocket in its pocket aimed at Michael’s lower gyrating extremities.

If by "wondrous and magical adventure" you mean "tied up and held captive", then I'm sure you will Michael. I'm sure you will...

As a child I don’t recall Moonwalker being so graphically questionable, but as an adult playing this game, I wonder if “game designer” Michael Jackson was trying to tell us something about himself way back in 1990…

Alright, after many months of storage I finally have my MAME arcade machine up and running again.  I have a carefully collected library of nearly 600 games courtesy of Usenet, but I just received a new updated shipment of MAME games this afternoon, so I’m anxious to refresh my ROM folder.  Unfortunately my MAME-dedicated computer doesn’t have a DVD reader on it.  In fact, this particular computer hasn’t been on the internet since 2001, is running a first generation unpatched version of WinXP Home, and is incapable of reading my external hard drives.

Yanking the computer from my arcade cabinet and hauling it upstairs to update it, I’m actually surprised to discover that this ancient hunk of metal has an Ethernet port.  I was fully expecting to have to update it using a complicated series of smoke signals, pantomimes, and sea shanties.

My ancient computer is incapable of seeing external hard drives, which is a pity because as everyone knows, I'm a backup fiend...

Yes, you're reading that right. 108 updates required. This computer was rockin' it old school

As so, instead of a quick update, I’m now relegated to hours of work, then I’ll be occupied with copying my MAME DVDs to an external hard drive, then from the HD to my relic of a PC.

My arcade machine looks so sad without a brain to drive it.  No lights, no sound, and no games.  Poor thing.

Don’t worry, little buddy.  I’ll soon have you up and running once again with Robotron, Metal Slug, and Dragon’s Lair before you can say “quarter haven”…

Happy Friday everyone!