First of all - the news. It looks like I'm signing back on with Rogers Television after a bit of a hiatus. Yeah, sure, I do the JCI Brantford Santa Claus Parade every year but other than an occasional appearance on First Local, I really haven't been around much.

That is all going to change in September.

First of all, I'm going to be part of a brand new show called "Inside Brantford". I hope this isn't a secret, because now I'm posting about it. Oops. I didn't sign anything saying I couldn't talk about it. On this show, I'll be appearing once a week during a live segment talking tech.

Then, you'll also see me weekly doing a video game segment on First Local which is going to be a lot of fun!

Finally it looks like Rogers is returning back to its community roots and I'm excited to be part of it. Not only because I think it will be good for the community but it will reunite me with Jason Souliere and Patti (Dickie) Berardi - whom I've had the pleasure of working with in a previous life.

So look for these all new shows in September on Rogers 20 - BRANTFORD!

Welcome to the New Promotion

When my PS2 collection recently went over the 1,200 mark I thought it might be a good way to draw attention to the museum. I know this sounds strange, but this is how my brain works at times. I thought I'd post the story to Kotaku, and I wasn't wrong about the idea of promotion. It turns out, the story has drawn a lot of attention and a lot of heat.

At this point, almost 47,000 views and a couple of hundred comments. It is somewhat surprising the negative comments (like it's "sad" that he has so many games) like it's a problem to have that many or something. I just laugh. Whatever. It's all good.

The thing is, those that know me will realize I didn't post the story to brag. I posted it to draw attention to the museum and it's doing that. Close to 20,000 hits on the museum website in 3 days is a record and I'm proud of it. Let's spread the word!

On a completely different tune, I wanted to point out how the soda pop industry must really like computer geeks. There are at least two major brands that I think have been created to cater to the programming geeks of the 80's for sure.


First, we have Sprite. If you worked on computers like the Commodore 64 you know that it had 8 Sprites built into it. Sprites are special graphic elements that can be moved around the screen independently of the background and essentially "on their own". In games, this translated into enemies or the player themselves. Atari computers had sprites too, except they called them "player/missile" graphics which was just a narrow way of saying the same thing. So Sprite, as a pop is going to be favoured over it's rough equivalent, 7-UP, by computer programmers every single time. I can't explain why - it just happens.

The other pop conspiracy with computer geeks is Hires Rootbeer. We don't say "hires" like hiring for a job, but rather, we call it "HI - REZ" rootbeer. As in "high resolution". In the good old days on the Apple II computer for example, you could put the computer in various graphic modes. Some were low resolution and some were high resolution (or hi-res for short). So again, the geek in all of us is going to be drawn to a higher resolution form of Rootbeer than say, a low one. Honestly, I can't make this up.