Dhivael/Anne’s Hyperactive Blog

If you’re aware of my YouTube channel at all, you’ve probably seen my video where I paint a map of the world set to the them from the PBS show ‘Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego?’. When I did that video, there was hardly anything on YouTube from that show. I think (though I’m not sure) that mine was one of the first. I know that there were no other videos on YouTube at the time with the theme song.

But now, there are a ton of clips from the actual show that have been uploaded. There are currently 10 or so shows that have been uploaded to YouTube (I haven’t counted exactly). But YouTube does not have the show that I wanted to see. The last show, “A Rodent Ran Through It“.

Why did I want to see this one? If you’re familiar with the show at all, you know that Rockapella was on every episode. There was this guy, that guy, the blond guy and… the guy with the braids. I’m afraid I don’t know who’s who very well. But at the end of the last show of the last season, the host of the show (Greg Lee) cut the braids off of Sean Altman.

This show is not on YouTube!

Fortunately, with a little searching, I was able to find the episode. On a site that I’d never heard of before, called Truveo. I don’t know why I hadn’t heard of it before, it seems pretty cool. It is a video search engine. So not only is the last episode, A Rodent Ran Through It, on there, it lists a total of 350 Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego clips.

Since each individual episode usually makes 2 or 3 clips, that means there are 100+ episodes on there. Though some of them might be clips of the computer game. Are they all different? I don’t know.

There are an additional 763 Carmen Sandiego clips if you use a different search. But this is more likely to include Where on Earth is Carmen Sandiego as well as Where in Time is Carmen Sandiego. Either way, enjoy the Carmen Sandiego.

What happened to the economy? Why did it all crash and burn? Could it have been prevented? You might want to take a look at the following video to see what both McCain & Obama had to do with the economic collapse before it happened.

Many game companies are opposed to the very idea of ‘abandonware’ games. It is, after all, their intellectual property and they don’t like to see people using their ideas for free.

Some companies try to halt abandonware by re-releasing the game, possibly in a “classics” CD package. I gather that this doesn’t work as well as most companies would like, since I don’t think these re-released games stay on the market for long. After all, would you pay $20-30 for a game that was obsolete 10 years ago, or would you rather spend that on a newish (from the past year or two) game?

Yeah.

So if people aren’t going to buy your obsolete games, what are you going to do?

Well, game makers could do what EA has done. You can play the original SimCity online, for free. It’s been turned into a nifty little Java game that (somewhat unfortunately) seems to only work in Internet Explorer. It’s missing the sounds and the complaints that tell you what your disgruntled citizens want, but otherwise it is the same as the original. You can even save your games, to reload later. Nice.

As you play, a scrolling message across the top suggests that you might want to play the newest SimCity game, which is just fine by me. And what better advertising is there, than right there with an already interested audience?

One thing kind of bothers me, though. The scrolling message also says that you’re playing ‘your daddy’s SimCity’. I’m old enough to have played the original and, even if I had kids when I was 18, they wouldn’t be old enough to play SimCity yet.

But, the point is, game makers could do a lot worse than emulate EA in this regard. Creating an online version of their classic games to be played on their website would be good for everyone all around. Advertising for them, fun for the rest of us.

I know I want to buy SimCity 4 now; I hadn’t realized that they were still making SimCity games.

Okay, maybe not really… But if it wasn’t enough that I moved my blog to a new address, I’ve gone and decided to port my old main site over to Joomla. I’d considered making it WordPress, but WordPress isn’t quite what I want in this instance.

Joomla is a bit unwieldy, but it should be good for a few things I have in mind. Once I figure out how to do them. And after I get everything ported over to it. Shouldn’t take too long…

Those who know me know that I tend to have a somewhat… odd sleep schedule. I swear it sometimes seems like my body follows a 36 hour clock, instead of a 24 hour one.

I’ve read many things that say if you have insomnia, the best cure is to simply not sleep until you’re tired. This does not work with me! I can, at times, stay up for 24-30 hours without getting sleepy at all. Or just barely sleepy, not sleepy enough to actually fall asleep. And when I finally do sleep, my body often needs to sleep for 10-12 hours before I even feel slightly refreshed. It’s maddening.

I’ve seen studies where people’s natural body clocks usually run about 25 hours, in the absence of any way to tell time (no clocks and no windows). Mine feels longer than that and I certainly do go outside.

When I went to Vegas, it took me quite awhile to fall asleep even though I was fairly exhausted from running around and from not really being able to sleep on the bus there.

So what do I do? I’m kinda tired of having such a wacky schedule, but I certainly don’t want to take any drugs for it.

I’ve kind of always had an odd body clock, much preferring to stay up all night than to be awake during the day. So maybe there’s not an awful lot I can do.

In my bid to redirect everyone here from the old /blog address, I didn’t realize I had forgotten to redirect the main blog page as well. At least, until someone pointed out that my blog was ‘gone’. So I’ve gotten that fixed and I think that the move is officially complete now.