Deano.com

After losing my old laptop hard drive, I found while restoring to the new drive from backups a few of my old reviews for Animerica magazine. Those were the days... First up, my take on the long-forgotten "True Crime: Streets of LA". Enjoy!

-----

Review: True Crime: Streets of LA

Intro: the secret of realistic gaming

Looking back over the past few months, and thinking about bringing back the blog, it's amazing how many things have changed. Just a few months back, I was paying almost $100/month for cable and high speed internet service here in Alameda... It wasn't that bad a deal compared to the other local options, but with all the download to own and rental content out there (not to mention free streaming), I figured I could ditch the cable box and still see all my favorites via iTunes/Amazon/et al.

It's 2008! Welcome to the future, everyone. We made it again, but somehow the clocks are reset, and we have another whole basket of unknowns to conquer out there in the yet-to-be.

All of us, with some exceptions.

Take Aventail (please). This huffy-puffy little VPN vendor, recently purchased by Sonicwall, seems to have run off the tracks a bit as far as customer service/maintenance of their product. Now XX months into OS X 10.5 release, we've still to see any significant movement on their part to release/update their VPN software to run on the new OS.

So the holidays came, ate all my food, and are starting to pack before the arduous trip to the airport.

Bigish news items... First, it's 2008! For those of you not keeping track, take note as you write those first new years' checks/affidavits/confessions/etc.

When I last wrote about our car search, I mentioned that we were taking advantage of CityCarShare's easy hourly rentals to test drive some of the car models we were interested in. This saved us heaps of time that we would have WASTED at the car dealer, given all the tricks and psychological warfare tactics they use to break you down into a buyer.

Number of links to Deano.com from other sites: 28

Deano.com's place in searches for "Iran War Conspiracy": 28

Result of "I'm feeling lucky" search for 'deano, 28': THIS GUY.

'Nuff said?

I decided to try and get all my old content rolled back into the new site... Lacking good backups, I'm going to rely, for now, on the Internet Wayback Machine's snapshots of my old sites. We'll start, for now, back in 2003, and my first (and apparently only published) Netflix review of Cary Grant starring in Arsenic and Old Lace. Through the magic of Drupal date falsification, this can now be found in the site archive.

This comes along... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nJ-xoIziMmQ "A" for effort?

No sleaze, no smarm, no pressure... Just sign up for City CarShare, pick a vehicle, and go!

This past weekend, Yoko and I started what will no doubt be a loooong journey towards a new car. Actually, the trip started a ways back, with the unexpected news I haven't gotten around to mentioning yet. We've been hopping online, scoping the streets, and getting some occasional input from various "trustworthy" drivers...

No, it's not Flag Day. The little flags that are springing up everywhere on the site are merely geolocation indicators... And since I'm writing this blog from the best, nearly-murder-free city in the USA, that means a veritable bevy of US Flags will be appearing here, until I get sick enough of them and all they represent to turn the feature off, or tone it down a bit. Any opinions on where/when such a flag would be appropriate? Just in the comments?