waffle

So. Paul Thurrott - well-renowned/hated (pick one) Windows journalist phenomenon got his wife a Mac mini for christmas, and wrote it up in one of his many columns. The amazing thing isn’t that a Windows journalist gets his wife a Mac. (If you reckon that amazing, consider stepping out of the 20th century.) Paul has owned recent Macs before himself - Paul does many things, but compare an XP box to his proverbial old LC he doesn’t.

No, here’s what’s amazing. The comments section is a zoo. There are as usual trolls in both directions - someone suggesting that “fisher price” is the real brand for the mini, and lots of people wondering if the just-mentioned submitter had ever worked in Windows during the past five years.

I find it amazing that it’s almost 2006, and what we’re all going on are these old pictures on how “those other environments” are supposed to work.

A few years back, my family leased a grape iMac. We figured we’d put some good use to it, but it just sat there. We really did try to use it, but eventually no one used it for anything and we returned it. At this point, blue screens and all, my opinion was that Windows 98 was a lot better than Mac OS 8.5.1.

I don’t expect that a lot of people who are constantly trashing the Mac have even that much experience with it - or even that recent! As avid (or even casual) readers will know, I’m currently using a Mac as my primary work computer, even when using other OSes almost daily in the home. The platform I would not consider using as my primary one in 1999, I started using as my primary one in 2005. I don’t think that would have been possible if I didn’t try to keep myself updated in as many fields as possible.

Next year, Windows Vista will come out (stop laughing) and I’m going to try that. I still haven’t had a chance to try out Ubuntu Linux and that pains me, because it sounds really good. I’m not going to sit around isolated on one platform, telling myself how it’s the best and will stay the best forever. I’m going to keep dipping my toes in the water, and I invite others to do the same.

Thanks to the wonderiffic magic of the Interweb, I’ve found some rules of a card game long played inside the family but hardly known outside of it: Kings in the Corner. (Index of Card Games (exhaustive), Wikipedia (uh, less exhaustive).)

The rules are very close to our rules, but in the interest of listing our own rules - as additions to the Index of Card Games page - here they are:

• Each player get six cards dealt in the beginning.

• You must play all cards that you are able to play. If you discover later that you could play something earlier, you must play those cards, and you’ll be charged 5 penalty points per card.

• Complementing the previous rule, you must only draw a card from the stock if you’re unable to play any cards, and drawing is always done at the start of the turn.

• In accordance with the earlier two rules, if you draw a King, you must play it and draw a new card.

• The scoring is more tiered, with 2→9 being 5 points, 10 10 points, J→K 15 points and A 20 points.

I don’t care a whole lot for card games, but a nice round of Kings in the Corner have never failed me. And what better time to try it out than now, holidays and all?