I’ve been an Apple user since the 80s, and have kept up with most of their products to date, including the iPhone. And as much as I also learned to love and hate PCs and other platforms, I never once tried out an Android product.

I had some money left over from Christmas, and I had begun to grow a nest fund to eventually purchase an iPad, but the strong reviews and sales of the Google Nexus 7 piqued my interest enough that I sent away for the tablet, sight unseen, and the move was not disappointing in the least.

The 7-inch screen is the ideal size for a portable device, the slick design (or lack thereof) is very reminiscent of the iPad, yes, but I don’t know how else you could make a tablet look once you take away all the unneeded parts… the back, however, is a gray rubber pad that makes it easy to grip and forgiving enough to place on a crowded desk.

The quad-core Tegra 4 processor  makes navigating the tablet quite a pleasure, and its accessibility to Google Apps gives me full access to all my online docs and apps, as well as my iTunes collection (synced with Google Music) and pretty much everything else I store in the cloud.

With a price tag of $200 for the 8 gig model, the top-notch performance of the Nexus 7 makes it a real rival for the current selection of iPads — definitely superior to any Android tablets I have seen or read about.

Picked up from Bre Pettis.

1. There are three states of being. Not knowing, action and completion.
2. Accept that everything is a draft. It helps to get it done.
3. There is no editing stage.
4. Pretending you know what you’re doing is almost the same as knowing what you are doing, so just accept that you know what you’re doing even if you don’t and do it.
5. Banish procrastination. If you wait more than a week to get an idea done, abandon it.
6. The point of being done is not to finish but to get other things done.
7. Once you’re done you can throw it away.
8. Laugh at perfection. It’s boring and keeps you from being done.
9. People without dirty hands are wrong. Doing something makes you right.
10. Failure counts as done. So do mistakes.
11. Destruction is a variant of done.
12. If you have an idea and publish it on the internet, that counts as a ghost of done.
13. Done is the engine of more.

And the poster, taken from spatulated, on Flickr:

Did you get the free Atari app for your iPhone a couple of days ago? I would have posted about it, but my server had some unexpected problem. Every single classic Atari game — coin-op and VCS — for nothing!

EDIT June 29, 2012 10 pm: It’s still free on iTunes:

http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/ataris-greatest-hits/id422966028?mt=8

My favorite, Adventure:

I clearly remember picking out this magazine from the rack and shelling out the three bucks it cost. A bit pricey for those days (1981, 82?) but I definitely got my money’s worth. I must have read it dozens upon dozens of times:

I loaned it to friends, got it back, kept it in my locker, in my parent’s car, in the living room, in the kitchen, and literally carried it with my like a four-year-old carries a security blanket. During its first year of publication, Electronic Games magazine told and retold the history of video games (about 10-15 years worth at that time) over and over again, and soon enough I was an authority on everything in cyberentertainment.

Those were the days.

[ Electronic Games PDF ripped from archive.org ]

EDIT: This being the early days of computer geekdom, this mag had a couple of pages that could put you ahead of the curve in computer knowledge, which was basically non-existent. A little information went a long way back then, and soon enough a select group knew more about “computers” than any of the teachers in my school. Really, ANY of the teachers.

I’ve reconstructed the site as a WordPress blog and so far I’m pleased with the results. I’m building upon an existing theme, Journalist, which I previously used in an earlier install of WordPress, and have mimicked the old site without too many complications. It helps that Journalist is a simple, elegant, bare-bones design. I was able to easily adapt the existing CSS and use the same graphic elements without any problems.

As the class continues, I hope to rebuild the theme from scratch, and then build a new original theme.