Temple Run is a production of Imangi Studios. It is an endless running game. Gameplay begins with your character running from a temple while being chased by some type of demon creatures. From there your character runs endlessly. It’s up to you to tap, swipe, and tilt to avoid obstacles and collect coins and power-ups. As you build your stockpile of collected coins, you are soon able to use them to purchase enhancements to the game. It is the coin collecting that has made the game so addictive for me.

In-app purchases are available for users who want to purchase coins outright, but I don’t see any need to resort to that. I think that the amount of coins and cost of enhancements is paced perfectly to keep one coming back for more. You can eventually unlock everything you need by playing the game normally.

Temple Run gets my highest recommendation. It is one of the most fun mobile games I’ve ever played. It’s available on iOS, Android, and even Windows Phone. It’s ultra-addictive. Since I downloaded the game, I’ve played it hundreds of times. If you haven’t played it yet, you must. Did I mention it is FREE?

Fans of the game will be pleased to know that Temple Run 2 was released in early 2013. I have the sequel and have played it some. The graphics are more polished in the new game. It is still true to the original, but a tad more complex and sports a few different features. Both are great games, but I’m still perfecting my craft on the original, so I’m trying not to get lured in just yet by the flashy newness of Temple Run 2.

I didn’t arrive at this opinion overnight. I’ve listened to their albums from “Pablo Honey” up through “In Rainbows,” some several times. I’ve tried for years to find something about their unique sound that I can appreciate. It just isn’t there. With the exception of “Creep,” their best song by a million miles, the rest of their catalog is pure shit.

Based on that harsh assessment, I’m tempted to consider Radiohead to be a one hit wonder. Creep is the only song that warrants being played in public. Beyond Creep, I will say that the songs “Fake Plastic Trees” and “Karma Police” are pretty good, but those are the only exceptions I can make.

I can barely bring myself to refer to their recordings as music. Their recordings are nothing but noise, pure unpleasant noise. There is no musicianship to be found in any of their songs beyond the two that I mentioned above. It’s as though the band members tripped over a pile of instruments, looped that recording, and put it out as an album. I am quite serious.

The lead singer of the band, Thom Yorke, has a singing style that amounts to nothing but indecipherable whining. I can’t understand a word he is saying. Every song is a four minute whine over a backdrop of ear grating noise. Also, pardon me for being so petty, but the name Thom? It has no impact on their music, but the name Thom makes my eyes roll.

I acknowledge that there will be a lot of people who wholeheartedly disagree with my opinion, my cousin Kevin among them. That is fine. Radiohead obviously has a large fan base, though I really don’t understand how or why. Personally, I find it baffling that they were rewarded a recording contract in the first place.

This morning I browsed countless websites and archives of social media icon packs. The creativity and design of the icons I found are all astonishingly good. People have clearly put a lot of hard work and detail into creating them. I applaud them.

The problem is, not a single one of them fully has what I need. Not one icon pack that I’ve found contains icons for both Instagram and Foursquare. Barely any carry an Instagram icon, for some odd reason. And I cannot find a single icon pack with a Foursquare icon. Why is that? I find that puzzling, since some of the most recent icon packs still provide icons for antiquated networks like FriendFeed or Google Buzz. I see no reason to include those this day in age. Even huge icon packs containing 60+ icons have no offering for Instagram or Foursquare. I find this completely unacceptable.

I suppose that for now I will have to continue rocking the icons that I’ve had on my Links page for years. It isn’t possible to mix and match different icon sets to represent the networks that I want. That wouldn’t be uniform, and it would look ridiculous. I challenge someone to create a slick icon pack that actually has the services that I want!

Tomorrow morning, March 10 2013, we move the clocks ahead one hour. This is a perfect opportunity to inform all of you about a White House petition to end DST.

If you don’t already know, the White House has a website for citizens to create and sign petitions that people want the government to act on. The number of signatures required to invoke an official response to any petition is currently 100,000. There have been several silly petitions that people have created in the recent past, but I hope that this one will be taken seriously. I truly believe that the time has come to put an end to this practice. If you agree, visit the petition and add your signature!

In addition, I’m embedding a terrific video that explains in great detail all of the ins, outs, and absurdities of Daylight Saving Time. (Yes, the word “saving” in DST is not actually plural.)

PART 3

After 23 days in waiting, I finally received my Windows 8 Pro install disc in the mail this past weekend. Actually, the package contained two discs, one DVD for 32-bit and another for 64-bit. I created a new 80 GB partition on my computer and installed Win8 64-bit. It installed in very little time, only taking about 10-15 minutes for the whole thing. That part was easy. I went about the business of getting it updated and activated before I attempted to install Battlefield 3.

Windows Update ran and found 22 important updates, totaling 324 MB. After it attempted to install those, it said that the updates failed and it rebooted and reverted the system changes. I cringed. I don’t know what that was about. After that snafu, I went to Windows Update in the control panel and manually selected various updates in small chunks. All of them installed without issue. Odd.

I then tried activating Windows with my product number and it wouldn’t let me. I was not surprised by this. I had read online that activation only works when you are upgrading in place, not creating a clean install. That is ridiculous and all part of Microsoft’s annoying upgrade pricing, but this is well documented. I soon discovered that I could change a small value in the system registry and it would activate. It did. Whew. You can find a link to those instructions here.

My Windows 8 install experience was fine, barring the complications I just mentioned. I have not experienced any system crash like I did when I installed my last copy. This time, I immediately installed the Apple Boot Camp driver package to avoid any driver-related failures. (More on those lackluster drivers later.)

Now I come to the rough part — I installed Battlefield. After two install DVDs and a long time later, the game was on my system. The game had a slew of updates that were required after install. The download package was a whopping 7 GB. That took a while. After it installed all of the updates, it then wanted to download the expansion packs that have come since the original game was released. Those expansion packs contain a lot of map data. They totaled another 7 GB that I had to download. Again, that took a while. All in all, I had to download over 14 GB of data to have a complete install of this game.

Battlefield was able to run, but when it reached the game deployment screen, it gave me a nasty message about my graphics driver not being current enough. I wasn’t able to proceed. I could see the game menu but my mouse and keyboard could do nothing to make it go. I fiddled with this for quite a long time.

I set out to get new drivers for my graphics card. My computer is an iMac and the card is an AMD Radeon HD 6750. (AMD bought ATI a while back.) Apple provides drivers for the hardware on Windows via it’s Boot Camp software. That is all good and well, but the latest version of it doesn’t support Windows 8. It uses Win7 drivers for everything, which seem to work fine (at least on the surface.) I had no issues with the graphics display in Windows itself, but Battlefield wouldn’t tolerate it.

Here comes the rub, and the bulk of my problems. I went to AMD’s website and tried to download drivers that should work. They didn’t. I think Apple has done something to the hardware to mask it somehow. The AMD detection software (running on Windows) was not able to determine my graphics card. Hence, it wouldn’t provide me with a driver. The best I could do was use a Microsoft driver for my card that was as current as June 2012. That’s nice, but Battlefield still said it wasn’t good enough. I then found a way to download AMD drivers for my card elsewhere on the web. But when I went to update the driver in the system device manager, Windows reported it was not compatible with Windows 8 and it aborted every time. After countless hours of wrangling, I gave up and threw in the towel. I’d had enough!

I went for a long bike ride. After several hours away from my problem, I sat back down and tinkered with it again. I ended up reading user forums online for an hour and a half on issues similar to what I was experiencing. I found a guy who had the exact same problem with the same computer as mine. Someone had provided him with a link to the specific AMD driver that was needed to make it work. I tried it myself and lo and behold, it worked. It freakin’ worked! Windows 8 accepted it as valid, as did Battlefield.

The number of hoops I’ve had to jump through to play this game is absurd. I would never have done this from the start if I had known what I was in for. I’m almost tempted to advise everyone that if you want a hassle-free gaming experience, stick with Playstation and Xbox. PC gaming isn’t for the faint of heart.

My biggest concern about running Battlefield on Win8 is that I’ve read mixed reviews on the gaming performance. People have reported lagging and memory leaks. Fortunately, I have not experienced any of those problems. I’ve played the game twice on Win8 and it seems to perform better than it did on Win7. That is probably due largely in part that it is able to make use of my full amount of installed RAM. At any rate, I can say that in my usage, game performance has not been a problem. It’s a miracle.

As for my early reaction to Windows 8 itself, I’ll say that it is pretty nice. The interface is something I could get used to in time. I’m only going to use it for games, so I’m not installing any programs on it, not even Dropbox or an anti-virus. It is strictly for games and I want it to run at maximum speed. Having said that, I couldn’t help but feel compelled to delve into the tiled Start screen and customize things. It has potential. I’ve only had it for a few days so I’m not going to write any more about the operating system itself until I’ve had some time to experiment with it more.

I want to give a plug to Paul Thurrott’s website called WinSuperSite.com. He really knows his stuff. He also hosts a weekly podcast called Windows Weekly on Leo Laporte’s TWiT network. Everything you need to know about upgrading and installing Windows can be found on Paul’s site. I only wish I had read it before I started this whole process. It would have saved me a lot of pain and hassle.

It has been 12 days since I wrote part 1.

I am so angry! I still have not received the Windows disc in the mail that I was promised, but they charged me shipping for it.

It has been almost two weeks since I communicated with the support rep. Tonight I started another online chat to chew them out, and guess what. I found out that they haven’t even mailed it! Its status is listed as “under review.” I bitched at the support tech. He said that since Windows 8 is so new, it is taking longer than normal to get the discs in the mail. I am pissed. I told him that if my disc isn’t put in the mail I will call them back and demand a refund. I was not nice to him. I have had it with this.

So far this whole debacle has been a waste of time, money, and effort.

PART 1

Backstory:

I have a desktop iMac computer, 2011 model. I have been dual-booting into Windows so I can play PC games (mainly Battlefield 3). Windows XP doesn’t have drivers for my Mac hardware, so Windows 7 or higher is required to dual-boot via BootCamp. My copy of Win7 is a paltry 32-bit, so it can only see 2 GB of my 12 GB of installed RAM. How Battlefield even runs on 2 GB of memory is a mystery to me. It has to be maxed out.

Through the end of January, Microsoft was offering Windows 8 Pro for only $39. I decided to jump on it and I bought it. I figured I owed them that much for using borrowed copies of Windows in years past. Plus, I need a 64-bit Windows OS to power my gaming needs. I didn’t particularly want Windows 8, but the sale offered a cheap long-term solution and I bought it.

Issue:

Here’s the rub. In order to purchase and download Windows 8, you must first run an upgrade advisor program on a Windows machine. I did that from my Win7 OS and purchased the program via download.

I then erased my Windows partition and created a new, larger one from scratch. I completed the OS installation, only to find out afterward that my shiny new Windows 8 is also 32-bit. I was furious.

I began to read up on the matter and it turns out that you aren’t allowed to upgrade to 64-bit if you run 32-bit currently. It’s not allowed under “upgrade” pricing. At no point was I told this or warned what I was actually buying. I felt like I was ripped off.

On top of that alarming discovery, while I was setting up Windows 8 and tinkering with settings, the entire OS crashed on me and required a hard restart. I fumed.

I began an online chat with Microsoft live support and asked for a refund. To fulfill that request, I was told that I had to call Microsoft support on the phone. I called them and was on hold for about 10 minutes. I spoke to a rather pleasant woman and I explained everything to her and that the product I paid for is worthless to me and that I don’t want it. She asked if she could put me on hold for a few minutes while she worked out a solution to try keep me as a customer.

She came back on the line and told me that if would satisfy me, Microsoft will mail me a physical DVD with 64-bit Windows 8 Pro to my house. I had not expected the offer and I accepted. I had to pay shipping on the disc.

I went on to tell the support rep that Windows 8 should never have been made as a 32-bit OS to begin with, and that these days 32-bit OSes are finished. She replied, “I see.” Well, what could she say, it really isn’t her problem. I just wanted to vent. I did ask her if they’d received a lot of support calls over this upgrade matter. She chuckled and said they had.

I’m not yet jumping for joy over this. I’m still curious how this is going to perform and whether Battlefield will play nicely in Windows 8 (online performance reports differ.)

As for the unexpected Windows crash: In hindsight, I think the system crash was driver related. I had not installed the Apple driver package for Windows that puts all the correct drivers in place for the system. Out of the box, Windows liked my Logitech mouse, MS keyboard, HP printer, and D-Link USB hub, but it scoffed at some of my computer internals such as the Bluetooth receiver, iSight webcam, and others. Once I installed the Apple-issued Windows driver package for the hardware, it appeared to function correctly. Truth be told, I’d be hard pressed to tell you what components are powering this machine.

We shall see what comes once I get the DVD, which should take 3-5 days shipping. Ugg! Then I have to delete my Win partition and start all over again from scratch. What a headache.

All of this to play a damn game. In the end, it had better be worth it.

Let me state that blue toothpaste is gross. It makes a mess. It gunks up my toothbrush. It doesn’t rinse out well. It tastes bad. And worst of all, it makes me thirsty. I once even tweeted, “I don’t understand how blue toothpaste is supposed to make my teeth any whiter.”

I want the manufacturers to add a small clear plastic window on the tube so that customers can see what they are buying before they leave the store.

I’m a Colgate fan, myself. Their toothpaste varieties are always creamy white and refreshing. The paste is gentle, tasteful, and feels designed for my teeth.

The worst toothpaste I’ve encountered recently was Crest Pro Health smooth mint. The paste was a strange teal color and tasted absolutely horrible. It tasted more like burnt cinnamon than mint. It was so bad that I threw most of it away. I have nothing against Crest’s products, but that particular tube was horrible.

My advice to toothpaste makers: Keep it simple. Sell a single product that is white, malleable, and refreshing. And most importantly, clearly identify what is inside the tube you are selling. You’ll make your customers very happy.

Through the end of the month, Microsoft is selling Windows 8 Pro for $40 (I guess to convince people to buy it.) I was thinking I could perhaps get that and use it. My Windows partition is maxed out right now anyway, so I could bear blowing it away and starting over.

Unfortunately, I’ve read lots of reports of Battlefield not working right under Win8. People have reported memory leaks and game stuttering. I’ll have to hold off if that’s the case. I haven’t seen any official response from EA about it. I don’t know why they haven’t released an update for these issues.

Anyway, it turns out that MS lets you download Win8 freely as a 90-day trial. I found that link here. I downloaded it this morning and installed it as a virtual machine in VirtualBox, just to play around with it. That isn’t going to let me run Battlefield, of course, but I thought I’d tinker around with the OS and see what’s up. I only allocated 3 GB of memory to the virtual machine, as you can see in the screenshot.

So far I’m not sure what I think of the whole tiled Start screen side of the system. Perhaps once I customize the tiles more it will grow on me. Still, I’d prefer the OS to boot straight to the desktop.

There was an opening act that was an AC/DC cover band. It was hard rock all night. They went on stage at 9 PM, then Zoso came on at 10. They played for three hours until 1 AM without stopping. It was ear-splittingly loud where we were standing. The band put on an amazing show. The lead singer sounds exactly like Robert Plant. The guitarists and drummer were unbelievably good. Tickets were $12, but this group is worth way more than that.

I really wanted to hear them play Misty Mountain Hop, which is my favorite Led Zeppelin song. They didn’t play it, but I wasn’t disappointed. They delivered a solid setlist in their long show.

All ages were present. I was surprised at how many young people (under 21) were there. After all, Led Zeppelin is known for their 70s rock. It’s good to see young people appreciating the classics.

I took the picture below. I was pleased that I didn’t see too many people holding up phones and cameras during the show. That stuff gets annoying. I didn’t see much of that at all. The crowd was busy rocking and cheering.