Free rice

A while back, somebody pointed me at Free Rice, which is a website created by the people who created The Hunger Site. The idea is this: every time you guess the correct meaning of a word, the Free Rice site donates 20 grains of rice through the United Nations. This allows you to simultaneously achieve two worthwhile goals: feed the hungry, and waste productive time at work.

And, totally unrelated to the above: Joe Posnanski is rapidly becoming my favourite Internet baseball writer.

Fresh, healthy winter air

It’s clear and cold as I write this: it’s -12C outside, which is cold by Toronto standards. One thing I noticed while I was briefly outside: the air is always fresher and cleaner when it’s cold out. I assume that this is because it’s coming from the north and is uncontaminated by urban pollutants. For whatever reason, it was extremely refreshing.

Of course, like all good Canadians, I quickly retreated back inside, where it’s warmer.

Lately, I’ve become addicted to two things. One of them is updating my Flickr photo site. If you pay up and become a “pro” member, they give you unlimited storage for your pictures. So I’m busy uploading larger versions of each of my pictures, whenever possible. Since I have 264 of them, this is taking some time. But I’m gritting my teeth and getting it done.

My other addiction is to Nethack, which is an old, old adventure-style game. In this game, you are represented by the @ character, and you go wandering through a variety of rooms and hallways. Along the way, you encounter various monsters, represented by letters of the alphabet. For example, “a” can refer to a giant ant, a killer bee, a soldier ant, or any of a variety of assorted enemies, depending on the colour of the “a”.

I’ve gotten into this game because it requires strategic thinking and because it is so damn hard. I usually only get about six levels down before I get killed by something really unpleasant, often without warning. Thankfully, Nethack comes with an explore mode, which allows you to automatically regenerate yourself when you die. I want to use this mode to get all the way through the game, just to see what happens. I want the Amulet of Yendor, and I want it now!

As you can guess, I am a games geek, and have been for years. Every now and again, I go through another burst of Civilization III addiction (the last was this summer). And I’ve never bought a games console, because I’m afraid to: I spend way too much time at home on my computer as it is. If I bought a Wii or a PlayStation, I’d probably never leave my apartment, and I would eventually die bitter and alone. This is not good.

So Hillary Clinton is running for president, is she? This will be interesting, just to see what the right-wing cranks try to do to discredit her. (I can picture Ann Coulter accusing her of dining on freshly killed babies, or something like that.) I’m not sure whether she would make a good President, but she can’t help but be better than the guy currently holding the job. And she won’t have trouble finding somebody with experience in the position to give her advice if she needs it.