The waiting room at my kids’ Kumon school has free wi-fi, and many parents bring their laptops to pass the time. Yesterday there were one MacBook, one MacBook Air, three Dell Inspirons with work bar codes on them (lots of Dell employees in Austin, of course), and one Toshiba. I felt a bit old fashioned since I was just reading a book. On a related note, I did see someone reading from her Sony Reader at lunch. It was pretty neat.

A few weeks ago, with the help of my friend Tony, I started to get interested in the new MMO, Age of Conan. Since it wasn’t out yet, I decided to start re-reading the Conan stories by Robert E. Howard. I first got a used copy of the Ace Fantasy “Conan”, which features some great stories, including The Tower of the Elephant and The Thing in the Crypt. The beginning of the movie Conan the Barbarian, where Conan is being chased by wolves, then falls into the cave and finds the sword, is loosely based on The Thing in the Crypt. The original story is much better, of course, since (spoiler alert!) Conan not only finds the sword, but the skeleton of the sword’s previous owner comes to life and he and Conan have a classic fight scene. I haven’t read all the stories in this paperback, but keep it in my camera bag for times when I have a few free moments.

Last week I picked up The Coming of Conan the Cimmerian, which is a larger compilation of early Conan stories, written by Robert E. Howard himself. Many Conan stories were written by other Fantasy authors, and supposedly many of them were pretty bad, so I felt good reading these original stories. Howard’s writing is straightforward and refreshing, getting right to the meat of the stories. And the stories are great! There’s tons of action, of course, but the settings and characters are so fantastic. The world that Conan lives in is brutal and savage, filled with warriors, thieves, and sorcerers, all wanting wealth and power. Conan is no different. In some stories, he is a simple thief, in others he is a fugitive, and in others, he is King Conan of Aquilonia. The stories are not in chronological order, and Howard didn’t write them as a Conan biography. He wrote them in the same manner as someone would retell parts of his or her own life, taking stories from here and there. It’s actually pretty cool to read them in this way. Although Conan’s status changes, his basic outlook and determination is constant.

Now that the Age of Conan game is out, we have been playing it a bit, and I think it is a great MMO. The graphics are really awesome! A nice change from the cartoony WoW style (which I like too). I have just left the starter town of Tortage, and traveled to the cities of Old Tarantia and Khemi. They really capture the feeling of the books. I read that the people who created the game did a lot of research into the Conan stories, and it really shows. I had read a passage the other night about how the city of Khemi looks, and when I visited the game version, it was spot on. Besides the overall atmosphere, the combat in the game matches the brutality of the books. Age of Conan is the first major MMO to receive an M (mature) rating, for its gore and nudity. There really is a lot of blood being spilled in combat, and occasionally your character will pull of a “fatality” move, where your opponent dies a fantastic death, sometime with his head flying off. It’s really kind of cool. (There is a setting to turn off the excessive gore and nudity, if you want) My main character is a ranger, whose main ability is archery, but also has some cool melee skills. It’s a really good game, but of course as an MMO, you gotta be careful not to play too much!

By the way, I am a huge fan of the first Conan movie, which I feel is a classic. It also captured the feel of the Robert E. Howard stories quite well. One thing that I noticed is that the archery in the game feels very much like Subotai’s archery in the movie. I like that.

If you are into Fantasy novels at all, I totally recommend picking up a Conan paperback. It may seem a little cliché, but Conan is one of the true originals of the genre. It’s kind a strange to think that these stories were written back in the 1930’s because they are still so fresh! And Robert E. Howard lived in the Hill Country of Texas, by the way. In fact, his vision of Cimmeria (Conan’s homeland) was largely based off of the Hill Country landscape. The biggest difference is that Conan’s Cimmeria was frozen, while the Texas Hill Country gets super-hot!

Nintendo’s Wiiware was just released, and the launch includes some cool games. Lost Winds look particularly fun!

We got Mario Kart for the Wii a few days ago and have been having a blast playing. It’s so much fun. The online portion is the best part of the game for me. It’s cool to be racing against people from all over the world. I’d still learning how to race better, but it’s still a blast even when I lose. We’ve been using the special wheel to control the cars and motorcycles, but I did use the old Wavebird when we had a 4-person multiplayer race going. It seemed a bit easier, but you don’t get the cool (at least I think it’s cool) wheel icon next to your screen name if you don’t use the wheel.

Mario Kart Wii has a lot of different vehicles to choose from. There are carts, souped up racers, dirt bikes, sport bikes, scooters, choppers, even stroller-cars! It’s so fun to race using different cars. The animations are really neat too. For instance, when you throw an item out of the stroller-car, the top canopy opens up and the shell flies out. Also, when you do a mid-air trick while on the bike, he does a moto-x style move. I tend to use the motorcycles more than the cars because the drifting animation is awesome-looking. Especially the Sugar Scooter, which looks like a modified Vespa. It’s very cool. And the racing outfits of the motorbike riders are really neat. I mean, look how cool Peach looks in racing leathers in the graphic above!

Mariko was telling me a couple neat things about Mario games that I didn’t know before. First, the name “Luigi” is the same as the Japanese word “ruiji” which means “similar”, which is a nice pun since he is similar to Mario. And secondly, by combining the name “Mario” and the Japanese word for bad, “warui”, the character Wario was born.

Mario Kart is really a great game, especially playing against others either online or multi-player. I definitely recommend this if you have a Wii. If anyone wants to exchange Mario Kart or Wii friend codes, just drop me a line! (barron @ the url of this site)

Check out my muxtape at barron.muxtape.com! Hopefully muxtape will survive for a while before the legal eagles swoop in.

An excerpt from an IM about the M-Rated “Age of Conan” MMORPG coming up:

(4:18:16 PM) barron: no preorder for me. screw the mammoth!

(4:18:20 PM) barron: oh, that sounded bad

(4:18:41 PM) Lopan: hahaha indeed. and it is probably possible

(4:18:55 PM) barron: OMG

(4:19:00 PM) barron: mammoth nipples

(4:19:09 PM) Lopan: udderly ridiculous

(4:19:38 PM) barron: /groan

(4:19:51 PM) Lopan: thank you ladies and germs. i’ll be here all week

Following Randomguru’s lead, I added Gravatar support to my site comments. So, if you have a Gravatar, it will show up next to your comment. If you don’t have a Gravatar yet, you can sign up (free) at www.gravatar.com. Enjoy, won’t you?

One totally convenient thing in Vista is the way that it handles copying files. Specifically, if you are copying a file to a location that already has a file with the same name, Vista will ask you if you want to either “Copy and Replace” the file, “Don’t copy” the file, or “Copy, but keep both files”. You can also of course select Cancel. But the huge change is that there is now a checkbox that asks if you want use the same choice for the rest of the files pending copy (and it lets you know how many files are in conflict). This is so convenient for me when I am copying photos between camera and computer, or from computer to computer. For instance, I will copy several days’ worth of photos to the computer. But then I keep on taking photos with the camera for the next few days, without ever deleting the previous photos. When I next copy the pics from the camera to the computer, I can just select all of them, then select copy, and then choose the “Skip files” option with checkbox to do the same to the remaining files. In Windows XP, you had the option to Skip a file, but you couldn’t tell XP to do the same action for all duplicates in that batch. I actually searched (albeit not too hard) for a utility that would do this. So it was a pleasant surprise when I saw the new, improved Copy File dialog box pop up in Vista. All-in-all, Vista is a really nice OS. I am enjoying it quite a bit.

I’ve been reading (an enjoying) Jerry Pournelle’s Chaos Manor Reviews and I like the way he names his computers. His newest is a Macbook Air which he named Khaos, the Greek goddess of air. It got me wanting to give names to my computers, of which I have three: my new HP desktop, my Dell laptop running Ubuntu, and my iBook. Long ago (mid 90’s) I named my mac that I had at work. I can’t remember what it was with 100% certainty, but I think it’s name was “Death Star”.

I like the names from Greek and Roman mythology a lot. I have decided to name the iBook “Echo”, but I don’t know what to name the other two. I am thinking maybe Medusa, Nemesis, or something along those lines. I just can’t decide. But it will certainly be more interesting that “Barron-Vista” and “Barron-Ubuntu”.