And now for something completely different.

I grew up on an Apple IIgs. I must have been six or seven years old when my father bought it for our family. I remember spending my computer time learning how to use a mouse with some pretty addictive games — and then there was Bolo.

The Apple IIgs days were pretty exciting, but they didn’t leave a lasting impression on me. For about 18 years, I completely forgot about what I did on the Apple II (and my favorite game Bolo, including the title of the game) until the game screen flashed into my head this past weekend. I was determined to find that game to relive my childhood.

My efforts asking peers were fruitless. Not many people were using computers at all in the 80s. The revolution began in the 90s when computers were deemed to be useful tools for every home.

I searched and searched, and thanks to Webomatica, I found out the name of the game and took it from there. I can’t believe there are emulators for this — but I guess there’s nothing to do now that the Apple II has been replaced by bigger, better, and more powerful machines.

Occasionally, I’ll post a little more when the hype dies down. Earlier this week, Firefox 2.0 was released (following the release of Microsoft Internet Explorer 7.0), and while I’ve upgraded both versions, I’m still getting acquainted enough with the new interface and don’t simply want to reiterate what others have been saying.

First Impressions

I have about 15 extensions, all of which I will highlight in a later post, and all except two or three (Spellbound Development being one of these — but that was understandable — more on this later) worked right out of the box.

The graphical user interface was not much different than Firefox 1.5, which has made me wonder why it was an official “2.0″ release rather than 1.6. I suppose it is due to the new features that became easily noticed: the “X” on individual tabs and inline spellcheck (this is why Spellbound was no longer needed).

I must say that I was initially frustrated by the presence of so many “X”s on the tabs, but within a day, I was using FF 1.5 on another computer and began longing for the ability to close the tabs right on the tabs — this forced me to upgrade all of my computers to 2.0, and I haven’t regretted it.

Following the ability to screenshot your website on a plethora of browsers, I’ve stumbled upon another useful utility that will enable you to install multiple versions of MSIE on a single Windows computer. This application, by TredoSoft, comes in handy for the heavy developer whose audience is predominantly stuck in an IE world (we all know the not-so-tech-savvy people are!)

Check out this useful free utility that contains IE versions 3.0, 4.01, 5.01, 5.5, and 6.0 — but note that there are a few bugs that have been reported, such as unexpected crashes.

[Via Cartoon Barry. Thanks Barry!]