I typed up two fancy posts bright and early this morning when what to my wondering browser should appear - but an error code decrying some "call execute" failure. It pops up periodically, and has apparently nothing to do with Movable Type, instead a hiccup on the server side of things, possibly a result of high traffic.

So as my provision to you for nearly six hours of uBlog deprivation, a pleasant visual tribute to Hanna-Barbara near-classic Grapeape.

That's one sturdy van chassis, I've got to admit. Even if old Grape were of normal ape proportions - the DOT wouldn't have it, would they?

Uncanny what a fantastic phone call with a buddy on the other side of the country can do for the soul. I've kicked back this evening after hanging up; a little bit of (re)mixing, some blogskirting and now - to the soothing Eighties throb of A-ha's Hunting High and Low - I'm crooning pseudo-countertenor while engaging in my occasional inspection of site visitors.

A really interesting activity: my server logs various IP addresses and, when curiousity gets the best of me, I slip them into the Visual Route Server tracker, release the dogs and discover the origin. My friends and I are the easiest to spot: we've hit the site in double digits over the course of a week.

But there are literally hundreds more addresses. Now, I realize that quite a few are webcrawlers and spiders, though certainly not all of them.

Which piques my curiousity even more, tweaking it like the wine-wet rim of a crystal goblet and setting off a sonorant ringing. Yes, indeed - as poetic as it is incessant.

Who's from Dallas? Or Japan? New York City? The City of Angels besides the two friends I have accounted for? I don't deserve a prize for guessing which blips are from Mount Holyoke - but what about the ones from Syracuse? Rochester? Or Egypt? What appears to be a barracks in D.C.? D.C. proper?

One of my favorite pastimes during senior year of college was to perch in a window of my fourth-floor, rotunda painting studio and face the quad - a huge, grass-and-sidewalk courtyard surrounded by Syracuse's finest architecture. When class changes between the various disciplines coincided, a mass of students would walk hither and thither, to and fro. I'd people-watch for a bit, then hop back down and dip my brush for another round of impasto or glazing.

People are watching - reading - me, now. And I'm curious. Very curious. Ahoy! Ahoy - who's out there?

One of my happiest memories from early college is a gaggle of us in the Link Hall Apple computer cluster, commandeering a trio of units and installing Warcraft II: Tides of Darkness for which to play the highly entertaining, exquisitely designed real-time strategy game of fantasy battle. A cross between Sim City and Sun Tzu's Ancient Art of War - with a dash of Mario World goofy humor - the game was a race to build up a medieval war machine; expanding, across a varied landscape, as necessary to support your hordes of men, magic and siege engines and smash your opponents. Players could choose humans or Tolkien-style orcs. Game units, from lowly peasants and peons to paladins and ogres, would respond in character to a player's clicks and subsequent commands. "Annoyed" responses - a Blizzard trademark - were really what set the game aesthetic apart. Imagine a husky, burly, cold-blooded orc animation who would growl, after several user clicks, "Stop poking me!"

Really, from the name you'd assume the craft of war or some such direct translation: the game was like costume-party rugby with sharp objects.

We played about five times over the course of two years. I always chose orcs, as did Jon. Kyle chose humans, presumably as an extension of his current "good guy" image. Danny, who'd been playing for the better part of a year, always played humans - and never failed to whip us up one side and down the other.

Devin, who bought the game for Apple, played about once. Well, multiplayer, anyway.

It was grand. The salad days of our underclassmen years at Syracuse University and here we were, among the e-mailers on their way to a party (or doing work, not uncommon on campus), playing a video game. We barely knew how to manage; strategies were spotty, games were unpredictable and half the time someone was discovering an obvious facet of gameplay we nevertheless missed in our rush to play. Far more laughs than guile.

Gradually, each of us recovered our lives. I stayed on the Blizzard bandwagon for Starcraft, deity to which I sacrificed a nominal amount of hours my junior year. Three years later, this past winter, curiousity snagged the better of me and I dropped five tens for Warcraft III: Reign of Chaos. Same fun game for a twenty-minute de-stressing, no doubt. Same funny creatures playing for-keeps rugby.

My friends and I were healthy about the whole affair. As with all computer affairs, the allure of Blizzard's games were galvanized by its creation of a gigantic, worldwide gaming system. All the calculator-fiddling weirdos from the Seven Seas could now battle one another - not for fun, mind you, but for win records. I attempted to play online with strangers a few times, quickly realizing that the whole point was nowhere near fun, but more in the general vicinity of animatronic, combative masturbation. Plus a whole load of mongoloid chatspeak, as if the couple of nine-year-olds who hammered me didn't know the keyboard better than the proverbial wife (incongruent analogy given the subjects). The most disturbing sight was during my senior year; the same room as freshman year, the computers having been replaced by off-white Dells. One lone Asian kid, pimply, diminutive. Earlier in the year, he'd been with about five pals playing Starcraft. Now he was alone, at the station in front of me, madly typing in a Blizzard chatroom.

Whats the matter, R you afraid of playing me? the pupa sociopath demanded of an unseen victim. The person capitulated, and played him, and he built all sorts of the same unit and sent said units straight to his opponent's base. Victory.

Yawn. Shiver.

Video games are my alcohol (Booze? What's the point?) and I consider myself a responsible "drinker": just one or two games for the taste.

I admire Blizzard. I fear most of its customers. I enjoy the nutty kitsch of the Orient. Cults are disturbing. So what to make of this:

Park Woe Shik is so serious about computer video games that he carries his personal keyboard and mouse wherever he goes, even on a three-day trip to Irvine this week from his home in Korea. Park, 18, was one of five professional video-game players visiting one of the meccas of computer gaming, Blizzard Entertainment, the Irvine developer behind the popular StarCraft and Warcraft titles. The latest - Warcraft III - was the third-best seller last year in the $1 billion-plus domestic computer-game market. But in Korea, the games are a cultural phenomenon.

Blizzard purportedly jumpstarted the South Korean economy. Professional gamers are celebrities. Since South Korea is several thousand miles away from me, including the breadth of an ocean, I've decided: I'll rejoice. Guardedly.

James Watson, co-identifier of DNA back in 1953, is trying to push the Gattaca game by blaming "stupidity," an adjective not necessarily describing definitive learning handicaps, on bum genes.

"Stupidity" has always been a fairly relative term: it's quite a mistake to attribute a lack of common sense to low cognitive abilities (if that's even how Watson intends the word to be understood). I know quite a few people who weren't college material who, while not in the intellectual realm for discussing theories and principles, are solidly capable of completing a lifelong series of reasoned decisions.

By the same token, I've seen veritable Mensa candidates who would most likely need parental supervision beyond the age of 45.

Watson tips his hand when, later on in the article, he remarks about how grand and ethically benign it would be to make all girls "beautiful"; as if there's a comeliness standard outside the horrid annals of the Jungmadelbund.

Confusing subjective preferences and kooky visions with speculative science is a reliable indication that a scientist may need to undertake the transition from laboratory to rest home.

In a couple of hundred years, a mammoth alien juggernaut will beset the spacebound human race; these invaders will be driven by their deity, "Pneer."

So long, Pioneer. Don't worry - we'll try to find you in several decades.

John Dvorak splits the Joe Millionaire atom by calling it a hoax.

He's right, of course: last week my buddies and I happened to flip it on before we watched Band of Brothers on DVD. Within three seconds I could tell by the predictability of subject interaction and facial expressions that the show was scripted. No girl, however mindless, is guileless enough to allow an onlooker - much less an army of cameras - catch her firing a singing glare at her rivals. And that's just for starters.

I watched about two minutes - not nearly enough to be able to write as tactile a review as Dvorak, but Good God, enough to realize how insulting to the intelligence television can be.

Wasn't so long ago that motherboard BIOS chips ceased to support 5 1/4" drives, was it? Onward, ever upward.

Yesterday, before the uBlog went to hell, I wrote about a Time article written by Gregg Easterbrooke precisely about the Space Shuttle: too expensive, antiquated, idiosyncratic; ultimately dangerous and not worth the nation's time. He made the points, but he obviously sees himself as an unheeded whistleblower - he recently spoke about the danger of the aging Columbia - and so his essay was littered with rhetorical rabbit-punches. He felt it necessary to break empty bottles of ripple over the alcoholic's head.

I'm more inclined to agree with both the position and presentation of Rand Simberg's piece in National Review. It's significantly shorter than Easterbrooke's on details - for instance, Easterbrooke's request that more time be spent learning the essentials of orbit and re-entry, lest we put the "cart before the horse" - but the scope is much clearer. NASA has gone too far without an objective that reflects the changing times. Novelty is gone; so is national greatness. Space travel is part and parcel to the technological development of mankind and, if you'll pardon the leap of faith, meeting others quite like us elsewhere in the cosmos, whose acquaintance will unimaginably broaden our perceptions of life, friend and foe.

NASA needs to check its compass much more than it needs to pretend to a ravenous Congress that spaceflight is perfectly harmless; men and women will always be integral to science, and risk never completely mitigated - but their sacrifices must be unquestionably justified.

Though this is my first blog on the subject, I would consider myself a well-versed amateur in the art of computer affairs. A short conversation during my senior year of college with a professor not much older than myself revealed the very distinct privilege I was given to have been the first generation able to associate my childhood with computers.

Santa finally - though not without a certain measure of humor - answered my years of requests for an Atari with a Radio Shack Tandy 1000 EX for Christmas 1986. Santa had written my sister and I a note, instructing us to snoop around the tree. Christmas and wide-eyed children being what they are, the glittery splendor of yet-wrapped presents managed to glutton-blind the two of us, effectively camouflaging a bright beige monitor and keyboard-drive unit set up on a dining room chair. After an embarrassing thirty seconds of Meg and I completely looking past the computer, then over it, behind it, and past it again, until soon on the verge of shrugging our shoulders and digging into the slightly more recognizable Christmas presents at the base of the tree, my father directed our attention to the space-age spectacle sitting right in front of our faces. He flipped the "on" switch and, MS-DOS startup disk in drive, the Tandy proceeded to run a batch file whose author was immediately apparent (in all caps, no less):

MERRY CHRISTMAS, MEG AND MIKE! I HOPE YOU LIKE THIS COMPUTER, MUCH BETTER THAN OLD ATARI!!!!!

BY THE WAY, WHERE ARE MY MILK AND COOKIES? NO MATTER, I NEED TO WATCH MY WEIGHT FOR MRS. C!

'TIL NEXT YEAR - S.C.

I love my father - er, Santa. Back in the days when the Shack was still attempting to sneak a living from the home computing gravy train, this knockoff of the PCJunior was the quintessential family computer. It was simple; nothing more than a typewriter-sized, keyboard-CPU-and-disk-drive composite piece attached to a monitor. The keyboard gave little action for your flying fingers; those bred on stiff Smith-Coronas would inevitably stuff a few unnecessary letters into every other word. The EX's John Bull heart was a 8086 chip was of the "Golly, it's a horseless carriage" generation which, for those who don't know, managed to put out a thundering 4 megahertz of processing power. Mass-produced models of the same price today deliver, of course, over one gigahertz. Files whose saving time we take for granted would involve at least ten times the wait back then, a user serenaded by the now-nostalgic gree-gronk, gree-gronk, gronk-gronk, gree; gree-gronk, gree-gronk of an accessing 5 1/4" magnetic floppy disk drive. My office computer's 3 1/2" drive emits a similarly antique groan when it operates. If I pay attention (during those times when I actually use it) I'm immediately brought back to 1986. Finally, the Tandy showed its IBM-clone-for-kiddies colors by boasting a three-channel sine/square/sawtooth sound module tied into a white-noise generator. Even for early games, the three channels could be utilized for full triad representation; by the early 1990s, music designers were squeezing entire orchestrations out of it.

With the computer my father had purchased a small assortment of entertainment and educational software; a handful of disks came along with the Tandy and Dad bought four more on his own, one for each family member. Mom, an impeccable typist but to this day a woman who fears computers much like homo-erectus feared fire, was given Typing Tutor. I opened up a copy of Fraction Fever, a representative of the sorts of games many of my generation were fooled into playing on Commodore 64 stations in elementary school. My sister was given King's Quest II: Romance of the Throne, sequel to the game by Sierra On-Line that defined a three-dimensional computer adventure, King's Quest: Quest for the Crown. My father, not to interrupt a string of classics, bought for himself the DIY-space-exploration extravaganza Starflight. I still remember him tearing off the paper and showing the rest of us the sleeve cover, a painting of a lithe little starship gracefully buzzing by the center of the composition, somewhere in the nameless cosmos.

We popped in Fundamentals EX, one of the bundled programs included with the Tandy. The family gathered around to be taught the basics of computer physiology via interactive, graphic presentation. Meg and I found particular joy in playing a maze game which, under the guise of teaching use of the numeric keypad, allowed participants to smack a stocky little mascot "John" into maze walls again and again and again and again. Tough little devil; he'd bump into the wall, fall flat on his backside and then dutifully stand right up for another go.

The Tandy served us well; King's Quest and Starflight provided months of entertainment - the latter an added benefit of sweaty palms when wandering through hostile territory, it was such a powerful game. Through chore-money, Christmas and the occasional lobby success, I saw added to the Tandy's complement games like Lode Runner, Pinball Construction Set, Earl Weaver Baseball, King's Quest IV, Starflight II, and Arcticfox. A collection of BBS-traded games found their way onto choc-a-bloc disks over the years as well, the glorious little time-wasters. I even learned - self-taught - a smattering of GW-Basic and managed to put together pieces of a lewd, prepubescent-male text adventure.

We upgraded the Tandy's memory; we turbocharged its CPU from sessile to ungodly slothfully slow; we added a second disk drive, as two times very little capacity or throughput is, of course, much more efficient.

By 1993, when finally time caught up with frugality and the Tandy could but pitifully handle even the most modest application or game, we replaced it with my father's hand-me-down 286 10MHz machine; to soon be replaced with a 486, eventually upgraded to a Pentium 166; to finally be supplanted by my old 300MHz Gateway buy.

But we've still got the Tandy; it sits in its original box in the basement. My father cleared out his fire-hazard back room in our basement last weekend and opened up a clear path to the Tandy's storage space. Although its main disk drive is iffy, the hunk of Neanderthal computer is still an unofficial family heirloom; God willing the strength of its silicon sinews, I'll be able to bring the antique out for children and grandchildren.

Or myself. There's really nothing like hearing "Greensleeves" played by a trio of sine wave generators.