NES

Any '80s child should immediately associate those letters with the Nintendo Entertainment System.  In the spirit of the Easter season, I did a little bit of messing with my computer because I wanted to play one of my all-time favorites, The Legend of Zelda.  It was surprisingly easy, and unsurprisingly awesome.

We've now got my MacBook with PS3 controllers running about 25 NES games in our office.  And the awesomest part?  The young guys here totally suck at old-school games.  Us "old guys" blame it on the everyone-gets-a-trophy upbringing.  Recent games baby you through, gradually teaching you to play and letting you save progress every five seconds.  Old-school games, not so much; if you suck, you start all the way over at the beginning of the level.  If you suck three times, game over.  Pass the controller.

...up, up, down, down, left, right, left, right, B, A, select, start.

AKs and News Stories

So today we got to head out to good ol' Panjwai to say hello to some friends and fire off a few rounds.  We brought with us some of our security personnel and they were generous enough to allow us to fire their AK-47s.  It was pretty awesome and a nice change of pace from my M4.  Hopefully I can mooch some pics from it.

Also, this NATO video is very interesting (though I may be biased since it was mostly filmed at our little compound):

http://youtu.be/3ZSKk6HwvgE

Living Acrosque from the Mosque

So I recorded some of the local mullah's singing today in hopes of posting the song for all to hear.  Since I don't know how to post just music, I mated the music to some photos I snapped of the surrounding area.   Sorry about the crappy quality of the photos in the video.  I had to compress it to make it uploadable from here and that made the pictures pretty bad.  Anyway, the sound is still there so I guess I met the original intent.

Back in Force!

The blog is back!

Not that I have the need to go retro or to buck the trend, but since I've been in Afghanistan I've been checking facebook much more frequently.  I chalk that up to racking up a lot of desk time here and not having a lot of interesting options for my many mini-breaks.

So as it tuns out, I've lost interest on most things facebook.  Maybe because it feels like a popularity contest.  Maybe it's that the majority of my 200+ friends would never even think to try to contact me directly.  Maybe I'm just tired of seeing that grumpy cat or whatever the meme pic of the week is.  I don't know.  I just know I'm annoyed whenever I get on the facebook.

So here it is, the first post in a year for the legions of readers.  Once I figure out what all the squiggly Pashto/Dari/whatever words on my Afghan internet mean, I'll be able to add some action-packed photos.  Stay tuned!