For the past year, Nintendo's been telling everyone that they might not be able to get a Wii if they wait until Christmas.

A week ago, my friend Doug's experience trying to find one seemed to bear this out. He spent over a week looking for a Wii in anticipation of playing Super Mario Galaxy, but was unable to find one. Finally, he called a Gamestop right after they received a shipment and rushed over to pick one up during lunch. Now he plans to sell it at a mark up the day after Thanksgiving (when people will no doubt be the most desperate to get one for the kiddos), but may open it before then instead because the temptation is so great.

I seem to be in a kind of inexplicable financial rut, which I really don't understand. First off, I have a college degree and a job at a software company. Second off, my wife and I live in an apartment. Yet still, we seem unable to save any amount of money. It's seems like every damn day there's some bill or emergency item we need to procure that leaves us poorer by the next paycheck than we were before.

About a month ago, my wife's car would not turn on. Try as we might, we could not get the key to crank. We finally looked on line after two stressful hours and found people saying insane things like "hit the key with a hammer." To paraphrase what Bill Cosby once said, there are moments of desperation where you will give the ridiculous a try, and I'll admit I hit that I eventually hit that key hard enough to bend it 90 degrees. Though that action incurred no additional damage, the entire ignition had to be replaced. When we got to the shop, we also realized the brakes needed work, and by the time we got the car back we where almost $800 poorer and the question of which fun new videogame system to buy this Fall was no longer my highest concern.

A day after the car came back, my wife commuted to Texas State and back. The next day, while in town, she turned the ignition and the battery blew-up. We called the same tow company and took it back to the same shop. We picked it up the same day for just over $200.

I remember in the seventh grade, I had a job cleaning the small horse stables at my family's old house. I'd work about two and a half hours each weekday and make two dollars, for the lordly sum of $10 a week. For awhile we had this chick come during the weekends and clean in my place in exchange for boarding her horse there; she'd arrive early in the morning each day, which meant on Saturday there was almost nothing to do (since I'd cleaned it Friday evening) and by the time I got to it Monday evening, it was a mess and took me over three hours. When that girl finally got out of there and I made $14 a week, it seemed like a hell of an amount of cash to have on hand.

Getting back to the Wii: as I said in yesterday's post, Super Mario Galaxy came out this Monday and it kind of sucks I can't get the Wii to play it immediately. As you may have heard, Super Mario Sunshine - the last "real" Mario game, for the Gamecube - was probably the least popular Mario game ever made. To tell you how bad it was, when you finally got Yoshi, he was somehow made of fruit and had to constantly eat more fruit or he'd liquefy into fruit juice. He also dissolved into oblivion when making contact with water, which was an odd decision on the developers part since every level of Super Mario Sunshine took place on a tropical island. For other reasons as well, the game felt like a kind of a step-down from Super Mario 64. Well, it's been said that Mario Galaxy is the best Mario game since the original Mario 64 and feels like it's the authentic sequel we've been waiting for.

This is ironic, because back in the summer of 1996, when I was making slave wages shoveling manure, I somehow saved money like a miser and had more than enough on hand to buy not just the Nintendo 64, but Super Mario 64 along with it the day they both came out. I'm not sure what happened between now and then that's made me lose the ability to successfully save my money; maybe it's because I don't keep a legal notepad with the current tally always written down (just imagine hundreds of lines in the form of "[Today's Date] $2.00 [$current total]" with occasional aberrations like "Final Fantasy III -$70 [$current total]"). Either way, it's kind of been bugging me that, at least in the realm of videogame system ownership, I seemed to have regressed from where I was at thirteen.

So on Sunday, I went to the store to buy groceries. On the way there, I walked through Target and noticed they had two Wiis for sale. While my first thought was doubt regarding my friend Doug's and Reggie Fils Aimes' theory that the Wii would be scarce, I quickly subdued them so I could instead focus on how I might be able to buy a Wii by using the possibility of selling it as justification.

I walked outside and called Amber on my cell-phone. For reasons I won't get into, my current cell-phone is six years old. Back when the screen worked, it was just a plain monochrome LCD with a blue light behind it. That said, it's skinny and it's worked quite well for years. Halfway through my conversation with Amber, it cut out. When I tried to call back, I came to the realization the phone had seen it's last useful day.

Damn, I thought, and went to the grocery store to buy a surprisingly expensive five bags of groceries, which included such things as fresh milk and cheese.

Then, as I drove the green sparrow (my nick-name for my wife's car) home, I noticed that my pick up and go had got up and went. I was in the fast lane, because that's where I needed to be at an intersection ahead, but for some people 40 miles per hour is not fast enough even when you're driving through a residential street where people jog. As one of the cars passed me on the right I think they might have put some kind of ironic witch hex on me, such as "if ye wish to drive so slow let ye always go that low!" or something that sounded more witty, with more effort put into it, because about that time, I realized I could not get the car to go above 40 and was indeed losing speed precipitously. I made it to the right lane just in time for the car to come to a complete stop.

I won't lie: for a split second, I panicked. It took me a moment to remember that cell phones were, in-fact, invented in my life time and that somehow people used to deal with shit like this everyday.

Pretty soon I realized I had already brought traffic to a halt. Maybe it seemed like I was having a lot of fun or had stopped in the middle of the road because I wanted to imitate that scene from Anger Management, because half of the people passing me honked with indignation, as thought they were objecting to some bad choice I'd made.

Now I remember in my teenage past, before I really had responsibilities but thought I did, an event like this would pretty much ruin my day and turn me into an emo-idiot for about a week. I must be getting used to this kind of crap because pretty soon after I had thought through my panic and realized my only option was to leave the car and find a pay phone, my attitude went back to normal, so I really had to make an effort to look angry when I got out of the car. I mean when you're slowing down traffic on that kind of scale you have an obligation to all those drivers to let them know you're just as mad about this terrible situation as they are, and boy oh boy if they could just be in YOUR shoes man would having to slow down to safe speeds instead of treating a residential street like a speedway seem like nothing.

After walking to a few apartment leasing offices which were not open, I went several blocks away and used one of the last remaining pay phones to call my Dad, since I knew he at least had some transportation and Amber and I were going to eat dinner with my family anyway that night. I called Amber, but finding her phone unavailable left a sort of mean message explaining that I wasn't even going to tell her why I was so late and she should call my parents if she craved answers for this mystery, which in retrospect I regret. I've never understood people's unwillingness to make themselves available to a cell-phone. I know that girls don't always have pockets in the clothes they wear but seriously they need to work something out because having cellphones always sunk into the bottom of purses, where they absolutely cannot be heard, puts the entire sex at a disadvantage.

I walked back to the car in time to see Johny Law pulled up behind me. Remembering that cops are authority figures I switched of my faux-angry face with my congenial smiley face. Given my ghastly visage that face is still pretty frightening but it makes it much harder for anyone to justify shooting me. About this time I also realized that both tags were three months out of date and Amber had gone just the previous day to get the car's insurance info from her Grandmother and I had no idea where it could be. If I at least seemed happy to see the cop I could always fake being really surprised and stupid about the whole thing later and hopefully get off with just a warning.

The cop car pushed the Green Sparrow out of the street using nothing but its front bumpers, which I was surprised to find didn't damage the vehicle. I pulled the car into a nearby apartment's leasing office and the cop thankfully drove off without saying a word.

I sat on the side of the street waiting for my Dad to show up for a long time. All I could think about was how much reading and research I'd done for the Dreamcast project I'm working on and how this situation, and the resulting need to focus investing in a second car and untangling Sprint's web of lies was going to force that, once again, to the back burner.

I looked at the cars, driving by me at speeds that could easily kill or cripple me should the driver's hands slip off the wheel at the wrong time, and I thought about how insane it is that it's impossible to survive or do anything in life at all without at least owning a car. I mean someday, when kids are born after the oil is all gone and everything sucks, it will seem like madness, that people once drove around in giant mobile mountains of steal. That nobody even built cars that were smaller, cheaper and cost less to drive because everyone was so scared they'd get killed in an accident with one of the far more prevalent monster sized trucks. I mean it will seem bizarre then, like if we heard in the 1700s everybody rode dragons. I know I said I don't get emo anymore, and thinking the entire world is crazy or stupid or wrong is one of the chief symptoms of acting like an emo-teenager, but when you're stuck at the side of the road just watching traffic for that long there's really few other places your mind can go.

Finally my Dad showed up. I loaded all the groceries into his truck, and found that the heat had made the carton of milk bloat up like a fat circus lady in spandex.

When we got back to the apartment, Amber wanted to know what had taken me so long. I tried as hard as I could to present the story in a way that wouldn't seem like I was telling a joke, but it was almost impossible and I couldn't help but laugh a few times. Of course she was pretty scared by it all, as it's her car and she has to use it a lot for commuting to school. But I guess when you spend so much time at a job, working late, day after day, you get to a point where you just shrug off family members telling you dramatically that you need to get a car because you figure there isn't much else you can do that wouldn't involve donating plasma.

When we all came back to the poor, immobile green sparrow, I suddenly realized how ironic it was that I might have bought a Wii that very trip and had to leave it in the car as I left to find a phone, and then later shown in to Amber in our most primal state of financial dread. I'm really glad I didn't. While I'm sure Amber would never make me feel bad about it, that Wii would've been like some sort of vile albatross around my neck and I would always have felt bad about buying it. Unless of course I sold it and made a lot of money. But since I can't do that now, I'll instead subdue that line of thinking and imagine that the Wii will be widely available this Christmas season and I won't resent any of my friends for making money for selling the thing.

Either way, when I finally do get the damn Wii it'll likely be as close to being a big deal as getting the Nintendo 64 was back in the day (at least, as close to feeling that way as is possible when you're no longer thirteen).

I originally wrote much of this earlier in the week, but didn't get a chance to post it until later. Since then, we discovered that the Green Sparrow's timing belt had broken, along with a lot of other stuff that ended up costing about one thousand dollars.

The day we got it back, Amber and I went out to eat and split a meal at Sarita's. On the way out, we saw a Sprint store and walked in to talk about phones. We figured out a plan that would work, but needed a copy of my Dad's ID to leave his contract and keep my current number. That sounded pretty suspect but I didn't pay too much attention to it, since my mind seems less than sharp these days. I stayed up late at night researching the different phones we could buy until I'd made a decision.

The next day, I walked back into my office at work and got a call from my Dad. The Green Sparrow had broken down in San Marcos and Amber was currently trapped in the middle of a busy road.

I called her after the campus parking security had arrived and called for a tow truck which drove her back to the mechanics. I left work to go pick her up, losing yet another day of full productivity to this nonsense. It was very awkward and uncomfortable talking to the mechanics, who've been friends of my family for years. I like the guys and find them reliable, but I'm ignorant as Hell about everything that's going on and wanted to just hear them outright say if the same thing had broken and if they'd pay for it, and maybe the two hundred and fifty dollar towing fee as well.

That night I tried to call the Sprint store back to get a phone. When I realized I couldn't find that particular store's number on Sprint's website I called another location instead. According to them, I needed to have my Dad's signature in order to leave his contract.

Thinking I'd cover my basis, I made plans to pick up a copy of this contract and take it to my Dad to sign, and also grab a photocopy of his driver's license. I headed out using the loaner pick-up truck, which though street legal is so full of known problems it should never be driven over 40 miles per hour.

When I got to the Sprint Store I'd called, they acted like I was an idiot for thinking I could take the contract out of the store. When I asked about bringing a copy of my Dad's ID I almost got laughed at.

They explained to me that I had talked to a third-party store. I thought they meant third-party in the sense of a different store, like Radio Shack, selling Sprint contracts, so I told them this store said "Sprint" and Sprint alone on it's marquee and sold nothing else besides Sprint crap inside. The guy told me he knew of another "third-party" Sprint store that had a sign that was bigger than theirs, but they did not honor any deals made at these disreputable "third party stores." I'm not really sure how that's legal for Sprint to let other stores use their name and then be completely free of liability for anything these shadowy, nameless organizations do in their name. In fact, next time someone tries to call me on my shit I need to just tell them they were dealing with "third-party Tim" and I do not take blame for any of his actions.

Today I decided to take my business to the third-party store, even though Sprint disavows all knowledge of it's existence and it smells kind of like gas station pee. It looks like all the charges for new phones, as well as a credit check (I know, I know... I need to establish credit) come out to around 300 dollars.

No word yet on the car repairs, except that the timing belt tensioner was defective. Hopefully we'll get some incredible discount on the current service. Regardless, don't be surprised if your Christmas gifts seem lighter this year.

This is Tim saying thank you for reading yet another long, boring post. If you spoil Super Mario Galaxy for me I'll bleed you.

Mario Galaxy is coming out next week, but due to extreme financial difficulties it looks like I'm not getting a Wii to experience it anytime soon. I'll just have to murder anyone who spoils it for me before then.

Hopefully the Nintendo DS release of Contra 4 will soothe this pain somewhat. If the game's over the top, ass kicking website is to be believed, it could be the first truly "run and gun" Contra game since Contra 3.

While most of the Contra's have been great games, one could argue that the series lost its way a bit after Contra 3. Much like the past four 2D Castlevania games, each installment was pretty good but lacking that final layer of polish found in the earlier games (excluding every game made in the entire 32-bit generation which were all plainly terrible).

I think the issue is Contra 3 was the last Contra game where you had to charge head first into a never ending stream of advancing infantry soldiers. As you ran forward, you had to hold the trigger down to keep shooting them before they mowed you down - hence the term "run and gun." The subsequent games relied more on neat moment to moment events and boss battles and as a result became less about frenetic, somewhat improvisational "run and gun" gameplay and more about methodically taking down sub-bosses or enemies that might appear once or twice. Usually this meant a lot of dodging, followed by shooting from some safe fixed position.

Contra Hard Corps, the Genesis sequel to Contra 3, was under appreciated in it's time and actually has a huge following these days, but it never quite gelled for me. The multiple characters and selectable paths were awesome - the game was the largest in the Contra series. But while the game did have a few moments of run and gun action, it continued the trend found in some of the later stages of Contra 3 in that most of the game was events and boss encounters. There's nothing wrong with that except you only got three lives and five continues, which meant you had 15 chances to try to get it right. Hard Corps is probably the kind of game that's a blast once you've beaten it and know the levels like the back of your hand. But otherwise, the lack of lives make the numerous hard to anticipate deaths frustrating. The size and look of the characters also made the game "feel" kind of different to me. While a great title, I've never liked it enough to get my own copy (that could owe more to chance, though), and can't imagine anyone beating it without some kind of cheating device.

During the 32-bit era Konami farmed out the development of Contra for two installments which have almost universally bad reputations. So when Shattered Soldier came out for the PS2, many fans saw it as a return to form for the series. Another big reason for it's praise is that it came at a time when 2D style platforming was almost not-available on the PS2 (this was when Sony of America was still blocking Metal Slug 3, in spite of it being one of the best games ever made).

Honestly, I think part of the reason Shattered Soldier is so revered is because many people had simply forgotten what 2D gaming was like. Around this time was also when "2D gameplay" got sort of a hip reputation, much like those Nintendo shirts they sell at Hot Topic. Part of the reason is that most people had never owned Saturns or played Metal Slug Collection on their computers and had forgotten what truly great 2D gameplay was. I'm not saying Shattered Soldier was a bad game, I'm saying it just reached a market that was starving for it. A more extreme example of this phenomenon was Alien Hominid, which on top of being "2D" was also "independent," and thus got a lot of hype in spite of playing worse than every Metal Slug game ever made.

Before I get too carried away, let me say I thought Shattered Soldier was pretty good. It just had some glaring flaws that lessened the experience somewhat and is one of my least favorite of the Contra games (not counting the two 32-bit era installments).

For starters, the entire aesthetic of the game is just gross and unappealing. Most levels look dingy, dark, or bland. The first boss of the game is the turtle from Contra 3, but it's skin is all read and veiny, making it look like some kind of tumor. Half way through the battle, the thing turns around and you have to fight this ugly face that's on it's ass. When you kill it, the head starts vomitting up green gas and slime. The problem is, the enemy doesn't seem cool or dangerous, but just sort of gross. It's like you're slowly killing some kind of retarded child. Compared to the Aliens inspired look of the past games, much of Shattered Soldier just looks unappealing.

But the fatal flaw the game commits in my book is that the action is interrupted all the time with these stupid cinema sequences that serve no purpose. Most of the times all that happens is the camera zooms out or rotates to take a look a better shot of an approaching enemy. Maybe it does this to mask loading times, but it gives the cheesy impression, like the game is trying to show you that it's using newfangled 3D graphics and they can indeed change the viewpoint. The problem is, usually whatever is being shown isn't important enough to warrant taking the control away from the player, and furthermore most of these sequences would be better served if the "action" could have happened in the background the player was at least free to move around. It gives the presentation a very 1997 vibe. The worst part is, even if you've seen these in-level cinemas a hundred times, you can't skip past them.

On top of that, the game had almost no "run and gun" moments to speak of. This lack of enemy rush moments is exemplified in how the game kept track and rewarded you for destroying 100% of anything that can be blown up in a given level. Almost every little thing you could blow up went towards this tally, from exploding barrels to the up to ten (that may be an over-estimate) infantry units that would charge you in each stage.

Getting high percentage scores unlocked the final sixth and seventh stage as well as the two other endings of the game. This would have been cool, except that the game penalized any lost lives by cutting into your percentage score. All the cool stuff only happened if you got the "S" ranking, which was only given for 100% - one death, or one missed shot at a fly by enemy, and you were screwed.

Because of the emphasis on ranks, you had the ability to give up one of your continues to restart a level penalty free to try it again in case you screwed up. As you might have guessed, this pressure to perform perfectly kind of made the game a pain in the ass- the sequel, Neo Contra, went a long way towards fixing it by letting you go as low as 98% before losing that "S" ranking.

The game's biggest flaw is the demand for precision gameplay, which required a lot of practice and retrying, did not mesh well with the constant cut-scene interruptions mentioned above.

Imagine this: you've played through Shattered Soldier and beaten it several times. You're playing the second stage, which you've already seen hundreds of times before (back before you knew the shoulder buttons allowed you to either stand in place and aim your fire or "lock" onto an aiming direction and freely move around - crowning achievement of the game, by the way). At the start of stage two, you're attacked byf this laser cannon that comes out of a submarine's periscope and attacks you in the distance, so all you can do is dodge. Eventually the submarine stupidly emerges right behind in a position where you can easily attack it. After you destroy the periscope / cannon, the game stops as you watch the submarine leave the water and turn into a flying helicopter / battle ship, which then flies high into the sky and reappears floating in front of you. This is interesting maybe once or twice, but after you've beat the game a few times and are playing for rank, you really don't give a damn about observing the transformation process. By now, you have seen the dopey interlude so many times Alzheimer's itself could not erase the memory, yet still you must sit through it each time you begin to play that stage.

When the ship has finally transformed and the game gives you back control of your character, let's say you do something stupid and die. Or worse, you forget to shoot down some enemy. Now unless you want to risk getting the boring endings you've already seen before, you'll need an S rank, so restart the stage... at which point you are forced to watch that same damn cut-scene again.

Maybe it sounds like I'm exaggerating this, but when you've played through the game multiple times (and it's pretty good) the parade of interruptions becomes frustrating and can make the game feel like more trouble than it's worth. As much as people love to bitch about the numerous entertaining and completely skip-able cut scenes in the Metal Gear Solid series, I have no idea why no mainstream game reviewer ever pointed out that Shattered Soldier forces you to watch shit that A) is not interesting or important and B) you've probably already seen ten times.

A short while after Shattered Soldier, Konami followed it up with Neo Contra. Neo Contra, in opinion, fixed all the issues I had with Shattered Soldier. The aesthetic of the game improved drastically; instead of Shattered Soldier's sort of clichéd, dark, techno, gothic, would-have-seemed-edgy-on-the-PS1-in-1997 look, Neo Contra exuded the same sci-fi militaristic machismo as the original games. Only there, it poked fun at itself by being comically exaggerated, which somehow made it seem even truer to form (view the inspired opening video here).

Despite it's greatness, Neo Contra had a problem that could be picked up by even the idiots who thought Shattered Soldier was the best 2D action platformer off all time: it was an overhead shooter and not a sidescroller. Neo Contra was the successor to the (good, in my opinion) overhead levels found in Super C, the second Contra game. The first three Contras all had a few stages where the style of play changed drastically as if to cleanse the palette for more platforming action later; why Konami stopped doing this is anyone's guess but the series has suffered a little because of it.

Despite Neo Contra's unexpected shift in perspective, I think it got the run and gun feel, as well as the style of classic Contra, down pat. It's a shame the same team never made a game with Neo Contra's style and values that was featured levels from both overhead and side perspectives. As it was a lot of people dismissed Neo Contra for the different mode of play alone, which is really too bad.

As good as Neo Contra was, and even though Contra 4 isn't even being made by Konami, it's hard not to get excited by what the website offers so far. Something about the sprite-based graphics reminds me the mythical PS1 2D Contra game that would've had Symphony of the Night style graphics, but was shot down by Sony for not being fully 3D. Even though it's not drawn by 32-bit era Konami sprite artists, the graphics are still looking pretty nice.

If you look at the enemies section of the web page, you'll notice they're actually recycling a few art assets from Contra 3. Normally this just strikes me as lazy, since the last two Castlevanias as well as every Capcom fighter made in the past ten years have done this to their extreme detriment, but here it seems nice. It's probably because every single other thing has been redrawn, so when you see something old you can trust it's being done as an homage and not because the bastards thought they'd shovel out a niche market 2D game on the cheap.

If you browse the site further, you'll see the number is justified by the story's placement. The game takes place after Contra 3 but seemingly before Hard Corps, when the series started looking dark and bleh. If you read about the characters, you'll see two of them come from the almost forgotten classic GameBoy Contra game, as does one of the villains of the game's story. Something about throwing a nod to such an old game yet making it seem valid again seems like vintage Konami, which makes the development by a Western studio seem all the more strange.

Hopefully this will be the first non-disappointing sequel to a classic 2D franchise on the Nintendo DS (sorry, but neither New Super Mario Bros nor Castlevania - Dawn of Sorrow quite did it for me). Check back later this week when I'll give my first hands-on impressions.

Just kidding, like anyone ever relies on this site for anything. Besides, I'll probably get bored by then and obsess over something else.

Continuing his adventures in video contest participation, Matt Ryan of MisterFilms.com recently formed a tactical unit named "Hero Squad" and created an entry for the Insomniac video competition.

It worked like this: to compete, each video had to incorporate several elements listed in the competition rules, which were only released 24 hours before the competition ended. This ensured that everyone had but a single day to create their videos.

Those elements were:

• A park bench.
• Radio static.
• The dialog "Don't tempt me."

Matt was able to transform a script he's had in his head for awhile to incorporate these things and Hero Squad set to work creating a video that is, honestly, as good or better than Matt's other works.

Watch Melody here.

Honestly, it could be that I'm biased but I think some of the best stuff Matt ever did was with the You's All Gonna Die series. Stupid, yes, but it is still so very watchable and enjoyable to this day.

Likewise I think this movie shows Matt's developed the skills to turn around a movie that "feels" professional in but a single day. What really gets me is how many locations they managed to use, and how crisp the acting feels. Maybe there's something about the rough, unplanned nature of it all that put everyone at their best. Whatever it was, I really think Matt should just start making one of these a month.

Anyway, only the 25 highest voted entries will be eligible for phase two of the Insomniac video contest, where the folks at Apple will pick the short which best represents the kooky, zany, "look I'm so hip I did this in a day and you can totally tell and talk about how you could make something better than this if you tried using Apple brand merchandise" feel they probably want to get out of this thing for marketing reasons. As Matt and crew didn't douche it up enough they're probably screwed, but you can still vote for them here.

Voting requires registering with Apple, but you can use your i-Tunes ID if you use that service.

I entered some kind of funk where I could just not update Border-Town so this post is extremely late; the contest ends November 9th (this Friday) so you should probably vote ASAP. On the plus side, though, nobody reads this site so my tardiness probably affects little either way. I put up a banner ad for Melody awhile back, and since my wife saw the video the other day without me even telling her to so I guess it's worked somewhat.

Like with Matt's other contest, he's been doing a series of making-of videos on his MySpace blog. I find these much more interesting than with the prior making-of videos because they show the speed the video was produced. You can see them all at MisterFilms.com.

I've been fighting the temptation to write more about the One Laptop per Child Program (I already made a kind of jokey post about it awhile back) but I really can't help myself. The more I look at both the XO-1 laptop and the program itself, the more it seems to surpass the Tango as the cutting- edge, society-changing, pipe-dream technological innovation that consumes most of my thoughts. A major difference with the One Laptop per Child program is that it's already on the cusp of fulfilling it's mission and becoming a reality.

Now, pardon me if I spend a whole post regurgitating information on this program that's already well known and available the Internet.

The mission of the One Laptop per Child association (OLPC for short) is to, as the name suggests, give one laptop to each child in developing nations to fuel their educational needs.

The philosophy behind this is as follows: when we are children, up until we go to Kindergarten, all of our learning is based on curiosity. We learn the presence of the sun heralds the start of a new day and it's fall announces the night; we learn how gravity works, and how to eat dinner with our family members; etc. Human beings even teach themselves have to speak and learn the elements of language by curiosity and experimentation - think of the babbling sounds babies make attempting to form words.

Then one day, as Ivan Krstic (who I am cribbing from entirely) explains, we go to school and the paradigm for learning changes. Learning goes from something we teach ourselves through research as a response to curiosity to something that is learned in group settings, at set times, from a single authority figure. This works very well if the teacher is good, but has tragic results if the teacher is bad or unavailable. One of the reasons (and there are many) behind the OLPC program is so that kids in poor, "majority-world" countries will be able to learn on their own when traditional school is not in session or is unavailable. Open-source software designed to a ridiculous extent with transparency in mind (one button on the keyboard shows the source code), along with easy-access to the web, ensures this can occur so long as kids have an Internet connection or are in range of another XO-1.

They expect to mass-produce the XO-1 laptops and sell them to governments for $100 a piece in shipments of 250k. According to various interviews I'd heard, many schools (for example, China and Brazil) have a text book budget of $20 annually per child. That said, the text books are often out of date or contain factual errors.

I bring this up because the first thing people snidely say about this project is that spending money on laptops is a waste when governments could be funding libraries, medication, or food. Well the last two don't count; they basically amount to saying we should not spend money on education (you know, teach a man to fish). The first point might be valid, and I'm not an economist, sociologist or any other kind of "ist" that could know for sure if giving children laptops would lead to more positive results than better funding schools. The fact is, nothing like this has ever been done before - when students are normally given laptops, they're expensive Windows machines that are quite different from the XO-1, so there's probably no good way to tell. However, I feel that if kids in countries that don't even have electricity were given a decent laptop to play with they would spend much more time learning of their own free will then they'd spend studying in a school library that they may not have access to. Add in free e-books to this and suddenly giving every child a laptop sounds like a hell of a lot better than spending money building school facilities that may or may not get used or maintained. And as Nicholas Negroponte commented in a 60 minutes interview, some of these kids don't even have trees were teachers can stand, let alone hold a real class.

Aside from the incredible humanitarian mission of the project, the OLPC also has appeal for technology geeks. Maybe not just any technology geeks (such as the "snarky bloggers" referenced in this excellent NY Times video review), but definitely guys like me who are interested in seeing technology that is truly revolutionary - or as Wayan Vota from Geekcorps puts it, "clock stopping hot technology."

That's because these laptops will spend most of their lives in dusty, rural environments being handled by small children - a far cry from my magnum powered laptop which is always stored indoors at room temperature and travels in a backbreaking, heavy-duty case to stay away from nature and avoid the detection of children. Thus, a whole host issues that have been unconsidered by hardware manufacturer's for years had to be addressed: How can a laptop be useful in an environment without plug-in electricity? How will can a laptop survive in a dusty, sandy environment? How will a laptop be strong enough to stand getting carried around and possibly dropped repeatedly by a child for five or more years? If you read interviews with the OLPC team, a big concern of theirs is that the kids feel comfortable to just play around with the XO-1, something that won't happen if they think of it as expensive and fragile (the leading way to view portable electronics).

The technological innovation that's been summoned to answer these problems is reminiscent of the space race, albeit perhaps on a smaller scale.

For starters: because the laptop cannot depend on a traditional AC power plug, the initial prototypes featured a ridiculous looking (yet ridiculously awesome) bright yellow hand crank which could be turned to charge the machine.

Apparently this crank could've given you ten minutes of charge time for one minute of crank time. Plus it would have caused young men in all participating cultures of the world to recreate the hilarious euphemism "cranking it" in their native tongues when their dominant arms became freakishly larger (although since many of these young men are cruelly forced to spend so much time outdoors- oh, the humanity!- the effects may not have been noticeable). The crank was dropped, which, while sad for twits like me who will never legitimately need this laptop but thought the crank looked cool, was ultimately for the best.

The new versions instead can use a variety of plug in modules ranging from a typical AC power adapter to a solar power panel that could run the machine or charge the device. Additionally, the battery that is included lasts four times as many recharges longer than typical laptop batteries and costs only ten dollars to replace.

The XO-1 is also unique in that it contains no moving parts. This increases durability - if a kid drops this thing, the inert parts will be less prone to breaking. Another reason is, of course, power-consumption. Stunningly, the device spends most of it's time running on one to two watts of power, with peak usage going from four to five watts. By contrast, most US laptops run on roughly 30 to 40 watts.

See the official specs here.

Keeping with this focus on low power consumption, the CPU is dramatically slower than current industry grade tech, running at a meager 433 MHz. That doesn't seem like a lot, but I remember in the mid-nineties running Duke Nukem a hell of a lot faster when I finally got a 433 MHz processor (in contrast, my laptop has two CPUs with 1995 MHz each). Additionally, there is 256 MB of RAM, which sounds like a lot for what this is (again, my laptop has roughly eight times as much RAM).

The bigger bummer is the hard drive is only 1024 megabytes, or 1 gigabyte (most of the hard drives we use have tens if not hundreds of gigabytes). That's because it had to be different than traditional spinning hard drives with motors that use a lot of power. Instead it uses the same kind of storage found in most MP3 players. 1024 megabytes may not be a lot for music and entertainment, but for static pictures, text documents and e-books it'll get the job done.

Now that I've talked about some of the embarrassing negatives to these specs, let me go over the good stuff - and keep in mind all of this is currently offered for about $180 and is projected to cost $100 in roughly two years.

There's an internal SD card slot which is semi-hidden - it appears you have to swivel the monitor to gain access to the slot, which is underneath the screen. That right away alleviates some of hard drive space problems.

There are also three USB slots on the sides of the machine. I don't know if it will be possible to use external hard drives or not (again, this isn't really important for kids in poor countries) but the OLPC guys have mentioned that flash drives not only work, it is possible to boot from them. Apparently Microsoft actually has XO-1 laptops and is programming a version of Windows to boot off a flash drive, for all the young Nigerian kids who are worried the XO-1 won't work with their favorite Windows 98 apps.

The 7.5" display is a completely innovative (although only useful for this application... as far as anyone knows now). By using a strange new kind of low cost LCD, the XO-1 will have access to a moderate color LCD screen that doubles as a grayscale screen with twice the resolution when the back light is turned off. This gray scale also significantly increases the battery life and allow people to read e-books. The experience of using the high- resolution, sun-lit mode is generally compared to "looking at a newspaper." According to Wikipedia, later generations of the laptop are expected to use those fancy electronic paper displays we're always hearing are "just around the corner" (maybe this project will speed up their development?).

The keyboard features a water resistant membrane (see the New York Times review linked above to watch someone splash a bucket load of water on it). This membrane also will keep out dust and crap. This is a feature I wish would become standard on laptops - my own has a ton of hair and dust that is small enough to get into the tiny seems in the integrated keyboard, despite my absolute best efforts to handle it well (I often wash my hands before using it after eating). It's sort of amazing keyboards like this aren't already the standard.

The touch pad is actually "dual mode," having a "stylus area" and a "capacitive touch pad area." I'm not actually sure what that means but I'll venture a guess- you are required to use a stylus only to draw on the entire area of the pad but can use your fingers as well in the middle section, which might work like a normal laptop touch pad.

The device features AC97-compatible audio and two stereo speakers. I'm not a hardware guy, so again, I don't have much to add here. However, "AC97" is a word that pops up frequently when you hear projects developed for FreeDos, such as the insanely incredibly MP3 player MpxPlay. Totally off-topic here, but if you have an old computer with some kind of sound card, you can install FreeDos and MpxPlay, edit the autoexec.bat a bit and have a crazy awesome (and ineffecient energy-draining) MP3 player that boots in under ten seconds. Getting back on topic, "AC97-compatible" probably means it will be easy for people to write audio software for it.

There's also a microphone port - but it's not just any microphone port. They hacked it a bit to allow people to also plug in other cheap devices as well, such as thermostats (kids could do science experiments using them).

This thing also comes equipped with a video camera with 640 x 480 resolution at 30 FPS. One one hand, you can freak out and go "OMG they're giving 5 year old children video cameras!" but at the same time this will allow kids to be creative and play with the device. It could also allow communication with parents that may be illiterate.

Then there's the already mentioned game pad, with Sony Playstation style shape identifiable buttons - I'm a bit conflicted on that. Thankfully the d-pad looks different- they're using the standard non-patented amorphous blob shape which probably means it would be any good. Damn you and your immortal d-pad patents, Nintendo!

Finally, the device has two antennas, which stick up like rabbit ears and look funny. However, the antennas actually increase the wireless range significantly. In the same lecture I linked to above, Ivan Krstic said - and I'm not sure if I heard this right - that two people in Africa were were able to get their XO-1's to communicate with each other for up to two kilometers away. Insane.

Which brings me to the next thing about the XO-1 - the crazy effort put into Internet connectivity. Of course the thing supports standard IEEE 802.11 coming from the kind of Internet routers we have in our homes, but what about when routers are in short supply? Well the XO-1's are capable of creating their own ad-hoc networks to communicate with any other XO-1's in the area. They do this using Mesh networking capabilities that are built into the device itself. This is so transparent that it works without the children doing anything at all. This means that if one kid has a connection to the internet, he can let someone else who might be just out of reach of the router piggy back off his signal and get a connection to the net as well.

The OLPC project puts much focus into the act of collaboration. It's built-in networking features allow kids to work on projects together - for example, kids can simultaneously edit text documents or draw pictures together. They can also make annotations to texts they are reading to share with the class, such as "look, the man just said a dirty word!" The only times I ever collaborated with kids in class we put curse words and lewd sexual acts into group creative writing assignments, or drew genitals on other people's papers. But since teachers also get a laptop to join in and spy on the fun, hopefully certain collaborations will be kept to a minimum.

The UI is very different as well. Rather than feature over-lapping windows, it has a single "home" screen where you can start and switch between programs. There is also a second screen accessible from the home screen, or via a button click (at least, AFAIK from the live CD I played with) that shows you the people on your mesh network and what they're doing. This last feature is a lot like how the Nintendo DS's pico-chat feature should have worked; because the XO-1 will allow kids to see who in their vicinity is doing what at any time without quiting what their working on, it should be much more successful at being a good group toy.

Something true nerds will appreciate with this project is how it heralds the return of "smartly written code." Modern computers have become so fast that the Operating Systems and applications can afford to be fat, bloated, and lazy (they can also be more flexible at the expense of speed). This is kind of a traditional bitch among geeks (along with "Windows ruins everything") and has become such a cliché I was tired of hearing it, but I think I felt the reality of such sentiment when I tried to configure an old e-machine someone had donated to my parents. Now this machine reminded me of a fine and dandy Windows 98 computer I still have, but I was horrified when I discovered someone had installed Windows XP (most likely at the advice of unscrupulous computer repair-men). The machine ran so slow at everything it was impossible to do so much as surf the web unless you were very strategic in your mouse clicks.

By the same token, the old DOS PC I used in the mid-nighties ran a number of mouse capable GUI applications - the most memorable one being "Kid-Pix" (which I'm surprised still exists) - very well. So it's no surprise to me that, given the effort and push behind the OLPC project such amazing software is being created for the device.

What DOES surprise me though is... well, you remember that one key you can press to view the source code of any project you're running? The reason that works is that almost everything on the machine, from the application to Sugar itself, runs in the high level language Python. In other words, the entire machine runs all of it's apps in their own little Virtual Machine.

In case you don't know, a Virtual Machine (or VM) is a controlled environment where computer code is analyzed by another program, interpreted, and then executed. In other words, in theory alone, it is slow. Now I don't know a thing about Python, except that I've heard Lua (my scripting language of choice) is faster and takes up less memory. I also know that Microsoft .NET and Java are both memory hogs. Java was also too slow to do much quickly even on premium computers for a number of years. Meanwhile the .NET platform runs quickly but cheats by compiling code when it first sees it. So the idea that the XO-1 not only uses Python - an interpreted language - not just for select programs, but for almost everything is mind-blowing.

Maybe I'm going overboard and just need to take a closer look at Python, but let me tell you another story to relay to you how incredible this seems to me. When I was a college Junior I remember having a big impromptu discussion with some fellow Computer Science students at UTSA after class. Everyone was talking about how Windows "Longhorn" - which would eventually become Vista - would be totally driven by Microsoft .NET. A guy went so far as to say the entire file system would be written in .NET and that, for example, the Recycle Bin would be an object you could change and manipulate. At one point someone made the crack that a group of Linux loving Microsoft haters (myself excluded) were salivating at the prospect of using the next MS OS. Of course, like most of what was initially planned with Vista, none of that stuff ever came to pass.

Well, in the XO-1, the file system itself is actually written in Python. More incredibly, this is a file system that allows source- control like Journaling (basically, it saves just the changes you make to a file in a super smart way to save space yet give you ultimate "un-do" powers).

In the same lecture I keep referencing, Ivan Krstic also discusses security. As you may know from the hilarious Mac Ad about Vista's overbearing security, one way to make sure users are free from Virus attacks - or at least, can't blame the OS for virus attacks - is to constantly prop them all the time when software wishes to do something. You can also keep a list of trusted and untrusted programs, the later technique being employed in anti-virus software.

Because the XO-1 has to be open to the kiddos, it must overcomes this problem as young kids can't be relied upon to remember passwords or advanced security settings, and must also be given the freedom to do whatever they want. The XO-1 overcomes this problem (let's hope) by treating every application as untrusted and running it in it's own VM. From a VM perspective, there is thus a lot of things malware simply can't do. In fact, Bitfrost, the security platform for the XO-1, doesn't even consider anti- virus or anti-spyware software because the platform renders these issues moot.

Now, I don't mean to be beating up Vista since maintaining compatibility with twenty years worth of programs is a very difficult task well worth appreciation, but so many of these new features in the OLPC software was rumored to be in Vista ages ago. Yet, the solutions to these problems (again, knock on wood) may first see the light of day in one of the slowest new computers ever built.

Not only is the OLPC project coming from an incredibly idealistic and pure-hearted place, it is acting as a test bed for what could become the very future of computing.

Again, for two weeks starting November 12, people in America will be able to buy one of these things for $400. They're actually buying two laptops; one for themselves, and one to give to a kid. You even get a tax deduction.

Since I wrote that last post, I have been more than a little tempted... the XO-1 has nearly turned into an object of obsession. I'm hoping it will pass soon because at $400 I have other priorities. But I'm beginning to wonder if this would be more important to me, especially since the time frame to get one is a paltry two weeks.

Additional OLPC Links:

• OLPC main site
• Excellent New York Times review (with even better video review)
• Inside One Laptop per Child: Episode one
• Hardware Specs
• XO-1 pictures and videos
  (watch the 60 Minutes segment here, which addresses how Intel is using price dumping to try to eliminate the OLPC project)
• Video speech explaining security and Python environment of OLPC - very long, but worth watching if your technically minded.
• Bitfrost Security
• OLPC News
• OLPC TV
  Nicholas Negroponte keynote at Harvard
• Site where I got the picture of the prototype OLPC.
• Kind of old article about possibly bringing the laptops to the schools in the states.
• Doom on the XO-1

Let me end with a link to this video. At the end of it, a small Nigerian boy walks across his village holding the Xo-1 by it's handle.

I, myself, never got a laptop until a little over a year and a half ago. But computers (and videogames, which inspired me to learn how to use computers) definitely played a massive role in my desire to gain an education and teaching me "how to learn," as Negroponte would put it. The difference is, every computer I ever used as a child was a clunky desktop, usually so large it required it's own desk if not area of the house. The downside of this was it sort of habituated me to the requirement of going inside (and sometimes even washing my hands) to play with the computer or use electronics. To say it wasn't integrated in the kind of life I should have, by cliche, been living as a kid is an understatement. It's nice to think that in some of the poorest countries of the world, kids will have access to the same well-spring of curiosity and creativity I was lucky enough to have, but because it will be on their terms, the experience might be even better.