Ask my bank and they'll tell you, I ain't a rich man. But if I were, the first things I'd treat myself to would be an amphibious sports car, a Tango, a Playstation 3 with a Dual Shock 3 controller (exclusively for playing Metal Gear Solid 4 and Metal Gear Online), and the Unicomp On-the-Ball Plus keyboard - in that order, reversed.

Check this out:

For starters, Unicomp holds the rights to the technology behind the old Model M series of IBM keyboards, which are so cherished by crazy people on the internet that it has its own extensive Wikipedia entry. In case you don't feel like simply following the link and reading it instead (and I must willfully assume you don't, lest I risk accepting that writing this post is a tragic waste of my precious time upon this mortal coil), the key feature of the Model M keyboards are it's buckling spring keyswitch mechanism. The diagrams on Wikipedia imply that the inside of these keys are made up of a zipper like object which, as it is depressed, makes a nice clicking noise and gives some rich tactile feedback to the user.

Lately I've found that I'm kind of dissatisified with most of the keyboards I use. I guess I never really gave this much thought, as keyboards are ubiqutous to the point I'd never actually considered that some might be substantially better than others. But as stated in this intriguing blog post, there was a time when people had no other way to interface with computers aside from keyboards and the quality mattered substantially to them. Various manufacturers competed to produce better keyboards, and the buckling spring keyswitch mechanism was the pinnacle of this period of evolution.

The old Model M's were heavy and nigh indestructable, and are apparently still found in good condition today. It wasn't until reading up on this I realized that the keyboard my computer loving uncle has been using non-stop for the last decade and a half is a Model M. A few times I've even seen him take off all the key caps and put them in the dish washer, and lovingly clean the innards using compressed air and the casing with rubbing alchahol.

The new Unicomp produced keyboards apparently feel just or almost as good as the old Model M's, though not quite as heavy (the original models apparently had a bit more steel inside of them which weighed them down). They also don't have detachable chords, for whatever that's worth.

In addition to the buckling springs, the Unicomp on the ball plus contains not just a track ball, but also a "pointing stick." The later was once a popular mouse replacement for laptops that I personally never liked. What is desired are the accompanying extra pair of mouse buttons below the space-bar - something not present on the non-plus model.

The sheer decadence of including not one, but two integrated mouse replacements on an already high-end keyboard alone warrants this product for inclusion in anyone's "if I ever become rich" list.

The idea of being able to avoid the delay and dreaded arm movement needed to switch to a mouse is intoxicating. It reminds me of those warm memories from the time when I made games in GW and Q-Basic, and could just blast away non-stop using onlya keyboard. Something rotten about mice is they don't turn your gears for production like a keyboard does. Think about it - the majority of creative endevors require extensive time spent switching between the keyboard and the mouse, but most mouse-only tasks are the kind of crap PC users waste all their time on, such as web browsing or... web browsing. like opening up web browsers while they're working on something serious. Think about it - you're worthless right hand is to blame for you reading the entirety of this dribble. Unless you start playing a game, there aren't many time-wasters that require only a keyboard, yet for the mouse there are hundreds. Mice are also the primary force behind multi-tasking, as they let you let you start up web browsers to waste loads of time. Almost any creative endevor on the PC requires a keyboard but also a mouse, yet something ab at while you can never really escape one using today's software, they make it possible for time-wasting, non-sense programs they make it possible to avoid the keyboard entirely for long stretches at a time so long as whatever you're doing is completely non-productive. Think about it - any great creative endevor requires extensive time spent switching between the keyboard and the mouse, but most mouse-only tasks are the kind of crap PC users waste all their time on, like browsing garbage on the internet. Think about it - you're worthless right hand is to blame for you reading the entirety of this dribble.

I hope everyone is having a merry Christmas Eve. I know I certainly am enjoying my break.

I walked out of my apartment this morning to find that one of my broham neighbors upstairs had blown chunks off the side of the stair rail next to their door, leaving a pile of soon-hardened vomit just a few feet outside of mine. Much of it had splashed onto the door and wall.

Anyone who knows me will tell you I'm not the kind of guy who likes to clean up a stranger's vomit on Christmas Eve, so I just walked around it and left to run some final errands, planning on letting the puke sit there until the office staff came back on Wednesday.

Well it turns out Amber does not share my tolerance for throw up and when she walked outside and saw it she nearly had a melt-down. As it turns out, her mom will be staying with us tonight, and I guess leaving unknown oral discharge at the entry way might seem uninviting. Plus, according to Amber, it being so close to the door is bad for Feng-Sui.

We're lucky enough to have a hose outside our apartment for just this sort of occassion. I used it to wash all that crap off and ended up flooding the entire walk way and making a muddy mess in the process. But even after this, I could still see chunks, so Amber mixed up a big steamy pot of hot water and bleach which I dosed over everything.

A quarter hour later I went back outside to rinse it all off for good, and as I was sticking my finger in the nozzle to flatten the spray and pick off the chips of vomit on the door, a Christmas miracle happened. My cap wearing bro of a neighbor came home, right as I was outside to greet him!

As he approached, I could see a look of recognition in his eye. Did he recognize this vomit pile? Was it his vomit? Maybe he thought I might try to shoot at him through the stair well with the hose as he walked up, since it was honestly the first though I had.

I asked "Hey buddy, did one of your friends throw up off the side of the stairs last night?"

He feigned ignorance as only spoiled little white pricks can, giving me some lousy story about how he was asleep and he didn't know what his friends were doing. I told him that this was either vomit or wet dog food, and explained that the placement of the mush indicated it had fallen from a height roughly equivalent to one story.

I then asked him if there was anything blocking the doorway to their balchony. I can't really remember what he said but that's ok because I didn't care. I implored him to, in the future, consider vomiting (or I guess pouring left-over wet dog food) out of the balcony, some place where I didn't have to walk by and see it. I advised that he may even want to clear a path to the balcony so that it could be easily reached in the event of an emergency.

Bro gave me his assurance that he could imagine that finding a stranger's vomit outside the door might be gross and would try to relay this message. It was about the best outcome I could have expected.

This is Tim wishing you all a merry Christmas.

I was just browsing Dcemu.co.uk and read news of an upcoming portable videogame console called "Pandora," designed to be open like the GP2X and more powerful than a Playstation Portable. Check it out:

The concept art looks pretty fake, and "open" systems like this often fail to materialize (such as the Indrema, the Phantom, and the Gameport) but since it's Christmas I'll allow myself to believe for a moment that this system will actually make its currently planned Spring release.

According to OpenPandora.org, the thing will have OpenGL 2.0 compliant 3D hardware and an ARM Cortex A8 CPU running Linux. The input options are pretty crazy, including a 800 x 480 (alas, not quite as wide as 16x9) touch screen, two analog sticks, a directional pad, and QWERTY keyboard (which currently looks very fake on the mock-up). There's also a Mini-USB port, which in addition to TV-out will hopefully make this thing viable as a "normal" console as well. At first the placement of the anlog sticks just seemed awful, like you'd have to really stick out your thumb to access them, until I pulled out my DS lite and imagined what how it would feel if the Pandora was the same size (which it roughly will be). My guess now is that they'll probably feel a lot better than they look in this picture.

According to engadget, this device will see a release in March or April, and should cost around $320. Sounds good!

You can see more images here and a video of a paper mock-up here.