Back in the day, my friend Todd and I used to play Street Fighter II in just about any venue we could, usually the local 7-11 or bowling alley. Now, many years later, Street Fighter IV is out for the home systems.

Despite my fond memories of SF2, I didn’t pre-order SF4. The other entries in the SF series just never captured my attention like the second one did. But after reading glowing review after glowing review, and also because I was rained in for most of the weekend, I ran out and bought it.

The verdict? It’s marvelous. The gameplay is very similar to what I remember of SF2, but it’s been completely remade with a modern aesthetic and modern specs (it looks great on an HDTV). Aside from some really hideous character fight intros, it’s a pretty game, and visually arresting. The new “black splatter” theme that adorns the game and its new “focus” moves is neat. It’s fun to play these classic characters on a modern system (in my case, the Xbox 360) that out-powers a handful of the original arcade machines.

My only regret now is that I didn’t pre-order it and also get the real arcade-style joystick, which is now sold-out everywhere. The gamepads the youngsters all use these days don’t cut it for an old joystick-loving fogey like me.

This is the RV that we really need for the bike trips. No problem camping at the top of Gooseberry Mesa in this one!

(Via Squob.)

Not that I’d trade our 25-footer for one, but Airstream has just introduced a new European-specific model, the Bambi 422. Very cute. Apparently, it’s lighter and narrower to accommodate the roads and lighter tow vehicles in Europe.

Dave

sent an email out about this year’s version of the

Fall mountain biking trip

about a week ago. Val and I have taken our RV (

the Minnie

at the time) for the last couple of years, but was figured to be down for the count because of the new baby. The trip usually starts in Vegas, moves to

Gooseberry Mesa

(near St. George, UT) and then on to Fruita, CO and lastly to

Moab

, UT. This version is no different, although it is a bit later, being at the very end of April/beginning of May.

Since joining Veodia just a year ago, I’ve taken a bike trip to British Columbia (North Shore, Squamish) and used the rest of my time off after

the birth of my daughter

. Luckily, I’ve recovered enough time to string together 5 weekdays off. Val was cool with bringing Ainsley along, so we’re going to pull

the Airstream

to meet the group for part of the Fruita/Moab legs. I can’t wait.

Because of the dearth of vacation time, I had written off Gooseberry. I love Gooseberry (it’s certainly in my top 10 places to ride), but I’ve been there the last couple of years in a row and haven’t been to Moab in probably 5. I used to make an annual pilgrimage to Moab, so I definitely miss it.

Then, things started falling into place for me to be able to fly out for a weekend of riding in Gooseberry. Many thanks to Dave for offering to schlep my bike out to Utah so it’ll be there for the weekend and also for doing pickup/dropoff duty at the airports.

It’s going to be a most excellent spring!

I haven’t seen it first hand yet, but TiVo’s new search interface looks good. I wish they’d give the whole interface a polish, with HD in mind.

Also, all the new features, like Netflix, are obviously written in some other way from the main interface. They look different, take a long time to start and are slow. It would be nice to see them pull the whole thing together into one nice package.

Alex has always been infamous for his biffs on the bike, but now he’s been immortalized in the lastest issue of Mountain Cyclist (PDF link), the newsletter for ROMP. (Alex is on page 3.)

That shot is from our recent trip to Canada, where we were accompanied by ROMP’s president, who was apparently well-positioned for that shot. I should say that, as perilous as it looks in that shot, it was (as always) steeper and bigger in person than it looks in video or photos.

James Duncan Davidson, who also recently bought a D700, has a good blog post about renting lenses. I’ll have to try this before laying out cash on some of those pricey Nikkors.

Loving it so far. More soon.

JRuby is, as you might guess by the name, a port of the Ruby interpreter (which is written in C) to Java. Some benefits of this include easy access to Java libraries in addition to Ruby ones, but the main benefit seems to be the additional deployment options. In an organization where Java is a standard deployment platform, it can be easier to get a project written in Ruby through Congress if it’s able to run in a JVM environment that the company is already comfortable with.

As you can imagine, Sun is one of those companies. As Java’s creators, they’ve got an enormous investment in Java, but they’ve also been investing heavily in Open Source projects, and they hired the 2 lead authors of the JRuby project to work on it full-time as Sun employees. Now Sun has allowed a rewrite of an existing codebase in JRuby and Rails.

That’s some bleeding-edge risk there, but it looks like it’s going well so far. I certainly wouldn’t go that far yet, but I’m happy to see other Ruby interpreters gaining traction.

I was previously running a release candidate of the new Rails 2 codebase, and hadn’t upgraded to the final 2.0 release. I’ve remedied that today by upgrading to Rails 2.0.2, the current production release. There shouldn’t be any breakage, but one never knows for sure, so feel free to let me know if there’s any problem.

Peter Moffatt, a director of seveal classic Doctor Who episodes, died recently. He did one of my favorites as a kid, The Five Doctors.

I’m a mountain biker, but I do enjoy watching some coverage of the Tour de France when it’s going on. They just today took the wraps off of what will be the course for the 2008 edition of the race.

Today’s the release of Mac OS X 10.5 ″Leopard,“ and it’s a big release as far as Ruby is concerned. Ruby is finally supposed to be built-in as a framework, with Rails, RubyGems, readline support and a whole bunch of other Rubylicious goodness. You can read all the details on Mac OS X Forge. I’ve been working on updating my personal projects to work with the Rails 2.0 Preview Release, so we’ll see how customizing the installation that Apple gives us goes.

As far as getting Leopard goes, I’m not planning in waiting in line to get a t-shirt, but I’ll definitely be making a stop by the local Apple Store to get my copy at, say, 9 o’clock. You know, after the lines die down a bit and I can hopefully just walk in and grab a copy.

I usually do a clean install when I get a new OS, but I just did a clean install about 3 months ago, and I think I’m going to try the upgrade route this time and see how it goes.

Update: The official Rails blog has an entry on compiling the native C extensions for MySQL to work on Leopard.

Those of you who know me know that I regularly post in a walled garden with a few close friends and also recently started a blog with my wife. Why another place here? Am I really lacking for an outlet? No, not really. But there are times when I’d like to write something viewable by the world-at-large and perhaps isn’t really relevant in a blog with Val. So, I decided to start this up. I’ll try and post here and if it doesn’t work, I’ll kill it off. We’ll see. 🙂

It came today. 🙂

It’s nearly identical in feel to the G7 it replaces, which is a good thing.

Except the strap, which was slightly nicer on the G7. If it didn’t say “PowerShot G7″ on it, I’d keep that one.

I haven’t had much time to use it, but here are some early impressions.

Pro:

• RAW!
• Bigger, nicer screen. Very noticable.
• New focus modes with new review modes. More later, after I experiment with them in detail.
• Faster.
• ISO data is back in the right place in the EXIF! Yay!

Con:

• Strap not as stylish.
• Viewfinder not improved over G7.
• RAW not supported in Lightroom or Aperture yet.

So far, I’m stoked.