Dear Blog-o-sphere,

If you were a 14 year old boy at the Children’s Home Society of Washington who wanted “Bionicles or anything he can build,” which particular Bionicle set would you prefer? Or would you perhaps prefer some K’NEX, or some LEGO/MEGABLOKS?

I didn’t know what exactly “Bionicles” were, but I figured it’d be an easy gift to pick out. I was wrong.

Any advice on what the best gift to buy a build-minded anonymous 14-year-old might be?

Yesterday I managed to lose a $20 bill in a public place, thus putting me well on my way to completing the unexpected-windfall karmic circle.

Yesterday I fell in love with a bird.

See, I love animals, particularly smart ones, so when we learned of an exotic bird store here in town, we went to check it out. This place has a ton of AMAZING birds just sitting on perches around the store who will let you handle them (provided you’ve used some of the hand sanitzer from wall-mounted dispensers. They’re that smart.)

Anyway, I was checking out all the cool birds when this one in particular kind of cocked his head at me and extended one betaloned foot in my direction. I stuck out my hand and the little guy jumped right onto it. Then he promptly bit a hole in my coat sleeve.

I spent a good ten minutes with him, then he climbed onto D’s shoulder and didn’t want to come down. It turns out that this particular bird is on consignment because his owner had to move to Colorado, and that he had been pretty spoiled by said owner, so he’s quite full of himself. When he wants your attention, you best give it to him. Both D and I got ourselves bit to the point of blood extraction because he didn’t want to be put back on his perch, wanting instead to keep getting attention from the nice sanitary-handed people.

So the store owner tells me that this particular breed of bird (the White-Bellied Caique, pictured at right) sells for $1,000, but that this one comes with a $600+ cage (that is enormous) as part of the $1,000. Now I’ve been agonizing over the fact that I’ve really wanted a bird like this for a long time, and that this is probably the best deal I’ll ever see on one. Not to mention that his one seems to really like me. (It likes me so much that I bleed when we part!)

$1,000 is a lot of money though, and 45+ years is a long time for a pet to live. If I thought it was hard when Filliam H. Muffman — who cost me like $10 — died after a month, I can’t imagine what it will be like when I’m 75 years old and I’ve had him for pert-near 50 years. Or when our incredibly jealous cat goes all Harlan Sanders with him. Whisker lickin’ good!

Because of the latest shot fired by the haxors in the big war with Sony over what can and can’t be done with a PSP, my handheld gaming console suddenly became able to do something I had previously resisted making it able to do: play ISO images of games right off the memory stick, no disc required.

Primarily, this is a convenience factor; games take forever to load of the disc and you have to carry around a bunch of discs if you want to play more than one game. Being able to do this is good.

But playing from the memory stick would also hypothetically allow one to get an ISO from somewhere other than the game discs you own. Like, for instance, a world-wide P2P network, allowing you access to every game ever made, without spending a dime. This is not good.

Sure, I’ve spent the better part of 10 years acquiring illicit copies of music, movies, TV programs, books, etc, but I’ve never once stolen software (unless you count obsolete gaming platforms… I have played many NES and SNES games on my PSP that I didn’t actually own back in the day), because for some reason, there’s a distinction in my mind — a sort of Rubicon that I refuse to cross.

Well, let’s just say that I crossed that line pretty easily. See, I downloaded a demo of LocoRoco since I had heard from many different sources that it’s a really great, addictive game. The only demo I could find was in Japanese, so I was having trouble figuring out a few aspects of the game, which ineveitably led me to see if I could find an english copy. I didn’t, but I did find an ISO of the whole game.

Needless to say, I’ve now played through like half the game (and it is indeed great). So yesterday I was at GameCrazy swapping out damaged GameCube discs we bought last week. So far we’re at 100% for discs purchased that don’t actually work. Dics suck; please bring back cardtriges. Anyway, I inquired whether there was a used copy of RocoLoco to be purchased by me, and indeed there was.

So now I’m left with the silliest-feeling purchase of my life: a hunk of plastic that will never be inserted into my PSP, instead to sit on my shelf gathering dust in the name of legalizing my software.

Gaaah!

For some reason when posting from my Sidekick, I get posts in triplicate. I’ve deleted the duplicates, but that doesn’t help the rss folk.

Sorry for all the spam :(