43 HP Vectras and no beer at Fortress Fiorina

MANY IGNORANT LUDDITES decry the loss of their childhood games, involving such dated concepts as 'outdoors', 'plants' and 'animals'. Children I am told used to use their imaginations rather than their computers to keep themselves happy. They only pretended to kill the non-politically correct term for subcultures instead of doing it in 32-bit color at 8x AA on a SLI rig. What fools.

At the INQUIRER however, we are always looking to the old ways, analog media, fresh air and the like are not completely unknown to us, there are museums where we actually learned about this stuff. Readers keep writing us implying that our perspective is a little off, and we have a childlike outlook on life. I assume they mean we are young at heart and keen to enjoy life.

So, we decided to see how things were done last century, all for science and your reading enjoyment. Keith Bachman and I walked into my living room and surveyed the tools at hand to do things the 'old fashioned' way. A quick check showed 43 HP Vectras and a Compaq Evo SFF.

As it will be to any astute reader, the path was immediately clear to us, we knew what we had to do. Build an onslaught map.... umm.... build a fort! Yeah, a fort. What else are you going to do with 43 Vectras, reimage them and give them to charities? No, with a fort we could play 'outsourced worker and Indians', defending the homestead against the evils of corporate greed.

The design was all done manually, and it was done in the name of the greatest and most loving corporate CxO ever to enrich herself on the backs of the well meaning innocent. Yes, we built Phortress Fiorina.

It was a rousing success. While we didn't pocket millions in the process, there were several comments tossed around funny enough to make at least one of us cry. We had fun, and no cats were harmed in this use of analog media, although two seemed very confused.

Final tally of things used in the making were as follows: 43 HP Vectras, 1 Compaq Evo, 1 Color Classic Macintosh to scare away mice, a picture of our mascot, the four-foot cattle horns from my Segway(1), a colander, a sauce pan, a spatula and a not-quite-as-dry-as-it-looked toilet plunger. Oddly, no alcohol was involved in this, but the bars don't close for another two and a half hours. Bye. µ

(1) No, really, I did bolt 4 foot cattle horns to the Segway. I had to take them off when I discovered it would not fit through the front door, but they will return.