Today the internet once again proved to be the best thing ever. At least for a 40 year old techie guy in the mood for reminiscing.

These are several of the toys of my youth, and in many cases, my introduction to the world of personal electronic entertainment:

Tomy Digital Derby: Ahh.. scrolling transparent tape and a mechanical wheel. That’s all I needed!

Entex Soccer: It was no Coleco product that’s for sure. Even then I had taste and this left a sour one. But I didn’t turn it down at Christmas.

Coleco QuizWhiz: Yes, this was one of my parent’s earliest attempts at ‘educational’ toys. Mind you I didn’t love it, but I didn’t absolutely hate it either.

Einstein (by Castle Toy): The cool kids got a Simon. I got Einstein, a cheap rip-off clone. You might as well have bought my running shoes at the grocery store.

Coleco Pac-Man: It even looked like the arcade machine! Need anyone say more?

Coleco Alien Attack: Technically, this was my brother’s game. But when he wasn’t busy punching me in the gut, he let me play it. It was built like a tank, but man was it addictive. I can remember the tinny music inevitably speeding up as we ascended the levels. Awesome, absolutely awesome.

Coleco Electronic Quarterback: This was THE game. Everybody seemed to have this one. Except me. I’d like to think it was because I was so individualistic, but it wasn’t. I played it a lot though, even though I didn’t own one. I remember the thin red led’s and the massively stiff clicking buttons. So simple, but it held you there like a crack habit.

Were you ever part of the era of early handheld electronic games? What did you play?
Thanks to the Handheld Game Museum for all the wonderful images and info. You made my day people! Check it out to see if you can find some of the toys of your youth…

Also very interesting (for windows folks anyway), is Peter Hirschberg’s LEDHead handheld game simulator.

I’ve had a Friendfeed account for just over a month now. Up until now I haven’t really given it a second look. But as Twitter seems to be stumbling from one problem to the next, I’m taking a closer look at Friendfeed, and it’s looking very interesting.

I think it’s great that I can have my Twitter posts, blog posts, Flickr posts and lots of other stuff show up over there in one stream. And the fact that I can pick and choose which services feed into it and which don’t is nice. Instead of posting links to your blog postings in Twitter for instance, the blog posts can show up there automagically with no extra effort on your part.

One thing I’ve noticed in trying to figure it out, is that documentation is sorely lacking. Sure there’s an FAQ, but not much else. I realize that the focus is on ramping up the features and technologies as disappointed Twitterer(er)s flock to something else, but there is a risk here of people not understanding what Friendfeed can actually do.

A couple of newbie questions that are puzzling me at the moment…

It’s nice that I can reply to someone’s Twitter posts from within Friendfeed and have that reply sent back out to Twitter. But can I just write a short post on Friendfeed and have a copy spit out onto the Twitter stream? It doesn’t seem so.

Is there a better, more controllable way to view my Twitterfeed? Granted I haven’t checked into the RSS feed or Gmail options, but what I really want is some more control over the bare-bones web page on Friendfeed. Collapsable comment threads would be a nice thing for starters. Some filter functionality wouldn’t be kicked out of bed either.

Of course it could be that I can do all of the above and just don’t know it yet. Educate me.

So if you’re interested, sign up over at Friendfeed if you haven’t already, and subscribe to me over at http://friendfeed.com/rfquerin. Lots of my Twitter contacts are already in Ff, but even if you’re not, I am trying to add (perhaps aptly named) “imaginary friends” for those Twitterers who are not over there yet.