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PC World Canada recently put up a list of the 25 worst computer products ever made. It’s quite a fun read, and can be found here.

What tops the list? What else: American Online.

But one entrant that is of particular interest to web designers, clocking in at number 8: Microsoft Internet Explorer 6.x.

With its neverending list of security vulnerabilities, ghastly support of CSS, and Microsoft’s obnoxious insistence on forcing any Windows user to have it crammed down their throat, why shouldn’t it be on the top list of worst computer programs?

I hear other web designers, when dealing with IE’s shortcomings, hasten to say they’re not “browser snobs”. It doesn’t require snobbery to hate Internet Explorer 6. It just takes common sense.

We shall see if IE 7 makes the hideous shortcomings of 6 a dim and particularly unpleasant memory from the past. I have some doubts (like the fact that CSS support is still lagging behind the other browsers, for no reason), but if for nothing else, I will welcome IE 7 as the means to put IE 6 at last to rest. Hopefully forever.

So I’m sitting at the computer late this morning with a client, looking over some of the sample logos I’ve been doing for his upcoming website (he has this notion of making the logo look exactly like the Sapporo beer logo, and I was feeling very smug that I totally nailed it) when the following exchange occurred:

Me: do you smell that? A sweet smell, like honey.

Him: it is the growing season in this hemisphere of the planet, Captain. There are doubtless many pollen aromas.

Me: (distracted) It was many years ago … on another planet …

Whoops — not that one. Actually, it went like this:

Me: Do you smell something burning?

Him: Dude, how do I know? It’s your place.

Me: Holy fuck, it’s coming from the computer!

Him: Cool. Did it melt?

I turned off the computer in a panic and got down on my hands and knees, inwardly cursing myself for letting so many weeks go by without vacuuming away the dustballs. I was sure that my lack of cleanliness had resulted in a a dustball the size of a tribble getting jammed into the CPU fan, grinding it to a halt, turning my CPU into a silicon swamp.

It wasn’t the CPU fan. And no dustballs were in sight. Instead, what I discovered was the graphics processor fan blades hanging askew and lifeless by a thread, dangling from the card’s heatsinks. Wonderful.

Fans do this. They start making weird noises and then they just … die. And this one died, the tiny little motor melting away to nothing like Toht’s face at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark.

Okay, I thought. Don’t panic. It’s an nVidia 6600GT, a popular card, not too recent to be scarce and not too old to be forgotten; it’s easy to get replacements. I’ll rush out and get a new fan.

Four computer shops and more than four hours later, without having had any luck in finding a replacement, and I realized that I could well end up with a weekend without a computer, without the soft glow of its gentle company, without the tools I needed to chase after work I was already hopelessly behind at. Jesus, without Oblivion.

Fine, I thought, as I stood in my local PC Club, the clock by this point well past 6:00. Nobody has my exact model of fan? I’ll just get another fan and jury rig something. It doesn’t have to be perfect. Just get me through the weekend until I can call up my card maker and have them send me the replacement. And then get through the extra couple of days until the replacement arrives.

I grabbed a cheap-o three-pin fan (sized for bios chips, I think), took a few minutes to chat geek-style to the two guys on duty at the shop, then drove home, determined that, if MacGyver could build a flying dirigible out of an old shoe and some toothpaste, then I could coax the wrong model of fan into my GPU to keep it going until the real replacement arrived.

So here I am. It’s approaching midnight. The soft glow from the computer monitor is warm and inviting. There’s a faint whiff of warm, toxic plastic; a comforting aroma. All throughout Los Angeles people are partying, going to movies, eyeing up potential conquests. But not me. I’m staring at the GPU core temperature readout in my Geforce 6600GT properties dialogue box. It’s resting gently at 47 degrees Centigrade. Warm, not too warm. If I reach my hand down into the case (which I’ve left open) I can feel the gentle breeze from my makeshift GPU fan. A cheerful breeze. The heatsinks are still there, snug and warm but not hot, not in danger of melting like cheese all over the GPU.

For a few hours today I was in a panic — the panic of nearly losing a loved one. But like that time on the island when Sun used aloe vera to make Shannon’s asthma attack subside, I made do with what I had to hand. To make everything okay. That’s what people do for their loved ones.

I just took my computer’s temperature again. Still 47 degrees. The fever is gone. The crisis, for the moment, is over. I can go to sleep now, knowing my loved one is healthy.

This being the first of the famous “Pinball table of the week” posts, I thought it important to carefully choose a pinball table that captures everything that I love about pinball, and everything that makes pinball a unique, valid and complimentary companion to other kinds of gaming.

So I got on Wikipedia and typed in a few pinball tables I enjoy. Big, classic tables. They didn’t come up. I went to the Williams page, and none of the pinball tables mentioned in the article had an associated link, whereas all the video games Williams produced did. Wikipedia has failed me? Impossible. As a test, I typed in some of my favorite classic arcade video games. Every single one I typed in had an associated article.

Before we get on to discussing pinball game of the week, then, let me put a plea out to pinbally people: Please start writing articles about these great pinball games for Wikipedia? Not just for those of use who enjoy them to read up on them, but also for new fans and the simply idly curious to learn about them. Of course, there are many other pinball-related resources out there, but these tables deserve to be recognized in broad sites like Wikipedia just like arcade games do.

Now, before I move on to Sorcerer itself, I think I need to point something out, that kinda sucks: I don’t have the actual real physical manufactured table to play. Nor have I ever done so. Nor is it likely that any of my tables of the week will. Yes, it’s depressing, but all of my pinball pleasure comes from Visual Pinball / VPinMame, which is supported by an amazing community of these insane geniuses who craft 3D replicas of these things, complete with lots of reference photos pasted as textures over the model, and then port the solid state stuff in using vPinMame. The brains of the machine thinks it’s running a real physical table, but it’s running a simulation of that real table. Since I discovered Visual Pinball nearly two years ago, I’ve been hooked.

Table of the week: Sorcerer

The Eighties was a great decade for pinball, with tons of great tables released. The Seventies had seen a great deal of technological innovation, at the end of which something really special began to occur: tables began to talk. The advent of speech brought a whole new level of immersion to the experience, and never is that more evident than with 1985’s Sorcerer.

Ported to Visual Pinball with tremendous artistry by superhero PacDude, replete with flashing lights and tons of eye candy, Sorcerer instantly propelled itself into my all-time favorite list, and judging from the ratings score at the Internet Pinball Database, others think so too.

The player does a sort of battle against a taunting, supercilious Sorcerer, and playwise the game features all the staples of pinball at the time, including an eye-catching elevated bridge running across the top of the playfield from a ramp on the left to a holding area on the right where balls get racked up to trigger the completely frantic multiball.

The bulk of play, and of scoring, lies in attempting to hit a number of targets arrayed through the middle of the board to spell — you guessed it — S-O-R-C-E-R-E-R. There’s also a little nook with a triple drop-targets and an associated extra flipper — get all three drop targets before the timer runs out (about five seconds I think) and bonuses start to light up on the inlanes.

The table is actually quite straightforward, in terms of design and features. It’s also one of the hardest pinball games to play, at least for me. The ball will very, very often skip out down the outlanes while I sit and watch, powerless to intervene. Such is pinball. I’m pretty much the worst player in the world at pinball, but I would rank the difficulty of this one pretty high.

What really makes this table special is the pair of amazing, intimidating eyes just above and behind the playfield, which flash and light in response to the action going on, and the awesome voice which goes with it. The Sorcerer basically taunts you and mocks you the entire time, in this deep, booming voice, replete with zappy, thunderous sound effects. The whole package deal is tremendously memorable, and I often play the damned thing just to hear the zippy sound effects (also, this table, like other Williams tables of the era, uses sound effects that any fan of Eighties arcade games will recognize, like Joust).

How can anything be bad which, when your game ends with a particularly pitiful score, taunts you with “You are done, mortal!”