Chex Quest 3

Chex Quest 3 is available for download! In 1996 Eric was a wee lad of four years. Back then I was doing a lot of the grocery shopping (or, in deference to SamJay, food shopping), and one day I saw that Chex cereals had a promotion with a computer game on CD-ROM. It was called Chex Quest. The discs were manufactured by AOL in return for Chex including the then-ubiquitous offer to join AOL. Although I had no interest in America Online, I couldn’t pass up the free game.

Chex Quest menu

My computer was an 83 MHz Pentium with 8 MB of memory and a 300 MB disk, that I’d upgraded from a 40 MHz 386 with 4 MB and a 170 MB disk. The upgrade made it possible to run Windows 95 no slower than I’d been running Windows 3.1. Internet access was a 33.6 Kbps modem dialing into a local service provider, and at that speed it took about an hour to download Chex Quest 2.

After installing Chex Quest, I recognized it immediately as being a DOS program based on the DOOM game engine. I watched the introductory video, with the background story for the game. I’ll let Eric explain the premise…
Continue reading Chex Quest 3

Mark it down! Market up!

Here’s something else that was sitting in the pile of draft entries I haven’t finished. It’s a table showing the standing of my house’s value in percentages, as estimated by Zillow a couple of weeks ago. The good news is, its value is still up by 78% from when we bought it.

Past: This
home		 Town County MA US
30 days -3.5% -1.6% -1.0% -0.6% -0.4%
1 year -8.7% -3.4% -4.7% -5.6% -8.3%
5 years -2.7% 8.8% 4.8% 6.8% 24.2%
10 years 71.9% 93.2% 91.5% 105.8% 89.9%
Since last sale 07/31/1998 78.6% 96.3% 96.6% 110.5% 93.1%
 

Voters are God?

This is one of a bunch of political items I didn’t get around to doing when the story was fresh.

Palin says election result rests in God’s hands

This is the sort of rhetoric that some eat up like ice cream, but gives others the chills. Neither the election, nor Iraq, nor the economy are in the hands of God. He’s got control over things like earthquakes and meteors colliding with Earth.