Lauren Caitlin Upton, the Miss Teen South Carolina representative for the Miss Teen USA Pageant 2007, demonstrates the effectiveness of Bush’s “No Child Left Behind” policy.

I’m not a typical gamer. By that, I mean, I do not play every crappy game that’s put out on the market solely because I feel the need to play different games. I am, however, very elitist when it comes to my gaming. I’ve played a handful of games in my 20+ years, mostly the “greats”: Doom, X-Com: UFO Enemy Unknown, Dune II, Starcraft, Warcrafts, Quake 1 and Quake 3, GTA 3 and GTA:SA, and the Halo Trilogy (I plan to play the final one when it’s released). That’s about it. I don’t have time for second rate games by second rate companies.

With that said, I have just spent about $5000 on my living room solely for the purpose of my entertainment:

• Xbox 360 Premium with HDMI
• 42″ LCD Sharp Aquos widescreen TV
• Leather reclining sofa
• A 1 and a 1/2-sized reclining chair (dubbed “The Cuddler”)

And the game I’ve found myself most playing is Ms. Pac-Man from the Xbox Live Arcade.

On an unrelated note, my girlfriend noted that Pac-Man and Ms. Pac-Man had a kid. “Shameful,” she says. She prefers Bejeweled 2.

This Alt-TAB replacement is actually an official PowerToy from Microsoft.  It will add function and beauty to your otherwise near-worthless and boring Alt-TAB window.  In addition to seeing the icon of the application window you are switching to, you will also see a preview of the application as it was running.  This helps particularly when multiple sessions of an application are open.

Launchy is the Windows version of Mac’s QuickSilver. It is free and open source (naturally) and a flexible and relatively lightweight alternative to using Windows Start Menu.

By pressing the hotkey (Alt-Space), you bring up Launchy’s main window and type what you want. A quick type of “fire” brings up your most used entry of “firefox” but doesn’t stop there.  If you have other programs (in this example, Fire Antivirus, SoftFire screensaver or Fire and Motion), it will display them as well since it contains the keyword you typed.

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Ady Romantika has so kindly packaged Pidgin into a nice portable package called PidginPortable for use on USB drives. Take your contacts, log files and conversation on-the-go leaving no trace behind on the computer you use. (I highly recommend the rest of the PortableApps as well.)

Included in his package in addition to Pidgin (the free, open-source, ad-free Instant Messenger client we’ve all grown to love) are the following features:

• Spell check support. Aspell is included with EN dictionary as an example. If you don’t need spell checking support simply delete the contents of the App\Aspell folder and you’ll save 5MB+ of space.
• Off-the-Record Messaging plugin support. Files located in App\Pidgin\plugins\ folder, as otr_*.exe and pidgin-otr.dll
• Included a gtkrc file for CTRL-ENTER key binding when sending messages.

In addition to that, Ady also recommends my custom smileys theme for Pidgin, ForumSmileys.