But for the last three weeks, I’ve been loving Armor Games’ Kingdom Rush. I bought it despite several Internet warnings that it was hopelessly addictive. I can report, after three weeks or nearly constant play, that is absolutely true. If you buy this game, you will get hooked.

What’s so great about it? At first glance, it’s just another Tower Defense game; i.e. you face waves of attackers that you must arrange defensive forces against. Kingdom Rush comes with the twist of being set in a medieval/fantasy environment. It’s basically a D&D spin on classic TD games. You fight off orcs, goblins, trolls, gargoyles, spiders, and other assorted magical creatures.

Your defenses are a combination of infantry, artillery, magicians, and archers. Using your initial budget, you set up your defenses, summon the attackers, and start earning more gold to buy additional structures and upgrade your original ones. As long as you keep killing the attacking forces, you keep earning exciting new ways to destroy them.

I'm about to die.

It’s a pretty basic concept and, honestly, I never understood why this type of game is so addictive. And then I played Kingdom Rush. There’s something about those rolling waves of attackers, those brief moments of rest, and the ability to see your weak points and correct them during the game that sucks you in. Also, you get a bit of a rush from dropping a Rain of Fire spell on a swarm of attacking monsters. Just when you think you have it set up the way you want, a zombie slips through, you die, and you think, “OK, one more game.” Two hours later you’re still doing that.

That’s been me for the past three weeks.

There is also the clever combination of strategy and tactics, neither particularly heavy, that makes the game difficult to ‘solve’. The game gets tougher as your skills improve. It never gets boring because there is always something new popping up. There are 12 basic levels that can be played at two different difficulty settings. Solve those and two bonus levels pop up. In addition, there are a pair of one-off scenarios at each level.

Put it all together and there are weeks of fun packed into this game. Oh, and the 99 cent price tag makes it a terrific bargain.

Thus, I highly recommend Kingdom Rush. But be warned: once you start playing, you may find it difficult to stop.

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Last Monday she lost her first tooth, her upper left incisor. It had reached that crazy, almost sickening level of looseness when Suzanne finally reached over and yanked it out. There was a scream of surprise then much happiness. Even more happiness the next morning when she found the Tooth Fairy's gift.

The upper right incisor looked to be about ready, too. It hung in a few more days, and when I picked Cait up from school on Tuesday, she big an even bigger gap in her smile. This time she yanked it out on her own. Tough girl.

In partial celebration of that and partially because it's been long enough, we went to the pet store Tuesday and she picked out a new Betta to replace the late Spike. She wanted one that didn't look like Meghan's, so she selected a small, blue female this time. She named the new fish Isabella, which is not a shock. That is Cait's (And Lia's) favorite name, and we've had about 1000 Isabellas in the house in recent months. Dolls, drawings, imaginary friends. Isabellas out the ass.

Meghan had a first last week, too. Her first sleep-over. One of her buddies from school called and invited her over Friday night. Everything went great. I'm sure there will be many, many more of these over the next dozen years or so, and eventually it will be our house that hosts not just one, but several goofy, wound-up girls at once.

Lia doesn't have any great, new accomplishments, but she has been making us laugh with her language. She's been dropping little phrases she's picked up from others that sound ridiculous coming out of a three-year-old into her conversations. Examples:

"What the...?" Fortunately she does not complete this one. "That's not what I expected at all!" "I can't believe it!"

She delivers each of these with much gusto, and always with a smile, as if she knows how funny she sounds.

She also gives me a thumbs-up all the time. The best is when she's chasing the big sisters around, looks at me, grins wildly and flashes me a thumbs-up as she runs by. Makes me laugh every time.

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He is blogging for GQ magazine on what life is like for a role-player in the NBA. His latest entry addresses finding your niche. It's something every player who gets drafted should read, because not everyone turns into the next LeBron.

This is where a little perspective and being secure in yourself can go a long way. If you have perspective, you will realize that your job totally rules. You get paid a huge salary to play basketball. You will be part of the 1 percent. You will get your summers off. You will be encouraged to take naps most days.

How To Survive in the NBA When You're Not a Superstar

You may recall that I took a crack at running a separate blog dedicated to my musings on Apple and technology. Like many of my Internet dreams, 1 it seemed like a great idea but in practice wasn’t such a huge success. Turns out it’s hard to write every day about the same subject, especially when there are about 1000 people out there doing the exact same thing. I admire those who can find something to focus their writing each day. And I’ll let them do it.

So I shut the Mac Daddy site down awhile back.

That doesn’t mean I don’t still have the urge to write about Apple-related stuff. And just because I only have a personal blog doesn’t mean I can’t share those thoughts here, right?

Thus, coming soon will be the first of my occasional reviews of iOS apps. I’ve been obsessed by a fun little game over the past couple weeks. So keep an eye out for that in the next day or so.

But, while I have your attention, a few thoughts on the surprise announcement last week of the next iteration of the Macintosh operating system, Mountain Lion.

Like many people, when the news first broke Thursday morning, I thought it was some kind of joke. After all, when Apple wants to surprise the world, they have a big event. They don’t talk to a select group of journalists and writers and let word trickle out. But, as they said, they’re doing things differently now.

After reading a number of the insider scoops, I’m left with a single impression: the operating system wars really are over, at least on the desktop. Apple, Microsoft, Intel, and the PC manufacturing community are far more interested in what’s happening in the portable device space. Desktop/laptop computers are still important and won’t disappear any time soon. But OS X and Windows are so advanced and the payoff for pushing them further is so little that all sides will scale things back dramatically there.

What makes that apparent to me is Apple’s announcement that they will now be doing annual updates to OS X, as they’ve done with iOS since its introduction. No more massive rewrites. No more starting from scratch. No more 18-24 month cycles that bring dramatic changes to the core OS. Every year they’re going to tweak some things, upgrade the security features another notch, refine some of the differences between OS X and iOS, and ship an update.

Along with the end of the massive update, we will also never again see a $129 price tag on the update. At least from Apple. The last two updates have both been in the $20 range. I expect that to remain the case. As iPhones and iPads have become the biggest components of Apple’s business, gone is the need to turn desktop OS upgrades into money makers. It’s better to keep the growing installed base on the latest iteration for a modest upgrade fee than try to goose revenues every couple of years with a major release.

And while it’s obvious Apple 2 is pushing their desktop and mobile operating systems closer together, I think this is a clear sign that while they may share more common elements over time, they will always remain distinct. The annual updates will keep the desktop side of the business as fresh as the mobile side, from a software standpoint, and make the overall experience even more similar. But running the same apps on your MacBook Air and your iPad is not happening any time soon.

Finally, you can’t help but look at this announcement and how it was handled and speculate on the changes in the company since Steve Jobs’ death. Maybe he signed off on this and it’s been in the works for a year or more. But it’s a very good sign for the Tim Cook era at how the company is moving forward. Execution is always the hardest part of any business plan, but so far it looks like Apple will not miss a beat in the new era.

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There was a common theme to the basketball games I cared about over the weekend. Friday the team I covered won their game by 35 points. In an amazing comeback over the past three weeks, my teams are now up to a +7 TMF. I get to cover the #2 team in class 2A this week, so hopefully that improves some more.

Saturday KU won by 33.

And Sunday, in the first NBA game I’ve attended since 2003 (I think), the Pacers waxed Charlotte by 35.

I sense a common thread.

The Pacers game was fun. They kicked it off with a 21-2 spurt. Charlotte scored 10-straight points but after that, it was over. Charlotte is not a good team, but they really seemed to quit at a couple points in the game. The old man in me wants to say, “Play for pride. You’re making too much money to mail it in like this.” The realist in me sees a team that sucks playing a Sunday night road game and has some understanding for why they were just trying to get off the court as quickly as possible.

I’ve been watching at least parts of Pacers games this year. They’re pretty young, full of (seemingly) good guys, and tend to play hard every night. Danny Granger is a third-tier NBA star. Paul George is a budding star who can be brilliant at times. Roy Hibbert is awkward and limited and likable.

But I most enjoy watching 12-year veteran David West. He still has some game, but relies mostly on old-man moves these days. He’s the perfect crafty veteran to lead this team of youngsters. In 22 minutes Sunday, he went for 14 points on 7-10 shooting, eight boards, three assists, three blocks. It’s fun to spend a few minutes just watching him. Focus on him working away from the ball, getting into the perfect help-defense positions, sneaking in for rebounds from the weak side. He’s a craftsman.

No real fun stories from the game. We were sitting in the upper deck, which felt a long way away after sitting in high school gyms most of the time. But it was still a good view. Banker’s Life Fieldhouse is a fine place to watch a game. We did see some scalpers screaming at each other before the game. One threatened to shoot the other, but pointed out that he wasn’t worth the bullet. That’s a fun conversation to walk through, believe me.

Official attendance was 11,600. I’m not sure it was quite that high. With the remake of the roster and them playing more competitive ball, the city is slowly re-embracing the franchise. But a Sunday night game against a bad opponent doesn’t fill the seats. While not in as bad of shape as New Orleans, this is still not a healthy franchise. It would be great if George, or some future draft pick, turned into a franchise cornerstone along the lines of Reggie Miller and the team could again be beloved and safe in Indy, rather than a prime prospect to end up in Seattle or Kansas City.

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The Bangles - "Going Down to Liverpool"

Two observations:

• 1 - A big strike against the 80s was how you could take a completely charming song like this and make an utterly awful video for it.
• 2 - The label clearly hadn't figured out what they had in Susanna Hoffs yet.

The biggest obstacle we faced this week came Thursday morning at approximately 3:30 am. I woke to hear the smoke alarms and cable backup box chirping and seeing strange flashes of light out the windows. After a few moments I realized the power had gone out. I waited a few more minutes until it was apparent this wasn’t just a quick flicker because a squirrel touched two power lines, and then took a flashlight into Cait and Lia’s room so if they woke up they wouldn’t freak out. A few minutes later there was another pop in the distance and some more flashes of light. “Great,” I thought, “transformers are blowing up.”

The weather was fine, so my hope was that this would be a quick fix. But at 7:00 the power was still off so we scrambled to get Meghan ready for school in the dark. When we left, a police car was blocking one way out of our neighborhood. That direction you could see one of the main power lines that is usually 40 feet in the air down on the ground and several of the utility poles had broken cross-supports. Greater still.

Cait’s school was first delayed and then cancelled, so she, Lia and I sat at home, them watching movies on a laptop and me reading in the light from the front window. Eventually I checked the Indy Star’s website and learned that a drunk driver had a run-in with a utility pole. Initially 6000 people lost power, but after some work, only about 300, all in our neighborhood, remained in the dark. And, according to the power company, it was going to take most of the day to fix it.

We went out for lunch, went to the library, and after getting Meghan went to my in-laws’ until we learned the power was back on after 5:00 pm. Good times. The girls were well-behaved and, fortunately, the temperature was in the 40s. By the time we left the house to get Meghan it was getting a little chilly, but it obviously could have been much worse this time of year. And yes, we have a fireplace that we’ve never used. I suppose if it was freezing we could have kicked it on, but I’d hate to be one of those people who used a fireplace for the first time in eight years and then their chimney caught on fire because there are birds nests in it or something.

And who drives drunk at 3:30 am on a Thursday?

OK, that was longer that I thought. I’ll keep the rest of this brief.

I covered a rousing comeback Tuesday night. My team, GHS, which had only won three games all season, dug out of a 13-point hole to beat a team with two Division I recruits by 11. GHS has, obviously, struggled this year but that was their third-straight win. It was great to not only see the comeback, but see a team developing confidence in the last couple weeks of the season. It’s unlikely they’ll make any kind of run in sectionals, but at least there is a glimmer of hope now.

Plans may change, but I am scheduled to attend my first Pacers game in six years this Sunday. They broke a five-game losing streak last night, but had been one of the surprises of the early NBA season before that. I wouldn’t say I’m getting back on the NBA bandwagon, but for the first time since before the Brawl, I’m at least paying a little attention to them.

Since my power outage rant went longer than planned, I’ll cut this off here. Have a great weekend.

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For some reason, Meghan thought of that this morning as she was getting ready for school. She asked who it was that came to pick it up. Here is our conversation, as I remember it.

“It’s called AmVets. They help people that used to be in the military.”

“What’s the military?”

“The armed forces. The army, navy, air force, marines. They help those people find work, places to live, to buy things…”

“Like weapons?”

I’m not sure whether I should be proud or concerned about her inductive reasoning.

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