My wife and I spent the day in Santa Cruz last Sunday, on the Boardwalk. I got in trouble by taking her on the Fireball for our first ride. "If this makes me sick, I'm going to kill you," she said. To make a long story short (and perhaps this is even needless to say), she wasn't happy when the ride was over.

To be honest, I wasn't, either. The Fireball is a great ride, but I think one needs to work up to it. But that didn't stop me. I must have ridden it 6 or 7 times that day. To shorten this story yet again, I wound up feeling pretty sick by the end of the day. But the really sick part about it all was that I wanted to ride it again. But I refrained.

It was a beautiful day, so we spent part of the time just laying on the beach or walking around. We alternated between easy rides (like the haunted house and some other kiddie ride, which made me sick from the gaudy visual displays) and the hard rides (like the Tornado, which is where we got really sick after reversing the spin direction of our pod). Chris even rode the Merry-Go-Round...while I watched. I had to get out of there quickly, since the automated "musical" instruments were driving me murderously insane.

What I really like about the Boardwalk are the old video games. For some reason, I didn't get around to playing any this time, but I did walk past an old Asteroids game...that had a single high score on it. Apparently, those old games don't get played much anymore. But Galaxians was there, and Frogger and a slew of others. My favorite was Gorf, which was kind of like five games in one.

I miss those old games.

If you go into an arcade these days, all you see are high-speed fighting or driving or flying games, that usually involve shooting at something, blowing something up, running something over, or crashing into things...or at least trying not to. The realism in some of the modern games is pretty amazing, too. But there's just something about those old, original arcade games that today's games just don't have. I can't put my finger on it, but maybe it is because they were just plain fun.

One game in particular seemed to be all the rage when it came out: Pac-Man. I was never particularly interested in this game and today still do not know what the attraction to it was. But it appealed to a lot of people, and if people were having fun playing it, then it was OK by me. Sometimes I just liked to watch.

Pac-Man reminds me of a friend of mine. Let me tell you a little about my friend Jeff. Pac-Man reminds me of Jeff because of a hilarious story he once told me. I can't remember the specifics, but it involved a bulletin board system (BBS for short - that I believe he wrote for the Commodore 64) and a particular chat function that one of its features. As a SYSOP (System OPerator - pronounced "sis-op" by some, and "sigh-sop" by others), Jeff had total control over the system. Also, since he wrote the thing, he could add whatever features he wanted.

Usually, BBS's were single-user systems - one user could dial up and connect to it. But while the user was online, he (or she) could page the SYSOP in order to enter a text chat mode and talk directly to the system operator...in this case, to Jeff. Well, Jeff had cleverly implemented a little hidden feature whereby if he pressed a particular key combination while in chat mode, the user would see a little animated (text-based, I assume) Pac-Man zip across the screen, eating the words away as it went by. Then it would disappear and the words would reappear as though nothing had happened.

One particular user (I believe it was a friend of Jeff's at the time) was very disturbed by this. And, of course, when he made comment about it or otherwise reported it to Jeff, Jeff simply denied that it existed and accused this user of contriving this tall tale. I mean, really - a Pac-Man marching across the screen, eating the text away? That's absurd! After all, this was a simple text chat mode on a BBS that Jeff wrote! Nobody was going to convince Jeff that there was this animated Pac-Man running around on the user's screen, much less on the system. Perhaps it was an early virus! ;-)

It was just a funny tale that I remember Jeff telling me. I wish I could have been there to partake in the prank, but especially to see the actions and reactions of this user that was trying so diligently to convince Jeff of what he was seeing. I don't know if Jeff ever told him the truth, and I wonder to this day if the guy doubts now what he saw back then. Well, but hey - he had a garbled print-out of the very Pac-Man character that he saw marching across his screen. Or did he? Hmm... Looks like a garbled string of somewhat random characters to me - better check your printer!