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The details of the game aren’t important. The developer, Delta Tao, stopped making Strategic Conquest several years back; they never came out with an OS X version. Even if they did, their last version, 4.x, wasn’t my favorite. I liked version 3.01. In fact, I liked it so much, that I’ve hung on to the original floppy disk that came with the game back in 1990.

The game is coded for the PowerPC Mac. I retired my PowerPC Mac from 2003 about 18 months ago, and I still have it in the bone yard. My current iMac is an Intel Mac, and it won’t run PowerPC software. In fact, if you dare put a PowerPC program on the Intel Mac the icon grows a ghostly white “NO” symbol.

I don’t know what itch caused me to suddenly yearn to play Strategic Conquest again. Well, heck, I’ve been wanting to scratch that itch for about 11 years now.

It’s probably that original floppy diskette sitting on my shelf. I mean, why did I keep it?

So I pulled out my USB floppy drive — the only floppy drive I own, and one that still comes in handy. I connected the USB floppy drive to my iMac. In went the Strategic Conquest disk and . . . nothing.

You know, floppy disks and other media will, over time, erase themselves. After a while, the earth’s magnetic poles reorient the ferrous oxide particles on the disk’s surface. The same thing happens to old video tapes. (You remember video tape?) Perhaps the disk was bum?

Connecting the USB floppy drive to a PC didn’t work either; the PC failed to recognize the Strategic Conquest diskette.

Not wanting to give up, and needing further motivation, I obtained a PowerPC OS9 Emulator for my iMac. It’s called SheepShaver, for some reason. It works: You run the app on your Intel OS X Mac and you get an OS9 Mac in a window. Pretty keen.

Now I was hooked: I just had to find a way to get that Strategic Conquest game onto my iMac.

I pulled my old PowerPC Mac from the bone yard and set it up. It worked, and even though it could have played Strategic Conquest, the game was nowhere to be found on the thing’s hard drive.

But the PowerPC Mac isn’t the only Mac in the boneyard. I also have a vintage Mac Quadra from 1993. I’ve not turned in on since about 1998 or so.

For 14 years, I’ve kept the Quadra’s monitor (CRT), console, keyboard, and mouse. The keyboard and mouse used the old Apple Desktop Bus (ADB) connection, not USB. The keyboard was missing its ADB cable, but the mouse was okay. I figured as long as I didn’t need to type, I’d be fine. (Thank you, Steve Jobs.)

To my surprise, the Quadra started right up. The CRT looked like Hell, but I could use it.

I put the Strategic Conquest diskette into the Quadra’s floppy drive (its only removable media), and the disk came right up. Turns out the disk is an old Double Density (DD) floppy. That’s why the newer computers couldn’t read it; they can only read High Density (HD) floppies. Duh. I should have known that.

After 22 years, the Strategic Conquest 3.01 diskette still worked.

I copied the program to the Quadra’s ancient hard drive. Then I ejected the original diskette and put in a new, 3 1/2-inch HD floppy. (Yes, I still have them.) I copied the program from the Quadra’s hard drive to the HD floppy.

Once again, I attached the USB floppy drive to my iMac, but this time I inserted the HD floppy. Sure enough, Strategic Conquest appeared in the window. I quickly copied the program to the iMac’s hard drive.

Eventually I figured out how to copy the program to the SheepShaver emulator’s OS9 volume. Then I started the emulator and — for the first time in 11 years — loaded up and played a round of Strategic Conquest.

I am poised for certain victory!

Yep: I’m a geek. But I’m thrilled.

Well, until the next Dotcom Dork hosts another server and does the same thing. The problem is really demand: There are too many people in the world who expect to get everything free on the Internet. That attitude is squelching creativity. It provides a massive disincentive to anyone expecting to reap the rewards of doing something new and unique.

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The organization I’ve been hired into is a medium-sized business, about 400 employees, $80M in annual revenue.

As part of my employment, I received a company laptop. It’s a Toshiba convertible, which means it can be a laptop or I can twist its screen around and use it as a tablet. Not an iPad tablet, but a Tablet PC, which is cool, but a feature I don’t use often.

Because I still work mostly out of my home office, I use the laptop to access the company network through the Internet. It’s a nerdy thing called VNC, or Virtual Network Computing.

VNC works like the old dial-up networks, but you use the Internet to connect with the mothership. Then using VNC software, I connect to the local network. That makes Outlook (Microsoft’s horrid email/calendar/scheduling software that I never use) happy, and it gives me access to the company’s network drives and all sorts of secret, forbidden information.

Just kidding.

I mean, I tried looking into those folders, but, well, “Access Denied.” And the IT guys won’t give me the master Admin password. Damn them for following the rules!

So the new tech things in my life are: Outlook for company email and VNC to access the company network. While I still sit in my office and write technology books, occasionally I have to spin my chair around, look at the Toshiba, and use Outlook to deal with company stuff.

Now, please don’t ask me any Outlook questions. Basically, I have no choice to but to run Outlook for their corporate email. (Well, I could access Outlook through the web, but no.) I’d prefer not to use Outlook. I’ve messed with VNC, but never used it for my own job, or had any reason to. I’ve also configured my Droid phone to access the Exchange server and get email. Glad I boned up on that. So it’s a different world for me, familiar but yet not what I’m used to.

I like my copyrights protected, thank you. I think thieves should be punished, and I think ISPs and web sites need to be responsible, even if it’s merely a link to pirated material. That’s because I lose money ever day from pirated copies of my work. It sucks.

Wikipedia obviously feels different. That’s okay. They distribute mediocre, barely-accurate, crowd-sourced information. It’s not terrible, but it’s not the same high quality as you can get when you — Oh, I don’t know — buy a book.

So Wikipedia can take its holiday. I don’t think it will prove anything, other than driving people elsewhere for their free, mediocre information.

And if you really want to use Wikipedia, get the Chrome browser and visit the French language Wikipedia site. Then click the button on top of the browser window to translate the page into English.

UPDATE: I wrote this post for Wednesday, January 18. Sadly, I screwed up the scheduling software, so it didn’t appear until 36 hours later. The Wikipedia shutdown is over.

Yeah: There are probably more ways, I’m sure. Don’t bombard me with the details. For the purposes of this discussion, most typical computer users access their email from either IMAP or POP.

Both IMAP and POP are clever acronyms. They’re clever because you can pronounce them: Eye-map and Pop.

An un-clever acronym is SDLIFHL, which doesn’t stand for anything. I just typed some random letters to demonstrate what an un-clever acronym would look like.

IMAP stands for Internet Message Access Protocol. It’s the method that web-based email systems use, such as Yahoo Mail, GMail, Hotmail and others. Even so, there may be non-web-based email servers using IMAP as well.

POP stands for Post Office Protocol. It’s the more traditional way that email is delivered, such as from your ISP or other large, intimidating organization that offers email.

Most email programs handle both IMAP and POP, so what’s to care about? Specifically, that IMAP allows for mailboxes to be created and saved on the server, which allows on-server storage of your email. The POP setup has your email saved and organized locally on your computer. In fact, most email programs are configured to remove mail picked up from the POP server after the mail is read. With IMAP, the mail stays on the server for the most part.

The problem comes when you need to update your mail account: It’s not really that easy to transfer your IMAP mailboxes from one server to another. You’ve probably experienced this problem if you’ve ever tried to move your Hotmail account over to Gmail or Yahoo Mail. Most folks just abandon all their old messages. I don’t blame them.

On my computer, I access about four IMAP email accounts and one POP. I have the program download all my messages, copying them from the IMAP server just like the POP server. That way everything is on my computer; it doesn’t matter if I change IMAP accounts because I still have copies of the mail.

Not everyone copies all their messages from IMAP servers. If you don’t, consider updating your computer’s email program to do so. The email isn’t going to consume much space on your hard drive, so consuming storage space shouldn’t be an issue.

The first time I failed to follow this rule — like any other time I failed to follow it — I waited until the last minute to print. I was heading out the door, so I clicked the Print button and . . . nothing.

It’s always a bad time to be angry with your printer at the last minute.

My son just did the same thing yesterday morning. He’s late for school and prints some document just as he’s closing up his laptop, ready to fly out the door.

Nothing.

What can you do? Well, you can admonish him for not printing the night before when the document was finished. Then any printer issue could have been resolved by a tired parent, but with plenty of time to see why the printer has become suddenly stupid.

Moral of the story: Print. Print now. Get it done!

I could go on and on about how much I love gadgets, how the CES is where I should go every year to spawn, and how jealous I am of others who make the trip. But I won’t. Instead, I’m going to bitch about why I loathe Las Vegas during big conventions.

The last time I was in Las Vegas for a big convention was one of the last COMDEX shows, back in the 1990s. That was just when COMDEX was waning, and I was in-and-out for a quick video interview. Earlier I would attend all five days of COMDEX. But, jeez, Vegas can suck when there are 200,000 people there for one show.

None of them gamble.

Few of them drink.

Fun? Well, fun at COMDEX in the 1990s was getting your laptop’s dial-up modem to work with the hotel’s phone system.

Face it: When I go to Vegas, I want to experience Vegas! I want to gamble. I want to drink. I want to swim in the pool and see a show. (But not at the same time.)

I remember gambling back in the early 1990s during COMDEX and my friends and I were the only people playing craps. We had a great time, but we were alone in the casino. That’s weird because:

Getting anywhere during COMDEX week was hell. Lines for a taxi were 200 or 300 people long. It would take 90 minutes before you would get inside a cab.

Often I would walk, which is hell in Vegas. Not only is everything so out-of-proportion that it throws your sense of distance, but you’re in the desert. I’ve walked miles and miles during COMDEX, not just on the show floor, but between the venues and hotels. My feet would swell like a Python programmer’s ego.

So, no, I would be eager to visit CES for those anti-Vegas reasons.

I’ve already heard from my editor about the lines and the walking. Sure, you see some cool gizmos and meet some great people. But the experience outside of the show is a bummer.

Yeah, I’m much more content to watch the show on TV and read about it on the Internets.

What intrigued me about Gorilla Glass was this image, which you might have seen have you been perusing the various tech blogs:

Well, I’m impressed! The reason being that when I was a little kid I remember hearing the story of vitrum flexile. It goes something like this:

A craftsman shows up before the Roman Emperor Tiberius. He displays a vase, apparently made of glass. Then he takes the vase and throws it down, which would normally break a glass vase. But this vase was made of vitrum flexile, or flexible glass. It doesn’t break. In fact, it dents.

One version of the story tells that the craftsman picks up the dented vase and proceeds to smooth it out using a mallet.

Anyway, Tiberius was impressed to the point that he started asking some serious, corporate questions. He wanted to know if anyone else knew how to make the glass? The craftsman replied, “No.” And then he wanted to know whether the craftsman had written down the secret forumla. Again, the craftsman replied, “No.”

So Tiberius had him killed.

The logic there — and it helps to understand the logic when you consider that the Roman Empire was basically a large organized crime syndicate — was that such glass would be more valuable than gold or silver. Basically, the Emperor wanted to protect his stash.

For thousands of years it’s been unknown whether vitrum flexile was a myth or not. Then in the 1960s, Corning (or was it Dow-Corning then? Whatever…) began inventing Gorilla Glass.

(The Star Trek geek in me admires that one of the elements in the glass is aluminum.)

Now, I don’t know if anyone at Corning has made a Gorilla Glass vase that can be dented and repaired with a mallet. But it still intrigues me that a story I remember from my youth is apparently proven true — or at least enough to protect my beloved mobile gizmos.

Pretty cool, eh?

Check this list to see whether your mobile device uses Gorilla Glass. I know that all the Droid phones I’ve written about use it, as do the Samsung Galaxy Tabs.

Read the Unbreakable Glass story from the Corning Museum of Glass.

See the Gorilla Glass FAQ