Ah...hah...oh, great.
http://www.digibarn.com/collections/...ers/index.html This could be why I've had no answer. As of 2006, seems that Brooke Boering's moved out of Santa Cruz. As for where to, I haven't the foggiest idea. Fun. I'm not really quite sure where to go from here, really.
Not sure how to figure out where Mr. Boering is now, and I'm certainly not nearly advanced enough to poke around in a debugger and figure out what's going on in this thing, either, haha. Oh, I tried, but I don't claim to understand what's happening, so...yeah. As far as I can tell, it checks something in the player's save file (along with a checksum somewhere to try and prevent tampering) to check if its registered or not. Maybe if I brute-force registered it in the older version, I'd be able to find the difference?
Wonder if the DigiBarn people or his old apartments would know where he is? The DigiBarn museum looks to still be around, at least! Hrm, the mystery continues...