A Home Away from Hythia

Hello and Goodbye

2007-05-15T12:49:00.000-07:00

This is the last post that I will be making to this blog...

(pause for dramatic impact)

... because my actual website, hythia.com, is back up and working.

This site was only ever intended to serve as a temporary home for me and it has come to the end of its time and will be used no more. Not that I really used it much in the last year anyways...

All content of this site has been moved to the new blog over at hythia.com. Please direct all future, current, and past traffic to that site instead.

Thanks and I hope to see you there.

cough hack wheeze

2006-06-05T21:45:00.000-07:00

So finally getting over a bout of strep throat. Some of the bastards I work with knew they were sick, but came to a meeting and coughed all over the rest of us at it and infected us all with their lousy germs.

Bit behind on work because of it, slept for pretty much all of the last few days. Not that I wouldn't have been behind even if I had been healthy... Thinking I may have overbooked myself a little bit this quarter for work.

Birthday tomorrow. Approaching it with dread. 365 days after that until I turn thirty. I remember when I was a kid (well, more of a kid then I am now) that I had all these plans of things I wanted to do, places to see, etc. that I wanted to do before I turned thirty and had to start acting like an "adult".

Still, turning 29 means I am several years older than quite a few people expected me to ever be. I think among my circle of friends from the olden-days the general consensus had been that sometime before I turned 25 I'd get mouthy to someone who would take offense enough at it to end me or hire someone else to end me. I was a bit more of a jack-ass back then.

Getting morbid now, thinking about how many of those friends I've already out-lived. Will likely become maudlin and drunk later as I try to figure out just what the hell I actually accomplished in this last year.

Tomorrow really is my third least favorite day of the year.

Blegh. Looks like it is going to be sunny too. Think I'll spend the day in a nickel arcade I know, forty bucks should keep me pretty busy playing Gauntlet or something similar until the day is pretty well and over.

BOOM!

2006-05-21T07:25:00.000-07:00

They blew up the Trojan Nuclear Powerplant's cooling tower roughly 28 minutes ago (at 7am Pacific). Well, not blew up as much as dynamited. Saying 'blew up' makes it sound less like a planned and controlled demolition then it was.

Apparently the cost of dismantling Trojan will be roughly the same as the original cost of building it, on the scale of $340 million or so (though the construction was 30 thirty years ago, so the true cost is far less when you figure inflation). Just the cooling tower today, two more years until the storage dome gets taken down and they haven't contracted a bidder for that or decided how to do it yet.

Of course, this still leaves the Hanford nuclear waste site and the Tillamook military site (((which produces C & B material (which also had a hurricane earlier this week and everyone on site has been required to wear a hazmat suit since (but trust the goverment, nothing is wrong, it is just a minor unnecessary precaution...))) in the northwest that needs cleaning up still...

Hmm...

2006-05-20T00:08:00.000-07:00

Are 'Obsessives' just 'Compulsives' who don't know when to quit?

Or are 'Compulsives' just 'Obsessives' with short attention spans?

The things I ponder six minutes after midnite when I haven't had enough sleep, and have had way too much caffiene...

Unrelated Bits

2006-05-16T12:38:00.000-07:00

Unrelated entirely to my other post from earlier, but today is Oregon's May primary election day. Which isn't a big deal to anyone I know until tomorrow morning when we can see the final results, everyone I've talked to sent in their ballot by mail over a week ago. Vote by mail can be nice like that at times, especially on days like today when it is supposed to be unseasonably warm out again and going to a voting booth would be a decidedly unfun trip in the heat.

One of the local free papers (The Portland Tribune) had a nice article about it today and it is worth reading. If your state puts up a ballot measure to switch to vote-by-mail I'd suggest supporting it. Just so nice to have it done with, especially since once your by mail ballot has been registered as accepted you are off the mailing lists for all the candidates and can stop getting election crap in your mailbox everyday.

Oh, also found this article on the Tribune website talking about how Portland inspired various bits and pieces of Matt Groening's "The Simpsons", which is again unrelated to the earlier bit of this post but might amuse Simpsons fans.

The End of the World...

2006-05-16T12:10:00.000-07:00

This seems to be a theme lately.

So while waiting for a bus downtown I had the 'joy' of listening to a street preacher go on and on about how the world is going to end in 21 days. His reasoning: It will be the sixth day, of the sixth month, of the sixth year of this century. That whole 'six, six, six' or 666 thing. (Of course this was coming from someone who is, I imagine, in the same class of people who thought that 2000 was the first year of this century in which case this is actually the seventh year of this century, counting year 0...)

While normally I would have laughed this off, likely loudly and in the face of the person preaching it, it bugged me a little as coincidentally that day is my birthday.

So, God, if you are reading this... Could you do me a favor and delay ending the world until relatively late in the day? I'd like a chance to see what (if anything) I get for presents and an hour or two to read, watch or play with them if I do.

Oh, also, if by some odd chance I turn out to be the Anti-Christ (proving the opinion of me expressed on numerous occasions by teachers I had over the years) and come into the fullness of my demonic heritage this year I promise to play fair and make war and end the world by the Old Testament rules of engagement you had us kooky humans write down for you so long ago. Not as keen on the New Testament stuff, the whole Book of Revelations is actually kind of corny by todays standards. If I have to go in for the special effects and weird events as heavily as they are depicted there I might have to hire a creative team and see if I couldn't jazz it up a little.

I Need Central Air

2006-05-15T21:30:00.000-07:00

Annoyingly hot right now, high of 97 degrees today where I live; and while it isn't uncommon for Oregon to have a couple days of 90 degree weather each year those days are normally in July or August.

Weather forecaster on the weather channel was just saying that today is the earliest it has ever been this hot in the 'summer season' on record. Given that those records do go back quite a ways...

Nope. No climate change here. None at all. Everyone go about your business and please don't notice the changes in the weather patterns. ( Meanwhile, I think I am going to go invest in stock in a company that makes sunscreen... )

It's The End of the World As We Know It...

2006-05-11T00:34:00.000-07:00

I just spent way too much time reading this which should guarantee some really odd-ball dreams tonight.

Anyways, Exit Mundi is a wacky little site documenting the ways the world will end. Fun reading, good times, lots of laughs.

Plasticity

2006-05-10T15:00:00.000-07:00

I accidently tabbed around and posted this when it was nothing but a title. For a moment I almost left it like that just to see what people would post as comments to a simple title of 'plasticity'.

Anyways, back to the original subject I had in mind...

History and how plastic it is, especially American history it seems. I have a silly number of books, a fair number of which are non-fiction reference books I've picked up over the years. The largest number of those being random volumes of history textbooks or the occasional odd-ball encyclopedia volume that catches my eye.

It is pretty amazing how wildly they vary when depicting historical events, especially in regards to the American Civil War. Looking at history textbooks from before the 1970s and you find people like John Brown (of 'Harpers Ferry' fame) being depicted as insane or criminally dangerous (and that it possibly ran in his family) simply because he supported abolition (which before the civil rights movement may have been considered a sign of insanity...).

An old copy of "The American Pageant" from the early 80s talks about Columbus's crew being mutinous and unruly because they feared they were about to sail off the edge of the world, when by 1491 even the Catholic Church had admitted the world was round. The copy I have from when I was in school had corrected that fact at least, but it goes to show how long silly notions like that stayed in print.

Not sure where this train of thought is going. It started with me being grumpy because I couldn't remember much about 'The Great War' (aka. World War 1) and the sequence of events that began it. Something I had been working on which was originally contemporary suddenly fit much better in with the bits of history I could remember from that time, now the story is going oddly split-screen and multi-generational in my head.

I can also blame the cold medicine for that I think. Bit under the weather for the last two days. Being sick always really and truly fucks with my head and results in really disturbing dreams. Well, disturbing in different ways at least then the ones I have when I am not sick. More 'Giger meets Walt Disney' and less 'Twilight Zone' I suppose.

Cruel

2006-05-05T11:46:00.000-07:00

So I have to break my work schedule a little today. Have stuff to get done, contracted on probably more projects then I should be working on at once ( in my defense, I really seriously did not expect as many bids to be accepted as were ), but I need to take some time off this afternoon.

Reason is, I have to help move my grandmother from the room she is currently in at the nursing home my aunts and uncles dumped her in to a room in the Alzheimers ward in the same building. Apparently she has finally slipped into that final twilight of the mind and needs more supervision then before.

The part that gets me about it thought is that there is a specific time window this afternoon that it is being done in, during the time that she is out on a drive heading to a park or garden not far from the building. We are going in, moving her furniture from her current room to a different room and apparently she is not being told what is going on and will just casually be brought back to her new room with all of her stuff now in again as if nothing had changed.

Something about that just seems frighteningly disturbingly cruel. Plus, really freaky for her. Reminds me of that thing Stephen King wrote talking about the three levels of fear: gross out, horror and terror. Terror being when you come home and find out that everything you own, every personal possession you have, has been taken out of your home and replaced by an exact duplicate. Just have this feeling that if she wasn't already suffering from Alzheimer's that something like this could pretty well be the bit that pushed her over the edge.

I really hate the world some days.

Star Trek Science

2006-05-03T22:07:00.000-07:00

I love it how every so often new bits of applied science get publicized and immediately get described in relation to 'Star Trek' or 'Star Wars' instead of talking about their merits and values in and off themself.

That said, it is kind of cool that they've found a mathematical principal wherein a cloaking device (ala 'Star Trek' Romulans) could potentially work. Leave it to bored British scientists to figure it out.

Article in the BBC News is here.

Autos

2006-05-01T07:29:00.000-07:00

How is it that myself, who has never owned a car and has never held a driver's license ( I had a permit once, long ago, that expired ) knows more about changing a cars oil or changing a flat tire then my friends who have owned cars and had licenses since they turned sixteen.

Gyah...

Planetes

2006-04-24T23:05:00.000-07:00

Anyone seen the "Planetes" anime?

Saw a trailer for it and it looked interesting, a lot different from the manga, but still good.

The basic setting of Planetes is near-future Earth. After decades of space exploration and orbital development and the building of facilities on the moon the orbit around the Earth is filled with tons of space debris. Which is a very bad thing since even a screw that has fallen loose moving at orbital velocity can pretty well shatter what it hits. So some astronauts get stuck with the 'noble and valiant' job of debris clean-up.

The manga was very character-based, very poignant at times, very well done. The anime looks a little more action oriented and more focused on the job they are doing and less on the characters themselves so I hope it still is as good but not seen any of it except some trailer bits.

Bright Glaring Day-Star

2006-04-22T18:34:00.000-07:00

So here it is the second to last week end in April, and according to the weather people, this weekend is only the fourth weekend with sunny weather so far this year in Oregon.

Go rain gods go! Up with the clouds! Block that damned too-bright glaring day-star from the sky!

Safari

2006-04-21T10:29:00.000-07:00

So I was looking forward to the idea of just spending all day today indoors, collapsing and doing some reading on the couch instead of on a bus seat as I have been lately, maybe digging my sketch pad out and inking a couple pictures in it for practice, or just something laid back that allowed me to ignore the existence of the outside world.

While I was thinking this I glanced out of my dining room window and realized that I couldn't see the street outside. Not that I had gone blind, or there had been a sudden solar eclipse, or heavy fog or anything, but because the grass / weeds in the front yard had grown tall enough that pygmy tribesman may soon be moving up from South America and setting in to the jungle that is quickly becoming my front yard.

Hadn't really noticed. Most mornings I am leaving before the sun is fully up and way way way before my brain is actually engaged and awake. By the time I am getting home my brain is tired and has engaged it's "not seeing things we don't want to think about" mode.

But damn. There are a couple things out there that look like alien plantlife but which I think are just weeds grown to be far taller then they normally get a chance to get and are producing huge seed / spore pods to spread across the entire neighborhood.

Off now to take my lawnmower on safari. If you don't hear back from me soon, call an anthropologist and let them know of the pygmy infestation in my yard.

A use for Wikipedia

2006-04-18T00:29:00.000-07:00

Okay, silly meme thing I got pestered into playing with which for all I know already made the rounds and I just failed to notice it.

"Go to Wikipedia and look up your birthday (excluding the year). List three neat facts, two births and one death in your journal, including the year."

So...

3 Neat Facts
1912 - Eruption of Novarupta in Alaska begins. Second largest volcanic eruption in historic time.
1969 - The first Internet connection was created when network control protocol packets were sent from the data port of one IMP to another,
1974 - A new Instrument of Government is promulgated making Sweden a parliamentary monarchy.
(also '2002 - A near-Earth asteroid estimated at 10 metres diameter explodes over the Mediterranean Sea. The resulting explosion is estimated to have a force of 26 kilotons, slightly more powerful than the Nagasaki atomic bomb.' which I wonder if we should consider as a sort of celestial 'warning shot'...)

2 Births
1799 - Alexander Pushkin (Russian poet)
1872 - Tsarina Alexandra of Russia
(also apparently '2001 - Shinji Ikari' from the Neon Genesis Evangelion anime/manga...)

1 Death
1961 - Carl Jung, Swiss psychiatrist
(also '1991 - Stan Getz, American musician and composer' who performed 'The Girl from Ipanema' which tortures elevator riders when converted to muzak to this day...)

I wonder what it is

2006-04-17T15:34:00.000-07:00

I wonder what it is like to be insane. Not bi-polar or something similar but full on bat-shit insane. Could you tell you were?

Happy "Jesus Unlocked God-Mode" Day

2006-04-16T14:20:00.000-07:00

I have never quite understood this holiday. The whole "Hey, look. You all went and got me killed, but thats alright, I forgive you despite coming back as a ghost to haunt you." bit kind of comes across as odd to me.

A bit after two in the afternoon. Just now getting up and moving. Think my sister is cooking something over at her place a bit later today and I am supposed to be there. Free meal, likely turkey (Mmm... Turkey...), but then I'll have to listen to her and my female parental unit complain about their jobs for hours. Think I'll bring a book to pass the time.

Random bits of my brain

2006-04-14T15:51:00.000-07:00

Haven't been doing a good job at keeping up at this lately. Starting and the ending of weeks is seeming to be when I find the time to write something here.

The little bits of writing I've had time for lately have been odd. Too many ideas in too small of a story or too big of a story for the characters aren't large enough to fill it out. There is a happy place in-between those two, just finding it is hard.

Anyone know how to find a copy of a 1920 issue of Scientific American, specifically the issue for the last week of October of that year? If it was a newspaper, it'd be easy as I know of a few places I could go to get that on microfilm, but a magazine? Hrm.

When you think about the Bible do you consider it an anthology or a collection? Yes, there is a difference between those two.

When did time and space become interchangeable concepts? If you are heading to a meeting and someone asks "Where are you?" why is the answer "I am five minutes away" which is about 'time' (or the passage of) when the question was about 'space' (your location within it) acceptable? Much less, why is it such a common answer? And then, when you ask someone "When will you get here?" you get a reply in terms of geography "I am just passing now."

Friday, means webcomic updates to read and orders to be given to my hattrick team for their Sunday match ( their training update is on Thursdays ). Just got home a little bit ago with a couple small plastic boxs of take-out sushi to fill the hollow in my tummy with. No idea as to my weekend plans yet, or even what I am going to do tonight after sushi and webcomics.

Take the moments as they come.

Going up the mountain

2006-04-09T16:50:00.000-07:00

Didn't have any reason to leave the house today, so taking today and being an introvert. Cel phone is somewhere in the house, not sure where. Ringer on my phone is off. Ignoring the front door. Not checking my mail. Just not accepting any input today and just relaxing and recharging.

One of the people I work with (Tal, whose name isn't really that as that is just the first syllable of a much longer first name I can neither remember, pronounce, nor spell) refers to it as my 'going up the mountain' days. He likens it to old hermits or prophets going up into the mountains to seek wisdom before coming back down and dispensing it to the masses. I can never be certain if that is meant as a compliment or a mockery when he says it, which is part of why I get along with him when working on projects. We can mock each other well and make it sound complimentary.

I swear that the Lifetime network is really 'cable to make you cringe'. Do they show anything that isn't either dying of an incurable illness (which amazingly gets cured), marriage is breaking up (but she goes back to the ass of a husband anyways), or crime (kidnapping, robbery, etc.) gets done but the police officer is handsome and comforts the bereaved woman and the case gets solved in the end and everything is better? I may be over-generalizing the channel, but that is all I ever see on it and isn't really a well-researched or well-informed opinion, but mostly me being tired and ranting and enjoying mouthing out about it more then I imagine I would enjoy researching it.

There are few things more damaging to a person then self-knowledge.

Home at last

2006-04-08T14:53:00.000-07:00

Last week was busier then expected. Three days of meetings with various design groups I work with and clients they wanted me to meet with them spun into ultimately five days of dreck. Potentially lots of work on the horizon, which will be nice as the actual 'work' part of my career takes up far far far less time then the 'meetings of mindless boredom' part does.

My still-living matrilinear genetic forebear remains cranky and cheats at cribbage. I've caught her pegging extra points, stacking the deck, and dealing from the bottom of it so far.

I've been asked about the possibility of teaching a couple of seminar classes. 'Accessible Internet Development' is one of them, the other is poorly named and even more poorly explained and has someething to do with XML or XHTML or X-something-ML-something. Easily qualified to teach both, just I have this deep dread of actually teaching again. Hate it. Literally hurts my brain to break the concepts down into small discrete chunks that are digestible via a lesson plan. Like trying to teach how exactly my lungs work and why I keep breathing even while sleeping to a shrubbery who has neither lungs to experiment with themselves or a conceptual basis in common ( I see the sun as a glowing ball of flame that is too bright and blinds me when I go outside, the shrubbery sees it as the source of all photosynthesis and nourishment... )

Need to get a laptop soon. Spent most of the week in meetings having to make presentation sections work or navigate example site-work on other peoples computers. Almost feels odd now to be at home, at my desk, and using my own computer and keyboard again. Plus with a laptop I could play videogames anywhere which might make meetings more palatable. Especially since I have no idea how long until the Nintendo Gameboy DS Lite is going to make it stateside. Very pretty piece of hardware, but huge production shortfalls in Japan make them expensive and hard to get even there, no idea how long until US sales will start.

Anyways, back now from errands I had to spend the morning running. Grabbing another shower and changing into sweats and a t-shirt and veg'ing out for the rest of the day. Maybe I'll post more later.

Viva Pinata

2006-04-03T15:47:00.000-07:00

I really thought this was an April Fools joke when I heard about it. I mean, the idea is just sooo freaking surreal. But apparently Viva Pinata is real.

Okay, quick summary of the concept. There is an island called Pinata Island where a breed of living pinata roams which you entice to come to a garden you maintain and befriend and raise and apparently train to fight hostile living pinata's.

Yes. Living. Pinata. As in the colorful papier-mache things that show up at childrens birthday parties.

Not just a video game for the Xbox 360, but also a kids series showing up on Fox 4Kids and apparently a toy line are going to be released before the next holiday season based on this concept.

This concept of animated papier-mache animals you befriend, lure into your garden, train to beat up other papier-mache animals, and then hang from a high branch with a short rope and watch while immature human spawnlings beat it to death with a wooden stick in order to crack its fragile body open and get at the sugary contents of its flesh.

Okay, not actually sure if that last bit will be in the game or the animated series, but c'mon... That is the end of the life cycle of the pinata. They don't grow old and retire to a Florida beach, they get beaten to death and devoured by children.

And there is now a childrens property making them all cute and lovable. Damn is that going to traumatize some kids as they look back on previous birthday parties....

Frick. Frick. Frick.

2006-04-03T08:21:00.000-07:00

Frick. Frick. Frick. Changed every clock in the house for daylight-whatever time yesterday except my alarm clock. Frick. Hate today.

Edit: And saved by mass incompetance. Back home now for a hour and a half (before I take off for another meeting). Got a call waiting for a bus transfer and found out that of the seven of us that were supposed to be at the meeting, five of us made the mistake I did, including all of the clients people. So meeting is re-scheduled for later this week and I hopped on the bus heading back the way I had just come so I could actually have some breakfast grab a heavier coat before going back out. Gloomy and rainy today.

MMORPGs

2006-04-02T23:50:00.000-07:00

My apologies in advance for any typos and all of my ranting, less then fully sober at the moment as I just got home from seeing a few gamer friends I hadn't caught up with for a while. Cheese sticks, nachos, chili fries and much vodka are mixed in my tummy. One of them had a birthday this last weekend so I got to drop off a very belated xmas gift and pretend that it was wrapped in birthday paper instead.

But to the meat of things... While hanging out, and scaring all the normal people, we got on the topic of MMORPG's. Okay, really, it was them trying to get me to pick up a copy of World of Warcraft and me stumping them with the question of, "Why? What does it have that another MMO doesn't do better?" So the conversation rambled for a bit as they failed to defend WoW, and we talked about a lot of the other MMO's on the market, and now you get to hear the points that I think are valid and hopefully make comments and replies of your own so I know just how one-sided my views are.

World of Warcraft is the current dominant one in the market. Which, really, I just don't understand. What honestly does it have that other MMO's don't have and haven't had for longer and done better?
About all I can think of is that Azeroth is a known world-setting from the previous Warcraft games, but if having a pre-existing known world setting is the key for MMO success then shouldn't Middle Earth Online ( or is it Lord of the Rings Online these days? ) with its much more detailed world setting and pre-existing fantasy fan-base be getting a hell of a lot more press then it is?
It can't be the races, damn near every fantasy MMO in existence has had the exact same damned races. The PvP combat is better balanced and, honestly, more interesting in DAoC, Lineage 2 or Guild Wars. If you want crafting then both EQ and DAoC had crafting systems. Hell, EQ also had more land to explore by the time the last expansions were added. In WoW you still need to sit on your ass and farm the higher level elite gear, hoping you have big guild friends who can help out with getting it. Balance is still whacked out in the game and remains the biggest complaint among the people I know who play it.
About the only allure I see WoW having is naked Alliance elf women in high resolution bump-mapped detail. Which explains why in the upcoming expansion the Horde side is getting their own race designed heavily for sex appeal. Which apparently is a pretty big allure given the number of new servers they've been adding lately. Ultimately, I think WoW is going to dominate the market for some time to come as Blizzard does know how to appeal to an audience and how to maintain that interest with small updates and dangling expansions in the distance.
I do have to admit that the game does look pretty, and it did do some things right, but the idea of grinding for gold and farming elite gear just to be competitive in PvP (or even high-level PvE) just turns me off enough that I don't see getting a copy anytime soon.

City of Heroes and City of Villains is still the only MMORPG I am paying to play. Don't see that changing anytime soon, though I have been finding that the 'new' has worn off and I don't rush to login whenever I have free moments like I used to. Which is shown by the fact that I've barely been on lately. For different reasons between the two games though.
In CoH, I've really ran out of things to do that keep my attention. I still have the Kheldian arcs to finish (mid-way through the 20-25 one) but other then that I only have one task force and I think 4 missions left to do and then I'll have seen it all. With Issue 7 having no listed CoH side content additions, I am kind of depressed about not having anything new and interesting to see in the near future for my hero peoples.
About the only bits of gameplay that have been keeping my attention lately is the PvP. Unfortunately Bloody Bay tends to be full of either whiners (Stop killing me! I don't want to PvP despite being in a PvP zone!) or griefers (How many invisible flying assassins can their be lurking above the helicopter at any one time?) and Warburg I find distasteful as the villains tend to be better mannered and more polite then the heroes (I've had villains offer to duel me and arrange meetings for a fight, and have had heroes lurking just outside of the no-PvP zone by the boat just waiting to jump people newly arriving.) so I end up playing in Siren's Call and that has me set in the 20s and gets dull after a bit, playing without a lot of my powers tends to get rather formulaic but at least the PvP in Siren's Call seems to have a point as you battle for control of the zone. I can only hope that the rumored "Recluse's Folly/Victory" high-level PvP zone shows up with Issue 7 to make PvP more interesting again.
In CoV I actually have a similar, but different problem. There is no where left to explore. I like seeing new parts of the map and the world, but the entire thing is available from the get-go and by the high-teens I had already been everywhere and gotten all the explore and history clicks and all the waypoints from all the zones. Nothing else to see until Grandville in Issue 7. The story-arcs are better written I think, but the balance is getting irritating as the CoV side of the game feels like it is balanced a lot more then CoH was towards trying to force you to team. Or maybe it is the archetypes that seem to do that. Not sure. Just something about solo-play in CoV, while still fun and I still like playing solo a lot, just hasn't clicked the way it did for me in CoH.

Anarchy Online remains a study in how not to launch a MMO. I was a beta-tester for it, and the game in beta- had potential. It was fun. But it was clearly not a finished game. And then they launched it anyways and a lot of people tried it out and quickly got disgusted by how buggy it was. It did have some things that were ground-breaking at the time, like randomly generated on-demand missions/quests. The character creator was one of the most versatile and allowed some of the greatest creativity out there until CoH trumped it. But the game was just incomplete and broken.
Yet it was still fun. I still played for a bit and I still go back and play every so often when they have 14-day free trials or something similar. Until I get into the mid-30s again ( takes me about 45 minutes a level with a Martial Artist or Nanotech ) and run into the same balance problems as before that make the game suddenly slow to a grind while playing solo and have to suddenly find a team to play with. Right now, three expansions later, the game really looks pretty solid and if it had been released with all the features it has now it would have been a much greater success and had a lot more of a market impact then it has had. Still, if you want a sci-fi MMO this would I think be the way to go. There is a free trial offer right now that if I actually had the free time I'd be tempted to download and take a peek at what it looks like again.

Speaking of sci-fi... Star Wars: Galaxies may not be around much longer. Or at least may not be improving anymore. From what I have heard, Sony may have lost the license to do any further Star Wars themed development. Honestly, I won't miss it much. I played from right around launch until a bit into the first Alderaan story-event thingy. Was fun, had a Master Smuggler with a bit of Pistoleer, but it got a bit repetitive and the story missions in the game were either buggy and didn't work right or just weren't interesting / fun.
The game also suffered a bit of 'early adopter' syndrome. To do crafting you needed resources, a lot of which were mined. One whole skill tree was about surveying to find where your resource extractor thingy should go. Well, very quickly, all of the good resource spots on all of the planets filled up REAL quick and new people had to go to crapper locations to get stuff. Now, to combat this, the resources were supposed to drift and move periodically so new people had a chance to potentially survey and find a good spot right after a drift and compete with earlier players. I played on, I think it was, Chilastra and when I went back after the 'Jump to Lightspeed' expansion came out adding space combat finally (space combat was fun, but not as fun as the old Tie-Fighter and X-Wing games were...) the resources after three years hadn't moved once. Blegh.
They did some re-design of some of the game elements, especially the 'Path of the Jedi' to become a Jedi because, really, that was what everyone wanted to do and why the played the game. I heard they also re-did combat to be more like CoH rather then typically EQ-style combat but haven't been back to find out. Ultimately the game has always suffered from the problem of the fact that if you stripped out all the 'Star Wars' thematic bits out, the underlying gameplay just wasn't that good. It was always a mediocre game made popular by the Star Wars licensed bits. Still, if you are a rabit Star Wars fan-boy you might enjoy it (and in fact already be playing it). Otherwise I'd wait and see if Bioware (who just started a MMO division) really is developing the new Star Wars MMO they are rumored to be working on and maybe that one will be better.

If I do pick up another MMO'ish game anytime soon it'll probably be Guild Wars. The first expansion is just around the cornor (the 24th of this month), it is fantasy-based (I've had this urge to play a fantasy game lately...), and it has no monthly fee (so I don't suffer in the pocketbook). Guild Wars was built by, it appears, the same people who did Diablo 2 (and some of the old Blizzard Battle.net development) and apparently after Blizzard North got axed started ArenaNet up. Basically it is a fantasy-MMO designed to avoid farming, grinding and a lot of the other normal MMO crap with a lean towards guilds and guild / PvP combat.
Here is the thing though, PvP is entirely seperate from the PvE part of the game but the PvE part of the game unlocks more options for you in the PvP. It is really hard to describe, but a lot of the thought in the design really appeals to me. Apparently they have been pretty surprised by the number of non-PvP'ers who got the game just to roleplay and do the PvE part too. They had apparently expected it to be a lot more PvP then it is. With the upcoming Factions expansion and the new asian themed continent, they will have new PvP styles and goals such as the shifting of the national borders on the new continent as the two-factions fight for control of the land.
All in all, pretty interesting to me at the moment. Solid PvE, interesting PvP, fantasy, no monthly cost, active development and expansions and lots to unlock and explore in the game.

The other one I have my eye on right now is Tactica Online which is still in development. Fantasy, squad-based, turn-based, online tactical combat. Set in a sort of fantasy Rennaisance era, it is three competing ideologies (Doctrine, Science, Magic) and a skill-based tactical game. The online-tactical-game bit is what gets my attention. I am a tactical game junky so looking forward to the Open Beta for this and trying it out.

Other then that, lots of other MMO's on the market that I haven't played:
Lineage 2 looks interesting, especially the actual guild-based castle control stuff.
Eve: Online turned out a lot different then I thought it would, a very cool concept and might be an interesting game someday to try but I lack the time to sink into it now.
Horizons: Empire of Istaria ended up being such a disappointing final product after all the promise and ideas they had for it very early on in development, just goes to show what going bankrupt and being desperate for funding will do to a game.
Ryzom is pretty unpopular in the US and not the prettiest game, but the 'Ryzom Ring' bit coming out soon which apparently going to make players into content-creators for the game and allow them to add storylines and areas to the game which is potentially very revolutionary.
Dark Age of Camelot I have played, but not in a long-time. Pretty fun, like the three-realm PvP balance. Imagine that most of the players bailed to go play World of Warcraft though.
Ultima Online I beta-tested for sooo many years ago. God that game was broken from the moment it was released. A lot of the terms you hear these days referring to peoples playing styles and behavior were coined way back in that game. No idea what the game is like these days. Been way too long since I even though about playing it, halfway surprised it is still around.
Everquest is another I beta-tested for. Was a lot of fun in the beta, too crowded after launch. Really the MMORPG most people think about when trying to define the genre. Haven't played it in years (Is the original even still around? Lost patience waiting for the website to load.) and only goofed with a friends beta of EQ2 and wasn't impressed by it.
Warhammer Online is apparently in development by the people who did DAoC. Either still in beta, or close to beta, haven't heard much about it. But solid world background of the Warhammer setting and hopefully solid game mechanics.
Ragnarok Online I think still wins the award for 'cutest MMORPG'. It was really popular for a while, at least among the crowd I used to hang-out with online, but I think lost a huge chunk of its players to WoW. Had the interesting bit where your gender was set in your account, so all of your characters had to be the same as the players gender. Interesting bit of forced honesty there. The 'Ragnarok' manga by Myung-Jin Lee is actually set in the game setting ( though the english release is re-written/translated oddly). Never played it, heard a lot about it, but apparently a very fun and very cute little game.

Ran out of MMO's that I have bookmarked or can remember off the top of my head. If I missed some, or you have differing opinions, please rant in the comments section. Interested to hear other peoples takes on them.

Sales pitch

2006-03-29T23:17:00.000-08:00

Talk about a pre-order sales pitch...

As someone who has purchased Audio CDs by Nine Inch Nails, you might like to know that Every Day Is Exactly The Same will be released on April 4, 2006. For the next few days, you can pre-order your copy at a savings of 0% by following the link below.

The actual pre-order savings is $0.03 which makes me want to rush out and pre-order that right now... Someone at Amazon fucked up this pre-order promotion email...

Digital Box

2006-03-29T22:55:00.000-08:00

The technology of the 1950s sci-fi movies, today! The Digital Box!

Okay, I like this mostly because of the label on the front, "Digital Box". Such a cheesy ass B-movie prop title for such a wacky piece of technology.

What is it you ask, well for £149.99 you get a:
12 Megapixel Interpolated Digital Camera
MPEG 4 Camcorder
MP3 Player
Digital TV Recorder
Dictaphone
Games Machine (The important part is that it plays Tetris)
Karaoke Function
Alarm Clock
Calendar
World Time
Calculator
Currency Conversion
Portable Hard Drive With Built in File Browser
USB Access to 1 Gig SD cards
And A Huge 2.5" Screen!

Heard about it off of Warren Ellis's mailing list, "Bad Signal" where he claims that it has an additional function of using the camera's flash to stun muggers, rapists or charging rhinoceri.

Title goes here

2006-03-29T22:46:00.000-08:00

So my grandmother is back in the nursing home her delightful children put her in, without bothering to ask her for an opinion about it. Her hip operation was a success and took all of fifteen minutes, though it won't be load bearing ( How much of a fucking load does it need to bear? I think my trench coat weighs more then she does now. ) for six weeks so she needs to stay off of it. Which she hates. And I can't blame her. I think I got my stubborness and unwillingness to ask for help from her, god knows I didn't get it from either of the fuck-ups who are my parents. So she is pissed as hell about the fact that she is supposed to ask for someone to help her get to the bathroom when she has to take a 'whee' as she puts it. Not a 'wee' but definately a 'whee'. I think senility is actually starting to catch up with her, instead of her just faking it to take it out on the shits that are my aunts, uncles and cousins. Or her pain meds are knocking her for more of a loop then they should be. Not sure. But as long as she doesn't fall down again and hurt her hip worse she should be fine. Though I am halfway tempted to slip her some mace or a taser so she can smack the shit out of the condescending prat they have assigned to sit with her all the time.

My grandmother fell and is

2006-03-23T17:39:00.000-08:00

My grandmother fell and is in the hospital right now. Visiting at the moment. Not critical, well no more then anything is at her age.

Need to get an iPod

2006-03-21T12:12:00.000-08:00

Sooner or later I am going to have to invest in an ipod. Not in any rush to do so, but one of those things about four or five items down my list of tech-toys to get (a gameboy DS and a blackberry fight for the top spot, the DS will probably win given how quickly my GBA sucks batteries dry (and they just released/announced a new slimmer profile DS so I will probably wait to see when/if that arrives/is going to arrive stateside before I get one)).

Just got most of my cd collection mp3'd again. Few cds stacked on my desk that I want to rip before the end of the day, Boa - Twilight ( got it for the two mixes of Duvet, the Serial Experiments Lain title track ), the Bare Naked Ladies I've gotten copies of, and Buckethead - Monsters & Robots( which I haven't listened to in two years and don't actually remember ).

But with it all mp3'd and on my hard drive it meant it was time to put it all in one huge playlist in winamp and shuffled to be as random as I can get it. It makes for a musical mix that I enjoy listening to, but which scares the frick out of pretty much anyone else who comes within hearing range.

So far this morning...
Loreena McKennitt - The Bonny Swans
Green Day - Pulling Teeth
Talking Heads - I Want To Live
Bush - Swim
Sarah McLachlan - Ice
Chem Lab - Elephant Man
Nine Inch Nails - Screaming Slave
Autechre - Rotar
Muthafist - My love
The Golden Palominos - Bird flying
Air - Clouds up
Bran Van 3000 - Rainshine
Cibo Matto - Flowers
Haujobb - Clockwise
Prodigy - Climbatize

Civ IV Expansion

2006-03-20T20:39:00.000-08:00

The Civ 4 expansion has been announced, Warlords will be out this summer.

"An all-new expansion pack, Warlords pays homage to some of history's greatest military leaders, delivering six new scenarios, giving players the chance to change the course of history with the help of their new powerful "warlord" unit. The expansion pack is loaded with new civilizations, new leaders and more units, resources and wonders that can be used in both single and multiplayer games."
- from the press release here

Strange thoughts

2006-03-20T14:55:00.000-08:00

Too much time alone,
Strange thoughts do I often have,
My brain slowly breaks.

Language- a weapon of words,
tool of communication.

Modern religion,
Belief, faith, deism, God,
What is it meaning?

An army of huge hamsters,
With this I would conquer all.

Four stories, one world,
But not all work togethor,
Divide into pairs.

Green Day cd is scratched,
MP3s of it I have.

Thinking in haiku,
Gets easier with practice,
But still rather odd.

I Love Babel Fish

2006-03-19T21:59:00.000-08:00

I added a Babel Fish translation sticker to the site, way down the menu on the right hand side. Just so I could laugh over translating it into foreign languages and then back into English.

English-French-English
Art of cover

Thus I just finished Re-of observing Serenity. Summer spacing it outside during last days in these sparse few minutes while I always sit down and have a meal.

A good always damné film, large watch.
With always a certain ass-ugly art of cover of case of dvd.

English-German-English
Cover art

Thus I terminated straight to RH-WATCH out Serenity. Been distance it out over the last days in those meager few minutes, while I still sit and a meal have.

Still another condemned good film, large clock.
Still something donkey-ugly has dvd drop cover art.

English-Portugese-English
Art of the cover

Thus I only finished re-to give attention to serenity. Been removal it stops outside on last the few days in those scarce few minutes when I to seat me still and he will have me a meal.

Still one has filmed good cursed, great clock.
It still has some donkey-ugly art of the cover of the case of dvd.

English-Italian-French-Dutch-English
You concern art

Thus I have rifinito hardly king - serenity look at. State plays I on the last days in these spreads few minutes whereas I put outside myself anchor and have a paste.

Still maudit a good film, a large vigilance.
Still he has certain art âne-ass - ugly of the cover of caso of dvd.

('rifinito' is Italian for 'finished'. 'maudit' is French for 'cursed'. 'âne' is French for 'ass'. 'caso' is Italian for 'case'.)

Cover art

2006-03-19T21:40:00.000-08:00

So I just finished re-watching Serenity. Been spacing it out over the last few days in those sparse few minutes while I am sitting still and having a meal.

Still a damned good movie, great watch.
Still has some ass-ugly dvd case cover art.

Wish they'd gone with simple and tasteful. Take the Serenity sigil that had been on the "Can't Stop The Signal" site and just put it with all of its rich colors on a black background and left it with that.

Actually, fuck. Need to get some glossy paper for my printer and I might print up my own insert for the dvd case so I could toss this freakish thing it came with.

The rumors of my death...

2006-03-19T10:26:00.000-08:00

Still alive. Still have all the same internal organs I did at the time of my last post. No new injuries. No new tall places fallen from.

Just been either inanely busy, sleeping, or being hermit-like and anti-social.

May post more later.
May not post more later.
Will have to wait until later to see.

I can apparently sleepwalk

2006-03-09T08:36:00.000-08:00

I can apparently sleepwalk.

Riding the bus to a meeting, been out and about for an hour, and I finally notice the snow all over.

Snow. All over.

Web oddities

2006-03-08T13:25:00.000-08:00

Ever asked yourself, "So... What would the Simpsons look like in live action?"

PS2 gaming

2006-03-06T19:16:00.000-08:00

So was shopping the other day for the fourth Haibane Renmei dvd. Just had a serious yen for the end of the series since I had spent a chunk of time lately looking at some other sketch stuff that Yoshitobe Abe (the artists name, I think) had done (believe he also did Serial Experiments Lain, but too lazy to go dig through my dvds to check).

Couldn't find a copy of it, or any of the other half-dozen anime dvds I've been on the look out for lately. Most of them are late dvds in series that came out a while ago, some of them are the first dvds in series I'd like to watch, some I keep looking for but don't think have actually been released in the US yet.

So instead I went video game shopping. Wasn't intentional, store I went into I actually went into looking for dvds, but they had video games and their entire selection was on clearance. So I picked up Dragon Quest VIII: Journey of the Cursed King and Suikoden Tactics, both for the PS2.

DQ8 is... Wow. Other then the fact that the main character looks disturbingly like college age Gohan from Dragonball Z and Angelo keeps reminding me of grown up Trunks from the same series, neither of which is surprising because the character design was done by Akira Toriyama who did the Dragon Ball (should that be one word or two, too lazy to check) shows. I mean... The game is just soo cool. Hard to describe why in ways that make sense. Just the feel of the game really. It is 'old skool'. It reminds me of old console games, RPGs that were all about story and character and not about flashy FMV sequences or the poly count on the models. The only RPG that has made me really be this interested in it for a while is 'Tales of Symphonia' for my Gamecube (which I have played all the way through at least 5 times and am on my way through yet again to get some of the last few titles/costumes for people).

It also comes with the Final Fantasy 12 demo, which I really haven't been interested in enough yet to look at. Another FF game... Meh.

Suikoden Tactics on the other hand... Very cool game in my opinion, but unless you like both the Suikoden series (specificaly Suikoden 4 which it is loosely based around) and tactical style games you may want to give it a pass. It is still a cool game, I am very much in the liking of it. But it won't have the wide appeal that DQ8 will for people. If you are interested in the Suikoden series, I'd instead recommend trying to find a copy of the two PSX games (Suikoden 1 and Suikoden 2) or Suikoden 3 instead. Or wait for Suikoden 5 to come out in a couple months.

My other console game recommendation, and probably the next one I'll pick up, is Grandia 3. The original Grandia game was one of those old school sort of games. Happy, sad, drama, romance, adventure, mystery, very cool game. I have it for my PSX and it is a wonderful game. Grandia 2 I actualy prefer over the original, I just like the character designs better even if the story was a little better in the first one. I have it for my Dreamcast. Grandia Extreme was a dungeon crawl that came out a bit ago and really wasn't that great, it was mostly just you fighting through a dungeon for reasons I never actually heard explained by anyone I knew who owned it. Grandia 3 should be a beautiful, fun game. I like the parts of the combat system it is carrying on, but don't know much about the story of it.

Anyways, this is a great year for PS2 rpg lovers. Lots of RPGs coming out right now, most good, some merely mediocre. It is kind of like the last year of the PSX with all the rpgs that came out then. So many games that have been in development for a while are coming out now since the PS3 is on the horizon for release apparently later this year.

The Sucky Bit of Shopping

2006-03-05T15:59:00.000-08:00

The sucky bit of shopping at times is knowing exactly what you want and who should stock it and being completely unable to find it...

One Word - Marc 04

2006-03-04T08:20:00.000-08:00

One word, sixty seconds. Write your bit, then post it here as a comment.

OneWord

Manga blathering

2006-03-03T11:56:00.000-08:00

From what I've heard, the 'Victorian Romance Emma' manga may be coming to the US sometime sooner rather then later. It has at least been licensed for release in America but no idea who is actually doing it as neither of the big two, TokyoPop and Viz, have info up about it yet. Which will be nice, as the scans of the manga I have seen are very pretty, very nice style on them, but were untranslated.

The anime I still have no word on, but the manga will be cool enough on its own. Especially since the anime wrapped up with episode 12 while the manga didn't have an end yet at the time, so the anime didn't have a real sense of ending to it.

The other manga find that I've been enjoying is 'Monster' which is part of Viz's new signature line of mangas. It is, to put it simply 'medical horror suspense drama' which is more of a bunch of genre buttons that it pushes rather then a good description of it as a whole. The story focuses around a young neurosurgeon and a fateful decision to treat the first patient that arrived on his shift rather then the more politically important one that showed up a little bit later, how that ruins his career and personal life while it restores his faith in his career path as a surgeon. Though it gets helluva messed up after that as the patient he did save may have grown up to be a serial murderer. Conspiracies, drama, hospital politics, psychological suspense / horror. It is 18 volumes long, and that is all just in the first book. Have to say, they write horror in a much more psychological way then the old 'slasher' horror comics we had here.

'Gyo' and 'Uzamaki' are the two other horror titles I have read, both also put out by Viz and I think both were written and drawn by the same person.

'Gyo' is the less strange of the two, which is saying a lot when I describe it as being a story about fish crawling out of the sea with robotic crab legs grown onto them and that it is a sci-fi/horror story. Oddly enough, the depictions of the rotting husks of fish, the stench of the sea life out in the sun, all keep it from being surreal. It is so accurate in the depictions that it keeps itself from being laughable and is more 'fucked up strange creepy' then anything else.

'Uzamaki' is the harder one to explain. A town is haunted by spirals. Yes. Spirals. The shape you draw on paper. Bodies are found twisted into spiral shapes, strange deformed babies are born, odd snail like creatures show up. Again, not with the slasher violence but much with the weird creepiness and unsettling.

Land's End

2006-03-02T11:24:00.000-08:00

The Diatribe track "Land's End" just came up in the mp3 player. It amuses me for the title and the somewhat fitting nature of the lyrics after the storyball thing back in November.

"The gang of restless souls...
Whose ship was lost at sea...
Only time has passed them by...
Still wandering beneath...
There seems to be no direction...
And I begin to see it all too clear...

Soon we reach lands end...
where the shadows of the rush...
i can not believe my eyes...
no one remembered us...
could it be that my times come.."

I missed about four lines of lyrics in there as they blended too well with the music. And the song keeps going but I am too lazy now to copy down more of the lyrics. Good album. Apparently they put out a second one titled "Nothing" (the one I have is self-titled "Diatribe") that I've never heard, along with a pair of single's. Will have to see if I can find any of it sometime.

Today's Playlist

2006-03-01T22:26:00.000-08:00

Diatribe - "Diatribe" ( Forgot how much I liked this album, been almost a decade since I listend to it. Wonder if they ever had another album... )

Stan Getz - "The Bossa Nova Years Boxed Set" ( 'The Girl from Ipanema' and other stuff. )

Razed in Black - "Overflow" ( A remix of the first RiB album, at around 140 beats per minute. Great to get your heartrate up, shit to try to draw to. )

Threshold

2006-03-01T19:40:00.000-08:00

Interesting word, that. Threshold. Or 'threskjoldr' if you like your Old Norse to be rendered into English. Think about all the things that it can mean.

The simplest definition is that of a gateway or doorway, something through which you go to get from one place to another.

It can also mean an 'ending'. The end of a runway for example.

Or a beginning, the place or point of entering, the start of a new age.

It is also the point at which physiological or psychological effects begin to take place.

Scientifically it can mean the point or level or value above which something is true and below which something is not.

On some level, I am a bit too aware of all of those meanings right now. A lot of stuff I've let slide for a while I've been taking more seriously lately, and some stuff that I've taken far more seriously then I mayhaps should have I am starting to let slide ( because, seriously, do I really need to unlock all the titles in 'Tales of Symphonia'? ).

Not that this really means anything to anyone outside of myself. Just me saying 'Hey, I am still alive. Just trying to figure out "what is next" for me and my life.' Don't need anyone thinking I fell off of a building again and lost another internal organ, only have a couple left to spare and saving those to be used for dramatic sacrificial gut wounds for the next time I get in a knife fight. Though fuck if I know how to manage to get stabbed in the gall bladder without anything actually important getting hit...

Redecorating

2006-02-27T17:46:00.000-08:00

It is amazingly hard to find the perfect wedding gift for a friend of mine's upcoming nuptials. The perfect gift that says, "You are a great friend, I hope you are happy for many years, but I still think your hubby-to-be is a complete hoser."

Anyways, I just spent the last hour or so after getting home from that frustrating shopping trip redecorating parts of my house. Vaguely pointless since I don't know how much longer I'll be here (keep expecting the landlord to say "Can you be gone in thirty days, going to sell this place.") but I figured that I had a good enough reason to want to do it.

Basically, it came down to this thought: "I bet I'd probably get more drawing done if I had my drawing table in a room that wasn't 50 degrees." My drawing table had been in my bedroom, the single room in this place that is the hardest to heat. I swear that the heat just gets sucked out of the room, which I don't mind too much as I tend to sleep better in a cooler room then a warmer one. But it meant I didn't draw much since I would get very cold very fast sitting still at the desk over a sketch pad.

So I hauled the drawing table into my office, re-arranged furniture a little, swapped my anime from one of my short bookshelves to a tall one and hauled it into here and then yanked my art books off my tall bookshelf to put on it. Nice little space now, computer desk, drawing table, small bookshelf, space heater, pile of loose papers big enough to hide a body under.

Huh... I suppose I probably should sort and file those papers before they fall on the space heater and catch fire... Or at least I should poke the pile with something sharp a few times to make sure there isn't someone hiding underneath it.

Weird late night cravings

2006-02-27T00:34:00.000-08:00

So I just woke up after a very small amount of sleep with a craving for crackers and cheddar. So sitting at my desk eating some Triscuits with small blocks of Tillamook cheddar on them.

Amusing myself as I devour the cheddar I cut off the loaf by re-reading MegaTokyo's archives and trying to find the exact point where I lost interest in the comic. I started reading it very early on, before they plane flight to Japan so in the first couple strips. I still have a 'Does anyone here speak leet?' t-shirt and mousepad.

It has been a couple years since I last read it, my opinion of it was pretty much the same as the one depicted here (not safe for work, Sexy Losers (the linked to comic strip) is funny, but adult enough that it could get you in trouble). Basically that you had to be a serious Japan fan-boy to understand the jokes or references that showed up in the strip and it just ceased to be fun or funny to me.

Will have to see if that happens again this time, I think it was during the giant monster attack upon the rampaging otaku who were swarming a store that one of the characters who was an ex- idol singer worked at.

Anyways, about a hundred strips in so still several hundred away from where I read it last. But about to drift back to sleep now that my tummy is full of delicious cheddar and not as delicious but still tasty triscuits.

Fox Island Marauders - First match

2006-02-26T21:08:00.000-08:00

My hattrick team played their first match today. I actually was pretty confidant that it'd be a victory, given the other player who got his team on the same day as me hasn't logged in yet to give any orders to his team.

Anyways, figured I'd put the match report up as a comment so if anyone wanted to see what it was like, they could. During the match you can watch it sort of live, with it updating one line at a time as time passes by. Like if a commentator was typing the information out for, say, a website like that rugby match report I linked to yesterday.

Random news bits

2006-02-25T11:11:00.000-08:00

Six Nations Rugby Live! - Scotland 18 - 12 England as of my writing this

Bird Flu - Confirmed in France so prepare for more panic news in the US

Only in California - Mystery blob eating downtown and they really do mean 'blob' and not some forgotten actor whose career is on the skids and let themselves go.

Portland weirdness - Hoodoo spell could be to blame and honestly this makes for a really funny legal defense plan. Probably cheaper then hiring lawyers.

Lego Orrery

2006-02-24T23:48:00.000-08:00

This continues my weird trend of finding random lego stuff.

Basically this person built an orrery out of Lego's to explain why Alaska gets so much sunshine in the summer and is almost as dark as Cheney's soul in the winter.

Not too scale and only the Earth, sun and moon, but still very cool and another example of why Lego's are the coolest toy in existance.

The photos of it are up here.

Todays Playlist...

2006-02-24T18:49:00.000-08:00

Today has been brought to you by the music of:

The Golden Palominos - "Pure"
Sarah McLachLan - "Rarities, B-Sides & Other Stuff"
Skold - "Skold"
KMFDM - "Angst"
U2 - "The Joshua Tree"
Depech Mode - "Violator"
Rush - "Roll the Bones"

(If we are defined by the music we listen to then I am soo schizophrenic...)

FTP Client

2006-02-24T14:30:00.000-08:00

Anyone able to recommend a good freeware FTP client?

I had been using SmartFTP, but it is whining to me about needing a registration code now so apparently it was expireware.

All my work stuff I do via a VPN connection so I hadn't even realized that my FTP client has futzed out on me. Had done a little work on my website but can't move the files up to see if the PHP bits work right. Frustrating.

On lighter notes, spending some of today day doing some sketching. Was going to ink and scan in (or scan in and play with inking in Photoshop) some older stuff I'd drawn but couldn't decide where to start.

So I ended up working on a sketch of a team logo for my hattrick team instead. Will have to cough up the twenty bucks to get a supporter account and access to the 'bonus' features like adding a logo to my team, and choosing the colors of their match kit, but pondering it because it also adds in a couple of nice statistics pages and some just useful stuff like bookmarking other teams and players so I don't have to do a search for them again. Definately not needed to play, and I'll probably put off doing it until I finish work on a logo that I feel like sharing / showing off.

But a relatively relaxed day today. Nice to get a chance to chill out and just be creative and have fun for a while with some of my personal work. Especially since I am apparently expected at some family gathering thing-a-ma-jigger this weekend. Ugh.

Girl Genius

2006-02-24T12:38:00.000-08:00

Spent a little while catching up with reading Girl Genius off of it's website today. Girl Genius is a wonderfully cool comic done by Phil and Kaja Foglio ( if those names don't ring a bell at all, you just lost a hell of a lot of 'geek points' ). It is up on the web with two story arcs, Girl Genius 101 is the original 13 (12?) issues of the comic book that they are putting up on the web now, three times a week, one page at a time. Girl Genius Advanced Class is the continuing story from where issue 13 left off. If you are new to the story, definately start with '101' and be patient. There is a pretty big gap in story still between where they are at with the web release of '101' and where 'Advanced Class' starts. You can jump right to 'Advanced Class' but their will be some spoilers about '101' pages that haven't gotten posted yet along the way. Very fun read though, love the whole fantasy steam-punk mad science romance setting.

On a different note, ran around with Kinetica in CoH for a while last night. Was fun, helped Puck beat up some Malta's and then helped Justice Stryke and Eagle Fist get a respec TF started, and almost helped them start a different one when the level of the Freakshow one was a little too painful but I think they snagged another teammate (who was too low to come on the Freak respec) to come along and get it started, hope it went well for them. Chatted some with people meanwhile, dropped a hello over to Avocet, and caught up some with NorthStar 1. Nice quiet little bit of play time. Amazing how much more fun it can be when I don't have to listen to people get verbally abused while trying to help them get something going.

Which ended when I realized I was hungry, it was dark out, and I still needed to get groceries to make dinner and I still wanted to devour some form of sea life. Things to remember... Get groceries earlier in the day, if it is dark out don't wear all black to walk to the grocery store in, and if it is late cold and raining to just get a frickin' pizza delivered next time.

Last couple days

2006-02-23T10:08:00.000-08:00

So I've been somewhat out of touch the last few days... Quick re-cap.

Tuesday
Meeting with the people I worked with for the intranet install to discuss how the project went and get clien feedback. Client feedback was along the lines of (and I got a very funny email about this):
"Holy shit! It is done?"
"I thought this was going to take weeks..."
"Are you single? Can I bear your children?"
"Do you do windows or mow lawns too?"

So... I'd say a success. But a long meeting talking about the project, wrapping up some documentation for it, talking about up-coming work, and then a nice dinner out a Jake's Grill downtown ( pretty nice steakhouse ) and then a late trip back home. At which point I had spent soo much time in an office chair in the last week I didn't really want to sit down at my desk again.

Wednesday
In theory, this was supposed to be a relaxing day of de-compressing and just getting back into the swing of things.

It started out well, caught up on sleep. By which I mean I slept until about 1pm before dragging my arse out of bed and grabbing a shower and getting laundry and dishes done. Had a weeks worth of both to do, tend to get that way during busy projects. Just let it stack up in the sink or in the 'dirty clothes basket' until they are in danger of breaking/burying me or the project ends and doing them.

Took a walk to the grocery store, got some food, got home and had some 'guests come over' for the evening.

'Guests come over' is one of those code-phrases that I speak, but don't type as much. By which I mean friends come over who stayed long enough to make themselves unwelcome or else I'd say I had some 'friends stop by'.

Quick way to make yourself unwelcome:
1) Descend upon my home and grab control of the TV to make me watch a show I have in the past expressed no interest in, or a movie I went out of my way not to see at the theater, just because you think it is great and really want to share it with (force it upon) me.
2) Show up right around dinner time, not having eaten, with no warning, and expecting me to have / prepare food for you.
3) Visit me only when you have problems and expect me to somehow come up with a comprehensive set of solutions for you.
4) Be in a fight with other mutual friends and expect me to take sides.

Or, if you are feeling really creative, do what they did on Wednesday and manage all four at once. *sighs*
1) I am really not that interested in Lost. For some reason, it just comes across to me as 'Survivor: Twin Peaks' and just doesn't keep my interest. For some reason, trying to force me to watch the pilot episode (again, I did see it the first time around) was supposed to fix that.
2) I was making spaghetti anyways, and was scratch-making a meat sauce and had leftover hamburger I had intended for a meat loaf, so that at least wasn't too burdensome to make a larger batch of sauce.
3) I am a single, heterosexual, male. If you are a homosexual female in a relationship, why in gods name do you think I am the person to come to when you need advice on how to keep things interesting?
4) I realize our token white catholic conservative republican friends frown upon your liberal independant multi-ethnic lesbian girlfriend, but as I am neither them nor you why should I be taking sides in this matter? If you don't like them, don't pay attention to them. Don't try to make me get involved in your fight.

Anyways, that kept me from logging in at the computer last night as it went on until way too late in the day.

Today
My hattrick team got activated so I've spent some time this morning firing the old coach, putting some players out in the hiring pool, bidding on the contracts of some other players and going through the managers license exam.

Still in pajamas, need to get dressed and head up to the grocery store again in a little bit to replenish my meat supply and poke around to see if any aquatic life is on sale. I have an urge to eat something that lived in salt water today, if nothing is on sale I'll probably grab some take-out sushi from the sushi place on my way back home.

Planning on spending some time in the CoX games tonight. Been a few days since I've been on (may not have logged in since Friday) and feeling the urge to blow something up.

Also, and I just remembered this and fixing this now, realizing that my cel phone charges better when I have the charger plugged in. Keep forgetting that I unplugged the phone charger to plug the space heater in. Spent yesterday without a cel phone because of that and the battery is abysmally low today.

I've actually ran out of things to say a paragraph back and at this point I am just rambling onwards to see if people actually read this much of the posts that I write or if your eyes have already glossed over and you've gone on to read another blog by now.

One Word - Febr 23rd

2006-02-23T10:04:00.000-08:00

One word, sixty seconds. Write your bit, then post it here as a comment.

OneWord

What the...

2006-02-20T20:07:00.000-08:00

I am getting snowed on. What the frick...

Tonight was supposed to be warmer then this, slightly cloudy, but kind of warm (in relation to the last few days).

Instead, I get snow. *sighs* Hope it sticks so I can sleep in and skip a meeting I don't want to go to tomorrow.

Install is done. Took forever. A bad switch made it take longer then it should have. Frickin' hardware. Still, a nice piece of work, coded and installed from start to finish in less then a week. (Okay, longer if I count the tiresome meetings talking about the project specs and feature requirements...)

My hattrick team is still not approved, probably because of the weekend, but kind of bummed about that as looking forward to playing it again. Apparently the last time I played was actually mid-last year. Feels like it was a lot longer ago.

Weird at times the way time compresses and expands. Really doesn't feel like that long since the start of the year, keep thinking it was just a few days ago. But thinking back to the middle of last year, events that happened then seem like they were ages ago.

Or it could just be sleep deprivation and the fact that I refuse to own a calendar.

Soccer

2006-02-20T00:08:00.000-08:00

I love soccer. I played it when I was younger, I still watch it when it is on TV. It is just a fun sport. Hell, it actually is a sport unlike half the crap I see on ESPN these days (though ESPN2 is fun for the really insane shit they air at times, like log-tossing).

A sport where the players actually enjoy getting hit in the head by a ball.
-Soccer advertisement for the MetroStars Major League Soccer team, 1997

If nothing else, it is a fun sport because people are actually constantly fricking doing something. The only people who ever should be standing still are the goalies so the rest of the time it is 20 people in motion on the field chasing after one ball.

In Latin America the border between soccer and politics is vague. There is a long list of governments that have fallen or been overthrown after the defeat of the national team.
-Luis Suarez

I tend to dislike sports that involve a lot of standing around. Especially the two most 'American' sports: baseball and American rules football.

I just don't get baseball. It is a lot of people standing around watching one guy throw a ball at someone else (while trying not to hit them) and the person being thrown at swapping places every few throws. Or, rarely it seems, he hits the ball and for a few seconds people run wildly about before standing still again and it goes back to repeating the standing and throwing ad nauseum. I played baseball when I was much much younger (shortstop) and found it boring even while playing it, I spent long periods of time wishing I was the pitcher so I at least got to throw the ball at someone.

Football I just don't understand the appeal of. It is like playing a giant game of that childhood playground activity 'Red Rover Red Rover Send Someone On Over' but with a ball that someone in the back throws around too while someone else runs to catch it and play 'Keep Away' from the other team. It seems to have more in common with caribou mating rituals of their beating one another with their horns to decide who gets to mount the choice females in the herd then to any other sport. Plus it just looks sort of weenie alongside rugby, I mean rugby players don't get to wear even half that much padding and they use each other for stepping stones to get at the guy with the ball.

To the aesthete (soccer) is an art form, an athletic ballet. To the spiritually inclined it is a religion.
-Paul Gardner

Personally, my favorite trifecta of sports are soccer, hockey and basketball. Because all of them involve a heavy amount of team work, the ball (or puck) tends to constantly be in play and in motion, and they are just exciting and fun to watch. Plus, by and large, the rules are pretty simple. Take the ball/puck and put it in (or through) the net. I need to watch more lacrosse to decide if I'll add lacrosse to the list of 'sports I like to watch' but it has potential.

The rules of soccer are very simple, basically it is this: if it moves, kick it. If it doesn't move, kick it until it does.
-Phil Woosnam

Anyways, it is the middle of the night, and I am ranting aimlessly while freezing to death in my freakishly cold house as I wait for my email to download before I go try to get some sleep.

Hope everyone had a good weekend and that those of you who have monday off get to enjoy the day and have fun.

Those of you (like me) who are working (damned install taking longer then it should), enjoy spending the day plotting the painful demise of those who get the day off.

Sleep and Soccer

2006-02-18T01:36:00.000-08:00

At the point where I am yawning more then typing and my eyes keep closing despite my best attempts to keep them open as I refuse to prop them open with toothpicks.

Long day ahead of me tomorrow, glad the TF got done all tonight so I don't have to worry about when I get back home since I won't have to worry about getting home in time to play in it since it got done tonight.

That last sentence broke my brain.

Signed up for a hattrick team again. Hattrick is a fun little web game where you manage a soccer club. You don't actually play the games yourself, but you hire and fire players, assign training programs for the team, arena size, etc. You can watch the games get played, sort of. On the game day you can watch as the game engine updates the game results in sort of real time. The games really do take 90 minutes to process and it'll update with events like someone scoring during the time.

I used to play this for quite a while. Stopped playing about this time last year I think and my team has long since been deleted. I really screwed my team up when I started and never quite recovered from that so getting a fresh start will be nice and hopefully I won't make the same mistakes this time.

Game is international ( started in Sweden ) and has something like 700,000+ players around the world. Have to wait for a GM to approve my application for a new team, but that usually takes a day or two at most. If anyone else is interested and signs up for a team let me know and I can try to share some of my acquired advice to help anyone else from screwing up a new club in it.

Just need to decide what I am going to call my team now...

Third Shard TF

2006-02-17T23:36:00.000-08:00

Took a break this evening from work and played some CoH. Third Shard TF. The entire thing took just a hair over four hours it looks like.

1 tank, 1 scrapper, 2 defender, 2 controllers, 2 blasters. ( I think. Might have been one defender and three controllers, it is slipping my mind right now as to what AT one of the people was. )

Only a couple in-mission deaths, the two times I can remember resulted from fights that got rather spread out. Oddly enough none of them were me, though the way I draw aggro I really deserve to get smacked down more often. We had a couple deaths going between missions when I think an ambush would descend on one of the non-50 people and gank them.

Nice break from work and a welcome reminder of how fun the CoX games can be with a team of people who are just nice people.

Good people, good times.

Now back to the testing checklist.

Brain... Tired...

2006-02-17T16:11:00.000-08:00

So the rough code for the entire intranet site is done now. Something like two and a half days (and eleven and a half liters of Coke) to code the entire thing, front and back end and build the database tables from scratch.

Taking a break to poke my head out of the project for a bit and surf the web for a few minutes before I start going down the testing checklist for it and make sure that I actually coded in all the features that are supposed to be in there.

Something below freezing out right now. Found out my furnace had completely ran out of oil earlier this week so my house has been heated by space heaters since then. One built into the bathroom wall means I don't have to worry about the toilet seat being so cold my arse freezes to it. The other I move from room to room as I travel about the house.

What started as one plumbing leak ( the cold water line to the water heater ) turned into three. The first one I ultimately coughed up a few bucks for a new LS-203 hose and replaced the hose and teflon tape and it is fine now. But then one of the hot water valves above it blew the handle off and started leaking. Had to turn the water off again, let the pressure drain out, and replace the valve head on it. Took a cold shower, went back downstairs to move laundry around, found the floor was wet again. The drain pipe from the shower had shifted / broke and I had to get a rubber pipe-wrap-thingy (brain just fuzzed on its proper name) to fix that.

Apparently my lottery ticket for Wednesday's Powerball drawing wasn't a winner, as the jackpot is even higher for Saturday's drawing. Whee, the lure of mathematically improbable wealth.

Supposed to be doing something in CoH later tonight. Have to get food before then, get further down the testing checklist so I don't have to stay up all night on it, and then haul the server to the client site to do the install on it tomorrow and probably re-write some of the back-end to be tighter while I am there. Fun part will be writing the script to pull their old tab-dileneated accounting database/text file into their new accounting system.

One Word - Febr 17th

2006-02-17T15:34:00.000-08:00

One word, sixty seconds. Write your bit, then post it here as a comment.

OneWord

Edit: The word for Febr 17th was 'current'.

Web-Comic Pimpage

2006-02-16T11:01:00.000-08:00

Because I don't get to use the word 'pimpage' enough in my day to day life, here are two other web-comics I like, but don't actually have linked to here. Both of these are much more 'proper' stories then the typically web-comics. They are divided into chapters and have clear rises and falls to their story-arcs. Plus they are beautifully drawn and make me smile.

Errant Story is a fantasy story with elves, magic, gun-wielding assassins, and a sociopathic girl with a talking cat who for her graduation project intends to become a goddess. Been reading it since the beginning as I used to read "Exploitation Now!" which was the artists former web-comic. The first page of it is here.

9th Elsewhere is the story of a girl trapped in her own dreams / subconcious and the muse who is assigned to help her work through the layers of her mind and return to the real world. Beautifully drawn, great story, if I could find some way to steal the basic concept of it and not be completely ripping it off I so totally would. Also fun bits of psychology and other things Jungian in it. The first page of it is here.

One Word - Febr 16th

2006-02-16T10:36:00.000-08:00

One word, sixty seconds. Write your bit, then post it here as a comment.

OneWord

Edit: The word for Febr 16 was 'unfold'.

The Future & Reality TV

2006-02-16T10:23:00.000-08:00

I have a prediction for the future, and an explanation of the present. It all hinges on reality TV, alien abductions, and the eventual development of time travel.

I forsee, at some point in the distant future, reality TV will finally run out of ways to humiliate and demean the people of the Present and in order to keep ratings high and commercial revenue coming in they have to develop ways to ridicule the people of the Past that are more efficient then VH1's "80's Flashback" shows. So finally, at long last, large amounts of funding get devoted to the concept of researching plausible time travel. Ultimately it gets developed, but it only works going into their Past as the people of their Future are smart enough to not want to get ridiculed so shoot all time travelers moving forward on sight.

"But how do we do this best? How do we mock and embarass the people of the Past without changing history?" the television producers ask. And lo, it becomes clear, a sign lights the way and shows them the path to follow. Something hideous and gaudy like the 500th anniversary of the Roswell crash and all the freaks who gather to celebrate it.

"We do it by pretending to be aliens and abducting the most inconsequential fucks from the Past that we can find and screwing with them." they decide and so it gets set into motion. People of the Future travel into their Past ( our Present ) and by data-mining the insane amount of information that the government and credit card companies collect upon the citizenry they manage to pick out those few people whose abduction won't alter history.

But it doesn't end their, good reality TV wouldn't be made just by abducting people and watching them trip out over meeting remote-controlled animatronic aliens, that wouldn't be good enough by far. Instead the abductees get anally raped with a metal probe that has the purpose of stapling onto the tail end of their spinal column a bio-organic broadcasting device and then the abductee is set free once more upon the world.

Now the good television really begins. The people of the Future, assholes one and all if the developing trends of youth today are any sign towards future behavior, sit back with their popcorn and watch these poor fools of the Past stumble about and try to convince people that aliens from another star have not only abducted them, but also probed their nether orifices in order to try to make intelligent contact with the people of Earth.

Pure. Television. Gold.

Fueled by Stress

2006-02-15T18:21:00.000-08:00

Very manic today. I have plenty of reasons to be depressed or pissy, but really I am so god-damned hyperactive today I am having a hard time sitting still to update this. Feet are tapping away beneath my desk, despite the fact that 'The Golden Palaminos' really aren't feet-tapping music.

I tend to respond oddly to stress. The more stressed, the more I have to do, the more crap that gets piled in front of me, the more manic / giddy / motivated I get. Which doesn't necessarily mean I am in a good mood, I am quite capable of being both manic and angry at the same time, but I tend to have more energy then I know what to do with.

Conversely, in those days when all I have to do is attend a meeting or wait for a contract to arrive I get bored and depressed. I don't necessarily self-motivate well, I tend to loose focus of my personal projects and sink into depression or escapism ( books, comics, video games, etc. ) or just sleep through the day.

So, yeah, last twenty-four hours has sucked ass, but I am hyperactive as hell and no idea when I'll get to sleep tonight.

Server setup is going well. Almost guaranteed to be a success now since I have shed blood over it. Blood sacrifices to the IT god tend to insure server reliability, at least such has been my experience in the past. When I ran a server farm for a web-hosting facility it was always the two servers that were assembled without bloodshed that seemed to overheat or break. But a little too hyper right now to finish it up. Almost twitchy which doesn't guarantee safe installation of sticks of ram or network cards.

The actual software build for the intranet is pretty far along. Nothing like being freakishly hyperactive to kick ones typing speed up another notch. At some point I am going to have to pause and document it but that takes time and is slow and code writing is going fast enough now that I don't want to pause to do that. Likely it'll bite me in the ass later when I can't figure out what a critical variable was supposed to be doing, but c'est la vie.

Water heater is... interesting. Picked up replacement piping for the hose that is leaking, as well as a large quantity of duct tape and some rubber leak seals. But the thing itself was electrified when I went to install it. Nothing like a good bit of voltage to wake oneself up and knock you on your ass. Luckily I wasn't standing in a puddle of water at the time that I touched it. Have since flipped the breakers off and swapped stuff around. Haven't turned the breakers back on yet, they are amp'ed at 40 which is wrong anyways, building code says 30 amps so wondering what'll happen when I turn it back on. But water is back on without leaking so I at least have a flush toilet again.

Plus I didn't tell the landlord so he hasn't dropped the "Well, think it is time to re-model and sell this place, you have 30 days to move out." bomb on me yet.

Headache is persisting, but it is a dull thud in the background and not quite enough of a spike of pain in the skull to distract me from everything I have to do.

Welcome to my life. I consider days like this to be as good of a proof of their being divine beings as I am ever likely to get. Because quite honestly, for this much completely stupid shit to happen at once means someone up there hates me. Joke is on him/her/it/them though, their hate only makes me stronger. Mua-ha-ha-ha-ha!

Frick Damn Gyah

2006-02-15T11:52:00.000-08:00

Ranting about 'The Feast of Lupernacus' will be delayed until later today.
Too tired and worn out to rant well at the moment.

Short synopsis of the last 20 hours:
(1) Went to pick up a server for the intranet install I have this upcoming weekend. Server turned out to be a box of parts I'll need to assemble. Frick. That doubled the amount of time it is going to take to prep it for the weekend.

(2) Had a bunch of friends over last night, watched bad movies, talk went around to 'spleens' at one point and the girl friend of one of them (a grad student at OHSU) was kind enough to point out that a single nasty strain of pneumonia would kill someone without a spleen before they realized they were sick.

(3) Woke up this morning with a headache behind my eyes. Reminded of all of the fun fear of going blind leftover from when I had a retinal detachment years ago. Reminded me that I have to update my will since it has been a while since I looked at it.

(4) Discovered this hissing sound in my house, which turned out to be my water heater's cold water pipe having sprung a leak and being in the process of flooding my basement. Hoping duct tape repair will work since if I bring it up to the landlord, he'll probably decide that this would be a good time to re-model and sell the place and I really don't want to have to find a new apartment in mid-February.

On that rather whiny and bitchy note, enjoy a few links about American politics as written by a British newspaper:
America's "Long War"
Feingold Again Tries to Block Patriot Act
New 'Abu Ghraib abuse' images screened

One Word - Febr 15th

2006-02-15T11:38:00.000-08:00

One word, sixty seconds. Write your bit, then post it here as a comment.

OneWord

Edit: The word for Febr 15th was 'emergency'.

Wondermark / Red Meat

2006-02-14T11:42:00.000-08:00

So not entirely sure how to describe this, but it amuses me and thus I put it out there to see if it amuses you who read this.

Wondermark is a very strange little web-comic. The closest thing that comes to mind would be if Red Meat was drawn in what looks like very old-style ink stylings or woodcuts.

Actually, as I look at it, Wondermark is a little heavier on the sight gags (which goes great with the art style simply making the dialogue feel out of place) and Red Meat is more from the built up absurdity of the dialogue (with the occasional sight gag like a naked Wally or Ted in a bondage mask). Hell, give them both a look. Both make me smile for entirely the wrong reasons.

One Word - Febr 14th

2006-02-14T10:52:00.000-08:00

One word, sixty seconds. Write your bit, then post it here as a comment.

OneWord

Edit: The word for Febr 14th was 'brick'.

Yearly Stupid Holiday Rant

2006-02-14T01:01:00.000-08:00

Today is St. Valentine's Day.

This is such an amazingly, stupidly, commercial holiday.

If you want to show someone you love them, then you do it every day. All-year round. You don't wait until the fourteenth of the second month of the year to finally get off your arse and show them that you care, and you can't make up for a years worth of neglect in a single day, with a single romantic gesture.

The worse part is, enough people out there do think that one nice gesture today will 'make things better' or 'show them that I care' that there is such peer pressure building up expectations that if you don't do something special, because heaven forbid you actually do regularly show that you care, you'll get smacked around for being thoughtless or uncaring.

I dare someone to get historical with their holidays and celebrate the Roman holiday of Lupercalia (the festival of Lupercus) tomorrow (the 15th) instead.

diesel powered valentines

2006-02-12T19:40:00.000-08:00

diesel sweeties is doing a set of valentine's day comics with cards you can print out and give people. Very very funny cards. Today was day 3 of it, not sure how many days he is going to do this in total. But definately worth a peek for a good laugh.

Tangerine Sunset

2006-02-12T18:11:00.000-08:00

Second night in the row that I've been on my way home from work just before 6pm. Sky in the distance was a really beautiful tangerine color over the west hills of Portland. It faded off at the edges of the hills to a shade of pale pink, but right over top of the hills it was really stunning.

Intranet install looks complete and stable. Will have to be back at the client site tomorrow to babysit the first day of operation to do any last minute fire-stomping of problems and make sure it is entirely stable under their expected usage load. Usually the first day is the worse, everyone sees the new intranet and spends hours just playing with it to see what changed and how things work. Usually makes for a pretty good stress-test and shake-down. Boring as hell for me though, just watching usage meters and server resources.

Bus route home on the weekends is odd. Couple routes I normally take are week-day only, so have to take an alternate path and walk a couple extra blocks at the end of the trip. End up passing by some landmarks that I really normally try to avoid, little slices of memories I try not to dredge up.

Have a moral dilemma at the moment I am trying to resolve. Not sure whether I should feel guilty or not about having pretty well emptied out all of the normal Coke from the soda machine at the client site's break room. Going to have to take some soda with me tomorrow, not sure how often it gets re-stocked. My kidneys are unhappy with my having drunk so much, but I needed the caffiene to stay awake today. Long boring hours of watching testing macros run.

Blog-reading to unwind, then need to cook dinner, then not sure what to do with the rest of my evening but sure I'll come up with something.

Long week

2006-02-11T00:54:00.000-08:00

Spent most of this past week in meetings. Long, tiresome, dull ones. Got to mock a clients IS department one day. Help another client build a new server and testing lab on another day. Have a network install this weekend. Been up early most days, haven't gotten to sleep until late pretty much everyday regardless of when I wobbled to bed. Just a very tiring week.

Spent today, yesterday since it is past midnite now, doing laundry and making some shopping trips for groceries and collapsing in front of the tv to finally beat Jade Empire on my Xbox.

Turned out to be a surprisingly short game, I think it clocked in at about sixteen hours. Missed a little bit in Dirge near the end ( stupid Dawn Star ) but I think I did most everything else an Open Palm character could do. Rather fun though. The basic UI and game design was much the same as the KotOR games, but the combat wasn't the silly hacked off turn-based of those and was instead pretty free-form and semi-button mashing. Okay, actually it involved jumping behind the foe and hitting them in the back until they turned around and then jumping over them again and repeating, but still was fun.

Went with a balanced character using 'Legendary Strike' and the longsword as his main weapons. Never really seriously used the other weapons or fighting styles and didn't bother with the magic until pretty far in when I got bored and started beating up foes by turning them into stone pillars and then shattering them. All in the name of justice of course.

Nice to have an Xbox game in my stack of actually completed games. I think Mechwarrior and KotOR were my only other Xbox games I had beaten. Still have all kinds of PS2 RPGs to beat, but figured I'd play with the Xbox for a few days instead.

Got on and did a little CoH around midnite. Got the 'Toothbreaker' badge with my high-level blaster ( with some assistance from a furry blue brute who kicked much red cap booty ). Was fun, not too many other people still on at that time but had a bit of banter and chatter taking place still.

Sleep now though. Have to be up again before too many hours have passed. No rest for the weary, wicked, web worker.

Legend of the Five Rings

2006-02-09T22:41:00.000-08:00

So there is a new edition of the Legend of the Five Rings roleplaying game system out now. Thankfully they are turning away from d20 finally and returning to their 'Roll & Keep' system as their primary focus. Not that I minded too much, I never had any intention of playing it with the d20 rules, but it means I hopefully won't have to wade through them in future products.

Really cool system and setting though. Many fun hours of playing it. Hoping the 3rd edition will stay true to the fun of the previous two. Starting characters in the 1st edition you were a little too powerful, in the 2nd edition you were a little underpowered if you went for a multi-faceted character, with luck they found the balance between the two with the 3rd.

Looks like the timeline has moved forward too. 1st was before the Scorpion Clan Coup, the second was two years after the Coup at the time of the Clan War. Supplements since then moved it through the second Day of Thunder and through the Spirit War. Looks like the 3rd edition takes place in the Four Winds era.

Missing a bunch of the 'Secrets of the' and the 'Way of the' supplements. Need to keep an eye out for them and remember to pick them up sometime. Have this sudden urge to run a campaign of it again. Not sure if I'd use the Rokugan setting, for as much as I love it the ideas I have don't quite mesh well with it. No clue. Still pondering.

Which is better...

2006-02-09T08:24:00.000-08:00

Which is better... Chinese-themed kung-fu & sorcery drama or Japanese-themed samurai epics? Curious about favorites and why.

Laptop or Gameboy DS

2006-02-07T09:51:00.000-08:00

Laptop or Gameboy DS. Need to get one of those to pass the dull hours at meetings playing "King of Dragon Pass" or "Animal Crossing".

Human-Animal Hybrid

2006-02-06T18:46:00.000-08:00

(from Overcompensating)

After the President's rambling in the State of the Union about how the government can't support the development of human-animal hybrids, why then does the Department of Homeland Security have one for a spokesperson?

Long road home

2006-02-06T17:44:00.000-08:00

I've been in a weird mood since I left the client site today.

My time being an elitist technology bigot earlier left me both with gut-pain ( from holding back hysterical laughter ) and despair ( at what I was about to laugh about ).

The clients 'reliable high-end in-office technology center' consisted of a very small, very dusty room full of rather old computers covered in dust. Their server was recognizable as being the machine with the 15" monitor next to it and the sticky-note on the front by the reset button reading "Press Here To Restart Network". Their 'Head of IS' ( if a company has an IS and not an IT department, I have learned to be scared ) decided to call in sick today. I have this nagging suspicion it was to avoid having to show me in-person the network serving running an un-patched, no service pack install of NT4 and Netscape Netserver. As it was, his assistant ( who didn't know where the server room was, we had to follow a network cable back to find it ) didn't have any clue that things were that bad since he just did desktop support. Lets just say that my technology recommendation for their new network server may include some training courses for the desktop guy since I think his boss is not long for that office.

But that left me feeling a little nostalgic, a lot cynically amused, and with a bit more free-time then I expected. Took the long route home, which for me doesn't involve driving as much as catching random buses around town and seeing where they will take me.

Spent most of my life in Portland, a lot of it traveling around town by bus ( ever since I was 6 and would get a quarter or two every week if I did my chores, had to take the bus to get to the comic shop since the grocery store by where I lived didn't stock the cool comics ( which in those days meant random stuff like 'Boris the Bear' )) so a lot of the landmarks are actually more familiar from a bus window to me then they are if I was standing on the sidewalk in front of them.

Love all the 'green spaces' around Portland. Just the random city blocks of park that you come across in the middle of some over-crowded residential neighborhood.

One got added while I was in NC not far from where I grew up. Couple had a big old lot of land, from back when homes in Portland had a huge minimum lot size, and had only a small house on one little part of it and a huge yard beside it. He and his wife used to sit on the porch and watch the kids play there. I remember kicking a ball around there with a friend who lived across the street from it. After his wife died, he subdivided his lot to be just the minimum around the house and donated the rest to the city on the requirement that it get used as a city park. It is named after his wife now and after he died his will had his life insurance payout get used to setup a trust fund to maintain and improve the park.

Strange to ride some of the routes. A lot of them haven't changed since I was a kid so it is the same houses, with a lot more years of wear and tear on them. Strange how some neighborhoods look so much cleaner and more prosperous then they used to and others are filthy now with the hedges untrimmed and the homes all in need of a paintjob.

Tired now and very oddly introspective. Wondering if I could look at myself from the outside for a moment which set of houses I would more closely resemble.

Fun part of my job

2006-02-06T07:40:00.000-08:00

Fun part of my job today. Going to a client site to evaluate what technology they have to work with. Elitist tech snob/bigot time!

Un-Rational

2006-02-05T20:32:00.000-08:00

I just had this truly strange chain of thoughts...

If I go to sleep, when I wake up it'll be tomorrow.
But tomorrow sucks, it'll be Monday and I'll have a meeting to go to.
If I don't go to sleep, maybe it'll never be tomorrow.
I need caffiene so I can stay awake since it can't become tomorrow until I sleep.
I wonder how long I can stay awake and keep it today.

At which point some very cold Coca-Cola was drunk which resulted in throat spasms ( it was very cold... damned poorly heated house ). That pretty much woke me up and made me realize that I really shouldn't have drunk that since I'd have fallen asleep pretty soon otherwise and I was getting rather incoherent in my sleepiness.

Opera

2006-02-04T23:41:00.000-08:00

Just got back from the opera. It was a performance of Verdi's "Macbeth". I don't think it was the original version as it premiered in Italy, but rather the later version that he adapted for Paris'ian opera houses because it included a ballet which wouldn't have been typical for when and where it was originally written.

How to put it properly... I think the quote by someone a couple rows behind me summed it up about right, "A beautiful performance. Wonderful singing. But who thought it was a good idea to adapt Shakespeare to opera?"

Well, Verdi did and he was a professional Italian opera-master... Myself I am a bit less certain. I think I would have liked the original version of it better, even if it would have been missing one of Lady Macbeth's four arias and one of the duets between Macbeth and Lady Macbeth because it also would have lost that confounded ballet bit in Act 3.

It isn't that I dislike ballet, though honestly I prefer opera to ballet because I don't need a script to figure out what the heck is happening on stage, but it is that having the witches ( of which they were a chorus of 33 ) dancing on stage before Macbeth enters to get their final prophecies from them felt a bit like that big bit in the desert in the middle of 'Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon'. Beautifully done, well acted, but it felt really the frick out of place from the rest of the opera and if it wasn't for the fact it was coming right off of an intermission it would have really screwed up the pacing.

I suppose my major complaint though, and this is largely because I am such a fan of Shakespeare, is that the translation from english to italian meant that it lost a lot of the phrasing and sense of language that was in the Bard's original writing. Things like the complex word-play where Macduff spins metaphors for a few moments to escape having to say 'the king has been murdered' just didn't seem to translate across well. In part I think the fault is that the opera is condensed greatly in some places from the play ( while in other places like the ballet drags on... ) and so some of the dialogue may have been cut, but the english to italian translation likely is at least part to blame ( and the italian back to english subtitles couldn't have helped ).

Their isn't much bawdy in Macbeth that I can recall. I think in the scene right after the King is murdered the servant at the door tells a couple dirty jokes and has a bit of dialogue ( obscure today ) relating to the Gunpowder Plot that occured in British politics about that time. If their was any of Shakespeare's often huge bawdy streak left in the opera, it definately did not make it back into the english subtitles that showed up on the screen over the stage.

( If you don't know what I mean by bawdy, hit the library and find a copy of either Shakespeare's Bawdy or A Dictionary of Shakespeare's Sexual Puns and Their Significance. Both books are humorous reads and can make watching a Shakespeare play a lot more fun as you can finally understand all the humor in some of the more amusing lines. )

Anyways, still a fun evening. Left in the 2005/2006 Portland Opera Season, titled Power and Corruption, is "Nixon in China" which is next and "Don Giovanni" finishes the season. Don't have tickets yet to either of those, though pondering "Nixon in China" just because I haven't seen a modern opera for a whlie. I missed seeing "The Rape of Lucretia" back in December ( I forgot about it ) which was the opera before this one, which apparently is a pity as I heard several people say that it was an amazing performance.

The 2006/2007 season has a few announced that interest me: "Faust", "Norma" and "The Flying Dutchman" all look good. The 2006/2007 season is titled Truth and Transformation.

Anyways, passing time now until Full Metal Alchemist is on at midnite, then to bed and sleeping way in tomorrow after that.

Weekend

2006-02-03T19:58:00.000-08:00

Got home from that meeting of idiocy a couple hours ago, then had to go out and get food for dinner. Picked up some groceries and a pizza from Papa Murphy's.

Still downloading the CoH patch. Didn't download for some reason the other day, but I got it going now with about forty minutes (plus however long it takes to apply) left.

Pizza just got out of the oven so having some dinner while I wait.

Meeting some friends for brunch tomorrow, then going to an opera in the evening. A performance of Macbeth. I know someone in the chorus so it should be interesting to see. The theatre group putting it on did a pretty nice job on the sets and gear, going to be interesting to see where they send it on to next.

Not sure what I am doing on sunday yet. Sleeping in most likely.

The wonderful excitement of my life.

Waste of oxygen and carbon.

2006-02-03T11:16:00.000-08:00

Waste of oxygen and carbon. Marketing-Boy and Graphic-Design-Geek are arguing about 'warm beige' or 'cool orange' tones. Kill me now.

Brain Pain

2006-02-02T18:06:00.000-08:00

Got home a little bit ago. Supposed to be online in CoH for a Storm Knights thingy but it'll take me a couple hours to download the patch so that is a non-starter for me tonight.

Brain hurts. Inside of my head feels like it is being used for a non-holds barred rugby match. Or maybe a Blood Bowl match for those familiar with the Games Workshop game.

Tylenol, then a quiet, dark room is my plans for the evening.

One Word - Febr 1st

2006-02-01T11:24:00.000-08:00

One word, sixty seconds. Write your bit, then post it here as a comment.

OneWord

State of the Union - Text

2006-01-31T19:42:00.000-08:00

This is from the Houston Chronicle and is as prepared for delivery to the press corps: here.

In a system of two parties, two chambers and two elected branches, there will always be differences and debate.
Well, glad we are entirely a system of two parties... No need to talk about the Green, Constitution, or Reform parties I guess...

The only way to protect our people, the only way to secure the peace, the only way to control our destiny is by our leadership, so the United States of America will continue to lead.
But is the rest of the world really interested in continuing to follow our lead? Did I miss something? Did we lead Palestinians to elect Hamas so heavily into their government? ( I wonder how long until they, as a democracy, attack Israel, as a democracy, and all the stupid punditry about 'No democracy has ever attacked another democracy' will finally be over with. )

At the start of 2006, more than half the people of our world live in democratic nations. And we do not forget the other half in places like Syria, Burma, Zimbabwe, North Korea and Iran...
Syria - 18,448,752
Zimbabwe - 12,746,990
North Korea - 22,912,177
Burma - 42,909,464
Iran - 68,017,860
China - 1,306,313,812 ( Oh wait, we don't talk about them anymore... )

Their (Bin Laden and friends) aim is to seize power in Iraq, and use it as a safe haven to launch attacks against America and the world.
Uh... Huh? Lets see... Iraq used to be a secular ( non-religious ) government, which actually considered Bin Laden to be a dangerous religious nut... Now we have... Let's see, the dominant party in Iraq ( over half the population ) is the religious Shiite party ( with their ties to Iran ) and they will likely take over the nation ( though in true American democratic fashion, we are trying to strong-arm the minority 20% or so Sunni faction into a stronger political position ). Even if the Shiites do take control, Islamic priests don't like Bin Laden either as his behavior usurps centuries of tradition as he attempts to declare 'fatwahs' and 'jihads' upon his own, rights which under Islamic religious law only priests can do.

By allowing radical Islam to work its will by leaving an assaulted world to fend for itself, we would signal to all that we no longer believe in our own ideals, or even in our own courage.
Or, maybe, we could be saying 'Hey, we respect your religious differences and will stop trying to impose our western imperialism upon you by ramming our culture down your throat or bombing your cities.'

America rejects the false comfort of isolationism.
Bullshit alert! Okay, name one politician or political figure in America who in the past year has advocated Isolationism? Anyone? Bueller? Bueller? Yeah... This is called a 'straw man'. Lets set up an easy target to poke holes in so we can make all the crap that follows from this statement sound good.

We remain on the offensive in Afghanistan, where a fine president and national assembly are fighting terror while building the institutions of a new democracy.
"Watch me claim this as a victory while I fail to mention that the three formerly unfriendly terrorist groups based in Afghanistan have actually agreed to join forces and are working togethor now. Also, I'll cleverly avoid mentioning the continued deployment of NATO forces there since, really, the government only controls a couple of cities and the nation as a whole is still a free-fire zone..."

And we are on the offensive in Iraq, with a clear plan for victory.
I thought we already won, didn't your landing on that aircraft career and that banner reading "Mission Accomplished" mean we won? We have a plan? Plan for what? Strong-arming the political majority in the nation into accepting a government that doesn't represent them because it is what we want and we should be the final arbitrators of their democracy?

Second, we are continuing reconstruction efforts and helping the Iraqi government to fight corruption and build a modern economy, so all Iraqis can experience the benefits of freedom.
Because no democratic government is ever corrupt! *cough* *cough* Abramoff *cough*

The road of victory is the road that will take our troops home.
... in pine wood boxes or in medical helicopters to where they can learn to use their prosthetics properly.

Staff Sergeant Dan Clay's wife, Lisa, and his mom and dad, Sara Jo and Bud, are with us this evening.
And they sooo did not look happy to be there.

Our offensive against terror involves more than military action. Ultimately, the only way to defeat the terrorists is to defeat their dark vision of hatred and fear by offering the hopeful alternative of political freedom and peaceful change.
... and the threat of us bombing them back to the stone-age if they don't toe the line.

The Palestinian people have voted in elections; now the leaders of Hamas must recognize Israel, disarm, reject terrorism and work for lasting peace.
And while we are making wishes, I'd like a pony too!

We also show compassion abroad because regions overwhelmed by poverty, corruption and despair are sources of terrorism, organized crime, human trafficking and the drug trade.
"Note that I am talking about 'abroad'. Domestic povery, corruption and despair will continue to be ignored."

Fortunately, this nation has superb professionals in law enforcement, intelligence, the military and homeland security. These men and women are dedicating their lives to protecting us all, and they deserve our support and our thanks. They also deserve the same tools they already use to fight drug trafficking and organized crime, so I ask you to reauthorize the Patriot Act.
Maybe I missed something... Since when did the DEA have the authority to perform secret searches of peoples homes without probable cause and just on the grounds of 'suspicion', when did we allow law enforcement officers opposing the drug trade to jail non-citizens without cause or trial, or allowed spying and violation of attorney-client privelage? Uh... Some serious bullshit there. The Patriot Act goes soo much further and impinges upon sooo much of the Bill of Rights.

In the last two-and-a-half years, America has created 4.6 million new jobs, more than Japan and the European Union combined.
Okay... 4.6 million new jobs, which are largely low-paying service industry jobs, alongside the loss of at least 2.7 million manufacturing jobs since 2000 ( that many were lost by the end of 2003 ) and the loss of over a million tech sector jobs by the end of 2003. So, maybe a net gain of 900k jobs, but doubtful since the numbers I was looking at for job loss and the general employment decline were dated back to 2003, 2004 was worse for the tech sector then 2003 was and I know in the Pacific Northwest at least that the tech sector is still slowly hemorraging jobs overseas. As well, manufacturing jobs continue to disappear, such as the Ford announcement just a few days ago.

This year my budget will cut it again, and reduce or eliminate more than 140 programs that are performing poorly or not fulfilling essential priorities.
Among the programs that are going to be suffering funding cuts are:
HOPE VI Program
Housing for Persons With Disabilities
Housing Opportunities for Persons With AIDS Program
Public Housing
Section 202 Housing for the Elderly

But since you are likely unemployed, or on welfare, to be part of those programs don't worry. Or rather, we won't worry as your lobbying efforts are likely to be inconsequential. We are just hoping you'll disappear entirely while we continue to cut welfare and medical aid spending. Stake out a large comfortable cardboard box now!

( I haven't found a full list of program cuts yet, that was just off of a listing of housing assistance programs taking hits. )

By 2030, spending for Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid alone will be almost 60 percent of the entire federal budget. And that will present future Congresses with impossible choices: staggering tax increases, immense deficits or deep cuts in every category of spending.
Yep. Health care for the retiring baby boomers is going to get expensive.

Keeping America competitive requires affordable health care. Our government has a responsibility to help provide health care for the poor and the elderly, and we are meeting that responsibility.
Uh... But apparently we won't be meeting that responsibility in 2030 without severe spending cuts in every category of spending.... ( see above )

Keeping America competitive requires an immigration system that upholds our laws, reflects our values and serves the interests of our economy. Our nation needs orderly and secure borders. To meet this goal, we must have stronger immigration enforcement and border protection. And we must have a rational, humane guest worker program that rejects amnesty, allows temporary jobs for people who seek them legally and reduces smuggling and crime at the border.
After the State of the Union was over on CSpan2 they were interviewing representatives that had been there for the speach to get their opinions on it. One of them really went off on this point. Apparently, according to him at least, the border could be secured today. The people and resources could be easily made available, but Bush has more then once withheld granting them in order to push his 'guest worker program' forward, which is not a popular program among several border state representatives.

Tonight I announce the American Competitiveness Initiative, to encourage innovation throughout our economy and to give our nation's children a firm grounding in math and science.
"Because in the future of fast food industry jobs, the only job market that hasn't been in decline over the length of my presidency, it will be vitally important that they can do the math to give correct change quickly!"

This funding will support the work of America's most creative minds as they explore promising areas such as nanotechnology, supercomputing and alternative energy sources.
It was really funny to listen to him pronouce 'supercomputing'.

Third: We need to encourage children to take more math and science, and make sure those courses are rigorous enough to compete with other nations. We have made a good start in the early grades with the No Child Left Behind Act, which is raising standards and lifting test scores across our country.
Okay. Prepare for a longer rant... 'No Child Left Behind' was, and remains, crap. I can't even begin to describe my loathing for the program. To sum it up 'no child gets left behind because the quick children get cut off at the knees'. The idea that the proper way to determine which schools get more funding is based around test scores is crap. I have quite a few friends who teach, several at heavily multi-ethnic schools. They have a seperate teaching criteria for every student of a different ethnicity and those scores are not apparently weighted. One student from Distractistan's test scores and performance is apparently considered on par with his 99 classmates who are third-generation 'Mericans. The number of horror stories I've heard about re-districting efforts to put all the minorities in one school so that just that one school gets fucked over and looses funding are insane. The entire thing promotes a 'teach for the test' way of thought instead of teaching children life skills or about the simple joy of learning or reading. Gyah... As Einstein put it years ago, "It is in fact nothing short of a miracle that the modern methods of instruction have not yet entirely strangled the holy curiousity of inquiry... It is a very grave mistake to think that the enjoyment of seeing and searching can be promoted by means of coercion and a sense of duty."

Tonight I propose to train 70,000 high school teachers to lead advanced-placement courses in math and science; bring 30,000 math and science professionals to teach in classrooms; and give early help to students who struggle with math, so they have a better chance at good, high-wage jobs. If we ensure that America's children succeed in life, they will ensure that America succeeds in the world.
So, lets see, 100k more teachers in science and math are going to solve our problems... How, pray tell, are you going to get those 30k math and science professionals to take the insane pay cuts they would be taking by going into the education sector? Given that teacher pay across most of the nation isn't a hell of a lot above the poverty line...

Much less, providing a whole bunch of additional teachers into a system without enough schools or classroom space already doesn't solve any problems. It is a nice little bit of political rhetoric that sounds great but doesn't do anything about the underlying issues.

Oh, what is also neglected to be mentioned is that tomorrow morning they are cutting back 12 million in funding for higher education grants and are upping the interest rates on college loans apparently.

There are fewer abortions in America than at any point in the last three decades, and the number of children born to teenage mothers has been falling for a dozen years in a row. ... These gains are evidence of a quiet transformation a revolution of conscience, in which a rising generation is finding that a life of personal responsibility is a life of fulfillment.
Or, maybe, just possibly... It is because it is easier to get condoms, birth control pills, and the 'morning after pill' these days then it was in 1976?

They are concerned about unethical conduct by public officials...
That one phrase being the closest the entire speach ever comes to talking about the corruption scandals in D.C. right now or about the pretty well glossed over now CIA leak scandal.

Tonight I ask you to pass legislation to prohibit the most egregious abuses of medical research: human cloning in all its forms, creating or implanting embryos for experiments, creating human-animal hybrids and buying, selling or patenting human embryos. Human life is a gift from our creator and that gift should never be discarded, devalued or put up for sale.
And because human life is so sacred, we are going to make expanding the boundaries of medicine illegal so we never develop medical practices or technology that could save it or extend it...

So far the federal government has committed $85 billion to the people of the Gulf Coast and New Orleans. We are removing debris, repairing highways and building stronger levees. We are providing business loans and housing assistance.
"We are also giving people only 120 days to decide what is going to be done to their property before we seize it and sell it to private developers. Note that we really aren't making that big of an effort to reach or contact people, they have to come forward and contact us on their own."

In New Orleans and in other places, many of our fellow citizens have felt excluded from the promise of our country. The answer is not only temporary relief, but schools that teach every child and job skills that bring upward mobility and more opportunities to own a home and start a business.
"And so we encourage you to move to Iraq of Afganistan where we are building plenty of new schools and infrastructure there. We even have electricity hooked up in their cities now because of us, unlike you people in the 9th ward of New Orleans who still don't have power."

A hopeful society acts boldly to fight diseases like HIV/AIDS, which can be prevented, and treated, and defeated.
Huh? We have a cure for AIDs?

We will also lead a nationwide effort, working closely with African-American churches and faith-based groups, to deliver rapid HIV tests to millions, end the stigma of AIDS and come closer to the day when there are no new infections in America.
Because, you know, a church is EXACTLY where you want to go to get a HIV test because you've been sleeping around...

Ai-yi-yi... I need more booze...

I need more booze

2006-01-31T19:05:00.000-08:00

Damn... I feel ill after watching that.

State of the Union address just ended, was watching it over on CSpan2 so I could just see the speach without all the commentary and crap.

Fun things I noticed...

Only twice ( Sandra Day O'connor's being thanked for being a judge and the very end of the speach ) did the entire audience stand to applaud. Only twice. Most of the audience stood up at the point where he was talking about fighting AIDs, but not all of it.

If you saw pictures of the audience standing to applaud, they were probably of the group to the right of the podium ( the president's left ) which was seated pretty well entirely white republican and they stood and applauded at every damned thing he said with nice pasted on smiles ( easily identifiable by the ladies in bright orange and red outfits in the upper left of the section ). The fun bits were when CSpan panned over to look at them ( and the rest of the audience ) between bits of applause and you would see people yawning or looking at papers they were holding.

So, Medicare and Medicaid costs are going to sky rocket and they need to be 'dealt with by congress'. But their should also be cheap affordable healthcare for everyone. Anyone else hear that and left thinking of "Soylent Green" or "Logan's Run"?

The thing I hate about all the talk of 'human cloning bad!' is that it is so heavily reminiscent of old bans like the one on doing surgery on corpses at all which slowed down the development of medicine for so long in the Medievel or Rennaisance era's. I want human cloning! I want experimentation! Medical advances and scientific progress are in my mind inherently good!

Maybe I missed a medical advance, but did he really say we could cure HIV during that? I seem to remember a bit about 'Prevent, treat and defeat AIDs' during the speach.

I also enjoyed the bit where, and I forget already which bill it was, that he mentioned congress voting down a measure he wanted passed last year and a good chunk of the audience interrupted him applauding that. He had a very non-plussed expression on his face at that point which was a nice contrast to the smirk he had the rest of the time.

Really hope to find a transcript of it up soon. Be fun to go over and point out the logical fallacies I have already forgotten and the various things that he really didn't talk about.

One Word - Janu 31st

2006-01-31T11:30:00.000-08:00

Haven't done one of these for a while. Stopped as the site kept getting stuck on the same word for day after day after day. Figured I'd give it a try again. We'll see tomorrow if I keep it going once more ( though I suspect I'll miss Thursday and Friday as I have early meetings both mornings ).

One word, sixty seconds. Write your bit, then post it here as a comment.

OneWord

Edit: The word for Janu 31st was 'flee'.

State of the Union

2006-01-31T11:10:00.000-08:00

Woo-whee! Everyone get some snack food ready and some drinks because the State of the Union address is tonight. Definately will need drinks for that. Likely alcoholic ones, hard alcohol preferable.

Honestly, I really am looking forward to hearing this. I mean, damn, how the hell is this going to be spun?

Afganistan is still a mess.
Iraq just became a religious state and no WMD were ever found.
Palestine elected Hamas ( who the US considers a terrorist group ) to their government.
Hurricane Katrina was handled miserably.
Hurricane Katrina also showed off a lot of the cronyism that is going on.
Whats-her-name his Supreme Court nominee before Alito was also cronyism.
Torture! Good, bad, or do we just outsource it?
Wiretapping and privacy in the US.
Abramahoff and all the fun corruption surrounding him.
Scooter Libby / Dick Cheney and the CIA leak.
Al-qaeda's latest video tape that really just mocked Bush.

Which is just the fun screw-ups and unfinished things that have drug through the last year that I can think of off of the top of my head alone. I mean, how do you spin all of that or do you just blow through it and give a speach and pretend none of that is happening and ramble on about some Axis of Evil again?

Weather

2006-01-29T10:18:00.000-08:00

You'd figure that after having spent twenty-five years of my life in Oregon I'd know the difference between:

Rain Mist
Misting
Light Sprinkles
Sprinkles
Light Rain
Light Showers
Heavy Sprinkles
Showers
Heavy Showers
Rain
Heavy Rain
Torrential Downpour

But really, where the frick is the dividing line between them?

Or the difference between:

Scattered Clouds
Slightly Cloudy
Cloudy
Mostly Cloudy
Overcast
Heavy Clouds

Is there actually set guidelines to differentiate between these things? Is it just dependent on the weather forecasters moods? Is meteorology actually a science at all? I have this long-standing suspicion that the only difference between a meteorologist and a fortune-teller is that meteorologists get green screens and radar domes to play with.

Blegh.

Quick thoughts

2006-01-29T00:33:00.000-08:00

So the church up the road from where I live had another set of fun sign snafus. I think I've mentioned them before, somewhere along the way. If not, someone let me know and I'll post up some of their previous gems as comments. Anyways, on my way out of the house today I noticed the sign read:

Get On Your
Knees Boys
Mens Prayer
Sat 8:00 PM

Which really really does not take much to read the wrong way... Anyways, on the way home they had someone out changing the sign, at the point at which I passed it read:

Get On Your
Boys Mens
Prayer
Sat 8:00 PM

Which wasn't much of an improvement, though the sign was in the process of being changed so you have to give them points for trying.

Full Metal Alchemist was at episode 44 tonight on Cartoon Network. Series ends at 51 ( there is a 52nd episode, but it is a re-cap episode summarizing the series up ) so while I really really would encourage people to give the series a try, watching it on Cartoon Network right now would be an awful place to start since it'd spoil all the surprises in the first part of the series. Actually, the series doesn't quite end at episode 51. It ends there, but then there is a feature length movie that came out later which continues on from there and provides the real ending to the series. The manga is still on-going actually, and I like the story in the manga a bit better then the way the anime ends. But still, the anime is damned good and by-and-large paced better then the manga ( which is the opposite of Naruto IMHO, where the manga pacing just feels so much more exciting then the anime ).

The tv ad for the Gilette Fusion razor is depressing. It has this nice whole sci-fi sequence of buried lab in the desert, black helicopters, people in lab coats with the cliche silver metal attache of doom, and it looks like it could be a trailer for a much better sci-fi show then the alien invasion crap that is on the networks right now. But it isn't. It is an ad for a frickin' razor. God dammit.

A magnitude 2.8 earthquake in Portland today, back at 6pm or so. We don't get blizzards, or much flooding ( okay, this year the weather is fall fucked up ), or tornados or hurricanes... But we do have volcanos and earthquakes. So... Yeah... My natural disasters are cooler then your natural disasters!

Weather is all messed up though. Last year we had the dryest first three months on record in Oregon with no appreciable rainfall through the end of March. This year we may have the most rainfall on record ever for a January in Oregon.

This goes to some of the people I know and the really weird conversations I end up having at times, but little did I know, Amazon.com has a bondage department. No longer do you need to go to scary stores that are poorly lit and smell of leather, latex and lube to get your cat'o'nine tails or your four-cuff restraint set. And oddly enough, the prices on Amazon.com are amazingly low.

More info on the earthquake here. The irritating thing about this for me is that I am left wondering now if that is an aftershock I just felt or a really big truck just drove by a street away. Mapping it out, I am roughly 8.7 miles south of the epicenter's surface location though the actual epicenter was nine miles down.

Note to self: Buy electric

2006-01-28T04:41:00.000-08:00

Note to self: Buy electric blanket. Bed is so unbelievably fricken' cold I almost went into hypothermic shock climbing into it.

Null value

2006-01-28T01:53:00.000-08:00

My brain has been kind of in a null state for the last couple days. Lots of wheels spinning, no gears actually engaging. Mostly just random surface level stuff drifting about the sea of my thoughts. Sort of at the 'left foot, right foot, left foot, etc.' level of processing right now. Mixed with occasional weird daydreams of story ideas.

Of all of my projects, three are currently active in my head:
Sci-Fi Space Opera Thingy - Has a beginning plotted out, an idea of ways to work the end, but the stuff in-between is simply dis-jointed scenes and ideas. Need to actually storyboard it out from the beginning and see if it actually comes to life and goes somewhere. Main cast of characters are pretty solid, but it is completely lacking in anything resembling a supporting cast right now which just doesn't work. The main characters are all so dis-similar that they each are going to end up with their own constellation of people around them that I haven't fleshed out yet.

Fantasy Steam-Punk Wagner'ian Thingy - Actually have four different stories with entirely different casts that all are somewhat related and are in the same setting. Need to choose one and run with it and stay focused on it until it gets near the point where they would all touch and see how it looks then. Geography is still a bit wonky on it. Need to sit down and try to rationalize it all a bit since as it is now it is sort of a mess sociologically, namely certain technological developments should have had social impacts that I didn't take into account and yeah... World-building crap.

Urban Shaman Dystopian Social Thingy - This ended up as three seperate ideas that I vivisected to get the good bits out and re-assembled into a staggering Frankenstein'esque story that actually looks to be a hell of a lot cooler then it would have been. It is waiting on me to get off my arse and do a bit of mining for research so I have some numbers to show just how freaking bleak it is going to be. Piece will be as much about style as it will be story I think.

But nothing is getting done on any of it right now. I can feel the hamster wheels not turning in my brain, which means Skippy and Bo-Bo have escaped out of my ears and neither of my cranial lobes are generated electricity. Come back little hamsters of brain-juice-generating, come back!

Why? Why me?

2006-01-26T17:56:00.000-08:00

So one of my friends is a big fan of the whole 'mexican masked wrestler' thing. Years ago when we were working togethor he came back from a vacation to Mexico with a masked wrestler mask, burst into the office the day before he was supposed to be back on the job with the mask on and just a pair of swimtrunks and growled and ran around the office and left. Which would have potentially been scary or impressive if he didn't have a build reminiscent of a beanpole.

Anyways, a mutual friend of ours just sent this story to both of us: Mexican police hunting the country's most-wanted serial killer have arrested a female wrestler.

I can get why he got sent a link to the story, though I am not certain she is a masked wrestler, but why did I get sent a link to it?

Day of rest

2006-01-26T14:58:00.000-08:00

At home today. Nice change from meetings. Be nicer if I felt better. Had this cough for the last few days that won't seem to go away. Crashed early last night with a brutal headache that moved on during the night when it realized I was comatose and it couldn't take pleasure in my pain if I wasn't awake to feel it.

Raining again. Started up against sometime yesterday. Coming and going today. Gone right now. Likely it'll come back the moment I put shoes on to go get the mail.

Hoping that a day of staying indoors, in a warm room ( in an otherwise cold house ), will help put things to right with the mangling of my lungs.

Stuff I should do today. Still haven't read the forums. No idea what the state of play is on things there right now. Should log some of my CoX people in so they at least look active. Got some work stuff I should get sorted so I can commence the nagging of people to get me art and content. Eternally have writing and art projects I could do.

Thinking breakfast, and a nap right now though.

Just to start a day-long

2006-01-24T08:23:00.000-08:00

Just to start a day-long meeting (waste of my time) off right... I am the only one on time. Go-go mass transit!

Applied Narcissism

2006-01-24T00:02:00.000-08:00

Couldn't sleep. House too freaking cold. Back up out of bed, furnace is running, being vaguely impulsive or compulsive or obsessive for a moment.

As a brief experiment in applied narcissism I dug out some old lists I had of my anime, manga and music library and back-dated them as posts to June of '99 and tossed them up as links in the side-bar.

Now, other then the whole 'look at what I have' aspect of it, the theory is that people will see that and suggest things that they themselves like (if they have similar tastes) or ask questions about things they see I have that they want to know about (assuming that my selection doesn't scare them off).

The other part is that it means that if I go shopping, and have net access, I can figure out what the hell I have so I don't buy myself a second copy of something.

As far as I can tell, the music cd list is pretty accurate with maybe a couple cds from my time in NC missing from it. The anime and manga lists date back two years ( lifted them off a similar listing I used to have up at hythia.com ) and I'll need to update them tomorrow.

House is warmer now. Sleep is calling. Not sure why I need sleep, I have another all day meeting tomorrow which means another day without needing my brain.

Edit: Actually, looking at the list again, I am missing a hell of a lot of classical music off of it. Mostly Wagner and some Russian composers whose names I won't even attempt to spell. Frick. Where did those cds get packed...

The meetings... Make them stop,

2006-01-23T11:22:00.000-08:00

The meetings... Make them stop, the boredom is suffocating my brain!

At least the rain stopped

2006-01-22T17:46:00.000-08:00

It is frickin' cold out. Not that I should be complaining, as this is the weather I grew up with ( yay, Oregon weather is sort of back to normal ) but damn... I think it rained more in the first 72 hours of this year then it did in the first 72 days of last year, also was unseasonably hot last year.

But damn... Cold. Hasn't been above 50 in a while I think, but at least it doesn't drop below 40 either. Just stays cold and rather damp.

Fully aware that some ( or maybe many ) of you who read this live in colder places then I am, and I am being a bit whiny about it. Also expect however that you live in homes that are better insulated and have better furnaces than my crappy oil one (which will cost me about the same as two and a half months rent to refill the oil tank on once it runs out this year ( freaking gas / oil prices... )).

Anyways, home from being out for the day and whining about the weather while I wait for the space heater in my bathroom to get that room to a temperature that allows feet to survive contact with the tile floor.

Also, waiting on my email to download. Someone sent me a file that is close to 8meg and my poor little weenie dial-up connection is choking on it. Which also reminds me that I have an apparently big patch to download for CoX still since it has been about.. uh.. twelve days since I've logged in from my home machine and actually played. Oi...

Drivers

2006-01-21T22:53:00.000-08:00

I will never fucking install device drivers from Windows Update again.

It has been nagging me for a while about having a new driver for my ATI Radeon 9800 Pro. Turns out the driver it had been trying to get me to update to wasn't for Windows XP. Oh yes, it was for my video card, but not for my version of windows.

So I had a cramped arse little screen area with a whacked out color palette that reminded me more of my old CGA video games like Neuromancer then anything else. Had to waste time poking at it for a while before I finally rolled back to the previous driver I'd had installed.

Stupid on my part to even attempt. I tend to check manufacturers a few times a year for their driver updates so I specifically don't have to rely on third-parties like Dell or Microsoft for drivers ( my current computer is a Dell Dimension ). Gyah. What in the hell possessed me to do this.

Never. Ever. Again.

Music

2006-01-20T21:13:00.000-08:00

Listening to Bare Naked Ladies, "Live in Red Rock". Hadn't ever really listened to them before. Just heard a song or two of theirs on the radio and it never really clicked as to who they were or what songs were theirs. I really suck at remembering band or album or song names.

Anyways, fun to listen to new music around the house. Been so long since I really got new music that the only really new music I ever heard was occasionally MP3s snagged from friends or VH1 on those days I am up early enough they are playing music or listening lately to the Cape Radio.

Find music tends to organize my thoughts while listening to it. I know from past projects that it tends to affect my coding and writing style. Both in tempo and I suppose in the pacing or arrangement of whatever the 'stuff' I am working on is.

Not as much the idea of some music being more appropriate for the 'mood' of what I am working on, but more of how I'll write code differently while listening to Wagner then I would whlie listening to Razed in Black's re-mix album that was done at a freakishly high BPM for what was essentially a very dark / gothic album.

Okay, a little sleepy so that came out weirdly but I think the point got across.

Still unpacking my music collection. Lived here for, uh, three years now and not unpacked yet. Will need to repack soon since my landlord is making sounds about selling the place.

My music collection reminds me of 'High Fidelity'. I can very much track my music collection by date or who I was in a relationship with.

The last couple years I haven't gotten any new music, or been dating.
My stuff from my time in hell, er NC, was really random and was me trying to fit in and listen to music people I hung out with had. It is stuff like AddNtoX.
Before that was a very eclectic period with Loreena McKennit alongside strange bands like Snog, the one from the teacher I dated one summer she was in town on a seminar. and the others from strange friends I had who went out of the way to find weird stuff.
I have a couple pop cds like Bush, Eve 6 and Stabbing Westword from when I dated a girl who was doing research on cultural movements at the time.
Lots of instrumental and orchestral from when I dated a cellist.
NIN and KMFDM from a girl who pretty thoroughly shattered my heart, but who I went to a lot of very noisy very dark concerts with while dating.

Don't really own any music from before that, if I did it would be on cassette tape and I think all of those got used for weird 3d art projects ages ago.

I need to catalog all my cds again. I have everything from before I moved to NC as MP3s so I can at least find out how many cds the ex-gf nicked from me that I owned before that.

Bleagh

2006-01-20T12:23:00.000-08:00

I think I need to change my job title from 'Web Programmer' or 'Internet Engineer' or 'Software Developer' to... 'Professional Meeting Attender'. I swear I spend more time in meetings then actually doing any freaking work these days.

Anyways, checking in a moment at home between meeting, lunch, and another meeting. My lift had to swing by his house and do something there ( he said pick up meeting materials, but I think he thinks he left his stove on or someting since the meeting we are going to is a new client trying to convince us that we want them as a client which means a lot of sitting and listening and trying not to look bored which doesn't really much for materials... ) so I had a few moments to spend reading email and blogs.

Damn. Craziness in my email box today. Which is somewhat reflected by my weather underground sticker being pretty impressively wrong for where I've been all morning.

For my second half of meetings today, I am thinking of trying to compose limericks based on the other meeting attendees names to pass the time...

A Home Away from Hythia

Hello and Goodbye

*cough* *hack* *wheeze*

BOOM!

Hmm...

Unrelated Bits

The End of the World...

I Need Central Air

It's The End of the World As We Know It...

Plasticity

Cruel

Star Trek Science

Autos

Planetes

Bright Glaring Day-Star

Safari

A use for Wikipedia

I wonder what it is

Happy "Jesus Unlocked God-Mode" Day

Random bits of my brain

Going up the mountain

Home at last

Viva Pinata

Frick. Frick. Frick.

MMORPGs

Sales pitch

Digital Box

Title goes here

My grandmother fell and is

Need to get an iPod

Civ IV Expansion

Strange thoughts

I Love Babel Fish

Cover art

The rumors of my death...

I can apparently sleepwalk

Web oddities

PS2 gaming

The Sucky Bit of Shopping

One Word - Marc 04

Manga blathering

Land's End

Today's Playlist

Threshold

Redecorating

Weird late night cravings

Fox Island Marauders - First match

Random news bits

Lego Orrery

Todays Playlist...

FTP Client

Girl Genius

Last couple days

One Word - Febr 23rd

What the...

Soccer

Sleep and Soccer

Third Shard TF

Brain... Tired...

One Word - Febr 17th

Web-Comic Pimpage

One Word - Febr 16th

The Future & Reality TV

Fueled by Stress

Frick Damn Gyah

One Word - Febr 15th

Wondermark / Red Meat

One Word - Febr 14th

Yearly Stupid Holiday Rant

diesel powered valentines

Tangerine Sunset

Long week

Legend of the Five Rings

Which is better...

Laptop or Gameboy DS

Human-Animal Hybrid

Long road home

Fun part of my job

Un-Rational

Opera

cough hack wheeze