Category: Uncategorized

Tonight I did not play city of heroes. Instead I played some mindless puzzle games from shockwave.com. I do not really recommend shockwave. Yesterday I signed up for their GameBlast subscription thinking that it would allow me to play all their download games while that subscription was valid. Their website led me to this conclusion, but unfortunately, not all their games are covered by a gameblast subscription. When I found this out I was pretty upset. Especially since the game I had wanted to play was one of the ones not covered under GameBlast’s subscription fees.

Shockwave has some kind of reseller contract with popcap games. Now, as we all know, Popcap makes some of the finest and bestest action puzzle games known to mankind. When I started really comparing the games available under the GameBlast subscription to the ones that weren’t, I realized that none of the popcap games I know and love are covered or available that way. I’m really pissed at gameblast for not being up front about what games are available via subscription, and what games you have to pay for individually. I read the fine print, and even if I cancel my subscription today, I still have to pay for a whole month of their service at minimum, so tonight I decided to get my money’s worth. They have a few pretty fun games. Most of them are crap though. One popcap game beats the lot of them hands down.

Nate wants to play Lemonaid Tycoon before I cancel it, but then it’s totally getting turned off. Shockwave sucks. Down with shockwave.

So yeah, I was going to write in some existential stuff here about how you are what you do. That phrase is never more appropriate than when you’re doing nothing. Even the productive part of my evening, when I went to Best Buy was a big waste of time, because I got home and realized I’d bought the wrong kind of DVD media. I’ll be going back sometime tomorrow to return it.

I’m a giant waste of flesh. …well, maybe not really, Zelda must find me moderately useful as he’s laying on my feet right now.

I should probably make some effort to sleep. I have a meeting tomorrow morning. Plus I told my brother to show up before then so we could burn coppies of his promo DVD. Now I’m going to only have one or two DVDs for him to use until I get back from going to best buy after the meeting.

So I realize that it’s been quite a while. Lots of things have happened and continue to happen. Laura and I are no longer engaged. (That’s a quite recent development.) I’m still taking tai-chi classes. Still playing City of Heroes. Ren fest has started and is almost over. (I’m not going as much this year as I have in the past. It’s mostly just been one day a weekend so far.) My birthday was at the beginning of this month and passed with a bout of the usual birthday manic depressive rollercoaster. I have had a recent urge to write fiction again. I’ve finished reading a few good novels. (The Golden Age and its two sequels by John C. Wright, and Altered Carbon by Richard Morgan, among others.) I’m currently reading the fourth in the Thursday Next series by Jasper Fforde, which is absolutely fantastic, and has had me near stitches at times.

I played unicycle hockey last night for the first time in ages. I’m composing this blog entry on my laptop, and will be leaving soon to get out to fest in time to watch my friend Fisch in the fencing tournament they have every year at the fencing booth.

Last night after unicycling I went to Steve’s place for his birthday party. Tonight is another birthday party at Kris’s place. I may stop there on my way out to fest. I am also missing Merlin and Shalene’s housewarming party as I write this. Merlin, if you read this, I’m sorry I missed it.

I doubt I’ll get another chance to write this weekend as I’ve got far too much to do tomorrow.

I’m having a mid-blog crisis, I think. Changing priorities and stuff. I’ll be back. I think. Meanwhile, I’ve been fairly good at updating the mindblurbs for those few of you who enjoy them. I still want to switch blogging software. I still try desperately to enjoy life more than I abhor it.

I think of this blog just sitting here like a pool of stagnant water, evaporating. Perhaps my heart hasn’t been in it because I have no comments. I miss the opportunities for discussion. Comments were what I loved and hated most about the blogging experience. (Not that I am done with, or sepparated from the blogging experience, not by a longshot.)

I should get working on whatever it is I’m going to do to “fix” the situation. This morning I got up at 7AM and installed wordpress. It’s taken me ages to get around to what ended up being a 5 minute process. Of course, now I have all kinds of testing to do. I want to make it work without mysql too, but I think that may take a ton of work. I’m not sure yet.

I have all these plans and they’ve all been washed away by time sucked up in the vortex or black-hole like void that is repetitive video-game syndrome. (RVGS.) CoH style. That and I’ve been feeling particularly emotionally dispondant. Not that anyone would notice what with my eyes glued to the monitor every non-moving waking moment. But I’ve been funk’d up for a week or so now. There are some things that I’ve been having trouble settling into the cracks and fissures of my emotional landscape. Maybe I’ll rant more about things once they have some kind of resultion.

In one day, in one fell swoop, I both installed linux on my desktop machine at work, and fixed all the weird errors I was getting on my machine at home.

The linux install was pretty much an all-day affair. We started around noon, using partition magic to split everything up (so I didn’t loose the XP install, and I’m even set up to boot from it, if I so desire. I’ll be doing that later today to move my mp3s to the linux readable/writeable fat32 partition we created just for that purpose. I guess linux can only read Windows’ standard ntfs format, and even reading is a little spotty.) After that it was clear sailing, (with a few tidal waves along the way). My co-worker Matt was really the brains behind the whole opperation, although Ryan has been around the linux block himself, and was the one who convinced Matt we should go with Debian instead of Fedora. One might say Matt was the wind beneath my penguin wings.

By the end of the day (ie, seven and a half hours later) we even wrote a CD with memtest86 on it for me to use at home. I loaded that up at home and was immediately getting errors. Thousands of them. So later in the evening, after dinner, and a scintilating hour or two at a bar with Kristin (who is in from NY for a few days) I started swapping out memory sticks, and found the faulty one! Amazingly, no more checksum errors. Windows didn’t spontaniously reboot, not even once! I ran all my anti-spyware/virus software, disabled some startup processes (like iTunes, who wants to run some background thing, but works just fine without it) and now the machine appears to startup much faster than before.

So I subscribed to netflix. I was sick of waiting for my classic science fiction movies to make it to the top of Nate’s queue. Plus, I just bought a DVD burner.

I’ve been up way too late these last couple of weeks on a regular basis playing City of Heroes. I’ve become one of those totally despicable people whose lives revolve around a massively multiplayer game. I think some subconscious part of me wants to burn out so I can be done with it. But I’ve got to wait till after just about everybody I know becomes addicted first, then I can play with them for awhile, have the coolest and most creative characters, then go down in a blaze of glory that would make Bon Jovi jealous if only he knew what a level 10 natural defender with Atomic skillsets does. (Of course I’ll be way above level 10 by that time.)

My character (for those of you who haven’t slumped off already or are still reading out of a morbid pity) is a four-foot bald guy in a puffy pink jumpsuit with gray spots named the Atomic Pig. He has a curly pink tail, and kicks ass. He’s also got teleportation powers, so if you befriend him, you can ride his porkchop express. (I know, I know, I thought of the “pigs flying” thing after I’d already chosen my level 6 powerset so I guess that joke will never… um, fly.)

In non-geeked-out-superhero news, I helped this guy Mark and his significant other move into their new apartment about 10 blocks from me, and boy are my arms tired! (Seriously, I haven’t been this sore from manual labor in a long time, and this was really only a couple of hours of work. I’m such a wuss.)

more rhyme and grime later… I’m off to work.

Seems like, when I don’t try and think of things to say, I have more to say without thinking.

progress made on a custom blogging application thus far: zero.

I have, however, had a friend of a friend tell me he’s interested in working with me on the project. More as that progresses.

I really can’t believe that this is even being talked about. The whole idea is so crazy it makes me wonder if it wasn’t some democratic scheme to take more votes from Bush. I guess time will tell. I really liked the Lincoln quote at the bottom of the article:

“The election is a necessity,” Lincoln said. “We cannot have a free government without elections; and if the rebellion could force us to forgo, or postpone, a national election, it might fairly claim to have already conquered us.”

DrBombay pointed out today that we’ve never lived in a true democracy, “it’s supposed to be a representative republic” he says. I didn’t take so well to history or political science, (one of my least favorite contradictions in terms), so I really wouldn’t know. I’ve always been pissed that it isn’t just one-person one vote, I don’t care where they live or how disproportionate the representation gets.

Laura is out of town, and has been posting pictures to her moblog. Some of them are really good, so I recommend you check them out.

Yesterday I was over at Mike Fish’s place playing City of Heroes for like 8 or 10 hours. I can’t decide whether it’s worth the $50 and then $15/month after that. The fact that I’m even debating it is pretty indicative of how fun the game has been so far.

Tonight I’m heading off shortly for Tai-Chi (which I haven’t been to in over a week, and then briefly to juggling after. I can’t decide if I should call up Mike after that and see if he’s up for some more slaying of villians. Ooh… or maybe he’d want to play some Go… Now there’s a thought… what if, in one of these Massively Multiplayer games, you could play other games, like Chess and Go, and maybe it would even give you some kind of skill that you couldn’t get otherwise, or enhance other skills that you already posess… hmm. There’s got to be something in that idea. I saw another ad for Puzzle Pirates today. I should give it another try and see if it’s gotten any better. I do so love puzzle games.

I know I keep saying this, but soon, very soon, I’ll be moving away from MT. I’m thinking now, (yes, I know complete 180) that I’ll probably end up running some kind of custom app. I want it to be somewhat like blosxom, but I don’t like a lot of things about blosxom. Basically, they (the developers?) are sacrificing usability for the sake of customizability. I personally don’t feel that’s a necessary sacrifice.

The irony is, of course, that I will spend far more time setting up (customizing) my own personal application than I would setting up pyblosxom (or whatever blosxom flavor I chose to taste). But if I’m going to invest that large a chunk of time, I’d rather have an intimate knowledge of the inner workings.

The other reason for my turnabout is that I’ve had a small epiphany about comment spam. Basically, that it’s never going to go away, and that using any “out of the box” web application (CMS) is just asking for people to spam you. Maybe not in the short term, but definitely in the long term. User submitted data is inherently volatile.

As a result of this, one idea that I had is that I might still have comments on this site, but that they would be “unmarried” from entries. So anyone could still comment anonymously, but their comments would only show up from the front page, not in the archives, and only for a limited time. I haven’t decided yet whether there would be “archives” for this new comment system.

Another (probably better) option would be to just limit the ability to comment to the entries that show up on the homepage. (like the last 7 to 10 or so.) I have found that the moment a post slides off the homepage, the chances of it being spam exponentially increase.

Whatever the case, I want to switch from MT. OK, I really want Ben and the gang to suddenly make MT opensource, but that’s probably not very likely.

You know, there really aren’t that many differences between the scenario I envisioned just now in that last paragraph and reality. I mean, SixApart could still charge for installations and support. Hell, I’ll bet they have requests left and right for development contracts. But no, they want to play the licensing game. The arguments for free software are many, and I won’t repeat them here, but I’m a firm believer that they’ve gone the wrong way. Copyright is in for some major changes in the next 10 to 20 years. In the mean time, SixApart want to just sit back and let the money roll in. But I’m not buying it. Literally.

well, things are not really progressing very fast with pyblosxom. It’s like instead of installing movable type once I’m installing it over and over again. I’m going to disable comments for this post because it’s confusing having the form there when it doesn’t do anything, I think.

This week has been busy for me. Monday night I biked to juggling and back, Tuesday I don’t know what the hell I did, and Wednesday I went to see the newly released original Godzilla at the Oak Street Cinema. Godzilla was really good, there were parts that were still funny, but you really didn’t want to laugh, because the movie was seemingly much more serious in tone than the americanized release.

Thursday was the last day for this documentary on Scrabble that I found out about at the Oak Street called Word Wars. My mom loves scrabble, so I told her we had to go, and it didn’t disappoint either of us. The world of competitive scrabble is just as weird and inbred as any other very obsessive-compulsive hobby… juggling, chess, sci-fi fandom, all share simmilar traits when it comes to the their upper eschelons, I think.

After Word Wars, I had this strange compulsion to see Trekies. It’s been on my list (albiet not very high) for quite some time now. We also (not surprisingly) wanted to play some scrabble, so we stopped by the video store, picked up Treckies, and got Laura to join us for some 3-player scrabble. It is definitely harder to play when there is a TV on in the room though, and I always feel bad for some reason if I don’t give a game my full attention.

Tonight I had about fifty things I was suppose to do, or could have done, and instead, Laura and I sat around at home waiting for her sisters to get into town. This seems noble, but we knew they were going to arrive after midnight, so we could have made it no problem to either or both of the birthday parties that were scheduled for tonight. Or maybe done the parade that started at six-thirty. But we both needed time to unwind after work, and it was easier just not to leave the house.

I did watch Shaolin Temple, (Jet Lee’s first movie), and it was a pretty decent action-packed kung-fu movie. Lots of one-hit deaths though, and then when it came down to real battles (at the end of the movie) there were times where it felt like a some of the blows should have been killers, but weren’t. It was silly, but fun, anyway.

Laura’s sisters arrived around 1 am, (having driven from Kansas) and we showed them the house, and played a game of Phase 10. Now I need to sleep… this weekend promises to be as packed as my week has been.

Anyway, that’s the week in summary… a small slice of it anyway.