Plot Line
I started to write a blog about work, but I decided against it. Blogging about work has gotten other people fired, so I’m going to avoid that pitfall. That’s ok. My work really isn’t all that interesting anyway unless you’re a hardcore Linux admin, Perl programmer, PHP engineer, or web developer. If you’re a computer geek, then you might find it interesting.
Anyways….
I’m running a D&D game on Thursday nights. My original premise for the campaign was pretty straightforward. As the game has developed over the past couple of weeks, I’ve picked up some ideas and hints from the players that I’ve talked to outside the game, and I’ve decided to change the game somewhat. I know that my players read my blog, so I’m going to avoid giving out any details here.
Let’s just say that the plot will thicken, twist, warp, and get very fun. Jhianna may not like it because the bad guys will get darker and more vile as the game goes on. I’ll have to do my best to keep it as light as possible, though. She doesn’t like it when games get really dark.
If you’re interested in reading more about what is going on in the game, you can always read the adventure log of past games.
Tim Hildebrandt
A person that was greatly influential in my life passed away recently. There was an article in the September 2006 issue of Dragon Magazine about the passing of Tim Hildebrandt. I never met him, and I’m sure he never knew of my existence, but he changed my life forever. He was an artist that did fantasy works. I never knew his name, but in his obituary, the article mentioned that he had done (among other things) the cover of the book Sword of Shannara.
I remember seeing the cover of the book at a garage sale that I was at with my grandmother, and I instantly knew that I wanted the book. The cover depicted three men standing in a stone chamber around a glowing sword that was embedded in a block of stone. I was probably 8 or 9 years old at the time, and I had no idea what science fiction, fantasy, or anything of that nature was. I just knew that I was drawn to the book, and that I had to have it.
I managed to talk my grandmother out of a quarter (or maybe two), so that I could get the book. We spent the rest of the day driving from garage sale to garage sale, and I spent most of the time in the tan Buick station wagon reading the book, and falling in love with Terry Brook’s work.
As soon as I finished the book, I hit the local library in an attempt to find more books like it. At the time, the fantasy section of the library was woeful to the point of non-existence. I was greatly dissapointed, but there was a used bookstore called Miss B’s Books that had tons and tons of fantasy and science fiction novels. I begged a few dollars from my grandmother, so that I can could get more books. She was gracious enough to give me the coinage that I needed to indulge in my new-found love.
When I first saw the Dungeons and Dragons red basic box set in a magazine ad, I knew that I had to have it. I didn’t know what it was, or even that it was a game, but the cover made me desire it. It looked so much like the genre of fantasy books that I had fallen in love with. In order to get the box set, I had to collect 10 “points” from Captain Olympic Greeting Cards. Each set of cards that I sold earned me one point. I quickly sold enough cards to collect my 10 points, and I sent in my order, and eagerly awaited my prize.
It was a long two weeks, but I managed to wait it out until the box arrived for me. I opened it to find these strange dice, a crayon (for coloring the numbers on the dice), and two books. One was for players, and the other was for dungeon masters. I didn’t know what either one was, but I figured out that it was a game. I read the players’ book first, and loved every moment of it. I then went on to read the dungeon masters’ book, and I knew that I wanted to play this game.
I was in the Cub Scouts at the time, and I managed to get a few of my friends from the Cub Scouts involved in the game. Some stayed for just a single session, but I was lucky enough to snag a few people that had a passion for fantasy like I did. We’d play during Cub Scout meetings, during lunch at school, on camping trips, and every other chance that we could get. I was ten years old at the time, and I’ve been playing (almost) non-stop ever since that summer. That was 23 years ago, and I’ve made tons of friends, have thousands of wonderful memories and stories, and I’m very glad that one of my hobbies has brought such great joy to myself.
Without Mr. Hildebrandt’s artwork, I would have never found Sword of Shannara. Without Sword of Shannara, I would have probably never found the cover of the Dungeons and Dragons box set interesting. Without Dungeons and Dragons, I would not have the close-knit group of friends that I have now. It’s all one long chain of events that start with Tim Hildebrandt’s artwork back in my childhood.
Tim Hildebrandt, you didn’t know me, but I still thank you from the depths of my soul for your work. Without you, I may not have turned into the person that I am today. Your work has brought immense joy to my life, and I’m glad you were in this world for the short period of time that you were. God bless.
Pulse
Warning: This is a movie review, and might spoil the movie for you. If you have not seen it, and plan on seeing it, then you might want to not read any further.
I went to see Pulse Sunday night. I mainly went to see the creepy parts. I really enjoy being creeped out, and the trailers made it look pretty good in that area. Good thing the movie was creepy in the good parts because the bad parts were really slow and drawn out.
The opening scene was pretty good, but it crawled to a slow after that. It took another 20 minutes before anything important, exciting, or interesting happened. I almost got up and walked out, but I decided to get my $7.25 worth out of the movie. I’m kind of glad that I stayed. Once things got moving, they stayed moving. The flick was ony 90 minutes long, but it felt more like 120.
The premise of the movie is very interesting and strikes home with me. A set of engineers managed to tap into the realm of the dead and gave them a gateway to the land of the living through electronic devices. Anything on the Internet, cell phone networks, Blackberry network, or some other connection becomes a gateway to between the dead and the living. I happened to have two cell phones with me while at the movie, and I knew that after the movie I as going to get online and type up this review. I know how hard it would be for me to give up everything that I have in my life (since most of it is technology-based) in order to survive.
For the entire movie, I was waiting for the “magic bullet” to appear for the protagonists, but it never does. You think they have a way to stop the dead spirits, but that fails miserably after a hopeful few moments. It turns out that the living are forced to become Ahmish-like and shun all networked devices in order to survive. The dead take over the cities, networks, cell phones, and PDAs of the world. It’s a really bleak and depressing ending to an otherwise mediocre movie.
I’m just glad that it scared me in various places. That’s what I paid my money for, and that’s what I got. I’m glad that I saw the movie, even though this review may sound otherwise. If you’re a horror movie fan, then go see it. If you’re not into the creepy scenes, twisted people, and startling events, then stay home.
Live Music
Spice invited a few people to join her Saturday night to see some live music from some local bands. Not many people seemed interested because only Jhianna and I went with her. That’s ok. I prefer the smaller crowds. I’m a protector type person, and in large crowds, I have a hard time keeping track of everyone. Anyways… We went to see some live music at the Bluebird Theater.
We went to Pete’s Diner on the way to the theater to get some chow before the big show. The food was ok (King’s Chef is better.) After eating, we managed to get a parking spot about three blocks from the Bluebird, and we walked to the venue. We managed to get there a few minutes before the doors were opened. We hung out, and watched the really freaky people in black leather and too many piercings. It made me feel a little old, and a lot conservative. It brought me back to the days when I had long hair, a mohawk, and tons of earrings. The only thing I have left from those days are the earrings.
We got our tickets as the doors opened. As we were walking to the door, the bouncer told us to take anything out of our pockets that he might think is a weapon. Damn. I always carry my Buck knife and Leatherman with me. I hardly remember that they are there until something like this happens. I decided to risk it. The worst that would happen would be that I would have to walk back to the car, divest myself of my “weapons”, and walk back to the Bluebird. I took my cell phone, keys, and other stuff out of my pocket. He patted me down, and did a horrible job of it. He didn’t pat my waist where weapons are usually kept. That’s ok. I really didn’t want to have to walk back to the car.
Once we were in, we were presented with a balcony (which is where we went), several tiers of flooring, and a mosh pit in front of the stage. Not many people were there, but it was only 8 o’clock, and the show didn’t start until 9. As we got closer to the time of the show, more people started to appear. I did a quick scan of the theater, and decided that they could pack 300+ people in the place. Turns out they only got maybe 120 in the door by the time the show started.
The first act, which is the one that we really came to see, was Swingarm. They only played 6 or 7 songs, but they rocked the house with every song that they played. I don’t expect much from small-time local bands, but I was pleasantly surprised at the quality of their music. The beat was good, the lyrics merged with the music quite well, and the musicians really knew their stuff. The bass lines and guitar licks kept the flow of the music going quite well. I was impressed.
While Swingarm was tearing down, and Blackout 7 was setting up, there was an acrobatic burlesque show going on. Two women in lingerie hung from the ceiling and did some pretty impressive stuff. One was on a giant ring that she would swing from, hang by her knees, and cavort on like it wasn’t that dangerous. The other woman hung from the ceiling by these two long strips of cloth. It was like something right out of Circe d’Soleil. It was quite impressive. It also didn’t hurt that both of them were really hot women.
The second band of the night, Blackout 7, sucked. They sucked harder than any band that I’ve heard before. They played 6 or 7 songs, and they all sounded exactly the same. They had the same rythm, riffs, licks, and notes. The singer did his best to distort his voice while screaming into the microphone. I guess he thought that volume over quality was the way to go. He was wrong. If you plan on going to a venue where Blackout 7 is playing, make sure to get good and hammered before they get on stage. It’s probably the only way to really enjoy their music.
It was a great relief to finally get Blackout 7 off of the stage. While they were tearing down, and prepping for the main act, the burlesque women were back in action. Even though I had seen their routine not more than 45 minutes ago, it was still just as impressive. I couldn’t believe the tricks that they were doing. I can’t imagine the lumps, bruises, and broken bones they must have gotten while practicing their art.
The main act finally got on stage. King Rat got on stage, warmed up a bit, and then jumped into their act. I was highly impressed. They had the fun, upbeat rythms of The Ramones, with the vocals of Green Day, some guitar riffs that reminded me of The Offspring (from their early days), and a punk edge to it all. The lyrics were understandable (as opposed to shoved down your throat), and I like that in a band. The guitarist was awesome (made me wish I could play half as well as he did.) I had a hard time hearing the bass riffs, and I’m not sure why. I really like the sound of a bass guitar, so I was a litle disappointed that it was missing. The band was really animated, and they put on a great stage show. If you ever have the chance of seeing King Rat in concert, go check them out. They’ve been together for a long time (first CD is from 1997,) and it’s quite obvious in the polished nature of the show that they put on.
While there, Swingarm was giving away demo CD’s, so I picked one up. When they announced the free CDs, they said, “Make sure and pick up a free CD and t-shirt!”. I thought both the CD and the shirt were free. After getting my CD, I asked for an XL t-shirt. The cutie behind the counter dove into a large box, but came up with a large. She asked me if a large would be ok. Large t-shirts are a little tight on me, but I still fit into them nicely. I accepted the t-shirt, and she said, “7 bucks!” I was kind of surprised since thought the shirts were free too. I had made her work so hard on finding the shirt, that I couldn’t walk away. I pulled out a 5 and a handful of 1′s. The 1′s were sticking together, but I managed to get them separated. While I was fumbling for the cash, she mentioned that she was working for free. She wasn’t getting paid for the work she was doing. I decided to hand her the whole wad of cash, and told her to keep the extra as a tip. I saw her a little later, and she asked me who sold me that “good lookin’ shirt.” I decided to flirt a little, and said, “I don’t know her name, but, man, she was hot!” She laughed at my joke, smiled at me, and then got lost in the crowd. It was good to make someone laugh and smile.
After the show was over, I noticed that King Rat was selling some CDs. I decided to check them out. They were selling 4 CDs, and I asked about the price. The guy tapped each CD, and said, “10, 5, 5, and 2.” I decided that I like them enough to shell out $22 for four CDs. I handed over the cash, picked up the CDs, and started to step away. I noticed they had a fan club kind of sign-up sheet. I decided to throw my name and email on the sheet. While doing that, the guy complained about the quality of their web site. Jhianna happened to be standing there, and she stepped up, threw her arm around me, and said, “Then this is the guy you want!” The King Rat sales guy looked interested, and I told him, “Yeah. I do web development for a living. Look me up (my name was on their fan club list), and we can work something out.” He looked at my name on the list, threw an asterix next to it, and said that he would be in touch. It would be very cool to do some web work for something as fun as a band. I just hope they can afford my prices, so that I can earn some money from it. Doing something for the “cool factor” doesn’t quite put bread on the table.
Once we were done at the Bluebird, we hit the road. I asked a few times if there was any other place that we’d like to go since it was only about 12:30. No one had any ideas, so we headed home. I was the driver for the night, so I made sure that Spice got home, then we headed to Jhianna’s house. I dropped her off, and then headed home myself.
It was a good night of (mostly) great music, and I had fun hanging out with my friends. I hadn’t done the local band scene since lived in San Antonio back in ’96 and ’97. I had forgotten how much fun it could be. I’ll have to check out more live bands in the area to see what else I can find.
Shredding Information
I have three desktops that I’m trying to get down to 1. I’ve made a catalog of all of the hard drives in the systems (30GB x 3, 20GB, 15GB, and 7GB). I’ve pulled all of the important data off of the drives, and I’m in the middle of “shredding” them. I’ve shredded once drive so far with great success. I need to pull the other 4 drives out of the other two machines, and shred them as well. I may do that over the weekend.
The process of shredding a drive is pretty simple. There is a GNU tool called “shred”. You hook up the drive to a box, repartition it so that there is one large partition on the drive, and you issue the command ‘shred -v /dev/hdb1′. The program goes through 25 passes of writing stuff to the drive. It alternates between letters, numbers, and randomly chosen characters. It takes about 6-8 hours to do a 10GB drive, so it’s a lengthy process. However, it’s worth it to keep vital information (like our old Quickbook data) out of the wrong hands.
I’m pretty sure that shred can be overcome with some really expensive and advanced tools, but they are not going to be available to the average person. If the government or military really wants my information, I’m sure they have it in a file somewhere by now. I’m not worried about them too much.
I’ve also got a new Seagate 80GB drive on the way to me. I have a dead 80 gigger that I RMA’d yesterday, so I should be able to put an 80, and a 30 into the file server and have plenty of space to share out. It’s going to be a nice file server once I’m done with it. I also want to get a DVD burner for the file server, so that I can do backups and such from it.
Interface Abundance
Many years ago I had my roommates computer, my computer, and a friend’s computer in front of me. I was on a BBS on my roommates computer, on my BBS on my computer, on a third BBS on my computer, and reinstalling DOS (pre-Windows days, mind you) on my friend’s computer. This was also pre-mouse days, so it was all just keyboards. While chatting with two different people online, reconfiguring my BBS, and reinstalling DOS, I was beginning to feel overload. I got a little sloppy, and decided to reboot my BBS to update the config changes that I had made. I was on the wrong keyboard, and accidentally rebooted the BBS that I was logged into where I was a SysOp. That made the owner unhappy, but once I explained to him what was going on, he understood. He actually thought it was a little funny. It was a few hours of typing on three keyboards, and multiple interfaces. It was a good time.
I’m back in the same boat. I have my old Linux server from my old house that I’m decommissioning. I’m copying files from it to my laptop as a temporary measure until I can get a new file server built. I’m also working on Perl on my work laptop, and I have my laptop powered up where I’m doing research for the Perl script that I’m trying to write. There are four keyboards, two touch-pads, and two mice on my desk right now. I’m doing a pretty good job of keeping them separate. No mix-ups just yet. Things are good.
As soon as I finish copying files from my old Linux file server, I’ll power it down, unplug everything, and move it aside to get it out of the way. Then I’m going to move on to my wife’s old Windows 98 box. She says that she has everything off of it, but I want to make sure that I don’t have anything of mine on the computer before it gets gutted, rebuilt, and sold. Once I’m done with her system, I’ll move to my old desktop, and save everything that I have on it.
My old desktop is destined to become the new file server in the house, but I want to find the two largest hard drives that I have in the house, and use them to build the file server. Should be fun and interesting.
Eyeball Deep
I’m eyeball deep in writing some code right now, I’m going to have to make this a quick and dirty entry. Sorry….
I’m writing a script to take thousands of emails (one per file) and push them through a mail server, capture some data along the way, and save that data into a database. It’s all for performance testing, and capturing some other data (which is a company secret, so I won’t post it here.) I’m to do this with an old product, and a new product to see how the new product rates next to the old product when put under the same loads.
I know. It doesn’t sound glorious or exciting, but I love doing work like this. Automating tasks with Perl is one of the best things out there. It’s reminding me of when I wrote some automation tools for a past employer. I don’t have time to talk about that right now, so I’ll post about it later.
New Technical Toys
I’ve always loved learning new things about computers. About 90% of what I know about computers is self-taught because of my passion for learning new things. Over the years I’ve taught myself BASIC, Pascal, HTML, JavaScript, Perl, SQL, C, C++, PHP, Java, shell scripting, Windows, Linux, networking, MySQL, PostgresSQL, Apache, qmail, Sendmail, djbdns, BIND, and a few other things that I’m probably not remembering to list.
A month or so ago, I read a few articles about Python. It looked interesting enough to dedicate some time to it. Python is an object-oriented, cross-platform scripting language that has really grown in recent years. I thought about maybe writing a BBS (bulliten board system) that people could run on their home machines, and allow people to log in over the Internet. BBSs historically have used modems to allow their users to connect, talk, download files, play games, and do other things online. This, of course, was before the Internet exploded in the mid 90′s. Once people discovered the unfettered access of the Internet, BBSs tended to fall to the wayside. I wondered if I could write a project that would bring BBSs back to the forefront. I dove into Python, and I used a handful of websites as tutorials, references, and guides. There were some good ones, and some bad ones, but most were average. Many of them attempted to teach me how to program, but I didn’t need that. I already know how to program. I just needed syntax, built-in functions, functionality, and other goodies like that. After playing with Python for a week or so, I decided that I really didn’t like it. It’s array functionality is odd, and I found that it really didn’t run any faster, better, or smoother than Perl or PHP. I quickly dropped the language, and decided that I would probably not go back to it. It’s just another tool — and a good tool — but it didn’t give me any capabilities beyond the languages that I already know.
Last night I read last month’s Linux Journal, and it was an issue dedicated to Ruby. Ruby has been around since 1995, but it didn’t gain in popularity until last year. The articles were in-depth, well written, and explained the basic concepts of the language. It’s described as a cross between Perl and Smalltalk. Basically, it’s another object-oriented scripting language with some neat features. One of the articles was an interview in which the person claimed to have written a full-blown e-commerce suite in just 2000 lines of code.I’ve done the same in PHP, but my line count came out to a little under 1800. Their accomplishment was impressive, but it didn’t persuade me to think that Ruby was any better than PHP when it came to doing web development. I’ll probably not even spend any time learning Ruby. Don’t get me wrong. I think it’s a nice language, but it doesn’t add anything to my skillset by knowing beyond being able to claim that I know it on my resume.
There is yet another new piece of technology that has recently come to the attention of geeks like myself: Ajax. Ajax stands for Asynchronous JavaScript And XML. It’s basically a way for JavaScript to snag parts of a web site and, in real time, update the page that you’re currently looking at without requiring a page reload or refresh. It’s very nice. I’ve worked with DHTML in the past where JavaScript is used to update the page that you’re looking at without requiring a server hit. This usually results in very quick page refreshes, and impressive movement on the page. I’ve done some pretty heavy DHTML in the past, but it’s always a pain because of the different implementations of JavaScript in the various browsers out there. Things have gotten better over the years (but I suspect that the release of IE 7 will totally fuck things up again) so the coding of DHTML has gotten easier.
This month’s Linux Journal had a short article on Ajax, and I really enjoyed it. It only covered the very basics of Ajax, but it was enough of a taste to make me want more. I’m going to do some searches for books on Ajax, and I’ll probably pick up a couple of them. It’s something that I can use here at work, and it looks really fun to do. Most webmasters that I know hate JavaScript, but I’ve always enjoyed using it. I think learning Ajax would be a great thing. If it’s good enough to play with (Hell, it’s good enough for Google Maps) then I may just redesign my personal web site using Ajax just to say that I did it.
Laughter From The Soul
I was in search for some Munchkin cards yesterday. I couldn’t find what I was looking for at the first couple of places that I went to, so I headed to the mall to the gaming store that is there. I managed to find what I was looking for (and a few books in a series that I have), so I was happy as I left the store.
While heading back out to the car, I passed two girls sitting on a bench laughing uproarously. They both had the signs of Downs Syndrome. They had the round, flat faces with larger-than-normal eyes, but they didn’t seem to care. They were pointing at each other and laughing. Between gasps of laughter one asked, “What are you laughing at?”
The other managed to stop laughing long enough to gasp out, “I’m laughing at you because you’re laughing so hard!”
The first laughed for a few more moments, poked her friend in the shoulder, and yelled, “That’s why I’m laughing at you!”
They seemed to be feeding off of each other in their joy. It cheered me up to know that there are people in the world that can laugh at nothing and have it come from the depths of their soul.
It’s been a long time since I’ve laughed like that, and I miss doing it. Don’t get me wrong. I enjoy my life, and I find great amounts of happiness in my friends, wife, pets, and other things in my life. There are a few moments here and there that I laugh at a good joke, a funny event, or a great story that is told. However, the last time I remember laughing for no reason other than to laugh was when I was still living with my grandparents. J.J., Vince, and Heather were at my place late one night, and we were sitting around enjoying being around each other. I don’t know why, but we started laughing our heads off. Part way through our laughter, Vince sputtered, “Ok. Ok. Let’s try not to laugh for the next minu…. BUhahahaaha!” Of course, we didn’t make it a minute. Hell, we didn’t even make it a second. We all fell on the floor laughing until it hurt.
We managed to wake up my grandfather, who came upstairs to investigate. He must have thought that we were stoned out of our gourd (even though we were totally sober.) J.J., Vince, and Heather stayed the night that night, and we were woken up early the next morning to the smell of pancakes. My grandfather was cooking us all breakfast. There were eggs, pancakes, toast, sausage, and bacon. A good country breakfast. My grandfather invited everyone downstairs for breakfast with the comment, “You must have worked up a good hunger last night. Come eat.” I don’t know if he thought we were having an orgy in my room, or getting stoned and had the munchies, or what. Either way, the breakfast was great, and we had a good time with my grandparents around the table.
Someday, hopefully soon, I’ll find something that makes me laugh just for the sake of laughing. I miss that feeling.
Perl to the Rescue!
My last post lamented about all of the world that I needed to do for data entry for the cities in my world. Turns out it was much quicker than I had anticipated, and after only about 3 hours of work, I was ready to run my script. The script took all of 5 minutes to run to generate the crunch about 460 cities. I was quite impressed. I figured it would take much longer than that to get it all done.
Once the 460 cities were regenerated, I went through a few of them and re-inserted data that I had already used the game world (a few inns, a tavern, etc.) It didn’t take long at all to get it done.
Once I was done with that, I made a copy of my city generator and hacked it to generate Korean names, so that I could generate cities for the Empire of the Sun. That didn’t take long to do since I already had the code for generating Korean names. I just had to copy, paste, and modify a slight bit. After about 20 minutes of coding, I was ready to finish off the rest of the cities on Tarkuris.
After about an hour of data entry, I had my cities all done! Yay! I’ve made a backup of the data in case something horrible happens. I really don’t want to have to go through all of this again.
Now on to the hard part… The fluff. I can do fluff, but there is so much of it to do, that it will probably take me years to get it all done. I’m going to start with the nations, and once the nations are sufficiently fluffy, I’ll start in on the cities. Of course, this would go much faster if I had some help. Maybe I’ll try to recruit some friends to help me out with things.
