Best Graphics In The World
I’m going to get on my mud soapbox again just a short period of time. I hope you don’t mind. Today’s User Friendly comic really struck a cord with me, and reminded me of better times… The times when people actually had to read, pay attention, and concentrate on what they were doing while playing a game in order to merely survive. To excel in the games, you had to think about what you were reading, and how it might affect you. There were even tiny hints as to what things (that were usually not readily visible) needed to be pulled, pushed, turned, twisted, poked, or looked at. It was an amazing time of gaming.
Sure, World of Warcraft has pretty good graphics, but they just can’t compare to something like this:
Something Wicked The cave reeks of old, decaying bodies. The smell of fresh blood also mixes, and any who enter are almost immediately overcome with a strong desire to vomit. The strange writings are all over the walls and ceiling and even parts of the floor, but there have been so many messages written over the tops of others, nothing is discernable any longer. The only way out is south, to somewhat fresher air. [ Exits: Unknown! ] Some strange deformity of a man cackles, and draws on the wall.
$ look man
Drool dribbles out of his mouth, and there is definitely an insanity in his eyes - deep and forever insane. He looks around, but doesn't see anything but the dreams constantly in his head. He grabs his knife, cuts his finger again, and as the blood oozes out, writes his messages. This poor remnant of a man has no worthwhile reason to live.
This is just one example of a wonderful creation done by Syra D’Hornan on my mud. I could probably find and post even more wonderful creations, but I don’t have the time to track more down. There is a great and simple elegance in the written word, and I fear that we are rapidly losing the appreciation of such a thing.
I’m no different. If I need to research something, I hit the Internet. In the past, I would go to the library and spend hours there. At one point, I wanted to know more about feudal Japanese society, the Huns, Celtic warriors, and all sorts of ancient cultures for a world that I was creating for D&D. I spent every day at the library (except Sunday because it was closed) for close to two weeks doing research. It was one of the most enlightening times of my life.
Sure, modern technology lets me get to the heart of the matter faster, and maybe that’s a good thing. Maybe it’s a bad thing. Knowledge is no longer hard earned. It is practically given to a person, and this gives them little appreciation for the difficulties that it took to accumulate that knowledge.
Ok. I’m getting off track, but I think I’ve pretty much said what I wanted to say. I’ll pack it in before I ramble even more than I already have. I could on and on and on about this topic. I’ll stop here before I bore you even more than I already have.
Picture Frame
Kiara got me a digital picture frame for a Father’s Day/Birthday gift last night. It’s really frickin’ cool! It has 128Mb of internal memory, but it also has card slots for SD, compact flash, XD, and another type of card that I don’t recognize. It also has a mini-USB port, so you can copy files to the internal memory from your computer (but it didn’t come with a cable for this [that's ok. I had one handy.]) Lastly, it has a port where you can plug in a USB flash stick. Very cool stuff.
It has the ability to cycle through all of the photos one at a time, or it can chop the screen into quadrants, and show 4 pictures (although fairly tiny) at a time. I played with the mosaic option for a while, but I decided that I liked the one-photo-at-a-time option, so that’s the one that I’m going with. This allows me to see more details of the photos. It’s really cool. I like it!
My PDA also uses SD cards for external storage. I currently have a 256Mb SD card, and I thought that this would be a good time to upgrade the PDA card to 2Gb. I would then take the 256Mb card and put it in the frame. No dice. My PDA can’t address memory up to that large of a size. Matter of fact, when I plugged the 2Gb SD card into my PDA, it totally freaked out and crashed. I had to turn it off, wait a bit, and then turn it back on to have it reboot. Fortunately, it came up intact with all of my data. Too bad the 2GB didn’t work. Oh well.
I took the 2Gb SD card, and plugged it into the frame. The frame found it, and it was empty (of course.) Now I need to get a card reader (they’re pretty cheap) so that I can drop a ton of photos on to it. The picture frame also does AVI animations as well. I’m not sure I’ll use that feature, but the 2Gb of space on the card allows me room to experiment with that.
I went to a local computer store at lunch to pick up the SD card (it was $15 [great price!!]), and while there, I also picked up two 2Gb USB flash sticks for $15 each. I’ve been wanting to play around with being able to boot from a USB drive to test out various flavor of Linux. This will give me the chance to do that without wiping my current 4Gb USB flash drive that I use for data storage, backup of essential software, and general goodness like that.
I was also told that this store carries new Microsoft Elite Natural keyboards. They are my favorite keyboard of all time, and you can’t get them anywhere any more. I’m glad this place had them. Maybe they were found in a warehouse somewhere, and the store bought them up to sell them. I picked up two of these keyboards. I need to replace the one that I have at home because my BIOS on my laptop doesn’t like it at all. I’m getting tired of unplugging my keyboard when I (re)boot my system. Replacing that keyboard with one of these will do the trick. The second keyboard will go into storage until one of the ones that I’m using now dies a horrible death.
I also walked around most of the store while there (never been there before and had to check the place out.) If I ever build another desktop system (doubtful), I’m going to go there and pick up everything that I need to build a new system. I’ll probably never do this again, though. For my personal machines, I just love having a laptop. The freedom that it gives me to do stuff from any room in the house (or at a friend’s house) can’t be beat. As far as my server goes (which is currently a custom-built desktop tower,) I’ll probably replace it with a 1U Dell rack mountable server. Of course, I have no need to replace the server anytime soon, so that plan will wait until the time comes that the server dies a horrible ugly death.
If the digital picture frames weren’t so expensive, I’d pick up one for my office at the house, and one for Kiara to have at her office. They’re just that neat. I guess it’ll have to wait until a later date to pick up two more of them.
Long Time, No Blog
It’s been over a week since my last entry. I just fell out of the habit of doing it with so much going on in my life right now. Here’s a quick summation of what’s been going on with me.
Work has kept me horribly busy with the looming deadline of a large project. It’s current line count is 13,069 of PHP and SQL. Most of it is really complex, so don’t let the small number of lines fool you. It’s been lots of hard work. Even though it’s kept me really busy, and challenged me, I’ve enjoyed all of it. If you know me, then you know that those are two things that I enjoy most. I hate it when I’m bored because of lack of work, or lack of challenge.
School has also kept me really busy. I’m in week 7 of 8 for my operating systems and object oriented analysis and design (OOAD) classes. Final projects and final papers are coming due in the next handful of days. I’ve been really busy with both classes. I’m almost done with my final paper for my operating systems class. It is about the internal workings of Linux, and has to be 8 to 12 pages in length. I’ve written 7 1/2 pages so far, and I have about 3-4 more pages worth of material to cover. It’s due on Sunday, and I hope to get a good chunk of it done tonight and tomorrow night, so I’m not trying to cram the final pages in at the last moment. My OOAD class is almost done. I’m done with everything I need to do for the class other than compile the final paper. The final paper is a collection of all writings, diagrams, and other goodies that I’ve done so far in the class. I just have to take all of my diagrams, export them to images, open up Word, and start importing pictures. Should be cake. I gotta wait for feedback from my instructor on the last assignment before I can start. I hope to have that by Sunday, so I can start compiling away. I actually may start sooner than that, and leave the last few pages for his feedback. We’ll see how time allows me to go.
I’ve also been busy reading. I polished off the last of Academ’s Fury Sunday, and I’ve been steadily working my way through Cursor’s Fury during the week. I’m about 3/4 of the way through the book, and it’s a great book. I can’t wait to see how it ends up, and that will start the long wait until December when the next book in the series comes out.
I’ve also be looking into starting back up with some martial arts. I’ve looked at a few places, and called a few of them for pricing, attitude, class schedules, etc. The place that I finally settled on is a Brazilian Jiu Jistu place that a friend of mine works out at and teaches there on occasion. The price is reasonable, and two of the four class times that they offer fit into my schedule fairly well. I’m going to head there Saturday to check them out to see what things are like before I commit to anything that is long-term.
I also upgraded my work laptop from Ubuntu 6.10 to 7.04 over the weekend via their automated on-line application. It was slick. I started it Friday as soon as I got home from work. I went to see Rise of the Silver Surfer Friday night, and when I got home the downloads were done, and the install was started. It was prompting me about overwriting a changed config file, so I had to answer a few of those before going to bed. When I got up Saturday, it was asking more questions. I decided to baby-sit it while working on my Linux final paper. I got some good work done on the paper while answering the randomly-timed questions on the upgrade. After the upgrade was done Saturday around Noon, it rebooted. The system came up clean, and I only had to tweak a few scripts and config files that I had changed. That only took about 20 minutes, and a reboot. After that, everything was working swimmingly well. I’m happy with the upgrade process. Good stuff.
I’m thinking about maybe rebuilding my server with Ubuntu Server Edition to see how things go with that. That’s lots of work and such. I’m not sure I want to suffer the day or two of downtime to do something to a server that is working fine. I’m currently downloading the ISO right now for it, and I’m going to test it on my personal laptop to see how things go. It might be worth the up-front trouble in order to make upgrades easier in the future.
That’s how my past week has gone. Just par for the course. Maybe I’ll start posting again with more regularity. We’ll see….
Ding Dong…
… the witch is dead!
I’ve been waiting for this moment in Order of the Stick for a long time. Ever since Miko was introduced, I’ve wanted the vile bitch to die. I had always hoped that it would be at Roy’s hand, but since he died first, I lost hope of that happening.
After Miko lost per paladin-hood, I kind of hoped that she would live the life of a fallen paladin, but in the back of my mind I still hoped that she would die. She didn’t get to suffer enough in the real world without her paladin abilities, which makes me a little sad. However, in the end, she was not redeemed, and had to die the death of a common fighter. That makes me a little happy.
I know. I know. It’s just a comic, but it’s a damn good comic! I just hope that the author brings Roy back to lead the Order of the Stick to greater heights…. now if the rest of the group would just find his corpse.
Kiara Is Back
It’s a two-fer!
Kiara made it back last night right on time. I managed to get to the airport 30 minutes early (I thought I was 20 minutes late, but I had the flight time wrong,) so I had plenty of time to sit and read my book (Academ’s Fury.) I was so happy to see her when she got to the airport. I had missed her from the five days she had been gone, and I was happy to have her back in my arms.
She managed to fill a huge suitcase with about 50 pounds of baby stuff while in Montana. I haven’t had a chance to crack open the suitcase to look at the goodies yet. It was about 10:15 by the time we got into the house and unloaded the car. I knew that it was going to take at least an hour to unpack the baby stuff, so I decided to put it off until tonight.
However, I was almost done with Academ’s Fury, and I wanted to get to the end. I did manage to do that last night, and I was in bed by 11:00. My only problem is that I need to stop reading Jim Butcher just before bed. It gives me strange dreams. I don’t remember last night’s dream with full details, but I did wake up several times during the night feeling as if I had never even fallen asleep. It was quite odd.
I can’t wait to get home from work this evening to crack open the suitcase to see what kind of goodies we got for the baby. Gonna be neat, I hope.
Comic Quotes
Last week was a good week for some great comic quotes. Here they are with links to the comics that contained them:
Coach things violence is aerobic.
Good Boy! Oh yes you are! Yes you ! You are such a good little… brown scaley… dead bunny thing.
The project is like a hundred drunken clowns with bees in their underpants.
Ooo, scary! Spell “outer.”
You tell that filthy weasel I’m gonna break him like a wedding vow on the Jerry Springer Show!
Ha! You didn’t think it would be that easy to kick the hobbit, did you? (This is a running gag on this comic, and I never get tired of it.)
You smell that? Do you smell that? Fabric cleaner, son. I love the smell of fabric cleaner in the morning.
Does a giant anthropomorphic penis costume count as a “stupid output?”
If I became physically attracted to things that irked me, the world would burst into flame from the friction of my furious humping.
Kiara Is Gone
… not permanently, you freaks!
She left town yesterday morning to head to her home town for a baby shower, and to see her family and friends one last time before the baby comes. I know that makes it sound like the baby will prevent her from ever seeing them again, but that’s not how I mean it. Having a baby changes everything, and she wanted one last trip (as I did a few months back) to run around without concerns of dragging a child along.
Her flight gets her home on Sunday night, and I can’t wait to see the goodies that we get for the baby.
While she’s gone, it’s up to me to take care of all of the animals. Kiara is the primary caregiver for the animals, but that’s mainly because she gets along better with the cats than I do. I can take care of dogs all day long. They’re easy. Cats are more finicky. You give a dog food, and they eat it. Give a cat food, and they may or may not eat. Up to them. We have three cats that have a huge food drive. If you leave food out, they’ll eat it all, puke it up, and eat some more if there is any left. This means that we can’t leave food out. As a matter of fact, we have three types of cat food for the five cats. Loki gets his prescription diet. Picasso gets a particular flavor of cat food, and the other three (Divinity, Palladium, and Nikita) get the third kind.
This all means that the cats get fed at the same time. Picasso goes in a cage in Kiara’s craft room while Palladium and Nikita are left to roam the craft room while they eat. Loki gets fed in Kiara’s office, and Divinity gets fed in the office as well, but she gets put in a small cage while she eats. Kiara has no trouble at all getting all of the cats where they are supposed to go. I guess she has a certain method. Me? I have a hard time rounding up one cat, let alone five of them! I can usually manage Loki, Divinity, and Picasso. Takes some skill and timing, but I get it done. Nikita and Palladium are a different story. Nikita is timid around me (unless I’m laying down in bed), so it’s hard to get her into the craft room unless she is really hungry. Palladium has been scared of me since we first got him, so I have to lock everyone away, and then feed him wherever I happen to find him.
Once I have them all isolated and fed, they eat fairly quickly. While this is happening, I tend to the dogs. Like I said, the dogs are easy. I throw down the food, and they eat it. Sometimes Fly (our greyhound) will get finicky and not want to eat her full portion. Kiara seems to fret over this, but I don’t. If Fly’s not hungry and doesn’t want to eat, then I take what she doesn’t eat, and throw it back into the bag of dog food. No biggie.
Three more days of tending to the animals, and missing Kiara before she gets home. I hope she’s having a good time back home, but I do miss her. At least it’s only a few days before she’s back home.
RIP: Ronald Luveal
I got a call from my dad as I was leaving work yesterday. His brother, my Uncle Ronnie, passed away yesterday morning. He went into the hospital yesterday with some breathing problems. They gave him some breathing treatments, but they were not helping. The doctors decided to do some x-rays to figure out what was going on. They had him on an x-ray table in the radiology department. That’s when he had a massive heart attack, and died right away. Dad said that the doctors worked on him for a while to try to revive him, but he was already gone.
I wasn’t very close to Ronnie. We saw each other during Christmas, and the occasional Thanksgiving, but that was about it. I did go to visit him in Austin a few times during summer vacations, but that was a rare trip. He was always nice to me, but there was a distance about him. It wasn’t directed at me, of course. That was just his style. He was a gay man, and I think that was part of it. He had a hard time getting close to people because he grew up in a time where homosexuality was barely acknowledged, and rarely accepted.
The one thing that I remember about him more than anything else was his calm assurance and intelligence. He rarely rushed into decisions, and always seemed to think his way through things. I wish that I had that talent most days, and I think that as I get older, I approach his thoughtfulness.
Another thing that I remember about his house in Austin was that it was always full of books. I’ve always loved to read, and I always looked forward to my visits to Austin, so that I could pull the old, dusty tomes from his shelves to see what kind of adventures I could find there. He rarely had mainstream books (except for Anne Rice) on his shelves, so it was always an eye opener when I cracked the books to see what I would find.
My last trip to Texas, I passed fairly close to Austin on my way to San Antonio, but the day was going to be 10 hours long to get to San Antonio without a side-trek to Austin. Going to Austin was going to add another 2 hours of driving, plus another 1-2 hours of finding Ronnie, and visiting with him. I knew that I wasn’t going to be able to make it to see my Mom that day if I stopped to see Ronnie. Now I wish that I had stopped to visit with him one last time, but I figured that I had more time to see him in the future. He was only 62 years old, and this has made me realize (even more than I already knew) that our time with our loved ones is fleeting.
Goodbye, Ronnie. Tell Granny and Papa “Hi” for me while you’re up in Heaven with them.
Going to Portland!
The trip that I talked about here got approved Friday. I would have posted about it Friday, but I was too busy booking the conference, the hotel, and finding the cheapest non-stop flight from home to Portland. I managed to get all of that done before end of day Friday.
I can’t tell you how excited I am to be going. Work is paying for the full trip, and since it’s a “work sponsored event” I don’t even have to use my vacation time while I’m out of town. This is going to be great. I can’t wait until the end of July when I get to go to Portland to geek out with my fellow open source enthusiasts. I also hope that I get to meet a few notable people like Larry Wall (creator of Perl), and Rasmus Lerdorf (creator of PHP). I’m sure there are lots of other people that are going to be there that I would like to meet, but I really have no idea who they would be. I’d like to meet Richard Stallman, but I don’t think that he’s going to be there.
I’ll make sure to give you a full report on the trip when I get back from it in July. It’s 8 weeks away, and I’m going to be counting down every day of it!
