Happy Birthday To Me
Happy Birthday To Me.
Happy Birthday To Me.
Happy Birthday Dear Beosig.
Happy Birthday To Me!
Yep. I’ve made it around the sun for the 34th time. Somehow it’s not that much different from the last several times I’ve done it. Of course, that’s all going to change in November with the arrival of the baby. Then I get to start counting someone else’s years that are more important than my own.
I opened my email this morning, and I had 5 birthday messages from people that I’ve bought stuff from in the past that had my email address and birthday on file. I think it’s kind of cool. I got emails from a local RPG/game store, Steve Jackson Games, VanDyke Software, RPGNet, and Borders. Very neat. I like the Borders one because they’re giving me 15% off of a book for my birthday, but the Steve Jackson Games one was especially neat. I’ve received it the past 3 or 4 years, but it still tickles me to read it. It goes:
Happy birthday to you
Happy birthday to you
The Illuminati are watching
Everything that you do
Fnord!
I just get a good giggle out of that every year that I see it.
Time to get back to work, so I can grow older while sitting at my desk typing away. Could be worse, eh?
Pain In The Neck
Since shortly after lunch yesterday, I’ve been having pain on the left side of my neck. It’s steadily gotten worse, but I can still move my head around. I don’t have as much range of motion as I normally do, so it’s bothersome. I wish that I could figure out what I did to it, so that I can avoid doing it again.
I’ve made some ergonomic changes to my work environment to see if that will help. I just got a notebook riser here at work to raise the level of my laptop screen to eye level. I’ve also taken my arm rests and lowered them, so that I’m not resting my elbows on them anymore. I had them set a little too high, and it was jamming my shoulders up. I had to have them that high to get them to slide over the top of my desk to get to a comfortable place to reach my keyboard. I’ve lowered them to the point where they’ll slide under my desk now.
Maybe these changes will help alleviate the pain that I’ve been feeling. Maybe not. We’ll see in a day or three.
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.
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….
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.
Pushing Buttons
I’m as guilty as anyone else on this matter, but I think it’s an interesting view into the human psyche. When I get on the elevator, I always push the button for the floor that I want to go to. It doesn’t matter if the button is already lit up, or if I saw someone push the button just a half second before I reach for it. Somehow I don’t think that I’ll be allowed to get off on my destination floor unless I’m the one that actually pushes the button. Very odd.
I thought that I was alone in this strangeness, but I’ve seen more and more people do it lately. Maybe I’m just looking for it these days to justify this strange quirk in my elevator behavior.
Does anyone else do this?
The Sound Of Battle
While I was back in Texas, I managed to catch the tail end of a fighter practice for the local shire, Black Lake. It’s part of the Society for Creative Anachronisms. I really wanted to catch the whole thing, but the loss of a phone number, the failure of a cell phone, and other commitments made me very late for the fighter practice.
I didn’t get into armor, but I really wanted to get out there and try my rusty skills against some of the best in the Kingdom of Ansteorra. Even though I didn’t get to fight, I still got to watch a few good friends practice with one another. I had forgotten how much I miss the sound of sword on shield. The ring of a a helm from a clean head shot, and the shuffle of feet across the grassy lands.
It really made me start to itch for getting back into armor, but I’m not sure that I’ll have the time for such a thing. I’m already too busy with so many other things as it is right now. Maybe… yeah… I keep telling myself “Maybe, someday” for lots of things. Perhaps I’ll actually sit down and put in the effort necessary to get the time to get out and be more active.
I really miss the sound of battle.
Fortune Cookie
Craing and I went to a local Asian food place today. We both had the daily special, which had a wide variety of flavors in it. It was good food. It was also a little expensive, but it’s a rare treat that I can pay cash for from time-to-time. Of course, at the end of the meal, we both got fortune cookies. I don’t like fortune cookies all that much, but today I decided to crack mine open and eat it. The fortune inside the cookie read:
The philosophy of one century is the common sense of the next.
I liked it enough to keep it. It just seemed to be so true. Thinking back on all of the discoveries that we’ve made over the years, they all start as an idea, a philosophy if you will. Many ideas don’t pan out, but enough of them do that we call it progress.
Our students today take for granted that there are three basic laws of physics, that electrons move from shell to shell in chemical reactions, that certain biological factors are necessary for life, and so much more. I know that I did. While learning all of these great philosophies in school, I never did stop to think too much on how they came about. My public school education required me to read, listen, absorb, and regurgitate. It was a rare teacher (Mr. Landrum, Ms. Setzer, Mr. Franks, Dr. Rucker, Mr. Vetter, Mrs. Ward, Mr. Bell, Mrs. Armstrong and maybe a few others) that really challenged me to think outside the box.
These teachers really changed my life for the better, and I think that is one of the reasons that I want to be a teacher. I want to touch lives for the better. I want to make a difference in the world outside my immediate grasp. If I can bring some of my (limited) wisdom and knowledge to the forefront, and unselfishly give it to another, then they may be able to take that knowledge to another level to make the world better.
Maybe, just maybe, one of my philosophies of this world will become the next generation’s common sense.
