I'm having these very strange problems at work, and though I'm pretty sure telling you about them will bore most everyone to tears, my hope is that somebody, somewhere will read this and realize that in addition to being an insipid writer, a lazy slob and an appallingly poor parent, I am also really bad at my job. That's my dream at least; I can only hope that it comes true.
I've got this web server (unfortunately, it's Windows for reasons too extensive to go into here) and about two weeks ago it started occasionally asking people for a username and password, but only every so often, almost as if it had forgotten that these people were members of the domain. Then a few days later it cut off all access to any programs which wanted to know who you were. Rebooting it seemed to fix the problem. But then these usernames and passwords started popping up on most but not all of the third party applications we had running on the machine.
It was as if permissions were disappearing all over the place, for no discernible reason, in no discernible pattern. Going in and giving everyone 'read' permissions and rebooting the server seemed to fix it, but new examples of the root problem keep popping up. I just hope I don't get called in over the weekend. The good news is that it looks like Spirit Will Be Perfect Again.
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Ross
At some point in the distant past I decided that I could no longer use the phrase "Catch-22" (describing a damned if you do, damned if you don't situation) until I had actually read the book, Catch-22. It was a good decision, and for any of you out there who haven't read it, I highly recommend it; not merely for the trenchant commentary it offers on war and bureaucracy, but also for the amazing vocabulary it employs. It's not often that you see a phrase like "callipygian pulchritude."
Now the reason that I was thinking of Catch-22 is because apparently at the tender age of almost 33 I'm going senile. There's this whole story of how in the army normally your fate is decided by determining the worst possible situation and then putting you in it. But every so often the good fairy of the army would take over and send you to Bermuda to sun yourself for a couple of months. The more I think about this story the more I'm convinced that it was Glory Road by Heinlein.
Anyway, the point I was trying to make is that this is what happened today at the DMV. Normally when you go to the DMV it's an exercise in pain, frustration and rage management, but today I walked in and told them that I had returned with my safety and emissions. They gave me a special number which put me at the front of the line. I had sat down for what seemed like 30 seconds at most, and my number came up. I spent two minutes at the counter and walked out with my license plates. Of course, then it took 15 minutes to get the plates on because I didn't have a screwdriver but that's another story.
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Ross
Though I think that my car still has plenty of malice left in it, I think it's temporarily out of ideas. The final hurdle was a seriously clogged fuel filter, which my mechanic generously waived all the labor costs on (plus a discount on parts). I used the money I saved to bribe the safety inspecter into passing my car. Okay, not really, but the idea that it passed at all is almost as fantastic.
I find that in general I have a limited amount of psychic energy. At any given time, I can worry about three, maybe four things at most. Hopefully now that I've fixed my kids computer, recovered the data off my dead Macintosh, got the car fixed (and by this time tomorrow hopefully licenced), I should finally have the psychic energy to put together a complete update on what's happening with DireKobold. Plus I should have plenty of money -- allow me to explain...
Apparently people often misspell their e-bay listings (NYT registration required, people have complained so here's a link to the Slashdot commentary on it). As a result, their listings are not found by interested parties. However, some people have discovered this, and they search under common misspellings (i.e. compact rather than compaq), purchase the item for 1/10 what it normally sells for and then immediately resell it on e-bay for a tidy profit. Of course now that there's been an article about it, everyone will be doing it....damn...
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Ross
Sorry for not posting yesterday, though based on the number of comments I got recently, I doubt that anyone noticed. I was hoping to post a big update of the what and when for DireKobold, but the fates have not been kind. I can tell you that Wil has sent me the long-promised (by me) Midnight adventure and that should be the next thing to be published by the end of February, but if you're reading this, you probably have some sick fascination with the troubles that perpetually beset me.
Well, part of the reason I didn't post yesterday was that I had a huge number of errands to run, including dropping of my old Mac Laptop at the local Apple store and picking up my car from the mechanic. At first it seemed to be all better, but then I noticed that it didn't seem to have as much power, though it's always tough to tell if there's something wrong or if this is just all the power you're going to get out of a 4-cylinder engine. Well, by this morning we were back to the "running worse than ever" mode.
I was driving into work and I started up the first big hill and I seemed to really be going slow; of course the person in front of me wasn't going very quickly either, so I thought maybe it was just a matter of not getting enough speed. Shortly after that, it was apparent that something about the power/fuel was not right. Occasionally it would be fine, but more often I could floor it without the slightest response from the engine. With about a half a mile (maybe more, though it was uphill through lots of snow) I ditched the car and walked the rest of the way. During lunch I got a ride back to the car and arranged for a tow, which made the third time in less than a week that my car was in the shop.
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Ross
As I look over the political landscape, as I talk to men and women on the street, as I surf the internet reading articles and commentary, as I listen to NPR and talk radio, my sense is that this country needs more whining, so that is precisely what I've decided to do today. After three nights of very little sleep, I finally did what I should have done several nights ago: I made my oldest daughter sleep with my wife and the sick child and I stole her bed. While better than the previous nights, it still wasn't as comfortable as the bed I normally sleep in. Today is better than yesterday, but I'm still dealing with sleep deprivation and I've added a sore neck (should have taken my pillow) and something of a sore back.
Another webserver crashed while I was at lunch. I guess I just have to stop going to lunch. I did manage to limp into work with my wounded car, and the mechanic is going to a look at it on Monday, but all in all, today isn't that much better than yesterday. It's a good thing that the weekend is coming up or I might have to hurt someone. As I mentioned yesterday, the family campaign is tonight so I'm basically out of time, however I will leave you with a link and a quote.
If we listened to our intellect, we'd never have a love affair. We'd never have a friendship. We'd never go into business, because we'd be cynical. Well, that's nonsense. You've got to jump off cliffs all the time and build your wings on the way down.
--Ray Bradbury
A pretty good article on what it's like to be a New Hampshire primary voter.
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Ross
Well, it's been an interesting day. Most of my "blogging time" was taken up deleting well over a hundred spam comments (though thanks to the help of my underpaid South American labor it wasn't nearly as bad as it could have been). I did finally find a place in Movable Type that allows me to block IP addresses, though I'm not sure how effective that will end up being. I myself have easy access to at least at least 10 IP addresses, and with effort could probably get access to 30 or 40 more, so I can only imagine that the spammer is not limited to that one address. I'm still flabbergasted that the software doesn't have some way to do a mass delete of comments; maybe that's coming in the next version (or maybe it's already here and I just need to pull my head out and upgrade).
Of course, all of my blogging difficulties were small potatoes compared to what happened with my car. It failed its safety inspection on Tuesday (uneven braking), plus it had an oil leak and a power steering leak going back to its purchase, so I took it into the mechanic. It also occasionally ran rough and had once died on me while I was driving it, but for whatever reason I didn't mention that. My mechanic (who is actually a great guy and related to me in a very bizarre fashion) fixed the leaks and the brakes. Additionally, he noticed that the spark plug wires were arcing, so he replaced them as well as the spark plugs. Well, when he told me that, I figured that must have been what was causing it to sometimes run rough, and my initial reaction was, "Bonus!"
Perhaps he put the spark plug wires on wrong, because when I got it back it wasn't just running rough occasionally, it was running rough constantly, and dying every other time I made a turn. I had to give someone a ride home and I had already taken longer on my lunch break than I should have, or otherwise I might have just turned right around and gone back. I can understand if the problem still existed, but for it to have gotten worse is hard to fathom. Previously I had theories involving the cold, but I have to discard those because it's warmer today that it's been in many days, maybe...it's the heat that's causing it.
In any event, given that I took a longer than average lunch full of cursing and pain, it was to be expected that (as far as I can tell) the minute I walked out of the building one of the web servers crashed for the second time today. By all accounts my phone was ringing off the hook the entire time I was gone. I was hoping to put out a fairly comprehensive overview of where DireKobold is (as requested by someone on the Message Boards) but it looks like I'm out of time, and with me DMing tomorrow it might be Monday before I get around to it, but I am aware of the request and I won't forget.
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Ross
The last few days have been interesting. My youngest was running a fever of around 104 on Monday. We were able to bring it under control by alternating Tylenol and ibuprofen, but she was still pretty miserable. On top of two ear infections (the doctor's eventual diagnosis), she has a new tooth coming in. As a result, she hasn't slept well (or really at all) the last two nights, which basically means I haven't slept well the last two nights.
Yes I'm whining again, but when it's nine at night and you can barely keep your eyes open and you're not sure if tonight will be any better, sunny optimism is the last thing on your mind. I guess it's also the reason that in a moment of weakness I'm going to confess to something: I've been watching American Idol (for great snarky recaps I recommend Television Without Pity). In my defense, I have long maintained that if I didn't laugh at other people I wouldn't laugh at anything, and if you enjoy laughing at other people there's no better place than the American Idol auditions.
In other more responsible news, there were the Iowa Caucuses and the State of the Union. The SOTU bore few surprises, but the caucuses were chock full of them. Dean finally imploded as lots of people have been predicting. Gephardt was kind of sad -- here's someone who, by all accounts, is a really nice guy but he had his chance in Iowa back in '88 and apparently they weren't willing to give him another one. In any case, I really need to get to bed, so I'll catch you later.
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Ross
Saturday, the guys at work rented a big conference room at the local megaplex and had a LAN party. It's not often you get the chance to gather with 20+ other people and play multiplayer games for 12 hours, so even though I'm not a big fan of the "First-Person-Shooter" genre (due to a complete lack of hand-eye coordination and the tendency to get motion sick) I decided to go. In the end it was pretty cool, though it didn't begin that way.
My co-workers take these get-togethers pretty seriously -- they even have an organization they've created to administrate all of the details. Part of the initial problems stem from the sheer logistics of a LAN party (especially if you don't go very often): you've got to drag your computer plus dozens of CDs and hundreds of cables (at least thats the way it feels) across the icy tundra to some place that was not designed with LAN parties in mind (in the past, one of the biggest challanges has been constantly blowing breakers). This doesn't even cover the hours of work beforehand, trying to make sure that all the games along with all of the attendant patches and mods are installed and working.
I had invited a couple of friends as well as my brother-in-law, who unfortunately didn't have a computer. This resulted in my lending him my computer while I borrowed a computer from a co-worker. When I got to the party, the computer that I borrowed would turn on, but never sent a signal to the monitor. So we figured it was the video card. I promptly went out a bought another one, but it wasn't the video card. The place I had purchased it from (CompUSA, stay away!) has a 15% restocking charge (how it costs $22.50 to re-shrinkwrap something and put it back on the shelf I will never know), so that obviously sucked. Having eliminated the video card, we weren't sure what the problem was, meaning I had nothing to play on.
Fortunately (for me not for him), my friend (the one who's computer I was borrowing) had to go to an extended birthday dinner, so I was able to play on his machine for several hours. Of course, by this point we had switched to a new game and I discovered that in addition to everything else I had installed that I was missing two more patches and a whole ton of maps. So after spending a half an hour tracking everything down and then another half an hour installing it, and bidding my friend a fond farewell, I was finally ready to play.
That's when it started picking up, and I actually ended up having a pretty good time. At the end of the evening they had a raffle and I ended up winning a some carrying straps for my computer, which was very cool, and hopefully should take the edge off the logistical part of the LAN party the next time around.
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Ross
I have a very narrow window between work and role-playing tonight, so I'm going to see if I can get an entry out in the short time available. The campaign I'm playing in tonight is an interesting one. The over-arching motif is that of time travel, so the DM has combined D&D, D20 Modern and several settings of his own devising. I'm playing a D20 Modern Gunslinger and the campaign has just started to go through Wil's Chronicles of Anyaka. This is problematic for two reasons: first I've read, edited, sweat over and coded all of those adventures so there's not going to be any surprises; secondly what am I going to do once I run out of ammunition?
As to the first problem, there's really nothing I can do. The DM is so in love with the Xenogenic system that he finds it hard to use any other adventures. As far as the second problem goes, I guess the DM is thinking of allowing me to magically modify the guns so that they never run out of ammo. I'm not sure how I feel about that -- in some ways I'm kind of a purist, and the idea of infinite magical bullets is somewhat off-putting.
Hopefully, role-playing won't go too late tonight, because tomorrow we're having the LAN party to end all LAN parties. We've rented a room at a local megaplex and we're hoping to get about 30 people there all playing the latest first-person shooters. For myself I'm not a big fan of the FPS, but with a gathering this big, how can I refuse? In any case that's all the time I have, I definitely won't be posting tomorrow and probably not on Monday either (too busy enjoying the holiday by picking lint out). I will, however, leave you with the day's link: Maybe the best way to get men on Mars is to make it a one-way mission.
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Ross
I'm kind of a political junky and I've been very interested in the Democractic presidential primaries. The nine candidates (eight, if Mosley-Braun drops out like people are saying) are all fascinating, though that's not necessarily a good thing. The first primary is the Iowa caucus on Monday and I'm intensely curious who's going to come out on top, though it will mean little since the Iowans are actually pretty bad at predicting the eventual nominee and many candidates have chosen to skip Iowa.
Of course, the question is why (other than temporal proximity) do I bring it up? Lately I've been watching a lot of The Daily Show (with Jon Stewart). It's freaking hilarious, but that's not the point. I've been wondering recently about the rise of "fake news." There's The Daily Show, The Onion, and at least a half a dozen other satirical news websites. I'm no expert on the history of news satire, but it seems quite a bit more prevelant than it was historically.
My theory on this is currently incredibly rudimentary, but I think Generation X (which seems to comprise the core demographic of The Daily Show at least) has been so saturated with media, most of it fictitious, that they only appreciate media when it's pesented in a surreal quasi-serious fashion. Like I said, it's rudimentary, but I think there's something there.
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Ross
Sorry about yesterday -- I forgot. Okay, I didn't forget in a classical sense (as in the way ancient Greeks forgot to write a play with a happy ending), it was more I got distracted (like the time some comely joggers distracted me from the car which had stopped on the highway in front of me, the resulting accident was neither comely nor did it have a happy ending). Generally, if I haven't already done my blog, I'll open it up when I get home, and then work on it when I get bored of whatever my "primary" task is. Well, yesterday I was so engrossed in running some numbers through a spreadsheet, that I totally forgot all about the blog. So you'll have to add saving us from Ross's blog to the list of things Math can do; come to think of it, is there anything it can't do?
Yesterday I came to the realization that Monday is a holiday. It's amazing the warm fuzzy feeling you get when you realize that a day you thought you would have to work is now available for staying home and picking the lint out of your navel while your brain turns to tapioca. It's one of the greatest feelings in the world. It is for this reason that I vastly prefer to take Monday off rather than Friday (if I'm looking for a three-day weekend). If you take Friday off, then literally before you know it, the additional time is gone and you're back to having a normal weekend (generally without anything to show for having Friday off).
On the other hand, if you have Monday off, your weekend proceeds normally until you reach Sunday evening. It's then that the reflexive dread of work the next morning begins to weigh upon your soul. Just when you're about to curl up in the corner and weep you remember, "Hey, wait a second. I've got tomorrow off! I can stay home and pick lint out of my belly button." Of course, you would only think this if you have an "innie." I have no idea what people with an "outie" think, and quite frankly I don't want to know what goes on in the heads of those partially evolved proto-humanoids.
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Ross
P.S. My wife reminded me that I need to include a link to something interesting, so here is a link to a Logarithmic Map of the Universe.
Apparently, mentioning the comment spam was taken as a challenge, because shortly after I posted someone came along and added at least 50 spam comments, spread across 50 different entries. Unfortunately, Movable Type doesn't seem to have a way to do a mass delete on comments, so I spent 15 minutes deleting all of the offers for Viagra by hand. Okay, no one is interested in this, but that doesn't minimize how annoying it was.
As far as the exercise goes, I have this problem where the line between aerobic activity and uncontrollable nausea is very fine. It's amazingly easy for me to overdo it and end up doing things that no one wants described. I think I'm getting a little more resilient because tonight I overdid it, but nevertheless managed to keep my lunch down. My current routine is to cycle for about 20 minutes; around 15 minutes in I crank it up to a cadence of about 90 for one or two minutes and then spend the last three minutes cooling down. With the exception of ten seconds, that's exactly what happened tonight, ten seconds was all it took...
The last ten seconds of the minute when I crank up the cadence I decided to go all out, I mean it was only for ten seconds right? So I cranked it up to around 160 rpm. When you're trying to tick the pedals over more than two and a half times a second, ten seconds is forever. In any case, after taking a few minutes to cool down, I spent the next half hour lying on the floor, trying to convince my kids not to step on me.
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Ross
It's interesting, but on the same day I pointed out the practice, I once again got another comment spam. A link that merely said Viagra, and once again it was a comment on the April 19th blog. Maybe it's one guy who's trying to mess with my head. Though there might be something to the idea that there is connection to the Branch Davidians and the Oklahoma City Federal Building. I've always been appalled by what happened in Waco, though I am probably more appalled by what happened in Oklahoma City. In any event, before this devolves into a rant I'll move on.
Tonight is once again the "family campaign." Last week we only managed to get through two combats and I nearly had a TPK (total party kill) both times. It's only my decades of experience as a DM that allowed me to save the situation without making it look like I was pulling punches. As it is. I think the adventure may be a little on the tough side for this group; they're still all basically neophytes. We'll have to see how it goes tonight.
Other than that, things are pretty boring. I've got a big work deadline on Monday at my "day job," which has sucked most of the joy out of my life, but hopefully once I'm past that, things will begin to improve. In order to fill my (often neglected) goal of one link a day I refer you here. I may have mentioned this earlier, but touch screen voting has a long way to go before it's the answer to all of the election uncertainty we've had. In fact, it appears to be causing a huge amount of uncertainty all on its own.
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Ross
What I was going to write about last night is the practice of putting spam into blog comments. I certainly don't have a very popular blog, so if it's happened to me, I'm sure that it's happening to pretty much every blog out there. The spam is the same kind of stuff you get in your e-mail, but what's curious about it, is that it seems to only show up on one entry, the one from April 19th, (though I've deleted them all) and for the life of me I have no idea why they have chosen that entry out of the hundreds I've done.
It's not the first entry, though it's close (it's number six). The subject of the entry doesn't seem unusual at all. Certainly it doesn't tie into any of the products which have been advertised. In other words, I'm at a loss explain why that spot on the internet out of all of the billions of possibilities should be chosen to hawk Viagra. If anyone out there can tell me, I'd be very curious.
In other news, I've been in communication recently with Wil Upchurch and it looks like the Midnight adventure is getting close to completion. We're going to do a couple of interesting things with this adventure. It will probably be the first that's available for individual sale. Additionally, the Xenogenic System isn't the best for layout, just because you're never sure where things are going to end up because the length is so variable. But we want to make sure that buyers have access to the cool Midnight layout, so we'll be offering a 'static' version of the adventure with everything laid out nice and purty.
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Ross
Well, I meant to post something, but suddenly it's almost midnight and I'm about to fall asleep at my desk, so I'll try and repent and do better tomorrow.
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Ross
When I was young I couldn't get enough of the PBS show Nova. I have a distinct memory of my parents finally acknowledging I was sick because I declined to watch it one night. For whatever reason, I grew out of Nova. I'm not sure why, though my speculation would be that it had something to do with puberty. I'm not sure if you noticed, but Nova has very few scantily clad women.
I guess I'm finally old enough that my hormones have subsided to the point that my curiosity has had a chance to reassert itself, and as such I'm watching Nova tonight. Of course, this is a special episode -- they're talking about NASA's Spirit Rover, which, I don't care who you are, is pretty exciting stuff. I remember reading Neal Boortz's blog on Monday and he was appalled that the lead story of the weekend was not the Mars Rover, but rather Britney Spears' marriage, and I would have to agree, especially after watching Nova tonight. The story of the engineering involved in the rover is incredible.
If you haven't read up on the mission you really should; at a minimum you need to take a look at the first color image taken by the rover's panoramic camera. It's hard to emphasize how important I think the exploration of space is. I know some would argue that it's a waste of money, but let's face it -- people who think that should be lobotomized and sent to work clearing mines in Iraq.
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Ross
Well, it's my older son's birthday today; he's turning 5. Both he and his older sister were born so close to Christmas (his sister was born on December 19th), that rather than giving them gifts on their birthday we give them gifts for their half-birthday. I agree it is somewhat strange, but it seems to be working out so far. We'll have to see what happens as they get older. We do, however, take them out for dinner for their birthday, to the place of their choosing (another thing which may have to change as they get older and learn about places that are $20/plate). My son wants to go to Wendy's, a man after my own heart -- their new chicken strips are surprisingly good.
As far as my New Year's resolution, it's going fairly well, though only time will tell. On Saturday I took advantage of the fact that the resolution doesn't require me to actually turn the pedals, since that's the day I finally cleared all the lingering ice off my driveway and as such figured I had already gotten plenty of exercise. Speaking of which, we've had quite the winter so far here in Utah, which is good because we've had quite a drought for awhile, but after the first big storm (the one chronicled on my vacation recap), I had decided it was time to break down and buy a snow-blower. Of course, as you might expect, with the heaviest snowfall in a decade there isn't a snow-blower to be found anywhere in the state.
I got Real Genius on DVD for Christmas. It's such a great movie that I may have to dedicate an entire blog to it. The movie is set at Pacific Tech, which I had always heard was a thinly disquised clone of Caltech, but I just barely found a page which lists all of the Caltech references in Real Genius. I confess that it's on the anal side, but I thought it was interesting. Perhaps more for its insight into Caltech than its insight into the movie.
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Ross
Well the holidays are finally over and it's time to get back into the normal grind. Tonight is gaming night and it's the "family campaign." For the last year or so, a good friend of mine has been dm'ing the family campaign, which allowed me to play, something I always enjoy, but after a year of running he needed a break so we're taking a hiatus from his campaign and I'm going to run some published adventures for a while. I would love to run all my DireKobold adventures (perhaps do Wil's Adventure Path), but my wife has read all of the adventures and some of the other players have read many of them as well. Despite this, I'm sure that before the end I'll have to run at least one of them.
Like many people, I have made a New Year's Resolution. You ready for it? Okay... I resolve to sit on my exercise bike every day. That's just sit, I don't have to touch the pedals or do anything else I just have to sit on it, but my hope is that I'll decided that as long as I'm sitting there I might as well turn the pedals for 15 or 20 minutes. As you can tell, I'm a big believer in setting attainable goals. So far I'm still at a 100%, so I'm feeling pretty good. In any case, since my last two entries were extra long I think I can get away with making this one a little shorter, so I'll end it here.
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Ross