I didn't accomplish much over the weekend, though I did get the van registered and took two naps, so it wasn't entirely a waste. I looked a little bit at some of the blogging sites, but not enough for me to make a decision on where to move to, or even whether I should move. The naps were in preperation for this week. The friend I stayed with in Vegas is going to be in town (he's doing a big tour of the western U.S.) so I'm thinking I'm not going to get a lot of sleep this week. I'm not sure how well it works to try and get ahead on sleep if you know you're going to be going without, but I do know that it's much better than trying to do it when you have a sleep debt.
It's been awhile since I included a link (particularly to anything non-gaming), so here's a story about a girl who escaped her kidnapper by the judicious application of a hammer to his groin. Now that is a good story.
It's the first time hearing "Hammer to the Groin" hasn't made me wince
Ross
For all those who tried to access the website yesterday and found it unavailable, I apologize. Before I get into the story, comments have been disabled; it will become clear why, but I wanted to make sure to get that out of the way up front, since I know that very few people make it all the way to the end of my blogs. In any case, the story starts Tuesday night...
I noticed that DireKobold.com was running really slowly, but it was still running. I was also getting SQL errors in my e-mail. Now I had seen this before when some spammer really went crazy filling my blog with spam comments, but it had always been temporary. Also, I checked the comment table and it wasn't that big. Plus, I wasn't 100% sure that it was the blog, because the SQL errors were actually being generated by the forums, which are old and possibly insecure. So I was concerned, but I didn't immediately know what to do, so I went to bed without taking any action.
The next morning I woke up and DireKobold was down: no web, no e-mail, no ssh, though I could still ping it. When I tried to ssh to it, it would tell me connection refused, and somehow that, along with the fact that it pinged, somehow led me to believe that it had been hacked through the forum. So I called around and managed to scrounge up one of the many shiftless, but tech-savvy that seem to cluster around my friend Josh, like moths to the flame, to go take a look at it. When he tried bringing it up, it got to the part where it tried to find the hard drive and hung. And one of the warning LED's was lit on the mother board. This did not bode well.
So he unhooked it and took it over to Josh's house. When he tried bringing it up there it came up without a hitch. This was good news, but it didn't rule out a major hard drive issue, and my initial inclination was to tell him to immediately buy a new HD. Instead, I figured I'd live dangerously and I told him to just make a back-up and then put it back. I managed to make it to the datacenter as he put it back. As soon as the server was back in the rack we started checking it, and it was immediately apparent that it was once again incredibly slow. So we checked the process list and there were hundreds of apache threads. We looked at the connections and in the five minutes it had been back up, hundreds of connections had been made. The last thing we did was look at the logs, and it was apparent that the comment script for my blog was being hit hundreds of times a minute.
Once we finally realized what the problem was I turned off the webserver, and then a little later, after I disabled the comment script, I turned the web server back on, and it's been smooth sailing ever since. So as I mentioned, comments are disabled. Which leaves me with several options: the first is to turn comments on and cross my fingers, the second is to continue to blog here without comments, the final option is to move my blog somewhere else like blogger, or blogspot or livejournal, etc. At the moment I'm leaning towards the latter, but I'd like to know what you think... except you can't tell me because there is no commenting...
Filled with murderous rage for spammers
Ross
I came home from last week's vacation with a pile of work waiting for me and a major deadline on Monday. As is often the case with me and deadlines, it slipped to Tuesday morning, but it's done now, so hopefully I can get back into the blogging scene. Of course I wonder what the point is since I'm sure that in the 10 days between my last entry and the one before that, that I lost my remaining reader (though that may have more to do with me missing my last two "friendship" payments). Actually the point today is that I was introduced to a couple of new games at GTS and I'm excited to talk about them.
The first game is called "Dreamblade" and it's being released by Wizards of the Coast. The idea is to take the visual and tactical satisfaction one gets from miniatures (as oppossed to cards) and attach it to a card game (or rather a collectible card game) type rule-set. See, most miniatures games are designed to be played on some kind of terrain map, whether it be a blasted post-apocolyptic cityscape, an underground dungeon or a grassy field with scattered hills. As a result of that, these miniature games are not as amenable to tournament play, because the field itself is too variable. Since Dreamblade is set in the dreamscape (as you might guess from the title) the playing field is simple, it looks like this:
| P-1 | S-1 | S-1 | S-1 | S-1 |
| 5-2 | 4-2 | 3-2 | ||
| 1-A | 2-A | 1-A | ||
| 3-1 | 4-1 | 5-1 | ||
| S-2 | S-2 | S-2 | S-2 | P-2 |
Before the dash:
P = Initial summoning portal
S = Summoning Row
# = Number of points the square is worth
The number after the dash is which player it applies to, player 1, player 2 or 'A'll players.
Whoever controls the most points at the end of each turn gets a victory point; the first person with 6 victory points wins the game. If both players have creatures in a square then neither of them gets the points (or both of them get the points, if you prefer). And it doesn't matter how many more points you have, you still only get one victory point per round. The first round both players start at the portal, after that they can summon creatures to any space on the summoning row which contains one of your creatures in that same column. What that basically means is that the highest scoring squares on the grid are the closest to your opponents reinforcements. It's also obvious that if you try and spread out and take too much territory that it makes it easier for your opponent to pick off your individual figures.
The game gets its name from an interesting mechanic associated with the dice. Each creature has a power which represents the number of dice you get to roll. The dice are six sided, two of the faces count as misses, three of the faces have numbers, 1,2 and 3 and the final face has a blade. A blade roll can be used to activate the creature's special ability, which can range from additional damage to forcing another creature to move, and anything in between.
In any event, that's all for now. The discussion of the other game will have to wait until tomorrow. Till then...
Trapped in a petty pace
Ross
I know it's been a long time since I blogged and for that I apologize. Things have been pretty crazy. Of course, the vast majority of last week was spent at the GAMA Trade Show in Las Vegas. I got back late Thursday night, but I was too busy catching up on stuff to post anything yesterday. I've decided that while I like road trips, that solo road trips are not very fun at all, particularly when you're really tired. What's interesting is that the most exciting thing to happen this week didn't even take place at the convention...
As I believe I mentioned in an earlier blog, my oldest son is in pee-wee wrestling. They have four tournaments, and each wrestler gets two matches per tournament. In the first two tournaments my son lost all four matches. So I was pretty worried that he would go without any wins at all. Despite losing four times he had a much better attitude about the whole thing than I did. In any case, his third tournament was the Tuesday I was gone. So I gave my wife strict instructions to call me the minute it was over. And lo and behold, he'd won not just one match, but both! The first was a massacre; apparently he won something like 19 to 2. The second was against a girl who'd been wrestling for three years, and it ended up being much closer. I believe the final score was 10 to 9.
Apparently quite a few girls are in pee-wee wrestling. A friend of mine who also has his son at the tournament told me that he also wrestled a girl in the second match. Apparently it wasn't quite as close as my son's match. After they pair people up for their matches they line up the pairs at the edge of the mat. From the moment they put them in line the girl started crying, and when it was their turn they decided she was too upset to wrestle so they let the pair behind them go ahead. This continued as pair after pair after pair went past them. Finally my friend went down to the mat and asked them if they could find someone else for his son to wrestle. Apparently this was enough to shock her into activity and they did finally wrestle, but as you might imagine the outcome was already pretty much decided.
Weekends are much too short
Ross
I'm pretty stressed. I'm going to GTS on Sunday, and I'm stressing about that. My day job has devolved into a pile of obscure, seemingly insolvable problems, and after promising me a new project for several weeks the company I'm consulting for finally got it to me, but of course it has to be done before I leave...
Urge to kill rising...
Ross
I know everyone was very interested to know what the result of my conversation with the Police Chief was, so I apologize for not posting anything on Monday or Friday. I talked to the Chief on Friday. Initially he assumed that it was my kid that had been arrested, which I didn't realize until about halfway through the conversation. Which I guess implies that he hadn't actually talked to the actual parents of the boy in question. I'm not sure what to make of that...
In any event, I mentioned that my big problem was cuffing the kid. He explained that after sad experience their policy has become cuff anyone 9 and older, which seems awfully young to me, but I guess 9 isn't as young as it used to be. And as I think about some 9 year old wanna-be gang member then I guess I can see where if they really started kicking and punching they could be a handful. But to this I replied, "Surely you have some discretion, I mean this was a kid who wasn't threatening anyone, from the gifted and talented bus. Was it really necessary to cuff him?" But of course he started talking about policy. And he's got a point, in our litigious society the minute you start exercising personal discretion you open yourself up to liability, but as long as you're following policy...
In any event, despite not reaching any kind of a resolution with the Police Chief, I felt better for having talked to him (and the transportation director) . Though perhaps even without talking to them I would have felt better just because of the passage of time. I guess the thing that still bothers me is that even if my kids don't take anything else away from this experience (which is unlikely) they're still going to be left with the lesson that danger is the greatest evil. That the merest hint of a threat, a kid with a small knife, provokes a greater response than anything else they've ever seen. And I'm not sure that's a lesson I really want them to learn.
Searching for self-reliance
Ross
Yesterday afternoon, just as the school bus my children ride was about to arrive at their stop, some kid was seen with a knife. Now you have to understand that this is an elementary school bus, that it is full almost exclusively of children in the "Gifted Magnet Program," and that the knife in question was a box cutter which the child had been given at school and then neglected to return. In any case, one of the children started screaming "knife," so the bus driver stopped. He was less than five minutes from my kid's stop, but he pulled into a parking lot and demanded the knife from the kid. Unwisely, the child refused. Of course, he's thinking he's going to get in trouble for taking school property (it's unclear whether he did it purposely or accidentaly). He doesn't realize that having a weapon is a much greater offense, but he will quickly discover his error.
At this point the bus driver, who's retired military and, who confesses later, never felt even remotely threatened, calls the police, who take their time arriving. Meanwhile my wife is waiting for the kids at the bus stop and after 20 minutes had passed decides to call the transporation office. They have no idea where the bus is, but they assure her that they will find out. Finally, back at the bus, the police arrive and begin to question the kids. As soon as they establish what's going on they take the offending child, put him in cuffs and toss him into the back of the police cruiser. While I have several issues with the way things were handled up until this point, I'm infuriated by this last point. Why the police found it necessary to cuff an 11 year old with a craft knife is inconceivable.
Of course at this point you're thinking, well it wasn't your kid with the knife, why do you care? Well of the seven kids on the bus, two were mine, so I'm the parent of 1/3 of the kids who were spectators, and I have to tell you both of them were pretty shaken, and I can understand why. When I was a kid the world of adult rules was mysterious and confusing. When I got in trouble it frequently blind-sided me, because I had not previously suspected that what I was doing was wrong. There also seemed to be a problem of degree. Sometimes I was only mildly chastized for things I thought would get me grounded for months, and other times I was lectured for hours about things which seemed perfectly legitimate.
I'm not laying any blame on my parents either. In all of the cases I can remember, I now understand the way the punishment fit the crime, but when you're a kid and you're trying to learn the ropes, things don't always make a lot of sense. So here you have my kids who see something, a kid with a knife, the same knife they've seen dozens of times in the classroom, and they figure it's no big deal, but then all of the sudden it's the biggest deal of their young lives. The cops are called, people are questioned, and the youthful offender is led away in hand-cuffs.
My son, who's kind of a trouble maker (and in fact at the beginning of the year was warned several times to stay in his seat) is now wondering if at any moment he could be hauled off by the police in cuffs. My daughter, who's the law and order child, is feeling guilty that she wasn't the one who told the bus driver about the knife. I mean it was obviously such a huge deal, how can she be forgiven for not saying something? Or so she thinks. As a result of this total over-reaction my own children's view of the world is severly distorted, and that's what's bugging me.
In any case, I called the transportation manager today to let him know of my concerns. It was then that I learned of the student's initial refusal to turn over the knife, which makes the whole situation a little more understandable, but still does not justify the cuffs. But of course that's the police, so I called the police chief and tried talking to him. He was in meetings all afternoon, but his assistant promised he'd call me back tomorrow morning. In any event, that's the story. I am interested in your thoughts...
Surrounded by jack-booted thugs
Ross