Story Archive - April 2006

Friday Night Poker (04/26/2006)

He was always late on principle, his principle being that punctuality is the thief of time. - Oscar Wilde

Friday evening my cousin showed up. Well sure, I'd seen him just a week ago for Easter, but I never see enough of the family so everytime I get a chance to see one of the it's a treat. We had a little party watch the first episode of the new new Dr. Who. I have a fiend that has a chronic habit of not showing up for events she says she is going to. She flakes. It's responsible flaking, since she isn't seminal to the event. To add a little shame to her, I said we would have a betting pool on what time she would call to say she wasn't going to be there. We also have a pool for what time she might show up.

At 8:55pm she called up, "If I show up now, who will win?" "Well, Adam will win if you get here in the next five minutes, otherwise Wesley wins." "I'll do my best, but since God hates Adam, I probably won't make it." Adam lost, because God hates him. The proof only keeps building.

Idiot Box (04/24/2006)

I hate television. I hate it as much as peanuts. But I can't stop eating peanuts. - Orson Welles

Growing up, my family room had cable. I was always in the study with the computer, so I didn't watch it much. It just never interested me. When I graduated from college and moved into my own apartment I didn't get cable for my television then. The rabbit ears that had graced my room's TV in childhood stayed on top of the box. I predictably watched just a few hours a week and almost all from PBS. I remember when all my friends would rant and rave about TiVO. With the few shows I watched, my VCR was more than enough to handle it.

I have cable now, but there still isn't a lot I want to watch. Old re-runs of Star Trek: TNG and the Daily Show take up most of the evening hours these days when there isn't the PBS shows on. I got Netflixs this past week. I'm doing a trial run to see how I like the one-movie-at-a-time program. The first movie delivered was Bubba Ho-Tep. The next on the queue will be Grave of Fireflies. Netflix really needs a Web 2.0 widget I can add to my website, you know? Could someone get on that for me?

Working on teh Geek (04/19/2006)

When a comedian's program is finally finished it slinks down Memory Lane into the limbo of yesteryear's happy hours. All that the comedian has to show for his years of work and aggravation is the echo of forgotten laughter. - Fred Allen

I've been spending some time playing around with technology. Since my first USR Robotics PalmPilot Pro, I've carried my calendar around on me. I'm a fan syncing. There was a time when my Palm was syncing with StarOffice under OS/2, Linux and Windows all at once. It has tended to be the connector of all my various applications. Everyone can sync with a Palm. My current setup is syncing my Palm to Outlook at work using IntelliSync and iCal at home using iSync. It mostly works well.

Just last week Google finally got around to releasing their calendar, so I wanted to get that new technology hooked into all my other syncing applications. So know I have Google Calendar through iCal Sharing to iCal through iSync to Palm through IntelliSync to Outlook. That directions works fantastic! Unfortunately, Google Calendar can't subscribe to my iCal. So I can't get events to go from the other three places I enter them (Outlook, Palm and iCal) back into the Google Calendar. It's close. I can taste it. I was playing around with the idea of writing a script that would daily delete my last imported iCal at Google and upload a fresh one. It's do-able. I just need to find the time to do it.

I've been busy with other things. I was looking through the AppleScript library when I noticed that the "say" AppleScript can output to aiff. Then I noticed that the "say" OSX command-line application can also output to aiff. Mix in a little bit of LAME technology, and I can produce MP3s. Add in a little Perl scripting, like what creates my RSS feed, and I can easily convert my daily entries in a MP3 format. All of a sudden, I have a Podcast without any of the hassle of talking. I call it, "Podcasting 2.0." Mine is "The Voice of Chaos." You see, it's ironic, because it's not my voice. Anyway, you'll see a new "Podcast" link appear up top next to the XML, WML and Google links. This site just gets more Web 2.0 every day!

The Sweet Smell of Defeat (04/11/2006)

There is nothing like an odor to stir memories. - William McFee

My tennis shoes smell. Not so much that it's deadly, but I notice. If you notice the smell of your own shoes, well, that's not a good thing. I take them off the moment I get home and let them air out, but it's not enough.

So how do remove the bouquet from a pair of shoes? I searched the internets for solutions and read quite a few, but the strangest one I kept running across was to put the shoes in a bag and freeze them over night. It's not like a I found that at a single site, I found it at quite a few. So, in the interest of knowledge I put one shoe in a bag and into the freezer to sit overnight. I poured baking powder into the other shoe.

Sixteen hour later I took a deep whiff and have concluded thus: Baking powder works. Freezing does not work. Now you know.

Here Be Dragons (04/10/2006)

I believe in fairies, the myths, dragons. It all exists, even if it's in your mind. - John Lennon

In a half spontaneous and half planned attempt to have a bit of an early celebration for the one-year anniversary of my first date with Gumdrop (three days after the first kiss, but about four months before I converted from being called 'the hot guy she was dating' to her 'boyfriend') we went running off to the Sausalito Cetacean Institute of Biology in Monterey. We kept close watch on the weather thinking we wouldn't go if the continuous onslaught of water kept falling, but on Saturday morning the sky blue, the gas tank was full and the drive was on!

I have no actual memory of being at the aquarium before, though I'm assured by my parents I did go as a child. I'm told the place has changed a lot in the last few years, but I wouldn't be able to point out anything. Some time was spent talking with Homer and staring pensively off into the ocean.

We had a nice little seafood dinner and tried to avoid eating anything off the don't eat list we got from the aquarium. I've been gossiping a lot about the relationship with my friends and I find it fascinating to hear the scale range from, "Wow, it's already a year?!?" to the other end of "Really? No, you guys must have been dating for at least two years." Fascinating. I think I teeter-tooter between the two depending on the alignment of the stars. When we go running away to Monterey on a whim, that's makes me teeter towards feeling everything is new. Though when we go a high school play that her younger cousin is in and I recognize many of the people from the last high school play we saw, I tooter over to the sense that is' been years. Both are good; both are fantastic.

Decaying Fish (04/06/2006)

Guests, like fish, begin to smell after three days. - Benjamin Franklin

I would say that three or four days a week I get lunch at the same Mexican restaurant with my coworkers. The other days we get lunch provided by some department or another. One of the items on the menu at the Mexican joint is a whole fish including the greasy skin and ugly head. I am always a little freaked out when someone orders it.

Today I had to work through lunch but the group came back and brought me the eaten head of one of the fish. The eyes and the cheeks were gone, because apparently those parts are tasty? I wouldn't know. Thankfully I was at my desk because they had planned to stuff it into my bag for me to find later. I can only image how long my beloved bag would have smelled of decaying fish.

The guy who brought it back threw it out in the trash can next to his desk, but less than five minutes later the smell was too much even for him and he had to move it to the kitchen trash. Damn I'm thankful it didn't end up in my bag.

Death of a Game (04/05/2006)

The secret we should never let the gamemasters know is that they don't need any rules. - Gary Gygax

There was an article online about the slow and painful death of the role playing game industry. In high school, once I could drive, the trunk of my car was always filled with (1) a bag full of DnD books, (2) a bag full of MERP/Rolemaster books, (3) a bag full of Storyteller books, (4) a change of clothes and (5) a sleeping bag. What more did a growing boy need? I remember spending nearly every Saturday up until the sun rose playings games. Then the sane people would go to sleep and the insane people would go to water polo. Even in college while my fellow students were out smoking pot and picking up hookers, I was hidden in the attic or the basement with a group of people playing LARP.

Being a geek and being a nerd continue to become cooler and grow closer to the mainstream, but the classic RPG isn't getting the same love. Spend all night coding? Women will be all over your! Spend all night playing WoW? You are guaranteed to score with some of them. But spend all night playing with little figures on mats and rolling dice? You're a loser and will probably die alone.

Strange, isn't it? The hobby shops are closing and game companies are producing fewer and fewer new games and books. There was a huge percentage of there market share made from the hack-and-slash crowd. I started as one of those and I remember taking my brother through giant Hero's Unlimited games where he would leave a ridiculous pile of bodies trailing behind his characters. That crowd has graduated to the MMORPG where they can be unburdened by the whole concept of role playing and discuss the previous day's math test while defeating thegelatinous cube. There's no real role playing there. Why would there be? You don't earn experience for it. There won't be a real role playing MMORPG until someone perfects the program that can detect good role playing and reward players for it. Some nerdy PhD working on a thesis in AI should be hard at work on this right now.

The drying up of sales and the lack of new games will never affect me. I've mostly hung up my game hat, but in the future when the opportunity to torture my children comes around, the same three bags full of books will still give me everything I need to do it. I suspect my children will happily unjack their brain from the Wired to play old-school with dear old dad. While my friend Chris sits tapping an oily d20 against the glass with a huge grin on his face and Coffee mug that says "World's Best Dungeon Master" the sounds of the other Chris and Jeff arguing over exactly how to calculate THAC0 will cause a dull thudding in everyone's brain.

I'm done here. I'm going back to play more Heroscape.

Running in Circles (04/04/2006)

Style is that which indicates how the writer takes himself and what he is saying. It is the mind skating circles around itself as it moves forward. - Robert Frost

On the technology side of things you'll notice (or maybe not) that I've updated my website to be even more Web 2.0 compliant. I've added rounded corners to the menu bar on the right side and more importantly added BETA to the title image. The linkroll is there too in the Recent Dogma showing you what my cool friends with RSS are writing about. I still need some sort of cool AJAX (I'm thinking of making the random photo rotate automatically).

I installed the OSX 10.4.6 update yesterday and had the first real issue with my Mac. Well, my hard drive did crash fantastically once destroying my Home folder. I guess my power brick did catch on fire at one point as well. So I had the first real software issue with my Mac from Apple software. I was working on the Mac for most of the afternoon after the install without noticing. All my applications were working and Dashboard was working and Spotlight was working. I clicked the Finder Dock icon and Finder deselected, and then I noticed the Finder menu bar slide down over the existing app menu bar. No Folder window came up. I clicked the Menu for a New Finder Menu and the Finder flashed and a new menu bar slid down without opening a window.

It was at this point the Stanford Level 2 help desk came to my aid explaining to me that my Finder was crashing. It was. So I nuked the Finder preferences and restarted Finder. At this point, Finder got stuck in a continual loop of restarting. It would focus for about a second, crash and then restart. My Desktop icons would appear and vanish about once a second and I couldn't do anything. I had to ssh in from another computer and restore the Finder preferences to make the computer slightly more usable.

Egads! I searched the Wired for a solution but nothing suggested worked. I was getting ready to take it to the Apple Store to have one of the Geniuses look at it. Though, I've found with the combine power of the internets at my disposal, I can typically summon more genius than they can. So I made another guess and downloaded the Combined 10.4.6 update. It's a little tricky to mount a DMG when you can't run the Finder. It's harder to open the Folder and run it. I did and problem resolved! I breathed a long needed sigh of relief.

Staring at the Ceiling and Thinking of You (04/03/2006)

Even now, when I'm asked how I'm doing, I like to reply, 'Pretty good. I've got all my fingers and both eyes. - Charley Pride

Too much work and too much play makes me a busy boy. I've been taking pictures, but I can't find my camera USB cable and my camera is antique enough that it's a non-standard cable. Guess that means it might be time for an upgrade. I'm trying to get a card reader from one of my friends so I can pull off what is there. Where is that cable?

I got calls from two friends over the past few days that I haven't talked to for weeks if not months. A lot of my friends have been slipping by the wayside recently with all the other things and I hadn't actually realized it. Apologies were exchanged and dinners and coffee talks were added to calendars. It's hard to manage all these friends across all these miles and all these places. It's hard to write all the mails and make all the phone calls that are needed. I know it's lame in that techy sort of way, but it's one of the reasons I like the online thoughts of life. No longer do my friends need to be burdened by writing long individualized mails or by having mass mailing lists. Instead they publish what they want to share on the Wired, and people they know who want to read can read. It's just that simple.