Just another useless personal blog
Us geeks are a weird lot, and perhaps this helps explain some of it: Five Geek Social Fallacies
I can definitely see aspects of what he describes occuring in places like EverQuest. The whole notion of a guild in these games is an artificial construct put together by people rife with these sorts of problems, so it’s not surprising to see them occur within the guild as well.
Continue reading “You Are All Deranged”
Alas, goatse.cx is no more. See this thread for more information on what happened behind the scenes. (Warning, disturbing inline images.)
What was it? If you don’t know, then consider yourself lucky. And do *not* visit that link above… If you really still want to know, well, it was a very candid look at a particular man’s rectal elasticity capabilities, to put it delicately (nothing to do with goats)…
What was the big deal then? In short, it was a focus of Internet mischief. It was a common volley in wars between people trying to gross each other out. Pranksters of all types would try to trick people into visiting it, through everything from simple direct links to fool newbies who’d never heard of it, all the way up to elaborate scripting to hide the true url to catch the suspicious and wary. In many circles people are now so suspicious that they carefully check each URL they see posted several different ways before daring to click on it. It was a form of punishment, something you would direct people to after you caught them stealing your image bandwidth. It was also a test of mettle, to see just how jaded you’d become to seeing shocking things on the net.
And now it is gone, at least officially. It will live on in various forms, of course. Many, many people have already ‘experienced’ it and it is one of those images that once seen, cannot be un-seen, and will be forever burned into their minds. And certainly some people will have the image cached away, ready to strike from their own private servers. It just won’t be the same, though.
Oh well, there’s always tubgirl…
This is a stack of CDs. CDs containing games. Games which I STILL HAVEN’T FINISHED YET. Some of them I haven’t even *started*.
I never meant to fall so far behind, of course, but then something called EverQuest happened. I still managed to sneak in some time to play other games too, but the vast majority of the time my first impulse was to log into EQ, see if anything was happening, if anyone needed me for a group, etc. All these other games weren’t going anywhere, they’d still be there in the exact same place I saved, but getting things done in EQ often meant being online at the right place at the right time.
Normally that would have just meant that the couple others I was playing at the time would have been the ones to suffer, but of course there’s more than that now. New games were still coming out and I’d hear about them through the usual reviews and word of mouth and felt like they were worth checking out. So, I’d pick up new games, install them and fool around with them for a bit, but…whoops, time to log in for that raid on Chardok tonight. Before long they too would fall to the wayside.
So, now I’ve got this mountainous pile of unfinished games. I haven’t spent as much time in EQ lately so I do have some more time to spend on them, but it’s still going to be pretty slow going. I also still like going back to some of the highly-replayable games like the Civ series and Diablo 2, which doesn’t help work through this pile any.
I’m tempted to say ‘screw it’ to my usual gaming approach and just grab walkthroughs and whip through them all as fast as possible, just to at least enjoy the stories, dialogue, victories, etc…
A RAID array may save your data from drive failure, but it won’t protect it from brain farts.
heide:/media/video/anime$ mkdir tmp ; cd tmp
heide:/media/video/anime/tmp$ cp ../bagi_part*
heide:/media/video/anime/tmp$ ls
heide:/media/video/anime/tmp$Wait, what did I just do…
I just copied the part 1 file over top of the part 2 file, that’s what… Gotta be careful with those wildcard expansions, especially when ‘cp’ and ‘mv’ are involved. (In this case I forgot the ‘.’ parameter at the end to tell it to copy the files here instead of over each other.)
Fortunately I hadn’t wiped the Linux partition on the old system yet and could recopy it back from there. Laziness pays off sometimes…
Lotus Notes must die. It was pushed onto us when we got bought out by our parent company and we had to integrate with their e-mail system, and it’s come to be universally loathed around the office. Outlook/Exchange had their own fair share of problems, but at least they were well-known and livable.
Continue reading “How Do I Hate Thee? Let Me Count The Ways…”
Wouldn’t you like to cruise around town in one of these babies?
A little late, but oh well…
I took a couple weeks off in December and spent some time in Edmonton visiting family and friends. It was good to see everyone again of course; I have to take an occasional break from going nuts by myself down here in Cowtown. :-) I ate, and read books, and ate, and watched TV specials, and ate, and watched movies, and ate, and chatted, and ate, and visited my grandfather, and ate… Maybe I was premature in buying a smaller belt.
It seems like Edmonton changes more and more drastically every time I visit, too. This time, as I passed by Old Scona, I noticed huge differences. One whole section of buildings had been demolished, new construction was underway in spots, and numerous old shops were gone and replaced by rather low-budget operations. Calgary Trail keeps stretching further and further south. The malls downtown have almost been entirely overhauled. There’s been more activity in the last few years than in most of my youth spent there.
I am also an idiot. After carefully packing up everything I needed for the trip, I rushed out at the last second and forgot a whole pack of items sitting on the kitchen table, including my CDs and Discman, Gameboy, batteries, adapters and chargers, and other miscellaneous accessories.
“Aw, isn’t that sweet,” you might say. “His separation from modern technology taught him the value of basic, plain living and how we shouldn’t rely on blah blah blah…” Screw that. I don’t depend on most of these gadgets; they were bought specifically *for* travelling, and if they get left behind then they were a waste. I did take books with me; if I had left them behind instead would I have been expected to have learned how to get by without books and just enjoy simple electronic pleasures instead? :-P
Anyway, back to the grind…
Looking around at a lot of people I know, it seems like I’m the only one *not* using or at least praising the Mac. Why haven’t I taken the plunge yet? Well, it’s not any “OS A sucks, B rulez!!1!” mentality; OSX sounds just great from most reports so far.
I already have two working systems, a full-time Linux server for ‘work’ and a dual boot XP/Linux system for gaming and other CPU-intense tasks, and between them I have pretty much all of my needs covered. Whenever I upgrade it’s almost always to get better gaming performance, not for experimental systems. I don’t really have the room for a new system and I’m not about to *replace* a whole system with a relatively unknown (to me) one. I just don’t have any big incentive to switch or add in a Mac yet.
Except maybe in one spot… The one thing I’m still missing is a laptop. It’s always been a fairly low priority item for me since I don’t travel much, but there’s the odd time it might be useful. Since the tasks it would need to be able to handle would be pretty basic (store files, access USB devices, basic net connectivity), a Mac would cover those basic tasks pretty well while still letting me have one to tinker with.
Will I? Eh, depends on how lazy I’m feeling when/if I ever get around to it. :-P It probably wouldn’t even be a top-end model; something like the 14″ iBook would likely suffice. I’m certainly not about to shell out $4300 for this one…
I know that we geeks are a weird lot, but calendars aren’t all that weird. Except maybe calendars related to an online game, that’s a tad odd. Especially when it’s a pin-up calendar. With scantily clad women that don’t even exist. In spider web bondage.
What kind of freaks do they think we are, anyway?
Oh, right…
Yeesh. My server had been up for almost a full month since the last reboot, but I go away for a week and what happens? A mere eight hours after leaving the house, one of the hard drives flakes out and leaves the system hung for the rest of the week…
For all of the computing progress we’ve made so far, it’s amazing that some things are still so fragile.
All I wanted to do today was install the new NWN expansion, and while it was merrily copying the files to the hard drive it ran into some sort of error and threw up a cryptic dialog box. Normally I’d just restart the install, but oh no, it wasn’t going to be that simple… The expansion pack now no longer recognized that NWN was even installed at all and wouldn’t allow itself to continue.
So, I was going to have to reinstall all of NWN. No problem, I dug out all of the CDs and manuals (damn the bastard who thought printing all the CD keys in the manuals was a good idea) and started a fresh install. After copying all three CDs, it asked for the first disc again, and after putting it in my CD-ROM drive started freaking out. It’s a rather….quirky drive, so I’d gotten used to these little hissy-fits where it would make strange noises, fail to recognize discs, etc., but this time it just sat there continually spinning and making its little choking noises and nothing I could do would stop it; it ignored the eject button, and attempting to bring up the system manager would just hang forever. So, I eventually had to give up and just hit the big ‘ol reset button.
Of course, since the install wasn’t quite finished yet and I’d forcibly aborted it, I had to redo it all over again…
You’d think we’d be able to build tools and programs that are better at monitoring their own state, repairing themselves, and recovering from errors cleanly. We always like to take the easy way out though, and when a simple “eh, just try reinstalling it” works, doing it properly becomes a much lower priority. Especially when it’s just a silly game…
Apparently a father and his son had decided that their pit bull was too old to fight anymore, so of course in their mind the only logical thing to do was drown it. However, they only managed to succeed in drowning themselves.
“The pit bull is still alive and unharmed.”
Does anyone want to buy the full-screen version of the Scarface DVD?
I wanted the widescreen version, of course, but it wasn’t until I’d put it in the player, hit Play Movie, and saw the ‘edited-for-your-screen’ notice that I realized I had the wrong one. I was quite surprised as this is the first time I’d ever picked up the wrong version of a movie. I looked at the case and saw the “Full Screen” lettering right at the bottom of the front, so I accepted that I’d just plain screwed up; I must have been in too much of a hurry, or assumed it would be widescreen since it was an ‘anniversary edition’, or just plain forgotten to check.
So today, when I went to pick up the right version, I checked to make sure it was the widescreen one. I found the rack with them, checked the front of the box, and…it said nothing. It turns out that although it mentions whether it’s full or widescreen on the front of the plastic case, it *doesn’t* say so on the front of the cardboard box wrapped around the case. It does say so on the spine of the box, but in easily-missed tiny print near the edge.
I’m still a dumbass for not checking in the first place, but come on Hollywood, don’t make this even more difficult. If you’ve got a rack full of the same movie in two different versions but the front doesn’t tell you which one it is, that’s just asking for trouble — I’m probably going to glance over them all, not see any difference, and think that there’s only one version there.
Silly spammers, I crush you like bug!
It did catch me off guard though; I’d never even thought of the possibility spammers would start making comments in blogs, guestbooks, and such automatically. I shouldn’t have been surprised though, as I’ve had to deal with spammers advertising in game forums before.
Fortunately there are already filters and plugins available to help stop them, for MT at least.
You thought the RIAA was bad? It appears that ASCAP is also joining the Evil club.
The whole process of detemining who has the right to collect money for anything music-related is fairly complex, but the way they’re going about it here is outright extortion. “No, we haven’t proven you’ve violated any licenses, but pay us anyway or we’ll sue you into oblivion.” Even if they could win, the legal fees alone would bankrupt most clubs and bars.
It’s reminiscent of how Microsoft would force computer vendors to pay for DOS licenses for every machine sold, even if it didn’t ship with DOS on it…
The War on Spam is getting to the point where you need better automated tools; having to manually adjust procmail filters for every new trick was quickly becoming annoying.
So, I finally decided to give SpamAssassin a whirl. It’s always been highly recommended but I’d been a bit hesitant to use it since it looked like it might be overkill. It’s the kind of thing you install to handle spam across entire corporate networks (we use it at work here too), so I was expecting something sendmail-like in its difficulty to configure and admin. It turned out to be pretty painless, though — do the ‘make install’, set up the .forward and .procmailrc files (the samples included work just fine), and ta-da, you’re done and your e-mail is now being spam-filtered.
The important question is, of course: does it work? The answer is yes…and no. So far it has caught a good number of spam messages and not accidentally flagged any valid e-mail as false positives. There are however still a few types of messages making it through the filter:
1) Viruses. Unfortunately Swen and its ilk are still circulating around the net far too much, and with little text in the message to parse and none of the spammer’s tricks being used, it’s hard for SpamAssassin to catch these. Technically it’s not really SA’s job to catch viruses; I’ll have to find another package and use it to do additional virus filtering instead.
2) Short, generic spam. These are those messages with vague subjects like “hi”, “lose it”, “can u spend few mins?” etc. and worded like a friendly greeting. Since most of the usual spammer’s tricks are missing, SA can’t judge these very well.
However, there is hope for the latter case: SA uses ‘Bayesian filtering’ to attempt to learn what spam looks like. If I keep feeding messages like those to the database, it should eventually start to be able to tell the difference between them and valid e-mail and start filtering them automatically. In theory, anyway. Only time will tell how well it will work, as it has to build up a history first.
In the meantime I still have to handle those viruses and some spam messages manually. It’s still better than no filtering at all though, and using the SA tools to teach it about the spam it misses isn’t too much of a hassle.
Searching the Alaska Sex Offender Registry reveals that there are indeed five registered sex offenders in that state named Chester.
At least none of them have the middle name Wayne…
(Am I bored? Why yes, yes I am.)
Monica Bonvicini said visitors would have to “defy their own embarrassment” to use the minimalist cubicle, made from one-way mirrored glass.
It is impossible to see into the toilet, which will be free to use, but the person inside can see passers-by. — BBC
I finally got around to buying a proper set of headphones for my portable music. Unfortunately, I was focusing primarily on making sure that they were light and unobtrusive — I have a fantastic quality set of headphones at home already, but they’re big and bulky and shut out nearly all other sound, which doesn’t make them very practical for day-to-day casual use. That led me to a set of Sony headphones that only cost around $16, but they seemed to be just what I was looking for.
Of course, they turned out to be utter crap. Too much of the sound leaks away, especially high frequencies, the headband is some cheap plastic that I swear is going to break within a month, and the jack is ultra-quirky. The slightest shift causes crackling, volume fading, and the right channel vanishing entirely.
I’m probably going to have to go down to somewhere like A&B Sound to find a *true* decent set of headphones that won’t break easily, sound good, and work reliably, and it’ll probably cost an arm and a leg. Of course, there are limits…
An artist has created a usable public toilet in a glass cube to challenge the curiosity – and bravery – of people passing London’s Tate Britain gallery.