This could be a ... (Open Thread)

Maybe it's an airplane? What do you all think?

Days Behind

So I'm falling a day behind updates, though maybe today I'll catch up. Warning, partial spoilers may follow, though mostly minor.


Yesterday (monday) we finished watching Buffy season 4, which puts us up to having completed Angel season 1 and Buffy seasons 1-4. Comparing the two most recently watched, I liked Angel better than Buffy 4, but some of Buffy season 2-3 was probably overall better than the Angel ones we've seen. Still, I like the setting for Angel a lot better, and I also like the main character a whole lot more - Buffy makes a lot of immature mistakes, which tend to be the focus of some of the episodes, where Angel makes more serious mistakes, which tend to be the focus of some of the episodes. The supporting cast for both is really good though, I especially liked Spike, Anya and Xander in season 4. For some reason, Willow and Tara just seem more blah in this season, I was expecting to like them a lot more. On the Angel side, Cordelia is one of my favorite characters, and Wesley got a huge amount cooler since his appearances on Buffy. Gunn has only showed up in a few episodes, but I like him already, so pretty much the whole cast gets a thumbs up for me.

In terms of episodes, picking my favorites from each season is tough, so I'll just list a top three for each.

Buffy Season 4:
1: The Harsh Light of Day: Return of Spike, oh yeah. :)
2: Fear Itself: Giles with a chainsaw!
3: Hush: Really creepy story and villains.

Angel Season 1:
1: Hero.
2: Sanctuary: I love the character developments in this one.
3: Blind Date / To Shanshu in LA: Again, development of one of the characters in these two was really cool, and the episodes as a whole worked well.

Magical Mountains

Sunday (today/yesterday) was our trip to Magic Mountain. We rode lots of coasters, which is my main reason for going to theme parks.

Some highlights: After a long wait for the Tatsu, including a 30m wait when we were the 3rd group in line because it broke down, we got to ride that one. It was as good as I remembered, but the experience was marred by having to wait so long, among other things. But immediately after that we went on the Ninja! Nin Nin Nin! No wait time at all, and it's a great little coaster, an inverted cars type which zips in and out of the trees above one of the water rides, much like a "real" ninja might.

Next up I went for my standard attempt to convince people to ride the Superman with me. I usually fail at this, but this time everyone helped me convince L's sister to go with! We waited in line, which was pretty short, which is good as the ride itself is pretty short and if there's a long line it's not really worth it. The queuing was fun, because there are two spots where the path splits, and each time I asked which way we should go, only to get an indifferent answer... so we went left at the first split, and left again at the second split, and ended up being all the way in the front of the car! For those who may not know this ride, it's a powered launch which accelerates quite rapidly, and then it hits a hill and ends up going straight upwards. Then you say hi to Superman, experience a bit of weightlessness and then go rocketing backwards along the track back up to the station. Basically a L shape where you start at the base of the L. It was excellent! I hadn't been on it in several years, but it was worth the wait. I think Ris liked it as well, at least once she opened her eyes to see Superman.

Next in line was the Deja Vu, which is a coaster I'd not been on in previous trips: This is sort of an out and back coaster, but with a cool design: It's an inverted coaster (you hang from the track), and the seats are in a blunt V shape, such that for one car you'd have 4 across, but they're staggered, so even the seats in the middle have a good view to the sides. The train gets pulled up a giant vertical column which is 'before' the station, and then released to go rocketing through the station, into a couple of half loops and then a full loop and then up another vertical column, where it hangs for a few seconds. And then you go through the exact same setup in reverse, which feels really cool because you can't see where you're going at all this time. The wait for this one was a decent bit, but was very worth it, especially since I'd not been on it before, and I'll definitely go again.

We then walked over to the Batman, along the way we spotted the Batman Action Theatre, with huge explosions and stuff going on there, though we couldn't see very well. It was really packed, which I found surprising at first, then it made more sense: I go to theme parks pretty much exclusively for the coasters, but a lot of families with smaller children (who can't ride the coasters) have to do other things, and thus an action show is probably a good bet. Anyways, the Batman coaster was excellent, there was no waiting (it's one of the older coasters in the park) and it was a good ride. Some of the others say it's one of the worst for motion sickness, but as I don't really get motion sick it's one of my favorites. It's also an inverted coaster, sitting, and has a lot of loops and corkscrews.

Finally, we visited the Scream. Which I think is a dumb name for a coaster and doesn't have as strong a theming as the rest, but it still is a good ride: non-inverted (is there a better name for that) sit-down coaster, four people across, and it has a ton of loops, corkscrews and that sort of thing. Probably either the smoothest or second smoothest looping coaster in the park (I think the Tatsu is a bit smoother of a ride, but hard to compare the two.)

We had two other stops on the list, but unfortunately when we reached the Goliath (my favorite coaster in the park, and also L's most hated) it was closed for a while due to malfunction, and thus we moved on (It did start up again before the park closed, but it was getting late). We headed over to the X, which is the only other coaster in the park I'd not tried, along the way a huge fireworks display started over the park. Very awesome. There was a pretty big line for the X, and since we didn't actually know how long it was (since you couldn't really see the far part of it, and we'd not been on it before), we decided to save that one for another day.

Back from SF!

And we're back! Yep, these two posts were made within a few minutes of each other. That'd be because I've been out of internet contact. I did pull up my laptop while in a mall in SF friday, but while there were several wireless networks, the public ones didn't appear to work (I suspect they were public, but only authenticated MAC addresses could be used on them). Oh well, so instead yall just get a pair of posts essentially from saturday.

The trip up and back was pretty uneventful. There was one weird bit with taking the bay bridge into SF: it was during some really heavy traffic, and I was in a leftmost lane. I couldn't figure out what lane I should be in, because some were marked FastTrack or something, and so when I saw a carpool lane (the first I'd seen in SF) I got into that one. We entered the toll booth area, and I was ready to pay the 4$, but the lane I was in came to a booth with no person in it, and it didn't appear to care that I was there (there was a screen, but it was hard to read in the glare, I recall it flashing up a 0$ sorta thing). So we went on, but I had this nagging feeling I was supposed to pay 4$ for the toll. I found out later that the nagging feeling was correct, but for the wrong reason: apparently carpools don't have to pay the toll, but carpools in SF are three people, rather than the two person per car rule in LA. So I shouldn't have been in the carpool lane, and thus would have had to pay the toll. Oh well, I just hope they don't get irritated about the carpool lane thing and fine me huge amounts. Coming back across the same bridge, we were all set to pay the toll, I had figured out which lane type would work (after talking with a native) and let me pay by cash, and then there was no toll booths at all going eastbound. Doh!

Anyways, here's how our stay in SF went: Drove up, got there about 4:30pm or so, received multiple calls to figure out where/what we should do. We ended up needing to delay til about 6:30pm before we'd have something to do, so we went looking for Cody's books, a bookstore I'd heard about. Finally found it after walking in the wrong direction a bit, only to find out that they had closed, and their Berkeley location should still be open. So we went back instead to the huge mall (between Market and Mission, and 4th and 5th). It gave the impression of being huge, with directory displays that didn't just have a flat listing of all the stores, but instead had a touch screen searchable index, and when you picked a store it displayed how to get there. I think it was actually smaller than the Beverly Center mall, but it gave the impression of being bigger. Hard to tell though, we only stayed for a little bit and went to three stores in a localized area of the mall.

We did see a cool store, which seemed extremely niche: It sold handbags, fancy ladies dress shoes, and half-trenchcoat-like coats. I spent a while trying to figure out how that could be economically feasible, but gave up. If you've got ideas, let me know.

After the mall visit, it was time for dinner! This is good, because we'd eaten a long time ago. We first navigated to pick up Weronika, and then headed to Little Italy to meet up with L's parents and sister. We arrived in Little Italy ok, and then spent the next way too long trying to find parking. Finally found it, and had an extremely good dinner at a place whose name I was too tired to note, and thus don't remember.

Zzzzzzz. Then there was a drive again and then sleep. Today, we met up again and L's sister joined us. (I don't know how to write about her - I think she reads this blog already, but I don't like using people's names. Except I clearly don't mind in some cases, so I'm not sure exactly what it is. I almost always keep myself and L partially anonymous in name, but not always other people... Sorry for the digression...) The plan evolved: Go to Berkeley! We found out that Cody's books in Berkeley had closed, at least the location on telegraph. Doh! But there was still Claire, a friend of Weronika and L, whom L hadn't seen in a year or so, so we met up with her for lunch and afterwards went to Games of Berkeley. Lots of great stuff there, we ended up buying a module for Serenity (written by Laura and Tracy Hickman!), and a board game based on Order of the Stick. Also very tempting were Exalted books covering Autochthonians, and one covering Fair Folk, plus 3rd edition L5R and Nth edition Paranoia. (The latter two Weronika did pick up, and I was sorely tempted to). There were also a ton of other things that were pretty cool: Arkham Horror expansions, which one of the store's staff said were excellent, in the we're all gonna die quicker version of excellent. I also saw the Sluggy Freelance cardgame, a Paranoia card game (It's mandatory!), lots of the new Magic cards, some great figurines (both painted - Hero Clix and some Mechwarrior type stuff, and unpainted - lots of great fantasy hero/heroine type ones, saw a great elven ranger that might have been Thiryal), and more stuff I'm forgetting at the moment. Anyways, this took up most of our time and we left late in the afternoon, luckily still early enough to miss the traffic (thanks Lem for the warning about traffic times!), though there was a little but it cleared up quickly.

The trip back was uneventful too, though I thought it worth mentioning that I was going to stop at the Shell on the hill (do people remember that place?), but we ended up needing gas and drinks about 25 miles before that point, so instead we waved as we went by. The only other thing of note was that I was alone in the front seat and we were listening to CD's. At one point we had put on the Postal Service CD I recently got, and it finished and started over. I took it out and asked for another CD to replace it (the case was in the back), and it took a little bit to figure out that the reason I wasn't getting any response was that they were sound asleep in the back. Oh well, I ended up listening to that CD three times through, and the rest got a nap. :)

Gone to SF

We leave today to go up to SF, to say hi to L's parents and then to kidnap her sister back to Pasadena. I think it would be a more devious plan if we actually were to kidnap her, rather than it being a pre-arranged thing where she flies back to Michigan after a week. Speaking of Michigan, it appears her sister got a position with the SF Ballet and will be living there soon! I don't really understand the details, but perhaps I'll ask her to guest blog about it while she is here.

Also, this post is way overdue, as you will see shortly.

Laying Out

Whoa, this post won't be at 11:59 pm!

In ultimate frisbee today, I had my best play ever. I was guarding someone who'd beaten me before, and we were near the end zone, with his team having the disc. He gets a step on me and streaks towards the end zone corner. I can tell the throw is going to him, and I'm a step behind, so I sprint as hard as I can. My hat nearly falls off, getting in my view, but I grab it in my left hand. We're in the end zone now, the throw is in the air chest height and I leap. Imagine lying down on a bed on your side, with one hand stretched above your head as far as it can go. Now imagine doing that with no bed, three feet up in the air. It's like flying. I push the disc outwards right as it reaches his hands. It goes flying out of bounds.

Sleeping Z

Zzzzzzzz......

So, what's on your mind?

On my mind currently is that I'm very tired but I've got some work overdue which has taken too long. It's looking like I'll be able to finish up by tomorrow so that leaving friday will work. Whew.

Oh, anyone up in SF want to say hi? We'll be there some friday/saturday, not sure how much free time but would love to say hi to anyone who is around :)

Sleeping Ratties

And now, your regular rattie update! Or not so regular, but at least it's here.

The rats have been doing very well. With the new desk, we moved the cage around so it's a lot closer to the desks and it's easier to say hi to them. They've also been getting out on a regular basis, which appears to make them happy, though they are causing all sorts of trouble. Their latest game is to pull everything off the one remaining shelf (on the desk), so they have room to hide in the cubbyholes. This is very cute, and horribly annoying as there are occasionally crashing noises as they knock something off, and we always worry that the rat fell with.

They have also been very cute while sleeping. I think the temperature is a bit hot for them, even with the AC running, and so when they curl up to sleep they flop over on one side so their belly gets cooled too. It's adorable, but I haven't been able to get a picture of it yet because they always perk up when I bring the camera near. Guess they're only mostly asleep.

We've also found a great way to round them all up. Opening the door to the hallway works like a charm, any of them near that can see it will immediately run straight for the door, and they try to make it through before we can close it. I usually bring one or two with on my shoulder for whatever I was going to do outside the bedroom, but they get bored with that after a while.

Slow Post (Use Caution)

Yup, this one is way late. Yesterday (monday) was one of those write-off days for me, where I feel like I don't get anything done, even though I spend a lot of time working, just on all sorts of scattered things that don't really come together. The other problem with that sort of day is that I forget all sorts of things, like posting something to the blog (among others). Oh well, here's a filler post from the future!

The Xbox 360 arrived at the repair place yesterday (UPS tracking said so!). That's good.
The web login for my xbox account couldn't bring up the info on the repair. That's bad.
The customer service rep on the phone got the xbox to link correctly to the web login. That's good.
The website now shows my xbox repair as still being in the "we sent him a box" stage. That's bad.
But, the customer service rep said that the box arrived at the repair place too! That's good.
Unfortunately, he also said there was a two to three week turnaround time.
That's bad.
Can I have my Xbox now?

Here's to hoping that this is the usual say it's going to take way longer than it actually will. Maybe I will take Lem up on his offer to play Overlord on his box. :)

Soon I Will Be Invincible!

_Soon I Will Be Invincible_ is a book by Austin Grossman. I just read it based on the review over at Girls Read Comics. If you want a more critical review, go over there and read that one. The following is my not terribly critical review.

I really liked this book, and it was mainly due to the viewpoints used to tell the story: Doctor Impossible, evil genius super villain, and Fatale, futuristic cyborg who gets offered a spot on the super-team, the Champions. Doctor Impossible is exactly how I imagined an evil genius would work: logical, crazy ideas that he does make work, a humorous inner monologue, and even self-awareness of his villainry (is that a word?). He's got the plan right from the start, and though the key idea isn't revealed until much later, if you are carefully watching the details it's certainly possible to work out what he's doing.

Fatale, on the other hand, is very new to her abilities, and has that out-of-place perspective when she gets invited to join the world's most famous super team. This works really well, because she has the same thoughts and is curious about the same things that I was, figuring out how the different people on the team interact, what their real back stories are, that sort of thing. She's also one of the best people on the team at analyzing the situation and so getting the perspective from her eyes is key.

Finally, I was completely surprised by a plot twist near the end of the book. There were two, actually, but one of them was completely surprising and I thought it worked really really well. I'm going to have to go back and read it again just to be able to verify all the clues that were there (and there were plenty, since we got to see both sides of the story, the heroes and the villain). The entire world setting was pretty neat as well, I'd be tempted to run a superhero game in the setting just because there's a ton of great heroes and villains mentioned in passing which would make great characters.

I highly recommend this book for a fun read, especially if you like superhero comics, or stories from multiple interesting viewpoints.

Daft Punk is playing ...

And they were excellent. It's interesting, usually when I go to concerts, one of my favorite things to do is watch the artists/performers playing the particular instruments. Usually I watch the drummer and sometimes the bassist or others. For Daft Punk, that does not really work. There's not much visually going on with the artists, and the instrument they play is not visible. This is made up for by the overwhelmingly elaborate visual displays. I don't have good words to describe them as a whole, so let me just give a short glimpse:

The stage opened with a gigantic pyramid in the center (or maybe it'd be better to call it a triangle, or a pyramid cut in half down the diagonal), with Daft Punk inside the pyramid about two thirds of the way up (that section was cut out of the pyramid, but there was still the cap above). They were dressed in what looked like shiny vinyl or leather suits, with reflective robot-style helmets. The visual display started simply, with lights outlining the pyramid in the shape of a triangle, and two large screens to the far sides of the stage showing close ups of the performers and other parts of the stage. Then the large LED display behind the whole stage was added in, previously unnoticed behind them. At some point around here, a secondary display in front of the LED display (and to the sides of the pyramid), which was essentially a triangle honeycomb with lighting along the edges, lit up and was added in to the different visuals. Not content with this, huge lighting strips actually on the pyramid edges were used, and then (for "Around the World") it turned out that the entire arena had similar lighting strips around the edge, which illuminated the whole floor! Next up, it turned out that the surface of the pyramid, not just the edges, were video screens, and they got added into the display! Many variations ensued, such that when they finished the set and the crowd was shouting for an encore, we exchanged remarks as to how they'd be able to top themselves for an encore.

Glowing Costumes. The same ones they were originally wearing were lit up, with light displays along the major lines of the helmets and jackets. Totally awesome and unexpected.

Anyways, it was an excellent show and I even moved around a little somewhat synchronized with the music, which is fairly unusual for me (I'm not sure why, it probably deserves a different blog post about it. I just tend to be a receptive person when listening to music, rather than active or interactive.). Of note were one of the openers for them: Ratatat, which we previously heard on the Gazebo's CD _Some Disassembly Required_. I don't think they played the song which AG put on the mix CD, but they were very good and I'm going to have to hunt down an album soon.

Crying

I wonder if the couple upstairs can tell that their baby is crying. I wonder if they have even woken up from it. I know I can hear it, and I always want to take action when a child is crying, to try and help them. But I feel stuck here, I don't really know them and I don't even know what to do about a baby crying. I think perhaps the key would be to figure out why they are crying, but if it's random that seems like a poor solution.

I know that when people (of any age) cry such that I can notice, my first instinct is to help. Of course, it is hard to tell exactly what one can do to help, but usually a good start is to ask them why or what made them cry, and then be a good listener. Even if you can't do anything about the causes, being able to listen and share that knowledge seems to help.

Box Travel!

And now for your regularly scheduled update on our broken XBOX 360. We got the packing materials yesterday, which included a glossy 8.5x11 page of instructions, anti-static bag, two foam molded pieces for the ends, sticky tape to re-close the box, and a prepaid UPS tracking/shipping form. Did the assembly of the outgoing box, and dropped it off today at a UPS store on the way to the dentist, it was marked as 3-day shipping.

Here's the best part: I walked into the store and one of the two guys that worked there said "An Xbox repair?" Me: "Yep." Guy: "Ok, just drop it there on the counter, the tracking number is your receipt number." Me: "So, you are seeing a lot of these?" Guy: "Yeah, about six to seven a day." I boggle for a while, then walk out. That's a much higher incidence than I'd thought, for him to estimate so many per day, at one of many UPS shipping outlets in Pasadena. I wonder why these problems hadn't shown up earlier? Or if they did, why they weren't as well covered? The first I'd even heard of this type of system failure was when a patch for GHII caused some to start occuring.

Anyways, I checked and the package is now in Ontario, CA, and it's headed to McAllen, TX. Any bets on which day it arrives, post em in the comments. I'm hoping it'll be there by next monday, and back here by next friday. I want to play Overlord! and GHII! And the list goes on...

Comfortably Numb

I spent six hours at the dentist's office today. No, a very small percentage of that was waiting. If you count travel times, it's closer to eight hours.

Oddly enough, it was a lot more painless than I'd imagined. It was very nice to hear that it's going to be painless after a point, and then have it actually be true. Plus, I got to hear the soothing voice of James Earl Jones for a while.

No Content, part 2 (open thread)

Oh how I wish I
had something to say today
I'm not a poet

Tales from the Iconian Empire, Part 2

1 Jul 2225

Much has happened in the past months since my last entry. There were of course many victories during that time: our second colony, Nexus, was established, we met two other space-faring gibberish-speaking races, and we developed an Ion drive based on data found in an artifact recovered from a meteorite. However, the single most important discovery arrived just a week ago from our flagship: they have discovered Paradise. The fourth planet around the star Primus has been so named, and our flagship was the first there, our scouts the first to set foot upon the verdant world lying directly at the center of our star cluster. I am told the planet is even more beautiful, more usable than our homeworld, and upon hearing the news our starport immediately rushed the production of a long range colony ship, at great expense to our treasury.

Let me speak for a moment on the geography of our star cluster. All the stars in the cluster lie roughly in a plane, along the edge of our galaxy. When we refer to this plane, we can then label one axis arbitrarily to be galactic north, and the other galactic east. The intersection of these two is then arbitrary, and we thus let that location be the center of our star cluster. Thus one can imagine the coordinate system upon which I will then describe our geography. Our homeworld, New Iconia, lies almost two parsecs galactic south of the center. Our first colony, Labyrinth, is then a parsec west of the homeworld, and our second colony Nexus is a parsec south of the homeworld. Paradise was discovered within a half parsec distance of the center, and thus is quite far from our homeworld. Along the way there, our flagship also discovered an important source of rare metals (which they named Draconium) and that would be about a parsec north of the homeworld.

A sample of those rare metals were recovered and brought back for study by our scientists. Alas, they proved to not be useful for our technology, but the scientists did come up with another purpose: those metals did make a very exquisite jewelry, possessing an inner glow of different colors, and thus would make excellent luxury goods for our citizens. Thus, immediately prior to our third colony ship (the one which we recently rushed into final production) we sent out a starbase construction ship to establish a mining outpost for these rare metals.

Our research also shifted after the discovery of ion-based drive propulsion, examining some artifacts which previously had been assumed to be junk, but now revealed their basic design to be some sort of translator. With this research we contacted those races we had met before, and established good relations with them. Well, not in the sense of having sent over an embassy, but in the sense that they indicated their good nature and we did the same. The ones we met first were the Torian Confederation, whose homeworld appears to lie one and a half parsecs east of the core. There were also the Akilians, who have not developed star travel, but do have a very large population on a planet a half parsec southeast of the core. Finally, just today I received news that representatives of the Altarians, and the Dominion of Korx were encountered by our flagship. I do not know yet where these lie, but I fear that they will soon discover our Paradise, and attempt to gain it for themselves.

Retribution

Sometimes being a retribution paladin is worth it. Sometimes it isn't, like today I got rejected for a simple BM group, not even a heroic, because in their eyes I was not a good dps. When in my experience, I can beat a lot of the dps I've grouped with, and just basing the decision on that alone is a poor one as I can buff the entire group well and can even function as a main healer for some fights if needed. Their reasoning is usually that they have played a paladin and know what we can do. Which seems like a poor reason, if they have actually played and geared a paladin, they should realize that we bring more than just damage to the table, and with good gear we can actually dish out damage quite well as well.

Oh well.

Then there's fights like this which are pretty fun:

You crit Zaxxis Raider for 1099.
You hit Zaxxis Raider for 621.
Your Seal of Command crits Zaxxis Raider for 1541 Holy damage.
You crit Zaxxis Raider for 1323.
Your Seal of Command hits Zaxxis Raider for 776 Holy damage.
Your Crusader Strike crits Zaxxis Raider for 1427.
Zaxxis Raider dies.

That's a total of 3 swings and one ability, pretty fast :) For those reading who may know WoW, this was without trinkets, without using avenging wrath, and starting without vengeance.

Edit: I start by judging crusader and activating seal of command. This is actually a fairly common fight, I had it happen similarly and started to write this post, it got knocked off the log so I just killed some more and had it happen again easily.

Tales from the Iconian Empire, Part 1

It is now two months since I took over as the leader of the Iconian Refuge. "Emperor Zifnab" has a nice ring to it, and I have already started taking the empire in a new direction. It was fortuitous indeed that my ascension to the throne came merely a few months after the news of the hyperdrive reached us on New Iconia, and the government had already pushed for the creation of a new interstellar colony ship based on this new drive.

The first weeks were where I had to make the toughest decisions: What path of research should the government take based on these new developments? Where should we send our two available interstellar capable ships? What improvements do we make to the infrastructure on the planet, to improve life here while people are yearning for expansion?

Clearly the most difficult and important of these was the research decision. This, however, turned out to be one of the easier decisions: Scientists had put forth a proposal already to build enormous Xeno Laboratories, to research artifacts and other items we proposed to find on other worlds. It would take only a few weeks to begin the first testing stages and for us be able to build these vast laboratories, both on our home planet and those we hoped to colonize. Further choices up until now were also easy, as we had a large need for improved drive technology, the basic hyperdrive units taking up so much space that our lowly scouts would take months to manage a single round trip to a nearby star system and back.

The next decision was more complex: there are six different star systems within the range of two parsecs, and any of them could contain planets viable for colonization. We have only two ships, one which we have called Haplo, a flagship in name, but merely a scout in purpose, and the other being the stately colony ship, ready to transport thousands of our populace to a new world.
We could colonize any of the star systems if we could find a habitable planet, or one of the outer planets of our system, a poor choice perhaps due to the terraforming which would be necessary, but perhaps better to take the known quantity. I quickly narrowed down the choices, thanks to our well developed observatories: only four of the systems contained a significant number of planets, and so we sent our flagship towards the nearest of these, the star named Markus. (Don't ask me who names these. Clearly, if I had been in charge they would have been named differently.) Word reached us even as the flagship was enroute that one of the planets orbiting Markus would be suitable for life, and may even be as habitable as our own homeworld! The colony ship was immediately sent, and the flagship diverted towards the nearby system of Iversonia. This however led to a change in decision, as even as the flagship approached Iversonia, it discovered that the system had two habitable planets, the second and third out, and they were individually even better than the reports from Markus! The colony ship changed course, and the first important achievement during my reign occured a few weeks after that: The empire's first colony world was named Labyrinth, and our colony ship set down and immediately began building the infrastructure necessary to become an asset to the empire, rather than a huge drain on our resources. A sad reality of our colonization efforts is that we must sink huge amounts of money and industrial production into them, and it is only months later that we begin to see a return on that.

As I finish writing this entry, I just received word that there have been ruins discovered on Labyrinth, vast relics of an ancient civilization. It is not expected to further our research any, which is a disappointment, but there is hope that it can be turned into a cultural site, preserved for visitors from our worlds, and others, to see. Our second colony ship has entered production, and we are spending great amounts of money to be able to complete work in just a few weeks, as with every week passing we discover more and more habitable worlds near us.

Distance

L is away up north-ish in San Francisco, visiting Weronika and getting to see her sister, who is in the area for a little while. The set-up to the trip was exciting, in that the shuttle was delayed for over an hour and so Lem drove her to the airport (thanks!), which barely got there in time (flight had been delayed, whew). So now I'm sitting around at home, watching the rats play (read as: watching the rats get into armloads of trouble), and thinking. Here's what I'm thinking:

I miss her when she's gone. It's one of those things that you can't really notice until you're apart, how much you love someone and rely on their presence.

Pretty Pictures

Not much has happened today. At work today we had a huge amount of moving of desks and computers, so that we would be set to use the new rooms and also have a secondary room with a nice table (Currently we only have the conference room and the table in the hallway). This meant that I didn't actually get much done before playing frisbee, because there was always another computer that needed to get shut down, and I'm one of the few people that know how to check to see if there's still processes running on the computer, and also have sudo privileges to shut down the computers that have no visual interface. I've taught people how to check if others are using the computer, but it never seems to stick as I still get this type of request all the time.

Today at frisbee we had a new player in the sense of never having thrown the frisbee much. He had a really bad backhand throw, but it was due to a simple mistake: holding the disc with both hands, the trailing hand stayed on the disc as it was tossed and it consistently would dive to one side. After seeing this a few times to be sure he wasn't doing it intentionally, I worked up the courage to go ask if he'd like a few tips. He seemed quite happy to listen, so I just pointed out how to throw the backhand without using the second hand, explaining why, and then we went back to throwing in the circle (a standard warm-up before playing). Teams came up quickly after that and we started the game, but there were several subs on each side, so I sat out the first few points to toss with the new guy, and he quickly got the hang of it and was throwing a lot better when we entered the game. That really was the payoff for me, he seemed really receptive to advice, and when he took it he got a lot better at the throwing.

Finally, back at home we moved desks and computers a bunch too. This seemed pretty familiar, we set up the desk G+P gave us, and started moving the computers around to better space them out. I'm still not happy with my computer's set up, but I'll figure it out eventually. The constraining issue right now is that it needs to be near the AC or it can overheat fairly badly.

And now, since I named this post before I started writing it, and haven't actually gotten to the one small bit I was going to say, I should do so. Check out this site: GelaSkins. They make vinyl covers for iPods and MacBooks with some really neat paintings/pictures on them. My favorites were "Odaijini", and the classics "Starry Night" and "The Great Wave". Anyways, just thought these were cool enough to pass on since I know a lot of the people reading this have iPods, etc. If you like the link, thank L as she was the one who pointed it out to me.

Oh noes!

So it looks like our 360 has died, oh no! Oddly, I haven't named it. I think perhaps I should start naming consoles, as then they can't die on me. At least according to recent comics at Order of the Stick, that could help. This isn't actually the dreaded three flash red lights death (I'll say it so others can't: "There are FOUR lights!"), but rather a general hardware failure (one flashing red light, lower right quadrant). Still haven't gotten through to customer service, but I think I know what caused this issue: It looks like the exact same error code as the three lights, and one of the common failure modes I've heard is that the GPU (heatsink?) can become unseated at high temperatures, which causes everything to go wonky. Since we actually saw it fail while playing Overlord and it was a really bad graphical corruption, this seems like the likely issue. Oh well, at least from what I've heard they add an extra heat sink when they repair this issue. Hopefully I can have them look at the sticky drive door as well.

Anyways... just thought I'd write about the poor console. I miss it already, now I can't play Overlord and Guitar Hero II for a while. :(

Three Panel Soul

If you haven't seen the webcomic Three Panel Soul, check it out. Today's was especially close to home for me: I've seen those hallways. I always wonder if the world is loading as I walk through them.

Some background on this comic: It's written by Matt Boyd, drawn by Ian McConville, the same team which brought us Mac Hall, one of my all time favorites.

Hide and Seek

Where's Scotty?

Lu Bu can't find him... or maybe he's hypnotized by the camera.


Where's the rest of the blog post? It's hiding!

Doctor's Office

I get nervous about the doctor's office. Or the dentist's, or sometimes even the emergency room/waiting room at the hospital. I don't think it's something about the waiting room though, as it didn't happen when I went for an eye exam, or in the waiting room for a psychiatrist, which are very similar situations.

I'm not sure why it is. I haven't really had bad experiences at the doctor's, or the dentist's. And while I have had bad experiences at the hospital, it was the particular affliction I was there for that was the bad experience, not the environment. One guess I have is that maybe I'm visualizing or empathizing the pain of other patients, or imagined patients. Or maybe I'm nervous that it's going to be me that has horrible problems, rather than the usual check-up in the office which says everything is ok.

In any case, I am nervous, I'm going in to the dentist's office again tomorrow.

Rat Antics

The rats have had a slightly longer time out of the cage today than usual, and so there are several moments which I will collect here that stick out.

Unusually, we let the rats play some during the afternoon. They are very sleepy during the afternoon and usually snooze the whole time, so when the cage got opened they approached it with some trepidity, or perhaps laziness. L managed to coax most of them out to go exploring, but even with some vigorous coaxing Lu Bu decided to remain sleeping in the cage. He eventually came out later, but it was clear that we were not going to interrupt his nap and he would emerge on his own terms.

2
(I don't know how Cao Cao managed to type 2 and enter on the numeric keypad as he walked across it, but since that appears to fit, I'm going to leave it.)

Also during the afternoon, Scotty demonstrated an amazing leap, as he jumped from the floor to the top of a bag of bedding, which is a good 2 feet or so off the floor. It really surprised L, who was watching them nearby.

After returning to their cage as we were about to head off to the baseball game, Patty came by to say hi to the ratties. They did their usual thing, and stacked up in the corner, three noses high. If you have ever seen the rats pile up, it was an especially cute pile in the corner presenting all three's noses towards Patty, even lining them up nicely.

Later in the evening after we got back, there were several other incidents. Cao Cao decided that my baseball cap sitting on the desk was a very good thing to hide inside. He sort of shuffled around with it, and I tried to catch a picture of him poking his head out of the back (where he'd entered). He seemed to like it, but while moving around he also seemed to want to knock the hat off the desk with him inside it. This was narrowly averted, but it looked like he was eager to try it again, so I moved the hat.

Scotty got to play shoulder rat and see what L was doing in the living room. Scotty was pretty good about this, but eventually got bored while watching L play guitar hero 2, and he was dropped off in the room and given a treat. At which point Lu Bu hopped on my foot, and looked up at me - "My Turn! I want treats too! Take me on a shoulder trip!". So he got to visit the living room as well. He is much more well-behaved, and didn't try to hop off the shoulder until after the song finished.

Lu Bu also starred in the twitching rat encounter today. He loves to sit on the desk in between my monitors, next to a speaker and the speaker control box thingie. This is coincidentally the one clear spot on the desk which has the air conditioner blowing directly on it. We refer to him sitting there like so: "Lu Bu's chilling again." The funny thing about this is that he seems to have a really weird nervous reaction while sitting there. Barrick came up to him and preened some of the hair on his back, but when he did this, Lu Bu's tail would twitch madly! I'd seen this happen before, but it's always really crazy. If he gets preened while sitting in front of the AC, his tail twitches like mad. Doesn't happen anywhere else. If I pet him behind the neck while he's sitting there, it'll sometimes happen as well. Really weird.

Speaking of Lu Bu, he tried to escape with the Mac OSX cd case today, lugging it halfway along the shelf and into a cubby hole. Not sure if he had a computer in the cubby hole he wanted to install it on, he got bored after reaching that destination and went off elsewhere.

Barrick decided to balance and pose for me today. Seated on top of a huge plastic container on the top shelf, just under the Much Ado poster. I haven't checked to see if those pictures have turned out yet.

Finally, Blue has been very quiet today, and so I don't really have any stories about him. He did try to steal a leftover peanut from Lu Bu, but didn't appear to be successful at it. I just went over to ask him if he had done anything interesting today - "No comment." I suspect I should go see what trouble he's been into quietly. He did organize a ratty gang, after I found him to see what he'd been up to, he hopped onto my shoulder, along with Lu Bu, Cao Cao and Barrick, and they ran around a bit then hopped back off.

Random Assortment, part 2

Rather than actually write content here, I'm going to post some random things.

First off, it was brought up that there's a Serenity game to play, and we may have the people present/necessary to play it next weekend, or at least get started there. So, with that in mind I finally got it together and sketched out all the plot for at least the first adventure. No fully detailed stuff yet, but it's progressing nicely. If you're reading this post and you haven't heard about the game but want to play, let me know! I'm aiming for a group of 5-7 people, and hopefully regular games once or twice a month. Also, if you've got great ideas for Serenity villains, plot points or just any ideas about the universe, let me know via email or the like (otherwise I can't steal them to use on the unsuspecting players!). Finally, for those confused by the previous paragraph, here's the deconfusation: Firefly is a TV series by Joss Whedon, made into the movie Serenity (also the name of the ship in the TV series), and there was also a pencil+paper RPG book released, with a pretty good system in which we are going to play the previously mentioned game.

Second, I thought I'd post two links which people may not have seen before:

Comics Curmudgeon. If you like making fun of the newspaper comics, or want some interesting commentary on them, this is the place to go. The writer usually selects 3-5 comics each post and has something interesting to say about them, usually pointing out the silliness.

Girls Read Comics (And They're Pissed). Commentary on sexist things which show up in comics, from a feminist's point of view. This blog has really given me a different perspective on some comics, as well as society in general. The most recent pair of posts (Jul 5, Jun 29) were interesting for different reasons, the first because it exposed a situation which must have been pretty frightening, and the second because it was really well thought out and covered some ideas I hadn't seen before (mainly the concept of "Otherness" and how the kids in the comic book had different approaches to it and different reasons why they were set apart). In any case, I had a hard time starting to read this blog as the main writer can be very angry in her words, which I find distracting, but after a while it seemed to mellow out and there are a lot of good ideas, examples and things to learn from.

Edit: I should note, both of these links are thanks to L, who reads a lot more than I do, and also a much more balanced selection of topics than I usually read.

A Random Assortment

A quick collection of things today: Some of you (most of you?) probably know I am a big fan of the Atlanta Braves. I got to catch the last few innings of the game today after the usual frisbee game, and got to see Chipper Jones break an Atlanta record: all-time home runs while playing for the Braves, which was previously held by Dale Murphy. I wonder if mom or dad remember how much I liked Dale Murphy when I was a kid, I remember I had a bunch of his baseball cards and always cheered for him and the Braves. Though I maybe wasn't so good with statistics then, I have a very faint recollection of thinking he had a .200 or so batting average one season and thinking that was great. In any case, he had 371 homers while with Atlanta, and I got to see Chipper Jones hit homers number 371 and 372 today. Another interesting thing about the home runs today was that they were hit while batting with different handedness: the first was while batting right-handed, and the second left-handed. And for a final interesting note about this, apparently Hank Aaron only hit 335 of his 755 homers while with Atlanta, and had 22 with the Milwaukee Brewers in his final two seasons. The interesting part is that the rest were with the Milwaukee Braves, and he holds the Braves franchise record with 733 homers. This was very confusing when I was looking up all the various statistics here, but I think it works out if you think of the franchise records and the Atlanta records as being seperate.

Ok, now, I know I was going to post about something else. Oh yeah! So, based on the interesting edge-detect photo editing a few days back, I was experimenting with some other similar things - I want to use the edge detection to create a layer which has a rough approximation of a rat's outline, and use that layer to make it look like there's a fuzzy brightness/halo around the rat. Some preliminary experiments sort of worked - they brighten up the area at the edge of Cao Cao's fur, but since he is already pretty bright, it doesn't show up too well. I found a decent solution by using the layer on the "only brighten" mode with some opacity, but it still doesn't quite achieve what I wanted. So going to mess with this some more, if anyone has suggestions, or other interesting effects to try, let me know.

Finally, I started writing a short story, because I had a decent opening line which led to the rest of the idea. But I have only gotten to write a line or two beyond that as I've been busy tonight. So maybe that will be posted later.

Live from Redondo Beach

Today's events started up with a trip down to G+P's place in Redondo Beach, from which we went back up into the Hollywood-ish area to eat at The Stinking Rose, followed by seeing Transformers at the Arclite Theater. All of the above were good/great, and I may review them later. But for now, live blogging from G+P's place after we visited the fireworks.

We're currently playing Guitar Hero 2 (PS2), the most recent song being Gemini, played by Matt and Lemming. Everything was going dandy, until someone added a huge number of notes to Lem's side, but luckily after spending half the song without star power, they had some and pulled through. The switch is on now, and Mason and Gary are up, playing Sweet Child of Mine. More reports on this shortly, but I'm going to post and see if anyone is watching the RSS - comment if you have song requests for us, or whatever :)

The song is going well. Both people are sitting, which is making the crowd go wild. Also, there is star power a-plenty, but no-one dares use it! Max enters the field and tries to get Mason to deploy star power (or maybe was just distracting him), but it fails. No worries, they will finish the song easily. While they are working on that, I've a question for anyone who knows how this sort of thing works: if I update a blog post, via hitting edit and adding more text, then posting again, does that show up well for people using a RSS feed? I know for someone sitting on the page they would probably have to refresh it to see anything. So how do you get live blogging to work? A post followed by a long sequence of comments on it? Or is there a cleaner way to do it via the blog code.

Song complete! A "Delightful set impreses the blackout bar", with a 3 stars rating. Here we go with the next song pick, same players... Heart Shaped Box, with G on the bass.

(patty typing)
Max is being a pain, he is way too excited because of all the people visiting. He is a "people" dog, always performs his TAIL ATTACK when the front door opens. He also demands people's attention, needy doggie... He does "try" to scare people away when the door bell goes off, bark like crazy, I suppose he gets a little bit of credit for trying... But as soon as the door opens, the dog transforms into a completely useless watchdog.

Hmmm, no ice cream anywhere to be found in this house, there is a good reason why there is no stock. The last time we had ice cream, the left-over was discovered possibly "years" after. How can ice cream go bad you may ask? But but but it is true! I suppose anything is possible.
(/patty typing)

(lem typing)
"Just let it flow. Geeze." Never let common sense, grammar, or any semblance of rhetoric get in the way of good writing. That, and never let dog slobber distract you from screaming weeblies or nailing the trembolos. But it's okay if you always seem to miss the last note -- everyone does that.
(/lem typing)

I'm back! Gary and I did a two song set: Misirlou and YYZ. We nailed YYZ with 5 stars and it was excellent. Misirlou I don't recall as well - we were trying to show G the way some notes don't need a strum to play them: they have a pure white top, rather than a white top with an outline. However, this wasn't really obvious for Misirlou because I was playing lead, which is the only one that has a few of those notes.

(lem & matt typing)
A song about boobs.
(/lem & matt typing)

And we're wrapping up because people have work tomorrow! See you all later!

Interesting Effect

So, I was asked today about how to install the GIMP for Mac OSX, and I ran into the funny situation of trying to recall how I'd done it. I thought I was using the Gimp.app version, but after a quick check it appeared that I'd installed the basic source version via the utility fink. So I figured I should probably go try the Gimp.app version, as it was mentioned as being a lot easier to use, as well as a lot nicer. The only tricky thing about installing it was that the X11 window system needed to be installed - it's on one of the utilities discs that comes with the Mac, but isn't installed by default. After that it was just clicking the downloaded file, dragging the program in the resulting folder into the applications folder, and done. And wow, it looks a whole lot nicer, plus some of the confusing things about the previous version I was using are a lot better organized. I opened up an image of Cao Cao and fiddled around with some of the filters, and came up with a pretty cool looking image from what was a pretty crappy one:


That was made by running an edge detection filter, which I thought made Cao Cao look pretty cool, and it also hid the general blurriness of the photo.

30 months is not an excessive sentence.

I direct you to Making Light's most recent thread "Get Out of Jail Free", as I feel inadequate to express my incredulity, anger and general feeling of wrongness in this space. Which is not to say that this is the worst of the offenses, but rather yet another which flaunts misguised and misused power.

First Month (open thread)

So today marks the first month where I've written a post for every day. I note that while there is a post for every day, sadly there was a small break where there was a delay in the posting, which was the trip to Chicago. I still feel like I've accomplished something though, and so I'll continue writing.

I think I will list my favorite posts this month, just because I really enjoyed writing and seeing comments on some of them, and think it's important to point that out.

Restaurant Shyness and Graduation I had a tough time writing, but it was worth it when so many people added their own thoughts to them, so I liked those for that reason.

Swimmingly was similarily hard to write, but when I was done I felt a whole lot better for just being able to write it down.

Graduation Photos and Rat Guide were the most enjoyable to just write, as I liked adding my own thoughts to the photos, and the editing and arranging of the photos was also fun.

Finally, Ratatouille was my shortest post, and yet I felt that I managed to say exactly what I wanted to. Even if I did use one sentence which had a whole lot of commas.

Anyways, thanks to everyone reading, it's been encouraging. If you had favorites, or things you'd like to see, subjects you think I might like to write about, and so on, feel free to post it in the comments here. Or just use this as an open thread if there's something else you want to talk about, cause that'd be fun as well.