Month: January 2004

I’m still on my tour of guest rooms and couches of friends of mine due to the evil “renters”; spent last night on Aryntha and Rai’s couch.

Fortunately it is a grand and comfy couch! 😉

As always I was instantly the best buddy of both of the cats, especially Mina who spent the night sleeping on my butt and is right now curled up next to me purring away.

So far this has been a less than pleasant week. The night before last, when I was at Tina and Rick’s place, Tina was exceptionally drunk and was hugging all over me all night… Tina gets very “love-y” when she’s drunk. This unfortunately pissed off Rick and they got into a fight that night… This of course prompted me to head out before sunrise that morning and catch myself another nap at the shop.

Maybe I’ll just buy myself a cot and keep it there at the shop…

So, since the renters came the only decent sleep I’ve gotten was last night, and I had to drive two hours for that.

Fortunately for me I’ve got some really cool friends. 🙂

Today we will be heading north of Denver for some more fone-phun. I have to stop by the accountant’s place on the way out and drop off a big pile of paperwork, then tomorrow I have to swing by Lyon and Wolf’s place to install their new router, configure Wolf’s computer to access the Sony camera I gave them, and fill out some form for the car… Then I head back up the mountain just in time for Larry to return wherein my days will get several hours longer due to some project he’s got brewing.

I need a vacation. 😉

It’s morning for me, for the third time.

These creatures sleep in shifts, probably for safety in an unknown environment. Now while it’s easy for me to sleep though a continual high level of noise, a sudden and loud sound in silence will awaken me. Therefore I was awoken at 3am, 5am, and 7am as each shift changed.

Add to this the fact that I’ve developed a full-on head cold and that my sinuses feel as if someone filled them with quickset concrete, and it’s easy to see why I’m not in the best of moods this morning.

Another thing I have noticed about these creatures is that they seem to spend a great deal of time either making fun of something they don’t understand or griping about the same. An example of this was the half an hour of laughing as one of them discovered Vivian’s “Shalom on the Range” cookbook. This prompted all sorts of “jewish” anecdotes in regards to the house and the people who live in it.

The biggest gripe so far seems to deal with the fact there are no computers set up here anymore. See, Larry advertises the house as having three computers set up with high speed internet access and hasn’t changed this yet. We don’t do that anymore do to the last few groups of primates who managed to screw them up to the point that one was thrown out and the others needed several hours of maintenance that I’m just not willing to do, so that I can do it again in a week.

Now it appears that one has successfully broken into the garage, which is off limits even according to the papers they signed, and has been going on about the “old Austin Martin down there.” First off, it’s not an Austin Martin, it’s a Jaguar XJ12. Secondly, get the hell out of my basement.

I’m trying to figure out how to punish these apes for breaking the rules. I think I’ll come blasting up in the Wag here in an hour or so and run into the garage. When asked, I’ll mention that the alarm went off and I just drove up from Denver to check on things.

It’s 5pm and the “guests” are here…

I’m in stealth mode right now as I’m feeling a bit under the weather and I really don’t want to deal with them all; so I took a nap for an hour or so with the help of some big Sony ‘whole ear’ headphones and four years of Naval Training which taught me that I could sleep quite nicely on top of a running steam turbine.

I feel like some kind of anthropologist studying a tribe of apes from a blind somewhere… They don’t know I’m here so they’re acting ‘normal’ and that is giving me a lot of insight into the activities of the middle-american ape in its natural environment.

There are 17 of them, 8 adults and 9 children, consisting of three family groups interlinked by a common parental unit. The remaining two adults are rogue males who appear to be attached to one another.

So far the topics of discussion amongst the adults for the last 3 hours have ranged from “what was the best episode of ‘American Idol’” to “what was the best episode of ‘Friends’”… These are serious TV watchers; reflected by their first half hour here of finding all of the TVs and making sure we got local channels. The young appear to be incapable of sustained communication and usually resort to assorted whoops and screeches.

That and these creatures in general are *loud*; really, really loud. I would assume it’s from spending 6-8 years talking over the volumes of their young which, according to my sound pressure meter, have peaked at an ear-shattering 94dB through a wooden door… Just a few points shy of a running jet engine. And of course the young generate all of this noise while rampaging through the nesting area in something akin to a 7.5 Richter earthquake. Just about anything sends the young into spasms of screeching. For example, one seems to have touched another wrongly and this has elicited about an hour of uncontrolled flopping and screaming.

As I don’t want them to know I’m here, I have my door locked. This has prompted each of them to try the door knob at least twice and two of the adult males have tried the main house keys on it in hopes that it would open. It didn’t, and this prompted them to bang on the door handle repeatedly for a while, then go around on the deck and try the sliding glass door a few times.

Right now they are engaged in a dinner ritual. Preceding the feasting three of the adult males sought out the local Wal-Mart hunting ground which was seen on the way to this nesting area. There were a few minutes of elevated hooting and hollering as the adult females attempted to instruct the adult males on how to get to their preferred hunting ground, which seemed to aggravate the males by insinuation that they couldn’t handle it.

It sounds as if the communal dinner ritual has about ended. There have been murmurings of “Super Bowl” from the males over the last hour. I will assume this means the nesting area will become quite a disaster area come Sunday. I should probably make plans to not be here…

That’s all for this missive from the outback of humanity. I’ll continue my observations and post my findings in the morning.

It’s one of those beautiful Rocky Mountain days up here today with weather you can only find here. The sun is shining and it’s pleasant outside even as it’s snowing about a thousand feet up the mountain from here. Seriously, you can stand in my driveway in a t-shirt and look up at a blizzard…

I reloaded XP Pro on my desktop last night so things will be a little weird for a while as I get everything re-loaded, re-setup, and running again.

No matter what Microsoft might say, you still have to do a clean install of your OS about once a year. Especially if you install and uninstall a lot of software or use Visual Studio like I do… It’s just impossible to clean out everything over time.

So far the re-load is going well and the system is back to it’s zippy self again. I was getting a bit concerned as Second Life was really bogging things down and I didn’t figure this system would be all that easy to bog down.

Let’s see, what else? Oh, there are more renters coming tonight and staying though Sunday I believe. That means I have to put on my “I like humanity” face and be nice to a troop of complete strangers that I will most likely not have *anything* in common with. No worries though, I can play just about any part I’m handed. 🙂

And with that I think I’ll get back to the re-loading of the computer… I have all of the network software I use re-loaded; SimpleMU, SL, Shareaza, Bulletproof, etc. So now I need to work on the art stuff like Photoshop and Painter, and all of my music stuff like Soundforge and MPTrack.

Fiddled around a little bit more with Second Life last night… I guess I’m learning the system fairly quickly as I’ve already been stymied by functions that don’t work as advertised in the manual… No matter, I’ll figure out a workaround.

The next step in my SL adventures will be the building of a place to live… SL is really just like a muck in most regards.

You first deal with how you look in SL which is very easy for the basic things like hair color/style, clothing color/style, and body and face details, etc. On a muck your looks are text-based and handled by describing yourself which is probably the easiest thing to do. You eventually, as you learn the in’ and out’s of the system, graduate to more and more complex descriptions and other tricks… On SL this is the design and scripting of your avatar beyond the built-in facilities.

Then things progress to the procurement of a space and the descriptions of it. On a muck you have to learn a bit about how the underlying system works so that you can link exits to rooms and whatnot. On SL it’s a similar learning curve as you need to have a passing familiarity with some of the deeper functions of the system such as alpha channels in textures and some basic scripting.

The biggest difference between mucks and SL is money in both a good and bad way… Everything on a muck is usually free as far as real-world money is concerned and you can have in-world money that is really only used to control the flow of new objects into the world. Meanwhile SL costs a minimum of $10 which gets you a character in the game permanently, but that’s it.

Now to get some land costs anywhere from $10 a month for a basic yard on which you can build your house to $200 a month for your own “sim” which is basically a city. You’re also limited in the number of objects you can have based on the amount of land you own. This is to keep things running smoothly on your computer by ensuring that no one gobbles up all of the ram in the sim you live in. You want more objects, buy more land.

Now SL can, and does, pay its users. There is in-game money called “Linden Dollars” ($L) of which you get a weekly stipend of based on how much land you own. Right now I don’t own any land and only get $L 500 a week as “income”. It costs $L 10 to upload a texture or graphic, and in game items that other people have made cost $L to purchase… Yes, SL has its own economy.

Now you can also earn real-world money from SL for hosting events, donating time to teach other folks how to do something, or other “big” things. You can also earn $L for the same things from what I gather… I’ve not done any of this stuff (yet) so I’m not completely clear on it, but I know that someone Aryntha knows got a $40 check from SL a little while ago for some in-game activity.

All in all SL is the best parts of a muck (building, limitless possibilities, etc.) mixed with a really nice 3D MMORPG. Based on the time I’ve spent with SL over the last three days, the name “Second Life” is really quite appropriate. 😉

I’ll post more as I find out more… For example; the other day I discovered that if you own your own sim (or by the consensus of the residents) you can change the “rating” of your sim from “PG” to “Adult” and along with this you can decide that avatars can take damage… I saw a light saber sword fight last night that was pretty spectacular.

Well, off to “First Life”… I gotta get to work. 🙂

Matt and Rai came up Saturday afternoon. We spent the evening goofing off and watching Aryntha quiz folks on Second Life to determine their “’leet haxor” levels. It was pretty funny actually.

Sunday we were going to go and do another phone trip to some sites located up here in the mountains but once again nature showed us that Climate is what you expect and Weather is what you get… We got up Sunday morning to a very pretty snow fall, but this also meant that we weren’t going anywhere and that Aryntha and Rai needed to head back down the mountain before the roads got bad.

I spent the rest of the day modeling stuff for my avatar in Second Life; Aelfyre Twilight.

Here’s a picture of how he appears right now…

Of course it was night time on the server when I took the picture, so everything is dark, but you get the idea.

I’m currently working on his tail-swish, blinks, a horn glow, and other effects which have to be scripted, but so far I’m pretty happy with the Second Life system and I think my avatar looks pretty spiffy. 🙂

I guess I have to recommend SL to folks at this point. The people online are of a fairly high caliber overall and it’s been a pretty cool experience so far. Besides, you can get involved for a one time fee of $10… Cheap!

Things move forward…

I just signed my Caprice over to Wolf and they just left to take it down to Denver. This takes care of two problems:

One, Lyon was recently involved in a car accident and totaled his bronco. He’s fine but the bronco is porked. So his insurance will pay off what he owes on the bronco and as the Caprice is paid for, that frees up some extra cash per month for them. This is a good thing to be sure.

The other thing this fixes is the fact that I no longer have to worry about the Caprice just sitting here rotting in the driveway or have to worry about all of the associated expenses that come with each car you own; namely tags, taxes, insurance, maintenance, and the zillion other things that go along with it.

So, that’s two less things to worry about just by signing a piece of paper. I like it.

Wolf and Lyon got here at about 10pm last night to pick up the car and as they were both exhausted, they spent the night here. We went over to Denny’s for dinner and here’s where things got surreal…

The local Denny’s here now has a fine dining section called “Denny’s Uptown” which serves amazingly good food with all of the presentation and texture one would expect from a place costing three times more to eat at. This section of the Denny’s was resplendent with white table clothes, candles, nice piano music in the background, indirect lighting, and expert service… But it was still *in* the Denny’s, they had just turned the “party section” into a fine dining establishment.

Wolf had a Tuscany salad that she says was extremely good right down to the caramelized walnuts. Lyon had a big t-bone that was prepared flawlessly and I had lemon-pepper chicken that was really quite amazing. The meals were complete with a large selection of excellent sides which for us were seasoned steamed veggies and mozzarella topped seasoned red potatoes in Lyons case and excellent garlic mashies in mine.

We really had to keep checking that we were still in a Denny’s during the meal and this is what made it very surreal; we were actually sitting in the back area of a Denny’s…

The price is nice too… We had eaten fare that was on par with places like The Broker or Black Angus, yet for the three of us, including deserts, it was a mere $41.

So there ya have it. Be sure to swing by the Denny’s in Avon on a week night (it’s right off the highway) and try out this new idea. Sam, the new manager there (and all around nice guy), has bet his job on “Denny’s Uptown” succeeding. I know the three of us sure hope it does.

Other than that it’s another weekend up here in the thin air. I meandered over to Glenwood Springs after work yesterday to take some pictures which are up on the OMFUXS web site now.

In the “major life changing event” column we have the offer I recently received from a rather prestigious tech school in Virginia. Chances are I’m going to go for this position as it sounds like they will pay well and are even throwing in a town home to live in. That and I like teaching and it’s intellectually stimulating.

While work at the shop here is fun and it does manage to keep me busy, I’m not going anywhere with it. One can only learn so much by selling snowboards to the local knuckle draggers day in and day out. Sure, there is the fact that I’m tech support for most of Vail Valley, but the really hard things to fix take all of about 10 minutes and even then it’s nothing new.

It’s become stale and I’ve been feeling the urge to move on again…

What’s got me bummed is that I’ll once again be leaving everyone I know behind. Sure, a round trip flight from DC to Denver is only $169 so I can drop in and visit all the time, but…

As a wise man named Otis once said, “Things change. Always do. You’ll get your chance! Important thing is, when it comes, you’ve got to grab with both hands, and hold on tight!”

Good morning!

Well it was an excellent weekend down in Denver. To recap quickly:

I got to Denver Saturday evening and we went to the local camera store to look for parts. While at the store Rai mentioned that she had a feeling we’d be needing some really long lenses on the trip tomorrow… Sunday morning we got off to an early start and made it to the Pueblo area at around 11 am. On the way Aryntha spotted a tower off to our east, which turned out to be “Pinon”, and we could only get about 2 – 3 miles from it thanks to all of the no trespassing signs and locked gate, and Aryntha didn’t bring his 300d and 400mm lens set.

We should listen to Rai…

We drove on to our first target for the day; the two sites near Boone. We drove around the tower for Boone R for about a half an hour without being able to get much closer than about a mile and again we wanted the long lenses we decided to leave behind. We finally decided that we’d return with a better idea of how to get to it and move on to the next site on our tour when Aryntha suddenly asked “What’s that?” while pointing to the north.

Aryntha led us to Boone RS, a true relic of the Cold War. Boone RS is an underground facility designed to survive a near miss with the best bombs the Russians had in the 60’s. As we pulled up there were no signs anywhere as to who now owns the site or that we should stay away, and the front gate was wide open… So we did what anyone would do and just drove onto the facility proper.

Boone RS has a rather immense parking lot which is actually the roof of the buildings several feet under ground. We took about a zillion pictures of anything on site that didn’t move too quickly to photo including the neutron detector that signaled “the end” to the rest of the network.

After ensuring that we could reconstruct the entire site, life sized, from photos we moved on and headed back south…

“Cedarwood” proved to be extremely difficult to find and had us driving around in the scrub brush and cacti for about three hours. After the first hour and a half we could finally start seeing the tower on the bluff to the south of us which let us home in a little easier… Tower hunting would work best with a helicopter…

Anyways as we were trying yet another road that should take us to the site Rai, who was referencing maps in the back seat, asked what road we were on and Aryntha replied “A.T.T.A.V.E.”. This prompted us to wonder if there was a road out there named for the tower site that was on it.

Well it turns out that Aryntha was right because about a mile up from where he mentioned this we saw the sign for “AT T rd.” I swear he’s a phone psychic.

We pressed on another mile or so until we came to the locked and “no trespassing” sign covered gate for Cedarwood and took some more “sunset and tower” postcard shots.

We returned whence we came, stopping at a Mexican joint in Colorado Springs that was really quite good. We even got some freshly-made-just-for-us signature hot sauce which was really impressive. It’s a recipe from the sister of the fellow who was our server.

We got back to the apartment, did the data-dump, and did the sleep thing.

Monday morning we were back at it and off to a few more local sites including some suspicious stuff down near Martin Marietta. This day Aryntha brought the lenses and 300d for long shots… See, we learn. 🙂

We opted for some close-to-home sites due to the fact that Aryntha and Rai have to head back to school today and needed to make sure they were prepared.

We got some photos of what we believe to be the Kessler Reflector and then took off for a short mountain hop to the Critchel site.

Critchel is about a half hour drive up 285 towards Evergreen, then another half hour jaunt out into the hills. We got to the site and took our photos, then took pictures of the view from there… A nice thing about tower hunting is the places AT&T put them lead one to really nice views.

We left Critchel and headed back to the apartment for the data-dump. I took off for the hills at about 4pm.

Today it’s back to the day-to-day. 🙂

Well I went ahead and paid for a years worth of LiveJournal. I wasn’t sure if I would be using it all that much when I first got involved, but as I’m over one hundred entries and the journal has been active for around five months, I guess I’ve met the criteria for being a “user”. Besides, it’s only $25 for a year and you do get some neat extras for the fee.

Gotta run, take care out there.

I had a great weekend down in Denver. I got to Denver at about noon Sunday and Aryntha, Rai and I chugged over to the Denver Zuni AT&T complex for some photos shortly thereafter. That’s a *big* place, let me tell you… We’re still trying to get a tour of it.

We went from there to a restaurant called “Noodles” that serves, well, noodles. I had a really great chicken stroganoff bowl there and it’s quite tasty and amazingly filling for being turtle-neck type yuppie-food.

From there we swung by Aryntha and Rai’s place to get a different car. We then took off to the East to go look at an old AT&T long lines facility called “Strasburg” which is right near… Strasburg. We got our photos in the fading light and headed back for Denver.

On the way back to south west Denver we were driving by Wolf and Lyon’s place so I called and we stopped by to introduce everyone. We spent a few hours there chit-chatting and going over plans for world domination then finished the trek to Aryntha and Rai’s place.

We spent the rest of the evening compiling our images and data from the day’s adventures.

I crashed there for the night. Monday morning Rai and I went over to a hole-in-the-wall breakfast place while Aryntha got another hour’s sleep then we all took off to follow Parker Rd (hwy 83) from Aurora to Colorado Springs. We’d had reports of old telephone sightings on this road and went prepared. I drove so that Aryntha could employ his new “light vacuum”; a Canon DSLR 300d with this monster 200mm zoom lens and a 1.4x teleconverter… The g’zinta hole on this lens is about four inches across and the whole rig is about a two feet long and is an arm numbing 7-8 pounds. It’s impossible to deploy quickly and is a bit quirky yet, but it takes mind blowing photos… Of things in other states.

Really, the zoom on the thing let us count beams on a tower nearly 20 miles away on a mountain… Amazing.

So we toodled on south and found our target, a facility called “Black Forest”, got some photos and headed back. On the way Aryntha’s phozone detector started tingling and he lead us over hill and dale to this ancient tower that was decommissioned some time before 1994. From highway 83, some 10 miles away, “Hilltop” looks remarkably like a high tension tower, but Aryntha wasn’t fooled.

So we returned yet again to their apartment, did the data-dump from all the cameras and I headed back up the mountain to work on the web site and get to the shop Tuesday morning. Once again the web site is: http://www.badpixels.com/~omfuxs/

This is only for those of you out there with a dangerously high geek quotient. 🙂

And with that I’m gonna head out. Have a great day out there folks…

I’m on my way to the bright lights and big city today. I haven’t been to Denver under my own steam for a few weeks now and I feel like I’m ready to deal with it for a day.

Today’s activities are most likely going to be phone oriented as Aryntha, Rai and I head over to the old Denver main building called “Zuni” to take some pictures. I’m also going to attempt to social engineer us a tour of the insides as we’ve had reports of the original 50’s and 60’s equipment still being there and in operational condition. That would be something to see. 🙂

“Why phones?” I get asked quite often. Well, it’s fascinating to me because it was all so ‘hush-hush’ back when it was running and it’s still pretty darn high-tech even as the systems we research are over 40 years old… Basically the old AT&T long-lines system is a lot like the SR-71; both are “relics” of the cold war, yet both are the pinnacle of the era and are still, in many ways, more viable than the “new and improved” stuff out there.

That and the Bell System engineers are some of my heroes… See, once upon a time there were these two very large monopolies…

The larger of the two had the following record: the Vietnam War, Watergate, double-digit inflation, fuel and energy shortages, bankrupt airlines, and the 8-cent postcard.

The second was responsible for such things as the transistor, the solar cell, lasers, synthetic crystals, high fidelity stereo recording, sound motion pictures, radio astronomy, negative feedback, magnetic tape, magnetic “bubbles”, electronic switching systems, microwave radio, telephone, and TV relay systems, information theory, the first electrical digital computer, and the first communications satellite.

Guess which one got to tell the other how to run the telephone business?

So I’ll be blasting over the Rockies in the Wag in about an hour. There’s no stereo in the Wag as it’s too loud to hear one anyways and after about an hour you can’t hear much of anything anymore. This’ll also be a $50 trip as it takes a full tank of gas each way… The up side to the gas-guzzling aspects of the Wag is that I can do 90-100 over the passes though four feet of snow if I have to or pull H2’s and small semis out of snow banks easily. Fortunately I shouldn’t have to deal with that today.

I think I’ll stop in Frisco for breakfast as there is a fantastic breakfast joint down there. I’ll also gas up in Denver where gas is $0.50 a gallon cheaper… So I guess I’ll get my shoes on and get rolling.

Have a great day out there in ‘net land!

Aryntha and Rai are here for a day or so getting away from it all and utilizing the relaxing powers of the Cannibal Special… It truly is a mighty thing, the hot tub.

Aryntha spent most of the evening trying to convince a pile of scrap parts that it was in fact a computer and after several hours of fiddling did manage to get said pile to boot win2k. The things some people do for relaxation. 🙂

I worked a bit on the iButton to world shim, and then did a bit on my winamp powered “now playing” graphic creation plugin. Basically the plugin just takes a few lines of user text and runtime variables and superimposes them onto a graphic of the user’s choice. The resulting .jpg is then uploaded to a specified web server every time the song changes. There are a few plugins out there that do a similar task, but require a php web server and a knowledge of script languages to get it to work… Not many people can do all that for a graphic so I’m writing one for windows users who, by nature, don’t code or compile.

All in all it was a simple, low impact evening that ended around 2am… I have to go into the shop for a few hours, but should be back at the house at around 2pm; about the time Aryntha and Rai wake up. 😉

Newsflash!

The Cannibal Special is back in business.

It turns out it was a faulty temperature sensor just as I had surmised. The main thermistor had gone south and was reading 5.45 ohms (140 degrees by it’s specifications) at 40 degrees.

The hot tub guy was here, double checked my findings ($50) and replaced the thermistor ($65) in about 10 minutes ($50)… Again, I’m in the wrong business.

Anyways, those of you who both read this and are close enough to visit; let it be known that the hot tub is back online. I just changed out the water, the filter, and did all the chemistry and it’s at about 108 degrees right now.

Oh, and a new cover is on order which means I won’t be changing the water so much anymore. That’s a good thing in my opinion.

In other news; between the hours of oh, 7:30 in the morning and about 5 pm you can get a look out of my window on the south side of the house. The camera runs 24/7, but right now I’m running a camera I found and it doesn’t work all that well in the dark… And it gets dark early here and sun rise is usually 30-45 minutes later than the rest of Colorado. Yay valley living!

I’ll eventually have a much nicer camera online and might even interface a little iButton weather station to the whole thing just for S&G’s. Of course that means writing software, but I haven’t done any code in a month or so and it might be fun. It’ll be very similar to the web site – PegaThing interfacing I did for Peg’s yacht back in Baltimore.

You can see the current incarnation of this marvel of technology (and recycled parts, duct tape, hot melt, and left over Sticker Station code) at: http://home.comcast.net/~rihahn/

Right now the whole thing runs off of a cheap $19 digital camera that has kludged streaming video capability, but I want to improve that by using an old BT848 video capture card and an NTSC camera. I can get away with this because NTSC is 512 x 384 and I’m sending 320 x 240 images to the web site…

Anyways, the BT card I have, but I’ll need to dig up a composite camera somewhere. I might even include a web page controlled PTZ (pan tilt zoom) so everyone out here in WebVille can play with it and look around.

If I go that far I’ll mount the camera up in the roof of the game room upstairs (4 stories in the air) in a dome. This’ll give folks a 360 degree view of the valley with tilt and zoom… So you can all peek in on my neighbors or count the cars over at WalWorld. (grin)

Yes, this is just this weeks “point of interest”… Makes one wonder what I’ll be into next week…

More snow this morning. I love it!

Was reading a few news portals this morning and came across a little blurb that read: “In a settlement between Sears and customers with improperly done wheel balancing, the lawyers got $2.45 million and the customers got $2.50 per tire.”

Hmm… Seems a little lop sided to me. So I went on a quest to see what else I could dig up…

There was a $3.7 million settlement between Jim Bakers’ “Praise The Lord Ministries” and 165,000 defrauded believers. The lawyers got $2.5 million and each victim got $6.54.

One other was a settlement between customers and a cosmetic manufacturer and retailers. The lawyers got $24 million on that one and each customer got a free cosmetic.

Yeah… I’m in the wrong business.

Now this little news excursion led me to a note about two American Legion posts and two other veterans groups in Pleasanton California who sponsored a class on dowsing…

They are trying to determine if it’s possible to identify domestic terrorists by pointing sticks at suspicious people and seeing if the sticks move. One of the brains behind this idea was quoted as saying “You can’t wait for the FBI and police to come up with solutions when you have the bad guys living among us.”

Ok, finished the great room reordering and I’m much happier now.

Periodically I’ve found that I have to turn my environment upside down and mix it all up. Otherwise things get stagnant and I get edgy.

New room features include moving the speakers to amore correct sonic configuration especially when sitting at the computer. Right now I have Oingo Boingo playing and Danny Elfman is *in* my head which is a spooky experience let me tell you. Another fringe benefit of the new speaker placement is that my big Sony’s get to load the corners of the room better which creates some nice, tight, bone-rattling bass without loading the whole room.

Another feature is that the amps in the speakers are now fed via fiber optic from the very cool little external SoundBlaster box that connects everything to my PC. Prior to this arrangement the speakers were too far away from the PC and I ran everything via copper… Light is better, trust me.

Above all it gave me a chance to clean, organize, box up and store, and otherwise straighten out my space here. This is a good thing and for me it’s like getting a whole new room.

So, yes, my neat-freak quotient has been satisfied for another year.

In other news it appears we are heading for yet another format war:

Sony (love those guys) and about eight other hardware manufacturers have developed this thing called “Blu-ray” which they hope will replace current DVDs. Basically Blu-Ray is a name for a new DVD standard which uses blue-violet laser instead of old red laser discs used in CDs and in DVDs. This allows manufacturers to store more data using the same amount of disc surface. One Blu-Ray disc will hold approximately 27GB of data (compared to 4.36GB on regular DVD) on one side/layer of the disc.

Video will be stored using MPEG-2 technology, just like in DVD-Video discs, but in much higher bit rate. Currently DVD-Video discs can have a bit rates up to 9.8Mbps, but Blu-Ray discs support bit rates as high as 36MBps. The down side to Blu-ray’s format is that it isn’t backwards compatible with current DVDs, but who cares. That $4000 HD-ready TV you bought over xmas has to do some real ugly stuff to get your old $15 DVDs to look good anyways.

Ok, now everyone who isn’t one of the nine companies in the Blu-ray development wants their piece of the pie too. Enter the recently ratified HD-DVD format presented to the DVD forum by Toshiba and NEC. Again, like the SACD / DVD-A war Sony has the better format by forging forwards rather than only going half way for all the “hangers on” out there.

Ok, so just about everyone I know is behind Blu-ray when suddenly Korea and China decide they want their slice of the pie as well. Enter EVD…

So where will the madness end? Who knows.

Chances are, much like the DVD+RW/-RW debacle and the SACD/DVD-A war, we’ll eventually see hardware that doesn’t care what format it’s in. But until then, some time in 2008, you’ll have to be like Aryntha and buy a different player for each media just to hedge your bets that when things shake out, you’ll still have something that works.

Yay money…

I got another illo done last night and once again was lamenting the loss of my Wacom.

The up side to not having my digital pen crutch is that I’m getting back into practice with the mouse… Back in the old days when we used to carve CPUs out of wood, my ex talked me into getting an Amiga to replace my Atari 800xl. (bless her) The mouse was all we had, not to mention a max of 320×200 and 4096 colors if you pushed it real hard (HAM); yet we turned out some pretty neat-o work with it.

So here I am almost fifteen years later. I have gone from 8 Mhz to 3 Ghz, 1.5 megs of ram to 1.5 gigs of ram, 1meg floppies to almost a terabyte of HD space, 320x200x4096 to 1600x1200xMillions… and I’m still doing art with a mouse. (chuckle)

An interesting side note to the above was that the original Amiga 500 cost $595 which is about the cost of a middle-of-the-road 2+ Ghz computer these days.

Well, here’s the art. It’s a commission for a character portrait of a Kirin as envisioned by her player:

Let’s see, what else? Oh, getting ready for the Ullr Fest up here… What’s “Ullr Fest” you ask? Silly flat landers… 🙂

Ullr is the Norse god of snow. Legend has it that Ullr was displeased with the people up here because they didn’t appreciate his snow making efforts and so he left the valley. To lure him back we throw a big party in his honor every year and it seems to work as we get about 300 inches of snow every year… If it ain’t broke we’re certainly not gonna fix it.

This year will see the Budweiser Clydesdales in the parade (and around town for a few days) so I’ll be sure to have my camera fully charged and several memory sticks handy…

Other than that it’s supposed to snow some more today and tomorrow. The skiers are going bonkers with the quality and quantity of the snow we’re getting this year.

Have a great day out there in ’net land folks. Take a few minutes to learn something completely useless today, like the flight speed of an unladen European swallow! 😉

Last night I started working on a new three-panel comic that I think I’ll make web-able staring Flint and Ravik. They’re kind of like the “Odd Couple” but more polarized as ‘good’ and ‘evil’ rather than ‘neat freak’ and ‘slob’.

I’m sure they’d rather not be roommates but they’re sort of stuck and simply have to deal with one another. 🙂

It’s also easy to come up with a continual stream of material as they’re always going at it with one trying to “convert” the other or simply just annoy them. Flint is by nature “good” and doesn’t really *try* to do anything to Ravik, but his general outlook and innocence are enough usually to get old Ravik foaming at the mouth. Ravik on the other hand is always plotting to do something to Flint, but Flint somehow manages to bumble his way though it… They say someone looks out for innocents and children and Flint is walking proof.

Fortunately they gave up fighting one another openly years ago as neither could make any headway against the other. So now it’s a sort of grudging co-existance with little feints and dodges at one another rather than open warfare.

And they have been rubbing off on one another over the years. Ravik’s quiche addiction is Flint’s fault, just don’t ask what’s in it. While Flint’s like of techno is Ravik’s fault though Ravik is more “Icon of Coil” and “Delta 9” where Flint is into happier stuff like “Scooter” and “Apoptygma”…

I don’t want to kill myself on this project though so don’t expect to see a comic but maybe once a week. Maybe I’ll do an inked one on Wednesdays and a color one on Sundays… We’ll see.

Ahh yes, making the most of your psychosis… (laugh)

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Disclaimer: Those of you with an overwhelming fear of the unknown will be gratified to learn that there is no hidden message revealed by reading this journal entry backwards, so just ignore that sudden desire to run down the street naked carrying a fax machine over your head. However, by pouring a complete circle of salt around yourself and your computer you can ensure that no harm befalls you and your equipment.

I got the snow melt system for the driveway working enough to hold out till Scott the boiler repair guy gets here Monday and the hot tub repair folks should be here Tuesday.

Now if I could just get Comcast to work I’d be a happy person… Well, can’t have everything. Though it would be nice to be able to post to the old Journal here without retrying for two hours…