Owe! That Hurt My Brain

Lyondemere Arts & Archery

Today was Lyondemere's Arts & Archery Tournament and Championship. Each year we select our Archery Champion at this event, and this year we selected our inaugural Arts Champion as well!

We had hoped that the weather would be favorable, and for the morning at least things were looking pretty good. Alas, the skies grew cloudy during the early afternoon and eventually it started to rain. We were lucky though, the judging for the Arts Championship was completed and the entrants had time to put there entries away before they could get wet.

The Archery Championship was also completed before the rain began, and from what I saw everyone seemed to have a good time.

Despite the weather I felt the event went very well. The autocrat did a good job organizing the event and keeping everything moving, and we were able to pack up and head to the revel site early. The Angel and I grabbed some lunch on the way, and spent the rest of the afternoon and into the evening pleasantly engaged in conversation with friends and family.

Pictures from the event can be found here.

Acually this is kind of a low score for me

You Are 78% Evil

You are very evil. And you're too evil to care. Those who love you probably also fear you. A lot.

How Evil Are You?

FanFic - It's not just for people who live in their Mom's basement

There's something about fan fiction that has always bothered me. I've always felt that if you were good enough to write fiction that anyone other than your Mom would want to read then you were good enough to write original fiction. Most published (by which I mean the stuff you find at the Barnes and Noble or the Borders) derivative fiction is pretty bad. Pick up any World of Warcraft book and at least 90 percent of Star Trek or Star Wars books on the shelves and you'll see what I mean. By the time we get to the stuff posted on sites like HP fanfic we're pretty much scrapping the bottom of the barrel.

There are exceptions of course. Q-Squared by Peter David is a darn good book, and Michael A. Stackpole's contributions to the BattleTech universe (Lethal Heritage, Blood Legacy, and Lost Destiny) are are amazing. I also have it on good authority that at least one Harry Potter fanfic, Restoring Hope by Paracelsus is worth reading. Now, into the world of unauthorized fanfic strides none other than Steven Brust.

"My Own Kind of Freedom" is a fanfic set in the Firefly universe. It's avaliable in .pdf and MS Word formats and was released under the Creative Commons license.

Roll Initiative Please - A podcast for women who like table top RPGs

Some friends of mine (and if you're reading this blog there is a good chance you know them too), have released a new pod cast called Roll Initiative Please. Their focus is on women and RPG gaming, how women interactive with the genera differently than men, and what women find interesting in an RPG.

I haven't played a table top RPG in quite a long time, but I still find the genera interesting, and it's fun to listen to people who have clearly though about the issues involved in RPG gaming and feel passionately about the topic.

On a related subject, there's a nice site called Play This Thing! that covers the indi game scene. There's some interesting things going on in that space, and a lot of the games are free, so check them out.

FAIL

Today I had one goal, get the pavers in that will serve as the foundation for the shed we want to put in the middle yard. This is one of those projects that, when it started, we though we'd have finished in a couple of weeks. Doh! The shed is one of those metal things, 8' by 5' and 6' tall at the center, all of which fits in a box about 18" wide and 10" deep. This means of course that the shed is in fact composed of about 100,000 little metal pieces, along with various connecting hardware. For some reason when we were talking about it I did not expect it would be so complicated. But when we first opened it up and realized what we were dealing with we found ourselves more than a little overwhelmed. So, for the last six years the shed has remained in its box, a tall, heavy reminder of over confidence.

But the storage situation at home is somewhere past critical. The garage is full to capacity, and the things in the house are forced to migrate from room to room like restless spirits, always longing for rest but never finding it. The Angel and I have our fits of "Something must be done!" but the laws of physics can not be ignored, and everything stubbornly refuses to fit in any space smaller than itself. Meanwhile the shed continues to mock us.

So today I took myself out to the middle yard to begin. First task, finish the fence. Why the fence? Because the shed is going to sit in front of the fence and if I wanted the fence finished I needed to do it before putting up the shed. When I was working on it I ran out of fencing and had to put a few pieces of the old fence back up as a temporary measure. I've had the new fencing for months, so all I had to do was get out the saw and get to it. It took about half an hour to get everything out, another half an hour to do the work. Ta da! Fence completed.

The next step was to get the instructions for the shed so I knew how big the foundation needed to be. I cleared my way to the box, manhandled it to the ground and opened it up. No instructions. This is not good. We have a drawer where we keep instruction booklets, the kind the come with appliances and such, so next I checked there. Alas, no shed instructions. I checked the filing cabinet in my office, no luck.

Excelsior! I cried, before heading off to the Home Depot, where I was sure I could find a shed like ours. But no, that could never be. They do have sheds, all made of plastic or fiberboard and all three times as large (and ten times more expensive) as ours. Defeated again I elected to head over to the garden department and secure the pavers and sand, after all, it's not like I was going to put it together today right? I found a suitable cart and was busy loading pavers when I realized that once again I was going to suffer defeat. In the back of my truck, right now, are three sets of very large, very heavy, shelves that we bought to put in the garage. Why are they in my truck? Because there's no place in the garage to put them. Why is there no room in the garage? Because we haven't put up the shed of course. The slider puzzle that is my life has defeated me once again.

Yesterday morning the Angel said that she would find us a storage space, but I told her no, that wouldn't be nessary, I was going to get the shed up. Yeah, right.

Some Weeks Are Harder Than Others

It was a rough week at work, actually two rough weeks in a row. Every part I've received in the last two weeks has been late, incorrect, or both. I asked of a fiber channel HBA (it's a type of network card) and they sent me a 9-pin HBA. I asked for a Write Accelerator Cache Battery for a Compaq 5300 RAID Controller and they sent me the battery for a 4200. I asked for a tracking number on a processor (which failed to ship on time) only to receive the tracking number the day after the part arrived. Ugh!

Today I had hoped to skip out the the range with some friends for a little gun time, but no. Yesterday I received a ticket on a failed 72 GB 10K Ultra320 Hard Drive on a SAN. Do we have one in stock? Nope. Do Disney or IBM have one in stock? Nope. Where is the closest one? Maspeth, NY, and it will not arrive until sometime before noon today. Can this 30 second job wait until Monday? Nope, needs to be done ASAP. So my trip to the range has been canceled while I sit here waiting for FedEx to show up so that I can drive 17 miles, swap a hard drive, then drive back home.

Tomorrow I'm going to try and get the base down for the new shed in the back. This is not shaping up to be what I think of when I hear the words "holiday weekend."

Update - 6:30 PM
My drive showed up just before 11 this morning, so I got in the car and headed off. While I was driving I got a call from my friends who were going to the range, seems that sleep was more important this morning than had been expected, so they were getting a later start than planned. I explained my situation and they agreed to go out at 1 PM, which left plenty of time for me to get to work, take care of the HD, and get home.

I took my two Rugers, the New Vaquero (38/357) and the 22/45 (.22lr), along with all the ammo I had for both. My friends brought their new matching Ruger 10/22s and a Springfield XD in 9mm. Much gunfire, and fun, issued.

Cha cha cha cha CHANGES

I've made some changes over the last couple of days. The things you see in the side bar are part of the reason I moved to blogger. Here's a quick overview.

The Amazon listing for Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life by Barbara Kingsolver.
This is an amazing book. I heard Mrs. Kingsolver interviews on Krista Tippett's Speaking of Faith. I had no idea who Barbara Kingsolver was, having never read any of her other books, but I was taken by her practical approach to the subject of eating, and her observations on American agribusiness. I bought my copy in electronic format, and loved it so much that I went back and bought a hard copy to loan to friends. The Amazon price is about $10 less than I paid for mine, and if you buy it though the link I get a little kick back from Amazon, but it doesn't cost you any more.

The "Call Me" Button
The Angel and I gave up the land line several months ago now, opting for our own cell phones. The only kink in the plan for me is that my employer pays for my cell phone. That being the case I was concerned that when I go to my next job a lot of people would start having trouble reaching me. The answer, for me, was Grand Central (cleverly bought by Google). Grand Central is a modern version of the old answering service: you call my Grand Central number, and it calls me. If I can take the call it connects us, if not it sends you to voice mail, and sends me a email. You don't really need to know any of that, all you need to know is that if you need to call me you can click the "Call Me" button. The best part? It's free!

The Google Adsence Banner
I just stuck that thing down at the bottom because I could. Who knows, once it indexes the site it might put up an ad that someone is interested enough in to click on. If that happens maybe Google will send me a check for a nickel. Hey, a guy can dream.

Slide Show (not new, but new pictures)
I made a new Picasa group for slide show pictures. Yay for new pictures!

Jericho - Enjoy it while you can

Tuesday night at 10 o'clock I'll be in front of my television. That I'll be there, instead of somewhere else, is testament to how much I've enjoyed Jericho. My understanding is that we'll get eight more episodes, and I'm hoping that the second season, short as it is, will be as good the first one.

Open Comments

I've changed the settings on comments so that you will no longer need to be logged in to post. I'm not sure how this will work out, and I don't want my blog to become spammer central, but I'm going to try it and see how things go.

BibiOdyssey - Books~~Illustrations~~Science~~History~~Visual Materia Obscura~~Eclectic Bookart

I can think of three or four people off the top of my head who should be looking at peacay's BibiOdyssey on a regular basis. There's some amazing stuff over there, much of which falls in the SCA's period. I discovered the site though a boingboing (which truly is a "Directory of Wonderful Things") post on the Geomancy Almanac, commissioned by Count Otto-Henry and completed between 1552 and 1557. If you're interested in historical documents, calligraphy, or illumination you should really add this one to your bookmarks.

Mauvais Role - from BoingBoing TV

Every now and then I'm stuck by how far computer generated graphics have come. Today over on boingboing TV there's a clip from Mauvais Role, in which a video game villain decides he's had enough of being the bad guy and goes looking for a new job. Anyone who's spent some time with a game console over the last few years, or has kids who have, will find the results amusing. Enjoy.

Better Off Forgotten

On May 18th of last year I posted an article on Newsvine regarding a story I read on Ars Technica about a research paper published by the JFK School of Government. In that article the author suggests that we need to teach our computers to "forget." This is especially relevant to me now that I'm posting my blog in a public form. I thought I'd like to republish that article here.

Better Off Forgotten - by jpathomas, May 18th, 2007

Several years ago at a church yard sale I stumbled on a delightful book by Hendrik Willem van Loon called "The Arts" and subtitled

"The story of Painting and Sculpture and Architecture and Music as well as all the so-called Minor Arts from the days of the cavemen until the present time. Done into one single volume, written and illustrated by Hendrik Willem Van Loon."

In his introduction Van Loon proposes that it's a good thing that the arts of past cultures is lost, because it frees us to reinvent art in our own image. As a student of history I had often lamented how little we knew and how much had been lost. But, as I thought about it I came to believe that Van Loon was right.

The double edged sword of digital technology and our new found ability to make sure that nothing is ever lost is that its ability to help us is equal to its ability to hurt us. It's true, we can listen to the music of Robert Johnson and see pictures of Mary Pictford in the 1920s, but along with these preserved moments in history comes an erosion of personal privacy. As we move into the 21st century Googling your data has become, according to CNN, "standard practice". Students are kicked out of school for pictures posted on Facebook, and hiring managers are checking the internet for information on prospective candidates.

Ars Technica has a piece about a paper written by Viktor Mayer-Schönberger of the JFK School of Government. His conclusion?

"If whatever we do can be held against us years later, if all our impulsive comments are preserved, they can easily be combined into a composite picture of ourselves," he writes in the paper. "Afraid how our words and actions may be perceived years later and taken out of context, the lack of forgetting may prompt us to speak less freely and openly."

In short we need to teach our computers to "forget" things. In his research paper "Usefull Void the Art of Forgetting in the Age of Ubiquitous Computing" Mr. Mayer-Schönberger suggest that we should "revive our society's capacity to forget. Mr. Mayer-Schönberger suggest that we could add a bit of metadata to each digital file which would tell our computers when to delete it. We might keep digital pictures for a couple of years by default, and if we want to save them longer we simply change the tag. It's an interesting idea, but one that I'm sure will never be implemented.

Put simply, our ability to collect and store data has resulted in a need for that data. Not knowing what will be important in the future, we can't feel comfortable planning to lose data. As law and society struggle to keep up with constant change in our technological abilities it's possible that we might even find ourselves liable for not keeping data. In the digital world of the future we may find that Sarbanes-Oxley applies to everyone.

If you're a Newsvine member you can vote on this article here.

VOTE!

One of the questions I've been asking myself is how much of this new blog will be personal. Those of you who come here from my LiveJournal blog have already noticed that this blog is more about tech than about my life's daily happenings. But if this is going to be my blog, then it's going to have to be more than just my personal version of "Today in Tech." So, without further delay, but with some small trepidation, I now present today's post...

I have registered, and for the most part voted, as a Republican my entire adult life. I'm not the "party base" as the NPR pundits like to portray it. I'm an atheist, I'm pro-choice, I believe that the Death Penalty is the only appropriate punishment for some crimes, but the current implantation is flawed, so I also support a moratorium on executions. I own guns and I value my second amendment rights. I believe that the state has no interest in the gender of your spouse and should stay the hell out of your marriage and your bedroom. I think if you sneak into my country the only acceptable answer is to throw you out when I catch you. I am the guy they are talking about when they say "Moderate Republican," fiscally conservative, social moderate, somewhat hawkish on national defense.

But given the state of my (and when I say "my" I mean the Republican) party and the actions of the current administration I didn't feel that I could vote the party ticket. There have been several issues over the last eight years that have tested my patients with my party and this President. Harriet Miers? What the hell was that about? But the thing that pushed me over the edge, the thing that convinced me that regardless of what other issues might come up that the Republican's needed to lose the White House, was Warrantless Domestic Surveillance.

The truth is it's not that hard to get a FISA warrant, you don't even have to wait for it, you can get it after the fact. Why is this a problem? It's a problem because the Administration knows they are way over the line. I'm not the first to say it, but it bears repeating; You cannot protect American values abroad while abandoning them at home.

It's a depressing state of affairs. I might have voted for McCain had he not pandered to the religious right, and more importantly if he's held his ground on torture and specifically on waterboarding. I know why he did it, because the primaries are all about the extremes, but I can't support it. Huckabee? Oh no you didn't. Mitt Romney? Not a chance. Ron Paul? Not on a dare. I'm a moderate adrift in a sea of conservative stupid.

So, if not a Republican who? Okay, here goes.

Testing MarsEdit

I wrote a few weeks ago about the difficulty of finding a good blogging platform for my Mac. I know I'm not the only one who's having this problem, a quick search over at google turns up a large number of comments about the lack of really good blogging software for the Mac. Before I left LiveJournal I was using Xjournal, and it's not bad, if you're blogging on LJ. But Xjournal doesn't support Blogger, so I'm back to looking for something I like.

This post was put together using MarsEdit, and so far I'm not hatting it, but I'm not loving it either. I'll try it for a few posts, then see how I feel.

Good Rules

Via boingboing, this inspirational little list of rules.

Immaculate Heart College Art Department Rules

This (by Sister Corita Kent) was worth retyping:

1. Find a place you trust and then try trusting it for a while.
2. General duties of a student: pull everything out of your teacher, pull everything out of your fellow students.
3. General duties of a teacher: pull everything out of your students.
4. Consider everything an experiment.
5. Be self-disciplined. This means finding someone wise or smart and choosing to follow them. To be disciplined is to follow in a good way. To be self-disciplined is to follow in a better way.
6. Nothing is a mistake. There is no win and no fail. There is only make.
7. The only rule is work. If you work it will lead to something. It’s the people who do all of the work all the time who eventually catch on to things.
8. Don’t try to create and analyse at the same time. They’re different processes.
9. Be happy whenever you can manage it. Enjoy yourself. It’s lighter than you think.
10. “We’re breaking all of the rules. Even our own rules. And how do we do that? By leaving plenty of room for X quantities.” - John Cage.

Helpful hints: Always be around. Come or go to everything always. Go to classes. Read anything you can get your hands on. Look at movies carefully often. Save everything, it might come in handy later.

There should be new rules next week.

Watching the Tail Wag the Dog

I sometimes wonder how these things get started. As far as I know the idea that Microsoft might buy Yahoo was first proposed by a stock analyst around a year and a half ago. The reasoning was that Yahoo would bring search technology to MSN that would help it compete with Google, and in return Yahoo would get funding to make their search even better, to (wait for it....) compete with Google. Yeah I know, it doesn't make sense to me either.

Today Microsoft announced an unsolicited bid for Yahoo, to the tune of 44.6 billion (stock and cash). The question is, what do they think they're going to get for all that money, flickr? Adding Yahoo's search technology (which is clearly better than MSN's Live Search) is not going to make Microsoft a threat to Google's search dominance.

Speaking of FARK...

No, your eyes do not deceive you, it's exactly what you think it is, Britain. Yes folk, this is the Gough Map, and it's the oldest surviving road map of Great Britain, dating from around 1360. One would think that would buy it a little respect, but then one might not have read the Metro...

Cool Link List #2 - xkcd

There's just something about Randall Munroe's xkcd that's, what's the right word? Endearing. Long a favorite of the boingboing and fark crowd (fark will need it's own Cool Link entry), as well as college campuses, xkcd has started to break out of geekdom and shows every sign of poking it's little stick figure head out into the main stream.

What makes xkcd so compelling? I think Wired found the answer.

The Cool Link List #1 - Apple

Apple Inc - Apple has not always been cool. In fact it was not all that long ago that there was a lot of doubt about the companie's ability to survive. In 1997 Michael Dell, of Dell Computer was asked what might be done to fix Apple, his answer was "I'd shut it down and give the money back to the shareholders."

Ten years later things couldn't be more different at Apple. The introduction of the iPod and the iTunes Store Apple changed the landscape of digital music distrobution, and in the process made Apple the number three music retailer in the county. The iPhone, avaliable since June of '07 has already sold over 4 million units, and while there have been critisims (mostly in regard to AT&T's slow EDGE network) there is no doubt that the iPhone is well on its way to braking open the cell phone market.

All those iPod and iPhone sales seem to be having a "halo" effect, opening people up to the idea of using other Apple products. MacBook and MacBook Pro sales are up significantly (I switched to a MacBook Pro myself after several years of Toshiba and Dell laptops) as are sales of iMacs. In fact Apple has reported its best quarter ever.