2008 Mar 10
Read the interview with the players responsible for this atrocity at Yahoo!’s Big League Stew.
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Just a quick tip that might help someone who had the same problem as I had with updating Thunderbird. If you are getting an error installing or updating Thunderbird, and you cannot manually delete the file mozMapi32.dll from your computer, you might have to stop your Logitech Quickcam. Just quit it in the system tray, then the update/reninstall of Thunderbird should work. The past couple weeks, my computers have been having issues. First, on my iBook, I am using an app called Snitter to post on Twitter. It’s been giving me a message each time I start it up that a new version is available, and asks if I want to download and install it. If I say yes, the app quits, the Adobe AIR installer starts the install, but then it never finishes. Actually, it looks like it finishes, and I don’t see an error, but when I fire up Snitter again, it gives me the same message about a new version. This past weekend I saw that there is a new version of AIR out, version 1.0. I figure I will just remove Snitter, then remove AIR, then download the newest versions of each and the problem would be solved. So I download the Adobe AIR Installer. However, when I double-click on the Installer, nothing happens. Then I try to copy the installer to the Applications folder, thinking that is the way to do it, but nothing happens if I double-click the installer, or try to launch the snitter.air file. So now I have no AIR, and no Snitter. I guess I will have to go back to Twitterific, which is nice, but lacks some features I like, for instance the ability to quickly reply to someone, and to filter by Replies or Direct Messages. If anyone has any ideas as two why I cannot install Adobe AIR, please let me know! Secondly, my desktop computer’s hard disk is dying a sloooow death. More sectors are going bad day by day. My new quad-core supercomputer still hasn’t shipped, so I am keeping my old computer on life-support. One bad thing that I did lose, however, was my iTunes xml file. It must have been on a bad sector, because when I launched iTunes, it said some files were missing, then started up with a vanilla library. The xml files were reset. I am not sure what info I lost, but I am expecting that all my playlists are gone, as well as the ratings. I believe iTunes appends the comments field to the .mp3 files, so at least I can rebuild my smart playlists easily. But I fear that all my ratings are gone. I did backup my xml files in early February, but I think that was before I consolidated my library to an external hard disk. Also, I learned in the past that it’s generally not a good idea to manage music manually outside of iTunes. When I do get my new computer, iTunes should be pretty snappy, though, which will be something new to me. I am still wondering what I should do with my old computer. I am thinking of installing Ubuntu onto it (it still has a secondary hard disk which is still solid) and using it as a torrent/file server. I can run it remotely using Ubuntu’s remote desktop, so I won’t need a monitor for it, which seems like a good solution. I thought about using it as a media computer, and hooking it up to our LCD tv, but the case is too big and it would be too loud to keep in the family room. A new smaller home theater case would be nice for the motherboard, but those cases are expensive!! I guess it’s just gonna be a Ubuntu machine. 2008 Mar 08
Bay is in 1st grade this year. One of the big milestones is that he has become a “collector” of items. Whenever I am doing the laundry, I have to check the pockets of his pants, otherwise the bottom of the washing machine will be filled with trinkets. It’s always a little scary digging into those pockets, even though I haven’t found anything gross like dead frogs or bugs. Mostly there are things like erasers, acorns, pebbles, beads, papers with drawings, and the occasional penny or two. About 20% of the time, there’s a bunch of sand or dirt in there as well, and I have to dump it out in the trash. I remember when I was growing up, my mom had a box on the dryer, which had some coins in it. I guess the box was to collect all the phat lewt that us kids had collected and stuffed in our pockets! Bay is a pretty clean and tidy boy, so I am not surprised that his pockets have relatively harmless things in them, but I can imagine Koa will be collecting more “extreme” items, like dead scorpions, broken glass, and rusty nails. I can’t wait. 2008 Mar 06
Last night Bay and I went to Moonie’s Burger House for dinner. It was their monthly “Cox Elementary Night” where a portion of the money made from Cox Elementary students’ meals would go back to the school. As you might know, I quit eating beef, pork, and chicken a couple weeks ago, so I was wondering if going to a burger joint would be tough. Well, it wasn’t. I have pretty much lost all craving for meat, so seeing those big burgers didn’t do anything at all to me. And I used to love burgers! I mean, they would be right near the top of the list of favorites. Bay had a kids meal with Corn Dog bites and fries, and while I thought about getting a veggie burger, I just munched on some fries. I was planning on running later, so I didn’t want to fill myself up. Moonie’s is a nice, casual restaurant, with good service and a snack bar feel to it. The burgers looked pretty big, and the fries were tasty. If you are passing thru Cedar Park and want a burger, you might want to stop in and get one from Moonie’s. Last night my desktop computer was seeming a bit pokey, so I decided to run chkdsk to see if anything was wrong. It required a reboot, at which point chkdsk started doing its thing. It found about 25 unreadable sectors on the boot up disk, and then went through the process of moving files, fixing files, and whatever else it does. This took about an hour, however it ended with a message “Unknown error occurred,” so I am not sure that it actually fixed anything. After the error message, it continued to boot up into Windows, but it was super-slow, with the disk access light constantly on, so I decided to run chkdsk again, then went to bed. This morning, it was still running, at the 22% mark. At least I think it was still running. It could have been locked up. So, I hit the restart button, then bypassed chkdsk and got into Windows. It was a little slow, but not too bad. Now I am copying any data files I have on that disk onto one of our externals. The only data I have on the bootup disk is whatever I dumped on the desktop, so the backup shouldn’t take very long (it was estimating 30 minutes when I left). I guess I could just get a new hard drive to use as the boot up disk, but the problem is that I don’t know where I put my WindowsXP disc. The computer itself is getting long in the tooth, being about five years old. It’s a Pentium 4 2.4Ghz with 1GB of RAM. I am thinking that it might be time to just get a whole new rig, which means I can either buy a prefab box from Dell, or hit Fry’s/Newegg and build it myself. I am inclined to just get a basic Dell box, and buy a nice video card on my own. Of course I don’t want to spend much money, but since I tend to keep computers longer than the average computer nerd, I should probably get something near the top of the line. Luckily, I enjoy spec’ing out new hardware, so this should be a fun process. Reinstalling my programs, however, will be a pain, especially Adobe apps, since they are mostly upgraded versions. 2008 Mar 05
Gary Gygax, the co-creator of Dungeons and Dragons died this week at the age of 69. I’ve read a few obits and tributes, and I thought I would reminisce a bit about my D&D experiences. Probably won’t be very interesting to anyone, but whatever… you’ve been warned.
Later on, my friends and I really got into D&D. We had most of the books, and started playing on weekends. Our regular group included P, D, my bro, BL and I think TB. We’d go over to one of our houses on Friday nights and sit around the table drinking sodas and eating popcorn, and have a blast playing! P was the DM for most all of the sessions, and he was great. I really liked the games at BL’s house, because we would ride bikes across the neighborhood which was fun, and the popcorn at BL’s house was so tasty. It was the first time I had popcorn that was NOT Jiffy-pop, and it tasted so much better!
One aspect which was fun was collecting the little lead figures. I had so many of them, and they were really fun to play with and paint. We didn’t really use them so much in-game, but they were still fun to collect. I remember going to the Paul Freiler’s Hobby Shop in Old Towne Mall (Torrance) and looking at all the D&D loot, and then later to the new Paul Freiler’s location farther down on Hawthorne Blvd. to read some Dragon magazine. The adventure modules were also a lot of fun, not only to play thru, but read on your own. My favorite module to play through was White Plume Mountain. That was so cool because it had a frictionless floor at one point, then the “Inverted ziggurat” and a vampire at the end. There were also some manticores and phat lewt as well! I believe it was a trident of some sort. Anyways, that was a great module to play through. The next module in the series was kind of futuristic: “Expedition to the Barrier Peaks”, in which you find a spaceship in the mountains and explore. My bro and I had a couple modules that we would just read thru: he had something about Hill Giants, and I had the other one, “Rift of the Frost Giant Jarl” or something like that. They had fun maps and traps etc etc.
Eventually, we lost interest in D&D. High School and other activities (girls!) were at the top of the list, and we stopped playing. But my interest in the Fantasy genre never died, and I continued to read Fantasy books, like the Thieves’ World series and Elric series. To this day, I still enjoy playing RPG’s on the computer and will occasionally pick up a Fantasy novel. It’s sad that Gary Gygax is gone, but he leaves us with a huge legacy in the gaming and Fantasy world. RIP, Gary Gygax. 2008 Mar 02
The other night when I went out for a run, I had a few things going thru my head. The first was that my face was kind of burning. It felt like I had a bad sunburn or something. I guess my skin was so dry, and the perspiration was burning my cheeks. Then later I started thinking about my new meatless diet. I’ve been reading some vegetarianism forums the past few days, and I’ve been surprised at how aggressive vegetarians and non-vegetarians are towards each other, at least on these message boards. It’s so surprising to me that people would get so confrontational about one’s lifestyle choice. Especially about food. I guess I can understand when someone is passionate about not eating meat, but the meat-eaters who come to these forums and start flaming the vegetarians are just amazing. I guess I just don’t agree with forcing your lifestyle choices on others. It’s okay to explain why you made the choices you made, but it’s too much to demand that others follow the same path. My regular running route takes me to the neighborhood high school, at which point I turn around and head back home. This particular part of the route is a long, straight street, with a speed limit of 35mph. I have often seen people get ticketed for speeding here, and I always keep my speed down. But, since it is near the high school, I see lots of new drivers hauling ass down this stretch. This night, I saw the opposite, although it was still a bit of stupid driving. One car was driving extra-slow, and another car behind it (I presume they were friends) was tailgating. Brake lights would flash, and they would slow down even more. Then they would speed up. Then slow down. I tried to remember back to when I was in high school, and I guess we did silly stuff like that too. What these kids were doing was not too dangerous given the slow speed and lack of traffic, but still, I couldn’t help but shake my head. Towards the end of my run, I again noticed that my face was totally burning. It only hurt when I touched my cheeks, so I just tried to ignore it. It must have worked since the next time I thought about it was when I was falling asleep, and my cheeks were back to normal. |
Probably around 6th grade, my friend C’s mom got the D&D Basic game, and we all played at their house one afternoon. I believe the module was “
Besides playing the game, I was into the books. Not novels or anything, but the actual rule books. I’d pore over the 
Speaking of maps, one of the coolest things about playing the game was mapping out the dungeon on graph paper. It was neat to go back and look at the map and recount the adventure. I also used to make my own dungeons using graph paper. I was crazy about putting pits everywhere, for some reason. I also enjoyed taking it a bit further, and drawing out world maps. I used to have this huge world imagined, with capital cities, rivers, mountains, deserts. All that kind of thing!