The Full Of Hate Brothers Say......

I Blame Al Gore

2011-07-17T10:19:00.002-07:00

It's July 17 at 10:18am, and I'm wearing a sweater because it's cold. By God, I want my damned global warming.

Portal 2

2011-04-21T22:08:00.002-07:00

Apparently I am slow and/or stupid as I was quite clear it took me more than four hours to complete the first time through the single-player game. In my defense, though, I wasn't trying for a speed run but rather wanted to listen to the voice acting (and yes, there's actual voice acting).

This was a tremendous game. I laughed out loud repeatedly, and loved every minute that I wasn't cursing the puzzle designers. There were a couple of spots where my faulty attempts only just barely failed, which I think was a pity; I kept thinking I only had to jump a tiny fraction of a second earlier (or later), or steer a slight bit more accurately and I'd have had it where the reality is I wasn't going to succeed with that approach.

Aside from that, this was super awesome. I'll wind up playing through it again to show Kathy, and perhaps a third time if that's required to clean up the rest of the single-player achievements. I have no idea how much of the co-op mode I'll get through as the odds of me playing this with some random schmuck on the internet is just about zero. But if we can play co-op between the PS3 and PC versions (when both Steam accounts are registered to me), then I can probably talk one of the girls into playing.

In short: strong buy.

Get The Hell Out

2010-11-06T00:55:00.001-07:00

Get up, get the hell out of wherever you are and go see RED. Completely effing awesome. Made totally of win and covered in awesome sauce. Go. Git.

Woo!

2010-07-27T16:21:00.001-07:00

After only 33 hours, my "StarCraft II" download finally finished.

*rubs hands together*

*pushes button*

How To Play iTunes Through Ventrilo On Mac OS X

2010-07-18T06:09:00.014-07:00

And there's a whole bunch of steps, because, well, I don't know why. In an ideal world there would be a menu item in Ventrilo, but there isn't.

One-time Setup

You only have to do this once; it isn't required each time you want to start or stop playing iTunes through Ventrilo.

Install Soundflower
Google up "soundflower code" and it's probably the first hit. The thing was written by a company called Cycle 74, but now it's hosted at Google Code, so that's where you want to go get it. Click on the "Downloads" tab at the top, then choose your version. As far as I'm concerned, "beta" means "my time is worthless", so grab the newest version that doesn't have "beta" in its title.

Start Soundflowerbed
One of the things that you just installed is an application called "Soundflowerbed". This is what makes the magic happen, so start it up. What you'll see is a little flower-looking thing in the menu bar at the top of the display. If you see it, you're golden. We don't need to dork with it just yet, but make sure it's there.

Copy Ventrilo
You need a second copy of Ventrilo for your music-playing robot. Open a Finder window and navigate to where Ventrilo lives (probably in /Applications). There's a keyboard shortcut for that, Command-Shift-A, and there's a menu option too, "Go | Applications". Find Ventrilo and select it, then copy/paste it. Mac OS X will duplicate Ventrilo in the same directory and call it "Ventrilo Copy" which is just fine for our needs.

Set up user name for "Music Robot"
Now you need to start Ventrilo to set up a profile for Music Robot. Click on the little arrow next to the first drop-down box, which is labeled "User Name". Click on "New", then type in the name you want music robot to show in Ventrilo, then click "Ok", then click "Ok".

Set up server(s)
Ventrilo stores the servers by user name, so you have to set up all the servers you talk on again, but this time for music robot. Go ahead and do that now.

Set up Ventrilo settings for "Music Robot"
Now you need to set up Ventrilo to handle "Music Robot"s special idiosyncracies. The important parts are (1) no push-to-talk, (2) no key clicks, (3) low but not zero sensitivity, (4) the sound input device should be "Soundflower (2ch)", and (5) Outbound amplifier should be turned way down. After setting all that up, click "Ok" and, back in the main window, click "Mute Sound" in the bottom-left corner. If you don't mute his whole Ventrilo window, you'll hear the music two times, like an echo, and it will drive you batsh*t crazy.

Edit Ventrilo settings for you

Starting "Music Robot"

Each time you want to start inflicting your choice of tunes on your guildmates, here's what you have to do

Make sure Soundflowerbed is running

Start both copies of Ventrilo
You have to start your regular Ventrilo for you to talk, plus you need the copy of Ventrilo running so Music Robot has something to use. Connect both copies to the same server. You should be able to talk and listen just as normal.

Use Soundflowerbed to redirect iTunes
Click on the little flower icon in the menu bar at the top of the display, then select "Audio Setup". You'll get a new window for your efforts. Set the "Default output" drop-down to "Soundflower (2ch)", then click "Ok".

MUA ha ha ha
Play your "Air Supply" collection in iTunes and you should hear it normally through your headphones, along with the wailing and gnashing of teeth from your guildies. Chortle with deeply heartfelt evil.

Stopping "Music Robot"

After you've had enough and are shutting down Ventrilo, here's how you go back to regular sound settings:

Stop iTunes
This step is totally optional
Use Soundflowerbed to stop redirecting iTunes
Click on the little flower icon in the menu bar at the top of the display, then select "Audio Setup". In the new window, set the "Default output" drop-down back to "Built-in output", then click "Ok".
Enjoy a well-earned snack
Yes, go on ... have a cookie.

And Another Thing ...

2010-06-28T14:02:00.002-07:00

Our 10-man Lich King kill puts our guild, Army of Ares, at 41st on our realm for 10-man progression and 16th in Horde guilds. Woo hoo!

I also note that WoW-Heroes.com says that Obamessiah is only the 68th best-equipped toon in the guild. Apparently everybody else is stocking up on 25-man loot, and yet we're the first 10-man team to take down the King. Apparently skill > gear, and we gotz mad skillz down in "group 2."

Yeah, baby!

P.S. I'm gonna advocate that we take Poxi to get his Kingslayer too, just so I can see trade chat explodiate in a hilarious fashion.

Kingslayer, Baby!

2010-06-28T12:54:00.002-07:00

So we downed the Lich King finally. Our long-suffering late night team finally stood atop the corpse of Arthas and put on our "the Kingslayer" titles. Not only that, but we were 10/10 at the finish, and ten people got the achievement at that same instant.

The night we got it, I was driving from my home in Seattle to a new job in Austin, TX. I missed the last scheduled raid night, and they got him down to 12% on their best effort. Since that's only 2% away from the victory RP, I didn't feel like I could miss it, so I stopped early and checked into a hotel with high-speed internet. Sure it meant I had to spend a few more hours in the car over the next two days, but I didn't want to miss the first kill.

I'm just sorry we couldn't have taken Garixx, Memos, and Jaylani too; our team has been together working on this raid for a very long time, and I wish we could all have experienced the thrill of victory together.

Winsong has already scheduled follow-up raids to go back in and do the heroic modes; I'm not entirely sure how I feel about that. On the one hand, I wouldn't mind getting the T10 shadow gear for if I ever get to dps instead of heal. On the other hand, it's a huge time commitment if I'm going to keep raiding, and I'd like to put more effort into some of my other toons and also getting our Saturday runs farther than 3/12.

Wait ... What?

2010-06-22T10:26:00.003-07:00

So there's a post on the front page of World of Warcraft today that the arena tournament ended. For the life of me, I had no idea it was so close; it would have been nice to have seen some indication that it was drawing to a close because I would have tried to get Leigha to come play some matches and get her pet and maybe get the title.

Oh well ... at least Kathy, McKenna, and I got our pets.

Holy ArPen, Batman!

2010-05-24T09:47:00.002-07:00

My pally tank is not uber, but he's pretty well geared. I'm main-tanking our ICC-10 fun runs, and have flown through more random heroics than I care to recall. But I have never seen anything like yesterday, when I ran into a fury warrior in a random. Pheruan the Kingslayer pulled over 13k DPS. In a five man. Ffffuuuuuuu.

I was doing everything I could to hold aggro and nothing worked. Nothing. Every stupid pally trick I could pull worked for maybe two GCDs, then the mobs were back on him except they were dying really stupidly quickly.

I told him he was a beast and asked the secret. He was sitting at 1400 armor penetration, so he was effectively fighting unarmored targets.

I now have a new goal for my plate DPS toons, because that was totally awesome.

P.S. I checked Elitist Armory: 33 Old Kingdom, 15 Utgarde Pinnacle, 12 Halls of Stone, 12 Utgarde Keep, etc. Apparently I lurb the Old Kingdom or something.

COKE Zero

2010-05-18T18:12:00.002-07:00

I assume the "zero" in COKE Zero is referring to the amount of quality taste inside the can. Bleah.

Not EXACTLY The Same As "Undergeared"

2010-05-17T11:25:00.002-07:00

Gevlon's experiment is a bit more hard-core, but on Saturday we went into ICC-10 on a fun run, for alts and people who aren't raiding seriously. I let myself be talked out of tanking at first (I was on my pally, so I went LOLRET instead). We picked up a guildy on his alt DK tank plus a handful of other pugs.

The DK tank might have had more than 5K gearscore, but he'd have been the only one. We wiped a bit, but we got Marrowgar, Deathwhisper, and the gunship down and had a really fun time of it. By the time we got to Saurfang, we'd been at it a while and so only made one attempt before calling it.

We're going back next week without the DK, and I bet we do just as well and with even more lulz.

I'm Not Dead

2010-04-24T21:10:00.002-07:00

Has it really been a month since I posted something? Jeez, I'm getting slack.

Woot!

2010-03-05T08:11:00.003-08:00

Last night we ran our weekly Trial of the Crusader (10 Man) raid. We had two new tanks, one of them setting foot in ToC-10 for the first time, a new healer, and three pugged DPS. And we cleared the whole damned thing, including one-shotting the Twins.

Good job, y'all.

Blizzard Doesn't Want Me To Play With My Friends

2010-01-25T10:02:00.002-08:00

In my continuing effort to gear up my pally, I need to run lots more random heroics. Lots more. Like 240 more emblems of triumph more. Lots. Kathy needs more badges, as does Leigha, so we're all aligned. On both Saturday and Sunday, I hop on my pally, we all group up and queue for a random heroic.

The fly in the ointment is that Dan's shaman's gear is srs bzns. He's got all T9 plus the T9.245 offset pieces, plus 1337 trinkets, rings, cape, the whole kit. For both ele and resto.

So the "random" dungeon finder looks at all of our gear and throws us into Heroic Forge of Souls. Both nights: Heroic Forge of Souls. I'm standing in quest greens, with an average iLevel of maybe 150, queued as the tank for Pete's sake, and it throws us into Heroic Forge of Souls.

Both nights, it's two plus hours to clear the dungeon. We stuck it out, but at the end of Saturday night I mention to Dan that's it's a distinctly sub-optimal use of my limited playtime to run the T10 heroics, and then Sunday night Blizzard does it to us again. We got through it both nights, but it's a long slog. After a wipe on the final boss, it takes five or six minutes just to run back, and then everybody has to rebuff and crap.

And to top it off, Heroic Forge of Souls gives four (4) emblems of triumph total, one per boss for two bosses plus two as a bonus for accepting a random assignment; if it's the first random of the day it's only two emblems of triumph (plus two emblems of frost that I may never be able to use on my pally). In contrast, in two hours ungrouped with my actual friends but pugging with random strangers, I could reasonably expect to clear between six and nine T8 or T9 dungeons, at an average of six emblems per dungeon, so 24 emblems per hour versus 2.

The conclusion: Blizzard doesn't want me to play with my friends. What's up with that?

Emblem-A-Palooza

2010-01-18T17:15:00.001-08:00

I decided to gear up my pally in advance of the incoming warrior tank nerfs. I got quite a bit of playtime this weekend, and spent almost all of it running random heroic dungeons.

Saturday morning, I had not played my pally at all since he dinged 80, so he was sitting in Dalaran in quest greens and blues, covered in a sheen of dust and neglect. I grabbed Pawn scales for prot and ret from Elitist Jerks, and started chain-queueing random heroics.

By the time I went to bed Sunday night, I had four (4) emblems of frost, because I ran heroics for two days. I had purchased the T9 ret chestpiece for 50 emblems of triumph, the T9 prot gloves for 30 emblems of triumph, and have 14 emblems of triumph burning a hole in my pocket. Quick math check: 50 + 30 + 14 = 94 emblems in two days ... dayum, but gearing up has gotten quite a bit more straightfoward.

PugChecker.com shows my track record so far, and it looks like at least 16 heroic dungeons. I say "at least" because there's a bug in how the Armory tracks how many times you've completed Drak'Tharon Keep. It shows I've done it at least once, but I don't know how many more times I ran it.

So maybe one more full day and I'll have enough T9 to queue up as a tank, and we'll see how much easier pallies have it than warriors. I also need to queue up for ToC specifically because there are still drops that I need for both prot and ret.

94 emblems, though ... that's amazing.

Threat Plates RAWK!!!!

2010-01-08T10:54:00.001-08:00

How did we ever live without Threat Plates? They are made of solid awesome. Go get them. That is all.

Important Critical Feedback For PUGs

2009-12-28T16:46:00.002-08:00

"u suck" is not feedback, it is merely offensive noise. And if you can't provide more detail, then perhaps you aren't the ideal person to be offering feedback.

"Use shadowbolt as filler until the target is <25% health" is feedback.

Does everybody see the difference between the two statements? One of them is specific and not accusatory, whereas the other one just identifies the speaker as a douchebag.

That is all.

Have Another Slice of FailPUG

2009-12-24T11:09:00.003-08:00

It finally happened last night: we stumbled into FailPUG-land. Kathy and I queued up for a random heroic and got heroic Halls of Reflection. This is an interesting instance, mostly because a really large percentage of the people imagine that clumping in the alcoves makes it "E-Z Mode".

it isn't. The melee have an AoE interrupt, and if you drag them all into the alcove then the healer is getting interrupted, which means no heals, which means dead DPS.

We got to wave 7 somehow and wiped. We came back in and tried it again in the alcove and wiped on wave 8. Seems like we're making progress, right? The third time we tried it in the big room with CC and everything. That was going well until one of the ranged aggro'd me (heals), and I died before the tank noticed him and picked him up (I suspect Vent would have helped here).

The tank ragequit at that point. Sigh. Frustrating, but children get accustomed to having everything handed to them and it takes a while for them to grasp that team sports aren't always about them getting exactly what they feel they deserve right exactly when they feel they deserve it.

We queued up again and got H ToC, which jebus haven't we seen that enough yet? The ele shaman posted the recount meters WHILE FIGHTING FACTION CHAMPS. And complained about the DPS. Why are you complaining about lack of DPS when everything is dying? This does not make me want to help you get your f*cking badges.

We got a DK tank. He was doing okay health-wise, but was losing aggro all over the place. I know DKs have AOE threat issues, and I wasn't really sweating it because I can keep everybody bubbled and running, but still ... get some threat plates. Black Knight phase two arrives, and he might be the first DK I've ever seen who didn't pop Army of the Dead here. Every single frame has the red square of Pissing Somebody Off Somewhere and I'm trying to keep everybody shielded and healed. In addition to bubble-spam, I have to chase the black knight and the DK; I assume the DK was trying to do something helpful but I'm mostly watching my raid frames and trying to keep everybody in range.

I chase the BK/DK pair right into a wave of corpse explosions. Dead priest ensues.

The ele shaman starts healing (yay dude! You seem to have some issue with DPS and "random pug" but way to change gears). I release and run back in, we finish the death knight, and collect the badges. While I'm rezzing the rogue, the DK ninjas the frozen orb, says I'm the worst healer ever in the game, and leaves group. Awesome finish.

So now I have six characters at max level and have put a grand total of two (2) people on my ignore list, both of whom came from one single PUG instance. I might unignore the shaman since he did, at the end, quit waggling his e-peen long enough to do what was needed to complete the instance, but maybe not. Life is too short for me to want to spend mine around e-peen wagglers.

Rawr v2.3.3 is out

2009-12-21T17:55:00.000-08:00

The big warlock patch must have gone in because it finally, finally stopped trying to get me to weight/gem MP5. What were they thinking, with that mp5 on a warlock thing? Preposterous!

Recount and Discipline Priesting

2009-12-16T10:07:00.002-08:00

Last night I stepped into a pug TotCr-10 with a warrior tank I know, who might become a friend and might become a raiding teammate. I didn't know anybody except him, so my expectations of "AWESOMENESS" were pretty low. The raid leader assigns the resto shammy to raid heals, and me (disc priest) and a resto druid (srs?) as tank heals then off he goes for the pull.

I will admit my druid isn't at level cap yet, so maybe there's a bunch of resto stuff I'll get between 75 and 80, but I would have sworn that druids are really good at rolling HoTs on a bunch of people and not so much at throwing huge heals on one guy. So yes, I think the healer assignments are off but I didn't say anything.

After the inevitable wipe, the druid posts the healing recount meters and says "the priest sux", because, I assume, it's my fault that the OT kited Acidmaw right through the DPS who were consequently too stupid to go get the fire debuff.

I replied that recount was a DPS tool that was spectacularly unsuited to dealing with healers, and that if you're a druid rolling HoTs on a whole raid and you're not at the top of the healing meter then you're doing it wrong (we'll come back to this shortly). He says, and I'm not entirely sure I'm spelling this verbatim, "nuh uh".

I followed up with telling him that recount fails at dealing with disc priest. He asks how that could possibly be, since Recount is made of WIN! Four other people in the raid answer him with variations on "damage mitigation" and "bubbles"; +50DKP to each of those people for cross-class awareness. He posted the overall healing done counts again, then left the group.

Which reminds me how much I really don't like people.

My lessons from this:

Pugs are really random
I should have spoken up about healing assignments. Just because I'm the last guy in doesn't mean I don't have valuable information to contribute.
There are still some people who don't know how discipline priests work

I can really only address #3 here.

When a priest casts "Power Word: Shield", he puts a damage-absorbing bubble around the target. If the bubble is 10K, then the next 10K worth of incoming damage eats away the bubble instead of the target's health. But the combat log just shows "damage absorbed", it doesn't show "damage absorbed by Obamessiah's PW:S", so Recount has no way to credit the priest with the damage mitigated by the bubble.

Normally a discipline priest will have the glyph of Power Word: Shield, which heals the target for 20% of the shield amount. So you can look in recount at healing done, then drill down to get the details for healing done by PW:S and multiply by 5 to get the potential amount of mitigation done by PW:S. Note that you can't tell how much of the mitigation was actually used since, once again, the combat log doesn't assign absorption to the spell.

The second kind of bubbles that disc priests put on people are from Divine Aegis. This happens when your heal crits, and adds a bubble that absorbs 30% of the crit heal. Further crits will stack their DA bubbles up to a maximum of 125*[target level], or 10K on a level 80. And Prayer of Mending crits count as well.

You can kinda-sorta estimate the amount of PW:S mitigation your disc priest is providing from looking at the healing done by the glyph, and you can kinda-sorta estimate the amount of DA mitigation your disc priest is providing from looking at the crit heals from Flash Heal, Greater Heal, Penance, and Prayer of Mending. Add all that together and that's quite a lot of not-dying your disc priest is causing that recount just can't show your loudmouth know-nothing buddy.

Seems like a lot of work, doesn't it? And that, my friends, is why we say recount is for DPS.

Patch 3.3 Day

2009-12-09T09:30:00.002-08:00

New patch! Woo hoo!

I signed in about 9:00pm last night, which is more or less when I normally get everything at home wrapped up and start playing. The realm I play on is on East Coast time, so quite often there are very few people online. Last night, however, there were a lot more people. Guildchat was full of achievements for people running the new 5-mans for the first time, and for PUGging with 10 different people, and all the other activities that come with new content.

I asked if anybody hadn't run the new dungeons yet and got a few responses. I invited Kathy, Dan, and two other guildies and off we went for our first look. It turns out that none of us had run them before, so it was new and shiny for everybody. We wiped twice, but that's not bad at all for a new team on new content. To be honest, after the first wipe I tabbed out and pulled up the Wowhead.com overview so I could research the boss strategies as we went along.

First, these new dungeons are fun. I had a great time, especially the Halls of Reflection. The whole HoR fight where we're retreating before the Lich King, with ominous music playing and waves of scourge and trying to kill everything while Lady Sylvannus broke down the ice walls trapping us .. it was very cinematic. It also had some lore in it, so it wasn't just running around the arena killing faction champions and the Black Knight.

Second, there might be crowd control again in here. There were very few two-mob trash pulls, and four or five mob pulls were much more common. I had to dig through my spell book and find "Chain Undead" spell to put it back on my action bars. It's been a while since we needed CC, so it was a pleasant change of pace.

Third, it's always a jarring boss mechanic when you have to stop DPSing or healing when they do stuff. Running out of the fire/smoke/poison/magic/bomb/whatever is second nature now, but it's just unnatural to be standing face-to-face with a boss not unloading on him. There isn't much of that, so it retains its weird novelty and that's good.

There'll be more stuff later, like whether or not my priest gets his shadow spec back (he's dual disc/holy at the moment) and how awesome it is that my mage gets to have his water elemental out all the time, but for now it was just great to run brand new content and see brand new stuff and get some brand new shiny shiny lewtz.

Raid Leadering Is Hard, Yo

2009-12-01T14:21:00.001-08:00

Really I just wanted to see the 10-man content with some sort of regularity with some of my friends. Now I have to worry about if the loot system is fair enough to current raiders without penalizing new raiders too much and stuff.

Sigh.

It was certainly easier when I just accepted the invite and showed up on time.

The Real Reason People Hate Pallies

2009-11-20T10:52:00.001-08:00

The truth has come out: why pallies are OP.

Now I Don't Have To Write Anything

2009-10-20T11:35:00.002-07:00

Real the whole unvarnished truth here: A Single Set of Rules On How To Raid ANYTHING. Read it. Learn it. Live it.

Thank you to Amber for finding this; I'm just trying to make sure everybody sees it.

Epic x2

2009-10-19T10:33:00.002-07:00

We ran Naxx25 this weekend (there's a whole long rage-filled rant there ... poke me later and watch the bile ooze out), and I managed to live through two (2) epic battles.

First, I broke my heretofore perfect record of finishing Heigan face down on the floor. That's right ... I survived the dance, finally. I even managed to get some DPS in the process because Devouring Plague and Shadow Word: Pain both work even when I'm in holy spec. I forget how long it took, but we had at least five people up at the end.

Second, we downed Instructor Razuvious in what was nearly a wipe, and got down to the last understudy with maybe five people up and him at 20%. Razuvious broke loose a time or two during the fight, but most of the people that died ate it from the fan of knives AOE thing he does. I do need to holla at Bearbehind, though. He tanked one of the understudies all by his lonesome for a long time. I also had no idea bears could get that much HP; he had like 50K when raid-buffed, which is just an insane amount of health.

More World of Warcraft stuff

2009-10-12T13:40:00.003-07:00

When you start playing "World of Warcraft", you roll up a brand new toon and start at level 1. You click on the guy in front of you, he gives you a quest to go kill something or other, and you do it and get some experience. Repeat this and you go up a level, and now you're faster/stronger/deadlier. After a while, you get to thinking that that's what the game is: leveling. You also start to think about getting to the level cap and wonder what you're going to do afterwards.

Kathy and I have actual real-life friends (Hi Dan and Leigha!) who also play WoW. They're leveling up pretty quickly now, and are in the low 70s rolling through the Howling Fjord. Kathy and I are excited because soon they'll be able to go do stuff with us, as opposed to having us run them through things.

But Dan said something with regard to the level cap (I don't recall precisely what it was now) that reminded me of how much my thinking about the game has changed. Specifically: I'm amazed at how much game there is still left after you hit the level cap. In some ways, it's an entirely different experience when you're not leveling, but it's just as rich and just as overwhelming and just as time-consuming ... it just isn't concerned with your XP bar anymore. Weird.

So anyway, I have five toons at the level cap with four more in the 70s and I do not have time to play more than two of them. What with the working and sleeping and doing stuff outside the game and all. And of the two toons I'm actually playing, only one of them is geared at the level of my guild; the other one is still trying to gear up in heroics so I can run him in the second set of 10-mans.

I still recall what it was like questing for level, and I really enjoyed it and fully intend to resume doing it with the rest of my toons (gotta get one of each to level cap, of course). I just thought that I'd be done seriously working them once they dinged 80; now, of course, I realize the depth of my previous error in thinking.

I hate being sick

2009-10-05T08:51:00.003-07:00

So now I'm sick. Started on Friday, and I really thought it was just allergies but I can be stupid that way. My poor baby girl (11 years old, now, so not so much really a baby) was running a fever and, when we checked her throat we saw white spots on it. So Saturday morning we trooped on down to the pediatrician's office.

Hooray! She doesn't have strep throat.

Boo! She does have mono.

I'm pretty sure I don't have mono, or at least I hope to diety I don't have mono. I do have a lovely cough and a slight fever and a head full of mucus. Bleah.

So now I'm "enjoying" a self-imposed exile to the bed and/or the couch with a belly full of faux-Sudafed (thanks, legislators and meth-heads!) in the hopes that I'll get my insides back in order enough to go back to work.

Shazam Is Awesome!

2009-09-09T11:33:00.002-07:00

Shazam, the iPhone app, is completely made of awesome. The promo for the new season of "House" has a cool song that I didn't know, but Kathy and I wanted to buy it. In the bad old pre-Shazam days, we'd have just been screwed. Instead, fire up Shazam, hit the "tag now" button, and let the commercial play. Not only did it identify the song, but makes it easy to purchase from the iTunes Music Store. Yay Shazam!

Interestingly enough, that version pegged out the "relevance" meter when searching for the title. Apparently lots of other people are also Shazam-ing commercials too. We're a meme.

Now go download it for your iPhone and use it. A lot.

P.S. The song is "Grounds for Divorce" by Elbow.

A Universal Attribute

2009-07-14T12:38:00.001-07:00

The Greedy Goblin went to Warsong Gulch. What he found there is people acting like people act: stupid. I recently farmed up enough marks to get my main (and Kathy’s main too, so you know how much of a beta provider I can be when I put my mind to it) the black war mount, and I found that (a) Warsong Gulch was the most frustrating of the three required battlegrounds, (2) PuGs all fought in the middle of the damned field for no damned reason, and (iii) I racked up several PvP achievements by standing in the flag room defending all by my lonesome.

What makes (iii) so surprising is that I did it on a 77 priest and again on a 76 hunter. Solo, in both cases, in a bracket that included plenty of 79 and 80 players. I expected it to just be a time sink, but I actually managed to get achievements in the process precisely the same way that GG observed.

Who Are You Gonna Believe?

2009-06-25T13:51:00.001-07:00

Me, or your own lying eyes? I see blue and green spirals. Srsly.

I’m Pretty Sure That’s Actual Irony

2009-06-11T13:06:00.001-07:00

Gmail works better with Firefox than with Chrome.

F’rinstance, compose an email. Use the “indent” button to indent a line of text. Press enter to go to the next line and try to unindent it using the “unindent” button without also unindenting the line above it.

I’ll wait.

Sadly Typical

2009-06-10T17:48:00.001-07:00

Today I spent my entire workday with my head down, madly type type typing away. If I hadn’t met with my personal trainer today (and dang my legs are still all noodle-y), the only person I would have spoken to since leaving the house this morning would have been the cashier when I bought lunch. I might as well be working from home for all the personal interaction I squeeze into my busy busy day.

On the other hand, I managed to check off exactly zero (0) things from my list of things to get accomplished. Yay me!

But now the day’s over and I’m going home to play “Rock Band” with my sweetheart and as many of my kids as I can rope into it.

Belonephobia

2009-06-09T17:15:00.002-07:00

When I was a wee tiny lad, I was sick. A lot. Spent much of my first five years sick, including quite a bit of time admitted to various hospitals. Enjoyed spending time in an oxygen tent with double pneumonia sort of thing. And got quite a lot of injections in the process.

To this day I do not do well with shots. Not all that long ago, an injection would usually lead to my unconsciousness, or at least to serious tunnel vision and wooziness. Occasionally crying would accompany all of the exciting symptoms of impending falling out.

So of course when I acquired a wasting disease (I chose ankylosing spondylitis, which I heartily recommend to everyone), I got one that requires weekly injections to manage. The good news is that, with weekly injections of Enbrel, I’m not in pain and the disease isn’t progressing so I won’t be losing any more range-of-motion.

So anyway I had to go down today to have blood drawn as part of my managed weight-loss program (down 42 pounds so far … woo hoo!). Since I get shots every week and no longer cry/pass out, my wife didn’t go with me to hold my hand.

*pouts*

Holding hands with my wife is one of the best things ever.

Motivation … Fading … Fast

2009-06-08T14:43:00.001-07:00

I don’t really want to work. The worst part is that I’m not terribly concerned that I don’t really want to work. I am, in fact, concerned that I’m not concerned because I am 100% booked for the next milestone and don’t have the schedule buffer to spend any time faffing around not-working.

I’m not concerned enough to do anything about it at the moment, but I have to keep an eye on that.

In other news, it’s sunny and warm out and I continue not to be a professional golf player, damn it all.

"Star Trek” Is Made Of Win

2009-05-07T14:03:00.001-07:00

I just got done watching “Star Trek” and ZOMG it is made of solid win and covered with awesome sauce. Our VP took the whole of the WLX team to see it this morning, and I could easily have watched it again once or twice right then and there. It was sweet.

The movie was great. It starts out exciting and kept the pace throughout. I sat there through the whole thing with a big grin except at the sad parts, where I got a little misty. Don’t tell.

The casting was phenomenal. I was really impressed at how well the actors inhabited the canonical characters. I completely believed that they were who they were supposed to be, and that they’d grow to be the characters we’d already met in ST:TOS. They even managed to sound like themselves without the actors doing impressions of the original cast.

I walked out of the theater amped, and have only appreciated the movie more as I’ve reviewed it in my head since then. This was a super experience and everybody should go see it.

I've Tried To Explain Before

2009-04-28T10:16:00.001-07:00

I lurv "Red Eye w/Greg Gutfeld" and think you should all be watching it. Unfortunately I haven't done a very good job explaining, whether electronically or in person, why it's the funniest show on television.

Allow me to point to Matt Patterson's take :'Red Eye' at 500

This Ain’t A Scene, It’s A God Damned Arms Race

2009-04-17T13:53:00.003-07:00

I have hosted my World of Warcraft addons at Curse.com for as long as I’ve published addons (not long, actually). And for as long as I’ve known about it, I’ve used WowMatrix to keep all the addons I use updated because (a) WowMatrix had a Mac client, and (2) it aggregates addons from many publishing sites, not just Curse.

For quite some time, there’s been drama between Curse and WowMatrix. I am told, but this all happened before I was paying attention, that WowMatrix used to list the addons without links back to the author’s websites and stuff which, let’s be clear here: that’s really a bad thing. WowMatrix are also reputed (by Curse and WowInterface) to have done other asocial things, but as I said, that was before I was paying attention so I have no personal experience with it.

So now Curse and WowInterface have teamed up to implement some form of blocking so that my WowMatrix client can’t download addons from them any more. Crap.

Curse is certainly allowed to do that; it’s their service and they can provide it however they want to.

I however don’t have to like it, and will be moving my addons away from Curse to GitHub (probably) and having my WowMatrix link updated. It is really a trivial thing, but there’s not much else I can do (besides update my router to block the ads displayed in the Curse Client and poison the Curse addon data that they insist on reaping from my gameplay).

I also hope that WowMatrix is working on figuring out a way around their blocking.

EDIT: Upon further reflection, I have to refine my position a bit: I do not hope WowMatrix figures a way around this. Curse and WowInterface certainly deserve their ad impressions in exchange for aggregating and hosting their respective addons. I still think there is a significant amount of consumer surplus to be had here, though, in further aggregating the updating process. I've started building a proof-of-concept that will (a) auto-update all my addons from whatever source, and (2) will display the hosting site's ads and pass click traffic to them. WowMatrix is definitely in the wrong to obfuscate the ads from the hosting site, and I won't make the same error.

Dang, That’s Cool

2009-04-01T15:52:00.001-07:00

Passwords suck. Srsly.

In an effort to completely screw up my online existence, I decided I need to perform some password hygiene. So I have undertaken a project to provide all of my online personae with good passwords. “What is a good password?” I pretend to hear you ask? I’ll tell you.

It’s a password that’s so full of random crap that you can’t remember it. Bruce Schneier says you should write it down on a piece of paper and stuff it into your wallet, since we are all in fact pretty good at physically securing our pocket money.

But I can’t write small enough to write down all the passwords I need, so I went looking for a password manager. Additionally, I need the manager to have Windows and Mac OS X versions since I use both of those platforms every single day.

A bit of research led me to KeePass Password Safe. I gave it a shot and it looks good. Next, I worked on how to transport my passwords around with me. KeePass has portable versions of both Windows and Mac clients, so I copied both of them plus my database onto a thumbdrive.

Now I have to worry about losing and/or breaking my thumbdrive. The canonical fix here is backing up. So I look for a tool to sync a file (or set of files) between my thumbdrive and a machine somewhere. I didn’t find that exactly, but I did find this instead: Windows Live Sync.

There are clients for Windows (duh), but surprisingly enough we have a Mac client as well. Install on all of my relevant machines, set them up to sync a folder with my password safe it in, and now I have an automatically-synced copy of my passwords everywhere I want to go. Victory!

More WoW Machinima

2009-03-17T16:48:00.001-07:00

I love me some machinima. “The Device Has Been Modified” is very stylish, very cool, and I really like the music:

Baron Soosdon has done some super work here, and seems to have quite a few other pieces under his belt. Well done, sir!

Me != Teh Innernets

2009-03-10T13:37:00.003-07:00

I don't hate John Scalzi. In spite of our political differences (and holy crap there's a bunch of those), I think he's a smart, funny, respectable human being. I also enjoy watching him whip out the ClueBat(tm) because I'm like that about private property and taking authority over maintaining same.

You go, John. Kick 'em twice. Fargin' kneebiters, all of 'em.

Who Watches The Watchmen?

2009-03-09T18:40:00.003-07:00

I do. It was really pretty good; both Kathy and I gave it 3.5/5 stars. I'm not sure how much it will appeal to people who aren't comic book types, but Kathy and I both enjoyed it.

It's dark ... make no mistake about that.

But holy christ, Jackie Earle Haley did a phenomenal job. Whenever he was onscreen, you could feel the controlled anger from Rorschach, and he was a serious serious badass. Mad props.

All You Need Is Hot Chicks and iPhones

2009-03-02T17:33:00.001-08:00

More Proof My Wife Is Smarter Than Me

2009-02-23T15:03:00.001-08:00

I was resisting publishing my addon because it seemed more work than it was worth. Kathy, though, insisted I should put it up on Curse. I figured other people already had something to deal with the neverending influx of trash loot while questing; certainly I couldn’t be the first guy to keep having to throw crap away so I could loot the stupid mob so I could skin it.

So anyway, I published it: MakeRoom on Curse.com. To my complete astonishment, people downloaded it immediately without me even trying to market it. Then they started adding comments and suggesting good improvements.

As of right now, there are 463 downloads, and three people have marked it a favorite of theirs. Woo hoo! Go me!

As an aside, if you can translate the messages into other locales besides U.S. English, it’d be a big help: MakeRoom Localization. Thanks.

In Case You Find This Useful

2009-02-20T13:51:00.002-08:00

Kathy was on me to put my addon up on Curse. So I did. It’s at http://wow.curse.com/downloads/wow-addons/details/makeroom.aspx. There is a bug with the release version that’s posted that I can’t fix until I get home tonight, so if you want to check it out, do that tomorrow.

One Down, 15 To Go

2009-02-20T13:49:00.001-08:00

I just completed my first week of the “20/20 Lifestyles” weight management program. For the first week, my diet was restricted to meal replacement shakes (sold by them, ‘natch), berries, and very lean protein. I was really glad to finish that first week and get to add some vegetables back into my diet.

The good news is that I lost 7 1/2 pounds that first week. Woo hoo! Go me!

Looks Like Trent Gained Some Weight

2009-02-17T14:18:00.003-08:00

Most realistic depiction ever.

Weight Loss Program Woes

2009-02-16T14:35:00.001-08:00

So I’m on this weightloss program for (counts on his fingers) four days now; nothing but meal replacement shakes and lean protein. When do I get to go back to Fatburger? I’m dying here.

World of Warcraft addon development is teh suXor

2009-02-16T13:54:00.001-08:00

I’m leveling up a whole passel of toons. Six of them to be exact, and many of them have skinning as a profession. You can’t skin a corpse until you have looted it. Put those two together and you get “inventory is full”. A lot.

So I started writing an addon to notice when my bags filled up and destroy the cheapest grey item in my bag to make room for the new crappy loot item. When it was just that (find the single cheapest thing and get rid of it), it was all easy: just a bit of Lua code and Bob’s your uncle. Then I ran into the situation where I needed to loot two things before I could skin the mob. My addon destroyed the first item okay, but I was irked that I had to manually run the addon again to make room for the second crappy loot.

My friend SeanK suggested I open a window with some number of crappy grey items so I could easily click-to-destroy several of them at once. “No problem” I thought, and continued to think that right up until I actually tried to write the damned thing.

The documentation for the API is okay, such as it is, at WoWWiki. Blizzard of course doesn’t publish the API docs although I’m completely sure they have docs. But at least somebody is publishing something.

The big pain is the actual UI work. The UI is written in their FrameXML dialect (rather like XAML except really really poorly documented). The only saving grace was you can download a tool from Blizzard to extract all of the Blizzard-authored UI crap so you can see how they did it because really that’s all the docs they’re willing to share. Hmph.

The second big fly in the ointment is when you try to test the code. Lua errors in-game pop up a nice debugger window with stack traces and everything (from the !Swatter package, I think .. some addon I got as part of some other addon I wanted). But XML errors and your addon silently vanishes. Nothing. Nada.

And is there a schema file so you can validate your XML? Well, there’s a local copy embedded into the game files that you can extract via the Blizzard download tool, but why in the world does anybody do XML development environments without putting their schemata online at the URI where their namespace lives? Seriously … are you short the bandwidth or something?

Bah.

Anyway, I finally got a release candidate after about two hours of honest effort embedded over two days of full-time cursing/researching/ReloadUI() iteration. Man, I wish we (MSFT) would take on addon development seriously because we would put out some serious motherf*@#!ing tools because THAT’S THE MICROSOFT WAY.

They Both Screwed Up

2009-01-20T13:21:00.002-08:00

Kathy and I watched the inauguration on teevee, and had a quick discussion about which of them screwed up the oath of office. I think we agreed that Roberts dorked it up, but the Language Log says they're both guilty. For extra bonus points, there are even Constitutional references in there! Win!

Recruit-A-Friend: A Post Mortem

2009-01-19T17:47:00.002-08:00

On Thursday, the 90 days of my triple XP from Recruit-A-Friend (RAF) expires. I didn’t make the best use of my time, and at this point I really wish I had gotten serious about using it sooner. I wanted to scribble down a few notes in case I can save somebody else a bit of trouble.

First, let me say that I was trying to level up alts via dual-boxing. My wife and oldest daughter were just normally questing (they’re also RAF linked), and they got up to the low 40’s without much difficulty, but also without really working on it. If you just want to level up normally but faster, then go right ahead. Have fun. If this is you, then the rest of this won’t really apply to you.

Fun With Dual-Boxing

Like I said, I was trying to level up multiple alts. My original plan was to play two characters at a time, and then do paid transfers to get them from the linked account to my account after it was all said and done. I set up my environment as suggested by WoWWiki and rolled up my first pair: a warrior and a rogue. I set the rogue on autofollow and drove the warrior. When I got into combat, I’d click back and forth between the windows furiously clicking and typing. It sort of worked until I got up to about level 10, where I was overwhelmed by the complexity of playing two reactive melee classes.

I looked at what was making things difficult, and it was that the follower needed to stop following to start fighting. Clearly I needed a caster as a follower instead. I also wanted to reduce the workload in managing the follower, so I wanted him to have two or three useful things to do.

I got a key broadcaster, so that any buttons I pressed in the main window would be duplicated into the follower’s window. I setup a handful of macros (follow the leader, assist the leader, heal the leader, get on/off your mount), and rolled up a rogue with a priest follower.

That worked much better. I drove the rogue, and when I ran into combat I’d hit the “assist the leader” button and the priest would Smite. I’d hit the “heal the leader” button and the priest would heal me. That worked great until about level 20 or so, when occasionally the priest would pull healing aggro and then I couldn’t kill the mobs before the priest ate it.

I refined the macros a bit to use “[target=focustargettarget,nodead,help][target=focustarget,nodead,help][target=focus,nodead,help][]” and to set the leader as focus. That worked almost perfectly almost all the time. I still died occasionally, but it was rarely from not getting the priest to do what I wanted him to do.

Leveling Guides

I am a big fan of Jame's Leveling Guides. I fdllowed his guides to level up my main from about 20 to 74 and was very impressed with the speed of progress and with the completeness of the guides. I also liked the price (free).

When dual-boxing, of course, you have to complete the quests for both toons. I never found a good way to automate the quest turn-ins, or to automate the looting, so I would have to click back and forth between windows to turn in quests, loot kills, and get the occasional quest that couldn’t be shared.

Also, I didn’t do all of the quests. In fact, I skipped over a whole lot of them, and skipped entirely doing quite a few zones. That’s because collection quests with drop rates that aren’t close to 100% really suck, and with 3x XP I didn’t have to do them. So I didn’t. Even with skipping collection quests, I still hit the level cap for the 3x XP well before the end of the guides.

Near the end, I gave TourGuide a try. This is an in-game addon that automates a leveling guide. It has a very minimal display normally, automatically tracks your progress through the guide with per-toon records, and is generally a lovely tool. Jame hasn’t posted most of his guide in TourGuide format, so there’s that to consider, but where the TourGuide guide matched the quests I was doing, it made it significantly easier to do (I did all of Dustwallow Marsh using TourGuide).

Conclusions

I enjoyed this, and will enjoy my new alts. I wish I had started seriously leveling them up as soon as I started the RAF instead of waiting until it was almost over because then I would have had a full set of toons at level 60+ instead of just the seven I’ve got now.

The dual-boxing was a fun challenge, and I enjoyed using my followers to help level up. I am looking forward to not having to use them, though, as they still represent a certain amount of duplicate effort (getting two full sets of loot items, clicking over to get/turn in quests, etc).

I also really enjoyed skipping all the stupid collection quests since I didn’t have to do them. Yay!

If you’re considering dual-boxing to leverage your RAF bonus, then I say “go for it.” If you have any questions, I’ll be happy to try to answer them.

Exciting new audiophile technology

2009-01-15T14:41:00.001-08:00

Check out these new products from the Intelligent Design Team at Elemental Voice. They’re spectacular.

There’s a word for that?

2009-01-12T10:13:00.001-08:00

English is written left-to-right, or LTR in programmerese. Arabic (among others) is written right-to-left, or RTL. And, it turns out, some languages are (or more precisely “had been”) written both RTL and LTR on alternating lines.

There’s a word for that: boustrophedon.

So now I have inflicted YET ANOTHER worthless piece of trivia upon your poor unsuspecting brain. Ha ha. I win.

Tournament Scrabble(tm) players, you already knew this one because it’s supposedly on your list of acceptable words. But you know what isn’t? “Boustrophedonically,” which is a real word but won’t fit within the confines of a Scrabble(tm) board. Neener, neener.

How do you people FIND these things?

2009-01-08T13:19:00.001-08:00

Elizabeth Bear points you to the Best! Amazon review! Evar!

I Never Thought I’d Miss Mary Murphy

2009-01-05T16:59:00.001-08:00

I hate hate hate her incessant screaming and neverending quest for catchphrase immortality. That said, we watched the premiere of “Superstars of Dance” last night; it was fun seeing more dance on television, but I would really have liked to hear the judges explain their votes at least somewhat. I especially would have liked them all to explain why they gave the Russian soloist such low marks. At least on SYTYCD the judges have to provide some commentary whereas SoD just has them spit out a number and nobody knows why they rated the dancer 6/10. Bleah.

It also took me longer than it should have to realize that the judge from India wasn’t negating everything the Argentinian judge was saying, he was just prefacing his vote of 9/10 by saying “nine” in some-language-not-English. Sometimes I are a dope.

Rock Band 2 Is Teh Awesum!!!!

2009-01-02T21:03:00.003-08:00

Holy crap, Rock Band 2 is awesome. I've been playing it, both solo as well as with my two daughters, and it's been a whole lot of fun. It's awesome, covered in awesome sauce. In addition to all of its merits as a solo game, the fact that I can play it with two kids, one of whom is only 6, and still have good results says a great deal about its family-friendliness.

I'll now be telling everybody I know to upgrade. So far, that means ... um ... you.

Happy New Year!

2009-01-01T10:20:00.002-08:00

Have a happy New Year, and I hope this year finds you and yours healthy and prosperous, or at least as prosperous as you can manage given what the hell is going on in these United States.

Merry Christmas

2008-12-25T08:55:00.002-08:00

Or, as we call it around my house to my mother's grave disappointment, "Atheist Kids Get Presents Day."

Cheesetastic video + Choose Your Own Adventure

2008-12-11T10:56:00.001-08:00

Equals WIN!!!! Thank you, Megan Messinger and TOR.COM. I feel complete now.

Arrrgh!

2008-11-21T09:09:00.003-08:00

I just walked through the living room where the teevee was on, and that minimal exposure to the D-bag Congresscritter from Missouri expounding on how the Big 3 automakers deserve huge piles of my money so that they don't reap the full benefit of their sh*tty decision- and car-making and go f*cking bankrupt was enough to make my head explodiate.

And now I am dead, with an explodiated head. Jebus farking christ on a stick.

I voted

2008-11-04T09:38:00.001-08:00

Did you? It's important.

World of Warcraft: Zombie Edition

2008-10-23T14:02:00.000-07:00

The zombie invasion has started. I had begun putting together a post about being a zombie and starting your own invasion, but after Blogger ate it, I found this thread on the official forums instead. It isn't a complete overlap, but there's lots of good info there.

It could be worse

2008-10-17T15:03:00.003-07:00

I just finished reading Zoe's Tale. As I was sitting in two airports plus a short plane ride in between reading, and sniffling, and wiping my eyes to the point that a passer-by asked me if I was okay and I lied something stupid about an allergy, I took small comfort in knowing that no matter how girly my crying was, Scalzi is even more of a girl for having written it in the first place.

Anyway ... go get it and read for yourself. Most excellent.

DIY Wi-Fi Antenna

2008-08-28T15:44:00.002-07:00

How did I miss this? The Ez-12 parabolic reflector antenna design, suitably simple to construct for kindergarten drop-outs such as m'self, is claimed to show up to 11dB gain in some cases. I'll have to try this out tonight and see how it works.

WANT! WANT! WANT

2008-08-08T13:44:00.001-07:00

Well, to be honest, I don’t know that I want one $250 worth, but still … who wouldn’t want a 50 mph anti-gravity racecar?

WTF Is Up With England, Again?

2008-08-04T16:52:00.001-07:00

I seriously do not understand what happened to these people. They used to be the forces of civilization, who carried the rule of law everywhere they carried their flag. Now, though, they sold their legacy for a mess of pottage.

I’m seriously disappointed. This is not the England that I knew.

Now That’s Novel

2008-08-01T11:23:00.001-07:00

Blizzard got an injuction against MDY last week about MDY’s Glider bot. They have now followed that up with a request for an injunction preventing MDY from open-sourcing Glider, which is certainly a novel request.

On the one hand, I see Blizzard’s point. Once the bot source is out there and available for use, they will be unable (mostly) to detect all of the different ways that people could modify the core bot play. Sure, each person that used the bot would then be violating the terms of service, but Blizzard wouldn’t have much luck in identifying them all. And without identifying them, Blizzard can’t ban them from the game. And without banning them from the game, there’s almost no way to ensure that they don’t fix up the “super PvP” mode that Glider’s devs claim to be close to, which disrupts my game play.

On the other hand, I don’t think the courts should be able to prevent a person or company from open sourcing their software assets. MDY built their own product, and if they want to open source it, I think they have the right to do so.

SYTYCD: WTF again

2008-08-01T10:42:00.002-07:00

There is no farking way that Courtney belongs in the finals. No way. She is teh suX0r. You people need to develop some judging ability and taste, for f*#$'s sake.

And another thing

2008-07-26T00:24:00.002-07:00

This is quite old, I know, but I was reminded of it by the STOP sign video link I just posted. So as not to have to go spelunking for it again the next time I think about it: National Flags of the World, with client's comments.

What If ...

2008-07-25T16:12:00.001-07:00

What would it look like if the stop sign hadn't been invented by the gummint, but had been outsourced to a private marketing firm? Let's imagine, shall we?

WTF Is Up With England, Part 2

2008-07-23T11:37:00.002-07:00

Fox News is reporting more details about Christian Bale's arrest. He apparently is charged with a class 5 verbal assault, which, as far as I can tell, translates as "raised his voice in a surly or disrespectful manner." He's lucky he didn't "intend to cause alarm", because that would be a class 4 verbal assault, you see, and holy farking christ on a pogo stick we don't want to go there.

I Love Dr.Horrible

2008-07-22T23:31:00.002-07:00

Kathy and I bought a season pass on iTunes last week and downloaded all three episodes, but we didn't get around to watching them until tonight. Holy crap, that was amazing. Get some.

Neil Patrick Harris was perfect. He made me laugh, and cry, and really feel what Dr.Horrible was going through. Also, Nathan Fillion was high-larious. Go watch it again.

WTF is England's Problem?

2008-07-22T13:31:00.002-07:00

Taking a photograph of a collection of hoodlums disturbing the peace outside your apartment results in a warning to the photographer and might lead to his arrest on assult charges. I've long wanted to visit the U.K. but crap like this makes me wonder if maybe that isn't such a hot idea.

You Did What?

2008-07-21T13:35:00.001-07:00

He might be the only movie reviewer that the average man-on-the-street could name, but ABC doesn't much care if he doesn't work for them any more: Ebert and Roper are both leaving "Ebert & Roeper".

Ewww!

2008-07-18T15:09:00.001-07:00

Wow. I sux0r at Photoshop, and even so I'm pretty sure I could beat this lame effort.

Tattoos Are Forever

2008-07-18T11:54:00.001-07:00

I'm really impressed by people who go to all the trouble to get themselves inked up but manage (somehow) to screw it up. Case in point: The 10 Greatest Misspelled Tattoos according to "The L Magazine." Also, I'm not entirely sure about "greatest ever", but they're still pretty funny.

That's Just Wrong

2008-06-13T10:15:00.002-07:00

There's no way that Jaime and Rayven should have been eliminated last night. Who the (*@($* are these people voting for Gev and whatshername that did the disco routine? They were lame lame lame. Lame.

Geez, people. Think before you start dialing. I haven't forgiven your idiocy last season in not giving Danny the crown he so richly earned.

I Might Have to Change My Mind

2008-05-23T10:16:00.003-07:00

I've never been a big fan of Weezer. Until now. This is super-dee-duper meme-alicious:

Pork and Beans by Weezer

And if you missed any of the pop culture references, Valleywag gathered them all together for you.

Cheese Levels Are Dangerously High

2008-05-21T13:21:00.002-07:00

We watched the American Idol final performance last night, and we commented to each other how amazingly atrocious the songs from the "write a sappy song" contest were. I blame the producers; if they hadn't picked such saccharine dreck the first time, we wouldn't be drowning in the hyper-focused syrupy twaddle three years later.

Anyway, Defamer summarized it thusly: David Archuleta Stops Weep-Giggling Long Enough to Pound David Cook into a Fine, Grungemo Pulp which is technically wrong but oh-so-right anyway. I thought David Cook took it in a walk, and DialIdol seems to agree with me.

Catchier than playing catch with a packet of ketchup

2008-05-02T21:40:00.001-07:00

Title stolen straight from Best Week Ever, who got it exactly right:

It's a FAIL-A-PALOOZA!

2008-04-28T16:28:00.002-07:00

I now have a lifetime supply of "FAIL" pics: The FAIL Blog

Oh, My Aching Sides

2008-04-16T10:37:00.001-07:00

I love it when poetic justice gets served, and I'm hoping that the courts are about to serve some up.

Warp Factor 3.6e-8, Mr. Sulu

2008-04-08T19:28:00.001-07:00

Reactionless engines are a possibility? Cool! The Mad Rocket Scientist has the details, or some of them anyway.

The Disruptiveness of the iPhone

2008-04-08T12:13:00.002-07:00

I got an iPhone, and it's now my indispensible portable device. I use it constantly. I can't wait until the 3G ships, so I can throw away my still-perfectly-usable $500 phone to buy a whole new $500 phone that does the Intertube faster. But here's the interesting thing: it's become indispensible in ways that I didn't expect it to before I got it.

Way back in the day, I used to compile all my sources with scripts. That lasted until I started doing Unix development, when I was introduced to "make". My first reaction was "why do I need that? I can write scripts to compile stuff." I was, of course, completely wrong. Completely, amazingly, agonizingly wrong. "make" was a whole different way of dealing with that particular underlying problem, and having once found "make", there was no way in hell I was going back to a non-"make"-having environment.

Same thing when we got always-on broadband connectivity (back in like '98 or '99). Up until then, we would occasionally go and dial-in to check email, but it was always a specific "go and check email" task. Once the broadband connection showed up, though, our network usage went way up. Not because we checked email all that much more often, but now the WWW was no longer unreasonable. And once again, having once found always-on connectivity, there was no way in hell we were ever going back to occasional dial-up access.

This pattern has repeated itself several times in just my personal experience: a technology comes along that beforehand I couldn't imagine why I'd want it, but afterwards became something that I couldn't imagine doing without it. "make", broadband, TiVo, and now an iPhone.

Kathy got the first iPhone in our house because she said I could take the birthday money she'd already gotten and just add the difference to get her one for her birthday. I did, because she deserves cool things in general, and whatever she wants I like to get her. I got one because I too deserve cool things, and she kept taunting me with "my phone's better than your phone."

Now that I have it, I find I use it constantly. Not for making phone calls, mind you. I probably don't use its "phoneness" more than I did my previous handsets. I use it all the freaking time as a portable Internet device. At this point I'm really glad that Steve and the Death Star made me get an unlimited data plan because I am sucking the bits out of the aether all the livelong day.

I can't even watch television anymore without my iPhone in hand (well, I'm watching TiVo, but you know what I mean). Previously I was unlikely to pause the show and wander off to the other room to look actors up on IMDB (one of the most common things we say while watching teevee is "I know that guy/girl/child from somewhere!"). Now that I have an iPhone in-hand, I do just that. All the time. I read my RSS feeds at the gym. I twitter. I facebook. I hardly even notice standing in line for random crap any more because I always have something to do while waiting to check out at the grocery store or whatever.

And I do all these things because they are now significantly more convenient for me to integrate them into the non-digital portion of my life. It isn't that they weren't there before, but they were previously walled off into their own domain. Now that they're everywhere that I am, I can use them to keep informed, to talk more loudly via twitter and blog, to research more deeply, to remember more broadly, and to listen more carefully.

I can't wait until The Steve invents an implantable iBrainPal so I can quit typing with my thumbs.

Wait ... what?

2008-04-08T10:09:00.003-07:00

Japanese fertility festival, where you can worship the penis! Seriously ... I wouldn't lie about that! See for yourself if you haven't already over at The Jawa Report or AoSHQ.

No heaven, but plenty of hell

2008-04-03T09:25:00.002-07:00

Saw this on io9.com: underground fires that burn for decades, complete with pictures of what hell-on-earth looks like. That's freaky-cool, and if I'm ever in PA I'm going to insist on taking a trip to what's left of Centralia.

Wooooo!

2008-04-02T09:22:00.001-07:00

Woooo! Iron man! Wooooooo!

My experience so far

2008-04-01T13:32:00.002-07:00

Day #2 of my doctor-suggested weight-loss and fitness program: making myself go to the gym in the morning is not the hardest part so far ... it's the "only one lunch per day" rule, the "no pastries" rule, and the "no pints of Ben&Jerry's after dinner" rules that are the hardest part(s).

Go forth and consume!

2008-03-28T19:24:00.001-07:00

I just ordered my copy of "Outside the Wire" on DVD, and I seriously think you should too. Go forth and consume!

RPC == teh suXor

2008-03-25T14:59:00.003-07:00

The more time I spend doing RPC, the more I realize that (a) it's the tool of the debbil, and (2) Indigo (a.k.a. Windows Communication Foundation) is an amazingly amazing piece of technology.

The one true lesson of software engineering

2008-03-21T15:09:00.002-07:00

The one true lesson of software engineering is "engineers don't know jack sh*t about anything. At all."

Engineers are really bad at figuring out where their programs spend all their time. I don't know anybody ever who could accurately predict where the real bottlenecks in their systems were without using a profiler. I don't know anybody ever who could truly optimize their systems without profilers.

And engineers are super-duper especially bad at scheduling. I had always just assumed that it was due to a lack of interpersonal skills that caused developers to throw away their estimates because their managers said "I need it sooner than that." That's what I saw, anyway. No matter how much time the engineer spent coming up with an estimate, they would cheerfully throw it away in order to agree with their manager's schedule-oriented daydream (or their manager's manager's daydream).

It turns out that there's more to it than just an inability to say "I understand you don't like this schedule, but it is what it is": humans suck at planning.

I have no idea what to do about it, but I thought it was worth mentioning. Now if you'll excuse me, I have an RPC traffic generator to finish writing; I said it would be finished on Monday and now I have even more concern than usual that it will be late.

The Moment It Clicks

2008-02-12T10:49:00.000-08:00

I was going to say "Go right now and buy 'The Moment It Clicks' by Joe MacNally. Now. Right now right now." but you can't. It's out of stock at Amazon. Let me just add my voice to the chorus that this is an amazing amazing amazing book that you should have.

In any case, you should stick it in your shopping cart until they restock.

After-Action Report: Bogen Cafe with Steven Katzman

2008-02-11T21:57:00.000-08:00

This past Saturday, February 9, I went to my first ever photography workshop. It was the Bogen Café with Steven Katzman event for Seattle, presented in partnership with Glazer's Camera. The speaker was Steven Katzman, whom I thought was a really nice guy and an excellent speaker.

The event started at 10:00, with Steven giving a short presentation about some of the lessons he learned over his career about how to be a better, or at least good, photographer. I took my notebook with me so I could write all this down, but the room lights had two settings ("off" and "OMFG that's bright") so I couldn't see well enough to record any thoughts during the presentation. I got the big point, which was to be empathetic and connected with your subjects but don't let that stop you from getting the picture.

The presentation included many shots from his new book, "Face of Forgiveness," as well as other photos from his catalog. He didn't lecture about any particular photo in terms of f-stop or exposure or even lighting setup. He mostly talked about the importance of feeling something, and connecting, and with telling the story. He showed photos from New Town and talked about how he got them, how the people in New Town and he came together, and how they were still affecting his life.

After the lecture portion of the program was over, the folks from Bogen and Glazer's led us back into a large studio space where they had set up three separate workshop areas with some serious high-dollar lighting gear and some models. Steven talked about the lights in general terms and named the equipment, but he wanted to talk about how to shoot a well-exposed shot with the gear, which quite frankly was far more interesting to me. His lesson here got me to use the histogram display on my camera far more than I've ever used it before, and I'm already applying the lesson there to the shots I'm taking at home. So yay! I got my money's worth! While we were ogling the lighting gear, and many of us were trying not to ogle the models, the Glazer's folk set up a fourth workshop area back in the lecture room with two more models.

Then they cut us loose and let us wander around taking turns being the photog at each station. All of the stations were set up with PocketWizards, so when it was your turn you just slapped the PW transmitter into your hot-shoe and off you went. Since I'd already shot a few hundred frames with my Cactus triggers, this was dead simple but a few other students hadn't seen wireless triggers and/or off-camera lighting, so the pace of the students through the process was quite uneven.

So here's station #1. You can see the ginormous softbox at camera right, and the edge of a big piece of white cardboard at camera left. The backdrop is just a cloth slung over a backdrop holder, and the models are members of the local Roller Derby team. The middle girl is holding a 90% white target so you can set the white balance in post-processing.

Here's what they look like when I was the photog and the light comes from that lovely lovely softbox and reflector instead of those nasty fluorescents. I managed to get each of the three girls with apparently completely different direction, so I apparently have a talent for something even if it isn't photography.

Station #2 had a single umbrella above eye-level at camera right and a second strobe about seven feet up at camera left. There was also a silver reflector in a frame handy, but I didn't use it (I'll come back to that shortly).

This was "Dirty 007." She tried so hard to look all tough and edgy. All of the roller derby girls tried very very hard to look tough and edgy. Maybe it's just that I'm old now or something, but they all looked as cute as kittens and about as ferocious. They were great. Anyway, I liked this shot because I got the specular highlight on the rollup door behind her head where I wanted it for a nice light-shadow duality thing.

I also got her to turn around so I could shoot her tattoos. She was all inked up and stuff, but still was just cute as a bug in a rug. My guess is that she's roughly the same age as the jeans I was wearing because I am just that much of an old curmudgeonly bastard.

Station #3 had one lightbox directly overhead, a white reflector angled up from beneath, and two lightstrips firing from behind the model angled in towards the center. In the setup shot, you can see the overhead lightbox and the two light strips (one facing you and one in profile). The reflector is there too, but it's in a frame and you're viewing it edge-on.

So this is what Marcus looks like when the lights fire. He looks great, and it's because the lighting setup was great so that I pretty much just had to be there to press the shutter release.

Station #4 had a beauty dish high at camera right, a white reflector at camera left, and a softbox firing into the backdrop. I forget the lighting ratio between main and backlight mostly because I failed to write it down in my notebook.

Megan and Lewis. These people are clearly aliens because no normal humans can be that gorgeous.

Don't believe me? Look at them. Tell me you're that good-looking. G'wan. That's what I thought you said.

So what did I learn?

Be the director

Connect with the models

Do something different

I did, however, have a really good time. I learned several things, some positive and some negative. I've been able to apply those lessons in my other shooting around the house, and I even think it's helping. In short, this was well worth the measly $25 I paid for the class.

I've got more frames up on my Flickr page, by the way, in case you aren't already bored beyond belief.

Yeah, yeah, yeah ... what?

2008-02-06T15:48:00.000-08:00

I'm reading through this short piece on the resurgence of 60's fashion crap and nodding my head and thinking "yep, yep, yep ... look at all of that dreck that the boomers are trying to bring back around." I'm not entirely sure that it's a bunch of twentysomethings trying to borrow this stuff to attract attention, so maybe we differ a bit there on the interpretation.

But then I get to this part: "Scared because on top of that, there’s a war going on that’s costing more than the military budget of the world…. combined." I don't want to pretend you're not afraid. Fear can be a real thing. But this doesn't even pass the laugh test.

First, it's very cheap to have legions of soldiers without equipment, so the lack of budget for the forces of the Sudan, for example, is hardly surprising. Add all of them up and you get a tiny dollar figure, but their troops are incapable of projecting power outside their own borders, and are occasionally incapable of projecting power to all parts within their own borders.

Second, most of the nations in the EU have approximately no armed forces because they don't need them; their expeditionary forces can handle small conflicts, and when large conflicts pop up they can always cry and wave for Uncle Sugar to come bail them out. We continue to have armed forces because (1) we don't really trust other people to guard ourselves and our posterity, and (2) it isn't all that expensive. In 2007, for example, our total military spending was 3.8% of our GDP ( National Defense Budget Estimates from the Office of the Undersecretary of Defense).

Let me repeat that ... 3.8% in 2007. The most astonishing thing about the U.S. military machine isn't how expensive it is, but how cheap it is.

It's BACON!!!!

2008-02-06T14:36:00.000-08:00

Mmmmm .... bacon bacon bacon bacon bacon. Bacon. Yummy yummy yummy bacon.

Phone Envy

2008-02-06T13:19:00.001-08:00

Yesterday was Kathy's birthday. I had been thinking about all manner of things to get her as a birthday present, when she mentioned that she was thinking about pooling her "money for birthday present" presents towards an iPhone. "A ha!" I said, so I bundled her into the car and off we went to the Apple store. I of course didn't tell her that's where we were going, so it was still a surprise to her right up until we were about 100 feet from the Apple store.

We walked in and I announced in a large voice that "my sweetie wants an iPhone, and I want you to get one for her." The clerk produced an iPhone in a box, there was some jiggery-pokery with the credit card and the handheld laser scanner / card swipe device the Apple store retail clerks use now, and then we were out of there.

Got home, plugged it into her computer, and activated it on our existing AT&T account (replacing her old and busted Moto RAZR), and she was golden. No problems. Not one. The whole process worked just like companies wished it always did.

And the phone! OMG it's gorgeous. And shiny. She just giggles every now and then from the delight of dorking about with it. After a bit she let me touch it so I could type in the access key for our wireless network at home, but then she wanted it back.

Now, of course, I have phone envy.

P.S. I tried to photograph it, but couldn't get anything I liked. Most of the shots looked like this promo from Apple's website, so here's a shot from Apple's website.

Amazon + TiVo = SCORE!

2008-02-04T22:14:00.000-08:00

We were so busy over the weekend that we totally forgot the Super Bowl was on. Normally we'd have TiVo'd it and then fast-forwarded through the boring parts to get to the commercials, but we were busy and didn't even do that much. Tivo noticed that there was a "House" on afterwards, so it recoded it. As always, though, the live event ran long and we didn't get the whole thing.

Our first stop was iTunes, but we didn't see any episodes of "House" there. So we checked Amazon and, sure enough, there they were. I had to sign for the "Unbox" service, but that was easily accomplished. Drill down to the missing episode, hit the "1 click" button, and bob's your uncle.

We didn't wait for it to download, but went off and did other things. When we sat down tonight, it was waiting for us. It was only standard definition, but it was a good encoding and still looked nice. It also came without commercials, which was an unexpected bonus. If only we could get a fatter pipe from Qwest, this would be super-dee-duper. As it is, though, it's a strong recommend. I imagine we'll be buying plenty more episodes from unbox now that we're sensitized to it.

All the new WCF features for the web

2008-02-01T09:47:00.000-08:00

Not that everybody needs this, but it's useful to have it all gathered in one place: Steve Maine's TOC for the new WCF Web Programming Model stuff.

Which of us are you lying to?

2008-02-01T09:44:00.001-08:00

Raymond Chen notices something disturbing on many levels. I wouldn't have been tricked because I whine until Kathy buys real avocados to make guacamole, which she does because she's super.

It's a cheeseburger. In a can.

2008-01-29T10:37:00.000-08:00

I can't imagine this is good, but I've been wrong before: cheeseburger in a can. A can. Around a cheeseburger.

Yes, I know I'm repeating myself. I'm having kernel panics because now you can get canned cheeseburgers.

Amazing what you can do with consumer-level gear now

2008-01-24T10:30:00.000-08:00

Mission: Restage the Omaha Beach invasion from D-Day.
Cast: Three actors
Time available: Four days.

Doomed?

I think not.