Category: Random Thoughts

The general category for posts on this blog.

A Car for the Zombie Apocalypse

Random Thoughts

One of the central preoccupations of my life is ensuring that I am prepared should the dead rise from the grave.

Okay, not really, but it is fun to pretend sometimes…

In any event, when I saw the products from Gibbs Technologies, I couldn’t help but think that they might come in handy should the improbable happen.  Especially the Humdinga.  Going from 4 Wheel Drive to gliding across the water is sure to safer than driving around looking for a bridge to cross the river the undead have chased you toward.

Now if they could just make it a hybrid capable of running on full electric, full gas, or any combination thereof, I’d be set.

Digsby

Random Thoughts

A long time ago, in an apartment far, far away… I was a gaming geek, and other gaming geeks with whom I chatted on IRC were talking about a new instant messaging tool called ICQ.  It was kinda like the instant messaging that AOL had, but you didn’t have to be an AOL user.  I wish I still had my old ICQ#, it was low, and that made me leet… sadly, I forgot the password, had the account set up with an email address I didn’t have access to, and after much pleading with the ICQ guys I gave up and got a new account.  But I barely use ICQ at all anymore.  Over the years, AOL made their IM client available to everyone, Yahoo put one out, and so did Microsoft.  There are more, like Google Talk, X-fire, and most social networking sites have some sort of integrated chat, but I haven’t signed up for most of them.  The real problem was having all that crap installed on your PC.  For years each network was completely separate.  And even now, only a couple of them have linked up to share.  That was why when a friend showed me Trillian, I was extremely excited.

Just think!  All my instant messaging clients wrapped up in one application where I could manage them all!

Trillian has served me well over the years, but a while back they simply stopped going forward.  The developers were pouring all their time into Astra (I’m in the beta), their next multi-IM client, but even it is going forward slowly.  It also doesn’t seem to be expanding on the features of the old program very much.  I’m in the beta, and I’ve been using it… its basically the same thing with a slightly different look and feel.  In fact, really, the only thing that Astra has is a web version that promised to have the same contact and configuration info as your desktop client does so you can get on your IMs from anywhere you can open a browser to their site.

A couple months ago, someone pointed me at Digsby.  I poured through the feature list and got very excited again.  They promised to integrate with MySpace and Facebook and others, they also promised to allow me to manage my email accounts (like hotmail and yahoo) without having to open the webpage if I didn’t want to.  And it delivered… with one tiny flaw.  See, they had this feature that allowed you to alias and merge multiple IM accounts for the same person under one entry, so now I wouldn’t see the same person four times, I’d see them once with four options for chatting.  The flaw was that after moving all my contacts around, when I closed and then re-opened Digsby, all my contacts were gone.

So, I trudged back to Trillian after one glorious day of Digsby.  But now, a few months later, I decided to check up on ol’ Digsby and it turns out they claim to have fixed many of the bugs, including the one I ran into.  I fired up Digsby and it auto-updated to the latest version, and blam! all my contacts!  In fact, all my contacts in the way I had grouped them prior to them vanishing!

It looks like I’m giving Digsby a second chance.  I’m still not uninstalling Trillian/Astra, just in case I need to recover my contacts again, but maybe this time ol’ Digsby will stick.  I hope it does, because I dig all the extra feature, none of which look like they are going to make Astra any time soon.

Building the World

Random Thoughts

So, I have finally begun my first furtive steps in building my Zombie MMO.  It will be web based, because that’s easier for me since I’m a webpage and database guy, not a graphics engine and client/server guy.  I could get some guys, but I couldn’t pay them, and I’d rather keep my game to myself for now.

Anyway… The first piece I’m working on is how to build the world, the structure upon which everything else is going to stand.  And I think I actually have the bulk of it worked out, if not all the details, many of which won’t become solid until other decisions have been made.

In the meantime, I’m taking a look around the internet at other web games to see what I like and what I don’t like.  To that end, do you have suggestions?  What are some web games worth looking at?  Which ones are well done and which ones are complete crap?  I actually want to see both varieties because understanding why something is complete crap can often be more beneficial than trying to figure out why something works well.

Garage Sale

Random Thoughts

One of the advantages of living in an actual house in an actual neighborhood is the neighborhood garage sales. Everyone carts all their old crap they don’t want anymore out on to their yards and tries to pawn them off on anyone willing to take them away… I mean, people try to divest themselves of things they no longer use and pass them on to people who will make good use of them, for a small fee.

The wife and I decided to take this opportunity to thin out our bookcases and to cut down out CD collection, and even empty a closet or two… and to try to beg people to buy my old computer junk. We dragged out two card tables worth of books, paperbacks and hardcovers, and easily over 400 CDs, a handful of DVDs that, frankly, no one should own, which is probably why I owned them. We also had a table of stuffed animals to which we held no special attachment and some board games we never play. There were some old blankets and sheet sets, all the light fixtures we’ve replaced in our house, my Body By Jake Ab-Rocker (no, it doesn’t really work, I did it every day for a year and I never got even remotely close to a 6-pack), and some odds and ends. And lastly there was my table of crap… 3 old 17″ monitors, 3 printers, 2 scanners, a DVD player, a box of assorted PCI expansion cards (a couple of network cards, a couple of video cards, a sounds card, an SCSI controller, a parallel port card), and a roll of 50 feet of coaxial cable.

No one buys my computer crap.

In the end, we managed to sell some books, CDs, a couple of DVDs, the odd board game and stuffed animal, and the DVD Player, netting us a grand total of $177. Now its time to box the junk back up and wait for the next neighborhood garage sale.

The Real Harry Potter

Random Thoughts

Back in 1986, or it may have been 1987, I didn’t realize that a simple trip to the local video store was going to introduce me to one of the most widely known names in the world today.  In fact, I didn’t even realize that such a momentous thing had occurred until my brother told me about the recent developments earlier this week.

You see… my brothers and I, as kids (who am I kidding? nothing has changed really as we grew up), liked to watch really awful movies.  The Sci-Fi/Fantasy/Horror section of the video store was the best.  And in 1986, a little movie called Troll was released.  It is the story about a boy named Harry Potter (Junior, his father is also Harry Potter), who learns to use magic to fight a troll who is attempting to take over the world, or at least to turn it into a place full of magical creatures.

The only reason this has come up is that it seems the original writer and director of Troll, John Carl Buechler, wants to remake his film, with a larger budget (£20 million) and according to various sources Warner Bros. is trying to stop him from infringing on their copyright.  The question is, can you copyright something you did not create first?

Its not as if this is some random director trying to make waves by making a film with a character named Harry Potter.  This is a man wishing to remake a film he made 22 years ago and utilize the same character names he used 22 years ago, 4 years prior to the 1990 bolt of inspiration that J.K. Rowling claims began her endeavour of the now more well known use of the name.

As far as I know, Buechler has made no attempt to sue Ms. Rowling, to force her to change the name, nor to ask for any monetary compensation, he only claims that since he used the name first in a copyrighted work, but didn’t copyright the name specifically, it places the name “Harry Potter” in the public domain where anyone can use it.

Who is going to win?  Personally, I feel that Buechler is right, at least in the case of his movie.  He used the name first and should be allowed to continue to use the name in remakes of that work.  But we’ll have to wait and see what the courts decide if Warner Bros. continues to head down that path.

All in all, it makes me paranoid about the things that I write.  Now I’ll probably have to make sure I google every name I make up just to make sure that no one else made it up first.

Earth Day

Random Thoughts

Today is Earth Day.

So, being that that is what today is, I figured it was time for another edition of what I will from now on refer to as “Probably Not Saving The World!”

Previously on the blog, I’ve mentioned my efforts to reduce my junk mail. The first couple of steps I took helped, but it always seemed to be a momentary slackening of the flood, not a stoppage. Then I was pointed at GreenDimes. I signed up for their $20 premium package, and the junk mail has all but stopped. At this point, the only things I get that I consider junk are a few local items, which I can excuse because they are local advertisements of local businesses and not big chains. Its nice, and it makes me feel better about not wasting all that paper.  With the GreenDimes service, you can even get the names of previous tenants dropped from lists, which is great since at this point nearly a third of my junk was for people who don’t live at my house.

We still keep up on the recycling, but even more so, I recently suffered through caffeine withdrawal in order to stop drinking Cokes, and have pulled way back on the number of canned and bottled beverages I drink. With a decent filter, tap water is just as good, if not better, than anything you can buy at the store. Plus, the more things you buy at the store (like sodas and bottled water) are more things that need to be trucked around the country. While I haven’t gone totally for “buying local”, I am trying to cut back on all the things I buy where I can.

Next up, we are looking to have an energy audit done on the house. That’s where someone comes and inspects the house to find all the places where you can improve efficiency, mostly for heating and air conditioning, to cut back on usage. As it is, we are trying to let the house stay cooler in the winter and a little warmer in the summer if we can stand it.

I’m really hoping that within the next five years I can get solar panels put on the house. You can even get money from the government to help with that, and get a tax write off.

So anyway… Happy Earth Day! Even if you don’t believe in “Global Warming”, garbage is still garbage, and less garbage is good.

Fool For A Day

Random Thoughts

In my opinion, there is comedy and there are April Fools’ jokes.  Comedy comes in all forms, any day of the year.  April Fools’ jokes come one day a year and the only good ones are immediate and physical, or slow gotchas.  The immediate ones are like putting tape on the water fountain with a pinhole in it, or whoopee cushions.  Timeless classics that make you want to punch someone in the face because the joke is retarded AND you fell for it like a giant dumb-ass.  The slow gotchas are the best though… present something that is just bordering on too far, plausible but not totally probable, and once you’ve hooked them with enough detail and spin, shove it over the edge and make people feel silly for believing you.

The problem with that second form is that you are literally getting people’s hopes up and then crushing them with comedy.  Strangely, people don’t like that.  So, most people who pull April Fools’ pranks usually just start over the edge and try to be funny from the get go.  While I don’t doubt that many people put a lot of effort into their creations for this particular day and I admit that many of them are in fact funny, the art of the April Fools’ con is lost to most.

Thanks to living in Atlanta for a number of years, I had the good fortune to experience some truly inspired April Fools’ pranks at the hands of the old 99x morning show.  A few examples:

  • Releasing information about a new theme park under construction in the Atlanta area called Magic Island, which was to be entirely underground.
  • A control room mishap that resulted in accidentally giving out Leonardo DiCaprio’s home phone number.
  • Firing one of the Morning X DJs because she wasn’t pretty enough to be on the new Web Cam that the station was setting up.

Each of these were well done because they did their homework… they got buy in from management, from sponsors, from actors, and they sold it to the audience, remaining in character even in the face of being called liars.  The joke wasn’t dumped on you in the space of a few seconds, it was slowly built over the course of two or three hours, the kind of investment into a prank you just don’t see that often.  Sadly, 99x is dead and the Morning X is long gone.  But I’ll always have my memories…

Anyway, I’m not going to link to any particular site for jokes today, but over at April Fools’ Day On The Web they keep a running list of all the jokes that people report.  Wikipedia will run a list also. Very few of them will really fool you, but some of them are funny.

Casserole

Random Thoughts

According to the definition:

cas·se·role: kas–uh-rohl
noun, verb, -roled, -rol·ing.
–noun
1. a baking dish of glass, pottery, etc., usually with a cover.
2. any food, usually a mixture, cooked in such a dish.
3. a small dish with a handle, used in chemical laboratories.
–verb (used with object)
4. to bake or cook (food) in a casserole.

the sentence “I casserole a casserole in this casserole.” would be valid. But trying saying it ten times fast…