Latest Posts

Appearances can be Deceiving

Random Thoughts

I read on the bus to work every morning. This week I’ve been reading ‘Lamb’ by Christopher Moore, an excellent book thus far (about half way through) and its looking like it will get a very good recommendation out of me. The book happens to be a semi-satirical look at the life of Jesus Christ, Joshua, through the eyes of his never-mentioned-in-the-Bible best friend Levi, who is called Biff. Anyhow, as I’m riding the bus, I notice the guy sitting next to me. He looks ‘normal’, and I mean that in the “We never suspected anything because he was just a normal guy” sort of way. He wore typical business casual clothes, khaki slacks, a polo shirt, and nice shoes. His hair was an average short but not too short guy hair cut. He wore glasses, had a watch on (a nice gold colored one that may or may not have been actual gold) and a wedding ring. As he sat, he was flipping through some papers and highlighting as he went.

A brief aside here… If curiosity kills the cat, then I’m glad I’m not a cat. I have an insatiable appetite for looking at things that I shouldn’t. As a child, one of my favorite pastimes was sneaking into my father’s closet to take a gander at the Playboy magazines that he kept hidden there. I was like eight years old. Eight year old boys don’t really understand looking at naked women, but I did understand that I wasn’t supposed to look at naked women, so that’s why I did it. At jobs, I’ve always poked around the networks to find files I shouldn’t see, also because I believe that if you really want to keep something secret you should take the proper precautions to ensure that it can’t be seen. So back to where I left off, a guy sitting next to me highlighting papers.

I’m pretty good at misdirection and that sort of thing, so I’m pretending to read my book and stealing glances with my eyes only over to his work. This ‘normal’ guy is reading through and highlight passages in satanic texts. He’s flipping through pages of books by Crowley and others, making special note of referenced texts. Of course, you might be wondering, “How do you know what satanic texts look like?” And I might answer, “Umm… because I’ve read most of them myself.” but you might think less of me, so instead I’ll say, “Because all the pages were printed from a website, and when you print from a website the URL appears at the bottom (unless you disable that in Internet Explorer) and it has ‘satanic texts’ written in it!” But even if you choose to believe the former, at least I have my head shaved and sport a goatee, and have had a number of people tell me I look evil (when I’m not, I’m really a nice guy), while this man looks like the poster boy for Suburban Living Monthly (which, ironically, is the same look and acronym for Sociopathic Lunatic Monthly, both of which I’m pretty sure you can pick up at your local Kroger). I can only hope that he was doing research for something he’s writing, like a novel or a screenplay, which, I assure you, is what I was doing when I read the same books, and not researching quotes for his manifesto swearing his faith to the one true lord which he’ll have on him as he sacrifices teenage girls and he’ll include copies of with the video tapes he sends to the authorities of his deeds.

Some days I wonder if my imagination is too active, or if I actually see things that other people don’t… Time will tell I suppose.

Blasts from the Past

Site News

I finally decided that I’m going to back fill my old posts from my old formats into this weblog. It’ll be fun to read that stuff again. Anyway, I missed Saturday because I went to bed early and forgot to do it. I had about a half a post written, but I didn’t feel like finishing it for today.

So… whatever… See you soon. 🙂

Circle Strafing

Gaming

You know, its just one of those skills that I have but I almost never use. In some ways, and in some games, its really a boon. First person shooters… being able to zip around someone and pop off a couple of shotgun blasts is cool. But its a very short thing… zip, zip, pop, pop, done.

I’ve been messing around doing some dueling in World of Warcraft. I’m a priest, and fighting other priests or mages is fun, we shoot each other, resists and luck have alot to do with it, and spell choice and all that. When I fight warriors or rogues, its just stupid… if they fight me straight up, then its like the priest and mage fights, sometimes I win, sometimes I lose, its alot of luck and the game engine, player skill is part of it too, but its not ‘exploitative’. However, most of the melees who duel don’t play it straight up, they don’t bother to rely on their gear, their resists or hit points… they completely rely on exploiting ‘line of sight’. As a caster, I can’t cast 90% of my spells on anything that isn’t in front of me, so the melee circle strafes around, always staying behind. I can try to spin, but since he can switch directions in an instant, its still almost impossible to keep him in front. Its just… stupid. Why bother to ‘duel’ me if you are going to render me 90% useless? Its like saying you’ll get in the ring with Mike Tyson, but only if they chop off both of his arms, one leg, and gag him first.

I don’t get it… and I probably never will.

Battle-Chasers

Reviews

Normally when I go to the book store I’m looking for two kinds of books… either one by an author I have enjoyed in the past, or one that has been recommended by a friend or other review. Last week I went looking for books of a different sort… the kind you find on a bargain bin by and author you’ve never heard of. It was here I found ‘Battle-Chasers’ by T.S. Robinson.

First, let me say it wasn’t a bad book. Its not something I would recommend to someone with great literary knowledge, someone who has read Tolkien, Martin, even Jordan. But I might push this on a younger reader to perhaps get them interested in reading. It was a short, fun read, that I finished in about five hours.

However… the book reads like a few guys sitting around a table playing D&D. As opposed to much fantasy where oft times magic is rare, here it is everywhere. Magic bracers, magic weapons, magic potions, priests, sorcerers, spellcasting, etc etc… Every character uses it, and much of its use really does feel like someone reading off the back of a character sheet. Rather than saying “When he spoke his voice seemed to be accompanied by a low growl, as if he were speaking two tongues at once, and the dragon appeared hypnotized by his words…” he goes with “The potion of dragon control he quaffed earlier magnified his command…” And that happens alot, a matter of fact explanation that paints little picture of the scene. The author also seems to like the word ‘greasy’ or perhaps his thesaurus just didn’t have another word for it, because it showed up… alot.

Anyway… in the end, it was fun and I feel like that I might just walk away from this book a better writer now that I’ve seen a few things I want to be sure not to do. It was worth the two dollars I paid for it.

Player vs Player

Gaming

I did my first PvP in World of Warcraft tonight, and I must say that in the space of thirty minutes I was both impressed and very underwhelmed. It started off fine… I had just logged in to do some bank management in Ironforge when I saw the call that Southshore was under attack. I figured, why not go try some PvP? So I hopped a griffin and was on my way.

When I arrived, Southshore was indeed under attack. About three groups of Horde, most level 60, were fighting with about two groups of Alliance. Now, I’m only level 45, but as a priest, I can do my best to stay out of the fight and heal people, so I asked for a group, got one, and started doing my job. We finally began killing some of the Horde (the guards helped a little), and had a moment where the town was safe. As a war party, we headed for the Tauren Mill, the source of the Horde in the area.

On the way, we clashed with some of their reinforcements, and their dead got their resurrections and came back our way instead of continuing at Southshore. We fought at the tower, the Horde with three groups still, but Alliance had swelled up to almost four groups. We won the skirmish and continued on to the Mill.

At the Mill we had one good fight, then some of the Horde left… four groups of Alliance were now pounding on one group of Horde… then no Horde players at all. It was here that PvP started to suck. Alliance just has so many people that we outnumbered them, and they gave up. We sat and killed guards for a while hoping more would show… they never did.

I did get a taste of what good PvP can be. Hopefully there will be more battlefields in my future…

Veronica Mars

Reviews

Every time I watch this show I ask myself, “What the heck is it doing on UPN?” Back when the UPN network started up, they put on some of my favorite shows… ‘Nowhere Man’ is one of those shows that I will definately buy if they ever put it out on DVD, and ‘Marker’ was like an updated Magnum P.I. But as time went on, they cancelled those shows and went with lots of 30 minute sitcoms, most of which were crap.

‘Veronica Mars’ is about a girl, Veronica, who is the daughter of a private investigator. Her dad used to be the sheriff, but got drummed out of the job after he accused the richest man in town of murdering his own daughter, who was Veronica’s best friend. Veronica is on the outside now, all her friends from the rich side of town have turned on her and what she wants most in the world is to know who killed her friend. The show has high school, mystery, and smarts. Its well written and well acted.

I just finished watching the finale for season one that aired last night, and it was awesome. I definately recommend this show to anyone, and I can’t wait until next season.

Screen Scrapes and Screen Shots

Random Thoughts

Its really funny sometimes… the big stuff, world hunger, politicians, war… even things like my car getting broken in to… they don’t really bother me. It all just kinda slides right off my back. But the little things just grate on my last nerve.

I’m a programmer, been doing computers for twenty years and programming for eleven. I’ve worked with all sorts of languages, dealt with umpteen different kinds of servers and thousands of applications, and over time in a career like this, you learn the terminology. Certain things mean certain stuff. For example, when dealing with mainframes or midranges and converting their text displays to another format there is an interim step called a “screen scrape“. It got this term because you are literally scanning the data stream to the terminal or PC, identifying and pulling out text and fields, and munging them through some sort of GUI to display to the user or do stuff to the screen (like autofill certain fields). Then after if they used a GUI, you plug the data back into the fields and submit it to the mainfraim or whatever. You are scraping the screen for data and fields and doing stuff with it. On the other hand, a “screen shot” is an image of the screen captured for display elsewhere (often in user manuals or to accompany a bug report).

Some of the people I work with, some of whom have been around computers longer than I have, keep calling their screen shots “screen scrapes” and its driving me up the wall. And the even worse thing is, because they don’t understand the difference, when I ask for “screen shots”, I usually get back blank stares. Finally they’ll ask, “Do you mean a screen scrape?”

My head explodes on a regular basis.

Mystery Men

Reviews

I know its an old movie, but I picked it up on DVD at Best Buy for five bucks today. I love this movie. Its a perfect example of what I think this world would be like if there were superheroes. There would be people with real super powers, but most of them would just be regular guys with kitchen utensils and garden implements throwing down a little justice on the wicked. Its also kinda what I was hoping for when I heard about City of Heroes so long ago… sadly, while their costume creator is fantastic, the uniqueness of the character under the suit is very limited. If you want to be a scrapper, you have a sword, a katana, some claws, a dark aura, spines, or you are a martial artist. And every archtype has the same limitations… you can put twenty blasters next to each other, and they may “look” vastly different… until they all pull out their assault rifle and fight exactly the same way. Where is my shovel? Where are my forks? Where is my bowling ball? Where is my furious rage?

Anyway, the movie itself is great. I highly recommend it.

I Don`t Believe You

Writing

One of the guys over at Ofasoft started up a little writing contest. The rules were as follows: Your story must begin with the phrase, “I don’t believe you”. The punctuation and context of this phrase is up to you. It could be a line of dialogue. It could be a message in a strange fortune cookie. It could a personal thought. If you need to sandwich a few words ahead of this, that’s fine. Second, your story must include the phrase “put it down” somewhere near the end. By “near the end,” I mean the last paragraph, or maybe the second to last paragraph. Again, this could be exposition or dialogue. Submissions must be at least 500 words in length, and may be no longer than 3000 words in length. I ended up being the only person to make a submission, even after an extended deadline. So here is my entry:

     “I don’t believe you,” Mrs. Thornsdale muttered. She shifted in the back of the limousine, trying desperately to find a position that was comfortable, would not ruin her dress, and allowed her to avoid looking at Mason. Her faced continued to move, arching eyebrows and lips mashing together causing the corners of her mouth to pucker, as she tried to formulate her next thoughts in to words.
     “I always told her she could do better than you,” came finally drifting across from her side of the car.
     Mason was warm. Not uncomfortably hot, but warm in a soothing manner. His black suit was still a bit ruffled, and there was a stain over the right breast that might not ever come out. The knuckles on his left hand were raw and split, still bleeding in places. And he tongued the inside of his lip to see if it was still swelling. His right eye was surrounded in red that in the days to come would surely turn a deep purple. It stung when he blinked, so he tried not to, but that only made his eyes dry which caused him to blink even more.
     His body was finally settling down, the adrenalin being worked out of his system. Whenever he lifted his hands from his knees they trembled. Mrs. Thornsdale was talking again.
     “I told her you were a thug. And today of all days you had to prove me right. She could have had a husband with some breeding, some taste. But no, she had to fall for a ruffian.”
     He wasn’t a thug, not by a long shot. Harvard educated, he’d built and sold three businesses in his life, each more profitable than the last. The mansion they owned was larger than the Thornsdale Estate and it was only one of four residences they kept. Most days he would have argued all this with his mother-in-law, but not today.
     She was still prattling on about some boy named Dwight who would have made a much finer catch as Mason’s thoughts drifted outside the car, outside the window to the scenery passing by.
     The rows of headstones crept by as the limousine maintained a snail’s pace through the cemetery. Still fast enough that if he locked his eyes in place the names etched into the stones became unreadable. He did this as his thoughts drifted beyond the graveyard and over the last eleven years.
     He snapped back into the car as Mrs. Thornsdale’s narrative caught up to this morning. She turned to face him now, and he kept looking out the window.
     “And then today, on the day of her funeral, you had to get into a fight.”
     There had been at least nine of them, maybe more. And they were laughing. Mason had overheard what they were saying, and every word of it was true, but it had made him angry anyway. He was sure he had broken at least three noses; one of them had exploded in a jet of blood on to his suit. After he’d taken off his jacket and picked up one of the poles that had held up the guide rope, he was sure he had broken a lot more.
     The rage in him was so hot then that even thoughts of it now began to raise his temperature. He’d wanted to kill all of them, despite the fact they hadn’t said anything that everyone else didn’t already know.
     Mrs. Thornsdale was getting angry herself now. “What exactly were you thinking? What was going through your mind to go on a rampage like that at Allison’s wake?”
     Mason barely heard her as he mentally lingered on the last moment of the brawl. Unconscious, broken and bleeding men lay around the front of the church. He had taken several deep breaths to gain the composure to remember the pole and to force himself to put it down. “They called her a whore,” he said.
     His mother-in-law slowly turned and aimed her gaze out the window on her side of the limousine. She breathed a heavy sigh, and placed her hand atop his, resting on the raw split knuckles, and they traveled the rest of the way to the funeral in silence.

I’m particularly happy with this because I wrote it, and I don’t just mean its an original. I mean, I wrestled with the theme, the limitations of the contest, a bit, and then I just started writing. It poured out, and when I was done, I didn’t revise it. Looking at it now, there are a few things I might change or enhance, and I’ve even considered using this in the context of a much larger story. But for now I’ll just let it stand.

Evolution

Random Thoughts

It looks like they are at it again… Evolution versus Creation. Although now, the creation side of the debate has come up with the theory of ‘Intelligent Design’ which is basically Evolution except that its not random, God planned it this way. I shrug when I think of this fight, because to me there just doesn’t seem to be much place for an arguement. I mean, if the religion side were asking only that evolution not be taught as a random series of lucky genetic combinations and focus only on the scientific evidence of DNA relations between species that indicate an evolving path, that’d be fine. But they always seem to want to take that extra step and make the schools teach God.

Its hypocritical… they say Evolution teaching is against their and their children’s beliefs, but they want to replace them with teachings that will be against other parents and children’s beliefs. The class is science, its about what you can prove and what you can theorize from what you can prove. We can prove DNA similarities between species. We can theorize an evolutionary path. Done. Why ask the schools to speculate on the nature of God? We can’t “prove” that God exists, nor do we have proven facts that point toward God as a theory. God is speculation. God is faith.

Plus, this is elementary school, middle school and high school. And if they are going to teach God, then I demand they teach all the other religions too. By the time we are done, public education will look like a comparative study of theologies. And really, I wonder if these people fighting evolution would like the school to teach other religions… I doubt it.