weirdo513

Just a random post.

Blog moved to: http://fadedpixels.net
Photos I take can be found at: http://www.flickr.com/photos/weirdo513/
I twitter a lot. That's here: http://twitter.com/weirdo513/

Random Life Updates:
Moved to San Francisco, CA.
I work for Electronic Arts now.

Posted some pics from Thanksgiving at Joe & Anami's.

Didn't get too many good shots sadly.

Testing this flicker -> LJ crap.

Took some pics of the Light Totem today, it's pretty neat.

( Sorry Aubrey, couldn't help it! ^_^ )

Well I'm going to try living in the world without LJ again. I may go back, but for now I'm running things on my own. The only reason I left blogging on my own server was that the comment spam and update procedures were just awful... but those are non issues in this new space.

So what is this new space? I'm running this journal/blog/whatever on Mephisto, it's being hosted by the fine folks over at Mediatemple, one of the best hosts I've ever had to deal with.

Why did I move? Well most of my website was being hosted off the machine (Odin) in my computer room. Now, while Odin was a fine machine, that room was getting dammed hot in the summer, and it seemed like a waste of a machine since most of my online persistence (read: screen sessions) is being handled by my work machines. Also, I already had a nice mediatemple account for my old guild's website (wowguild.net) and my wedding website (brianandjennswedding.com) but with both of those sites more or less defunct, I felt it made sense to move my webpages to the account. I could have moved my pages to Panacea (server shared by friends of mine), but the hardware is sketchy and too many people depend upon the machine for me not to be neurotic about the content. Plus I was using dynamic IPs for my DNS resolution, which was horrible at times... and meant I couldn't turn my computers off etcetera. Oh, and I hate LJs S2 system it makes me a sad panda.

I did some reorganizing, and so a lot of URLs probably just broke, but I'm ok with that for now. The main page is gone for now, but I don't think people will cry too much about that being gone. As time goes on I'm going to populate more information into the new blog space and refine the CSS style, I can't decide if I have it looking how I want it yet. I'm also going to try and transition to all em values for my style, but that's going to be a little annoying.

It will take some time for the dns changes to propagate. But you will be able to read my journal at the new url, or you can add weirdo_rss to your list, that should have the URL fixed soon.

Crossposted to http://blog.weirdo513.org/.

So I'm going to California in about a week, and I am in need of some DS game recommendations.

I've not bought a game since I snagged New Super Mario Brothers / FF III, so I'm a bit bored with what I have.

Off the top of my mind I recall that I haven't played:

• Yoshi's Island DS


• Elite Beat Agents


• Castlevania: Portrait of Ruin


• Hotel Dusk

Ideally I would like a platformer and a puzzle/skill game, so the first two on the list seem like the obvious choices.

Any votes from the peanut gallery?

So I got a standard Gallup poll call last night, I've never gotten one from the actual Gallup people before, so I took 3 minutes to respond to a few questions, mostly about bush and iraq. At the end of the call the guy (who was extremely nice about the entire call to the point of offering to leave me alone if I had more important stuff to do.) Asked if I wanted to join the Gallup Panel.

I told him to let me think about it and he's gonna call me back in a week. I can't decide if it's a good idea or not. On the one hand it's a chance to actually give my stupid opinions on a weekly basis to someone who will actually give a damn. But it's may also include market research, which is less attractive to be sure.

So I'm still pretty undecided, Jenn thinks it's a dumb idea, but I remain on the fence. What do people think?

I am filled with a deep sense of revulsion every time I realize that there really are people in this country for which fear of hell and divine punishment are the only things that keep them from stealing from, raping and/or murdering their neighbors.

I'm getting ready to work a lot for the next few days, I have 2-3 projects due in the next couple weeks. Yay finals week.

I'm probably going to the O'Reilly Open Source Convention(23-27) and maybe the Ubuntu Live Conference (July 22-24). So that will be a lot of fun :) I've never been to OSCon, so I'm pretty excited.

I'm also flying out to San Diego, CA for about a week for the middle of may, for a date that's kind of a big deal. We're gonna go to Disney Land, and maybe just maybe we'll have some fast food it's gonna be awesome.

In warcraft it seems as though I'm not the only one annoyed with my guild, the two main leaders just quit... so that's cute.

I rolled a Bloodelf priest named Asmer on Frostwolf a couple days ago. Justin and Zack are running the guild, they were the people who ran my old guild with me, so it's been fun. There level of humor is way above what I'm used to and so I find myself laughing a lot more at guild chat instead of marveling about how retarded a people can be... so that's good.

I totally didn't notice http://sfbags.com made a DS Lite case.



Looks pretty sweet. Little costly but very nice.

Linuxfest 2007 is taking place in the ICTC building on the IUPUI campus tomorrow (Wed) from 9am-3pm.

More information here: http://www.ussg.iu.edu/linuxfest/

I finished Mushishi, I enjoyed it very much.

It's a 26 episode story that follows the travels of Ginko, a master of Mushi.

From Wikipedia:

The story features ubiquitous creatures called Mushi that often display supernatural powers. Mushi are described as beings in touch with the essence of life, far more basic and pure than the grotesque creatures we are accustomed to. Due to their ephemeral nature most humans are incapable of perceiving Mushi and are oblivious to their existence, but there are a few who possess the ability to see and interact with Mushi.

One such person is Ginko, the main character of the series. He employs himself as a Mushi master (mushi-shi), travelling from place to place to research Mushi and aid people suffering from problems caused by them. The series is an episodic anthology in which the only common elements among episodes are Ginko and the various types of Mushi. There is no over-arching plotline.

All of the episodes are wonderful, and a lot of the episodes are very touching. Highly reccomended for fans of things like Princess Mononoke. And the soundtrack is quite good.

I feel a computer upgrade coming soon, and it's not gonna be super cheap. Sigh, playing warcraft lulled me into a false sense of "My Computer is Fine!" But I've in actuality not upgraded my poor desktop in like 3 years. In August of 2004 I upgraded my machine, and it's been pretty much the same since.

But, now there are some games that I really need to play.

I mean... it's command and conquer, by law I have to play it. Even if it blows! But, it's good so very very good. I played the demo this weekend, and the graphics and gameplay are amazing. The live action cutscenes are hammy as ever with BSG stars and awesome camios. I need to play it. It's like the original game with a high tech once over and updated content.

And Supreeme Commander, otherwise known as Total Annilation 2. TA was the only game that I've played a single 2v2 skirmish for like 5 hours and had that be normal. And the new version is even better.

But they both make my current rig cry and curl into the fetal position. I mean when you go into the graphics options and you see everything set to low, and you're still sputtering and chugging at like 11fps... it makes me a sad fucking panda.

BUT I'M SO DAMN POOR. AND I WANT TO GO TO JAPAN. DAMN YOU CRUEL FATE.

Ok, I'm done being mellowdramatic for a while. Now to figure out when to get ~$400 for upgrades... hmmmmm.

I should of watched this a lot sooner. Holy Shit. I'm laughing so hard.

George Takei making gay jokes, and Betty White making dirty & racial jokes.

I mean what the hell... Just hilarious.

I just finished Texhnolyze... the end of that was just fucked up. Depressing as hell and fucked up.

I can't sleep. One of the many reasons I can't sleep is Warcraft. I haven't 'played' in like a week or more. I have not been counting the days or anything. I just noticed my xfire play tracker has me at 0 hours of WoW for the last week. So there you go.

I guess I've stopped playing (for now) for a few reasons. I'm in a new guild (well I've been in the guild for about 9 months, so it's not -that- new), and it's very very different from the one I used to run. I used to run a guild that prided itself on being ethical, that valued family and real world obligations. Even 2-3 months after we broke up I logged on to an alternate character and had people ask me where my guild went, because we were good people, we had class. Now I'm a peon in a guild run by 14 year olds, who are not above cheating and exploiting to get what they need done... and it gets to me. People outside of the guild don't like me cause of the dick heads in my guild.

But that's not really the main problem as sad as that sounds; it's just reality and the way things are... The problem is that even putting in 35-45 hours a week I wasn't "contributing enough" to get a first string raid spot. That's right, even playing enough to justify calling it a second full time job I wasn't doing enough in the eyes of my guild['s leadership]. Maybe it's because I dare to take time off to study for tests, or take 15 minutes at night to put Jenn to bed, I don't really know... and I'm starting to realize I don't particularly care.

Don't get me wrong, I love the game still. And given a quality guild I would probably be back playing in no time. But, now I log on and I realize that I do not have even a single friend in the guild. Like not even one. I log on and no one talks to me, no one greets me, no one asks me how I've been, or even tonight when I logged on for the first time in over a week, where I've been. Back in my guild I would log on and get three private messages and 2-3 people talking to me in guild chat. Now? Nothing. When no one cares about you it starts to take a toll. One of the primary draws of this game [ for me at least ] was the social aspects. Hoping on vent to talk with people, having a generally good time every minute you play.

Now I only log on vent [voice chat] when I am forced to for a raiding situation. And then when I am on vent, I don't say a word. There's no point, these people aren't my friends, they are barely tolerable as acquaintances. These are the people I made fun of in high school because they are worthless... I remember in my old guild I played with a guy who had a masters in Religious theory and latin, a medical doctor, and a physics professor. Now I play with people who aren't even old enough to know how much they are sacrificing for this game. I mean when someone mentions how their playing this game made them lose out on a grant, or made them fail out of college it just turns my stomach.

So after not getting in to raids for 2-4 weeks, and not getting any explanation... I decided to wander off and see if I felt compelled to wander back. It's been over a week and I haven't had a single person come ask where I've wandered off to... so I'm gonna continue to chill and work and relax and not worry about WoW for a while. This guild makes it feel like a job, like an obligation... and I have better ways to waste my time.

Speaking of ways I've been wasting my time. I finished my new work website ( http://www.ussg.iu.edu ) and while I didn't do the theme myself, but I did port our old website from plain html pages to a nice RoR CMS.It's running well, and people are enjoying it. So yay. I'm working on our "I" theme so the visual identity people don' eat our souls, but it's coming slowly.

So work is generally good.

I've been feeling anti social lately, I've been staying up at night for no reason, playing Wii or watching anime. I should start going to guild more.... that is at least social, even if I have to deal with people who don't seem to like me all that much. ^_^;;

Anyway, I'm starting to get tired so I'm gonna go snuggle in next to my sick, crippled, 'stressed out to the breaking point' wife. Who I love dearly, even if she's insane (sometimes).

If you know someone in Bloomington who is looking for a part time web monkey job, my department is looking for one. http://www.indiana.edu/~uitshr/services/jobs/USSG_WebDesign_hourly.html is the listing. Intrest has been low so I'm just putting the word out.

We're also looking for an hourly UNIX support guy.

Work
Work at the USSG is as fun as it always has been. I've found a few major projects to sink my teeth into, so I'm amazingly busy all of a sudden.

Current Projects:

• Our website used to be Mambo, until they realized how utterly horrid Mambo is, and cshields did some magic bash command and rendered the whole thing in flat HTML. That was 3 years ago, and nothing has really changed. I'm moving the site into Mephisto, a Ruby on Rails CMS, so that we can keep our information up to date, and be a little more current.
  
• Once the website is finally up (it was supposed to go live last night but the server was killing the dispatcher processes with amazingly unhelpful log output I blame gentoo) I'm going to have to work on a new theme for the site, since right now it's blue, and that doesn't jive with the Visual Identity police shouldn't be too bad, I found a theme that we can use that almost matches the color scheme, and I can tweak it to work. Once we hire a graphics designer I can turn them loose on it.
  
• I've also taken up the task of being laptop support for our AVP, which means I have to build, and maintain the laptop of a fairly important person, and be ready to fix things whenever he breaks them. Should be fun, I've got to start getting the laptop ready for him soon.
  
• I'm also working on learning Ruby and Ruby on Raisl so that I can use it to develop a database project to track students for the ussg edcert class. I could write it in perl, but I really want to learn Ruby, and this seems like as good a time as any. I have a few books that I've been reading, and I'm liking Rails so far, can't wait to get some time to really dig into it.

Anime

• Finished Honey and Clover (and Season II) a few week ago, and I really really enjoyed it. Props to boco for suggesting it. I would say that it's definitly not something recommend for everyone. It's very much slice of life, relationship drama/comedy stuff. And some people just don't care. But I found it hit close to home in a number of places from earlier times in my life, and while on the whole it left me a little depressed, overall I enjoyed the experience. Good Stuff.
  
• I moved on and started watching Texhnolyze and I'm not enthralled yet, I'm only on the first DVD and the story is just getting rolling. I'm enjoying what little of the story makes sense at this point, but it's very much in the vein of Haibane and SE: Lain. Both of which I ultimately enjoyed, if not fully understood.
  
• I did however get swallowed whole by Death Note ( The Series currently #1 on ANN's top10 ) which is a fairly compelling bit of storytelling. It's a little dark, but I'm enjoying it so far, since it's still airing I have to wait a week for each episode, but I'll deal.
  
• I also snagged Mushishi because it was on the top10 and I hadn't heard of it, so I figure it's worth at least a gander. Maybe it will be good, who knows. I think I'm gonna watch the first episode right now, and then go to bed.

Edit: I'm now hooked on Mushishi, it's kind of like... if there was a spirited away spin off that focused on the kodama.... hmm I think that doesn't really do it justice.

I'm sorry... but what the fuck!? O_O

I mean... you can't just ... but... what the fuck.

Most evil cliffhanger ever.

Stardust - http://movies.yahoo.com/feature/stardust.html - Neil Gaiman's newest movie.
Day Watch - http://www.apple.com/trailers/fox_searchlight/daywatch/trailera/ - Might bee cool.

I still need to see 300. Meh.

"You can think all you want about what love and marriage is suppose to be in theory, but in the end, it's living through it that really shapes your definitions of all that. Not the idea you had listening to The Smiths: Queen is Dead album and watching Say Anything."
- Annie Sertich