marty's place

2011 post

2011-11-17T11:12:00.003+10:30

Yeah, I'm still slack.

Since the last time I posted, over a year ago:
* I changed employers, leaving my employer for over six years to an international IT company
* That international IT company then won the bid to outsource the IT for... the company I worked for for six years
* My son turned 20!
* I posted this message :D

Yeah, there was a lot more that happened, but I didn't post anything in that entire time.

I am thinking of getting back into blogging, perhaps in gaming-related fields, since I play a card game (Legend of the Five Rings), a miniatures game (Warhammer/Hordes by Privateer Press), and a role playing game (was Pathfinder, but we're starting a Tunnels and Trolls campaign this week!) pretty regularly.

Comment Spam is Evil

2010-04-07T19:54:00.003+09:30

I'm not posting as often as I should (well.. duh) and so I've decided to change how comments are handled. Comments on posts older than 14 days (ie, pretty much everything) will need to be moderated. Given the 999:1 ratio of drive-by spam to actual people commenting, this won't be a huge problem. If the spammers start filling my mailbox, I'll turn off comments entirely.

Obligatory "Haven't posted for a while" post

2010-01-25T14:39:00.003+10:30

Yay. Another year.

I've stopped playing WAR, and with most of the active players in my guild, I went to Aion. Best part of it is the flying, but the grind is getting to me.

I've been playing Warhammer 40K with my son, and so I think I'll be staying away from Aion for a little (or cutting down a bit) so I can get my army painted and make some terrain. Aion is already wearing off on a lot of the people I play with, so we might be looking for a new game soon.

Only logged in to delete some spam by some random blog spammer. Here's a hint, spambot. If you comment on a post that is a year old, about the bad customer service I had for the Oceanic server, don't say "I agree the customer service is good". Also, since there ISN'T an Oceanic server anymore (it was merged into a US server), the whole post is obsolete. In all, obvious spammer is obvious.

Dawn of the Self-Entitled

2009-09-16T16:51:00.003+09:30

First, Josh Olson weighed in on why he Will Not Read Your Fucking Script.

John Scalzi picked it up with a short post and then a longer re-statement of an earlier post. Harlan Ellison appears in the commentary, with the brilliant use of "a fistful of auk-vomit", and a hearty "Boy, am I glad IIIIII don’t have e.mail."

Lee Goldberg also linked to Josh's post, and again with his own recent experience. Lee (and his uncle) turn up in the comments to John Scalzi's post.

Then Boing Boing links to John Scalzi's post.

Commentary is either:

"You are right, I'm an X, and constantly get asked by random strangers about X-stuff, and it gets really annoying"

"You are such a DICK for not giving me MY entitlement! I don't care how much effort it costs you, that part isn't important! It's ME this is all about!"

"I'm a concerned troll who deplores the incivility of some of these authors/scriptwriters/doctors/lawyers. Why oh why don't you just say 'sorry, I can't help with that' instead of posting such icky words as 'No, I won't help you and here's why'?"

The third case is particularly annoying given that the authors, script writers etc have often provided countless advice and experience to others (Lee Goldberg mentions doing teaching, speaking and seminars for free at a writing festival; John Scalzi has a huge number of articles about the writing business as well as his plugs for other authors on his site). And they've all gone way down the "Sorry, I'm not going to do that" route, more or less politely. They don't WANT to be the bad guy. So they make a post saying why they aren't going to read your stuff and then their comments fill with "You're such a dick!".

Someone on Boing Boing called "A.J" wrote:

Before reading this blog item, I had never heard of this dude. As of now, I still have no idea what he writes or why anyone cares, but I know for certain that he's a dick.

He doesn't even know who John Scalzi is. But he knows he is a "dick". Because in a hugely reasonable tone John Scalzi said "The person who determines what a writer should do for others is the writer, not you".

I get this. I'm not a published author (I'm waaaay too disorganised to finish any of my stories :/) but I work with computers. If I tell anyone that, look out. "I've got this problem with my computer...."

I agree wholeheartedly with Josh Olson over who is the dick in this situation: The requestor

Yes. That's right. I called you a dick. Because you created this situation. You put me in this spot where my only option is to acquiesce to your demands or be the bad guy. That, my friend, is the very definition of a dick move.

Don't Be A Dick.

One of my heroes

2009-09-15T17:26:00.002+09:30

It is really odd for me to admit to a hero: Richard Dawkins, Richard Feynman, Stephen King...

John T Reed.

Mr Reed is a hero to me for a reason. His B.S Detection is awesomely good not only for detecting B.S. from Real Estate Scammers, but scammers in general. If something appears too good to be true, it probably is. If it is supported by a mass of "testimonials" it most probably is. If it makes use of waffle words like "easy money", "risk-free", "painless", "dream stealer", "nothing down"... it most definitely is.

I first found his site when I was researching Robert "Rich but non-existant imaginary Dad, Not so successful Dad that was the superintendant of education in Hawaii and to all accounts a perfectly adequete father" Kiyosaki. My boss at the time was a complete Kiyosaki fanatic who'd lent me a couple of his books. I found them interesting, but had qualms about the ethics of some of the things mentioned. Lie to the bank about your loans? It was okay to lie to the vendor and take their home for much less than it was worth?

Mr Reed has a whole page just on the topic of Kiyosaki here which goes on for page after page of a breakdown of claims Kiyosaki has made.

I'm not that interested in real estate, and as Mr Reed says, his advice wouldn't be suitable for Australia anyway simply due to the difference in laws and culture. I am interested in busting scams, which to me is why John T. Reed is a hero.

Drive by Blogging

2009-09-01T11:26:00.003+09:30

I could mention that I haven't blogged for a while, however, that would be pretty obvious. Strangely, since work blocked the site, I haven't twittered in ages either.

Either I have very little to say, or I just couldn't be bothered.

Is this yet another blog with "Gee, I should blog more?" as the most common post? Hopefully not.

Douchebag Found in Victoria

2009-02-10T20:06:00.004+10:30

Well, I was reading Pharyngula, as you do, and came across this story about a Pastor Danny Nalliah, who leads the "Catch The Fire Ministeries". They were making noise about how their god bothering will help with the bushfire victims (and I've seen some amazingly scary pictures of the fires, not good at all). It's nice to know they'll be helping distribute aid to those worst affected and are helping the Salvos with some trucks filled with necessaries.

What isn't nice, however, is Pastor Danny stating that he knew this was going to happen, due to a dream he had last year, and that the fires are punishment for the "incendiary" abortion laws put in place last year.

Well, Danny boy, you're a douchebag.

People, hundreds at the current count, have lost their lives. Thousands have been made homeless. Families have been devastated and even the Premier of the state broke down at a news conference. Of course, this is all due to some malevolent spirit with a primitive sense of morality.

Of course, it was all in his dream which of course, he'd never mentioned before hand.

In my dream I saw fire everywhere with flames burning very high and
uncontrollably. With this I woke up from my dream with the interpretation as the
following words came to me in a flash from the Spirit of God.
That His conditional protection has been removed from the nation of Australia, in particular Victoria, for approving the slaughter of innocent children in the womb.”

Uh huh. Right.

Ironic, coming from a group labeled "Catch the Fire". I wonder if whomever set some of the fires (since some were set deliberately) is a similar nutjob, determined to punish some "sin" of everyone else.

As for slaughter of innocent children, it's apparently not allowed as long as Gawd hasn't, I don't know, determined that you should rip children from their mother's arms and beat their skulls against the wall. Or kill pregnant women, children and even livestock belonging to other tribes. Then it's okay.

As PZ has already said, this guy is a ghoul.

On Skepticism

2009-01-30T15:23:00.004+10:30

A few times, I have spooked myself.

In the car, I will have the CD player on "Shuffle", and as a song plays I might think, "I'd like to here track 5!"... and then the next track was number 5!!!!

In an elevator once, as I reached for the button, the light turned on before I could press it.

When I was filling my water bottle once, I thought to myself that I should have closed the fridge door since it would take me a while to fill the bottle, and the door just shut by itself.

ZOMG!!! I must be psychic.

Err. No. That's a problem with being a skeptic. I'm not a psychic because I have no reason to believe such abilities exist. Is there a simpler explanation than being a psychic?

Yes.

The shuffle mechanism on a CD player might not be 'random', since it rarely if ever plays the same song twice in a row: so since that is the case, it is more likely to be some resorted list. Perhaps the song numbers have some factor added to each, and then the list is resorted. My car CD player (which I add is pretty crappy, you can't play burnt CDs in it very well) can't go in "reverse" order -- you can only use the forward button to go to the next song. On my MP3 player, you can go backward to the last couple of songs played, and then the next "backward" takes you to a random song. For my MP3 player, this probably means it keeps a memory of the last couple of songs it played. For the car, it doesn't. Since it isn't a strictly "random" process, it may be that every time it plays a sequence, it is likely to always play that sequence again. Perhaps if it had played songs 4, 7, 3 in the past it is always followed by song 5. Maybe the reason I "knew" song 5 was coming up is because it always came next.

Another reason could be simple luck. I've also wanted to here a particular song many, many times in the past and had it not be the next track. Usually this means I stick with the song (or impatiently I hit the "next" button a few times until it does come up). I remember the times when it did work simply because it seems so unusual, whereas with say eleven tracks on the CD, I'm likely to guess the next one correctly at least one time in ten.

With the elevator button, I'm not so sure. Seems very weird, but although thinking "ZOMG, I has Telekinesis!!!" I admit was my first thought (and spent some of the day trying to move things around without any luck), what is more likely is that my observation was wrong. After all, I did push the button, however what I believe I saw was the light come on before pushing the button occurred. It's much more likely that my observation was incorrect, especially since this "light before pushing" event has only occurred a couple of times ever -- could it be somehow I registered the light turning on before the sensation of pushing the button occurred? And somehow that was conflated in my mind as being a much earlier than the button pushing? Or I was distracted at the time, and so I only thought I saw the light on first? Possibly I even got into an elevator with the light already on, went to push it and only then noticed it was on? Actually, that is much more likely than me being able to register a time difference between the nerve impulse and the light registering.

The fridge door? Well, if it is most of the way open, it pretty much stays open. But just a little bit less open and the weight of the door swings it back, at first slowly and then it kind of speeds up and closes. Plus, plenty of times I have left the door open and it stayed that way -- which is why I love my new fridge with the door alarm. Although it can be annoying to my wife when she's putting away the groceries. Apparently I don't put them away properly, go figure.

I'd LOVE to have telekinesis or clairvoyance, but if I did I'd have easily won the lotto by now.

edit: welcome to those who came from The 105th Skeptic's Circle

Oceanic Servers Downtime and Customer Support

2009-01-15T16:16:00.003+10:30

Warhammer Customer Support is pretty good, the ingame support is excellent. However, every now and then when a major fix comes out, the Oceanic servers tend to be a bit iffy.

The Server Status page shows that all the servers are up. When you log in, the servers appear to be up. But when the client attempts to connect to the server, instead it fails to complete. The last time this happened, everyone in my guild was getting this "Server has disconnected you" message, or even a crash out of the client. The other favourite is "Your password is invalid", which is great given you can't even get to this stage of logging in without giving your password, and if you mistype the password you don't get to the login stage.

Anyway, I report this to EA Customer Support, although there still isn't a "Server Issue" category.

Can't login to Oceanic servers. My whole guild is unable to login. Can login to US servers. Servers do not appear as offline, they disconnect when logging in (and sometimes the login screen crashs to desktop instead).
Also, you might as well add a "Can't login" category because it sure happens a lot.

Note that we CAN login to US Servers, just not the Oceanic ones.

Eventually, I get back this message (sent four hours later, by which time I was able to get in and play).

Hello,

Thank you for contacting Warhammer Online Support.

If you are unable to log in to the Warhammer Online game servers or receive an error message, saying "No servers found" or "Cannot connect to server," you should first check to see if the servers are still up.

Players can check server status by visiting http://realmwar.warhammeronline.com/realmwar/ServerStatus.war. An icon to the left of the server name indicates whether that server is online or offline. Green indicates an online server, and red indicates an offline one.

To check for outages or updated news, please visit http://herald.warhammeronline.com/warherald/NewsOverview.war.

If you still encounter the same problem in logging into any of the servers then I would request you to wait for few hours before you try to log-in once again.

We appreciate your patience in this matter.

Thank you,

EAREPDELETED
EA Online Support.

Err... thanks for sending the form letter. What part of "Servers do not appear offline" did you miss?

My reply:

Firstly, of course I checked if the servers were up. According to both the inclient server selection screen and the realm status page on the WAR site, they were.
Secondly, no outages were list.
Thirdly, saying I should wait "a few hours" before trying again is not a satisfactory answer to this issue. This issue occurs quite often (and in fact although I was able to login again "a few hours" later, some guild mates posted on our forum that this wasn't the case with them.

I would prefer that this issue is rectified. The Oceanic servers don't seem to be getting the same level of care that the US servers get. I applaud Mythic for having them actually in Australia, unlike a certain other game, but surely you can test the damn things after you roll out a patch. I've had a few issues with the authentication server failing to recognise me after a patch: and in those cases I have no problem logging into US servers.

Try doing this in the US: the first time you make ALL the regions servers not connect users or refuse to authenticate them (but appear to be up and running), you'll have calls coming out of your ears.

Sigh.. should have been "Secondly, no outages were listED.", oh well.
So, that was more a rant session. Why the hell do the oceanic servers cop this issue, which as far as I know, doesn't effect the US users.

I get a reply back, four DAYS later:

Hi,

Thank you for contacting Electronic Arts.

We will need some information from you in order to assist you. Please respond with the following information:-

Your account name:-
Your secret word:-

If there is anything else I can help you with please let me know.

Thank you,

EARepDELETED
EA Online Support.

What. The. Fook. Why does he (and or she) want with my account name? And what is a secret word? Secret word? Well, I guess getting my account name might qualify as useful to check logs, but I did think my EA Customer account was already linked to that. As for secret word, I don't recall setting one and I can't see why that would be required.

I replied:

My account is XXXXXX. My secret word? What secret word? And how is it relevant to ALL the oceanic servers becoming unavailable for ALL users after a fix? Please provide the reason this has occured and how it will be rectified so that it won't occur in future, and what EA/Mythic will do to compensate for our losses. Thanks.

So, that's where it's at for now. I'll update when or if anything further comes out of it. I do recall that other game compensating users with added time when they had outages, so who knows. Maybe all Oceanic users will get an extra days play for free.

Writing

2009-01-09T16:12:00.005+10:30

I haven't written about writing for a while, nor have I updated any stories -- in fact, not since the end (middle) of November, when I dropped out of NaNoWriMo due to lack of time (cough Warhammer Online cough).

Looking in my google docs, I've got.. hmm..

The Keystone
Apprentice Wizard manages to not be turned into a sacrifice bringing into the world the demon of chaos, only to end up marked as, well, the sacrifice to bring the demon of chaos into the world. And gets to be a pretty powerful wizard as well. And kidnapped by slavers. err.. and meets the girl of his dreams.
This had been a nanowrimo from 2005(!) that was written on an old OLD IBM PS/2 laptop so the paragraph formating (from Wordperfect for DOS!) is really bad. I had a vague outline, but started way in the past, so this story was meant to be the background to the real story.

Lost Mabel/Maude
Old lady meets a cat, then gets mugged by two very strange teens. Teens are from the underbelly, and take old lady back with them. The old lady has to live in a world of dark magic, watching out for Seth, the lost one (or is he?) who has ousted the Masters of Cups, Swords, Coins and Wands from the Lost Realm. Can she save the Realm, bring the underbelly into the light and prevent her grand-neice (also called Mabel/Maude) from joining the Riot Girls? (literally, Girls who riot. and tear men to pieces. And eat the pieces)
I'd been reading a few graphic novels when I came across the graphic novel version of Neil Gaiman's Neverwhere. What a fantastic idea, a world parallel to ours, where things are dark and fantastic. At the same time, I was listening a lot to Green Day's CD, American Idiot, and two things came out of it. One was this story idea, and the other is for a stage play for Jesus of Suburbia the musical (which I won't write about here, since I don't and will never have the rights for anyway. Plus, although according to the Wikipedia article there was at some stage a plan to make it into one.

Nurquititor
Humans came to the planet called Refuge a few times, when their ships went through strange portals that teleport the ships onto the surface of this strange planet. Humans aren't alone, there are many intelligent species on the planet. Some, like the Ooo, are really strange. Others are human like. And there are other humans. The story follows the lives of the crew and descendants of the first interstellar colony ship.
This one has some plotlines mixed together, with humans both the hero and villian as the descendants of the first ship try to defend the university-city of Nurquititor from the invading armies from the south, the empire, founded also by humans but descendants of refugees from an interstellar war with aliens. The common thread is through the eyes of Darius, an engineer on the first ship who fell into a pool of strange slime: which turned out to be Ooo, an alien race that intelligent beings become a part of. Darius becomes immortal, and he (and other Ooo forms he makes) tries to keep humanity a part of Refuge.

The Gardener
The Evil Lord is dead, and the only one upset by it is his Gardener. A Princess needs to escape a marriage she doesn't want. A rumor of a new Evil Lord comes, and only the Gardener and the Princess can stop a new war.

Fantasy from a different angle.

So, now I just need to write them all, finish them up, make them all look nice and get them published. Should be easy. :/

Drive by weight loss spam

2009-01-08T12:40:00.002+10:30

Way back in 2007 I wrote a post on Syndromes and Disorders, so i was a bit surprised to get an email that someone had commented on it.

And what a lovely comment:

luccy said...
Dieting and physical exercises can help you
in shedding your weight to a certain extent but if your BMI (Body Mass Index) is
30 or exists above this value, you need to take extra measures for adequate
relief from the shackles of obesity. However, Phentermine, Adipex etc are FDA
approved diet pills that suppress your appetite effectively and assist you to
lose weight once you fall in the grip of obesity. Phentermine should be
administered only after getting hold of a Phentermine prescription from the
doctor and for more details on the medicine, visit the website http://deleted the site

Well.. let's see. First, this has nothing to do with the post, which was more about Asperger's, Tourette's, tics and ADD. Smells like spam.

Next, luccy states you can't lose weight without help if your BMI is too high. Given I do have a BMI over 30, that was news to me. It's probably news to the contestants on Biggest Loser as well, since most of them succeed in getting that shackle relief you apparently can't get -- I think the show is a load of crap, by the way. A hell of a lot of emphasis on losing weight rapidly, but some of the techniques could be bad for you if you aren't under supervision. How on earth no one has dropped dead from a heart attack during it is beyond me.

It would be news to my doctor as well: Mind you, my doctor thinks that everything wrong with me is due to obesity (Lack of energy? Obesity. Aches and pains? Obesity. Broken leg? Obesity. Run over by a truck? Well, if you weren't so fat, you'd have gotten out of the way. Obesity.)

Hmm.. some drugs that are "FDA Approved" to reduce appetite. Nice to know, but since I'm in Australia I don't think that's really helpful to know. And, strangely, I don't want to know. Appetite isn't causing me to get fat: that's caused by my eating more kilojoules than my body uses to burn. Reducing my appetite will reduce my food intake. Reducing my food intake will cause that lovely effect well known to dieters -- the body treats reduced food intake as a famine, and goes into protective mode. Sure, you lose weight. You don't lose fat. Same goes for those diet shakes. I was on one for a while that worked by pretty much filling you up with "Ultra Low Calorie" food (more like flavoured dust). Add to that the "carb free" rules you had to eat by, and it was Atkins-with-flavoured-drink. You lose weight with low carb diets because you lose water and muscle mass. Then it levels off and by reducing your muscle mass its a lot harder to lose more.

The site (before I deleted the link) was called "weight-loss-truths". Strange how sites that lie are called "Truth" isn't it? They aren't selling weight loss, they are selling an alleged way to lose weight easier. Hate to say it, because it effects me too, but there isn't an easy way. It was easy to put the weight on, because for twenty years I continued to eat huge (and fatty/sugary) meals and exercise only little. The way to reverse that is to exercise and eat much better. For Twenty Years. Or eat really well and exercise a LOT MORE. Plus, I have a liver condition (Yep. Caused by Obesity) which pretty much means I have to lose weight slowly. Losing weight too fast (or using dietary drugs...) could cause more liver issues.

So, luccy, you're a spamming git, aren't you?

Symbols in Chat in Warhammer Online

2009-01-07T12:38:00.007+10:30

I'd like to say I discovered this, however doing a search on "icons warhammer online" found a few other hits.

There is a library of icons and symbols that is in the WAR client, and its used by the minimap, the bags, the map, server announcements and the like. The symbols can be accessed by using "&lticon>" within a chat (it also works in email subject lines and probably contents). I'd love to know if it works in guild names (although there seems to be a bug in guild names currently -- we spent an hour trying to get a guild name accepted last night, for an alt alt guild built for fun scenario runs in T1 -- seems if you use more than one capital it fails, even though there are guilds in ALLCAPS as well as Guild Names Like This. Must be recent)

Way back in the early days of WAR (after release), an announcement popped up saying that Altdorf was now level 4. There were three stars at the end, and also "&lticon43" where the last star should have been. (memory is bad, so it may have been a different icon number)(also, I think there had to be a space between icon and the number, although this isn't the case now)

Icon43?

So I tried "/say &lticon43"
Well, that didn't work.

How about "/say &lticon43>"?
I got a star floating in my 'voice' bubble, and in the chat window.

I tried different numbers at random, and found a bunch: between 1 and 65 or so. I mentioned this in Guild and people had a bit of fun dropping random icons into the chat.

The problem at the time was that doing this caused issues for the chat text coloring: Text that should be blue appeared white, or half would be blue and half a different color. It effected anyone who say the symbol (so people at the other end of the chat weren't too impressed). So, I stopped trying it out.

...

Go forward a few months, and I try the icon thing again. And this time, it works fine, no bad effects. Someone in Guild tries "&lticon777> and it works... there's more than 60-odd??

I made a macro with &lticon10>&lticon11>&lticon12&gt...&lticon19> and ran it. Then changed the macro to &lticon20>&lticon21&gtetc. Then ran through them. I'm up to about icon300+ now. From around 200 on, the icons are bag items. They are also not the same size as in the bag window, so the icon must resize or my chat window font size is different to the bag window default.

I'm looking for a Clock symbol, and since I'm sure I've seen a watch in the past, should be there somewhere.

Icon 33 is a stop symbol. Icon 140-something is a hammer (theres a bunch of weapon symbols in a row in the mid-100s). And a clock, and I have "Stop-Hammer-Time".

...

Khalid is a 29 Rune Priest now, but I've also got Individual (21 White Lion), Telansa (20 Bright Wizard), Tact (22 Knight) and Cunning (6 Shadow Hunter). And Bigbadwolf, level three War Priest.

edit: i can't seem to fix the left bracket issue in this post

Apatheism?

2009-01-03T17:59:00.001+10:30

(originally posted as a comment on Friendly Atheist)

I've been thinking about this "used to be an atheist but now I'm in the bosom of Jesus" types. At a risk of raising the "No True Atheist" flag, I don't think they were atheists.

I think they are Apatheists. It wasn't that they didn't believe in god, but they just didn't care. Maybe paid lip service, or attended church with family pressure, but otherwise it was either too hard or too boring or too much to believe, and so by the definition of their old faith, they label themselves as Atheist.

They accept the label, maybe learn some of the ways Atheists act or think, and try that on: in a way, they treat Atheism as if it was a faith, a religion. They read the books other Atheists tell them about, they go to the sites, they nod in appreciation at the witty comments and condemn the god-bothering trolls... but, still, they start to feel something missing still. It doesn't occur to them that the missing thing is them letting go of faith, but rather they start to feel the missing thing being god. They feel that its great to be out of the moral code of their old religion, and for some that freedom means going the other way, over to drinking to excess or sex sex sex. Because they are free now, free from that church they had been in.

And suddenly because a family member makes them or there's a sign or they burn toast and it looks like Jesus; and we have another Atheist turned Christian doing the lecture route. They couldn't keep to their original faith in the first place, and the new one (which could be the old one, but is more likely a revivalist or evangelistic church) isn't boring, they say the right things, couch answers in easy to understand (and wrong) logic. A(pa)theist becomes Theist again.

Apatheism is not atheism.

New Year's Eve

2008-12-31T13:38:00.003+10:30

It would be nice to actually keep a few resolutions for a while, since I often have the same ones -- on the other hand, I often have no resolutions to keep (seems simpler).

For 2009, I'd like to do the following:

Get Healthy. Not "lose weight", but definitely lose a few (tens of) inches from the belt.
Write more. Blog more, write more stories, write some articles perhaps.
Get frugal. I read http://www.thesimpledollar.com/ often, but I'm terrible with money. I make a nice amount, but after mortgage and bills come out there isn't a huge amount left over.
Have a holiday. Go up to Brisbane for a few days or a week even, with wifey and my kids.
Play better. I play Magic the Gathering and love it. I'm not very good at it (although I have had my moments), and it would be nice to get better.
Get known. Articles, discussions, helping out online -- these help you get known, get your name out there. It isn't going to just 'happen', I need to make it happen.
Love more. Do more things with the wifey and kids, especially wifey, she has to put up with me after all.
Live better. Do stuff around the home, garden (yerk). Clean out that overfilled granny flat out back and turn it into a workshop and den.
Get things done. I've had the books for ages, but I drifted away from GTD -- too much effort. I never did the cleanup of things to do at home, so that didn't help either. Make an effort on this in the new year.

Happy New Year.

Internet filter in Australia

2008-12-18T09:18:00.002+10:30

The Australian government, in an effort to emulate the liberty and freedom held in such democracies as China and Saudi Arabia, is hell-bent on introducing a country-wide web filter.

That the filter is easily stepped around (proxy servers, anyone) is beside the point: The ALP needs the support of the Christian Fascist, sorry Family First party in the Senate, and this was their thirty pieces of silver. Australia will go from having a less-than-world-class internet access to having .. a less than third-world internet access.

Arguments against the filter are coming from all sides of politics, and even the geeks (such as myself) are up in arms. Do you realise what this will mean to our ping times? Well, probably nothing, but still. It will slow down internet access for everything and it won't prevent the thing it is there for. And... noone knows what is to be on the "list". If the Christian Fascists can get this in place, what is next: "We want sites that educate about contraception on the list. And gun control. And abortion. And feminists. And teh gay. Especially Teh Gay!!! And witches. That new Harry Potter site, ban it!!!"

Arguments for the filter look like this:

Chief executive of child protection group Child Wise, Bernadette McMenamin, said most of the criticisms levelled at the internet filter scheme were founded on misinformation.

"It's disturbing that people are getting hysterical about all the misinformation that is being spread about the internet filter," Ms McMenamin said.

"Instead of hearing hysteria from the minority we need to hear from the Government and exactly what it intends to ban."

Ms McMenamin was equally critical of the past weekend's protests and the DLC's plans for future action.

"Let the 300 people march on Canberra because it looks pathetic," he said. "It looks pathetic and shameful because most of these people are not fully aware of the facts and secondly, those who are aware are, in effect, advocating child pornography."

* People protesting over a badly conceived invasion of privacy and infringement of rights equals a hysterical minority.
* You should never listen to a minority, the government is always right
* People who complain about censorship want child porn. Won't nobody think of the children.

Ms McMenamin, this is a truly poor argument. Casting aspertions that the protestors are a bunch of hysterics is hilarious given who is supporting this abomination. If anyone is not fully aware of the facts, it is you. Every group involved in the coalition (the Digital Liberty Coalition, who staged protests against the filter) has put out statements supporting the protection of children, but all of them have pointed out that this is not the cure. This isn't like pulling out your own eyes to stop you from seeing what might offend you, this is pulling out everyone else's eyes too.

And they wonder why we want a Bill of Rights.

WAR update

2008-11-28T10:28:00.002+10:30

Well, I've played through the Heavy Metal event on my alt Individual, which was fun and amazingly fast to complete. I guess they want lots of Empire Tanks. I'll be tanking up once the event finishes. I haven't played a Tank before so this should be interesting.

I'm playing a Rune Priest (my main), Khalid; a Bright Wizard (Telansa) and a White Lion (Individual). All are fun, but I'm not out of T3 on Khalid yet (only level 24). Scenarios are great fun, but I think it is too quick to level on Scenarios alone. If they pop rapidly, and you consistently get a good group, you can get around 10K xp each time -- not including the extra xp you get for the repeatable "go do this scenario" quests. Tie that to the "kill x enemies" quest and you can get 15-20K XP every twenty minutes or so.

Warhammer Age Of Reckoning starts

2008-09-19T18:48:00.002+09:30

WAAAAGGH

Warhammer Online starts now, although I was in the closed beta (err.. thanks for not emailing me guys, so I didn't realise until the open beta was almost on), open and the non-collectors edition headstart (yeah, I loved the two day wait as well).

Unfortunately I only got one play session during the open and maybe won't continue on my Dorf Engineer. He's still pretty cool, but apparently some of the guys I know have Destruction characters on the same server. Game looks pretty cool and the open grouping feature is great.

TechEd Sydney 2008

2008-09-04T15:15:00.002+09:30

Well... I'm bad. I haven't blogged in six months, which for me isn't that unusual. Given this is a pretty much unread blog, that's not so much of a problem, but the idea is to post regularly... I also use the ellipsis a little too... much. ...

Anywho, I'm here at TechEd 2008, slurping down a load of microsoft. I've had some interesting stuff so far: some good info on Windows 2008 Server Core, and Branch Office DCs, read-only domain controllers that only have the credentials for the users at that site -- great idea. If you lose the DC, you only compromise the local users and you can delete the DC which triggers a "do you want all the users to reset their passwords" function.

I'm also hitting every PowerShell session I can: not happy that I missed out for one instructor led lab though, got there a couple of minutes late and found the room overflowing -- not enough computers to go around. I've done most of my scripting work in vbscript, but powershell encapsulates .net programming (oh noes) and can do some pretty cool stuff.

Windows Server Core is a cut-down server with no pretty gui... only, there is one because you get a command prompt in a window, and can open notepad and regedit on the box. However, even though you can run IIS on the box, .net isn't there and so neither is powershell, which would have been cool. I wonder if you can slipstream .net into a core box, maybe hacking in the binaries and the registry keys?

Anyway, I'll try to keep updating in the future, but I'm pretty slack.

Gary Gygax gone

2008-03-06T21:29:00.006+10:30

E. Gary Gygax, creator of D&D, dead at 69.

Nerds worldwide mourn one of their legends. Gary's rules became D&D, AD&D and on.

Some tributes: Order of the Stick
, Penny Arcade, Something Positive, GU Comics
update: xkcd

Yes, I read a lot of gaming webcomics, why do you ask?

When I was young, I collected many role playing games. Strangely, I hardly ever played them, but I did have D&D (Basic and Expert editions), AD&D, Tunnels and Trolls, Traveller, Runequest and others. And Gary started it all off. Okay, Dave Arneson had a huge input into the first edition, but welp.

TSR went on and had ups and downs, and was eventually acquired by Hasbro, who gave the intellectual property to Wizards of the Coast, who soon will put out Fourth Edition D&D.

I want to see a Dragon Special Edition, with a tribute to Gary. Unfortunately, Dragon was cancelled.

Gary, you lived the life many of us would live. Roll high.

And back...

2008-02-20T14:05:00.002+10:30

Well... long time no post.

This seems to occur on occasion, I go for a few months without a post. Then I have to do catch up.
Anyway, I've still got the beard, which I'm mostly used to now: I hardly ever look in the mirror and get surprised by it now.

I've stopped playing World of Warcraft, mostly because I'm playing a lot more EVE Online. I'm in a Corporation that is part of the Goonswarm alliance, beating on the Band Of Brothers alliance for the control of the galaxy. Or, more accurately, for them to NOT have control of the galaxy. Then us goons will be off drinking and partying.

I've started work on a novel, and have the outline down already. A first for me, I usually have no idea what I'm writing, get the first couple of chapters down and then choke. Then I forget how it will end and stop writing. I have a few stories like that sitting in my google docs, rotting away.

hopefully I'll update a little quicker next time.

Kitty kard

2007-08-27T10:53:00.000+09:30

This card is the top loot for the new WoW card game set (Fires of Azeroth).

I bought a box from my favourite games shop (infinity games, adelaide) and opened Spectral Tiger, which is shiny, pretty, new and selling on ebay for around $US500 !!!

... Looks like I'll be selling it soon :D

Never Mind the Pillock

2007-07-12T10:31:00.000+09:30

I've been honoured here with the company of "MICKY", he of the stuck capslock key and a penchant for spamming other people's blogs with nonsense. Apparently I'm not his only victim.

I'm sure blogspot will be interested in this activity. It's one thing to come to another blog and make a post, it's another to spurt random crap in the comments, especially when this said crap has no relationship to the post.

self-conscious blogging

2007-06-29T11:58:00.000+09:30

Someone at my work found out about this blog and, being a twit*, comments on it constantly.

Some of the joy of blogging is just getting the post out there; and having someone looking over your shoulder so to speak can be disconcerting to say the least.

I've found Marc Andreessen's blog now, from a link at lifehack.org, and a great post on productivity -- I love the bit on the inbox, as well as the "don't keep a schedule" idea. The best tip for me was the lead to stuff on using procrastination as a tool. Since I'm a world-class procrastinator I'll have to give it a go.

* yeah yeah, you're not a twit.... much :D

Beard...

2007-06-21T13:10:00.000+09:30

I've grown a beard. Or, more accurately, I haven't shaved for a while, leaving the hair on my face to become more prevalent.

I quite like it. I haven't grown much facial hair before, except when being lazy for long periods without shaving, but until now it just formed facial mess, rather than a beard. Must be old age doing it.
...

A double-blind experiment is when, for instance, the pill given to a patient may contain the new experimental drug or instead just sugar, and the patient and the doctor giving out the pill don't know which it is. The doctor records that Patient X got the pill in box Y. The results over a large population are assessed. Some people just get better by themselves, and by using a placebo this effect is taken into account. If 15% of those on placebos get better, and 20% of those on the other pill, then it can be assumed that the pills effectiveness is 5% better than a placebo. If 1% on the placebo get better, but 40% on the real dose do, then that pill is a good one. If 2% on the placebo die during the trial of a heart attack, but 10% on the real dose do, that isn't a really good sign.

The doctor doesn't know which pill is which so that the doctor (consciously or not) doesn't influence the results either way.

Any experiment that tests for a result needs a control group (those on placebos, for instance) and results have to be compared to that control group to make sense. Otherwise, you get things like homeopathy or Reiki. Sure, some people are apparently healed, however how much of that is due to the placebo effect? How many would have been healed over time without it? How is it better than NOT doing it, or using something else?

Double-blind methodology made me think of a thought experiment.

You are God. You made everything, the universe, all the people. You want people to be good, and you will assess them after they finish with the first stage of their existence, that of 'mortal life' within the physical universe.
If you tell them what to do, you have directly influenced their behaviour. Are they being good, or doing good things, or treating each other well because you asked or told them to, or would they have been good anyway? If they did good out of fear or to personally gain, are they truly good?
If you don't tell them what to do, when it is time to assess them you can see them as they would have been. Those who have done good did it out of themselves alone. Are they good, then?

...

Due to popular (err.. one person) demand, I've added a pic. Sorry if it hurts :D

And now the next book

2007-06-12T13:34:00.000+09:30

Amazingly I just found the sequel to Old Man's War, Ghost Brigades, on a trolley waiting to be shelved at the local Borders, here in Adelaide.

There's one less to shelve now :D

I found Old Man's War to be a very good read. If anything, it was way too short -- that's more my problem than the story, I just read so fast that anything of average size just doesn't last me long enough. If only I could write as fast as I read. I don't remember running into anything that made me step out of the story (although I did guess what "ghost brigade" meant before it came up).

I found the Ghost Brigade part interesting, but superficial: I don't know, maybe I wanted more detail on how they were 'developed' so quickly. This might not make sense if you haven't read the book (or maybe even if you have) but I don't want to ruin anything for the one reader of this blog who came here via the "Next blog at random" button.

If you did, buy the book. It's good. Actually, buy both books.

Old Man's War

2007-06-05T17:06:00.000+09:30

Seen in the Wild in Borders, Adelaide, South Australia. There is only one left now.

Oh, and Android's Dream there too...

Not too impressed with the layout here... Sorry, I just can't seem to get these pictures where I want them.
Left a note on John's blog

aqr / hacker

2007-05-18T09:49:00.000+09:30

I've been toying with a story idea for some time, where hackers -- those people who through their dedication to knowledge, geekiness, hardware and software -- have become in the future a sort of community, that of "Aqr". These are the people who fix problems but who have difficulty in conversing with the norm. Highly intelligent folk who may not have the best in social skills.

Aqr'i live in closed community groups, with their own laws and society. They are seen as being.. valuable. Sometimes. Aqr formed due to persecution and overreliance -- coming together because they were blamed for system failures, and also to pool skills. The result is a bunch of hardcore geeks that the outside world relies on, but otherwise disdains and treat as abnormal (ie, same as it ever was).

Okay, other than wishful thinking on the part of a geeky guy, this idea nugget was more as background to other stories -- I could have an Aqr in the story, with some background but not the main storyline.

This came to mind when I read this: From FijiTimes via BoingBoing

BUSINESSMAN and information technology specialist Ulaiasi Taoi says he was punched and kicked by eight soldiers while he was kept overnight at the military
camp.
He was arrested and detained over allegations that he was involved in anti-military blogs on the Internet.
Mr Taoi was held in a cell at the Queen Elizabeth Barracks for 24 hours after soldiers escorted him from his office in Toorak about 2pm last Friday.
The military took him over its suspicions that he was behind one of the resistance blog sites that have been very vocal against the takeover. He had earlier had a "heavy" and "very abusive" telephone exchange with Colonel Pita Driti in which he was blamed for instigating the blog sites.

So... blaming an IT guy for bloggers attacking an illegal regime. At the same time, the military are trying to use IT guys to block the sites -- Aqr'i can be on either side of a problem, because they are there for a PROBLEM, not for a CAUSE. It's a failing -- most people, including hackers/coders/geeks, hate spam, for instance, but who do you think wrote the programs that do the spamming?

Waiting for Scalzi

2007-05-10T17:13:00.000+09:30

Day 43. We've run out of pancakes. The dog is looking edible. Still waiting for Scalzi to return.

Actually, I don't remember my comment on his site as it dropped into the moderation queue never to be seen again. At least *I* thought it was funny.

Edit: Turns out that, because I was viewing his site through Netvibes, I never saw all the updates he was making to his tour thread. Doh.

On syndromes and disorders

2007-05-04T16:51:00.000+09:30

On wikipedia, I wasted some time by looking up some facts, which led to other links (as usual) which led to Attention-Deficit Disorder. Since my attention span is quite often sadly lacking, I followed a link to Adult Attention-Deficit Disorder. Hmm.. I'm certainly not "hyperactive", but inattention, impulsivity, restlessness... sounds familiar to me.

A link elsewhere took me to tics. When I was younger I used to sniff constantly (although, I did have a diverted septum so it could be related to that), I had a 'thing' with my right eye, where it moves up to the top right (well.. that's my top-right. I guess from the outside, it would be me looking to the top left). Apparently sniffing can be a "phonic tic", while the eye thing could be a motor tic. Hmm. That led to Tourette Syndrome which surprised me, as the uncontrolled swearing aspect that it is famous for is really something that only effects about 15% of sufferers. And also, these tics are not truly involuntary, but more "unvoluntary" -- the inflicted gets an overwhelming urge to swear, jerk, move. If concentrated on, it can be supressed, but eventually they have to release it. Interesting, because the sniffing is pretty much gone now, my eye only jerks when I think about it (damn it) and now I swear like a sailor.

Some more links take me to Asperger's. This mild form of autism occurs in people who test with superior intelligence (that rules me out) but some of the markers include not reading the social and emotional message from eyes (I find I often don't look people in the eye, which is a bad thing apparently), being considered rude (that's definitely me!), being "too honest", difficulty in being deceptive (certainly). Inability to recognise boredom in others (no comment :D). I hit most of these targets more or less. Damn, I'm just re-reading these and this is from the page:

15. Coping with criticism - people with AS are compelled to correct mistakes, even
when they are made by someone in a position of authority, such as a teacher. For
this reason, they can be unwittingly offensive.

Oh my... Not only do I do this (correct mistakes constantly) but I get stressed about not pointing out a mistake, and then I stress about how I will be perceived if I do point it out (Should I point out the mistake? They might think I'm being picky. But its a mistake. What if they don't notice? Will they think I'm a smartarse?) which can cause me problems.

On the other hand, I'm way way not totally ignorant of other's feelings.

So. ADD. Tourette's. Asperger's.

Good thing I didn't look up hypochondria.

Can't find a book

2007-05-01T16:00:00.000+09:30

Went looking for another 'atheist' book to go with The God Delusion, but surprisingly couldn't find one. Borders Adelaide stocks TGD in the "Science" section, which is where the other major booksellers put theirs. Although I saw a copy of The Atheist Manifesto the other day, no such luck today.

But what else IS there? And where do you put Reality-Based books? I found twelve bookshelves for religion, spiritual and alternative medicine books in Borders, and yet only a couple for science topics. I could get the Satanic bible, books on the Kabalah, books on the medicines THEY don't want me to know about (the all powerful "THEY" who apparently weren't powerful enough to stop the publication of the book...) and yet I didn't find a non-fiction reality based account of the world. Maybe I was looking in the wrong place.

Patrick, Get an Appointment

2007-05-01T14:48:00.000+09:30

slight update

2007-04-19T16:00:00.000+09:30

Not much to see. Go about your business.

Had my teeth cleaned last week. Exciting stuff that.

I've been reading up on some Atheist sites, seems that you aren't allowed to be an Atheist unless you can not only give post-doctoral dissertions as responses to theist/creationist/Intelligent Design proponents, in multiple subjects at that; but you also need to be a doctor of theology to respond to scripture quotations. Meanwhile, any theist with a hat is allowed to put forward the "God said so" argument and gets an auto-win. Pointing this out, by the way, isn't allowed either.

Some dental fun

2007-03-23T09:23:00.000+10:30

I had a three-in-one dental job done yesterday.

Two broken old amalgam filings were replaced with ceramics. On a third tooth, I had a full crown done to replace the long-gone filing. Amalgam filings have a definite lifespan and they tend to break or fall out. I had one snap in half when eating some muesli.

The dentist (Dr Richard Huebl from Riken Dental) was very good. Richard was recommended to me by a couple of fellow employees and he certainly was worth seeing. But DAMN crowns cost a lot. If I didn't have health cover I'd be a much poorer person.

The three were done in one hit, which was a good thing but my back teeth were flooding by the end. I needed to see a man about a dog? Some other euphamism for "I needed to wee".

Anywho, the new filings are ceramic, and Richard used a 3D camera to take a shot of the hole, then he drew a line around the gap on the computer screen. The program they use filled the picture of the hole with a filing and Richard adjusted it. Once he was done, he printed it! The "printer" uses computer controlled bits that carve out the filing from a block of ceramic. Water is sprayed over the block constantly (at a guess, to stop it getting really really hot and shattering). After its done, Richard 'glued' it in place and it was done.

My jaw is still hurting a bit (from having to keep it open wide for nearly two hours) but other than that I don't have gaping holes where I should have teeth now.

Brights

2007-02-28T17:39:00.000+10:30

I'm a bright, in that I have a naturalistic view of the world and don't consider any supernatural explanation for any of it. This doesn't mean that I wouldn't, under stress, wish for something or "pray" for an outcome. This is apparently human nature. Oops.. wrong link. This is better...

The use of "bright" is not meant to have a meaning of "you aren't a naturalistic atheist, therefore you are NOT bright", but rather just be a noun... this hasn't stopped theists from accusing brights of being elitist -- the correlation between intelligence and atheism isn't proven as far as I know...

Intel Viral Marketer fails own advice

2007-01-30T13:28:00.000+10:30

On the Chronicles of George board, we had a new user (owenpdx) whose one and only posting seemed ... spammish.

When I get tired of dealing with the constant stream of stupid computer questions (which is almost daily) I do two things: drown my sorrows in the chronicles of George, and visit this site: http://www.pebkactranslator.com/translate.html
Enjoy, my comrades of the help desk!

After a number of welcome posts, board regular Marlo Vino noted that there was a similar post here. Uh-oh... spammer??

Not so, because owenpdx then posted:

I'm a legit new real member... as I live and breathe. I'm new to these types of
forums, but I'm for real. Thanks for the welcome!

A round of apologies begins... before I put on my Sam Spade hat... and go to.. err.. samspade.org

A whois shows the pebkactranslator site was put up by an 'Owen Jones and Partners' company. Hmm... maybe the site is advertising based, or popups... so I go there.

The site is okay, if you like overly garish flash animations. There is a rather prominent intel logo on the site, and either a while after clicking it (or it was a set refresh timer?) and the site refreshes over to: http://www.intel.com/business/vpro/pebkac/index.htm

What a surprise! It really IS spam!

So... I go digging, and find a few other posts by owenpdx

A search for Owen Jones and Partners just finds the (actually well done) front page of the company with little else on it.

A search for Owen Jones Intel finds this as the first hit

And while the Multiply campaign is the main thrust of advertising to this particular target segment, Intel has quietly launched its own version of an in-joke for IT managers in hopes it will go viral. With the help of
communications agency Owen Jones and Partners, Intel has developed a Web-based widget available at Pebkactranslator.com.
The phrase PEBKAC stands for "Problem Exists Between Keyboard And Chair," and is slang for IT managers being asked less than intelligent computer questions by their clients. The Pebkactranslator is a Flash animation that will "translate" an IT manager's predictable answer to such questions into a more acceptable format, said Bhagat.
"You input your own version of 'go take a leap' and it spits out a politically correct version of that," she said. "It's developing an emotional connection in understanding the frustration that IT is going through, which helps our relationship with building a brand with the IT community."
The Translator itself features a "machine" with alternating devil horns or angel halo that spits out questions like "I haven't been feeling well today. I think my computer gave me a virus. Is that possible?"
Although the Translator features branding for Intel's vPro chips, the company is not actively spreading the word about the site. Instead, they first reached out to the Flash developer community to discuss the combination of the Flash front-end tied to a query database of answers, according to Rusty Grim, creative director and partner at Owen Jones and Partners, and then just let things spread by word of mouth.
"When you do something viral you have to respect what that means. You have to release something in a way that is not overly heavy handed. People can smell a fake when you try a viral attempt," said Jones.

Unintended irony in bold.

Savaged by ducks

2006-11-30T12:18:00.000+10:30

Robert Scoble was asked to attend PodcampNY, and quite rightly asked if travel expenses were an option. Not demanded. Not asked for an appearance fee. If it was a possibility.

Apparently this was too much for one of the organisers, who drops it onto his blog with comments that this was all too much...

Robert posts it on his blog and the fun begins.

The commentary on the organisers blog is quite good, he's not going to be living this down for a while. Especially since he still hasn't apologised.

Wacom Pen Tablet set to stun

2006-11-29T08:03:00.000+10:30

I've been very slack in updating this blog... I'll have to make an effort to update daily. Or hourly, like Scoble - I think he has a blogging robot that posts for him, but that may only be a rumour.

My shoulder has been very painful. The steroid injection helped not at all, or at least not once the painkiller wore off. My wrist was aching hugely as well, in that numb ache way. So I bought one of these:
This is a Wacom Pen Tablet, the A6 model so it isn't huge. I've been using it as a mouse replacement at work, and pushing work to buy me one -- given it costs about $150 (AUD) I was concerned about leaving it there.
I've found that since I got this I don't get that numb wrist and arm anymore.

It hasn't helped my shoulder a huge amount though.

The Tablet comes with some drawing software as well, so I'll have to give it a try out.

My weight is now around 88 kg, which means I've lost five kg since I started watching calories -- I have approx 1500 a day, although some weekends that is stretched quite a bit. Some meals at Fasta Pasta, for instance, have more that 1500 calories on the plate.

Speedom of Freach.

2006-10-03T13:18:00.000+09:30

I'd been reading some articles on the rise of apparent fascism in the USA. A recurrent theme by commentors include statements like "If it was a dictatorship, you wouldn't be able to say that!!"

Err... Freedom of speech in the blogosphere era just adds a bit more noise to the background. For each comment made by an astute observor, add fifty spam blog posts; twenty astroturf blog posts; official news on Fox; reports on photographing famous people instead of covering the iraq war in national magazines.

Freedom of Speech is irrelevant when no one hears you.
Scream.

Political Aside

2006-09-26T15:46:00.000+09:30

Being an Australian, it may be odd that I find the USA's political system fascinating. On the other hand, the USA is an enormous force in the world.

It wasn't that long ago I would have said "An Enormous force for good in the world". I'm not so sure now.

With Americans heading into mid-term elections, it is hard to understand why they haven't put their president in a cage yet. Torture is "Okay". Invading a country that had nothing to do with the Sept 11 terrorist attack is fine, especially if you lie about how it was involved and now say "oh well, we was wrong". Not understanding that the president is NOT immune to the law. Spying on your own citizens. The list grows.

Voting Republican in the states means a vote for torture

In Australia, chief Bush lickspittle is our very own Prime Minister, John Howard. Vote Liberal. Vote for Torture.

By my understanding, if Australian troops in Iraq have participated in torture they would have committed an offence against our law. If they knowingly allow US troops to commit these acts, they would have committed an offence as well.

not a blog?

2006-08-22T07:26:00.000+09:30

http://scobleizer.wordpress.com/2006/08/20/torres-says-half-of-all-live-spaces-arent-blogs/

In a ThinkWeek paper, accepted by Bill Gates, and discussed with him before MSN even started publishing Spaces (more than two years ago), we (not just me, but MS researchers too) defined blogging as having five things:

1) Easy to do reverse-chronilogical content display. Type in a box and hit publish. New stuff goes at the top of the page. Old stuff moves down.
2) Discoverable. Through search engines (I listed Google, Technorati, MSN, Yahoo, and a few others). I specifically mentioned a ping server as infrastructure too, ala Technorati or Weblogs.com. IE, blogs are public. I would go as far as saying that a site that does not ping a pingserver, like weblogs.com, is NOT a blog (private Web sites don’t ping weblogs.com and are NOT discoverable by search engines).
3) Social. I can track when you link to me from another domain, either through search engines, through trackbacks, or through my referer logs. (I can’t be social with private cross-domain spaces).
4) Permalinkable. I can send you a link directly to a post. (I can’t do that with private spaces).
5) Syndicatable. I can use a news aggregator to read your content, which lets me read a lot more blogs. (I can’t do that with private spaces).

Now.. let's see how many I get right.
Reverse chronological order? Check
Discoverable in search engines? Err...
Social and trackbacks? Blogger has "backlinks"... apparently. This is too hard.
Permalinkable? Yeah, got that.
Syndicatable? Blogger provides an rss link.

Now, technically I should be able to go to the linked post and post a link back to this post -- I guess thats the "trackback" bit. But from seeing other sites, it seems to be more... automated than that for some sites.
As for discoverable... well, eventually. If you knew what keywords to use. Maybe.

--

Shoulder has started aching again, and forearm gone back to numb. Yay. Back to the Doctors. However, since surgery is the option left on the shoulder, I think I'll have to live with it.

needles update

2006-08-02T18:16:00.000+09:30

Having a needle shoved into the bursa on your right shoulder is not as bad as I expected. I barely felt the needle going in, and just a slight pressure as Cortisone and the local were injected.

So far, I haven't noticed much difference: apparently it can take a few days before it takes effect.

Oh, and thanks to the nice person from Scotland who bought one of the PPU infant creepers :) I'm hoping that whatever CafePress charge for postage isn't too insane

Babies good for two things??

2006-07-28T11:41:00.000+09:30

From Mark McClusky's Blog

Kristen and I were talking about the blogging thing the other day, and realized that the single best promotional opportunity is the cute little baby we have. After a little design work, here's what we came up with. What father could resist? Grab your own at Cafe Press.

(via Boing Boing) Babies are apparently good for marketing, but the Boing Boing link to the article was titled "Babies good for two things: poo production and marketing" -- so I thought it only fair if t-shirts were available for the OTHER thing:

Needles

2006-07-27T17:23:00.000+09:30

I have a lovely condition called "Bursitis" in my right shoulder. This is not fun at all, as it makes the range of motion of my shoulder smaller than it should be. Also, it hurts.

I've been taking anti-inflammatory drugs for the bursitis for over six months, however these don't seem to be improving the problem. Adding to the bursitis is a persitent "numb" (lack of) feeling I get in the hand and forearm. The doctor thought that it might be carpal tunnel at first, but a nerve conduction test showed that to not be the case. Nerve conduction tests, by the way, are done by doctors who get to zap electricity through their patients while trying hard to not laugh.

So.. I'll be getting a needle steered into the joint by using ultrasound, and then steriods will be injected in. This apparently has a good chance of working.

I hope.

WTB [Bloghabit]

2006-07-25T10:14:00.000+09:30

I find that adding posts to a blog is not an automatic habit as yet. It is something that needs to be learned, become ingrained.

My interests are fairly wide, which makes for a blog without a strong, single theme: there's writing, World of Warcraft, Computing, games and gaming... some politics sneaks in on occasion, and I read a few lefty blogs from the US: not extremely helpful here in Australia but interesting in that the US is now the only world superpower.

I'm a little concerned that the US executive decides that torture, well, it's fine. What's next? "Hey, poison gas is fine--if you object, you must support terrorism!!!"

Given the.. total lack of readers other than those using the "next blog" button, I'm really writing this for me. Ah well.

My 60 Rogue Telansa is getting a bit lacking for things to do: in WoW a lot of the feeling of achievement is in leveling the character. Once you hit 60 (until the expansion comes out) all there is left is getting better equipped... so that you can do the raids and instances to get better equipped. Or you go grind reputation with a faction to get the faction rewards that equips you better so you can etc etc.

DDO is not WOW

2006-06-27T13:58:00.000+09:30

I've been playing some DDO -- Dungeons & Dragons Online, that is. Stormreach (as it is subtitled) is an online, multi player version of the pen-and-paper (PnP) role playing classic. The game is a reasonable version of the 3.5 edition rules. But is it an MMORPG?

I'm familiar mostly with World of Warcraft. In WoW character progression is well done, there is a huge pile of content, some nicely balanced character classes (rough rule of thumb -- if all the class forums have complaints about their class being nerfed or no good, then they are balanced. Oh, and nerf shamans!), professions to gather resources and create things from those resources. A functioning trade system (Auction House), enhancement of items (enchants but also short-term enhancements such as poisons, sharpening stones). Guilds. Two sides (Horde and Alliance), which are also balanced. Quests lead to other quests. Grinding. Solo play and group. Items that get better and better and are worth fortunes.

DDO has.. err.. well.. its got characters. And adventures.

What doesn't it have? Well.. no professions. No gathering or manufacturing.
Even though group play is almost essential to progress (you have low level adventures that are soloable, but in the main the jobs need a group), there doesn't appear to be much to make people want to play with others.

Is it fun? Yeah, it is, but its more something where I can team up with my son and hit a few adventures. We're only level 2 (progression in this game is intensely slow, although the use of "enhancements" inside the levels was a brainwave) and hopefully by the time we hit level 3 we'll be able to get into some of the more challenging quests. The quests, adventures, scenario things is it, and if you don't mind that in the game I guess it would be enough.

What does DDO need?
Gathering and Manufacturing or customisation of things would be a huge boon for this game. Some MMORPGs can point to their crafts as a big play point -- Star Wars Galaxies, Everquest, E2, WoW, EVE Online -- they all allow the players to make things that then have a value elsewhere in the game. DDO has nothing. If there were alchemists (able to make Cure Light Wounds potions, for instance) EVERYONE would want to be one. DDO has players collect a few different artifacts (Mushrooms, Prayer Beads, pages from a research journal) and these can be traded to "collectors" for some nice(ish) loot. Why not instead allow the players to combine mushrooms into potions, or prayer beads into an enchant on some piece of gear?

Some content that isn't in a sewer, basement, abandoned warehouse -- how about out in the open? Mind you, we aren't that far into the game, perhaps that is coming.

PvP or duels. Or both. I don't play PvP much on WOW, although I used to -- lag time from Australia to the US WOW servers is bad for PvP (plus I suck) so for me it isn't much of a priority. But to enhance the game it would be great to be able to duel it out with another player, or even have a "Capture the flag" or "King of the Hill" type arena.

Bad guys. Everyone is either of Good or Neutral alignment. Where are all the bad guys?? Strangely, the coming patch will include Drow -- Dark Elves are evil, so I'm not sure how that will work.

Some way to stop the scenario frustration -- we did one quest three times over and just got pissed off: if you killed too many Kobold Prophets you failed the quest. Since the Prophets mixed in with other Kobolds, it made it hard to avoid them, and since when you swing a weapon it rolls to hit everyone in your range we killed too many over and over again. When I'm playing a game that takes an hour I don't want to get into yelling matches with my son over who killed the last prophet: a "stun" effect that doesn't do damage would be good. Maybe I should have leveled the sorceror instead of the warforged barbarian.

There's a content patch coming in July, and we're only a little bit into the game. Hopefully we'll find its worth the money we're paying for it.

Back again

2006-06-01T12:07:00.000+09:30

Okay, I'm guilty. I didn't update here for quite a long time (last post was way back on April the 6th).

Some of the reason for that was sheer laziness on my part. This blogging stuff is hard work. I won't even pretend to get a huge number of readers -- fact is that I doubt anyone comes here at all. If you are here and have a read, Hi!! Post a comment so I know you were around :)

Another reason for me not being here was.. well.. I wasn't here.

Blogger had decided I was a spam blog. Their robot locked me out, and that was it. I had to send a "please unlock me" message to Blogger. What I didn't know was that my page would not automagically reappear, but that I had to come into the control part of the blog and republish it.

Now, why did I appear to be a Spam Blog? I don't know. My past posts about Spam Blogs maybe? My links from other sites? My links to other sites?

In any case, the nice people at Blogger must have reset my blog, and so I'm glad to be back. I'll try and keep this site more up to date in future.

At Last! Writer Beware Blogs! A.C. Crispin and Victoria Strauss Reveal All!

2006-04-06T17:10:00.000+09:30

At Last! Writer Beware Blogs! A.C. Crispin and Victoria Strauss Reveal All!

Ace writing scam revealers have a blog. Fantastic... more to read I guess.

Gates of AQ opened...

2006-03-16T06:46:00.000+10:30

By ... someone?

And here's a shot of my interface as well :)

Necro-blogging

2006-03-03T16:49:00.000+10:30

but I have a tendency to believe that if one must have a two-party system (and for some unfathomable reason, apparently we in the US must), the best scenario is when the executive and legislative branches are controlled by the opposing parties. That way neither party gets everything they want and by and large the public is served by their need to compromise to get anything done.

from Whatever

from 2003!!

And so true. Here in Australia, for the first time in decades, on the federal level the Government (currently the Liberal party (Australian conservatives) ) will have control in both the Upper and Lower Houses of Parliament (that is, the House of Representatives and the Senate). We don't have an "executive" branch, but the party with the most seats in the lower house is the Government. The leader of that party is the Prime Minister. For the lower house, the person who gets the most votes (done with a cascading style of voting) gets the seat. The Upper house, however, uses a much more complicated proportional representation method. And so it is easier for the "third" parties to get seats.

This means that compromise happens. It has to. To get the laws through, the Government has to either deal with the opposition (which it does a lot more than would be expected) or the third parties who have the balance of power.

But now (or soon) the Government will have a clear majority in the Senate. No compromise is necessary.

We are all screwed.

Origami??

2006-02-24T12:08:00.000+10:30

So.. what is this then: http://www.origamiproject.com/1/ ?
Found on http://scobleizer.wordpress.com/
Interesting flash, but very little information so far.

brrreeeport runs around the net (and a book report)

2006-02-17T11:47:00.000+10:30

Robert Scoble makes a suggestion for bloggers to put the non-word "brrreeeport" into their blogs, to test out the search engines. And away they go!

Not only was it taken up quickly by his fans, but it appears a number of splogs have used the keyword as well... Interesting to see where this leads.

Books: Just finished Cell by Stephen King. It was... not what I expected. Okay, let me put it this way: If the author on the cover had been some other name, and (for some reason) I bought it, it would have been an enjoyable read and I would have noted that writer for future purchases.

But with Stephen King on the front, I want more. I felt a bit let down, that he hadn't given his all to this book -- on the Amazon site there are a few opinions about it being a rehash of The Stand. Err.. no. The Stand was a multiple POV epic, spanning months. Cell occurs over a short timeframe (a week? two?) with a single character viewpoint. This makes it a tighter read, but I felt the character of Clay wasn't developed enough. He needed a few more flaws -- he's an artist who draws comics. They're mentioned a few times and then that topic is left. No one pops up who recognises his name, he wasn't famous as an artist.. it's as if the comics and the portfolio he is carrying at the start were just a prop to chuck as soon as he could. He's seperated from his wife, but the why isn't apparent.

I liked it, but I wouldn't say it was a favourite.

WoW: My character is level 52 now and has 300 skill in Tribal Leatherworking. I just spent three quarters of my gold getting one recipe (Devilsaur Leggings), which I won't be able to make until I can kill multiple giant dinosaur things... Not going to happen soon.

Good writing advice

2006-02-16T17:01:00.000+10:30

http://www.scalzi.com/whatever/004023.html

Given that I already read Scalzi's "Whatever" blog, it was nice to see a link to it on Coding Horror, which is another blog I read. Holy bloglinking, Batman!

Have to remember a few things. One, write more on this blog; Two, write more in general. Oh, and three, eat less kilojoules, lose weight and avoid the currently high risk of getting Type II Diabetes in the next five years. Yeehaw!

2006-01-17T12:55:00.000+10:30

I've loved these pictures ever since seeing them on John Scalzi's website (whatever).

I'm posting this one mainly to link from elsewhere (hehehe):

Bouncing around the web

2006-01-12T15:15:00.000+10:30

The Reg is the Wikipedia vandal you can't revert.

I don't bother with The Reg anymore. I only went there for the BOFH, but all the latest by Simon have been crap. Actually, since number 14 or whatever they've been pretty tame.

I'm using www.netvibes.com to aggregate RSS feeds... which is fantastic except for the slight problem I have now -- I have 39 feeds I'm subscribed to. If they're all open, it fills a couple of screens with links, and often, they are to the same place.

One of them is digg.com, which apparently is a useful place. I wouldn't know. In netvibes, when you click on MOST of the feeds, a floating window frame thing opens with the rss published text inside it. You may only get a bit of the article (on Blogger you have to choose to publish the whole article in your feed, so I understand the WHY of this), but you generally get some idea what the link is about. Digg however opens a new window. And this window generally contains nothing except for another link, usually to someone ELSE. Fantastic. To make it more fun, say I read the article in the link on BoingBoing. I have that linked in netvibes. Then I see a link on Ed Bott's blog (another netvibe link). Two links. One back to BoingBoing, the other to somewhere else. So I go to the other link (Thomas Hawk) who links... to BoingBoing. Sigh. AND to himself (this article). Gah.

I guess this is all part of the fun :/

merry xmas

2005-12-29T10:13:00.000+10:30

Merry Xmas, Christmas or whatever.

This blog is becoming my infrequently posted WoW status page. Not good, as I wanted it to be more technical in nature. I'll have to give it some thought.

Teh Wha?

2005-12-16T09:06:00.000+10:30

I play World of Warcraft.

My son plays World of Warcraft.

And now... my daughter plays World of Warcraft. :)

Now, if I could only get my Wife to play...

After senselessly grinding turtles for two hours (I need to make some turtle armor for a quest. The armor needs *lots* of turtle scales. Turtle scales drop every... now and then. So I kill ten turtles I might get 2 scales. This means LOTS of Turtle grinding to do) I logged off Telensa and on as my level 8 Human Priest, and did some running around with my daughters level 5 Warlock. :)

woot

3 Dings

2005-12-12T11:48:00.000+10:30

Three Dings in a row.

On Friday, I was called into my boss's office -- as I wondered what I'd done (this time), I was handed an envelope and congratulated. The envelope contained an offer to the next level at work, although the duties are pretty much identical. Fantastic! Unexpected too, as the other members of my team had told me horror tales of waiting for two or more YEARS to get promoted to Level 2.

That night, I played some WoW and dinged Level 40. I can get a mount now, which means that (after paying a LOT of money) I will be able to get a big panther to ride on (Night Elves ride panthers, everyone knows that!) and training to ride. This usually costs around 100 Gold all up -- and given I've only ever had at most 10 gold it would be a hard slog to get the cash. Luckily I'm a member of a very good guild, and I should be getting it funded for me. I will pay it back, of course, but once you hit the high levels gold just falls on you.

Then on Saturday, I turned 39. Happy birthday to me. Bleh, 365 days until 40.

Sunday -- went and played Two Headed Giant at infinity games in the city. Much funness. 2HG means a team of two share life totals and turns. Life is set to 40 to start, with a lot of side rules and special stuff. It was great fun, but when we got home, Alex said he wanted to sell all our cards -- even the top-dollar cards that we took ages to get. He only likes playing Limited (that is, when you get cards given to you and use them on the day) and not constructed (which is, you bring the deck with you and a list of the deck). Constructed lets you try to build your own designs, but the winners are often those who have four of each power card in the set -- although it certainly helps if you can play well too...

Limited (especially sealed) is in a way harder and easier -- harder, in that you have to make a deck quickly from the cards you get; easier because no one is going to have anything they didn't open (or draft). Very little chance of having four of the power rares.

Because of this emphasis on Limited, he doesn't really care about the cards we have. And since some cards are worth tens of dollars (well, some cards are worth HUNDREDS of dollars... but we don't have any of them), if we sell them it would equal money. And money is good.

I wanted to keep them, just in case. But then again, I always want to keep things just in case. Which explains the granny flat of doom, filled with boxes of crap. And, as he said, not going to constructed (or BORROWING A DECK if we did go) will mean more time to play wow. Damn the kids got me pegged!

2005-12-01T10:02:00.000+10:30

Currently my rogue (Telansa on the Dark Iron realm) is at level 37. She's a Night Elf, a Skinner (Artisan) and Leatherworker (Artisan) although in the low 200s for Leatherwork.

Telansa is in one of the Penny Arcade affiliate guilds, being "The Cardboard Samurai", although there are merger discussions in effect for the whole guild to be absorbed into Annarchy

That would be fantastic :) we're much smaller and by joining Annarchy we would be gaining a lot, while they would be getting a few more serious long-term players.

My baby

2005-11-28T07:17:00.000+10:30

I'm typing this on my new laptop, the Dell Inspiron 9300.

Other than the "Dell" logo prominently displayed, this is a cool machine. Playing WoW on it is nuts -- widescreen view and very clear. Wireless too (although for a gaming session I hook it into the switch with a cable).

holidays!!

2005-11-04T18:25:00.000+10:30

Going on holidays for a couple of weeks. Now, that should be a bunch of downtime to play world of warcraft for 24x7 but instead I'll be cleaning out the granny flat and mowing the lawn at a guess. In between getting the kids up and off to school.
The wifey is off work too the first week -- this is good as it means more sleep, and bad as it means she'll be bossing me around (kidding :)... no.. I am kidding... arrgghhh) which means less playtime.

And some of the time I get off will be spent doing my Nanowrimo novel! As if!

The places you go

2005-10-13T13:25:00.000+09:30

Okay, so I'm going through some other blogs and find a link to technorati, which is very much a big site in the blogging world. For a laugh, I search for 'marty'. Hmm... too many hits. I try "marty" and "blogspot".

And find this site (well, the actual link went to the false page -- this is in the archive now), where I'm quoted as saying:

“Funniest thing I saw was a bunch of comments on one spam/link site, that was totally irrelevant but pointed to ANOTHER spam site. The spammers are
spamming each other.”

Which is quite true, I did say it. Mea Culpa. There were other quotes too... only.. they were quoting Phillip Lenssen quoting me.

EDIT:
Okay, did some more vanity-searching on technorati, this time for "Marty Kay" (in quotes).
And found a few more links. Like this one: http://aimbright.blogspot.com/2005/09/marty-kay-made-interesting-comment-in.html

Which... is on a SPLOG! Phillip's quote of my comment is a comment on a splog site, advertising (of all things) "Automated Internet Marketing". So splog sites are botblogs.

:blink:

Banned Books in the US

2005-10-13T11:52:00.000+09:30

Nice article, found on A View From Elsewhere, aka John Montgomery's Weblog.

This year marks the first in five in which the Harry Potter series does appear
on the annual list

I can see it now. JK Rowling, puzzling over the lack of banning attempts realises the perfect out...

"Where did I put those Harry/Ron Slash fanfics...?"

omgwtfbbq

2005-10-10T16:38:00.000+09:30

Hmm.. long time no blog.

Briefies - getting a laptop for son. Not getting a laptop for son. Getting desktop for son, getting laptop for me. Son can't make up mind. Teenager indecisive -- film at eleven.

WoW - Rogue is level 23. no, 24. Umm.. 25 soon. Good stuff.

When we have two WoW capable pcs, son and I'll be joining a new server and ramping up two characters. Might go horde for a change. Shaman.. hmm???

Things that make me go Boom!

2005-09-23T15:56:00.000+09:30

Which really only leaves the nuclear option. Nuclear energy is actually the best alternative to burning oil. First, it scales; it is already possible to build big nuclear power plants which produce energy on the scales required. Second, it is relatively clean; although the problem of waste disposal is a problem, it is arguably less destructive than releasing hydrocarbons produced from burning oil into the atmosphere, or damming rivers, or covering vast areas with windmills.

Fairly old blog posting linked to, but one I've read recently. And it links to a number of sources indicating that even some of the Greenies are considering it. About time. I've been spouting it for years (Probably due to an inoculation of Heinleinism at an early age) -- Nuclear power is the best choice. Simple. Yes, it is dangerous (so is Coal mining btw, and the pollution from Coal/Oil/Gas fired power plants) but as I italicised above it is waste disposal that is the main issue.

Another link of interest is this (see page 3). Interesting.

2005-09-19T14:31:00.000+09:30

Back again.

Not much is happening currently. I was going to go to the Melbourne Grand Prix -- that is, not the car race but the Magic: The Gathering tournament. However, a good look at the funds in my bank makes this a bit of a non-event, especially since my son wants a Laptop for Xmas.

A laptop. Well, not just a laptop, he wants something gamer worthy. That makes it about $1000+ more than it would be otherwise as it needs a Radeon/Geforce mobile video card in it for a start. Add to that the 1G of RAM it will need and a decent sized HDD and you get on the pricey side.

There goes the trip to Melbourne!

Ah well... I was going to suck bad anyway. I'm not totally deluded, if I was winning tournaments here often or even just top-eighting now and then, I'd probably go. But with my current losing streak in events it really isn't worth it.

World of FishCraft

2005-09-02T11:59:00.000+09:30

Okay, so its a guest comic on little-gamers, but its still funny.

On WoW I now have a level 29 Night-Elf Druid on the Gilneas server (he's wandering around ironforge atm... haven't played him for a while) and on Dark Iron I've got a level 17 Human Paladin.

Dark Iron is a PvP server. In a way, its THE PvP server cos that's where the PVP fans are playing. Penny Arcade fans are playing there too, with the PVPers being Horde and PAers being Alliance. PvP (the play type, not the webcomic) is different -- there's much more raiding, more likely to run into the other side. Gilneas is a PvE server, it's you vs the environment; Dark Iron is like a bunch of battles with quests inbetween.

Well, that is more true for the American players anyway. Since I'm in the +9 GMT zone, when I get on it can be pretty quiet. Good in a way, because I don't have to put up with twenty minute queues to log in (I did a week ago when I had a day off -- tried to log in and had to wait... and wait...), but I'm missing out on a lot of the other action.

Last night, I made some Flying Tiger Goggles (My Paladin Giladan is an engineer/miner), popped out a bunch of other items, smelted my whole 3 silver ores and bought some better leg armor and a belt (the old ones were crappy, the new ones not much better). I learnt a new spell and then flew off to Redridge. Since it was going to take a minute, I popped outside for a smoke. When I came back, I was dead.

There was a horde raid happening, so I joined in. Two seconds after Res I was dead. Next time took about 3 minutes, dead. Sigh. Res again, and off we go. With a pack of guys we ran after a troll mage, troll rogue and a hunter. Together they chewed us up but I found my Hammer ability (causes stun) was great. If it worked, they were stunned and everyone piled on to kill. If it didn't I had to run like hell. I also chucked some bombs into the attacks as they stun too, but most of the time missed them.

Got a whole 2 honour kills, so I was happy about that. This pvp stuff isn't too bad. Now, to make my paladin a LOT better!

brave new world

2005-09-02T11:55:00.000+09:30

Well, just about killed my blog off. Somehow on blogger I have two blogs listed when I go into the dashboard. I thought that meant I had two blogs -- silly me.

I wanted to make a book review blog as a seperate entity, so I start making a bunch of changes and updating the blog, all the fun stuff.

Until I realised that the link... was also to martykay.blogspot.com. Which is this blog. Err...

Luckily, I was able to bounce back up to the dashboard, go into this blog instead and republish it all.

I still have the two blogs listed in the dashboard, but see not much point. There is a "delete this blog" function... but I'm too scared to use it now.

Long time no see

2005-08-24T12:35:00.000+09:30

About time I posted an update, I think.

Just spent a little time at KaneKong at the Movies. Nice to see some honest opinions for a change.

We've had some fun (?) at work lately, what with servers falling over and the like. Ah, great times.

On the home front, I'm hopefully getting a new(er) car very soon. My old car decided to die a couple of months ago. On an automatic, there is one component that is the most complex piece of machinery: the transmission. Which makes it also the most expensive to repair. When your car decides that Reverse is the only gear worth knowing about, it isn't very pleasant to be the driver.

And since the cost of repairs is more than the value of the car, it wasn't worth doing. So instead I'm selling one of my kids to pay for a new car. Okay, so maybe not, I'll be (gulp) financing it. The finance company concerned apparently liked me enough to say "yeah, we'll lend up to $X". They didn't like the car I choose though, so now I have to find one they DO like.

Which is good, because after telling my family about the car I was looking at buying, and how it had ABS brakes, aircon, nice interior, all the other good bits all that they cared about was the colour. "Green? I don't want a GREEN car!"

wtf?

Anyway, back to work. Lunchtime? Woot!

New stuff and some links

2005-08-05T20:54:00.000+09:30

I'll have to get the hang of this blogging thing. Update daily, perhaps? Make an effort to have more interesting information? Smaller posts? Longer posts??

Maybe some links would help?
Lee Goldberg's blog is one of my favorite places to visit, due to a few things: he doesn't hold back, he's a writer and he has some interesting posts. And a lot of fanficcers aren't his fans.

Little Gamers is a gaming related webcomic with its own style. Webcomics about gaming or game related include Penny Arcade, Ctrl-Alt-Del and quite a few others. Another couple of webcomics I read regularly are Something Positive and Megatokyo. I've been trolling through the archives on these lately and got up to date on all Little Gamers. Only a few more to go.

New stuff: not much. Done some SYSVOL replication fixing on a domain controller that was... interesting. Cleaned up the AD record for old Exchange 5.5 servers so that we can move soon to native mode Exchange 2000 Server. Trying to cope with some moron who has decided sending forged SYN Flood packets to one of our mail relays is a fun thing to do. You know, normal stuff.

Kids are great

2005-07-26T15:51:00.000+09:30

My son had a comment to make about having a blog.

"Why do you want a blog, no one would care!"

Err.. thanks.

Given the huge numbers of hits, probably true. Okay, definitely true. As I said to him, its more for me--I've been reading other people's blogs for a while now, and thought it about time I joined in. If no one comes, fine.

Now.. if that's true, why did I add a Site meter and join Adwords?

Hmmm

EDIT: okay, killed off the Site Meter and the Adwords... Ahh..

Back again

2005-07-23T20:58:00.000+09:30

Well... that was fun.
A week spent in Melbourne was quite fun, although it took down to the last day to find ways to get servers to rebuild. On one server it was enough to pull the fibre channel adapters, on the others we had to be careful to not load all the drivers (seemed to cause the server to go nuts detecting everything when it was rebuilt).

Anyway, while we were there we went to see "Sin City". Abso-fscking-lutely fabulous. Gritty and dark. Full of violence and humour. Buckets of blood in some scenes.

I took three books with me to Melbourne to read in taxis, between jobs, on breaks... They were Snow Crash by Neil Stephenson, The Dark Tower by Stephen King, and Harry Potter and The Half-Blood Prince by J.K. Rowling.

I hadn't read the final installment of the Dark Tower series before, and thought it finished the tale of Roland well. I had a few issues with the ending (and no doubt many others have as well). I gave it some thought of what other ending there could have been, and really can't see a better one -- without giving the ending away, there is a hope of redemption.

The Half Blood Prince... First off, the hype was pathetic. Sure, lots of people were going to buy the next story in the tale of Harry. It was a given. But have television show excited people (most of them young) lining up outside a city bookstore to give a false frenzy... Sad. If you were one of those who had to run out and buy a copy at the "Special" price of $AUD 45, well.. I bought mine the same day for $AUD 22 at Big W. They had PALLETS of the thing. They'll be giving them away with socks or something.
Onto the book. It was great, liked it a lot. If anything, I was disappointed by something Harry does at the end of the story, when he goes all "noble" and self-sacrificing. I know WHY he does it (to protect someone he cares for) but since he does care for them, and others already know it, it isn't going to make much of a difference. Plus it's quite a different Harry to the defiant young wizard of Order of the Phoenix.

Okay, so I ran out of books.

introduction

2005-07-15T10:57:00.000+09:30

Okay... well.. welcome to the blog. I suppose an introduction is in order.
I'm Marty, I do server wrangling for a mid-size energy company here in Australia. I work on Windows 2000 servers, Exchange server, do ActiveDirectory stuff and spend quite a bit of time bullshitting^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H providing my expertise to others in the team (damn, wheres the strikethrough?)

My hobbies are playing Magic: the Gathering, computer games, writing, reading, arguing with people, downloading pron... err.. forget that one... basically doing stuff on this intarweb thing. I read a number of webcomics and other people's blogs. I haven't blogged before, although I think I did have a livejournal account at some stage.

I'll try to record at least somewhat interesting snippets in here, although can't promise anything. Some stuff might be technical, some stuff might be games related... who knows?

Pseudo-Real is a reference to two of my online aliases, going back to irc days a while ago. Real or roolmarty was one, Pseudomarty was the other. Now I'm just going with martykay to be different.

Thanks for coming. :)

marty

marty's place

2011 post

Comment Spam is Evil

Obligatory "Haven't posted for a while" post

Dawn of the Self-Entitled

One of my heroes

Drive by Blogging

Douchebag Found in Victoria

On Skepticism

Oceanic Servers Downtime and Customer Support

Writing

Drive by weight loss spam

Symbols in Chat in Warhammer Online

Apatheism?

New Year's Eve

Internet filter in Australia

WAR update

Warhammer Age Of Reckoning starts

TechEd Sydney 2008

Gary Gygax gone

And back...

Kitty kard

Never Mind the Pillock

self-conscious blogging

Beard...

And now the next book

Old Man's War

aqr / hacker

Waiting for Scalzi

On syndromes and disorders

Can't find a book

Patrick, Get an Appointment

slight update

Some dental fun

Brights

Intel Viral Marketer fails own advice

Savaged by ducks

Wacom Pen Tablet set to stun

Speedom of Freach.

Political Aside

not a blog?

needles update

Babies good for two things??

Needles

WTB [Bloghabit]

DDO is not WOW

Back again

At Last! Writer Beware Blogs! A.C. Crispin and Victoria Strauss Reveal All!

Gates of AQ opened...

Necro-blogging

Origami??

brrreeeport runs around the net (and a book report)

Good writing advice

Blogrolling, linking, trackbacking

Bouncing around the web

merry xmas

Teh Wha?

3 Dings

My baby

holidays!!

The places you go

Banned Books in the US

omgwtfbbq

Things that make me go Boom!

World of FishCraft

brave new world

Long time no see

New stuff and some links

Kids are great

Back again

introduction