Games
A new card game, 1000 Blank White Cards! Guess what you need to play . . . A pack of index cards and some pens. Play proceeds similiar to Calvinball. Offensive (to the offendable) yet amateurish (even for kids) doodles.
Games
CamperStrike is a flash game which simulates camping in CounterStrike. (Camping being a derogatory word for staying in one place waiting for targets to present themselves.)
Rights/Politics
Bush kinda signs Patriot Act 2 on a Saturday. The same Saturday that Sadam was caught. Feds can now get records secretly(gag order on receiver), without probable cause, without reporting usage to Congress and without a judge's order from any "financial instiuiton" "which previously referred to banks, but now includes stockbrokers, car dealerships, casinos, credit card companies, insurance agencies, jewelers, airlines, the U.S. Post Office, and any other business "whose cash transactions have a high degree of usefulness in criminal, tax, or regulatory matters." "(quoted from article).
Games
I took over the world yet again. This time in
Deus Ex. (Thanks for telling about this game Rob.)
It's quirky and crashes some times. The maps should have longer overlaps so that you can manuver at the transition points, when it loads
a new map it tells you that it is saving and it isn't, when you die you have to explicitely tell it to load a saved game. Half Life does these three
things perfectly. If you've played HL, you'll be annoyed by these little quirks in DE.
Now Joe and I are tempted to take over Europe in Medieval Total War. He
found a
Comprehensive Strategy Guide
and a flash based
Unit comparison tool (Click Units in the bad font on top)
My DSL modem is flaky as hell again. Guess it's time to turn everything thing off for five minutes so that "everything can reset". Verizon tech support always seems to solve the problem. They don't make it stop or go away, they just qwell is for a while.
In my continuing stream of helping people in ways which won't help my career, I told the Battlelord's roleplaying community about my character generating spreadsheet for that game.
I posted a couple new Family pictures as well as
my car
with no mirror and a scuffed wheel.
Christmas is officially over and my car computer is back in the trunk and the lindows box is serving webpages again. So all the pictures are available again.
Tech
Are you running Internet Explorer? Does it misbehave? Go learn about parasites. Just like viruses, they run on your computer without your knowledge. Just click the link, it will tell you if you have any.
Tech
The A* pathfinding algorithm in Java. I'm reading the source trying to come up with a better way for troops in video games to move.
OSCommerce.com is an open source, php based web store package that I'm going to look into when I get a chance.
Life
Packages are in FedEx's capable hands and you'll get them late.
Someone hit my car while it was parked and kept going. Destroyed the mirror and
somehow managed to hit the front wheel and mostly not hit the fender. $1300
estimate, they can't start work on it till Jan 5. Apparently, bad luck will come
to find you even if you stay home.
Life
Tech
Okay boys and girls, this is a bit wierd for me too. I need to work on my car computer, so I'm taking the Lindows box offline and serving my site from my Windows box. The photo album will be offline till I'm done. Since getting php running on this machine will probably take longer then the linux box will be down for, I'll just manually include the header links:
Life
So, google dropped me. Apparently no one links to my site at all, so google decides that my site has no value. I'm a bad brother, I don't send cards or emails or gifts. I'm a good person to call if you need help moving things though. 2 friends have gotten computer jobs recently, that's encouraging. Still haven't seen Return of the King yet. And Deus Ex is an excellent time sink. Thank you Mr. Robert Murphy, you *mutter mutter*.
Life
Snow! 
How I love my Subaru, let me count the ways. I got plowed in. I had to shovel a path for the car and a path to the door.
Before
The hole it left in the snow.
Life
More snow today. I've been helping folks move stuff this week. It's good to get out though.
Hopes and prayers to my two disconnected friends and their child.
Pyx 106 Babe of the day Tasteful as pin-ups get.
Life
HURRAH!! I fixed the web page of the marriage of Jenny's dad. The broadband version still needs work though.
I made a character generator for the roleplaying game Battlelords. (In MS Excel.)
Life
I didn't know how to program within Excel before I started that project.
If I could only explain, to an infinite number of HR people, that programmers don't need to have experience
in everything before they start. We are intelligent people who enjoy learning new things.
As a demonstration of the joys of job hunting, here is the list of just the technical skills that I've been asked
for in job ads so far. These were in jobs that I came close to qualifying for.
Guess I just need to keep rolling the dice until I find a match. I started a spreadsheet to track which skills are
in the highest demand. Since I can't learn everything out there, maybe I can find three or four skills that will help a lot.
Tech
I got
Festival and Festival-Gaim(no good website) installed and running.
Now if you IM me on this box, it will read your message out-loud.
For those of you who don't know, my Aim account is in the format FirstLastHome. So if I was Bob Smith, you
could reach me at BobSmithHome. Yes, this is exactly the sort of paranoia that hides me from ALL spam. Yep, you
read that right. I get zero spam. Thanks go out to everyone who doesn't tell my email address to random websites too.
Tech
Someone found my
armor website
today by searching msn for
What do they make body armor out of?
(Hey, I'm number 2 on there. :)
He didn't look around much though. He probably would have been happier with
How Body Armor Works
from HowStuffWorks.com
Also got a visitor through Search.CometSystems.com looking for
pictures of
Fort Ticonderoga.
Life
Jenny and I got through two different colds recently. Bleh. But we're better now.
Thundarr, The Barbarian (fansite)
Stuntpeople are slightly insane and interested in making martial arts films. Grab one of their short movies and marvel at their abilities. (I don't know about your setup, but when I try to play DivX movies my whole machine spontanteously reboots. If you aren't sure, save your work before you try it.)
Life
Albany declared a snow emergency After the snow stopped. That means that you have to move your car at 8pm on some random night. I was, luckily, out of town helping Alan move. Jenny's car got towed. $80 worth of towing and a $50 ticket. grrr.
Life
And we have Snow! I haven't been out yet, but it looks like 2 inches of fresh powder. Kinda wish I had skis and money for a lift ticket.
Tech
Mom sends us a link about IE Parasite software which will install itself into Internet Explorer and give you pop ups amoung other things. It appears that there are around 100 variants identified on the left of this site. He also has instructions for detecting and removing them.
Tech
Cell Phone Jammer for 170 pounds which is about $293. It's handheld, rechargable, out of stock, and has a 15 meter range.
BoardOfWisdom.com "Always shows the best quotes first"
Life
Lost with my November web log was the note that I'm posting pictures to my miscellanous folder in the gallery. So far, just pictures from a visit to the state museum.
SCA
Pennsic.net has lot's of photos. (Pennsic 2003) Repost
Life
Hey! Mike's wife almost got a complete picture of him (third one down) in her weblog. Hi Mike! I thought your hair was black way back when.
Life
My Subraru lit up the check engine light last week. The dealer wanted $80 to hook it up to the computer and tell me what happened. Midas wanted $70. Autozone did it for free. Turns out that one piston (#3) misfired once. I almost spent $70 to learn that.
Hurray! One of the "Enemy combatants" that we've been holding for 18 months got to talk to a lawyer! How long is it okay to imprison a US citizen without counsel? How long are You willing to stay in jail without a trail or a lawyer? What if the President says you're a danger? Article in TheStar.com
Tech
Resize your browser window and judge the readability of my site. Try it really, really small. How's your favorite site compare?
Super size it cartoon by Dana Summers of The Orlando Sentinel posted on PoliticalCartoons.com. If you go, take a look at the Worldwide Cartoonists linked on the bottom of the page. Some are hard to understand, but foreign viewpoints are like that.
12/2/2003
Life
I'm going to throw pictures into my gallery and then link to them now. This way you can look at just
pictures if you like.
Today's additions are several satellite photos that I photographed.
Ulster county:
A police car door from the WTC:
And some pictures of Empire State Plaza and The Egg:
Tech
My favorite reference on CSS so far is Guide to Cascading Style Sheets
Noah seems to be working at HotJobs.com. Hi Noah!
12/1/2003
I accidently nuked ALL of my style changes from last month. And the entire log for last month too. :( grrrrr
note to self don't copy a file onto a hard link of itself. (linux allows you to have two filenames pointing to the same file.) ARRRGGGH
It makes me so mad, I want to take to the high seas, kill someone and copy their floppy! 
