I've been getting some pretty serious traffic this week. I posted those pictures of the Mid-Winter Melee Muster on Sunday (I think) and the album has pulled 157 views this week. Some of my other albums have pulled that many hits over the course of a year or two. As far as I can tell, Verizon doesn't care how much data I move. I hope that continues.

The only problem I'm having is that my DSL connection ends up being slow when I want to use it. There are bandwidth throttling modules that I can attach to Apache (the web server software). My difficulty lies in the fact that I don't want to throttle the bandwidth all the time, just when I'm moving lots of data. Therefore I'll need to figure out how to change the throttle rules on the fly or at least very quickly and easily. That way I can swap computers, type out a command and swap back to enjoy my First Person Shooters. :)

Bad case of the Blah's yesterday. That article from a couple days ago about internet job boards has sapped my interest in spending time looking for jobs online. Guess I could go to the libraries instead and look through their newspapers.

Jenny and I are skipping two SCA events today. Albany's Concordia is having a ball and Potsdam's shire is hosting a fighting event. But Jenny and I are back on stupid-reverse-time so we woke up at 4pm and will be up till probably 6 or 7 am. (Hmmm, I'll have to set my alarm clock to be sure I catch fight practice tomorrow.) It doesn't take much staying up a little late to move one's sleep cycle all around when you don't have to wake up for anything.

No word on most recent resume submission yet. Perhaps I can compose an eloquent and polite follow-up email.

Pill Identifier Wizard

The most recent episode of Foamy the Squirrel ("The Owner") discusses pill popping and purple pills with an E on them. My best guess is that he's taking Zydone, a "narcotic painkiller".

I think the next time I think about subscribing to a magazine, I'm going to judge it based on the number on cardstock inserts. National Geographic got really bad this month and last. I finally had to rip them all out so that I could flip the magazine open to a new page.

I finally had to do it. I'm making a Tasteless category.

And the first entry is: The 50 Worst Eulogies

17. Dearly beloved, we are gathered here to honor #456-B's life before consigning him to lot #5, space #A-16. Praise God.

Furthermore,
Some offensive but Amusing Billboards

I'm learning Visual Fox Pro from this weird online book just in case my most recent resume submission works out well. The tutorial is wierd because it assumes you don't know how to use a windowed OS. VPF is a neat language/environment so far. Unlike most systems you can directly change lots of stuff about the environment with program code. Usually, you can get custom appearance by building everything from the ground up (with Visual Basic for example) OR you can use what you were given and try to make a develpment environment user friendly (like Access). It looks, so far, like VFP combines Access's "There Is Only One Environment" with VB's "Make Your Application Look the Way You Want". We'll see.

I already wish I had looked into VFP when we were toying with the idea of a service call tracking system. It's almost built into VFP. (Specifically, it's one of the prebuilt databases. So it probably needs user interface code added.)

Went to a large-ish fighting event called Mid-Winter Melee Muster and had a great time. Pictures by me and Mark Johnson. Sadly he hurt his ankle early on. So he took up my little camera and got some excellent shots. Thanks Mark!

I still have to convert the high speed shots into animated gifs. That can wait though.

I got a chance to try the dessert Turkish Delight. Very different then I expected. Very mellow, subtle sweetness. Uber-Gooey with a pistachio finish.

Job Boards Suck 40% of hires happen through word of mouth. Around 6% through internet job boards. This maps very well to my experience in job hunting. A very small number of companies will reply at all to a resume sent through a job board. Even fewer reply with a non-form letter. And the Only way I've gotten an interview was through personal recommendation.

Things I wish I knew a year ago. (Newspapers were a pretty high percentage too.)

I just received my final check from un-employment. Next week, we're living on nest egg money.

Hey! I just realized that now I'm not un-employed. As far as government numbers go, I'm not in the workforce anymore. That means the economy just got one person better!

Hot Kung Fu training tip: Eat something the day you train. A whole meal at least.
No big deal, I just had to stop training 30 minutes early.

Not so hot training tip: Study Rumfeld's Fighting Techniques

Rumsfeld (wikipedia) is apparently the Secretary of Defense. Actually, he's the youngest and the oldest SoD.

System Shock 2 gets my rating of "2 Boots to the Heads of the entire Design Team". Frustrating upon frustrating. Everything except your trusty wrench is in limited supply.

• The guns wear out and must be repaired. The repair tools are one use only.
• Bullets are in short supply. You can't take them out of a broken gun.
• The character you play can launch psionic attacks with his mind. Your psionic energy doesn't regenerate, you need a "psi hypo". They are in short supply
• You need a variety of skils that can only be acquired with magic cyber chips. Guess how many of those you get. Right! Not enough.
• You can buy things from automated dispensers. Things like soda and hypodermic needles and grenades. Guess how much money you can find. Not enough.

System Shock 2 is more frustrating then fun. Un-Installed. Thanks for letting me try it Rob!

I got a chance to play chess online with an old friend, Mike, today. We played on ChessHounds.com, which seems to be one of the only chess systems to allow play through a tight firewall.

Between moves, I found a long article on the origins of chess. He says China and supports it with linguistic clues and linguistic's belief that cultures share bits of themselves with each other.

I'm serving from my Windows box again for a little while. You might need these:

Driverless cars to be tested in the Mojave . Vehicles must cross 200 miles of rugged terrain in 10 hours without human intervention. $1million prize from DARPA.

Disappointed by the slow pace and facing a congressional mandate that one- third of all Army ground combat vehicles be unmanned by 2015, DARPA decided to kick-start the research by inviting any scientist, engineer or gearhead with an idea to give it a try.

Contestants are modifying a Toyota Tundra, a Polaris 6wheeler, and a dirtbike.

Wander the special projects on the DARPA page. Some neat stuff going on.

Fought again today. I'm getting better with the pole arm. Every body at the local fight practice got much better in my absence. That helps keep me honest. I get whacked if I get lazy with someone.

Natural Selection, one of the multiplayer, online HalfLife mods, recently came out with version 3. The game is greatly improved in both graphics and gameplay. Sadly though it still attracts an immature crowd who get under my skin and ruin the game for me.

Somehow, Day of Defeat, which is WWII based, attracts a more mature set of gamers who are much more fun to spend time with.

Happy Valentine's Day ( wikipedia article)

Monster.com loses some points today. I found this ad (parts clipped, emphasis mine)

SOFTWARE DEVELOPERS & TESTERS WANTED TO WORK FROM HOME
Established company seeking dependable, enthusiastic, and responsible software developers to be a part of virtual internet-based projects.

The successful candidate should be proficient in some of the following areas:

Hey! Wonderful, I can work from home and I only have to match some of the skills! Wait a minute, this sounds to good to be true. Um, what's a "virtual" project? Does that mean the project does not actually exist? Oh, what's this small print?

This opportunity requires a HomeCS.com paid membership to apply.

A $30 membership, just to send them my resume. Um, no. A quick Google on "homecs" gets me to this disappointed article which leads me to the Better Business Bureau (bbb.org) and their warning report.

Apart from that, I found that Think Resources Inc, and/or ThinkEnergyGroup.com posted 275 random jobs erroneously into the category "Computer, Software". I think "Technical Advisor - Steam Turbine/Outage/Maintenance" was my favorite "software" job.

So, I'm disappointed that Monster.com carries such low quality ads.

Computer gaming news sites, value unknown:
BluesNews   FourFatChicks   GameTunnel   GoneGold  

Today it is my pleasure to announce an important victory in the War on Laundry. Yesterday troops in the field cleared out and defeated an amount of laundry in excess of 3 loads. The heroic efforts of our troops are our only defense against the continueing threat of dirty laundry. And yet, dispite their gallant efforts at home and abroad, there are indications that this War on Laundry will continue into the forseeable future. Rest assured that we will fight this fight whereever it takes us for as long as it takes us. We will make this apartment a safe place to dress and to smell!

DeviantART.com has pictures of the day by artistically inclined people. Good place to go for some wallpapers.

"Live as a good person and treat others better than you want to be treated."

-James Cerul

What the Internet Is and How to Stop Mistaking It for Something Else.

Perhaps companies that think they can force us to listen to their messages their banners, their interruptive graphic crawls over the pages we're trying to read will realize that our ability to flit from site to site is built into the Webs architecture. They might as well just put up banners that say "Hi! We don't understand the Internet. Oh, and, by the way, we hate you."

Small Business Administration
SCORE Service Corp of Retired Entrepreneurs

Jenny's pics from this year's Dancing Fox:

Rush's "Marathon" is the song du jour.
lyrics:

It's not how fast you can go
The force goes into the flow
If you pick up the beat
You can forget about the heat
More than just survival
More than just a flash
More than just a dotted line
More than just a dash

It's a test of ultimate will
The heartbreak climb uphill
Got to pick up the pace
If you want to stay in the race
More than just blind ambition
More than just simple greed
More than just a finish line
Must feed this burning need
In the long run...

Chorus
From first to last
The peak is never passed
Something always fires the light that gets in your eyes
One moment's high, and glory rolls on by
Like a streak of lightening
That flashes and fades in the summer sky

Your meters may overload
You can rest at the side of the road
You can miss a stride
But nobody gets a free ride

More than high performance
More than just a spark
More than just the bottom line
Or a lucky shot in the dark
In the long run...

Chorus

You can do a lot in a lifetime
If you don't burn out too fast
You can make the most of the distance
First you need endurance
First you've got to last...

Chorus

It's a cool song, but the band loses 10 points for requiring Flash to look at their site. I'll give back 1 point for artistic liscense since they Are a band, not a normal business. They also earn back 1 point for having Rush playing in the background of their website.

The scorpion du jour is the Scorpio maurus. Yeah, I didn't know there was a scorpion du jour either. I expect this site doesn't get updated anymore.

I need to pick and install some real blogging software at some point.

Kung fu moved to Tuesdays, I went and had a grand ole time. Lot's of driving.

My juke box (computer) seems to have had a disagreement with the jolt I gave it the other day. That's all sorted out except I need to find my pair of RCA female-female adapters to hook it back up. The huge, convient selection of music makes the 3.5 hours in the car at night much more manageable.

Kudo's to Mr Jaime for reaching out to a potentially grumpy me. He mentioned OverStock.com. He's purchased from them and didn't say anything bad about the experience, so that's similiar to an endorsement. (But different)

My check engine light came on last week, a second misfire in a different cylinder this time. I should go buy a spark plug socket, pull my plugs and adjust the spark gap. Apparently the layout of Subaru engines makes that kind of a pain. In most engines, the spark plugs are on top pointing up so they are easy to get a wrench on. In Subarus, they are on the bottom with half pointing left and half pointing right.

Oh yeah, forgot to mention, A mile or two from our apartment is the old site of National Lead which made depleted uranium for the army. Weeeee. Painfully long article from the local event's paper, the Metroland.

Pretty bugs

The Central Park Zoo in Manhattan has two gay penguins who have incubated and raised a fertile egg together. After a couple paragraphs the article goes on to examine same sex pairings throughout the animal kingdom. It also discusses the lack of scientific reporting of same.

' But he [, Mr. Vasey, ] added: "Infanticide is widespread in the animal kingdom. To jump from that to say it is desirable makes no sense. We shouldn't be using animals to craft moral and social policies for the kinds of human societies we want to live in. Animals don't take care of the elderly. I don't particularly think that should be a platform for closing down nursing homes." '

Hurt my neck at fight practice. no close friends. family hates me. do not taunt the happy fun ball. Two of my friends seperated, he moved to one of the Carolina's, she stayed in the area with their child. I was trying to help them and failed. been coding some Java, that feels good, not that I have anyone to share it with, but I'm used to that mostly. maybe I'll see the error of basing my decisions and opinions on logic, experience and information.

It's a new day and I'm feeling much more cheerful.

Wikipedia has a new article on Diving cylinders. In it, I found out that people breath 10-25 liters per minute normaly. If ya panic, it can go up to 100 lpm. And every 10 meters you go down, you add 1 atmosphere of pressure. Yep 10 meters of water wieghs as much as the whole atmosphere. This increases the rate that you consume air from your tank. At 50 meters, you're burning through 60-150 lpm or 600lpm if you panic. Tanks hold between 900 and 5400 liters of air pressurized into in 3 liter to 18 liter bottles.

A student in East Greenbush's highschool (Columbia HS) shot the Special Ed teacher with a shotgun today. East Greenbush is 10 minutes east of where we live. The teacher was treated and released from the hospital already.

Updated SCA events page. Don't know which events we're going to yet. Current plans include Dancing Fox, MidWinter Melee Muster, and Winter War.

I'm really enjoying Sword and Shield (as opposed to Polearm). I think my new steel gauntlets are messing up my pole technique. Some drills will help that a lot.

A friend recommended "Design Patterns" and it looks like a great book, but I'm not up for dropping $50 on much of anything. It concerns patterns of thought for object oriented programming.

Selling the Invisible has been an interesting read thanks to the library. Lot's of 1 page stories with single sentence lessons about business. I'll probably carry some of the lessons over into my resume.

I've been watching some James Bond flicks. He's a jerk. It's wierd that I never noticed that before. Perhaps he's more and less jerk-like depending on the movie.

Our difficult realignment of our sleep cycles is going out the window. I'm still up at 2am.

Tourney results from Birka are up. I placed 47th out of 78 spots. There were 138 fighters and lots of ties. I managed to fight 33 times, win/lose/draw = 9/22/2. Kinda poor I guess. My defenses include, I'm new to sword and shield and 10 feet is a really small box to fight with a polearm in.

hmmm, there's a bug in the display, looks like I can actually claim spot 46. *shrug* The people running the tourney did great. One little bug in the html display is not a big deal.

Picture of snow in Albany today.

The SCAtanic Verses is rude, funny and mostly accurate in describing the SCA. Written by someone who has given up on the SCA.

In my photo gallery, I added my footer links. It was really easy, I just had to make a symbolic link in the right directory ( /usr/share/gallery/html_wrap ) and point it at my footer link file. This was the whole command:
ln -s /var/www/site/footlinks.html gallery.footer
So, yar! Now people who look at my gallery first can find the rest of my site too.

Jenny and I are back from Birka and well. I'm off to fight practice again. Late tonight I'll have a chance to post more and cycle last month's blog into the archive.

That was a good Super Bowl but the commercials were bad.

So, the Birka Report:
On the way out to Manchester, New Hampshire, Jenny and I got off the highway at exit 5E thinking that was similiar or close to exit 5. Nope. Exit 5 is not near 5E, 5W, or 5B. It is in fact after exits 6, 7, and 8. So lesson 1, don't take any exit for Manchester that fails to mention "Manchester" on the sign.

Re-entering the highway at exit 5E, I was tail gated in a big annoying way. I performed "Tom's Annoy the Tail Gater Tricks #1,2 and 3" being foot off the gas, tap the brake and downshift and pop the clutch. Trick #3 was successful and Punk Kid backed off. Upon re-entering the highway, Punk Kid passes us shouting something at my closed window and gesticulating. He performs "Angry Punk Kid Maneuvers #1 and 2" which are Cut me off and slow to a stop on a busy, major highway and Get out of the car and walk towards mine. As cars swerve madly in my rearview to avoid hitting me and my flashing fourways, I back up a bit and drive around him. He gets back in the car and drives next to us preventing us from joining the highway traffic. He continues to shout at the closed window and shake his finger at me. About the time the entrance lane ends completely, I stop a couple hundred yards behind a police officer on a traffic stop. Punk Kid drives off and Jenny and I relax a little, drive to the next exit and stop at a gas station and relax some more. I would have talked to the police except that he was in the middle of a traffic stop and I can't remember what the kid's car was at all.

So, lessons numbered 2. A. Try to avoid using "Tom's Annoy the Tail Gater Trick #3". B. If you are doing something unusual on a highway, 4 way flashers can save your butt. C. Cars are weapon and armor in one package. Don't leave you car, run over you assailent. (Boy am I glad it didn't come to that.)

The rest of the event was much less interesting. A friend of mine, Revlin, became a Master at Arms which is an alternative to Knighthood (in the SCA) and does not involve an oath of fealty to the crown. Rev's knighting is very encouraging to me. It indicates that becoming a knight in the East Kingdom IS a possibility for me. The process and requirements are still a mystery to me, but it now falls into the "possible" category.

There was an ox-hide tourney. You got to fight as much as you could manage. You got 1 point for fighting and a second point for winning. Each fight was held in a 10'x10' square so I had to switch from my 7.5' pole arm to sword and shield. The Mistresses of the List (scorekeepers) were great and dealt with the enourmous line very well after they got warmed up. Results should be posted Monday the 2nd. I think I'll be listed as Tomas.

Birka Pictures

At Christmas with my family, my brother Ed received a small version of the leg lamp from "A Christmas Story". I've finally posted the picture I took of it. This pose was completely unprompted.

January 2004 Blog