Prosthetically Hip

I got framed for $1,500

March 16, 2011 1:51pm

For this past Christmas, my mother-in-law got me this completely awesome set of Ninja Star Wars prints:

I talked to a friend who works at Lemieux Galleries about getting them framed for trade in computer work. After meeting up (and agreeing how incredibly cool these prints are), I picked out a matte and frame. Each print is 11.25″ x 27″, and 18″ x 34″ after the framing – they’re not exactly small.

Well, I finally got around to hanging them. The unexpected hard parts of hanging them though, was deciding the order. I settled on chronological order of appearance, according to the original trilogy. I did it from memory, and used an ever-excellent and accurate xkcd comic as a reference. The only thing I’m not exactly sure about is whether we see Admiral Ackbar or the Emperor (and no, his hologram doesn’t count) first – and that can be quickly (and funly!) solved by popping in the DVD.

The only thing I debated to myself about was the Luke poster. I wasn’t sure if the white robes depicted his time on the ice planet Hoth, or a more metaphorical representation of him as a sort of “white knight”. I went for the more literal Hoth interpretation because a) I think it’s the correct one, and b) that would give me a solid reference on the timeline.

Well, and I think we can all agree the set looks awesome:

I think each one ran me about $250 each, but that works out to 30 hours at $50 an hour. I get sweet custom frames, they get working computers. Everyone wins.

Good hardware, looking for a home

February 17, 2011 9:25am

Bea and I are in the process of moving our office from a room upstairs to the front room of our house. And we are pleased with the progess.

On the other side, it means that I’m finally getting around to getting rid of the last bit excess hardware that’s been collecting dust over the last x years.

Still works fine, just needs a good home. I’d love some cash for these items (I’d settle for some Guinness or Abita), but at the end of the day, they still work and throwing them away would just be a shame.

APC Smart UPS 1400. Great battery backup, just needs fresh batteries which aren’t all that hard to come by.

HP ProCurve 400m. Such a good switch. Lots of unused drive bays, and can have a secondary power supply installed.

Cisco Catalyst WS-C1912C-EN. A neat little switch for someone wanting to play with/learn about fiber.

Cisco 3101 and 3102 Routers. I dunno, bookends?

Know anyone who’s interested? Send them my way!

Do as I say, not as I do…

July 26, 2010 10:12pm

I know this post is technically going out on the 27th, but I’m backdating it.

Tonight I had to re-write my recently created DUI.system, because the hard drive it lived on crashed, and I didn’t have a copy of it on a second drive. I don’t know how many times I’ve told people not to trust external drives as the keeper of their primary (or only) copy of something, and somehow, this one slipped by and bit me in the ass.

Derp.

On the upside, the new revision is cleaner and the actual tweet output will be more informative based on the title of the press release. Looking at the old releases, some would have Cancelled or something similar in the title – handy info at a glance, IMHO.

DUI Decimal System

July 23, 2010 5:52pm

Unbeknownst to many, the NOPD is required by the Louisiana Supreme Court to inform the public of upcoming DUI checkpoints. How they disperse the information is pretty passive, and I think it should be a little more active.

I had an idea this afternoon, and have built out a “twitter app” that does just this.

All people have to do is follow the account, and if they choose, have it notify them via text message of the checkpoint. It won’t have the location – just a link to the checkpoint, but with so many people having internet capable phones, I think it’ll be just fine.

I might add some sort of Facebook cross-posting, but I figure one person will then put the info there, then others will ‘like’ or whatever, so I’m leaving it out for now. So for you New Orleans twitter users, go follow @NO_dui.

Goblins? In my Necropolis? It’s more likely than you think.

July 20, 2010 10:34pm

Today was every other Tuesday, so you know what that means: D&D!

We we on a skeleton krewe today – just Paul as the DM, Chris/Grak, Allen/Marduk, and me/Oran. We had to supplement our group with Clarence, our NPC (Non-Playable Character) friend. Despite missing two of our company, we decided to do a dungeon crawl anyways.

We almost got our asses handed to us, but ended up prevailing so far – and this dungeon looks huge. We’ll probably play the same dungeon for a few sessions. In addition to the gold and XP we gained, Allen/Marduk ended up with a goblin hand for souvenir and I got the cloak of Balgrond (sp?) The Fat, chieftain of the dungeon.

Allen and I are definitely getting better at combat and keeping things flowing.

Here’s the map of the city, I unfortunately didn’t get a shot of the total clusterfuck of a room where each one of us had goblins on at least 2 sides of them, some of us 3 or 4 at a given time.

 
It also looks like we’ll be back at my house next session, which I’m happy about. Nothing like having people over to get you to clean, amiright? We currently have 4 guys who live in a few block radius of each other on Algiers Point, but it seems that everyone can make it to my house from work much quicker, so we get started sooner. I also have two full-size tables we can join, so the space fits the group a bit better.

And since it looks like we’ll be adding a much needed cleric to the group, we’ll need the extra space…

Several Levels of Failure

July 14, 2010 10:27pm

I know several things went well today, I’m just going to harp on what went wrong:

• Truck needs an oil change/transmission fluid/pretty much every fluid change.
• One of the big 5-drawer tool chests is pretty banged up. Waiting ’till above is done to return. Hopefully tomorrow.
• 4 trips to Lowe’s today, got almost all I needed through process of elimination. Then lost a piece.
• There’s a mosquito loose somewhere in my office
• Looks like tomorrow will also be oppressively hot.
• Running out of things to write about for NaBloPoMo

I know I know, first world problems.

Sing it, Front:

One does not simply SSH into Mordor

July 9, 2010 11:08am

Today has been apeshit crazy, and it’s only noon. Besides the usual tidying/dog walking/plant watering I tend to do in the morning before work, I had to rush out some code for a project and get a braketag.

Except, it never seems to be that easy. I’ve been having issues with my reverse lights lately. It seems they work fine right between when the car starts and before you put it into drive. Luckily at the brake tag station, reverse lights were tested before I had to move the car.

I also have a headlight with water in it, and it isn’t secured to the frame very well. It won’t fall out or anything, but it’s loose. The brake tag guy said that he couldn’t give me a tag for that, but if I went home, drilled some small holes so the headlight would drain now and in the future, and made an effort to secure the headlight, all would be good. I drilled the holes, and showed that I had run the suggested bead of caulk (which I don’t thing will work long term, but that’s what he suggested), and drove over. When the tag hit the window I got the hell out, and met up with Amy Jett so she could take the truck for the weekend to move.

Also, I made this for you Linux users and fans of The Lord of the Rings. It’s not hard to imagine the Venn diagram for that – just draw a circle.

 
I’m sure this isn’t an original idea, the “One does not simply _____ into Mordor” being an established meme and all, but I have yet to see an SSH implementation – of course I haven’t looked either.

We all float down here

July 6, 2010 11:34pm

Tonight was the Tuesday out of “every other Tuesday” for D&D night, and before I continue I just want to again stress how much fun I am not only having by playing the game, but at making fun of myself for it as well.

Last night took us into the sewers to find a significant amount of loot hidden by a friend (a bugbear named Clarence) – loot needed to clear a debt with one bad mother(shut your mouth!). So far, our adventures have been above-ground and concentrating on finding Clarence.

Considering this was my first real dungeon, I was pretty excited. Our actual combat went a lot smoother than the previous session. Being new to the game, we took too much time the other week not only deciding tactics but deciding what attack to use, etc. Where we only had time for one combat sequence the other week, we did 3 this week. We’re quickly improving, but there is still plenty of room to get better.

Despite the swarms of ROUSes (Rodents Of Unusual Size), we had a lot of fun in the sewer and almost got our asses handed to us in a room by 4 zombified Royal Guards and 6 kobolds (those little knee-stabbing bastards). It would have been just the 4 guards, but Will had to get all Indiana Jones on a jewelly statue type thing in a nearby room, lowering a wall and letting in the 6 kobolds with crossbows. Will’s character isn’t so much stupid as mischievous, and I welcome it. That ass-whoopin’ hurt, but we made it and really enjoying the encounter despite our seeming inability to hit out target most of the time. Plus, most of us got enough XP to level up! Time to rework my character sheet.

I think I’m getting a much better handle of the game already, and can’t thank Paul enough for being patient and running this game for us.

And at least there weren’t any grues in the sewer – I had my lantern lit the whole time so we’d have been fine anyways. Getting eaten by a grue would definitely not been awesome.

MC Frontalot – It Is Pitch Dark:

Kudos to you who got the Stephen King’s IT reference in the title.

Lastly, I know this is technically going up on Wednesday the 7^th, but I was obviously busy all night and my crap-ass web host was down when I got home. I can backdate posts, so I’m going to. That is all.

I’ve Created a Monster

June 9, 2010 8:37pm

Well, I haven’t created so much of a monster, as I have a 1^st level Brawny Rogue.

Last night was the first time I’ve ever played Dungeons and Dragons, and as we wrapped up to head to our respective homes, I found myself wishing that I’d done this years decades ago.

Basically, I blame Whil Wheaton (yes the ‘h’ in ‘Wil’ is on purpose) and Mike and Jerry from Penny Arcade. Both Wil and Jerry are old hat at D&D, but Mike is brand new. I’ve both read about and heard from Wil about how awesome the game is, and with Mike a quick convert, it really began to eat at me.

These guys are geek icons. I feel I identify with them on various levels, and I find them immensely smart and talented. I felt as though I’d really been missing out.

So, I talked to an old friend and ex-coworker, Paul. Paul and I worked together at directnic.com from early ’02 to mid ’05 (his tenure was /much/ longer), and he and I became good friends – one of the handful of people I’ve kept in touch with regularly since my departure. Anyways, Paul’s been more or less playing this fell game for as long as I’ve been alive. I’m 30.

I’m just going to let that set in.

…

After talking for Paul about my interest in getting a game together, we figured that after the wedding (which he was a groomsman in) we’d talk a bit more seriously about actually doing it. I’d also talked to Allen about it, and he was definitely interested. Well, Paul talked to my old boss Chris, and also to his old roommate Will who also worked with us at directnic.com and I see all the time. Well, Will talked to our friend Lando, and before we knew it, we had a group.

We met up once at the best bar on the Westbank (where most of this group lives) to really get things going, and got together the following week for character building and basics on game mechanics. Allen and I couldn’t make it for various reasons, unfortunately.

But last night. Ohhhh, last night. We were all able to meet up, and let me tell you, I picked it up pretty quickly and really had a blast. The only downside is that I wish we’d had more time to play, and that I didn’t have to wait to weeks to play again (to make things easy, we’re playing every other Tuesday).

At Paul’s suggestion, I built my character off of a character I was already familiar with: Batman. He’s a brawny rogue, and fun and easy to play.

I even had the wife alter an image (she removed the mask) of some Batman-in-the-Old-West fanart:

Chris created a warlock, Allen created a tiefling (humans with demonic ancestry) based on Hellboy, other Will created a cow-farmer-turned-fighter named Philadelphia Collins, and Lando created a character named Pablo the Escobarbarian. Need I say more?

Well, I’m hooked. Thank you Wil, Mike, Jerry, Paul, and Chris for helping me to find a missing piece that I didn’t even realize was missing.

And thanks to my wife, Bea, for putting up with my overwhelming and ever-expanding nerdery and geekery – which is exactly how it should be (both the putting up with and the expanding *.ery).

The Price of Modern Communications

November 11, 2009 10:00pm

I took a quick jaunt uptown today to help my friend, a (quasi-?) retired lawyer, hook his cable internet line up to his shiny new wireless router.

About 15 minutes after arriving at his house, his two laptops and his wife’s desktop (who was up until today connecting via dial-up – *the horror*) were hooked up to his new wireless connection, and he was showing me his few prized pieces of artwork by our mutual friend, Maggie.

I wasn’t planning on taking any payment, but he made me an offer I couldn’t possibly refuse; a bottle of Jameson’s 18 year old Limited Reserve.

 
Needless to say, I was floored. This is on average an $80 bottle of whiskey, and in no way is this “payment” remotely close to the value of the time I spent. Then again, his wife is no longer on dial-up – I’d say he won the day.

I am unfortunately not enjoying a glass of it this evening, as I didn’t want to bike home with it – I opted instead to leave in the jostle-free environment of my office. I’ll collect it tomorrow, and probably won’t have a good chance to enjoy it until Saturday.

Oh, how I look forward to Saturday. And no, you can’t come over just yet.