OMG . . .

This patent application is SICK

It isn't the Microsoft connection that's sick. It's using the example of comic books as an interest that is so out of the mainstream as to list it on a conventional dating site is counterproductive.

The geek interest stigmata strikes again.

On another front, this domain is going away. Point your browsers to the original url -- operationmindfsck.blogspot.com for my irregularly delivered wit and / or wisdom.

Arrrrrr!

Avast, ye mateys! 'Tis International Talk Like A Pirate Day!

Arrrr!

Daily Bloggery 2009-04-10: Never Split The Party

1. Sad day in geekdom: D&D co-creator Dave Arneson has passed on. Now Dave and Gary can argue over weather dwarf women have beards and sling dice together once again.

2. Health: SGLs green (93 this morning), got a nice walk in yesterday, getting another in today. Dressing change after work today.

3. WoW: What a difference a day makes. Marty is ready for Naxx 10! I have a few things I need to get enchantments for and a couple of my items are not rares yet, but I am ready!
This makes Gwenny smile.

4. Speaking of Gwenny, well, this here relationship gets better and better. I can really get used to not being considered "a diamond in the rough" by my SO, being loved as I am for who I am, not jst for my "potential."

Daily Bloggery 2009-03-14: SQUEEEEEEEEEE!

π Day update:

Gwenny: Going very very well. By mutual consent (the changing of various social.net sites' Relationship Status fields) today -- is not π Day a geek holiday if there ever was one? -- marks the birth of our relationship. It's a bit insane, yes, to fall for someone like this. However, we fit. You know how some couples seem to think as though they have a single mind? We do. Not in the sense that there are only enough brain cells between us for a single functional brain (been there . . . ) but that the same thoughts are occurring at the same time to both of us.
Not to mention that her kids seem to like me . . . and her friends are sending me emails . . .
I've NEVER felt quite like this. Evah.
She's off with BOYD (the WoW Guild Bring Out Your Dead, on Kul Tiras. She's Yolhauni and Paharita) raiding. I told her to "Go loot something nice for yourself."

----------------
Now playing: The Elders - Turning Point
via FoxyTunes

Look what landed on my desk this morning . . .

. . . this 8 gig iPod touch 2nd gen. I like sales contest prizes.

The OOB experience was the typical one I've had with every Apple product I've ever owned: plug it in, charge it up, sync it with iTunes, and it worked. The wifi connected right away with the network in the office. Yay wifi! Yay mobile Safari! Yay mobile Mac Mail! Contacts, iCal events, music and photos synced like a charm.

I'm ordering just a few apps for it: iPhone Bookshelf (for transferring my PDA's ebook files), Islet (for tracking diabetes stats), the SJ Games' Fnorder (just fnord because), a dice roller for gaming, a secure note program, Wikipedia and Facebook apps.

In other tech / gadget news: new iMacs, new Mac Pro and Mac minis out today. The mini is a verra sexy little beast: mini-DVI AND mini Display Port video outs for dual display support, FIVE(!) USB 2.0 ports, 8x Superdrive as standard, 2.0 GHz Core 2 duo, nice Nvidia integrated graphics, a gig of RAM standard . . . in an aluminum enclosure. Leopard and iLife '09 complete the package. Cute machine, but it's not an all-in-one, it's BYOKMD.

The iMacs are likewise yummy. 2 gigs RAM standard in the 20-inch display model . . . 256 MB graphics, etc.

----------------
Now playing: Black Sabbath - Paranoid
via FoxyTunes

Monday Musings

1. Safari 4: Apple's web browser for both Mac (and Windows!) looks kind of neat. Outside of work, I do not use Safari all that much. One reason is that some web sites and Safari simply do not get along very well. Firefox seems to work better on these sites; the reason there is even a browser called "Safari" at all is because Microsoft ceased development on Internet Exploder for Mac OS X prior to the release of Panther (OS X 10.3).

I use Safari 3.2.1 at work under Leopard (10.5.6), and at times, I am not amused by its miserable performance.

Lately Firefox has been showing signs of acting just like Safari 3.2 -- beach ball of doom (think "hourglass busy signal" in Windows), random unexpected program quitting, etc, on two systems that are meticulously maintained. And, these are sites I visit all the time, not sites with wonky logins and SSL.

Safari 4 seems faster than FF. Apple has always marketed Safari as the fastest browser anywhere, based on small-print benchmarks. Small print benchmarks do not impress the typical user all that much. They want speed they can perceive and experience, hands on with their system. Safari 4 launches faster (and does not pollute the startup group with "helper" launch on login crap, thank Odinn) and seems to render the same pages faster, even when both browsers start with nothing cached. Apparently Safari 4 is using a new rendering engine, not good old open-source WebKit (as Firefox does).

I was able to bring my Firefox bookmarks over without pain. Import them (of course you have to know where FF stores bookmarks, but damn it, I'm a tech!) then stick them into the Bookmarks Bar or Folder as appropriate. A nice Automator or AppleScript program would make this easy cheese even for a novice.

Safari 4, in the tradition of all Apple products, has some nifty innovations. Tabbed browsing has been around for awhile; Safari 4 puts the tabs at the top of the window instead of below the bookmark bar. This is actually less confusing to novices. Toolbar customization has been simplified and made friendlier to new users (and it is a LOT friendlier than FF). The big enchilada is Top Sites. Top Sites is a way to view the most frequently visited web sites on a single page. It reminds me of Cover Flow view in Leopard and iTunes -- something that gives me the willies in the former -- as well as the "Spaces" feature of Leopard.. It is visually spiffy and easy to use.

Of course, Safari 4 does this by taking caching to a much higher level than ever before. This means that marginal Internet connections are really going to feel the pain. If your Internet connection is lousy, then the time it takes to fill the caches will make Safari seem dog-slow.

Not to mention the total lack of anything like "Foxytunes" in Safari. I like the ability to post the song I'm listening to -- or a theme song of some sort -- into my blog posts. Safari lacks this ability because the Foxytunes browser addon does not have a version fro Safari. Yet a version exists for IE. Go figure.

2. WoW: I got some good playtime in this weekend. Did a 25-man Heroic difficulty raid on the Obsidian Sanctum with my guildies. Just one wipe (the first time we did OS, I think we wiped a dozen times), but we took down ol' Sarthiron (he's a big-ass black dragon) in what a Brit would call "a close-run thing." The best loot this guy drops is a token that you can cash in for a piece of top-end raiding armor tailored to your class and specialization, aka "Tier 7 gear".

Well, I got the token on a percentile dice roll of 96. And I bought the Valorous Earthshatter Grips

I've been waiting a log time for some tiered armor. I never got a single piece of Tier 4+ gear in 6+ months of near-weekly raiding of Karazhan in the last expansion.

3. Health: Serum Glucose levels are right in the middle of the Green Zone (80-140), and I actually feel somewhat energetic. I have a dressing change later.

4. Photo stuff: iPhoto 8's editor really does a number on red-eye. I got some shots on Saturday that make my Goddessdaughter's eyes look like something out a bad horror flick where the kid just reaches puberty and it is revealed that she was sired by a malevolent entity with the express mission of removing the collective soul of humanity as painfully as possible through its nostrils with mere mind powers.

From the YGTBSM* files

No, ISYN**

President Obama action figure . . . with kung-fu grip!

*YGTBSM -- You've Got To Be Shitting Me.
**ISYN -- I Shit You Not

Black Friday Special...

Darth Vader Toaster!

This is simply begging to be mocked . . .

Random Thoughts (and dry, un-buttered humor) follow:

"Always two slices, there are . . . "

The Sith are TOAST!

The Dark Side™: Part of this nutritious breakfast!

Eggs Aankin: Like Eggs Benedict, except on Darth Toasted muffins

"What is thy bidding, my Master?"
"Two slices, not burned."

----------------
Now playing (what else?): John Williams - The Imperial March
via FoxyTunes

" . . . I want to install Leopard on a Dell . . ."

Talk about "putting lipstick on a pig . . ."

And I'd like to install iPhone OS on my Palm Pilot and RAZR V3 . . .

----------------
Now playing: The Elders - Turning Point
via FoxyTunes

I can haz ifon appz?

From the folx who brought you teh cheezburgers . . .

Notes, errata, tidbits, etc

Interesting week . . .

1. Apple announces layoffs: a few friends are affected by this, but nobody in my department. Ironic date choice for the layoffs (May 1 is International Labor Day). The layoffs are jobs here moving to Austin, Texas, folks can take the job there, or another job here, or the severance.

2. My favorite coffee shop just became my former favorite coffee shop. The vibes I got there now are totally unwelcoming, and they refused to power cycle their wireless router when I told them the network is down (other people were having the same issue).

3. I attended the Company picnic to celebrate 7 years of #1 tech support in Consumer Reports last week. I wish I hadn't. The less I say here, the better.

4. My current main WoW character, Dakatirr, has a new epic mount (pictured left).

Epic mounts are cool; they're faster than the standard level-40 mount (which is a whole lot faster than running!) and they look nice. This is my second character with an epic mount . . . and I've decided one of this character's motivations involves collecting all of the epic mounts I can earn on my own in WoW.

The Purple Great Elekk I'm riding now is a racial epic mount, the easiest one to get from a vendor in the Draenei home city. If I were to go to Ironforge, Stormwind or Darnassus (the Dwarven, Human and Night Elf capital cities) and try to buy an epic mount for those races, I'd have to have an "Exalted" reputation with those cities / races. I'm not exalted with them quite yet.

There are other ways to add to my collection. There are three or four mounts you can earn through Player-vs-Player combat in Battlegrounds (not my favorite way to play WoW . . .) as well, plus the one I'm working on right now: a white sabertooth tiger, which is earned through earning Exalted reputation with a minor faction. The three quests are very very very repetitive but they result in getting a butt load of gold from selling leather, ore and uncommon drops from the elite giants you grind on in southern Winterspring.

<=== The kitteh I'm after. Purty.







WoW funny of the day: "If you give a dwarf a fish, he eats for a day. If you teach a dwarf to fish, he'll hang out in Ironforge all day leveling his Fishing skill, not camping your resource nodes."

Got this from a colleague . . .New MMORPG

I've been outside. It's overrrated.

Traditionally Outside receives extremely high ratings by those who like to see others play it, and these people are in many cases comfortably ensconced Inside themselves. Outside was released many years ago, it was in fact the first massively multiplayer game, and yet it has always managed to avoid the double-edged Retro tag. In its favor, continual user updates have kept Outside current; there are always new things to see and do Outside. Participants are permitted, to some extent, to modify their own areas of Outside, which is a large part of the fun of the game. However it seems that in the end one is modifying Outside largely for the sake of it, and having done it, there is a distinct feeling of "now what?"

In terms of the traditional target age content metrics, Outside is remarkably high in sex, violence and challenges to traditional values, despite the strong child-focussed marketing it receives. Many would go so far as to say that for a child to develop the ability to cope with Outside is essential, as long as the harm incurred is not too debilitating. Children injured playing Outside are usually comforted by parents, and soon encouraged to go Outside again; this leads to the conclusion that somehow Outside has escaped any and all of the usual moralizing that surrounds the videogaming industry. One might say that Outside gets a free pass from the Jack Thompsons of this world.

That aside, how does Outside actually rate? The physics system is note-perfect (often at the expense of playability), the graphics are beyond comparison, the rendering of objects is absolutely beautiful at any distance, and the player's ability to interact with objects is really limited only by other players' tolerance. The real fundamental problem with the game is that there is nothing to do.

In terms of game play the game sets few, if any, goals: the major one is merely "survive". What goals a player sets, are often astonishingly tedious to actually achieve, and power-ups and gear upgrades, let alone extra weapons, are few and far between. Some players choose accumulation of money, one of the many point systems in the game, as a goal, but distribution of this is often randomized and it can be hard to tell what activities will lead to gaining points in advance, and what the risks will be.

Other players choose to focus on accumulation of personal abilities, the variety of which greatly exceeds the capacity of any individual to accumulate; again, the game requires players to engage in years of grinding to achieve any notable standard with a skill or ability. Players are issued abilities and characteristics largely at random, and it is entirely possible for a player to be nerfed beyond any reasonable expectation of being able to play the game, or to be buffed to the point where anything he or she does is markedly easier. Unfortunately over time, player abilities tend to degrade, unless significant effort is made to keep skills up. This reviewer cannot emphasise this enough: Outside requires a huge time investment to build up player abilities, exceeding any other massively multiplayer game on the market by some three orders of magnitude.

Players are encouraged to focus on social interaction, which can be engaged in in a variety of ways. In fact it's extraordinarily difficult to solo anything whatsoever in Outside, apart from basic skill and knowledge accumulation quests. One of the major forms of social interaction in the game is based largely around the addition of new players to Outside, and is both complex and, in comparison to the storyline-driven romance quests of, say, Baldur's Gate or Mass Effect, they are immensely difficult. Dedicated players of Outside, however, report that the romance quests are among the most rewarding the game has to offer.

The game world is immense, perhaps unfeasibly so. The sheer amount of resources that went into development of the Outside environment is staggering to consider. Outside is a world of tremendous size, containing examples of every known real-world terrain type and inhabited by every known real-world animal. On the other hand it is somewhat lacking in the traditionally expected, more interesting, zones where the developers would be given the opportunity to show off their skills in varying the physics and graphics of the game. There are, for instance, no zones where gravity varies to any significant degree.

The respawn rate of objects and players is ridiculously slow. A dead player can expect to wait for years to respawn, and will be set back to zero assets and a tiny, nearly helpless form. Death is hardcore, and resurrection all but impossible. Outside is not a game for the QQers out there!

In terms of the social environment, almost anything goes. Outside has a vast network of guilds, many of its players are active participants in designing the game's social environment, and almost any player will be able to find company to undertake their desired group quests. On the other hand, gold-buying is rife, the outskirts of virtually every city zone in the game are completely overrun by farmers, and the developers have so far proven themselves reluctant to answer petitions, intervene in inter-player disputes, or nerf broken skills and abilities. Indeed this reviewer will go so far as to say that the developers are absent from the game entirely, and have left it to its own devices. Fortunately, server uptime has been 100% from day 1, despite there being only one server for literally billions of players.

On the whole, Outside is overrated, and many gamers will find themselves forced by friends and family to play it against their will, but it still deserves a high rating. I give it 7/10, and look forward to improvements in future patches.

Bits, bytes, nybbles and other data constructs

Scenes from a geek's life:

1. My hip going "pop" as I was getting ready to leave the doctor's office. Tylenol is helping; two of the world's most awesome nurses *ever* making sure that I did not leave the doc's office until the pain had diminished. Valarie and Connie are a matched set (literally!). I've met more educated nurses, sure...but none who are so patient-centered.
(Gheekspeak follows)
2. I get my job satisfaction shots in strange doses. Few things make me happier than rescuing a customer from a mistake. One of my axioms of Mac Teching is "Walk non-technical customers through the start of an Archive and Install (preserving) because there are too many ways for a nontech to fsck it to hell and beyond." "Archive and Install" (preserving) is a common resolution for software issues on a Mac; what it does is move the /System/ folder to a new location (the "archive" part) and installs a new one. It does NOT overwrite the old /System/, /Applications/ or more importantly, /Users/ (the "preserving" part). The /Users/ folder is home to things like the Desktop, Documents, Music, Movies and all the stuff you store on a computer and want to not lose. Well, Ms. Customer made one little mistake: the did the archive and install with the "preserving" option disabled. When this happens, the /Users/ folder goes into the archive as well. Upon completion of the install, your system goes through first time setup as though out of the box and looks like all the data is gone! The call started out with my diffusing the customer's demand for scalps. I told her how I think it happened, without assigning blame (I care about happy customers, not the whys of breaking things or Who To Blame), and showed her the mystery of how to restore a archived /Users/ folder without hosing the file permissions. This customer went from mistrustful and hinting at legal action to wanting to fly me to the East Coast for personal Mac lessons. Long call, because this restore process is a bit delicate . . . but the call ended with a VERY happy customer.
(end Gheekspeak)

3. Last night, in semi-secret rites in Nygel's Point, Desolace, Dakatirr (my shaman) was passed the title of Guild Master for the WoW guild Legends Till Death . Yet another case of insufficient reluctance. I'd been looking at starting my own guild for awhile, but I literally could not buy nine signatures for a guild charter I took out for . I did not set out to take over someone else's guild, but now that I have it I'll be doing as much administrivia as I do actually playing.

4. A few days ago, Barack Obama gave this little speech about race, faith and a few other things. My inner Orator (the one who got free in speech classes in high school and college and earned the highest degree of distinction from the National Forensics League for oratory, debate, extemporaneous and impromptu speaking) was amazed. Presidents are supposed to be inarticulate boobs who cannot sting together two original thoughts without connective tissue. Presidents are supposed to be rhetorical embarrassments. At least that's been the lesson of the 21st centuty dark age that is the Bush / Cheney administration. BO was brilliant in laying out his vision for that nation, his view of this nation's historic and persistent racism. (geek sideline: while his first and last initial suggest something odorous, his full initials -- BHO -- is a Windows geek acronym: Browser Helper Object. Some BHOs suck, others are not so bad) Folks, Barack Obama (BTW, his first name means "Lightning" in Hebrew and was also the name of Ariel Sharon's armored brigade in the Sinai in the 1973 Yom Kippur War, the name goes back to a military commander from the Old Testament) is the Real Deal.

4. Finally: to the piece of human debris who parked his or her car less than a foot from my van which was centered in it's space at Kaiser, forcing a buy with a sore hip and not-so-mild claustrophobia panic attacks to climb in through the cargo door: FSCK YOU WERRY MUCH, ARSEWHOLE! I was just one security camera away from keying the passenger side door of your PoSmobile. Please, for the sake of the people who must share the road and parking spaces with you, get a real license to replace the one you have courtesy of Cracker Jack and Learn To DRIVE and PARK, you miserable dollop of dog crap.

wtf did you expect?

Your Ultimate Roleplaying Purity Score
Category	Your Score	Average
Hacklust	6.6% Slew entire Asgardian Pantheon with one hand while blindfolded	53.5%
Sensitive Roleplaying	15.19% There is no player. There is only.... Zuul.	54.7%
GM Experience	10.87% Worldbuilder, storyteller... Master.	69.3%
Systems Knowledge	78.53% Local rules guru	90.4%
Livin' La Vida Dorka	8.05% Gaming is my life	63.2%
You are 28.74% pure Average Score: 68.7%
Take The Ultimate Roleplaying Purity Test and see how you match up! (By The Ferrett)

Action! Adventure!

Spine-Tingling Toast!

DunDraCon 32 Report

DDC Con Report

For the first time in three years, I've made it to a game con . . . and I feel fine.

That has not always been the case with respect to gaming the last year. I was very very close to writing a repeat of last year's April Fools post – and that post not being a joke. I've been feeling burned out on all fronts of the hobby, missing the fire and passion I used to put into my games. My game world was in a virtual stasis, I had all but ceased writing anything for it and I kept asking myself “Why bother with working on a game anymore – or even playing?”

This weekend reconnected me with why I game. I originally decided to attend DunDraCon 32 as a kind of last huzzah, a farewell of sorts. I'd run a game as I always do, and I'd play as many as I could. If the old magic wasn't back by the end of the weekend, then I'd leave the hobby for good.

I got to the con on Saturday morning just minutes before the start of my con-sponsored game. I had put that game together in what had become my usual style the last year or so; with a bit of background info and an outline as to possible events. When I came up with the game-world event that would frame this adventure a few months earlier – having the party put an end to the misconduct of a mercenary company – I did not have a clue as to how this would happen. I floundered for weeks looking for an important game world consequence of failure . . . .

Sometimes I feel as though I am channeling the game world, not writing or running it. Stuff flits into my conscious mind, my “this is cool!” alarm triggers, and an idea hits the pixels. Three separate bolts of deep channeling hit me a week before the DunDraCon that got me the skeleton of a plot and some approaches the party may take in completing the adventure. On Saturday I had more pages of players notes than I did DM notes. This was a bit of a worry because the DM I was two or three years ago was hyper-prepared. I'm a good improviser, but was I good enough?

Apparently I was.

I got what had to be the best group of players I've had outside of my home groups: no power-gamers, no stat-monkey munchkins, no spotlight hogs. Players who actually took the time to read the background I'd created and integrated it into their roleplaying. While not up to the deep-character / deep verse style of the Kitsune Chronicles players (the best damn roleplayers I know, period!), I was floored by the quality of player I'd gotten, and I was as underprepared as ever.

My players made all the difference. They managed to scheme, sneak, dissemble and when needed fight their way to victorious success in the scenario. As in years past, I created a convention adventure where party failure at this convention game would drive major plot threads, or in this case, literally enact a cosmic change in the game world.

Their play took my breath away. I found myself challenged to keep up with them, even when I was the DM, the supposedly all powerful demigod in charge. I still don't know quite how it hppened, but I walked out of the game a new DM.

My D&D game was only the setup for what was to come next. The next day I finally got to play a game I bought some time ago as a convention break-game – SJ Games' Munchkin. Reading a review on a website saying “Munchkin is cool!” or hearing a friend tell you “Munchkin is cool!” pales next to the moment when you get to play and finally get to say to one and all “Munchkin is cool!”

Munchkin is a card game of old-school dungeon-crawling: kick open the door, kill the monsters, steal their stuff, stab your buddy in the back and steal his stuff too. Be the first to get to level 10 and you win.

I got the box out and one player (me) became three (me, Iz and another) became five. It's a game that's pretty easy to learn, hard to master. You must be ruthless in ensuring that your buddies get the backstabbery they soooo richly deserve. While I did not win, I came very close and managed to pull off some pretty ruthless moves. At times I think they need to call this game “You Bastard!” because that's what you'll say when someone ices your perfect plan to kill the last monster you need to win. A willingness to engage in High Treachery is needed to win. If you aren't looking for a way to fsck your buddy, you aren't playing to win.

In meta terms, DDC seemed a much smaller con than it was back in 2002-3. The dealer room was tiny, the con less spread out. I suspect this is due to macroeconomic issues and worries.

The facilities in San Ramon were awesome as usual, the hotel staff was friendly if a bit bemused by the eclectic crowd that is Gamer Nation. The on-site food options were not insanely overpriced. I would have given a random testicle for decent bandwidth, though.

Finally, early Monday morning I was interviewed for a podcast: “Heroes of Science Fiction and Fantasy.” In it I discuss my adventure “The Agony of Kessel” and my favorite sf and fantasy media.

Praise Teh Sacred Google!

This. Is. C00l.

The Discordian in me loves this kind of stuff. Eris and Google -- BFF!

Google's High Holy Day is September 14, the anniversary of the date the domain google.com was registered. And, it's just five days before another geek holiday, Talk Like A Pirate Day. A holiday devoted to the discovery of truth and good, not to mention pirates, is a perfect antidote to the annual beating around the head and shoulders with the proverbial bloody shirt every Sept 11.

Of course the Dungeon Master in me beat them to it awhile ago.


----------------
Listening to: Seanan McGuire - Still Catch The Tide
via FoxyTunes

There and Back Again . . .

There's a good reason for the gap in my posting: I was in the hosptial for swelling and infected wounds in my legs. While I had my MB with me, I had no way to connect it to the Internet --I guess we're still a few years from what EarthLink founder Sky Dayton called "packetspace."

Ten days of almost no Internet (I had the browser on my cellphone, and that's it), coffee or TeeVee did not quite leave me a gibbering idiot. I was a near-run thing, though.

The most noteworthy aspect of this stay was that they (Kaiser) transferred me to a Kaiser-run skilled nursing facility (KPPACC) in San Leandro, about 100 miles from my current digs in South Sacramento.

I was not amused.

Highlight of my hospital visit: I successfully suppressed the urge to throttle by roommate at KPPACC. Idjit would have the remote for the one TV set the room had and play the most mind-destroying teevee other than political campaign ads or Fox News Channel: soap opeas and sports. Not only that, he'd read the damned paper with the fscking teevee on!

Whotta asshat. I wanted to stuff that remote down his throat, I was so pissed. I chose instead to employ my iPod -- stuffed with tunage from Leslie Fish, The Elders, Seanan McGuire and Flogging Molly -- and headphones to block out the sound; fortunately I had Civilization 3 loaded on the MB, a perfect non-Internet game for whiling away large blocks of time.

I also had The Sims 2 on my phone, another very good game. I'd never had the chance to play the game much until this trip to the hospital, and I got my money's worth from it during the ambulance ride to San Leandro.

M&D also brought me some spare underwear and Guinness pajama bottoms before I was shipped off to KPPACC. I wore the PJs for most of my stay at KPPACC. The tangerines helped stave off the hungries from the notoriously small (and utterly flavor-free) portions of Hospital Food® and the sugarless Jelly Bellies and Gummi Bears were treats I savored.

I managed to read William Gibson's Idoru as well -- I wouldn't say it was better than Neuromancer but it was better than Count Zero or Virtual Light.

At Kaiser South I encountered some utterly awesome nurses and a wonderful doc.

My daughter, bless her, came to pick me up and bring me home. Our first stop on the way home: Starbucks.


----------------
Listening to: Sun Green & The Imitators with Neil Young & Crazy Horse & The Greendale Chamber of Commerce - Be the Rain
via FoxyTunes

Heard in Global Trade Channel: "LF Guild "

Presidential candidate meets WoW. Film at 11 (server time) . . . .



----------------
Now playing: The Elders - Gonna Take a Miracle
via FoxyTunes

Stoopid StarCraft Install Tricks v 1.0

OK, so there I was, at work, installing the copy of StarCraft I got as a prize on my MacBook via Firewire target disk mode (due to the bad optical in this MB) when the evil nasty badness began. My MB was on battery and in the middle of the install it shut down, out of power.

One of the "thall shalt nots" of FireWire Target Disk Mode is "do not forcibly dismount the target volume during data transfer or you will hose the target disk."

Oops.

I restarted my MB, hoped for the best and got the worst. Dreaded apple /gear startup. Disk Utility confirmed that the volume was as hosed as Chicago in 1871.

So, I reformatted the hard drive, reinstalled Leopard from a FWTDM'd workstation and went home.

Once home, I started first time setup and restored from my Time Machine external backup volume.
EVERYTHING is BACK -- all my gaming notes, my bookmarks, email, iLife suite, music, pictures of Her Cuteness, and oh yes World of Warcraft. Only a couple of hours lost in restoring. Had I had a working optical I could have restored while booted from it.

Mac users: if your machine can run Leopard, and you have not installed it yet, your data is at risk...If you've installed Leopard and not gotten an external hard drive for Time Machine, your data is at risk . . .if your machine cannot run Leopard, get one that does. You know you want to, and it is the right thing to do.

If you're not using a Mac, well you need to.

Update 1: Ran software update and it hosed my HD AGAIN! Fortunately, archive and install fixes this crap.