Month: March 2004

My game; news

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The first thing that I want to mention here is that the little game that I made, which can be viewed or played on my site Here. Is still also available on the internet at the JavaBoutique. As a result of that I still get emails a couple of times a week from people who want the source code to the game. Mostly they are college students that need to create some java thing for their computer science course and want to see how I was able to achieve the end result that I did. It is a bit flattering on the one hand, but on the other hand, it just sucks. More on that in a moment.

Something that I remembered while I was typing the previous paragraph was that there was one particular person who requested the source code for the game, and used it for a really great cause (if they were telling me the truth). This company (I can’t remember the name) said that they had seen my game and thought that the layout would be perfect for a new device that they were installing in Hospital waiting rooms. It was, I guess, a small touch-screen computer that supposedly would let people play various games or watch local television channels, but it was all opereated by touch-screen. The person who emailed me said that they had chosen my game for the sole reason that the way the game is played would make it easy to alter the source code to work with a touch screen instead of a mouse click. I am not sure if they ever did use the game for the purpose that they said they were going to, hell, I am not even sure if that wasn’t just an elaborate story to get me to send them the code so they could alter it just enough to claim that it was their own. Anyway, I would like to believe that there is a kid in a hospital waiting room somewhere right now playing it while waiting for his mom to come back from life threatening surgery. As I have previously stated, simple goals.

The majority of the people who request the code are students in computer science, or similar classes. I can only theorize that they go out looking for these little applets and assume that whoever programmed them must have been schooled in Java Programming. Nothing could be further from the truth, in my case. Not only have I never been schooled in Java, I have never been schooled in anything. The truth is that one of my friends was starting to learn the basics of java programming and in a juvenile type of ‘I can do it too’ mindset, I started to program java. I bought a book called, “Teach yourself Java 1.2 in 21 Days”. Lies! Here it is what six years later and though I can make a java applet, and for the most part I can make them do what I want, I would hardly say that I have actually learned how to do it. With the exception of the very first applet that I ever wrote, every one of my programs has pieces cut and pasted from previous ones that I have done. There is always modification to be done, of course, but I am not really sure if I were to sit in front of a blank computer screen if I would be able to even make a java applet simply display the word “Hello”.

When these people do request the source code I always send it to them, but I spend so long explaining that this should only be used as an example of how not to program java that it really kind of depresses me. I actually have the following phrase at the top of the source code;

This was programmed by a novice at java who was mostly drunk while doing the programming. I do not guarantee that implementing this code will not kill you, someone else, or even make the world explode. Thanks.

Hardly a glowing recommendation. Don’t take my word for it, you can actually view the source code of the applet Here if you really want to. I just did to make sure that my link worked and I gotta tell you, I am a bit amazed that the applet works at all. If anyone ever happens upon that little game and finds that some portion of it doesn’t work, let me know. I am quite curious to know if the game would actually load and play in a newer version of Netscape or AOL as I do not have either of those.

After that little bit of self-castrating, I think I will move on to happier things.

Or not.

There is just not a lot of happy stuff going on in the world, well at least the U.S. part of the world, right now. It is now pretty clear that no one supports the purported “War on Terror” that we are fighting. Fighting terror by fiercly guarding oil fields in the middle east seems to be a bit of a stretch of the word ‘fighting’, and also seems to be letting the terrorists run amok. Now that other countries are being attacked, and as such being forced into defensive measures, they are not wanting to send out their military personnel to be slaughtered like the 500+ American soldiers who have been killed since Iraq’s leadership fell.

We all know, of course, that Iraq was not involved in the 9/11 attacks, and the fact that the Bush administration decided to attack Iraq as opposed to finishing the job in Afghanistan has likely swayed the opinions of the rest of the world to think that we are a bunch of bullies. The sad truth is that I feel that exact sentiment. There are a lot of wonderful stories, and links, on the new blog called Political Animal which is written by the former CalPundit BlogMaster.

I do not like to write about politics on this site because I do not feel that I am well enough informed to make reasonable assumptions/decisions about it all. There is normally a huge difference between what the actual news is and what the American public can see on the television. Yet, it seems, myself and a lot of other people in the U.S. have given up on the televison or print news for any actual info, we now rely on the internet. The internet just doesn’t seem to give a damn where you are, or who you are, and it lets you read actual information without trying to spin facts to get higher ratings. Again, I hate to write about politics, but in a survey (I just asked people who came into the store today) most (like nine out of ten) of the people who were wearing dress clothes (suits or nice dresses) said that they would vote for ‘anyone other than Bush’ in the next election. I am not sure that the vote will actually go that way, since a lot of the elderly people just never leave their house except to vote, and they like a familiar name to vote for, even if that familiar name wants to make them homeless.

One other thing that I have to put here, just because it makes me sick. I am not linking to a news article since it really doesn’t deserve it.

Paris Hilton was thrown from a horse while filming the new season of a show, and may have been injured. She was air-lifted to the nearest hospital, probably not hurt, but as a precaution. This would likely have never been news, were it not for the last line of the news entry;

Hilton also made headlines recently when a graphic video of her having sex with her boyfriend surfaced on the Internet.

Can I get transferred to a country where showing a nipple on T.V. doesn’t shut down the entire media for a month, and amatuer porn isn’t the only thing anyone ever wants to write about?

site

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I did spend a lot of time last night trying to get something on this site, I made some good headway, then a freak power surge shut my pc down. I had not saved it as I was typing, as I never do, and it is lost to history even more so than the songs that I list on the sidebar with that same title. There is no way that I am ever going to get that content back since it only existed in my mind and what I typed. My mind kind of unloads and becomes what I type and after that I would not know my own writing from anyone elses unless you actually told me which was which.

I was not at all that confident that the computer shutting down was a direct result of the power surge, so I ran a few programs on it once I got it back online. I ran an anti-virus, Ad Aware, then did a scan disk to make sure I didn’t have any system problems. My system came out pretty clean, with the exception of some spyware that I got while trying to download an mp3 file to put in the sidebar.

I think that I really need to make two commitments here, the first that I should make sure that any link that you click on through this site will not result in all that spy-ware garbage. I do scan all of the files that I put up here, but the links I only click through on my own system, if they do have any garbage files like that then I have them too. The second is that I should commit myself to not try to do a blog (that is the first time that I have used the term blog in direct reference to what I am doing here, BTW) on Wednesday, since I get off work late enough that I can not really spend enough time on it to make it worth reading…Whether any of these are worth reading is certainly Open to debate.

On a personal note, the medical problems seem to continue. I have talked so much about the pain in my neck that I don’t really even feel the need to link to an instance here. Now my neck appears to be just fine, but out of nowhere I have a ringing in my left ear that I can not explain. It is constant. You would kind of have to be in my body to know what I am talking about, I can still hear out of the ear, it is just this like buzzing kind of thing going on. I haven’t been to a really loud concert in months and this is an all-of-a-sudden type of thing that makes me wonder if whatever I did to tweak my neck could be involved in this new problem.

The only up-side that I can find to this new, weird, ear-ringing thingy is that if it persists I will be able to go to concerts and just point the ringing ear to the stage. What could possibly happen? It will ring worse? No problem, I still have a good ear. I have no doubt that, like my neck, this is a very temporary thing that will soon go away, but as of today it is something that I noticed.

I came up with a new song to put on the sidebar for the ‘Music lost to history’ thing, and I went to search it out last night. That was the entire reason that I ran all of the tests on my system once it came back online. I thought that some of the crap that I had downloaded might have resulted in my pc shutting down when a minor power surge hit. That has turned out to be a completely false assumption.

Sometime while dealing with that whole ordeal, trying to get my pc going again, I thought of another song that I really wanted to put on that side bar. The thing is that I actually have the playable mp3 of this one, which must be illegal, else they wouldn’t be busting kids for downloading songs, right, right? Leave that for the lawyers. I will get that one posted within the next few days with a very modified name.

Well, I have yet to die, but I assume that people will be pissing on my grave by the end of the day. I am not trying to make it as such, I am just ‘calling things like I see them’. Tomorrow will be a day that is totally different, and not related, to today so the hope is that someone will actually read the post that I make before I change it to be more politically correct.

Dinner; Mad cow

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Yesterday’s update was cut a bit short because I went out to dinner, that is a pretty rare event around our house. I would like to say that it is because I am xenophobic or agoraphobic but the plain and simple truth is that I am just a cheap-ass. On second thought, I think I am gonna go with a combination of xenophobia and agoraphobia, and -hopefully- seem to be a bit less of a jack-ass.

Aside from the monetary concerns involved with eating out, the other issue that I have with the process is the servers. At a restaurant where you have never been, you may expect that there could be shoddy service, while at one that you frequent you would expect better service, or else why would you frequent it in the first place? The place that we normally eat out is local, and in a town as small as mine when I say local I mean that it is owned by two people, one is my barber and the other is his wife, who frequents the grocery store I work at. Think happy thoughts about the “Mayberry” type small town for a second, than toss that mess right out the window.

I am on a first name basis with the owners of the establishment (there is no need to include the name of the place, since there is only one in the entire world) as well as the guy who runs it on a day to day basis. Perhaps because I know the people so well, I find it very difficult to complain about anything, even when that something is absolutely terrible service that I know they would not tolerate from my store, and would not expect me to tolerate from their business. That is where it all gets just a bit tricky where I live.

The servers where I live get paid shit wages. I don’t mean like minimum wage, I mean like last I knew they actually make about three dollars an hour plus tips (some restaurants do pay base minimum wage plus tips, but they are few and far between). I am not sure if there is a law in the state of Arizona that makes this possible, or if the tips that they earn put them above the minimum wage to make it legal, however it works, it works. I am not sure about you, but if I was making three dollars an hour, I would bust my ass to make sure that I made every customer feel like he/she was royalty. Most people don’t even tip ten percent, even less fifteen percent, and if the service is bad there would more likely be a penny under the upside-down cup full of water, which I have only done a couple of times.

There is a server at this restaurant that is just amazing, knows myself and my wife on a first name basis, has our drinks on the table before we order them, always has an ashtray on the table quickly (yes, I know it is going to kill me and I should quit, but until I do, when I sit in the smoking section and do not have an ashtray it really irritates me). This server is probably the best that I have ever seen in any restaurant ever, and he, yes HE is not a young man, he has been at it for a while, and knows that the level of service will dictate the level of tip. What other job is there where your efficiency can either triple or half your hourly wage on a day to day basis? This guy always gets my highest honor, that being a twenty percent tip. Some of the other servers in the same restaurant get much less, like a dollar. On a twenty dollar dinner that would be a 5 percent tip. Servers here (elsewhere also?) are required to report 10 percent of the total from the people they served as tips received, even if they didn’t make that much. So providing bad service to everyone that you wait on could result in you actually losing money for the night. That’s some kind of incentive, in my mind.

What I was trying to get at, a few paragraphs back, is that it is hard to find good servers down here. When the base wage is so low (it may have changed since the last numbers I have, but the three dollars an hour I spoke of was when federal minimum wage was five twenty-five) the only people that really apply to that position are usually teen-agers, except, frequently there will be illegal immigrants here (there are a lot of farms nearby that rely on them for cheap labor) that use false social security numbers to get jobs. I am quite sure that large corporations do extensive background checks on the people that apply, your average family owned business here really just doesn’t. Even when I got my job down here I did not have a single photo ID, I did have a social security card, but who was to say that that was actually me? That is the same angle they are using, and quite effectively.

At any rate, back to the dinner story. I just somehow managed to spend way too long explaing that the server that was waiting on us initially last night didn’t speak english. About ten minutes into the experience we decided to switch tables, to be closer to the door the servers go through, so that, in theory, they might notice that there were a couple of people there without the requisite placemats, silverware, salsa, chips, drinks, the sort of stuff that this place is usually really quick to get to you. I spent the next ten or so minutes trying to level our table, it was a really wobbly one, by the time they came around with the chips I had nearly acieved true level (though I didn’t have a level to check, so that is based solely on the fact that you could no longer put a nickel on one side of the table, push down on the other side of the table and watch the nickel fly into the street). The woman tried to take our drink order, ‘Coors Light’ and ‘Hard Lemonade’, she did not understand about the hard lemonade. She understood the lemonade part, but not the ‘hard’ part. She went and got a bottle of lemonade and brought it over to see if that was what my wife had ordered, which it wasn’t, when my wife said, “No.” that might have been the only time she understood a single word that either of us had spoken so far. She took the lemonade away…And never returned…

We now had the chips and salsa, but no drinks, we nibbled on the chips and salsa anyway, sure that the drinks would eventually arrive. Big mistake. You must understand that the salsa in this place is considered ‘mild’, where I live fresh salsa that is called ‘mild’ makes Pace Picante Sauce that is ‘Hot’ taste like tomato sauce. So, we were both now breathing fire, no drinks to be found, and my wife said that she would just do with some ice water if we ever saw the server again. I was a bit irritated about the whole state myself, so I went to server central (inside the place, as we were on the patio) and happened to run into the guy who ran the place on a day to day basis. I simply asked him for an ice water and an ashtray, as we had been waiting at least twenty minutes at that point for any kind of actual service. He asked me if there was a problem, I didn’t want to say anything, but I did mention that they had taken the drink order and the girl didn’t seem to understand. It turns out that they no longer carried any type of ‘hard lemonade’, but had just gotten in some new type of hard raspberry drink. I left there with a glass of ice water and an ashtray, and about twenty seconds after I got back to our table our drinks arrived, carried by a different server.

I don’t think that we ever saw that original server the rest of the night, but the service certainly improved. It only took about ten minutes (maybe fifteen) to get our food, after taking longer than that to get, well, anyone to come to our table. There was a mistake with her food order, but it was an addition, and it was not charged to us, so that doesn’t really matter. The one thing that I really found strange about the whole ordeal was that the guy who runs the place day to day had said that “your drinks are on me”, since they never brought us a bill I really couldn’t say for sure, but what I can say is that my wife asked if they charged her for the item in her meal that she did not get, and they hadn’t, but they did charge here for a ‘hard lemonade’ which was the source of the entire problem in the first place. The two beers that I drank, at least, were free.

I am not sure if I have ever written on this site that I am a butcher, if not there you go. I am not the one who slaughters the animals or anything, I am the one that takes the 20-60 pound crude cuts of beef/pork and makes them into the yummy little steak/roast size portions that you see in the local grocery store. The majority of the meat that I deal with is boneless, as it is a far more efficient way to handle it in a small time operation like the one I work in. The pieces of meat, though, are also whole, like a whole striploin (muscles on the lower back of a cow/pig that are on the inside of the rib-cage), I don’t want to go into to much detail, just to say that I know where each piece of said cow/pig came from. Since the day when it was discovered that there was at least a single case of bovine spongiform encephalopathy found in the U.S., when anyone asks me which type of ground beef I prefer, I will always say that I prefer the one that I make daily from cow muscle, where the one that is called “Extra Lean Quality Ground Beef” is the leaner type of beef, it is also the type that may be mechanically stirpped from the carcass, and far more likely to have neural matter from the slain beast in it. That would make it, in my mind, far more likely to be able to cause the same disease in humans.

Looking around online today, I found this article which does not really put my heart at ease. Read the whole thing for context, I am going to take a few quotes from it.

The government last year conducted mad cow tests on tissues from 20,543 animals, virtually all of them cattle that could not stand or walk and had to be dragged to slaughter. After the case in December, the department initially doubled the number of animals to be tested this year to 40,000.

Well it is good to see that we have taken a firm stance on this. We want to make sure that animals that very obviously have serious problems are tested before they go to slaughter. Maybe they just tested the whole puddle of DNA they got by having to drag the animals to slaughter, since they could not walk on their own. I feel so much safer now.

The department announced plans Monday to test more than 221,000 animals over a 12- to 18-month period beginning in June.
Included would be 201,000 animals considered to be at high risk of bovine spongiform encephalopathy, or BSE, because they show symptoms of nervous system disorders such as twitching.

Random tests also will be conducted on about 20,000 older animals sent to slaughter even though they appear healthy. Those tests are aimed at sampling cattle old enough to have eaten feed produced before 1997, when the Food and Drug Administration banned the use of cattle tissue in feed for other cattle.

So they have raised the bar, a bit, now testing animals that are at “high risk” of the disease, to me that means that the animals have already been privately tested and have come out with clean bills of health, otherwise the american beef industry would be ruined. I may have the wrong take on this, though, as they are not saying whether these tests will be at random. I bet the 20,000 old cattle that they are willing to test, who were sent to slaughter, were checked by the american beef farmers also.

“We want to see the U.S. government introduce the same system for beef safety, or at least an equivalent system, that we have in Japan. We test all slaughter cattle, regardless of age — not some,” he said.
Nearly 50 countries imposed bans on American beef after the first U.S. case was confirmed. Poland has lifted its ban and Mexico has relaxed its prohibitions, but major importers like Japan and South Korea have said they will not allow American beef back in until all 35 million cattle slaughtered in the United States each year are tested.

Wait, seriously, if we slaughter 35 million cattle in the U.S. every year, we could certainly do better than to check 200,000 of them to make sure they aren’t going to kill people, right, right…..

The department expects to announce soon a new system of rapid tests that will make the increased surveillance possible. The rapid tests could be done at laboratories around the nation, as well as the department’s National Veterinary Services Laboratory in Ames, Iowa, currently the only facility that can do testing.
The testing could find one case of BSE in 10 million animals, he said. It would establish whether the United States has more cases of mad cow.

DeHaven has said it’s not necessary to test every animal because the department’s targeted surveillance program system would pick up one case of BSE in 10 million animals.

Those are the type of numbers that I like to hear. So we are slaughtering 35 million animals a year, but only one in 10 million of them will kill you if you eat it, therefore we don’t need any further tests. WTF? So what comes next, they have to put labels on the sides of the containers that your beef comes in that say “Caution: eating beef has been linked to the immediate death of thousands of people, but we just don’t give a fuck.” Great advertising there, eh?

Witles

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Well there was nothing new posted here yesterday. I am likely the only one in the world that knows this, save my wife and a friend or two. I would love to throw up a glorious reason why that happened, but there just isn’t one. I started to update my Archive page, which required skimming over most all of the posts that I have made then typing brief descriptions of each. That took a hell of a lot longer than I thought it would since I had not done it since, oh, about my 9th post.

I was also trying to get another Arthur Witles story done. Well, I was trying to get a completed story online anyway, but I found myself trying to redo it as I went. That led to the first page being as long as the entire story was. That was really not what I was going for when I started to do the Arthur Witles stories. The stories were all written in under an hour, and when I found that I was spending so much time trying to make it ‘just so’, that it had already taken thrice the original writing time I decided to scrap that. There are a lot of issues with all of my Arthur Witles stories, questions that I will ask myself at the end (after reading it, not writing it) some things just do not mesh. I actually found those little quirks to be pretty funny when I did a first reading of the stories, but they were all done on a typewriter, and it is pretty tough to edit that sort of media once it is complete.

I did get that particular Arthur Witles Story posted, and the only editing that was done on it was making Witles blow bubbles through his pipe as opposed to smoking tobacco through it. I did not realize that I had stories where both of those occured. I tried to style him a bit after Sherlock Holmes, but I didn’t want him to be puffing tobacco, yet I somehow had given him a real pipe in some stories and a bubble pipe in others.

There are so many issues with the Arthur Witles stories, that I am just not going to even try to go into them here. Okay, I will just mention a few, for fun. He is supposed to be modeled after Sherlock Holmes(maybelock houses) who lived, in theory, in the late 1800’s. He has supposedly had little input other than books that he reads regarding pathology and forensics, yet for some reason, I seem to forget that it is him speaking and his speech may come out with terms that are very contemporary, he is also using contractions that were not available in that time. He is living in this time, so he would likely have gotten those terms from everyday life, it just seems to me to be a bit silly that he uses contemporary terms almost interchangibly with period terms.

There are a lot of other issues about Witles that I really don’t care for, but I am going to stop talking about them, since I really do want you to read the damn stories. I just know that I could certainly write them a lot better today than I could ten years (or so) ago when I first made the character. In fact, I don’t think that I have progressed enough as a writer to try to do anything other than a humorous character like Witles. There seems to be as big an audience for a two-hour-read humorous paperback as for a two-week-read serious novel. If I can just get my characters defined enough that I can tell who is talking I may be in business.

I got yet another email! That has to be like, what, 5 since this site was created! Eat your heart out CNN.com.I will get back to that email at some point, as it was something that I really would like to bitch about, the subject more so than point.

Time is up, day is done. more tomorrow?

Games

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Well, it has been some time since I have spoken (typed) about the pain in my neck, so I am going to go into it a bit today. The good news is that I no longer feel like my heart is only beating inside my head, that is I don’t have the constant head-ache anymore. As a matter of fact, I have not taken any of the muscle relaxant pills over the last couple of days, and ibuprofin only sparingly. I do have a bit of pain when I wake up in the morning, but I suppose that is to be expected. Once I am up and moving about I can actually forget about the injury altogether, unless I sneeze or cough, but those actions do both involve a bit of head whipping, so again, I guess that is to be expected. With those two exceptions, the only real pain that I am feeling is in the trapezius muscles and it is more like the pain that you get with a muscle cramp than the debilitating, ‘I am going to die for sure this time’, type of pain that I was feeling at this time last week. I think it would be a bit of a stretch to say that I am healed, but I am a hell of a lot closer to it than I was last week. I now think that I can work through the pain as long as I am able to use liberal amounts of Tiger Balm on my neck region after having been up and active (working) all day. Let us call this issue done. -Barring any unexpected recurrences of the pain-

I believe this lack of pain has left me in a much better mood than I have been in over the last couple of days for sure, and as I result I have spent way too much time playing games. There is nothing like a good game to get you back into the swing of things. First, I will talk about the game that I tried after seeing BlackChampagne link to it.

On a side note. If you haven’t noticed by now BlackChampagne is the only blog that I really read. I visit and read CalPundit pretty religiously also, but it is a bit more political than I am trying to be with this site, so I rarely (if ever) link to it. If you have never been there, and you aren’t a seriously right-wing republican, you would probably appreciate someone looking at political news objectively and presenting facts rather than misguided opinions. Time after time I am amazed by the way he can quote articles that send me into a blind rage, but he just presents facts to rebut them, with seemingly no emotion. Some of the advertising on his site does tell you which way he leans as far as politics, but you would never know it to read his writing on very hot political issues. “He is wood that will not bend.”

To the games!

The game that was linked to over at BlackChampagne was Dynomite. It is one of those PopCap games. Some of their games I love, some of them I hate, more love than hate I suppose. I went into this game after never having played the arcade version when I was younger, and as such I had no idea what I was doing for the first few minutes. The first few levels (in puzzle mode) are so easy that it doesn’t really matter if you know what you are doing anyway, so it went well. The game is, I am sure, quite addictive. I would likely have been totally into throwing several hours into mastering it, had I not been experiencing exactly the same problem that I have with Snood. That problem is that I will think I have a shot totally lined up, I will be able to clear out a group of ‘things’, then I fire the shot and it just misses the target. Maybe it catches one of the objects on the way to where I want it to go, maybe it passes the object I am trying to catch the corner of and passes a level too far. End result, I am usually screwed.

It could be that I am just not very good at this type of game, I am certainly not going to deny that. But, when you have that shot lined up that is going to clear half the board and save your ass, and it misses, the frustration is overwhelming. Sure you can load it all and do it again, but it sure is frustrating. I will probably give the game another go tomorrow just to make sure that I both love and hate it as much as Snood, but I really doubt that I will be trying to master every nuance of it.

DiabloII:LOD, on the other hand, took away many hours of my life yesterday, and for no good reason. If you don’t play that game, don’t bother reading below as I am not going to go into a breakdown of the game for what I am going to bitch about.

My brand new paladin has been in act 3 for a lot longer than I would like to admit. I have yet to find a single waypoint. I am playing is single player mode, so the map stays the same and every area that I have explored is outlined on the map, but the monsters come back. I had already gotten the first two pieces of Khalim’s thingy and I had yet to find a single waypoint. The first waypoint that I found was actually in the ‘Great Marsh’, which is a zone that I rarely ever travel through, since most of the time (in my experience) you don’t really need to. I started mapping that zone thinking that I might find another entrance to one of the other zones, specifically the flayer jungle, since I was not at all concerned about having a waypoint in the spider forest.

I spent several hours last night following the edges of the great marsh, and I did eventually find another entrance to the flayer jungle. I followed that route for another twenty minutes or so and found the waypoint, about two steps off the screen from where I went into the great marsh in the first place! I would have really been irritated if I had not gone up two levels (23-25) during this, and had my mercenary (still an act 1 archer) not gone up very near three levels (20- a kill less than 23) in this little walk.

I know that I have previously written about why I started playing single player again, and I think that a little setback like this really kind of defines it. I can not recall having a mercenary this close to my level since the expansion came out, now that I have to walk around until I find the stuff that I really want/need (as opposed to someone just giving me waypoints on b.net, but then who on b.net would have the act 3 waypoints?) I gain levels, and my merc. gains levels, since she is fighting things that are very close to her own level. It is like the game seems somehow ‘Fresh’ again, even though I know where to go and who to kill.

One other thing of note that has happened since I started playing my new off-line character is that I don’t really care about any sort of magic find. That is the polar opposite of my on-line characters. My on-line characters are looking for gear that they can trickle down to the other characters who can use it, or else I will trade the elite unique items for items that I want/need for my new builds. My new pally is all about resistances and extra gold from monsters, all the better to survive and to gamble, respectively. A rare ring from ‘Ormus’ is usually absolute crap on hell level, but on the normal level it could be the difference between life and death against Mephisto. The same can be said for gambling. You would never gamble a belt when you already have a string of ears, or a helm if you already have a shako, but when you have nothing if it comes up with a little bit of life steal or resistance against the next boss in the way, that is good stuff.

When you are a paladin, and you have placed only six total stat points at level 25, you are going to be looking for any advantage you can find. At the same time, I think I could just probably kick it up to players 8 and run lower Kurast for a while, then be like level 30 when I take on Mephisto and likely take him down easily. But, for now, I am still just looking for better gear.

Aren’t we all.

Web searches changing broadcast news?

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Well, like it says above, it is Friday, it is about 7:30p.m. my time and I have had a couple of hours at home to try to come up with something to post here, that has not happened. I have read the news sites that I read on a daily basis, and been sorely disappointed. I have read the blogs that I read on a daily basis, and found nothing of worth to lash out about in them either. Either the world is just getting so damn predictable that I don’t feel the need to point it out, or I am just getting a tad sick of it all (by that I mean any form of media in general, t.v. news, web news, blogs, just everything in the media).

I think what may be happening here is that the major internet sites may be giving in a bit to the pressure of your average consumer. By that, I mean that they are posting stories in their major headlines that are a bunch of crap that I am sure is the result of so many people searching for it. Sure lots of people that are living in the Jerry Springer Watching areas of the US are interested in seeing that Janet Jackson is going to be on T.V. later this month, but is that news? Then there is the story about Howard Stern being the moderator in an interview with her. The lack of links here is directly related to my lack of giving a shit about it. She showed a tit, he talks about sex, what in the hell has the US come to when that is more important than the soldiers that we are killing to try to make sure that rich, white americans can be driving hummers? That seems to be the way the American psyche is swinging and, being American, I can not believe that we have failed so much as a society that we would put material things above human life…But, we are capitalists…

To clarify that last paragraph just a bit, what I was intending to say is that we are having soldiers die in Iraq still, just to protect the oil-fields. While people wealthy enough to buy those gas-guzzling Hummers are actually getting tax breaks. Our media, however, does not think that is nearly as newsworthy as a 60 year old tit that popped out during the super bowl.

I don’t like the way I am going with this so I will stop now. I said at the founding of this site that I would not mention news, then I changed it to not doing political type news. I have strong opinions when it comes to the policies of the administration in charge of my country, but they are my views and everyone else is free to feel/think otherwise and it was never my intention to put anything either way on this site. It is, after all, the freedom of choice that makes our country strong, but when you have to dig through the data-bases of several news sites to find out what atrocities America has done today, I just have to sigh.

Now to the happy clowns!

Damn, I don’t have any happy clown pictures to link to…Okay so just imagine that clown from the old ‘Scoobie-Doo’ show and picture him in your mind, then continue. Now that I think about it, he was a rather freaky looking clown, maybe not the best one to think of. Okay, so picture John Gacy in a full clown outfit, wait, that is a bad example also. How about the rainbow-haired guy that was showing up in sporting events on t.v. in the late seventies-early eighties holding up the ‘john 3:16’ sign, wait, he was later arrested for holding hostages in a hotel.

Okay, quit thinking about clowns.

I was thinking about putting a photo of a very cute puppy here, in a thumbnail, that when clicked would show a photo of a rabid dog. The thing is that I can not find a really good photo of a rabid dog. Poo. Oh well, I am sure that I will find something better to put on this site in the days to come, so I won’t have to do such ruses, but I probably will anyway. I am an ass, after all.

Feedback-PC Vs. Mac; Childhood

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Well the most unfortunate thing happened this morning, I woke up to find that Viacom and Echostar had reached an agreement and my channels were back on the air. I suppose that should have me rejoicing since I can now watch South Park, but the thing is I had another lengthy bitch that I was going to get into yesterday about the issue and now that the issue is resolved it would be a bit pointless to write about it. Fear not, I have more, even less interesting things to talk about today!

First, there was a sign on the bulletin board at my local post office that I found pretty amusing. It said, “New construction company looking for someone who can read a tape measure and not show up for work drunk or high” There were of course phone numbers hanging from the bottom of it, and several had already been plucked off. I noticed that they weren’t even saying how much the job paid, I guess that one must assume that the type of people who would apply to an ad like that would probably be happy with minimum wage, or an amount close to it. I am happy to say that for the first time in my life I actually think that I may be a bit over-qualified for that job.

Yesterdays very short musings resulted in two emails, this time with a bit of an argument regearding the Microsoft security alert that I bitched about yesterday, the first one said;

Hey. I was just reading your website and caught your quote about Windows vs Mac when it comes to security issues. I just wanted to share with you an opinion that I have become very comfortable in believing. If you think about it, the ratio of Windows users to Mac users has got to be an ungodly large number. The hackers know this as well as anyone else. When you get a guy sitting behind his desk making a malicious program, most likely the main thing on his mind is to harm the most number of people, and would therefore not even bother writing a virus for other platforms. You always hear news of MS finding this or that security issue because they most likely have a huge team working solely on security, where as the Mac guys are probably sitting back in their chairs laughing at the pains that having a monopoly brings.

Just when I logged into my email to cut and paste that line, I had received the second email, which said, in part;

There just aren’t enough OS X users around to make a statement if a virus is released. We’re only 5% of the market.
Having said that, my friend who works in Mac support for a major university says that OS X is incredibly stable and most importantly, safe. According to her, it would take years to hack through some of the encryption codes the OS uses.

I read both of those and I really think it is a bit funny at the approach each person is using at presenting the same argument. The first email is obviously from a Windows user, and his angle seems to be that no one cares about Macintosh, but they would be just as easy to hack if someone put their mind to it. That may or may not be true but the fact is that you just NEVER hear about any problems with the security on Mac machines. I mean any type of security even like stolen credit card numbers and bank info and all of those type of things seem to only happen on Windows based systems.

After reading the second email, which is from an OS X user, it seems that the mac users concede that their is such a small base of users that even if their security ever failed it wouldn’t make headlines. I am not sure if that was really what the emailer was trying to get at, but that is kind of what I got to after having read both emails. The thing is that there is nothing further from the truth than that.

I strongly believe that if a single OS X system anywhere on the face of the earth encountered security issues, Microsoft would be on it like maggots to rotting flesh. Macintosh has been a thorn in the side of Microsoft for decades and the thought of them not attacking mac if even one person ever had security issues is ludicrous. It would be in every Microsoft commercial and ad campaign from here until the end of time. If you are thinking, no, Microsoft would not attack them for something like that, since they have had so many problems of their own…Sober up…

Do you remember a couple of years ago when Macintosh starting doing those commercials where real people told the story of why they switched from Windows based PCs? Microsoft immediately started hiring actors and giving them false stories to read about why the switched from Mac back to the PC. I can’t find any articles about it right now, but I seem to remember that they got in a lot of trouble for not specifying that the people in the commercials were actors and not actual Mac users. Now if a company will openly break the law when faced with someone else talking about the shortcomings of their product, I would bet my nuts that they would take every advantage of the shortcomings of their competitor’s product. The mere fact that they have not yet been able to do so is, I think, the best advertising the Mac has ever had.

One other thing of note to put up here. I was looking through my site stats today and noticed that I have a referral from a googlebot and two search strings that led to people clicking my site. Woo-hoo google has finally found me! I feel a bit sorry for the people who searched for “comedy central is gone” and “nail gun movie -massacre” as I probably didn’t have quite the information that they were looking for on my site. But, you see, that is why I chose to name the site shadowtwin.com even though donnieburgess.com was available. I really didn’t think anyone would click on a link to donnieburgess.com since it looks like it is probably just a personal page, where shadowtwin.com could really be anything. Except animal porn.

A thought occured to me today as I was again thinking about children. More specifically I was thinking about everyone and their sister asking my wife and myself why we don’t want to have children. I had long thought that it was just some internal drive that some people have and some don’t. I don’t mean like libido, but some sort of maternal/paternal thing that some people just have more than others. I had often noticed that more affluent couples seem to have less(if any) children than poorer couples in the same area and had surmised that more money meant more joy, so they did not need children to brighten up their lives. I don’t really think that I believe that anymore.

The next series of thoughts involved a child’s upbringing contributing to whether or not they would, in turn, want to have children. I really believe that far too many people are having children because they are not happy about the way they were brought up. Like when you were a kid, and at some point you said, “when I have kids I won’t treat them like this.” to your parents -come on, you know you did- some people just seem to take that to the next level and have children so they can spoil them just to piss off their parents.

Sometime while thinking about upbringing, I think I found the reason that I don’t want to have children. Life -much like shit- happens. Most of the time you don’t have control over your current situation, it is more in the reverse, your situation has control over you. If you are buying a house, buying a car basically being a consumer, you are bound to your job as if it was your own skin. If you lose that job for whatever reason, you have to find other work. If other work is far away from your current location you really don’t have a choice, you would have to sell your house and relocate. That is why I don’t want to have children.

I really hated my childhood after about the third grade, and by no small coincidence that was when I started moving around a lot. I am sure that many people have had to experience being the new kid in school and were able to overcome it. That never really happened for me. I was always the new kid, over and over, new friends that I would lose in a couple of months, learning from different school books, it was just horrible. Here I will do my best to list my scholastic career:

1st grade: Riverside elementary
2nd grade: Fir Grove elementary
3rd grade: Fir Grove elementary
4th grade: Eastwood elementary, Benson elementary, Tombstone elementary, Benson elementary, Cochise elementary
5th grade: Cochise elementary
6th grade: Rose elementary
7th grade: Riddle middle school, Fremont middle school
8th grade: Fremont middle school, Winston middle school
9th grade: Douglas High
10th grade: Douglas High
11th grade: Douglas High, Roseburg High
12th grade: Roseburg high, Douglas High, Roseburg High

With the exception of the last two years, all of the different schools that I attened were due to moving about with my mother or father. Of course the grammar school years are when you are supposed to be developing all of your social skills, and I was doing quite well with it, right until the fourth grade. When it all went to hell. If there is anyone still reading this, I will break down why the moves were made from school to school to the best of my recollection -and, as per what my parents told me at the time.-

Riverside closed down after my first year there, it was quite close to a very busy street and a river, and the parents had a vote and it was closed. Half of the kids went to Fir Grove, half of them went to Rose, varying by region. My parents divorced while I was in the third grade and my mother drove me to Fir Grove for the remainder of the year, but we moved very close to Eastwood over the summer break, so that is where I started school the next year. After about two months of school at Eastwood, I got a note that I was supposed to go to the office and I was in horrible fear about what I had done, but it turned out that I had been pulled out of the school by my mother and we were moving to Arizona.

We found a house in a place called Dragoon and it had bus service to Benson, but the house was condemned after we had lived there for a month or so and we moved to Tombstone. Only about six weeks in Tombstone I think, and the house that had been condemned in Dragoon was repaired to where we were able to move back in, so back to Benson. Benson quit sending a bus to dragoon since they were only picking up 3 kids and it was a forty-minute round trip, so the parents started car-pooling us to Cochise. I spent a few months and then an entire year at cochise, but 1st-8th grade there were only 52 kids in the whole school, so not a lot of friends to be had.

I spent my entire 6th grade year with my father and went to Rose, some of the friends that I had had in the first grade still went there, but we knew each other only in name, and it was not quite what I had hoped it would be.

Seventh grade was spent with my mother in Riddle, I don’t remember exactly why we started going to Freemont from there (yes I do, it was because Freemont had a free lunch program and Riddle didn’t) so I spent the last six weeks or so there. Eighth grade started with Freemont, but I went back to live with dad which put me in Winston, where I graduated with my class and spent the first two and a half years at Douglas high with them. That was when it was my fault that I moved so much.

I didn’t actually move after that, it was just that I was working full time after my dad died, and I was missing too much school. If I missed more than 12 days in a semester I would not get credit, but Roseburg High and Douglas High are only about 15 miles apart, so if I got close to the 12 days per semester I would transfer to the other school which would give me a clean slate.

That is something that I would not want to put a child through. If I were wealthy enough that I would never have to worry about something like that, I would surely have a different opinion about children. But I am not, and I don’t.

Windows; million dollar bill

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I really had high hopes for today. I found a couple of news items that I really wanted to bitch about, and had a thought for what to put below. Then my father’s twin sister called me on the phone and it all went to hell.

I really wanted to bitch about several news items that I saw today, but I am not able to because of the time.

Well, I may be able enough to give it a go. So here is the first headline;

Microsoft Says Latest Software Flaw ‘Critical’

SEATTLE (Reuters) – Microsoft Corp. (Nasdaq:MSFT – news) upgraded a recent security warning to “critical” after discovering new ways in which an attacker could run malicious software on a vulnerable computer, the world’s largest software maker said on Wednesday.

So when is the last time that you heard about a problem with the security on a macintosh system? Is that a rhetorical question or does the Imac team just handle it a lot better? I don’t really know myself, but, I think I may find it out soon.

Was she thinking that they would make change for this or what? I mean it is a Million Dollars. so they would check with their supervisors and give her back over 900,000 in cash? Not a good ruse to try at a Wal-Mart. It is not even a really clear copy of the bill in question, but I would think that even your average “Circle K” employee would notice that it was a bill that far exceeded the twenty bucks or so that they keep in their till. It does look like real american money, but that is what they are going for when they make the fake million dollar bills, isn’t it?

Should we kill the people who made that bill? No way, that is the ‘ignorance of the consumer’ in action. The people will find a way to sucker anyone in for any reason. If your ignorance plays a part then you are less of a person than I thought you were…

Comedy Central; Pictures

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Well it turns out that Flux over at Blackchampagne had a link to my site in his blog today. The good news is that it did make me have quite a spike in site traffic, the bad news is that there was not much worth reading on my post. Whether there is ever anything worth reading here could be debated till the end of time, so I won’t go there. It is the thought that counts.

I awoke this morning (I am using the term ‘morning’ very loosely here) and flipped on my television to find out that some jack-ass had taken comedy central off the air. There had been ads running on Comedy Central all week that said that Dish Network was going to quit carrying the channel, but I just assumed that was a ploy to get a bunch of people to call Dish Network and say “I want my Comedy Central!”. Well if that was the case I guess not enough people called, or Dish Network just didn’t seem to care, since it is certainly gone now. Other networks that were ripped from the lineup include Mtv, Vh1, Nickelodeon and a bunch of others. To put it bluntly, my “top 50” package is now more of a “top 35” due to this.

Wy wife called to ask if the stations were really gone, and I assured her that yup, we’re fucked. But, at least we still have our CBS affiliate, as they have removed CBS from the lineup in many major markets including New York and Los Angeles. So it could be worse, I guess.

Once home from work I really wanted to go see just what the whole fuss was about, and I found it in heaps. I went to Yahoo News and did a search for ‘Viacom’ (who own the stations in question) and found at least a dozen stories there that had been added within the last three hours. Every on of them was about Viacom and Echostar’s (the company that owns dish network) dispute. I read about ten of them, starting with the earliest post. It just sickened me. The following quotes are taken from this article

Viacom officials said EchoStar was fighting over what amounted to 6 cents more per customer per month.

I am not sure which side is telling a version of the story that is closer to the truth, but if I just take viacom’s claim and Dish Network’s claim and average them it still comes out to being an increase of like 30 cents. 30 cents for all of those channels on a monthly basis, a penny a day, hell I would pay that in a heartbeat if it would get Comedy Central back on.

I can certainly see where each side is coming from after having read all of the articles though. Viacom is constantly stressing the pennies per person per day thing, while Echostar is talking about Hundreds of millions of dollars over the next four years. I am pretty sure that they are using the exact same number but it sure seems a lot bigger when you say hundreds of millions of dollars. Don’t get me wrong, I bet that if everyone that subscribed to Dish Network would send my six cents per month I could easily retire and buy that new Ferrari Enzo I have had my eyes on.

I had been siding with Echostar on this, thinking that Viacom was really trying to be a mean old bully and beat us up for our milk money, then I saw this particular quote;

EchoStar said it planned to give $1 monthly credits to customers who lose CBS programming, and another $1 for those who subscribe to additional Viacom channels. Besides CBS, media conglomerate Viacom also owns MTV and the Paramount movie studio.

So what they are telling me is that I am going to get a dollar a month credit for losing 15 channels? One dollar off of my $34.98 bill for losing 15 channels? I mean what the fuck? There are probably a lot more than 15 channels, those are just the ones that are on the list we look through daily, and that is only one dollar? I am starting to think that both sides may just be mean old bullies trying to steal my milk money.

What burns me worst of all about this whole situation is that I only signed up for Dish Network for two reasons. The first reason was that it was about three dollars a month cheaper than my local cable, the second was that they had Comedy Central. Now what am I to do? If they do not bring back Comedy Central I may well just go back to local cable since I could then get high speed internet access in a package deal with the cable and save myself a bit of cash. In case you had not yet noticed, this whole thing just really has me pissed off.

I got yet another email today, that is like two in two days. I don’t know how I am going to deal with this constant barrage of email… Seriously, though, this one was from an old friend who was wanting to know if I had any pictures on the site since his wife has never seen myself or my wife. I feel quite obligated to throw a couple of pictures up here because, well, I don’t really know why. So here are a couple of pictures. As always click on them for a full size pic.

Here is one of me playing guitar. This picture is a bit dated, but I really don’t look that much different now, unless you want to count that strange third arm that recently grew out of my forehead. The problem is that while I am usually quite photogenic, that requires that I be near a camera while someone is clicking it, and for some reason that is something that I really try to avoid.

Here is yet another rather dated photo of me, maybe three or four years old. I am standing in front of the grand canyon if you were not able to guess. I really actually hate this picture because it makes me look like I have one of those little Fu-man-shu moustache type things. I am pretty sure that I hadn’t shaved that day, but still.

Here is one of my wife and myself at the wedding ceremony. For some reason the camera has made the color of my flesh look a lot more red than it actually is, but it did the same thing to the Pastor. This may have been one of the photos taken with the cheap disposable cameras that we left on all of the guests tables, I am not really sure. It certainly does look like I have been holding my breath for about three minutes though. This was the best photo I could find that really showed how beautiful my wife’s dress was. Of course you need to look at the full size shot to see that.

Well, that should be enough photos to sate you all for roughly the rest of your natural lives. I had never actually seen these shots side by side before, and I think that I really look just about the same in all of them. Sure I have more gray hair now than I did in the photos, but with just a bit of selective plucking or some “just for men gel” I could probably take a photo in a similar pose and be able to fool people into thinking that they were taken at the same time. If I am ever reduced to that, though, it will probably be at about the same time as I buy a convertible and start cruising for women twenty years my junior. Since I am quite happily married, and I really think that it would be sick and wrong to look for dates at a gradeschool, I will let that thought go for now, and hopefully the rest of my life.

Now on a side note. If any of you are reading this after having linked through from blackchampagne yesterday, I would really like to know your thoughts, good or bad, about my little site thing. What, if anything you like, what, if anything you hate kind of thing. I do enjoy email.

Odd news; Warlock

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Before I start to go into something else, I want to mention that when I read my update from yesterday I noticed that I had left out a detail I really wanted to include in my bitching about the movie ‘Signs’. The particular detail was about the fact that water is toxic to the aliens. The part that I forgot to mention was humidity -you know, the amount of water in the air-, so depending on what particular month the story supposedly happened there should have been enough moisture in the air to kill them on the spot. Then there is the issue with rain…but it is going way beyond what the small time/scale of the movie was going for, so we will assume that they just never thought it would rain. But, enough about that.

In other developements, I found that I have a site reader that I did not know I had. This person sent me an email with a request. Despite the request I am not going to quit doing these updates ;), The request was for more doggy pictures and stories, and the story of how I ended up two ‘vicious pit bulls’ is one that I think could be entertaining, or at least informative, so I will go into that below.

There is a very odd and short news thing that I have to put here today;

SYDNEY (Reuters) – An Australian handyman admitted he was stupid to shoot himself in the head with a nail gun in a misguided prank that left him with a nail lodged in his brain.Brad Shorten, a father of three from Victoria state, was enjoying a few beers with friends after working on his house when they began joking about industrial accidents.

Shorten, 33, picked up a nail gun that he thought was empty, pointed it at his head and pulled the trigger.

He later said he had turned off the gun’s compressor and taken out its nail cartridge but did not realize there was still enough pressure in the gun to fire a nail.

“My mates and I were talking about construction site accidents and taking your eye out with a nail gun, and I foolishly put the gun to my head and pulled the trigger,” Shorten told the Sunday Herald Sun newspaper.

“I did a very stupid thing,” he said.

The bizarre mishap left him with a 1.25-inch nail counter-sunk through his skull just behind his temple.

Royal Melbourne Hospital neurosurgeons removed the nail in a delicate four-hour operation even though Shorten, who was expected to make a full recovery, had offered to take the nail out with a pair of pliers.

Isn’t it funny that they were joking about this exact thing when some jack ass decides that holding a nail gun to his head and pulling the trigger would be a good idea? I think he should be put to death (or at the very least castrated) to keep his idiot gene from passing to another generation. I am all about protecting the children after all…

Puppies!

You know, some people think that canines are no longer ‘puppies’ when they hit the fifty pound mark, but I know the truth, as long as you have control over them they are still puppies. Sure one of my puppies has eclipsed the 50 pound mark and ran with it, but he is well behaved and as such Is still my ‘pup’, well technically that is my wife’s pup, but the idea stays the same. A well controlled dog, regardless of size, will always be your puppy.

Here is the story of how we got our first dog;

When my wife and I moved from a studio apartment to the house that we are now buying, we thought that (well she thought really) that a dog would be a good addition to the non-existent back yard. We kicked the idea around for at least a month, maybe six weeks, before we decided to go ahead and get a dog. Once the decision was made that we were going to get a dog, we went to an animal shelter in the Mesa/Phoenix area to try to find one. We chose to go to the shelter to find a pet for the simple fact that if they are not adopted they will be put to death sleep. It seemed more logical to us to take a pick of the dogs in the pound than to pay someone for a pure-bred.

We walked all up and down the aisles at this place. I was hoping to find a small dog and I am not sure what my wife was looking for. She ended up picking out this guy, who we named ‘Warlock’. He was the only dog in the entire place that was not barking or jumping, he was just laying there in his cell waiting for someone to let him out. He did drag my ass when I was trying to lead him to the car, but once there he just jumped into the back seat and layed down to sleep for the duration of the roughly one hour trip home. Once home, I broke out my cheap-ass digital camera and took the above shot of him (which really doesn’t do him justice).

We were initially worried that he would mess in the house, but that never happened. He has never made a poop or a pee inside the house, though he did once vomit, but he licked it up before we could clean it up.

He was not only house-trained, but he was also quick to learn commamds like ‘sit, stay, lay down, shake, My wife actually has him trained so that he will do a certain trick depending on how many fingers she is holding up. I think those are some damn good results from a dog that was on the “half price” rack at the pound. (at our pound they go on the ‘half price rack’ the day before they are to be executed euthanised).

The story of how we got Zelda will come sometime in the next few days, but, for now you should just appreciate your pets and thank the random fluxuations of time and space that they are still in your home.