Five Years

 It has been over five years since my last post.  I have been putting my stray thoughts in nice notebooks, writing with fountain pens, instead of writing anything here.  Still, I have more ideas than time.  There are two at-home projects that I'm going to begin to bend my will toward.  One to develop my computer/technical expertise, one to exercise my RPG creativity.  Blogger is not where I intend to hatch or explore these activities.  I'm going to host my own blog, and export all of my blogger content to the new platform.  The first step will be to build a routine to make room for this time, small steps to follow.  With school starting up again, it should be easier that the last six months have been.  Now I need to setup a slot in the calendar to write again...

Projects

I need to write some code. The first project is a front end and data warehouse for Eve Online for useful economic data. Most of what is out there, is not really useful, especially if you have experience with manufacturing or economics. The second project is to dust off my programming project from my senior year in college and rewrite them with new programming tools and new hardware. Particularly the chaos theory and encryption tools, with OpenGL and CUDA support. I am discouraged with the prospects of finding a currently supported UNIX/Linux for the Mac mini. The MacPPC architecture is not high enough in the food chain to have a lot of active support. There is no FreeBSD package repository for it, and one of the key ports application lost the web URL for the source. I'm down to OpenBSD, Lubuntu, and Xbuntu. This is the Mac mini where the office of Steve Jobs answered my e-mail to expedite my order because baby Lucy was on the way around the time of the back ordered shipment. I have a bit of sentimental attachment to that box.

Back from a long pause.

Now with that wretched cretin Barack Obama out of office, and the vile evil of Harry Reid too, I feel like I can breathe again. I just could not stand to get roped into the political discussions at work. I just retreated further into hermit mode. Eight long years of scum and villainy over, and an even darker future with Hillary narrowly avoided. Now with the economy on the razor's edge, and a decade of future capital blow into oblivion, I am slightly hopeful. While I did not vote for the buffoonery of Trump, if he shrinks the size of Government, reduces regulations, and perhaps approaches a balanced budget... maybe...

But what will certainly happen in the next four years is that I will be endlessly entertained by the wailing, teeth-gnashing, and cloth-tearing progressives who are completely at a loss at what to do. Hillary outspent Trump almost two-to-one and failed to pull off a victory. The next round will be a big breaking point for the morally bankrupt Democratic National Committee. Wikileaks has make that whole campaign an interesting read.

So while Trump mocks the press, the Progressives whine, and I sip my tea, maybe I can get some writing projects done and finish up my Pathfinder adventure campaign notes completed. I've let my speculated domains thetruthaboutbarack.com and thetruthabouthillary.com queue up for expiration. I need to keep my thoughts positive. I've blocked CNN, ABC, CBS, NBC, Fox, Techcrunch, Buzzfeed, any many more. People that have gone into a Trump-bashing, hate-fueled fit are blocked too. I haven't unfriended anyone over politics because that is just silly. Conversations are always welcome, but I'm not going to listen to rants aimed to social media anymore. I largely kept my anger quiet, so I'm not going to listen to anyone else's. The DNC helped make Trump president, now they are stuck with him. I laugh every time I think about it. It is a shame the Libertarians did not fare better with the two main candidates being such poor choices. Ah well.

I've got plenty of game material to read, reread Henry Hazlitt's Economics in One Easy Lesson, Murry Rothbard, and several Honor Harrington series novels. Eve online is an interesting study in economics too, although most of the online tools for market analysis are rubbish. Old PC strategy games, and some programming projects will fill the fun time too. Evening walks around the neighborhood are a possibility now with the weather warming up, and I've got a new notebook on the way. Yes, things are coming around. Time for some sleep.

Damned Goverment

I hear a lot of people complain about Government waste, but few who are willing to cut everything down in proportion.  The two party system vigorously defends the programs and bureaucracies that were installed under their watch, and increase them when they some back to power.  Since 2008, there has been no Federal Budget, only a never ending stream of stop-gap spending measures.

Solution: cut 2 Trillion dollars in spending next year.  And if you don't think it can be done, go outside and get some fresh air.  Then beat your head into the ground until you understand.

Untitled

"The strength of a nation derives from the integrity of the home." -Confucius

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48 Hours of Rain Playlist

So after days and days of rain...  I started a tirade of songs/video on Facebook, then I turned it into a playlist on YouTube.

Remembering...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XxFvpHUIG2s

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EdyxPugh1Og

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cx7vUsydtok

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=og1HAkjOuL0

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SmVAWKfJ4Go

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Keolc7BpTcI

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qwoNBaOh1_g

Xmarks staying alive

There is always hope...

http://blog.xmarks.com/?p=2007X

I actually quit looking for a replacement and switched to the hope for a white knight rescue.  Really good technology is hard to find, Xmarks has it.

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Xmarks shutting down

This is more aggravating, since I've just finished installing and synchronizing my bookmarks across all of my machines.  *sigh*...

http://www.xmarks.com/msie/upgrade/1.3.0

I guess I'll be shopping for a new solution this weekend.

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Increasing Security

So, after procrastinating for a great while, I have finally installed Xmarks, LassPass, and CrashPlan.  This is not the most important set of to do items that I have, but they need to be done.

I live on four different computers (not counting virtual machines), and my bookmarks desperately needed cleaning up and synchronizing.  I may actually start using bookmarks again, after resisting them and using my memory and Google.  Xmarks has many good reviews and a fair deal of cross-platform-bowser support.  Whatever it takes to keep me organized is a good thing.

My website passwords were getting sloppy and packing around a logbook was not practical.  After hearing Steve Gibson's review of LastPass on the Security Now podcast, I was convinced that it was the password manager for me.  Xmarks can do it, but at this point someone would have to convince Steve Gibson to switch away from LassPass before I would.

CrashPlan has a home plan for unlimited data on all the household's PC's hosted in the cloud, and it is quite a deal.  I have a LOT of data.  Having offsite backups is mandatory in a backup plan.  Fire, Floods, and Tornadoes will easily wipe out the external hard drive in the desk or filing cabinet.  I've got six computers that will be sharing this account and it will take weeks to move a copy of all my data into the cloud.  I'd like to see a Drobo application for CrashPlan...

Now as I have typed this, I've noticed the media upload option for Posterous.  Images, audio, video, and docs...   Wow, I'm going to have to try this out.

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Humor

http://www.comicallyincorrect.com/comicallyincorrect_002.htm

GenCon

I have spent more time playing games at this GenCon than any other.  My picture taking is waaaay behind.  I am getting some video though.  5 hours of gaming a day takes a big chunk out of the time to stroll the exhibition floor.  I played to Pathfinder Society events, they were quite good.  The groups Seth and I played with were a lot of fun.  I now have two first level Pathfinder Society characters, adopted from the pregenerated pile.  I've been poking around with my Pathfinder account, getting them set up.

Tonight I'm meeting a few classmates from high school, and there is the Star Wars dance party at the Ugly Monkey.  OR possibly finding the 4th Ed dungeon delve or Tower of Gygax game to play.  I've got a new GenCon pastime, its called finding Hazelwood.  I've already found Waldo and have video to prove it.

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GenCon, Day 1

This morning is time for the the pack-and-prep.  I feel that I'm going to be traveling lighter, but that remains to be seen.  D&D rulebooks will be down to the core books for 3 systems, since the iPad will have the accessory books.  The camera bag will be smaller, now that I have the Kodak Zi8.  Doodling supplies will be down to almost nothing.

I don't have any specific purchase items, other than Gaming Paper and Campaign Cartographer.  And I have no specific events tagged.  Most of that will be planned tonight.  Time to get moving, 4 hours until departure.

Move your data out of Facebook.

I have had a couple of cases where my Facebook data left me.  One case the FB brute squad deleted some pictures, and I could not get them to tell me which ones.  The second case is my old data seems to be dropping off the end of some time fence.  You really have no control of your data in Facebook, once it is in there.  There is no way to back it up or export it either.

Now I'm wiring up blogger to host the data that I want to keep.  Photobucket or some other picture site will be my repository for that media.  First is my recipe data.  Then the goofy stuff like Zombie lyrics.  I'll probably resort to posting in Friend Feed, or Posterous and let it post to Facebook.

iPad #1 D&D/Pathfinder/RPG accessory

Thanks to the iPad app, GoodReader, my iPad is now my most important gaming accessory.  No more lugging a backback full of books/adventures around.  As a book reader, the iPad does a superior job of presenting full color books.  With a little practice, I probably will be much more capable navigating PDF's than flipping paper pages.

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Amahi installation, part 2

The second pass went flawlessly.  The Amahi interface is up and running.  But I am out of time for configuring the server, since I am due elsewhere.

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Amahi installation, part 1 redux

Too many package dependencies were failing.  Going back to the beginning, after reading the instructions.  SELinux was buggering up some things too.  I'm sure it will go much more smoothly this time.

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Amahi installation, part 1

Well, I started right out with a non-standard installation.  I loaded Fedora 12 in a virtual machine on my ESXi/PowerEdge-1900 Box, before reading all of the instructions.  It turns out that you are supposed to add the Amahi repo during the installation of FC12.  But my habit is to install FC12, then vmware-tools, then the other stuff.  Now I've added the Amahi repo and letting yum run to its heart's content.  *drum roll*

 

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Amahi Home Server

The torrent for Fedora 12 finished downloading last night.  So today the project is to install Amahi on the virtual machine.  After Waffle House, of course.  This is going to be fun.

https://www.amahi.org/

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New stuff in Windows Live™

I really need to spend some time playing with the goodies in Windows Live.  I know I'm a Google fan-boy, but Microsoft has caught my eye.  Of course I'll have to find out how it runs on OS X and Linux.

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