Diary of a Wolfeman

This weekend Pookie and I went by her old school to check out the park next door that they were re-opening after a long bout of refurbishment. Silly me forgot to bring my new camera to take pictures, but I was absolutely astounded at what I saw:

An actual, honest-to-$Diety all-steel play structure, and not a single foam pad in sight. There are no swings, but there are these chairs that sit on threaded poles; you can theoretically spin them all the way to the top and then spin all the way back down again in a maneuver guaranteed to induce nausea. There’s also a vertically-stationary spinny thing with $Diety’s Own Frictionless Grease on the bearings, because this thing really gets moving.

The best part? The climbing walls that are bolted to the thing go all the way to the top, about 8 feet in the air. Those top bars, however, curve downward at a nice angle. So nice, in fact, that moments after I noticed them, I noticed that one of Pookie’s classmates was scooting right up them so she could perch on the top. (I noticed a moment later that her dad was 15 feet up in the tree behind me - the monkey gene runs true in that family.)

Everywhere I looked at this thing, I saw places where an uncautious child could splatter themselves all over it. The only safety feature is the three inches of bark dust on the ground.

Every where I turn, I see nothing but Nanny-State mandated warning messages (lid of my coffee cup:Warning, contents may be hot) and here I am at a playground made of solid steel with no padding that can be climbed in about 10 seconds by an 8-year-old.

I think I almost wept with joy.

Our Dungeons and Dragons 4E boxed set arrived this week, and I’ve just finished the Player’s Handbook. Looks pretty good so far - I read the 2nd Edition books once and didn’t like the changes, then was kinda out of the circuit during the 3E and 3.5E days, so I can’t compare to those, but I like the way it’s changed since good ol’ AD&D. They’ve added some complications compared to the original, but streamlined it in other places.

Most impressive change: 1st-level mages and clerics are actually useful! I really like the idea of the At-Will, Encounter and Daily powers for every character. This takes away the sting of playing low-level characters who used to have just one thing.

Even better is the knowledge that even the ancient Romans were geeky - check this out.

I’ve recently been thinking about getting a digital camera for taking the occasional snapshot and posting pics of my leatherwork, and today I got assigned to do a site survey of a new client. Actually it’s a two-fold client, as the end-users hired $BigNationalMSP to handle their stuff, but $BNM doesn’t have anyone local - so they hired us at $SmallerLocalMSP to do the legwork in the event a remote session can’t fix things.

Anywho, $BNM has a 20-page survey form, and the last page says “take pictures of everything you can”, so I figured why not? Cameras have been coming down in price lately anyway, so off to the store I go.

What I got was a nice little Samsung S860, which had the two features I really wanted: Digital Image Stabilization (I’ve wobbled almost every picture I ever took with other cameras), and it takes SD memory (because I have a spare 2GB card already). It has some pretty simple controls, and a goodly number of features for taking pictures in various lighting conditions - it can even take movies. Best of all, it’s black :)

Now, the funny bit came when I decided it was time to try offloading some of the test pics I’d snapped around the house. I read the manual, and it was the usual crap for Windoze: load the driver disk, install the software, uninstall any crap I don’t want, etc. On a whim, I took it down to the garage and hooked it up to the new laptop that runs Kubuntu.

A couple seconds went by as it thought about it, and Lo and behold! A window pops up asking if I want to download pictures from the device with DigiKam. <click> and the program launches, scours the camera, and shows me a selection of the pics it found on the camera.

Poking around in the software a bit, I discovered that it has some fairly intuitive image-manipulation routines, so I don’t even have to wade through The Gimp to do a little touch-up and resize. What a relief! (The Gimp is exceedingly powerful, but also very complicated; for my needs it’s like using a bomb-pumped laser cannon to swat a gnat. Sure it looks cool, but I think I missed the target…)

So far, I like ‘em both. The camera was just $100, so I should get my money’s worth and then some out of it.

Now I think I need to design a camera case for it. Where’s my pencil…

So, a busy few days. Let’s do a little recap:

Friday through Monday: The Pirate Gathering at Horning’s Hideout. Nice venue - it’s a privately-owned park. Would have been a lot nicer had the rain stayed away, but we still had a good time. There was actually enough of us camping that there was usually something going on in our main pavilion, so I was rarely bored. Always a good thing.

I did get to spend a fair amount of time playing with leather stuff, you’ll have to read the other blog for that.

Tolerant’s niece joined us this year, and had fun by all accounts, despite our inept attempt to find her a playmate. We’ll have better luck playing matchmaker next time.

Tuesday, I took the day off to recover from the long weekend, and ended up tripping down to Fry’s and buying myself a new laptop to replace the poor, aging Dell I have in the garage. Then I spent most of the rest of the day bashing the Vista install and installing Linux on the thing so I can actually use it :)

I started off with Kubuntu, and had it mostly bashed the way I like it when something irritated me and I went for OpenSuSE instead. Well, that went over like a lead balloon. (Wait - Mythbusters proved it possible. Make that a concrete balloon.) I was in dependency hell inside of 5 minutes just trying to get the ATI drivers installed. So, back to Kubuntu I went, and as of 30 minutes ago, I think I have it tweaked just right.

This will, of course, last for about a day.

For those who may be interested, I followed this guide to get the config down. Extremely thorough, with lots of pictures. Actually a bit too thorough, there were several things I left out because I don’t use them.

Oh, and the laptop? A Toshiba Satellite A215 with a Turion64-X2 proc, 2GB RAM and 160GB HDD. Not bad at all.

Not a whole lot of interesting stuff going on. Tolerant and I have been prepping for the upcoming Eventing Season, and that means finishing up all the projects we started over the winter - clothes, gear, etc. I finished the scabbard for the cleaver, you can check it out here. Tonight I managed to get a decent inventory of the gear in the garage, so that leaves tomorrow night for the preliminary packing and maybe a grocery run.

Zoom!

Do not, I repeat DO NOT let your bracing finger slip whilst punching a hole through leather and stab yourself on the inside of the first knuckle joint.

DAMN that hurt like a bitch until the nerve settled down. Or in this case, went numb. I can’t feel the outside of that finger now. I’m sure it will be fine in a couple of days, but nnggyahh!

Just a quickie here, since everyone else has reviewed it already.

Technical cinematography: Damn, this is a gorgeous movie. Props to the prop men, lighters-in-the-air to ILM, and something else to the other guys. I’m a bastard for pointing out bad edits, and I couldn’t find any. Technically, this movie is amazingly well put together.

Downey as Stark: hammer, nail, head. Pow. Hmmm… an actor known for his boozing and womanizing playing.. a billionaire inventor known for his boozing and womanizing. Gee, tough stretch. He does, however, nail the flipside of that role pretty solidly as well.

Paltrow as Potts: Again, a solid bit of casting. She’s never the damsel in distress, and never the token eye-candy. Solidly played.

Howard as Jim Rhodes: The downer cast member. Honestly, I thought he came off a bit gay, which just doesn’t seem to fit for a character that is A:) a ranking military officer chosen to be the liason to Stark Industries, and B:) the guy who will eventually be War Machine.

Bridges as Obadiah Stane: he dies in the end. Thank you. My sense of hearing is a bit weird - I hear pretty well, around the top end of the human ability. The problem is in the filtering: out in the woods, I can hear you coming long before you’ll see me. In a loud room however, I have trouble filtering out the rest of the room and paying attention to the person I’m talking with. To combat this, I have become a half-assed lipreader over the years and use it to fill in the gaps when my ears get overloaded. This means that while you may be watching their whole face for expression, I’m just watching the mouth, and I can’t stand Jeff Bridges’ mouth. He talks like an old man who forgot to put his teeth in. Plus he looks terrible as an old bald guy.

The Verdict: Two paws up. Go see the movie, and don’t worry about paying full ticket to do so. I may go back and watch it on the DLP screen.

So there I was, figuring I had heard and seen the last of the Beastie as I drove off the dealer lot in my new Kia January of last year when Lo and Behold, a letter comes for me.

A bill for towing and storage fees, and notice of auction for one black 1987 Cavalier.

It seems the dealership sold the car to someone, who never bothered to re-register the vehicle in the 14 months since I traded her in, then went and ditched her someplace where she got towed. Of course, the towing company waited a solid 15 days before sending me the letter, and haven’t returned my calls for two more days (they charge by the day for storage, so they are not in any hurry) so now whoever bought the Beastie would have to pay over $500 to get her back… and she was worth maybe $250 when I traded her in.

Poor thing. She’s going to end up on the auction block.

So, new spam filter, right? When I first installed it, the image at the bottom of the right sidebar had white corners, which looked bad against the black background. I whipped off a quick note to the plugin author requesting that the background of the image be made transparent to solve this.

Within mere hours, the author wrote me back saying “that’s a great idea! It was fixed, here’s a new build for you.”

My kinda service, lemmtellya.

In the ensuing conversation, I mentioned my gripe with the WP upgrade process (his plugin’s auto-updater worked great), and he tripped me to another plugin (by a different author) that automates the process. You can find it here.

If you can read this, it worked. There was a slight hiccup at the end - it was supposed to re-enable all the plugins, but that part didn’t work. I have a feeling it was my fault, so I’ll reserve judgment on that until next time.

What a relief!

While it hasn’t been published anywhere else, there is a small blurb on Dave’s blog that he will be dropping support for Spam Karma 2 and moving away from WP in general. Serendipitously enough, I ran across the WP-Spam-Free plugin via a link on my dashboard and have installed that.

As a true test of it’s mettle, I have also disabled the Bad-Behavior plugin. We’ll see how things go.

This all comes about after a whole weekend of site-updating activities. As I said in the earlier post, I launched the new Rogue Leather blog, and have downloaded and tested about 30 different themes over the weekend. So far, I’m liking this one and the one I have over at RLdc pretty well. Haven’t had to tweak too much.

Getting back to Dave and his dropping WP, he does go on to explain his reasons, or rather, he points to someone else’s reasoning here: Yong Fook’s 10 reasons to ditch WP

One point of all that I can certainly agree with is the upgrade process. In my case, not 2 days after I finally updated this blog to 2.5, 2.5.1 was released. And the damn admin dashboard tells me on every page that I really should upgrade.

Well, if it didn’t mean uploading the whole thing all over again and cherry-picking folders and files out, then I might. I just don’t want to deal with that right now.

Among other annoyances is the update to the post-writing portion, in which they have taken the “Categories” section out of the right admin sidebar and put it down below the edit box. Why? It was perfect where it was. With proper sizing of the edit box in the previous version, I could get all the important post-writing oprions into one screen of my laptop, and now I’m scrolling up-and-down on every post instead of just the ones I wanted to post pictures in.

Bastards.

Ok, enough ranting for now.