Hazards of the Infrequent

A long (long) time ago, I did 3D modelling. It was a long forgotten day when my 386 with its 16MB of system memory and 4.2GB of disk was a serious amount of computing power.

By today's standards it's pretty weak, but in a day when hardware acceleration hadn't quite reached consumers it was pretty awesome.

Hazard: I have these stored in RD4 format (I upgraded). Nothing in the modern era seems to be able read these files. God knows that even if I had an install disk for the program that made those that it'd be a miracle to get a machine together that will even run it.

The good news: the files are in ASCII. The bad news: the format was written by a "real programmer" and is unintelligible. Yeah. Awesome.

Sooo....my options are looking like:

fiddle through the data to try to piece together the geometry

keep looking for something that can import them

rebuild the models from the source sketches assuming I can find them

Woo.

Half a Rant

I got a package today. This has learned me four things:
- the mail carrier chick is hot
- either my angry calls to the post office or my judiciously applied handwritten nametag worked
- my doorbell also works (didn't know I had one, the random assortment of pizza doods that have been here always knock)
- my legos are no longer lost in the mail

That would be all except for my half a rant.

I spent two days trying to get Linux installed on a spare machine to be a) a non-windows platform to cross compile on, b) an always on place I can drop the multitude of files I want to keep, c) an X server I can break (no X on my firwall). Gentoo did not play nice. This morning after many hours of not being able to get xorg and fluxbox installed properly, I got pissed off and installed OpenBSD instead. It was installed with X before lunch with xorg and fluxbox no less.

Gentoo definitely seemed cool after about an eight year hiatus from anything Linux. If I cared more about the operating system, I probably could have spent another couple days getting it to work. Then I realized that I'm old and cranky and have got better things to do and...hey! Durn kids! Get off my lawn!

Adventures With Legos, Part 1

This one is dedicated to Mr. Brian's weiner cat who sadly can't play with legos due to a distinct lack of opposable thumbs.



Step 1: Pretend to be able to draw with any kind of perspective (yes, the torso part was hacked from a different scan to save your eyes some pain).

Step 2: Get drunk off your rocker and watch TV for five days straight in a pile of legos. Kids: get your parents' permission first!

Step 3: Build:



Depending on which one you saw first and/or your particular loyalties to the respective brands, this is either:
RFL3N-Rifleman from Classic Battletech

==OR==
Raidar X Battloid from Robotech

==OR==
ADR-04-Mk.X Destroid Defender from Macross


I swear that I've run across a blurb about how FASA settled in court with the Macross doods on Classic Battletech but for the life of me, I can't find it now.

Action pose!



And just in case you think I'm way out there, this dood will actually sell you a lego mech.

Stupid Ebay Tricks

A sane person might think that paying rent in one state, mortgage in another, and being out of work for the better part of a month would prevent me from buying crap on Ebay.

Ebay is evil; that is all.

Now Reporting LIVE From Maryland

For those wondering: I did indeed make it though not in record time. That said, I'm pretty glad I took two days to make the trip with a totally loaded car than just doing it in one.

Since arriving in town late afternoon yesterday I've scouted out the appropriate places:
- an appropriate establishment to buy beer
- a place I can get food
- the local EB Games
- Chipotle

The cable doods were here this afternoon and I've appropriated one 72"x30" folding table and a folding chair on the cheap so it's almost like civilization again.

I Hate Moving

So Monday they came and took most of my stuff. That means I have no chairs or tables which means that I've been either sitting on the floor or standing for the last five days (ow). Even worse yet, today the carpet cleaner guys came and things won't be dry until sometime tomorrow. So now I can't even sit on the carpet anymore and I've had to relocate my sleeping accomodations to the kitchen (hey, it was either that or the bathroom).

Fun. And by that I mean "not".

I'm so buying furniture when I get the keys.

Moving Miscalculation

Today the movers came and got all of the stuff that I won't be tossing, putting in storage, or taking in my tiny little car. The house is now mostly devoid of anything but dirt, spiders, and cobwebs--perfect for the kind of cleaning that I need to do (well, minus the spiders anyway). The bad part, the miscalculation from the title, is that I have neither a proper desk, nor a proper chair, and my microwave is now on a semi bound for Florida. I have no idea why Florida is on the way to Maryland but hey, I don't drive a truck either.

So I can't really warm things up to eat without firing up the stove and my back is rapidly cramping thanks to the contortion that I'm doing to type and see the screen.

I had a grand plan of cleaning and playing a few days of Supreme Commander. The cleaning part is sadly unavoidable, the last part I just don't see happening anymore.

850 miles is a hella long way

It's 850ish miles from Madison WI to Towson MD for anyone who's interested. That's a long goddamn way. I managed to make it in roughly 13 hours including stops (tolls, food, etc). I've done this kind of driving before; it's about the same distance from Fairfax VA to Madison as well--yet another set of one day drives I don't recommend to anyone.

How did I make it so fast? Suffice to say that if I had gotten just one ticket for every state I travelled through today, that the total citation sum would be two to three times as much as I'm paying to stay at this crappy hotel for two nights. At least the hotel has wireless.

I think I'm going to pass out now.

Daylight Savings Sucks

...and I get to do it again in another month when I move from CST to EST...again.

That is all.

Moving

It occurs to me that I've neglected a couple of things. The first is that I'm switching jobs and moving cross country (again). The second is that this is the reason I've not finished February's game or done another thousander club update. This isn't probably news for the majority of people who read here, but for everyone else: now ya know.

The majority of February was spent studying, interviewing, making plans, and generally being very nervous about the whole thing. This is not conducive to getting any real work done. March is so far going about the same as February minus the studying and interviewing parts but with the addition of furious cleaning and fixing of my house to make it more marketable.

Selling my house is going to be a pain; I imagine that it always is. Dealing with the pile of crap that my dad made me take now that he's in his "get your shit out of my house" phase is also going to be a pain. Normally, I'd agree with him since it's my junk, after all. This is fine as long as there's space to put said shit, but moving from a 3 bedroom w/basement and garage house to a 1 or 2 bedroom apartment is already unfun. So I'm going through stuff and seeing what I can toss and otherwise get rid of as much as I can stand.

I will very likely need both storage here in Wisconsin for the stuff my dad can't pick up but still wants (my parents are in their Arizona home at the moment) and in Maryland where I'm landing because I'm going to have roughly 1/3 the space I currently do. Yay. House selling issues asside, I'd rather not be paying rent as well on storage space.

Probably the biggest difference than the last time I moved is that I'm probably going to go with movers this time. I just don't want to drive a big honkin' truck through Pennsylvania again. I'm hoping like hell that this is going to be within my budget and that they don't destroy my otherwise already destroyed stuff. Maybe I should hope that they don't destroy it any more than it's already destroyed.

Total Annihi...er...Supreme Commander

Way back before the dawn of time (i.e., the year 2000) I played a mess of RTS games. One of the most notable of these was Starcraft which I played an undue amount of. What killed it for me was when I realized that I was losing matches because I didn't micromanage the first minute well enough. That sucks.

Enter Total Annihilation.

I dunno if the time was right or whatever but I ended up playing even more TA than I did Starcraft and I never really bored of it (just got distracted with other games, then jobs). In fact, from the time I started playing TA, I've upgraded my main machine in these denominations over the last decade or so: Celeron 300A, PIII 733, Athlon 1333, P4 2533. Each of these has subsequently been ground to a screeching halt by that one game released in 1997 and modded to the moon and back. And it's still fun. Lots of people didn't like TA, however, because it was less action, more strategy, and was 3D rendered in software right around the time that everything had to be 3D accelerated.

Enter Supreme Commander.

Supreme Commander (for those who have no idea what I'm talking about) is the spiritual successor to TA headed by the same dood (one Chris Taylor, not to be confused with my recent student of the same name) but at a different company and with uber modern requirements. I suppose that as a true spiritual successor, it will need to bring yet another three generations of machines to its knees and by all accounts it does so.

So after having pre-ordered it, I built a new machine. In fact, I got the game before I got the parts. The final upgrade straw was that my old machine wouldn't ever have enough video card to run the game (GeForce 6 minimum). This is the first reasonably cutting edge machine I've ever owned to the tune of about $2K (running Vista, but that's a rant for another day). I built it yesterday, got it all configured and downloaded and patched and almost usable and went to play Supreme Commander for the first time. After roughly ten years of antitipation I've now been stuck in the patching portion (done in the background) for, oh, the last two hours. On a blazingly fast machine. That was built specifically to play this game. On my extra premium 3Mbit connection that's normally really nice.

I'm convinced that the universe hates me.

Just a Bit

How much snow did we get, you ask? Ho boy.

Never in my life have I moved more snow in one day and remember that where I grew up, we stick spigots in trees.

This was my front door this morning.




I caught the culprit in action. I didn't get a shot of the other machine but it was pretty awesome too.




This is the left side if you're looking out my front door, checkin' out the uber corner there. My study's window looks out that way if I ever had it not shaded. Note the position of the fire hydrant and how far up it the snow goes.



In this shot, you can barely see my mailbox. Don't worry, it gets worse. On the left of my mailbox, you might not notice my driveway. This was before that other gigantic machine pushed a neck high pile into the bottom there.

So, there's your begin pictures. It might look cold out there and it was, just not as cold as it has been. In fact, I spent most of the next five hours clearing without a coat on. Never in my life have I been more happy that I'm covered in a layer of insulative blubber.

Being realtively warm outside had the benefit of making the snow sticky so it tended to stay where I put it. This also means that there's probably not going to be a lot of drifting--an uber good thing for tomorrow. The bad news is that it was wet. Hella wet. That means heavy and I've got the back strain to prove it.

Note the hydrant on the right. Also note that my lazy neighbors couldn't clear their sidewalk (pansies).





Somewhere in there, I have a mailbox. Hopefully I can't get fined for that.

I Hate Winter

Seriously, I hate it. For those not in the know right now, the midwest is under siege from winter and it's not supposed to stop until late next week (stupid winter).

I left for my class as is my saturday habit at ohgoditsearly o'clock and almost got stuck. Odd, though, because the snowplow doods hadn't done their dumping on my drive yet. Arriving home at just before 4:00 this afternoon, shock, then amusement, then horrification played over my face in what I can only assume is a suitably comic manner. I was too busy being shocked, then amused, then horrified to properly notice.

Sadly, instead of just taking off the top layer like they've done all season long, the doods did two passes--one for the top layer, one for the harder, dirtier, nastier crap that gets packed down when you drive over it. Might I add that this is the heavier bit.

To add insult to injury, they'd also managed to run what I can only assume was a frontloader up onto my curb depositing yet another waist high pile of the aforementioned heavy snow onto the corner of my lot. Now, for those who don't live in the fine state of Wisconsin, as a resident of the City of Madison, I'm required (by law) to clear the sidewalks in their entirety within 12 hours of snowfall lest I get fined. They don't give warnings. I have a corner lot.

Half an hour later, I deposit my car in its rightful place in my garage. An hour and a half after that, and I fulfill my duty to the City of Madison for another day (ow), at least until it snows like crazy again tonight. And tomorrow. And the day after. And the day after that. And the day after that. And if we're lucky, the day after that. That's right, kids, it's supposed to snow every day up until and including Thursday.

Note that my driveway is not clean. Oh no. They won't fine me for not clearing my driveway. When I was done, though, you coulda eaten off that sidewalk. And now, a mere two hours later, it's already covered again.

I'm so moving somewhere tropical.

Roddenberry & Lucas

These days I don't watch a lot of TV and don't see many movies but that wasn't always the case. In fact, I whiled away many a youthful hour locked up in the vivid scenes conjured from someone else's imagination. Most of those years have been subsequently locked up away from my own prying eyes in the bustle of daily existance. So well, it seems, that I can barely recall much of my pre-college days--probably for the best.

It's been a long weekend (thankfully) and I caught two shows on the History Channel. Yesterday was Star Wars: Empire of Dreams. Today was Star Trek: Beyond the Final Frontier. I don't know what it was about those two productions but it reminded me of the wonder I had of cinema and TV that I've all but forgotten. Maybe it was Wil Wheaton's Blog which I discovered a couple months ago (it's on the must-read list). Maybe it was his commentary on ST:TNG. I dunno.

The prevailing theme through all of that was that those two pieces of fiction changed the world. I'm not sure that anyone who lived in this country who were at least as tangentially aware of popular culture as I am would argue against that. So what happened? The only thing I can think of that comes even close was the Lord of the Rings trilogy but even that was written a really long time ago (I doubt many people realize that it was originally written in the WW2 era). Are we so focused on the glitz and the glam that we've lost track of the bigger picture?

I don't know when the hell it was that I got old, but I find myself longing for simpler times; the kind of times that I barely remember.

A Tale of Pastries And Danger

Unless something terrible happens this month, I'll be building a game (yeah, I decided). Here is a snippet from the design doc:

3.1: The Story
You play the part of Thomas Eugene Howard Chuck, otherwise known as T.E.H. Chuck.

T.E.H. Chuck is Head Cakey Taster at the Intergalactic Cakey Tastes Corporation and has just been asked to oversee the Chocolate Covered Sponge Cake (With Tasty Cream Filling) plant on Alpha Nebulon 3. Alpha Nebulon 3 has a large native population that sustains itself on the very tasty chocolate veins that run through the planet; hence the Chocolate Covered Sponge Cake (With Tasty Cream Filling) plant located there.

The good news is that since chocolate is available in a mining state in great quantity, that it greatly reduces ICTC’s production costs and allows for a large degree of automation. The bad news is that the indigenous inhabitants of Alpha Nebulon 3 are both extremely hostile and not very happy about the corporation stealing their foodstuffs . Hence, any ICTC personnel found in the field tend to meet a terrible fate.

The plant on Alpha Nebulon 3 is in a remote area near a particularly rich chocolate deposit but the rest of the planet is undeveloped. Luckily, the surveyors left limited range transporters around in random places that can be used to move back and forth between the survey areas. Not so luckily, ICTC, in a further attempt to reduce costs, had the sentry guard systems in areas around the transporters installed by interns who weren’t very careful. So instead of installing a sentry guard system to protect the loyal employees of the ICTC, they instead ended up installing a veritable obstacle course of deadly disposition that isn’t quite smart enough to pick out human targets to not neutralize.

On the way to the plant, T.E.H. Chuck crashed his large shiny black sport utility spacecraft on Alpha Nebulon 3 while backing up trying to park. Luckily, the ship crashed a short distance away from the plant. Not so luckily, it was a short distance for a spacecraft which is quite a long distance for a Head Cakey Taster through a dangerous environment filled with hostile creatures who dislike the whole “stealing their food” bit.

Baked Beans; Avocados

I realize that few of y'all cook...but...

If you cook and you like baked beans, you should totally go out and get a crock pot and make a batch, right now. Google has a veritable cornucopia of recipes vying for your attention. The batch I got going right now includes maple syrup because, hey, I like maple. I'm almost convinced that if slow cookers didn't end up with food at some point that they'd qualify as bona fide torture devices.

Also, avocados rule.

That is all.

1KClub Update

January started out pretty good but ended up kind of flat. This month's contribution broken down by category:

44 hours: BEER updates

7 hours: GWA updating (to reflect BEER updates)

4 hours: artwork

12 hours: studying advanced topics

Total: 67/83.33
Grade: B-

That's not so good.

I could make a bunch of lame excuses but it's not like I didn't kill at least 15 hours in front of the TV instead of doing something productive. I'm going to try to do better this month.

The good news is that I've finally received my small fortune worth of software. Well, most of it. I hope to be moving to VC2K5 and Photoshop CS2 very soon. I don't know that it will help my productivity (in fact, if I'm honest, I expect it to hurt), but it makes me feel better so that's something.

For this month, I was planning on doing a game. I should, but I'm on the fence about spending another month refactoring BEER which would certainly be beneficial.

OMGWTFWireless

I hooked up my wireless again for the first time in roughly 6 years. I have no idea how I lived without it.

That is all.

Mmm....Paaaaah

Forgot to upload this last weekend when I made them. These would be no-bake chocolate mousse pie. There's a thin layer of ganache at the bottom and a thick layer of mousse on the top. They were pretty awesome. I just thought I'd share.

WoW Drama

I learned today that the group of friends I left behind in WoW who subsequently guilded has broken up. Even though I've been gone for about 3.5 months, I'm still pretty shaken by it all. So suitably, I'm more than a little drunk right now but if/when I gather my thought sufficiently, I'll write up something more meaningful.

Edit: I've decided against making a follow up post. Maybe sometime in the unforseeable future.