Diary of a Wolfeman

All rumors to the cintrary, my last contract position will be paying me after all. That is a huge relief.

I took another contract position today setting up a new office with a few workstations they need networked. Yay!

The Old Man was local today, so I packed up the kids and met him and the Stepmonster for lunch at a truck stop. Managed to talk to her for an hour without her ticking me off, so things went well. Of course, I had brought the Pookster along to distract her :)

It’s damn hot out there.

As some of you know, I spent a couple years while I was in ‘Vegas working for a company that ran video arcades. One of the biggest benefits of this job was being able to play all the new games for about a week to stress-test them before we put ’em out in the field.

Back when Time Crisis came out, I thought it was the best shooter-game I’d ever played. Having that ‘hide’ pedal was a superb twist on the idea of a shoot-’em-up. Last night, I came across the next generation from Konami: Police 911

The basis for this game is that you’re a Tokyo beat cop called in to assist against a Yakuza gang. SWAT is already on-site, but they figure they could use all the guns they can, so your sorry but is going in too – with a sidearm only. Oh – did I mention no body armor? Yup. You better know how to duck, chombatta.

Like Time Crisis, this game walks you through the scenario location by location, allways putting you someplace where you have the use of some sort of cover, whether it be a wall, a bar, or a line of riot cops with shields. Where TC has a pedal for you to step on to toggle between views, P911 has a sensor grid in front of the game to track your actual movements. When you duck, so does your character. The game is exceedingly accurate at this – your point of view only changes as much as you duck, instead of being a simple toggle. This also gives you more options for play, since you can also move right and left to take advantage of cover or optional firing angles. (Hint – early on, there’s a little window to your right with a bottle in it. Shoot through here to take out one of the three thugs coming at you, instead of leaning left and getting hit by all three.)

The only bummer the game has is that you are going after gangsters toting a single .40 calibre sidearm with a limited number of clips. Yep – after a certain number of reloads, you have to stuff your magazines while crouching behind a trash can in the middle of a firefight. Goes towards the realism, I guess.

One other thing, folks: stretch before you play this game. I run up and down stairs all day in my house, and my upper thighs are still twitchy after only one game last night.

To: The RAT-FUCKING BASTARD that stole my backpack.

When you reached into the backseat of my (unfortunately) unlocked car on East Burnside this last Sunday afternoon, you gained the following list of items:

• Stansport Backpack with laptop pocket = $60
• Aluminum forms holder (clipboard), letter size = $25
• Aluminum forms holder (clipboard), 5″x8″ size = $15
• CD Wallet, 32-disc capacity = $20
• Some 20 data CD’s, including my Windows discs (98SE, 2K, XP) a few Linux distributions, some misc. software collections, and a rather eclectic MP3 collection. = No value, they were all copies unsuitable for resale.
• Some misc. floppy disks. = Same
• Half a box of my custom business cards. = $10
• A couple of really good pens and mechanical pencils, with eraser reloads. = $10
• A spiral notebook with various doodlings and notes. = $3.50
• A folder containing more of the same. = $0.35
• A condom. = Neg.
• An old copy of Maximum PC magazine = Neg
• My checkbook = $8.00 for new checks.

Total cost of replacement: +/- $150.00

The checkbook may have had some short-term value, but considering I closed the account first thing the next morning and sent notifications to all the national check-verification companies, it is now useless.

So, other than that, what are you going to get for your effort? Aside from probably the best backpack ever built, I’d say roughly bupkus. That’s right, nothing worth having at all, unless you happen to like my music. It’s value to me, however, is somewhat greater than that considering the nature of some of the paperwork inside and the time and money it will take me to replace everything.

So here’s a deal: you give it back to me for a REWARD. No questions asked. Finding me will be pretty simple, considering the box of business cards. Call me anytime.

Sincerely,
The Cyberwolfe

“”…an alliance of “several U.S. and Canadian organizations” that announced a “War On Pornography” campaign in Utah yesterday….””

Meaning the thing most likely has the backing of the Mormon church, and I’ll do my part to undermine any church-based social lawmaking. Just doing my bit to enforce the seperation of Church and State.

Here’s an interesting read posted most recently by her Cosmicness. The author is one Frizzen Sparks, the post in question is his definition of a Retrosexual. It’s been awhile since I’ve voiced anything other than anti-Microsoft opinions, so we’ll take a look at this.

Now, I agree with most of it, but I think his sarcasm may have got the better of him :) Read on for the rest…

Read the rest of this entry »

Greyduck and I finally got around to putting together the entertainment center given to us by the EMC and her husband. In the words of Buffy or Willow, “it’s giganamous!”

It has enough room for all the widgets we have attached to the TV though, so it’s a good thing. Strangely enough, there are no lateral supports on the bottom 1/4 of the unit though, so it’s a bit wobbly. We’ve got it wedged into the corner at an angle so it can’t move much until I can fit some braces to it. I don’t know what they were thinking – it’s an obvious design flaw.

If they would just ask me about these things… :)

You’ve heard me talk before about the benefits of having a Linux live CD handy for doing repair work – today I’ll tell you about the best one for rescuing a Windows system: Knoppix.

From the website:

“KNOPPIX is a bootable CD with a collection of GNU/Linux software, automatic hardware detection, and support for many graphics cards, sound cards, SCSI and USB devices and other peripherals. KNOPPIX can be used as a Linux demo, educational CD, rescue system, or adapted and used as a platform for commercial software product demos. It is not necessary to install anything on a hard disk. Due to on-the-fly decompression, the CD can have up to 2 GB of executable software installed on it.”

So, your Windows system has crashed, you can’t get it to reboot, and you need to rescue whatever data you can before you accidentally destroy it “repairing” Windows. Drop this CD in the drive, reboot – instant operating system.

The really handy thing here is that the system is set up to automatically detect and mount all the partitions on the hard drive. You can transfer them by all the regular means – floppies, network, even CD-R (provided you have more than one CD drive – you can’t pull the Knoppix disc once launched). In the rare event that the problem is a file error, you can set the windows drives writable and replace the files in question rather than doing a re-install.

I used the Ratboy’s computer for a test run, and it found all three of his drive partitions with no fuss.

Knoppix is based on Debian, so while it’s a version number behind in things like the kernel (2.4) and KDE (3.1), it’s rock-solid, which is what you really want for a rescue disc. Get yours today from one of the download links on the site – your best bet is the BotTorrent feed.

Not a damn thing. Just thought you’d like to know.

You knew it had to happen sometime or another.

A few years back, somebody got the bright idea that the next thing your Windows desktop needed was a little bit of porn. Virtual Girl was what they came up with, and the program has an animation of a girl that strips on your desktop. Completely useless, except as a distraction.

In the Linux world, programmers are all about eye-candy and distractions too, but have a hard time making a program that doesn’t do something useful. Enter Hot Babe. This is a linux cpu monitor program. It puts a cartoon of a hot babe (duh) on your desktop. The busier your cpu gets, the less she wears.

Just another tidbit that goes toward the theory of geeks being better in bed because they never get any, and spend all of their time thinking about it :)

Yes! For the first time ever, folks, I now have a Linux system that actually does everything I want it to do. (At least, until I think of something else hehe)

Today, I managed to install the 2.6.7 kernel, with only a couple of minor hitches. Feeling emboldened by my success, I took the next step and began wrangling once again with the ATI drivers.

These proved a little more difficult, as they required a patch to be installed before they would install. Things finally installed correctly, but still weren’t working – until I remembered that X.org uses a different name for the configuration file. A quick rename of the file, and I am now cooking with the full use of my rather expensive video card :)

Now to go play some games!