Diary of a Wolfeman

As I sit here listenning to my nipples freezing up and cracking, I have to wonder: who the fuck authorized all this cold weather? I didn’t vet this. Clerk!!

Of course, it doesn’t help me any that Ratboy is of the firm belief that his comfort is paramount to everyone else’s. Since he runs warmer than the rest of us, this is a problem – I’ve caught him twice this week with a fan in his window letting out all my expensive heat. His response? “Well, turn the thermostat down to 60 so I’m comfortable.”

Can’t. Strangle. Children.

I spent the first 18 years of my life in homes with wood heat, which means that it was always cold in the mornings. To hell with that – I will keep my house to a temperature where it is not unreasonable to walk around the house barefoot.

In other news, tommorow night is the annual Trans-Siberian Orchestra show, and I am again looking forward to it. Yeah, it will probably be the same show as the last two years – so what? How many people see the Nutcracker every year? I can’t stand ballet (unless it’s my daughter.)

Yup, outta steam again…
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Take 1 Honey Baked Ham, add mashed taters and yams, garnish with fresh-made cranberry sauce. Fresh veggies with ranch dip for appetizers.

Blow shit up on your computers for next three hours.

Ahh. Sunday afternoon happiness.

This is our second run with the new MekTek 3.0 patch, which was raised to bugfix version 3.0.1 recently. Changes include Inner Sphere weapons getting shorter reload times to offset the extra tonnage.

New weapons include a massive railgun, which takes up 7 slots of space – currently, there are only two mechs that can mount it: the Behemoth II and the Marauder II. The gun rides as a dorsal mount, and does 56 damage every 10 seconds. If used properly, it will knock down an Atlas.

Muahahahahaha!

For those who like energy mounts to go with your insanely overpowered ballistics, take the Behemoth. For bullet-gunners like myself, you’ll prefer the Marauder.

Other changes include a new variation on the Omni weapon mount: the “Direct-Fire” slot, which will take any non-missile weapon. This breathes a little new life into several mechs I had not looked at before. (I hate trying to manage heat, I just want something to go boom whenever I pull the trigger.)

Some of the new ‘Mechs don’t really even qualify as ‘Mechs – I’m talking about the Elementals. This patch brings out a dozen or so Battle Armors, with a new bunch of weapons to outfit them with. Want a challenge? Take six of these out against a pair of assault ‘Mechs. It gets messy, since these guys tip the scales at a measly 20 tons, and can be squished like tanks.

In all, three hearty cheers to the fine folks over at MekTek for continuing to provide excellent content and variations to a solid game. And they do it for FREE! You – go donate now!

I seem to have been a bit remiss in my postings. Ok, to bring you up to date:

That weekend with the fucktard programmer in Washington was followed by a Monday. That’s all I’ll say about that.

Tuesday was one of those days that starts out bad and gets worse form there. I very nearly got into a fistfight with my boss in a customer’s parking lot because he wanted me to strap a ladder to the roof of my car. Heaven forbid any of us employees balk at the idea of causing physical damage to our vehicles in the name of the Company. How I managed to get through that day without killing someone I don’t know.

Wednesday wasn’t so bad – another wiring gig, but no insulation in the ceiling and all the jack locations had holes pre-cut so it went pretty quickly. This job will get more fun later when I have to dismember the client’s existing phone system and move it to the new office. Finish off Wednesday with a pre-Turkey Day mini feast starring TWBGF and an evening vegging in front of the tv with no arguments, strife or other unpleasantness. Yes, an excellent evening indeed.

Thursday started off wonderful – see Wednesday evening. Finished off Turkey Day at the EMC’s place for copious amounts of excellent grub, good people and general happiness. My former sister-in-law seems to have gotten over whatever ill-will she held for me in the past, which is very cool.

Friday I did as little as possible until I picked my sweetie up from work. This brings us to today, in which I again did as little as possible, and most of what I did do involved playing with my daughter Pookie.

Yep, just a whirlwind of excitement around here. Then again, this is the closest thing I have had to a vacation in over a year, so I’m getting the most I can out of it.

So, Saturday morning up at dawn to drive up to Lakewood Washington (known for it’s ..umm… fog?) to “get the player tracking software installed and running.”

Yeah, right.

Bossman and I arrive at 9am to discover that the programmer who is doing this did not catch the flight last night due to ‘a problem with the plane’ and instead caught a morning flight. Okaaay…

So, we’re here, what’s the server doing? Been turned off because there was no reason to have it on for the last three months? Ok, that makes sense. How about the end terminals? Been turned off and stuffed into kiosks for a year-and-a-half because they bought them waaaay to soon? Okay, they’ll need updates then.

10am- Proggy rolls in. 11:30am- Proggy is finally ready for a meeting, but his laptop drive just kerplooied due to extreme age. That was his development environment. Casino manager takes this amazingly in stride. Break for grubbage.

12:30pm- Proggy decides that current network infrastructure has somehow been changed in ways he does not like, and we must re-arrange certain things to bring everything on to one network. Comes up with stupid reccomendation which we ignore, and simply install a second NIC on the server. *Poof*- Marketing now has access. And you were saying…?
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The World’s Best Girlfriend and I met up at the mall the other night to do a little shopping and grab a quick bite to eat in the food court. We were happily munching away when a minor altercation between a group of young black men started up in the open area in front of the theaters. It seemed like nothing at first, but I kept my eye on them just the same.

Sure enough, the minor incident escalated into a full fistfight between at least three people, and started drifting over toward us. Patrons seated nearest the scuffle jumped up and ran away. The WBG smartly moved around to keep our table between herself and the action (her back was to them originally, with no protection) but otherwise stood her ground. I stood up and stepped behind my chair when they got within 10 feet.

What none of the other patrons saw as they all ran away was that this was nothing more than greasy kid stuff. These were not hardened gang-bangers trying to kill each other, these were teenagers burning off testosterone. The blows they managed to land all hit soft targets, and even then did no real damage. The kid that got the worst of it hopped back onto his feet when it was over and was more worried about whether his pants were falling down than any potential bruises.

I’ve gotten hurt worse rough-housing with my older brothers.

What does this mean, when only two of about 15 people are brave enough to stand their ground in the face of adversity? It means I think public schools need to be teaching basic hand-to-hand, or at least situational awareness. If an invading force were to hit the beaches of America today, I wouldn’t be counting on my neighbors to help defend our block.

Okay, I could count on two of them, but that’s because I know how many swords they own. You get my point.

We have a dual monitor setup on our shop gaming rig, so people outside can see what cool things it can do. I go out for an after-lunch smoke, and wander over to see what mayhem KG is unleashing, only to see him going through his wardrobe in Matrix Online. I finally lean back in and yell at him.

ME- “Dude! Quit playing Pretty-Princess-Dress-Up and go splatter something already!” (KG is cross-dressing currently and playing a female character.)
KG- “I can’t!” He says, “I’ve got to go to an in-game wedding.”
ME- “You’re shitting me.”
KG- “No, my faction leader is getting hitched in twenty minutes.”
ME- “In-game.”
KG- “Yeah.”
ME- Blink. Blink. Blink.
KG- “I just hope the Bride doesn’t try to make me her Maid Of Honor.”

Time for a stream-of-consciousness post kids. Hang on to something…

Moderately-crappy workday turns into free parking downtown and giving the GF a ride home from work, where she mixes up good eats whilst I wash dishes. I’m a good boy, I work for my supper.

Again, I either need longer days or a third weekend-day added to the calendar. Not enough time to do all the things I want. Ok, I’ll settle for building another bedroom into my house. Or somewhere Pookie can watch Fraggle Rock without me. It could have been worse, at least she doesn’t have that stupid Amanda Show DVD anymore.

Went through and re-did the crappy wiring job on The Beastie’s stereo, maybe it will stop dropping the left channel now. And the power.

Speaking of re-works, blew out the SuSE install again, this time it didn’t crash when I upgraded KDE to 3.5 beta. Arts still sucks. And I can’t get Scorched 3D to run. I’ll have to mess with that symlink sometime…

AMV Hell: The Movie. Watch it. DBZ overlaid with Whitney Houston. Just try not to snort your soda.

A note to innie-to-outtie transexuals: stright boys don’t wear cute shoes. You paid the money for the transformation, follow through with it. Oi.

Frizzen Sparks is out to make me spew tea out my nose. Go. Read. Now.

Pastor of Muppets, of stuffed talking things
All of Henson’s spawn now kiss my ring
Baptized by me in a stage prop hot spring
With Statler and Waldorf heckling
(Statler: “You call that a sermon?? What is this,
vacation bible school?!?”)
Pastor
Pastor
With Statler and Waldorf’s damned heckling
(Waldorf: “I’ve been more inspired by things
I’ve found in my navel! That’s it, I’m converting to Islam!”)

From The Register:

All eight Dover, Pennsylvania school board members up for re-election have been booted out after introducing intelligent design to the science classroom. In their place are a number of those who campaigned against the policy.

Three cheers for Dover, PA!

To the commentor from the previous post, who says that nasty little annoyances like mosquitos, fleas and the fossil record are “a test of faith”:

Faith that keeps you going when everything is against you is a wonderful thing. I wholly applaud those whose personal faith in their God allows them to overcome odds and obstacles in their life.

Faith as an excuse for not using your brain or thinking for yourself is a crime against humanity. Just because the clergy are in the habit of referring to their constituents as a ‘flock’ does not mean you should be sheep! Cramming that faith down the gullet of children in a publicly-funded school curriculum is a clear viloation of the First Amendment to the Constitution’s Bill of Rights. To wit:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof;

You can argue that the school board is not Congress, or that ID is not favoring an establishment of religion due to the omission of the phrase “by God” in the official thesis. The truth of the matter is that ‘Intelligent Design’ is just the Creation story with some pretty makeup on. This is a subject that should not be taught in public schools. To satisfy your complaint that science teachers should teach that Darwinism is not the only theory, I propose that all science textbooks henceforth contain the following:

“Not everyone believes in the Darwin Theory of Evolution”

Science classes are where we go to learn science, not religion. I leave that to the qualified folks down at the local center of worship.

From MSNBC.com

TOPEKA, Kan. – Risking the kind of nationwide ridicule it faced six years ago, the Kansas Board of Education approved new public-school science standards Tuesday that cast doubt on the theory of evolution.

The 6-4 vote was a victory for “intelligent design” advocates who helped draft the standards. Intelligent design holds that the universe is so complex that it must have been created by a higher power.
…
John Calvert, a retired attorney who helped found the Intelligent Design Network, said “These changes are not targeted at changing the hearts and minds of the Darwin fundamentalists.”

It takes a fundamentalist to spot another, I suppose.

All of this supposes that the higher power in question, however, was this much of a stickler for details. Think about it – what do most people want the most of in their lives? Simplicity. Not some hugely involved millions-of-layers-deep master plan, they strive to remove the complications from their lives. Now, if said higher power created Man in His / Her image, why aren’t we looking for more complex solutions rather than slimming down?

Seems to me that any being with that much power wouldn’t want to spend several BILLION years in the largest QA session ever. There wouldn’t be thousands of species of insects to carry out the job of plant pollenation, there would be one. There wouldn’t be thousands of breeds of animals constructed for the purpose of keeping those insect populations in check; the insects would simply only breed as necessary.

And what about all the nuisance insects and animals? You want to tell me the mosquito has a divine purpose? The flea? That God really sat down one day and said, “You know, what we really need now are some blood-sucking, disease-mongering petilences. It should be damned annoying when they bite, too.”

Is this the kind of God you want?

Other creatures are fairly easy to explain under ID: the Creator got stoned. Look at the sloth, for instance. A creature that is so sedentary moss grows on it. Then there’s the platypus – obviously, God had some spare parts lying around and just kind of jumbled them up. “Hey, let’s really screw with their minds! I’ll make it a mammal, but it lays eggs! *snorffle* Hey, don’t bogart the bong, man!”

Was God high, or was it Evolution? My bet is for Darwin. You don’t agree, that’s fine – just keep your arguments out of my children’s schools and in the Church where it belongs. When you can come up with an idea that actually satisfies the definition of theory, then you can talk to me.