Diary of a Wolfeman

Well, the tax man came a-knockin’ last week, and Da Roomie and I managed to get a loop of rope around his ankles when he wasn’t looking. A short time later, we had managed to shake a nice stack of quarters out of his pockets, so there is playtime and toys in the future.

And, of course, my car payment. The bank FINALLY sent me the information about where that payment is to be sent – I was getting worried. Of course, I still haven’t got the registration paperwork from the DMV.

On the toy side of things, it’s time for Tolerant to get a new computer. I’ve finally talked her into getting DSL, so she should probably have a machine that can make better use of it. As for the rest, I’m torn between a new flat-panel to replace the gargantuan CRT on my desk and possibly going SLI on this rig, or some other combination of upgrades. It isn’t really needed yet, but I keep thinking about it. I had planned on building a new computer outright next year, I should probably just wait.

I suppose the real hard part is going to be picking up Tolerant’s new gear and not getting stuff for mine too…

For those of you who have been pining away like me for a new space shooter since we got tired of playing Tachyon: The Fringe and gave up on X3: The Reunion, there is some small bit of hope: Ascaron Entertainment’s DarkStar One.

Basically, the game is a T:TF retread. Your character is given his murdered father’s ship, the experimental DarkStar One after he graduates from flight training. He is of course then tasked to go find his father’s killer. Along the way, he flies from system to system, meets new, interesting people, and kills them.

Yeah, the plotline’s a bit hashed, and I think an almost direct copy of X3, but what the hell. It’s not like we really give a rat’s ass about the plot, we’re here to shoot down other ships.

And, boy, do they give you plenty to choose from.

The hook for the game is the ship itself, which has a new twist up its tailpipe: the ship can be upgraded by collecting Coupons…err, Artifacts that have been left behind by some ancient race.

In asteroids. That are being actively mined for ore. And people just left these things lying around without taking them to any of the hundreds of research stations planted throughout the galaxy…

Yeah, not a lot of thought here.

Keep reading… Read the rest of this entry »

NOT!!

So I get assigned a work order to set up a new laptop at a client’s. I show up, fire it up, and …shit. It’s running Vista.

So, I spent a full day back-and-forth with tech support from their developers upgrading the applications to the latest version and tweaking, poking, prodding and generally swearing at this laptop to come to the foregone conclusion:

Nuke it back to XP. It just ain’t gonna happen.

Da Wolfie:“So, why did you guys order a Vista laptop?”
Clueless Client: “We just wanted the latest and greatest!”
DW: “Did you think for a second that the 4 absolutely-must-work-applications you guys use might not work with Vista yet?”
CC: “Well, Vista is backwards-compatible, right?”
DW: “Not so much, no.”
CC: “You’re kidding me.”
DW: “Nope.”
CC: “…”
DW: “Vista was built from the ground up to be different than XP, in a supposed effort to give us more functionality and security. What this means is that hardly any existing software will run on it, and any new versions will have to be re-built from the ground up to work with Vista.”
CC: “That sucks!”
DW: “It gets worse.”
CC: “!!”
DW: “Do you really think that your software developers are going to put in all those hours to re-write their applications from the ground up and then offer it as a free upgrade?”
CC: “Oh shit.”
DW: “That’s right. You’re going to have to buy NEW copies of everything you use. All at once. For the whole office, because you know that shit won’t be backwards-compatible either.”
CC: “But…but…WHY?!?”
DW: “Billy-boy thought his money was getting lonely?”

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At another end of the “being the guinea pig” spectrum, I have installed the full production version of Vista on my spare hard drive so that I can use it as a target for the latest version of the “migrate all yer shit to Vista” software packages available. While I was at it, I figured I would install some games.

Well, try to , anyway.

Not having so much luck there. Ok. They installed fine, it was just when I tried to run them that they crashed.

Color me unimpressed.
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So, again I say that the only thing you can run on Vista is a web browser and office 2007.

So, I did take the SBS Exam last Friday, and passed! WooHoo, 788 out of 700 needed!! YAY! Now I get to learn the Secret Handshake!

More importantly, it means my boss didn’t waste money on business cards, as he already bought me a box with the “MCP” tacked-on at the end of my name. So now everything is all official-like, and I can truthfully call myself a Network Engineer and a Small Business Specialist.

Of course, I have mixed ideas about that terminology – in my mind, Engineers build stuff like bridges and roads. Me, I just plug stuff in and make it work. “Software Engineer” is truly a travesty of terminology, as these people are Programmers and should be called such. The whole thing just smacks of a PR move.

Now, no offense is intended here, I’m not dissing anyone’s skills. I just think you should call a pot a pot, and not a Heated Surface Meal Preparation Device.

Know whattamean, Verne?

Of course, the major dictionaries and Wikipedia all disagree with me. Shrug.

Just for the halibut. Might give me better info than the traffic logs.

Create your own visitor map!

Well, tomorrow I go in to retake the SBS exam. Hopefully this one will go better.

So far today I have taken two 40-question test exams and passed them, and have gone through the entire sample question package so I could write down the answers to the hardest questions. I’ve found that the act of writing something down on paper sets it in my mind, so I did this about 6 times each for the 10 hardest questions. Two of these are of the “arrange the steps in proper order” type, and this should help.

I also plan on forcing myself to take…it…slow… I normally blaze through tests pretty quickly – I read and comprehend things faster than most, I suppose. A useful talent in many situations, but it sometimes gets the better of me. So, read the question. Read it again. Read all the answers. Read the last two sentences of the question again, THEN choose the answer.

Wish me luck.

What the FUCK is this world coming to? This is one of those stories that you just can’t make up:

‘Electric Slide’ on slippery DMCA slope | CNET News.com

The inventor of the “Electric Slide,” an iconic dance created in 1976, is fighting back against what he believes are copyright violations and, more importantly, examples of bad dancing.

Okay, I am all for people being able to copyright their works of intellectual property (for a reasonable amount of time), but this goes too fucking far. Patenting a movement of the human body? 28 years after the fact?!? And then enforcing that patent because someone isn’t doing it quite right ?!!?

I’m sorry, but this is just too much. 28 years is just too long a gap between invention and patent. I could understand a gap of two years or so – plenty of time for you to do market assessments to discover if the cost of filing a patent will be worth the effort.

But 28?

Here’s a message for the folks at the Patent Office: you have the perfect opportunity here to show the world that you have a pair and shut this idiocy down. If the law prevents you from doing this, bury this shit in paperwork until it doesn’t.

Please. I’m beggin’ here.