Diary of a Wolfeman

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.

When I started the whole leatherworking thing, I thought about selling my stuff, and with that comes a website – so I went and bought www.rogueleather.com

After a few months of making sure the guy who owned it before me didn’t want it back, I finally decided to do something with it – only I now realize that I don’t really have the time or inclination to sell my leather stuff on any sort of regular basis. So, I turned it into another blog. I will probably copy some of the posts I have done here over there, and any new leather-related posts will be at the new site.

Just thought I’d let ya know.

This one was a bitch, and since the closest thing I could find to a remedy online was to delete the store and create a new one (not bloody likely) I’ll publish the results of a call to MS Critical Support for the benefit of the masses.

The problem was one user had almost 50 emails stuck in the local delivery queue. They could send email inside and out, but incoming would never get there. I believe the problem was a corrupted mailbox.

To fix the user’s mailbox, I exported their account to a .pst using Exmerge. I then deleted the user’s mailbox and created a new one, adding back in all of their aliases. This got new mail flowing again without too much fuss. The mail in the local delivery queue, however, was still stuck.

To get this going to the right mailbox, we had to ‘recategorize’ the existing mail to the new mailbox.

1. Stop the SMTP service.
2. Open Regedit and navigate to the following key:
   HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\SmtpSvc
3. Creat a subkey named “Queuing”
4. Select Queuing and on right hand pane create new dword value with name “ResetMessageStatus� with value 1 in hexadecimal.
5. Restart the SMTP service – check the queues and see if mail is being delivered. Also check the account mailbox at this point.
6. Once all the mails are delivered to that user, stop the SMTP service and change the value for �ResetMessageStatus� to 0 and start the SMTP service.

That should do it. Seems simple, right? HA! I bashed on it for almost two hours, then called crit support and tech#1 bashed on it for an hour, then called in tech#2 who took another half-hour to come up with the registry fix. We still ended up losing a handful of emails, but that was because it took the user two full days to tell me something was wrong, and our queue alarm didn’t catch the problem.

Which, of course, will be step 3 of this process…

*Update: comments closed due to excessive spam. Glad I could help all of you with this post.

I don’t pay a whole lot of attention to the site here (as if you haven’t noticed) but Da Roomie is pretty good about not only keeping up with things, but posting about them as well, so I will end up finding out about it.

Since he went out and updated his site, I got to thinking about doing the same here. Well, it just so happens that I had an hour or so today where I could watch a progress bar crawl across my screen, or I could do something a little more useful. Hence, a fresh update to WP 2.5 and a new theme.

The old theme carried over fairly well, but I thought it was time for a change anyhow. Luckily, at least one designer out there has a proper sense of color and design (snicker) and I didn’t have to give myself a headache with tweaking CSS and whatnot.

Except, of course for all the snarky little quips in the forms. Those I had to add back in, which has kept me up way late. Goodnight, folks.

Man I made a terrible mistake tonight – I watched some of the news at 10. That’s a sure way to get my blood pressure up.

Some of the top stories:
A man drives into a residential neighborhood late one night, pulls over and tells a girl on the street that he has an emergency and needs to borrow her cell phone. He then grabs her and hauls her into the car, drives off and rapes her. Cops circulate an artist’s rendering, and the picture definitely looks like a black guy. They then describe him as white or hispanic… WTF!?! Were you not looking at the picture? Or was the artist talking to the girl and just drawing whatever he wanted?

Teens at Bridgeport Village Mall harassed another kid earlier this week. Once the kid got free of them, he went to a guard for help. The guard was less than helpful at first, but later at least tried to be useful. The kid calls his folks, and they come to pick him up – only to be attacked by the group of teens? A bunch of girls dog-pile on the mom, and then their boyfriends gang up on the dad when he wades in to help mom out. How the hell do children get the idea that they can get away with this shit? And why wasn’t the dad swinging harder!?

The Human Race is almost run. The vast majority of Americans are too bloody timid by far to stand up for themselves anymore, let alone stand up to their own children, and they’re being ridden over roughshod. That dad should have gone in with both barrels – if he had, chances are those kids would have freaked out when they met real resistance to their animalistic behavior. That girl’s parents should not have been letting her wander the damn streets at 1:30 in the morning.

I don’t care how freaking un-PC is is to say this, but parents: beat your children. And to the Welfare people: Let them! Crap like this didn’t happen on a daily basis back in the 50’s, because if you got caught, chances are whoever caught you would beat your ass, then frog-march you back home where your mom and dad would say “thanks” and then beat you some more.

Pain, my friends, is an excellent teacher. It is the parents’ responsibility to raise the child, not the State’s, and you need to get off your lazy ass and do it yourself. Yes, your children will be pissed when you do it, but they will eventually get the hint that the belt only comes out when they do something stupid and will start to think before they act.

And all of you bystanders out there trying not to be seen? Step up! If you see some kids doing something stupid or dangerous, get their attention and say something. Just shout “HEY!” at the top of your lungs and give them the evil eye – you’ll break their concentration and probably diffuse the situation with nothing else being said. Quit depending on the government to do everything for you and take some responsibility for your life, your own welfare, and your safety.

This post on Coyote’s not-a-blog damn near made me fall out of my chair.

————

According to the license plates on the car outside my office today, all the popular Sith lords are driving these:

It just goes with the hat I guess.

First, this is just too damn funny.

see more crazy cat pics

Okay, on to the long awaited …

A Post!!!!!1111!!ONE

Yes, I have been reading too many LOLcatz. Deal.
On to the show.

So as you know, I have been messing with leatherworking for over a year now, but I have only recently sat down and decided to do some carving. The whole “cut stuff out and rivet it together” part comes fairly naturally to me, having been trained as a metalworker back in the days of yore (and high school.) It was time I did something a little more challenging, so I sharpened up my swivel knife and got to some serious doodling. Take this, for example:

Now, detail is pretty poor due to me using my phone’s camera, but it didn’t turn out too bad for a doodle. And yes, by the time I am done doodling, I will have a new set of coasters for the coffee table.

Once I had carved the design, though, I realized there needed to be some sort of background treatment done to help it stand out – but I had neglected to buy any backgrounding tools. Tolerant, however, in her brilliance, gave me a Dremmel tool for Xmas, and I happen to have a couple of lag bolts lying around with no better use, so I put two and two together, came up with 5, and decided to shave that down to a proper 4. The result is too small for my phone to get a good picture, but the effect is visible in the skull doodle. A simple cross-hatch pattern that does a decent job of squishing the background into the background.

So, after much doodling on the little coaster cutouts, I decided it was time to graduate to something a little larger and I bought some good tooling belly to play with. It’s about twice the thickness of the coasters which allows me to cut a more visible picture and get some real depth to it.

Like Celtic knotwork.

If you think drawing knotwork can tie your fingers up, try carving it with a small knife sometime. This came about while I was designing a new set of arm bracers for myself – I wanted to put my stylized compass rose motif on them, but realized there needed to be a border of some sort.

I was originally against the idea of knotwork due to another artisan on the Faire / SCA circuit who borders a lot of his stuff with knotwork. Besides – it looks so damned hard to carve :) So, I experimented with a few geometric designs that will probably work pretty well, but didn’t quite strike me as being very period.

While digging around on the Net for some examples of actual period stuff (and there isn’t much) I decided to go take a second look at the afore-mentioned “other guy’s” stuff – and discovered that he isn’t really even doing knotwork. He just does a three-strand plait. (See this reference for a complete description of a three-cord plait and knots.) On top of not really being knotwork, he never finishes it – it just runs right off the edge of the piece on it’s way back to Ireland, apparently offended at not being done right.

Well, if he’s going to cheat it, I can feel free to do it right! Here is most of the “Mark II” design for the arm bracers:

I have never claimed to be an artist, but I am a pretty decent draftsman – so I usually put things together on graph paper. Here you can see that I had to cut several pieces of graph paper out to get the knots suitably centered and rotated on the main pattern.

While it is not a terribly ornate design, I am pleased that both sides come out not as a three-cord braid, but rather a single strand woven back through itself from one side to the other. And, through the wonders of transparent tape and a scanner, I now have a re-printable pdf of the design complete with graph lines that I can use in future projects.

But, before I jump off the deep end and carve the actual bracers, I thought I should practice that knotwork. Here are a couple of small pieces:

Normal…

…and Inverted

The difference between the two is which part gets the beveling. Normally, you bevel outside the design so it stands out, and you can make it stand out further by using a background tool on the surrounding area. In Inverted, you (obviously) bevel the design itself, and leave the rest of the work alone. I will probably be using this second method for border designs. The only tricky part in using this method on knotwork is getting the ‘over’ strand to look like it is really crossing the ‘under’ strand. Obviously, more practice is required.