Diary of a Wolfeman

Okay boys and girls, time to pay attention: the Fundies are doing their damndest to rewrite the schoolbooks that our children will be reading for the next ten years. See this post from February and this newer post for more details, but here’s the gist:

The two states that buy the most textbooks are California and Texas. The California school board can’t put a majority together due to their own diversity, so they don’t really have much of a say in the big picture.

In Texas, on the other hand, the fundamentalist religious groups have managed to secure a majority of positions on the state Board of Education, and have an almost free reign on what they want to put in the curriculum. Since Texas buys so many books, the publishers like to limit their own work and so will endeavor to just publish one version of their textbooks – built to meet the Texas guidelines.

Yes, this is the part where you get scared.

And this is where you go to contact your local State Representative to say something about it. Speak loud and speak often my friends, or your children may have some very different views of the world.

Had a bit of a worry today – Pookie and I had been out running around avoiding the bridal shower The WBGF was throwing for a friend of ours, and I figured it was time for an oil change. I pull up to the bay, and right then steam starts pouring out from under the hood. Pop the hood up, and sure enough, somebody has sprung a leak in the coolant-return hose.

Yes, little miss Golightly, I’m talking about you.

So, borrow some duct tape from the boys in the bay, and off down the road to the nearest parts store – which has recently been bought out by another company. Lo and behold, guess who doesn’t stock the hose I need, and can’t remember if they even sell duct tape (I wanted a new roll) or know where it would be in the store. We’re outta there!

Out in the car, I call over to the Autozone on Cully, and the lady on the other end says she has the hose in stock. Trusting to the many wonderous powers of duct tape, I wheel it for that store and hope. Arriving, the lady spends about fifteen minutes dilligently searching, but is unable to find the hose we need in the stacks – apparently they are changing their inventory system around, and currently the hoses are in some disarray.

Knowing I will need to get a hose on Holly before Monday, I go out to the car and take a picture of the hose in question, and tell the clerks to wing it – just find something basically like this, and I’ll make it work from there. They do, and I buy a few other things to go with – like brake pads. We’ve started squeaking in the past few days, and I figure since I’m already here… turns out one of the guys behind the counter used to work in a Kia dealership shop, and got me just the right parts, saving me about $20 in the bargain.

I guess I know what I’m doing next Saturday.

As a good many of you should already know, MekTek.net has been given the go-ahead to release Mechwarrior4: Mercenaries as a free game (!!) to go with the enhancements that they have cooked up over the years. All of this is in preparation for the upcoming reboot of the Mechwarrior franchise, which looks to be very awesome indeed.

This is great news, because I’ve missed playing Mechwarrior, but haven’t wanted to go through all the trouble to re-install the damn thing. It’s a 2-hour process, once you take into account the multiple patches for the original game, adding in the supplements that I’ve bought over the years, all of their patches, and then the MekTek stuff, which is just too cool to pass up. I honestly wasn’t sure it would even install onto a 64-bit Windows7 box, so I was reluctant to use the two hours I could maybe scrape together for playing a game trying to install it.

Luckily, though, MekTek has put together an installer that works and manages to shoehorn the whole thing together without much fuss and bother… unless you happen to be running Norton 360 antivirus.

Once again, Symantec proves how thoroughly they suck. While it only takes moments for someone to submit a false positive, and maybe another hour before Norton distributes an updated signature file that deletes the effing executable to the game, it will take them probably 2 weeks to clean things up and ‘certify’ the files in question.

Gee, Symantec. Thanks.

Luckily for us, Da Roomie and I have avoided Symantec products for years now, and had no problem at all getting it installed on just about every computer in the house. We are thoroughly prepared for LAN gaming possibilities, as this is old enough it will even run on our laptops without dragging the video settings down.

Tonight, we took some Assault-class ‘Mechs for a run around a couple of maps, and Greyduck has found his favorite weapon at long last: a Large Continuous-Beam Laser. Two of those paired with Gauss rifles, and he’s giggling like mad. Especially when we both manage to lock an Annihilator into our sights and knock it over with 2 Gauss hits and one round of my railgun all at once.

Good times :)

Picked up a new app called FxCamera for my G1, thought I’d try some of the effects. Here’s fisheye:

 

To the Jackass who keeps posting spam comments on both my blogs:

Knock it off. It’s getting annoying to have to delete your comments from moderation.

You’d think they would have learned, since none of the messages ever actually make it past moderation…

So, been pretty busy with life lately, and my writing has fallen by the wayside. My apologies, etc., etcetera.

I may have mentioned this before, but the general consensus is that our SCA family is going to sit this year out as far as events go. The last few years we have been going to the Pirate events, of which one has gone away to be replaced by a new event on the same weekend, and we’re just tired of the other one. This all means that we would have to pick new events from the actual SCA calendar to go to, and we’re not really happy with those choices either.

Plus the fact that over half the family has spent most of 2009 unemployed, and you can see where this is all heading.

Fortunately for myself and Da Roomie, business has been mostly quite busy – unfortunately, this super-busyness has led almost directly to the loss of an important client. It’s a long story, but the gyst is we weren’t paying enough attention. Then there was the client that hired us, bought a ton of hardware and spent some 50 or 60 hours of labor, and then went completely belly-up. Yee-haw, that was fun.

In the same vein but with a different vector, we lost one more client today because the owner opted to go for a ‘merger’ with another company, that has resulted in the next best thing to ‘they got bought’. The ‘buyer’, of course, has their own IT setup and doesn’t want to deal with us.

This one is a bummer, because the client is the first one I brought in. They called us one day because their server went tits-up, and I came in and sold them not only a new server, but the management package as well. The folks in the office have always been great to work with, and they’ve been very good about not breaking things – almost a perfect client, really :) I’m going to miss them.

Okay, that’s enough moping. Onward!

So, there you were, enjoying your SBS 2008 server and all the things it can do when ploooie! Something goes to hell and drags you in along with it. You spend the next 4 hours desperately searching the Internet for any sort of repair guide, only to discover that everything is written for Server 2008, and using those resources will severely screw up your SBS box.

At least, that’s what happened to me. Luckily, I work for a company that has a Gold Partner membership with Microsoft, and was able to call the support line. They guy on the phone said “haven’t you seen the SBS Repair Guide?”

Why no – because the damn thing doesn’t show up in a Google search until I specifically asked for it by name. (Two days later, the damn thing shows up under nearly every search I run. Maybe they rebuilt their metas?)

Anywho, here it is: The Windows SBS 2008 Repair Guide

May the Force be with you.

So the H.S. Golightly (Holly to her friends) has recently ticked over the 60k mile-mark, and is in need of some maintenance. I took a few minutes a couple days ago and spoke with a Kia dealership to see what this sort of service entails and costs.

The service consists of the following:

• Change the timing and accessory belts
• Flush radiator, flush transmission, change oil & filter
• Change the spark plugs
• Total: $1185.00

Ouch!

Not having that sort of money lying around, I figured I was going to have to get my hands dirty and do as much of this myself as possible. Breaking it down, the belt changes only come out to $360, and half of that is labor. That seems doable, but will probably have to wait a bit.

This means that they want some $825 for changing a bunch of fluids and the spark plugs. further research on the spark plugs shows that the OEM plugs are NGK and run $2.50 each retail – but the dealership wants $15 each!

I call ‘horseshit’.

So, off I went to Oil Can Henry’s and my local Schuck’s, and between the two I got a better set of spark plugs and all the fluids and filters changed for $200 plus the time it took. Which was significant, because OCH was packed when I got there. I waited in the car for an hour before I could get into a bay, but it was still worth it to have all that bit sorted by someone else. After all, I had my copy of Sherlock Holmes in the car with me, so it’s not like I lacked for company :)

 

You know what surprises me nowadays? When other people tell me they haven’t checked their email in a couple of days.

O_o?

I don’t get this at all. Even before I had a smartphone, I was always in my email. I just don’t get it.

 

Tolerant and I are very fond of the Chinese Village at 82nd & Stark, but it can be a bit too far to drive after work, so we’ve been on the lookout for something closer.

Chino Sai-Gon fits the bill rather nicely. They handle most of the Asian favorites with large portions at a reasonable price.

Now if only they delivered…