Diary of a Wolfeman

So there has been apparently some traction in the area of making Cowboy Bebop into a live-action flick. First announcement was that Fox Studios bought the rights and had a director, second announcement is that Keanu Reeves will take on the role of Spike Spiegel, mysterious man-of-action and partner to Jet Black.

This annoys me. On a number of levels.

First, let’s face it – they’re going to fuck it up. The chances of Fox taking on a movie like this and doing it any justice at all is so minimal as to be a statistical error.

Second, they put Reeves in as Spike. Now, if you look at pictures of Ted (Theodore) Logan and compare them to snaps of Spike, there is definitely a resemblance. Okay, I’ll give you that. But then there’s the fact that Keanu can’t fucking act. I realize that Spike isn’t the most emotive of characters, but let’s face it – he’s just a happy-go-lucky guy. Keanu acts woodenly because that’s all he’s got. Whoever they cast as Faye Valentine is going to have a helluva time carrying the movie on her tits.

I think one of the most terrifying things, however, are the Keanu-fanboy boards. I ran across one earlier today that spun the hell out of it and was trying very hard to give the impression that Reeves was actually in charge of and the driving force behind this project.

Bullshit.

You know how this went down? Someone at Fox managed to get the rights and tossed the project at one of the directors in their stable. Director sat down with a writer and pitched ideas back and forth. Then they watched a few episodes to get an idea of what the fuck they were talking about. The writer passed the spliff to the director and said “y’know (koff koff), we should get Reeves for Spike (koff).” So the director calls up Reeves and offers him the role, to which Reeves responds, “Whoa. Yeah.”

$Diety save this project.

The crime scene: the living room floor.
Description of event: came downstairs to feed the cats on my way to work and discovered:

1.) Laptop power transformer cord on the floor almost to the kitchen. When last seen, it had been plugged into both said transformer brick and the wall outlet 7 feet away.
2.) My Toshiba laptop, upside-down on the floor in front of the bookshelf it normally rests on top of.

Normally, the laptop sits on the top of my 7′ tall bookshelf as the only available horizontal surface in the living room unlikely to be covered with cat hair and the only place where the laptop is unlikely to become a cat pedestal. The power transformer sits in the corner of the windowsill, which is another handy horizontal surface midway between the nearest outlet and the top of the bookshelf.

Possible cause: I’m guessing that a certain gray mackerel tabby named Trouble Underfoot managed to get his tail (which is semi-prehensile and, we suspect, owner of a brain all it’s own) wrapped up into the cords as he jumped off of the windowsill, in the process pulling the laptop off of the bookshelf.

Partly my fault, as I had been in the habit of leaving the laptop a) running, b) charging, and c) perched kitty-corner on the shelf for best cooling airflow.

In any case, I think the poor beastie may be dead. Every time I press the power button, I get a different response, ranging from I get a power LED and nothing else up to allowing me to enter my login password before it freezes up. Popping the main panels off and re-seating all the connectors I could find hasn’t done much with it, the next step will be to completely dis- and re-assemble it.

Luckily, this is a Toshiba laptop and it was assembled with completely sane Phillips-head screws instead of some esoteric design I have never seen before. They even went so far as to make use of only 3 sizes of screws – One about a centimeter long that holds almost everything in, a tiny one for tight places, and a stainless steel one on a couple add-in cards.

Wish me luck…

Here’s a bit of silliness for you: a music meme.

IF YOUR LIFE WAS A MOVIE, WHAT WOULD THE SOUNDTRACK BE?
So, here’s how it works:
1. Open your library (iTunes, Winamp, Media Player, iPod, etc)
2. Put it on shuffle
3. Press play
4. For every question, type the song that’s playing (feel free to annotate, since snarky commentary is half the fun)
5. When you go to a new question, press the next button
6. Don’t lie and try to pretend that you’re cool…

Okay, that doesn’t really make any sense – why would I put the player on random for this? If my life had a soundtrack, I’d want it planned out properly! The soundtrack is a vital component to the situation. Nobody gets naughty with J-Pop in the background, it just ain’t done!

So I’ll compromise and do this both ways – the first song will be the random one, and then I’ll put what it should have been. For the sake of limitation, I will only use my personal collection.

Opening credits: “Kiss me, I’m shit-faced” by the Dropkick Murphys. Not exactly what I would have chosen, that’s for sure. This might not be too bad as an ending credits cut though…

My choice: “Tank!” by The Seatbelts (Cowboy Bebop OST). It worked for Bebop, it should work for me too.

Waking up: “Beautiful World” by Devo. Not a bad choice, actually. Unless, of course, you happen to wake up hating the universe.

My choice: Something that starts out slow and then builds up, like “Burn Up” by Siouxsie & The Banshees.

First day of school: “Fascination” by The Human League. I wouldn’t have picked this originally, but now that I listen to it in that context, it makes an okay choice. Of course, it’s really all about the next scene though.

My choice: “No Spill Blood” by Oingo Boingo. Children are animals.

Falling in love: “No One Lives Forever” by Oingo Boingo. Huh. My randomizer is trying to tell me that love kills. Bullshit.

(Then again, Tolerant got me a set of glasses that say “Love Kills Slowly”, so maybe I should think about this…)

My choice: “Jane’s Getting Serious” by John Astley. The tale of a guy realizing he’s falling in love with his best friend – just the way it should be.

Love scene: “Digging My Potato” by The Seatbelts (Cowboy Bebop OST) It’s an instrumental bit, but slightly whimsical so maybe not the best fit.

My choice: “Nights In White Satin” by the Moody Blues. Duh.

Breaking up: “Good Ol’ Fashioned Lover Boy” by Queen……. No.

My choice: “Ball and Chain” by Social Distortion

Life is good: “Red Barchetta” by Rush. Pretty good choice – the tale of a young man evading the cops and having fun driving. I’ll leave this one be.

Mental Breakdown: “That Day” by Poe. Yeah, this one fits here.

My choice: “Insanity” by Oingo Boingo. Kinda obvious.

Driving: “Speed Freak (Moby Remix)” by Orbital. Too many interruptions in the flow, sounds more like I’m in Downtown traffic.

My choice: “7 Minutes” by The Seatbelts is just that – 7 minutes of movie car-chase music, with a 30-second interlude for the “oh no! I’m caught but I get away!” bit.

Flashback: “Come Around Again” by Jet. Score one for the randomizer.

Getting back together: “Shock to the System” by Billy Idol. Not really feelin it with this track.

My choice: “Hey Jealousy” by the Gin Blossoms. That track was on heavy rotation back when I was on-and-off with Twiggy.

Wedding: “Travels in Nihlon” by XTC. Great track, REALLY does not fit here. This would be good for mental breakdown or maybe as a lead-up to the final battle.

My choice: the song we played at my wedding: “Nothing Else Matters” by Metallica. Why? Because it’s a waltz!

Birth of Child: “Fantasie Sign” by The Seatbelts. The lyrics are French, so no clue.

My choice: What’s the name of the song they play whenever the spawn of Satan crawls out of the sacrifice in the horror movies?…

Final Battle: “Just a Little” by Used. Nah, not a fit.

My choice: “One Little Victory” by Rush. The drumline alone should get your through the fight.

Death Scene: “Bastards on Parade” by the Dropkick Murphys. This one would have been better earlier on – the song asks for a second chance not just for the singer, but for all those like him.

My choice: “No One Lives Forever” by Oingo Boingo.

Funeral song: “Subdivisions” by Rush. This would have been a good choice for first day of school.

My choice: “We Are The Champions” by Queen.

End Credits: “Strutter” by The Donnas. Heh.

My choice: “The Real Folk Blues” by The Seatbelts. If we opened with bebop, might as well close with it…

And there ya have it folks – enjoy. My typo percentages have tripled, so it must be time for bed.

Speaking of upgrading computers, I thought I had blurbed about this but I guess not. On a whim the other day I downloaded and installed the Windows 7 Beta.

I went with the 64-bit version, and I have to say that so far I am impressed. It responds rather snappily, and the only problem I have had with it so far is that the Activesync replacement for Vista and Windows 7 isn’t as good as the original. It doesn’t always sync up to the phone. Considering I do all of my real syncing over the air, not a big deal.

Bonus points: The default setting for the User Access Control (UAC) that normally bugs the fuck out of you is a little tamer in 7. Programs still trip it, but they trained it to ignore when a user clicks to change something like a network setting.

Oh, for those that did not know this, the Windows Live Mail client sucks just as bad as Outlook Express does. You’ve been warned, use Thunderbird instead.

All in all, at this point Windows 7 looks like what Vista should have. Yes, it still swallows more of your resources than XP, and yes it still has the Vista interface, but aside from that you can live with it.

So, after all this time of just using the default video drivers on the laptop, I decided it was high time to upgrade to the full ATI driver and see if I couldn’t get Compiz to work. Lo and behold, I give you screenshots!

First, the Holy Grail of Compiz: the Cube!

May the Cube be with you!

Here it is again, showing off the 3D-layered effect:

Shuffling the windows

And now, the feature that makes me smile for no reason whatsoever… I give you: Wobbly Windows!

Now, there are one or two of you out there geeky enough to notice that I appear to be running KDE4 – and you would be right. 4.1, in fact.

So how do I like it? Whoever decided that desktop shortcuts were bad and that we should have these stupid folder views on the desktop instead should be beaten. Alot. Oh you can have icons on the desktop, but they have a hover menu that keeps popping up every time you mouse around the desktop that gets annoying.

There are other little annoyances as well. Say, I’m choosing my time zone and I choose “Pacific – Los Angeles”. What kind of a clock does it give me? A 24-hour clock. Nobody in civilian life uses a 24-hour clock in the USA, you’d think they would realize that and make 12-hour be the default for that time zone. I could go on for about twenty minutes ranting about the date format too, but apparently us Americans have been doing it wrong for centuries now.

Funny, considering how we all immigrated from somewhere else. We must have decided writing “Friday, September 26th” was somehow more revolutionary than “Friday, 26 September”. I’ll admit that year-month-day for shorthand makes great sense as a linear progression of largest-to-smallest (and makes sorting computer files much easier) but I have been using the proper American month-day-year for 30-some-odd years now, and it screws me up every time I run into a British day-month-year notation.

At least we’re all using 4 digits for the year now.

I’m rambling. Must be bedtime.

So Da Boys and I scrounged up and plunked down some electronic cash at Amazon a few weeks back and pre-ordered the new DnD release along with the first module, The Keep on the Shadowfell, and The Physicist and I decided that I would be the one to run the gang through the DnD stuff, while he would GM some Sci-Fi stuff. I’ve read through all the books, and last weekend I ran the party through the first part of KoTS.

These are definitely NOT your daddy’s kobolds. We’ll get more into that in a minute. First, I want to talk about the new system.

DnD, or more accurately ADnD, got me started in the whole RPG genre many years ago – roughly the third grade. I can remember in the 5th grade, a friend and I sat down with my Player’s handbook and commenced to code a character generator in BASIC that actually did everything you needed it to do – with the small exception that we didn’t code in the entire equipment list. This was on an original TRS-80. Had I actually owned a computer back then, I would probably have taken that program and added to it to get some of the tools available today.

While Wizards of the Coast have been promising us the “DnD insider”, a website with a virtual game table, character creator and various other things, they have stated that “it will launch when it is ready” – which of course bugs the hell out of me, because I hate waiting! You want to drive a Gemini nuts? Tell him you have something really important to talk about and then say “oops! gotta run! I’ll call you tomorrow!” Head splodey.

So, not wanting to wait until probably NOVEMBER to get the WotC versions, I went trawling the ‘Net for alternatives and discovered RPTools, a site with a number of RPG-related tools built in Java. The good news: it’s all open-source and free to use and modify. The bad news: 4thEdition isn’t fully supported yet, but the gang is hacking it as I type. In the meantime, the tools as they exist are still useful, just not custom-tweaked for 4E. So, for those of us who can’t seem to do anything without involving a computer, there are some very useful bits of code for you, even when you RPG.

Now, about those Kobolds…

The party consisted of a Paladin, 2 Rangers (one archer, one twin-weapon), a Wizard and a Warlord. They made it through the first encounter intact, but the second one was not so well fought. Kobolds are no longer ALL cannon-fodder; some of them have grown up and turned dangerous. Back in the old ADnD days, the only effective way to use Kobolds was en masse – by the hundreds, at least. Not so much these days – a mere 5 were able to take out the above party. That’s right – we got 5 characters killed by 5 kobolds.

The SHAME!

Honestly, the biggest problem the party had was bad rolls – the dice hated them, and I was rolling pretty good. Example: I rolled a critical hit against the Warlord. The Paladin says “I’ve got an encounter power that lets me turn that into a regular hit” – cool, no problem. I didn’t want to hit the Warlord that hard anyway. So what happens next? You guessed it: I rolled maximum damage anyway, in full view of the players, so I couldn’t fudge the numbers.

The players took it well, and I think they’ve got their second set of characters ready to go. This time, we have a Cleric, a slightly different Paladin, a Wizard and a Fighter – and that archer-variant Ranger is back – he’s my NPC, and he just barely managed to escape into the bushes while those nasty kobolds were burning the wizard… ;)

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.

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.

A new client was sold a block of 5 static IP addresses for their business by Qwest.

I was dispatched to the client to set up their firewall to make use of these.

Pretty straightforward so far, right? Little do you know.

So I call up Qwest support, because the DSL modem is currently configured to offer DHCP and NAT translation, which is not the end result we want – we need it to just act as a gateway. Strangely enough, I get Bill on the line, who actually used to live around here. (No idea where he is now, he never said.) He promptly tells me that while he understands what I want and has a vague idea of how it is done, it isn’t actually supported by Qwest to do so.

Uhm, excuse me? you mean to tell me that while your company has sold me this product, they don’t really support it, and you have no official instructions on how to configure the modem to make it work?

“Uhm, yeah.” Sez Bill.

Oi.

Being the nice guy he is, however, Bill does his best to help me get things going. I’m pretty sure that at some point he did not actually understand what I was aiming for, but we plowed on nonetheless trying a number of different combinations of settings. During the course of this, Bill let’s me know that one of his supervisors wandered by a few minutes previously and commented that “we don’t really support that”, intimated that it shouldn’t take that long to do, and then wandered off.

“What? Bill, go lasso that man and get his ass onna phone. If he knows how to do it, why the hell are the two of us floundering around with this crap? Track him down!”

It takes a few minutes, but Bill does manage to convince him to get on the phone. And guess what – 10 minutes later, we’re up and running.

Total time on the phone: 2 hours, 15 minutes. Time actually needed for the whole call: 15 minutes, had Bill had proper documentation for this config.

Bill, thanks for being a sport – sorry I killed your stats for the day.

For the rest of us, here’s what you do:

HOWTO configure a Qwest DSL modem for static IP range

1.) Default the device. Maybe not necessary, but it won’t hurt you. Stick a pen in the reset hole until the power light turns amber, then release. The unit will reboot to factory settings, which include serving DHCP.

2.) Run IPconfig, and point a browser to the Gateway IP address. No password required, you will get straight to the config page. Select “Non-Windows Setup”. (This is just a misnomer, nothing about this modem has anything to do with Windows. Just their way of keeping out the reg’lar folks who would be scared by it.)

3.) On that page, tick the radio button for PPPoA and enter the username and password supplied by Qwest. It will be in the < $username>@qwest.net” format – see figure 1. Save and reboot. When it finishes, you should get green lights across the board.

4.) Go back to the config page and select “Advanced Setup” and then click the button for “Begin Advanced Setup”. On this page, make sure it is again selecting PPPoA, and put a check in the box for “Unnumbered Mode” and enter your Gateway IP and Subnet Mask info – see figure 2. Save and reboot again.

5.) You should have Internet access at this point, and your computer should have received one of your static IPs via DHCP. Go back to Advanced Setup and find the DHCP settings, and turn them off. (Remember to go to the external gateway IP, not 192.168.0.1)

That should be it – your firewall should be able to use any of your static IP’s at this point.

Figure 1

Figure 2