Diary of a Wolfeman

yeah yeah yeah – it’s been like forever, I know.

Recent happenings:

Sea Dog Nights – fun wit’ da Family. A bunch of us trouped down to Lebanon for an almost-SCA event, and fun was had by all. It was also the maiden voyage of our new chandelier, a design that is probably best described as “Martha Stewart meets the Hell’s Angels”. Take three lengths of chain, weld them into concentric circles. Then hang them horizontally with the smallest diameter circle at the top, and hang the next one from that, etc. Now weld some pipe sections horizontally so you can set a votive holder in them. Voila! Gypsy chandelier, courtesy of Tolerant’s brother-in-law.

Work: is work. We’ve been just busy enough to keep me hovering on the edge of qualifying for a bonus. Just 3 more percentage points…

Movies: saw The Dark Knight on Monday, well worth the ticket. Folks have been complaining about the violence in this one, but it boils down to one thing: the Joker is an agent of Chaos, and he’s a sadistic, violent, psychotic sonofabitch. The director was right about that. The plot could have moved a little better, but the acting made it all worth watching. Ledger nailed the role, and someone else is going to have a helluva time living up to that performance if they ever bring the character back.

Tolerant: is still the WBGF.

The Ratboy: is all set to move out for the first time. He and his new roomies (an old friend and her boyfriend) are set to take possession of their new apartment on the 4th. The management just spent a bunch of money refurbing the building, so they’re offering some good deals to load up on tenants to pay for it all.

Computers: just tried to upgrade my laptop to KDE4.1, with limited success. It won’t boot into the new window manager, but it will run some of the new apps under KDE3.5. I just need to dig up the logs and figure out what the problem is – I just don’t have the time or the brainpower to do so right now.

And now it’s off to bed.

This weekend Pookie and I went by her old school to check out the park next door that they were re-opening after a long bout of refurbishment. Silly me forgot to bring my new camera to take pictures, but I was absolutely astounded at what I saw:

An actual, honest-to-$Diety all-steel play structure, and not a single foam pad in sight. There are no swings, but there are these chairs that sit on threaded poles; you can theoretically spin them all the way to the top and then spin all the way back down again in a maneuver guaranteed to induce nausea. There’s also a vertically-stationary spinny thing with $Diety’s Own Frictionless Grease on the bearings, because this thing really gets moving.

The best part? The climbing walls that are bolted to the thing go all the way to the top, about 8 feet in the air. Those top bars, however, curve downward at a nice angle. So nice, in fact, that moments after I noticed them, I noticed that one of Pookie’s classmates was scooting right up them so she could perch on the top. (I noticed a moment later that her dad was 15 feet up in the tree behind me – the monkey gene runs true in that family.)

Everywhere I looked at this thing, I saw places where an uncautious child could splatter themselves all over it. The only safety feature is the three inches of bark dust on the ground.

Every where I turn, I see nothing but Nanny-State mandated warning messages (lid of my coffee cup:Warning, contents may be hot) and here I am at a playground made of solid steel with no padding that can be climbed in about 10 seconds by an 8-year-old.

I think I almost wept with joy.

Our Dungeons and Dragons 4E boxed set arrived this week, and I’ve just finished the Player’s Handbook. Looks pretty good so far – I read the 2nd Edition books once and didn’t like the changes, then was kinda out of the circuit during the 3E and 3.5E days, so I can’t compare to those, but I like the way it’s changed since good ol’ AD&D. They’ve added some complications compared to the original, but streamlined it in other places.

Most impressive change: 1st-level mages and clerics are actually useful! I really like the idea of the At-Will, Encounter and Daily powers for every character. This takes away the sting of playing low-level characters who used to have just one thing.

Even better is the knowledge that even the ancient Romans were geeky – check this out.

I’ve recently been thinking about getting a digital camera for taking the occasional snapshot and posting pics of my leatherwork, and today I got assigned to do a site survey of a new client. Actually it’s a two-fold client, as the end-users hired $BigNationalMSP to handle their stuff, but $BNM doesn’t have anyone local – so they hired us at $SmallerLocalMSP to do the legwork in the event a remote session can’t fix things.

Anywho, $BNM has a 20-page survey form, and the last page says “take pictures of everything you can”, so I figured why not? Cameras have been coming down in price lately anyway, so off to the store I go.

What I got was a nice little Samsung S860, which had the two features I really wanted: Digital Image Stabilization (I’ve wobbled almost every picture I ever took with other cameras), and it takes SD memory (because I have a spare 2GB card already). It has some pretty simple controls, and a goodly number of features for taking pictures in various lighting conditions – it can even take movies. Best of all, it’s black :)

Now, the funny bit came when I decided it was time to try offloading some of the test pics I’d snapped around the house. I read the manual, and it was the usual crap for Windoze: load the driver disk, install the software, uninstall any crap I don’t want, etc. On a whim, I took it down to the garage and hooked it up to the new laptop that runs Kubuntu.

A couple seconds went by as it thought about it, and Lo and behold! A window pops up asking if I want to download pictures from the device with DigiKam. <click> and the program launches, scours the camera, and shows me a selection of the pics it found on the camera.

Poking around in the software a bit, I discovered that it has some fairly intuitive image-manipulation routines, so I don’t even have to wade through The Gimp to do a little touch-up and resize. What a relief! (The Gimp is exceedingly powerful, but also very complicated; for my needs it’s like using a bomb-pumped laser cannon to swat a gnat. Sure it looks cool, but I think I missed the target…)

So far, I like ’em both. The camera was just $100, so I should get my money’s worth and then some out of it.

Now I think I need to design a camera case for it. Where’s my pencil…

So, a busy few days. Let’s do a little recap:

Friday through Monday: The Pirate Gathering at Horning’s Hideout. Nice venue – it’s a privately-owned park. Would have been a lot nicer had the rain stayed away, but we still had a good time. There was actually enough of us camping that there was usually something going on in our main pavilion, so I was rarely bored. Always a good thing.

I did get to spend a fair amount of time playing with leather stuff, you’ll have to read the other blog for that.

Tolerant’s niece joined us this year, and had fun by all accounts, despite our inept attempt to find her a playmate. We’ll have better luck playing matchmaker next time.

Tuesday, I took the day off to recover from the long weekend, and ended up tripping down to Fry’s and buying myself a new laptop to replace the poor, aging Dell I have in the garage. Then I spent most of the rest of the day bashing the Vista install and installing Linux on the thing so I can actually use it :)

I started off with Kubuntu, and had it mostly bashed the way I like it when something irritated me and I went for OpenSuSE instead. Well, that went over like a lead balloon. (Wait – Mythbusters proved it possible. Make that a concrete balloon.) I was in dependency hell inside of 5 minutes just trying to get the ATI drivers installed. So, back to Kubuntu I went, and as of 30 minutes ago, I think I have it tweaked just right.

This will, of course, last for about a day.

For those who may be interested, I followed this guide to get the config down. Extremely thorough, with lots of pictures. Actually a bit too thorough, there were several things I left out because I don’t use them.

Oh, and the laptop? A Toshiba Satellite A215 with a Turion64-X2 proc, 2GB RAM and 160GB HDD. Not bad at all.

Not a whole lot of interesting stuff going on. Tolerant and I have been prepping for the upcoming Eventing Season, and that means finishing up all the projects we started over the winter – clothes, gear, etc. I finished the scabbard for the cleaver, you can check it out here. Tonight I managed to get a decent inventory of the gear in the garage, so that leaves tomorrow night for the preliminary packing and maybe a grocery run.

Zoom!

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.

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.

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.