onotob

I have just finished wrapping all that must be wrapped, a formidable task considering that I could only find a mere sliver of scotch tape and the only scissors that could be found were a small pair of chocolate-handled moustache trimmers, since the fairly sturdy and dependable pair that usually reside in the knife drawer along with the worn Ginsu knives and the potato masher are sitting, cold and lonely no doubt, in the house of my ex-girlfriend, who just this weekend updated her MySpace profile to indicate that the kind of person she would like to meet is exactly the kind of person I am not, which is to say someone who has seen that the line was actually a sphere, and now I sit listening to a lovely American songstress croon angelically about a young boy being shot dead in the street and it, oddly enough, fills me with the warmest of loving thoughts for those in my life and causes me to wonder what they are up to themselves at this very moment, and hoping for them all the best things this rough, cruel, exhausting, thrilling and altogether too-short life has to offer.

Merry Christmas, everyone. May it find you as blessed as it has found me.

Posted at 11:54 pm.
3 Comments

So, I finally decided to ditch Textpattern and migrate to the lovely Wordpress to manage this blog. In the process, I broke every permalink out there in the wild. My bad (sorry all you KT Tunstall fans!).

But, Wordpress is delicious and I have no real regrets. Except, perhaps, that I do not blog often enough. This post can now officially join a list of blog posts about not blogging enough.

Life is a little crazy right now, what with a new lady friend, an existential crisis, and other interesting possible outcomes. Some days it feels overwhelming and other days it feels just right.

I might keep you posted.

Posted at 12:47 pm.
4 Comments

If you think national phone call information database that the NSA has been assembling for the last few years is benign (are there really people who think like this?), please think again:

A senior federal law enforcement official tells ABC News the government is tracking the phone numbers we (Brian Ross and Richard Esposito) call in an effort to root out confidential sources.

Posted at 8:20 am.
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Wired has an article about video game bosses, and why they are so satisfying to defeat. This is a subject very close to my heart, as many of you know (all too well). Boss fights in single-player games are fun and challenging, but for me they do not compare to the feeling I get when I defeat a boss for the first time in World of Warcraft. As I’ve said before, these bosses require 40 people working together to kill, and you must defeat an entire dungeon of other bosses just for the privilige of attempting to kill the final boss. The cost of failure is relatively high (in-game monetary costs for repairing equipment and buy materials, and real-life time). The so-called “hardcore” raiding guilds will come back night after night to work on the encounter until they beat it, which is why they are the ones to kill bosses first. My guild is more casual, so if we cannot defeat a boss in about 5 tries, it means another week and another run through the entire dungeon before we can try again (all of the big dungeons in WoW reset every seven days).

My guild first set foot in Blackwing Lair (BWL) December 1, 2005. We had been running the previous dungeon, Molten Core (MC), for the past 6 months and felt we were ready for the next challenge. We did not defeat the first boss in BWL until January 11, 2006. It took us over a month and in the range of 30 attempts to defeat this boss, and we still had to face six bosses before we could even attempt to kill Nefarian, the final boss of the dungeon. It would be another three months before we beat that encounter.

Finally defeating these bosses can be very emotional. If you skip to the last 5 minutes of my Nefarian kill video you can hear the excitement and down-right joy of my raidmates at the moment of victory. All the struggle and frustration gives way to a strong feeling of satisfaction and accomplishment as four months of effort finally pays off.

And then, of course, there’s the loot.

Posted at 2:45 pm.
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From the first time I heard of the Big Bang Theory, I thought it was a terrible idea. First, there is nothing. No time, no matter; nothing at all. And then suddenly there is everything! A huge explosion, caused by nothing at all, generates all the energy and matter that currently exists in our universe. Creationists are quick to point out how stupid that is, and they’re right, although they don’t have a very good alternative.

A few years back I read a quote from a scientist calling the Big Bang “improbable” and had my confidence restored. I was not the only one who felt this way!

Now, a new Theory of Everything is being floated that claims that there have been many “big bangs” in our universe, that our universe is perhaps 1 trillion years old, or that our universe is infinitely old and infinitely large.

I love it. Why must time have a beginning? Because we cannot contemplate something with no beginning and no end?

Posted at 12:04 pm.
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The Shape of Song is a Java app that creates a visual representation of music based on patterns in the compsition. It scans MIDI files and links groups of identical notes with arches. The results are stunning.

[Via The Morning News]

Posted at 6:59 am.
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I realize the title won’t mean a lot to most people, but here is a video of my guild killing Nefarian, lord of the Black Dragon Flight and the final boss in Blackwing Lair.

Posted at 10:13 pm.
3 Comments

KT Tunstall: Big Black Horse on Taratata (France)

KT Tunstall: I Want You Back (Jackson 5)

Thanks, Jon.

Posted at 1:13 pm.
8 Comments

John, the names we could not recall were Tika (the barmaid), Flint (the dwarf), and Tasslehoff (the Kender).

Posted at 11:15 am.
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The end of the year was pretty eventful in my neck of the eWoods. The Suck.com domain was apparently transferred to a domain parking services, causing a small panic in the Suck enthusiast segment (more influential than you might think) when the full Suck archives suddenly became inaccessible. But enterprising geeks sprang forth from the digital woodwork and produced a torrent of the entire archives, as well as a couple of live mirrors. No one yet knows why this went down, but everyone is finding comfort in the fact that we can still read all about drunken, regretful rabbits. Ride the torrent, share the Suck.

I suck at Internet time. While gathering URLs to linkify this post, I found that Suck.com now serves up the old content again. As you were.

Also, on new year’s eve, Last.fm had a drive failure and lost a sizable chunk of their data, causing yet another small panic, this time in the music recommendations via reputation engine segment (cooler than you might guess). John, as always, filled my heart with terror as he relayed to me that at least one month of listened-to tracks had been wiped from the face of the Internet, but it appears that the Last.fm guys have everything under control. The site is back up, although they are not accepting new submissions until they are finished restoring the data from what we can only hope is a painstakingly stashed backup.

Posted at 11:02 am.
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