Wintermute's Blog @ Nitemare Cafe

I'm seriously considering moving my domains completely onto Google's free services, because I've been having some major reliability issues with Time Warner's RoadRunner service. Any time I download anything large-ish, such as a perfectly legal Ububtu iso, my connection seems to stall and I have to reset my modem, sometimes several times before the download completes. Then, sometimes, the connection drops after days of being stable with little to no activity. It's unpredictable and driving me nuts. I live in the city now, so DSL is a sorta-option other than the no POTS line and intense hatred of all things AT&T and their TOS which would prevent it. (I believe TW's TOS allows it. If not, they don't enforce it via technology. Unless that's what's causing my stalled connections...) I could take Brandon up on his offer to host me, but I hate to take advantage of a friend who does web hosting as part of their living. I could also pay for co-location somewhere. Or I could talk to my boss about hanging the server off of work's T1. None of the hosting solutions solve my connectivity problems, though, so maybe the solution is to write a script that monitors connectivity and uses an opto-isolated relay off the parallel port of the server to momentarily cut power to my cable modem, thus resetting it, whenever the connection stalls. That seems to be the funner, more geeky, solution anyhow :)

Sorry it's taken me so long to get my thoughts together, but here's my Penguicon 6.0 report. Hope everyone enjoys it...

Penguicon was a last-minute thing for me. My wife stumbled across the website after work on the week of the con while my boss and I were standing in her office, she mentioned it being something I'd probably be interested in, and my boss asked if I wanted to go. That was probably Tuesday evening. On Wednesday, travel arrangements were made, a hotel room was booked (at the overflow hotel), and I had Friday off. The drive up to Troy, Michigan, was pretty uneventful other than I-75 being closed in Detroit. The Penguicon website maybe should have mentioned that ;)

I arrived at the con a little early and asked about registration. I was pointed to one table and told 3:30. 3:30 came and went with no one at the table, but a line was forming at a table on the opposite side that I had been pointed to. So I jumped in line and waited. And waited. And eventually it was confirmed that I was in the correct line, but there was some confusion at the registration desk. Jokes were made about registration computers running Vista, but it turns out that the paper registration forms just weren't there yet. Lovely. So, closing in on 5 or so, I was finally registered. Unfortunately, it was a little to late to make it to one of the talks that I had hoped to attend. Instead, I just sort of hung out until opening ceremonies, which were a bit uneventful for such an event-packed con.

At 8 PM on Friday, I saw "I Stopped Sleeping (How to Succeed in Webcomics)" followed by "A Murder of Crows" at 9. Both were interesting discussions, and I met Randall Munroe (of xkcd just before the webcomic panel. I tried not to go all fan-boy on him. I simply introduced myself, shook his hand, told him how much I loved the comic, at which point he beat me within an inch of my life. Apparently, he likes to do that to people who approach him about how much they love his comic. If only I had overheard his comment a moment earlier...(OK. Only he and the three people who heard him joking around will probably get that joke, but it's funny, dammit. Trust me.) From there, I sorta hung out until deciding to call it a night and walk back to my hotel.

I started Saturday with Jason Scott's talk on Interactive Fiction. At this point, the lack of organization was already apparent (from registration the night before), but the bed on the stage pretty much sealed it. It was a good talk, though, even though Jason was surprised be the lack of video in the room for his presentation.

Even with the lack of organization, Penguicon was very enjoyable as an attendee. I won't bore anyone with further details, other than to mention a couple more highlights of the event. The panel discussion "Surviving a Zombie Apocalypse" on Friday night was an absolute riot. And if you ever get the chance, you have *got* to see the giant telsa coils in concert.

All in all, I had an excellent time. Next year, I'm dragging the wife along :)

If any of my old BBS users are reading this and would like a nitemarecafe.com email address, drop me a line and I'll set you up.

I'm currenly in Troy, MI, at PenguiCon 6.0, patiently waiting for registration to start. If anyone happens to notice the guy with the Tux tattoo on his right ankle, that's me!

OK. As of Friday at 5pm, The Blitz is now The Rock, and it doesn't *totally* suck. The thing that really sucks is that there are currently no live DJ's. This makes it sound sort of like my MP3 player on random shuffle, but with commercials and a slightly larger play-list. The good news is that I messaged the station on MySpace on Friday, and here's their reply from earlier today:

Well the DJs will be back sometime in May. Right now we are just concentrating on the music right now and will start to introduce other programs in time. The morning show will also be returning sometime in May. Thanks for your questions and we hope that you will enjoy the station again!

I appreciate a couple of things about this reply. First, I appreciate the personal response, even though I'm sure they've been busy dealing with hundreds of friends requests, dozens of comments to approve, and who knows how many messages. I also appreciate that the talent will, in fact, be back on-air sometime in May. I can't wait, because the DJ's are what give a radio station it's personality. Otherwise, I'd listen to my MP3 player on random shuffle, commercial-free.

This morning, I get in my car and tune the radio the 99.7 The Blitz, and out comes a message saying "Please stand by, the radio station is rebooting." The website says the same thing. So does the official MySpace page. So, I dig around a bit and find this via Yahoo Answers (link):

Mo from the morning show posted this bulletin: to avoid hundreds of individual inquiries, i was informed today that the blitz is changing formats beginning friday april 4th at 5pm. i do not know what the new music music will be, i will find out when you do, all i have been told is i am still under contract, the plan is to restart the morning show with the new format but not until the music takes hold which means though i will be paid, blazor and i are off air for the next two months. in thirty days you will here promos for the new show which i believe will be blazor and mo, even though it should be the other way around because i am way better looking. but i digress. will be here drinking for the next two months and mo’s mix is still a go for april 18th so i better see you there.

—mo rocka

A little more digging reveals a blurb in the Columbus Dispatch (link):

"I can say this is not a whim and that it's not based on personal preference," Fish said. "We did some pretty major research of the market to establish what the best opportunity was."

"The Blitz was a cool concept that lasted awhile," Fish said. "Hopefully . . . (the new format) will (make) our advertisers happy."

Let's all hope he considered the listeners, too. Classic rock stations like 96.3 and 105.7 are OK, but The Blitz is better. 107.1 changed formats to country awhile back, leaving 99.7 the only station with its format in the area. If 99.7 changes too much, there will be a definite void on the Columbus radio dial.

And now, I'll leave you with this 80's poem:

Disco sucks,
Punk is dead.
So give me ROCK,
Or give me head!

Update: Apparently, their call-sign changes to WRKZ today as well. (link)
Update2: WRKZ used to be the call letters for 93.7, K-Rock, (before changing call letters themselves) in Pittsburgh. (link) Not that the old K-Rock is going to have anything to do with whatever The Blitz becomes at 5PM today.
Update3: 997rock.com points to the same page as wbzx.com. (link) I guess we'll find out if the word "rock" within the domain name is a good sign in just over an hour.
Update4: The Blitz is now The Rock. Looking at the new site, it looks like the new format is similar to 105.7 The Brew. But hopefully they'll include the stuff they played as The Blitz in their new format. I guess we'll see. On the plus side, we can listen online now...
Update5: Bring back The Blitz! 'nuff said...

In case there was any doubt:

100% Geek

Yeah. It's a random title from song lyrics... Yet it is somehow fitting for today's entry...

Gary Gygax died on Tuesday, and Wil Wheaton shared a great story in his honor. His story triggered a long forgotten memory that I thought I'd share as well. It's nowhere near as good as Wil's, but read on if you're interested.

When I was 13 or 14, my family moved into the apartment complex where I met one of my best friends all through school. Unfortunately, we lost contact long ago, and this story is not really about him. It's about another friend, though one I only knew briefly.

It had to have been around 1982 or 1983 when we moved into the apartments. Up until then, my family always lived in rental houses. Though the apartments were only a mile or two from our previous house, and I retained many of my previous friends, I made many new friends as well. One of those friends was nicknamed "Bones." For the life of me, no matter hard I try I can't remember his real name. I think it speaks to my early geek status that my friends held Star Trek inspire nicknames.

As I mentioned, I didn't know Bones long. Shortly after we moved into the apartments, Bones' family moved away. But in those months that he did live there, we had some adventures together. While "the first time I ever got drunk" fits the bill as an adventure, this entry isn't about that experience.

Bones was the only child of a single father who worked way too much, which meant that a) his father felt guilty and gave him a much higher than average allowance for the early 80's, and b) his father didn't mind that he spent that allowance on Dungeons and Dragons, while all the other parents where freaking out about how "satanic" it was.

And so it came that in the summer 1984 or so I was introduced to D&D by Bones. He had heard about it from all the older kids in the apartment complex, but none of them would let us younger kids play. So Bones bought all the manuals and a starter game and read everything by the time my family moved in. Wizards and Warriors had already completed its run on CBS by then and I hadn't even heard of D&D until I met Bones. But once he mentioned this game and we started hearing about the "satanic" connections, being the rebellious teenager that I was, I knew I had to play. So we gathered several of the other kids who weren't allowed to play D&D with the older kids, and we started a campaign in secret. A lot of the parents were pretty freaked out about their kids getting involved in D&D, so it remained secret and therefore a pretty small group, just four or five of us.

I don't remember much about the campaign, or even the group. I remember Bones was the Dungeon Master, as his generous allowance gave him enough money to buy materials. I remember my best friend all through school was part of the group. I remember we wanted a mixed party, and while everyone wanted to be a fighter, we drew straws for flipped coins or something. I picked last, and was "stuck" being a rogue. We played at least a little while every day after school, and also on weekends. I grew to love the game and my character, and then Bones moved away because his dad got a new job somewhere else. He took all the character sheets with him (because we all feared our parents finding them) and the game died. I've played D&D here and there since then, always playing a rogue, but never as seriously as when we played for the two or three months that I knew Bones.

I haven't thought about Bones in years. Thank you for introducing me to Dungeons and Dragons. And thank you, Gary Gygax, for giving me such a wonderful memory. And thank you, Wil, for triggering a memory that would have remained hidden away forever.

Awhile back, I wrote about finally switching my DVR software over to MythTV. Since then, I've added a little program called TVWish that allows me to create a wishlist of programs to record should they ever air on TV. One of the features that I like about TVWish is the "suggest" feature, which allows it to record programs based on past and scheduled recordings as well as genre. The problem is, the guide grabber that I am using, zap2xml, does not fill the programgenres table in the database. Unfortunately, this is the table that TVWish uses via its suggest.pl, instead of using the category field of the program table. This left me with two options for implementing genre suggestions.

First, I could patch suggest.pl to use the different field and table. Problem is, I don't know perl. It's close enough to C that I'm sure I could hack around with it and get it going, but it would probably take me awhile.

The second option is to modify zap2xml to fill the table. Again, I don't know perl very well. Zap2xml is a little more complex than the suggest.pl of TVWish, so it would probably take me even longer to get it right.

The third option, the one I went with, was to fill the programgenres table with the required data, taken from the program table. Since I do know PHP, I decided to hack together a very quick script to do this for me. It's certainly not pretty, but here it is anyway (be sure the variables at the top match your system):

$host = 'localhost';
$username = 'user';
$password = 'pass';
$database = 'mythconverg';

$connection = mysql_connect($host, $username, $password) or die ("Unable to connect!");

mysql_select_db($database) or die ("Unable to select database!");

$query = "DELETE FROM programgenres;";

$result = mysql_query($query) or die ("Error in query: $query. " .
mysql_error());

$query = "SELECT chanid, starttime, category FROM program;";

$result = mysql_query($query) or die ("Error in query: $query. " . mysql_error());

if (mysql_num_rows($result) > 0)
{
   while($row = mysql_fetch_object($result))
   {
     $query2 = "INSERT INTO programgenres VALUES (" .
         $row->chanid . "," .
         "'" . $row->starttime . "'," .
         "'0' ," .
         "'" . $row->category . "'" .
         ");";
     $result2 = mysql_query($query2) or die ("Error in query: $query2. " .      mysql_error());
   }
}

Please note that this entry is nowhere near 500 words unless I include the code. It does not count for the challenge I mentioned on Saturday ;)

OK. I’ll admit it. I’m out of shape, and have been for some time now. I weighed in around 115-120 when I graduated high school, which was a little on the light side, even 20 years ago. I’m now pushing the 200 mark. I don’t think I’ve broken it yet, though I’m probably close. I’d like to get back down to 138, which according to all the charts is my ideal weight.

So, what am I doing about it? Well, last year I started running because I was going to try to run the Columbus Marathon. I started another blog about it, and bought some video equipment so I could make a documentary about it. That plan didn’t really work out so well. Life got busy. We bought a house and sold another. I put my plan of running in a marathon on hold and quit running temporarily. Of course, that “temporarily” stretched on into winter, and it’s hard to motivate myself to go running when it’s cold as hell outside ;) But I’ll start training again. I promise ;) Probably later today, or tomorrow morning at the latest. Gotta start (again) somewhere, right?

In the meantime, my wife decided to buy a Total Gym 1700 Club (affiliate link). It came a couple of weeks ago and we got it set up, but we really need to organize and unpack some more boxes so we can convert a spare bedroom into an exercise room. We’ve also got an elliptical that we purchased just before we bought this place that we plan on putting in there. I’d also like to eventually get a treadmill and stationary bike, for when it’s too freaking cold outside to run. But we’ll probably hold off until we start using what we already have.

My ultimate goal is to maybe convert part of the massive garage that came with the house into an actual gym with free weights, the equipment we already have, maybe some boxing equipment. I bet a boxing ring would fit and we’d still have room for four cars in there.

The garage needs a lot of work before that could happen, though. There are some windows that are out. The electrical needs rewired. The roof needs replaced. There’s a gap under one of the doors. Critters have gotten in and decided the loft makes a good restroom. I have to make repairs to prevent the critters from getting in. Then I need to clean all the crap (literally! Yuck!) out. The stairs to the loft needs replaced with something that resembles something I’d actually feel safe walking up and down. Then I can start thinking of putting in a gym. It’s nice to dream, though.

At any rate, while I’m out of shape, I’m starting to really do something about it. And yes, I’m still planning on running a marathon. Maybe it’ll be this year, but probably next. And I plan on documenting the entire training process. Maybe I’ll even update the other blog once in awhile ;)