Well, new words from me at any rate. I just looked at my front page and it has been 3 months since I posted anything. It certainly doesn’t feel as though I have been silent so long. And it certainly is not because I have been so busy with real life, quite the opposite in fact.

I did mess my back up Memorial Day weekend, and the drugs I was on made the next two weeks disappear even more quickly then normal. The rest of the time, I have no excuse for. Not that there was a huge audience to disappoint here anyway.

I did re-read all of the Vorkosigan books during that period. While not horribly productive, it was certainly a great deal of fun. Well, actually, I am still in the process of reading Mirror Dance. It is the most difficult for me to read for some reason.

There is certainly enough in the political sphere to warrant attention here. From the lies being spread about the healthcare plans, to the idiocy of the Birthers, to the voting on Judge Sotomayor, there is plenty that I could comment on. But I have found that just reading the stories and seeing the clips from the news shows just wears me out. I see the politicians and talking heads spreading misinformation and outright lies, and I get angry at them. And I get angry at the supposed journalists that don’t challenge them on the lies. By the time I am done, I am too disgusted to write anything myself.

Then there is gaming. I have not been able to visit my friends to play board games recently, I have been saving the money. I have been playing City of Heroes and EVE Online. Thank goodness for annual subscriptions, or I would have had to let both of them go also.

The Mission Architect for City of Heroes has been a great deal of fun. While there are a lot of really bad stories, and a lot of farms, overall it is a very nice addition to the game. There are some outstanding stories already created, and I am certain more will be added as more features and abilities are added to the system.

And of course, the big news for COH fans is the coming of two of the most requested things in the history of the game. Power customization and switching sides. I was not really too excited about the power customization in Issue 16 at first. But as I have played more of my alts, I keep finding things that I would like to change, to better fit the character concept and look. And the animation changes coming for Martial Arts and Super Strength are very welcome, giving each player with those powersets the ability to differentiate their character from others.

I started out excited about Going Rogue and being able to switch sides. I have characters on both blue and red sides that can easily fit moving into the grey, or even out right switching. I created them with that idea in mind, some over 5 years ago when I started playing the game. It has taken a long time to get here, but I have had a lot of fun waiting.

Well, I will try to be a bit more proactive about posting here.

As a wise man once said,

Life is what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans.*

So the last couple of weeks have been busy. Far too busy to keep up with posting here obviously. Part of the time was spent trying to earn some money, part with family, and part with playing games. The family had games parts were much more successful than the money part so far.

Especially with the last couple of days, dealing with taxes. That has been especially depressing, but at least it is past now. Just the regular bills draining my resources at this point.

To combat the various depressing parts of the last couple of weeks, I have been spending too much time buried in City of Heroes. Issue 14 is live now, and I had to bring over and update an arc from the Test server. Feedback immediately got me started re-writing parts and searching for typos. The re-writing is done, but I do not believe it is possible to get rid of all the typos. They hide from me, just to jump out and bug the players.

Frankly, between the time spent working on a website for someone else, and writing I have been doing on my arcs for the Mission Architect, I have not had the time, nor really the inclination, to  get much written here. But I am currently between arcs on City of Heroes, and before I start on the website, I thought I would drop a quick update here.

I am also considering how, or even if, to proceed with the plugin reviews. I enjoy looking at the various offerings the plugin developers  give us, but I really need to spend more time making money, which my writing reviews will not do. Will have to wait and see how life happens I guess.

Oh yeah, if anyone that reads this is a COH player, try out Future Skulls, ID 4727, and Simple Times, ID 70801, and let me know what you think. Both are low level arcs, with related stories.

*John Lennon of course.

I have only been on Twitter for about a month and a half now, don’t have many followers, and am only following a few dozen people. I started using it because of the Rick Sanchez (@ricksanchezcnn) news hour (Hey CNN, take an hour off of Situation Room and give it to Rick. He just gets going and has to stop.) and have been using it more and more ever since.

I started out using TwitterFox which is perfectly adequate for quite a bit. It makes it easy to do a quick tweet from your FireFox browser without having to switch applications. But when I started to expand my list of people I was following, I needed a bit more control. So I have been using TweetDeck the last couple of weeks. The ability to split replies up into groups is very handy, making it easier to follow conversations.

I think the major benefit of using Twitter is not just getting to interact with famous people. Most of them have so many followers that it is not likely they will actually respond to your message. Although sometimes they do. The major benefit is getting exposed to things you never would have known about otherwise.

Following Phil Plait (@BadAstronomer) lead me to Marian Call (@mariancall). Not only is she a wonderful singer, she is a geek:

Then there was this bit of social commentary by Louis CK, found and tweeted by Danielle Corsetto (@dcorsetto).

Following the Discovery Channel PR account, led to an interesting article on Dirty Jobs next episode this week. Then checking a string of replies from astronomy buffs, led to these great photos of a comet I had never heard of before.

So there is a lot of benefits to Twitter, makes me wonder what kind of things I missed before I joined.

I have been looking at a lot of plugins lately, as you can see from my posts. I have noticed something about most of the plugins I look at that is very annoying. I was thinking about posting this today, when I checked my RSS reader and found the post from Ma.tt about there being 4000 plugins in the directory as of today. He then posts on the Wordpress Blog that today is Thank a Plugin Developer Day. Well, I do thank them. But I also have a bone to pick.

Wordpress requires MySQL v. 4.0 or better and PHP v. 4.3 or better to run. They deliberately did not use version 5 of either in order to allow more people use the software. This is a good thing, it has helped spread the use of Wordpress over all corners of the web, as blogs and as CMS.

Then there are the plugins, and some themes for that matter. Programmers, especially hobbyiests, like using the latest thing. Updated langauges and software call to programmers seductively, tempting them with more gadgets and easier ways to do things. I have no problem with this, I like things being easier and faster when possible myself.

What this results in is plugins that are developed and tested one MySQL 5 and/or PHP 5. Which means they may, or may not (bet on not), work well on version 4 of either. This is also all right. Sometimes you just can’t do what you want with the older version, or it takes much more overhead that makes it impractical. It will mean less people can use your plugin, but there are still thousands that can. And eventually most places will upgrade.

What I do not like, and think is incredibly stupid, is the huge number of plugin developers that do not say what versions of PHP and MySQL are required to run their plugin. So someone will install it on their site, try to run it, and have errors. So they go to the developer and ask for help. The developer will spend time and effort trying to figure out the problem, until he asks, or it is mentioned, what version of PHP is on the server. Then it is “Oh, it won’t run on version 4.”

Developers, please. You have the front page of the directory page for your plugin, you have a FAQ section on the page, most of you have websites that are linked from the page. Someplace on these pages, or on all, you could easily mention what versions of PHP and MySQL are required. It will save you, and your users, so much time and trouble.

That won’t make any difference, but it felt good to say. And thank you developers, I do appreciate your efforts. I like playing with your producopts.

Someone has decided that it is finally time to fulfill all the promises from the science fiction of the 40s and 50s. I do not know if it is actually practical for commercial, everyday use, but it certainly looks like fun.

I have bookmarked their site, Skycar Expedition 2009, and will be watching to see how things go.

Have you ever wondered about how things really work? Not things like the financial system, there is ample evidence no one understands that. But more important things, like bubbles bursting, or how a bowling ball is curved as it flies down the alley. Or how do they make baseballs.I love learning about this stuff. I ran across the television show called How It’s Made on the Science Channel and was immediately hooked. They show exactly what the title says, how something is made. They do shows on everything from springs, to accordions, to playing cards.

Each episode covers 3 or 4 different products, and they basically go into a factory and follow an item from start to finish. They do not always follow the entire process, some things are proprietary processes that the companies do not want publicized. But they do cover the basics, and it is amazing how complicated some things are. A spring is nothing to look at, but is not all that easy to make. But in some ways, the machines that make the springs are even more amazing. I can not imagine how people come up with the designs for the fabrication machines. And the process for creating a steel drum? All of that, to make those simple things?

Another show that is in the same vein, is How Do They Do It?, also on the Science Channel. They tend to cover more intricate things, and have not been around as long as How It’s Made. But they also cover entire processes, like how UPS delivers packages quickly (when they do) or how a prefabricated house is built and delivered. So while there is some overlap, the differences make it another fun show to watch.

Right now my favorite show about things we don’t think about or even notice, is Time Warp. They use high speed video photography to look at things all around us and see what really happens. My favorites so far are watching balloons and bubbles burst. It is amazing to see how the break in the skin travels around the curve surface. The two look amazingly alike, although the balloons do stay more cohesive since they are more solid.

Some things are more interesting than others. The stunt men doing the shooting scene was okay, but the whip end breaking the sound barrier was really neat. And I firmly believe that the women that were doing the fire breathing are crazy. Watching this stuff makes me wish I had an HD TV, because the more details, the better.

I don’t think I liking these shows means I am a geek. I am pretty sure I was a geek long before they were a gleam in their creator’s eye. Now that I think about it, there is a good chance I was a geek before their creator was a gleam in their parents’ eye. But I still like watching them.

It was a pretty good weekend, except for the parts that weren’t. I guess that technically fits all weekends, but at least most of this one was good. Well okay, most of it wasn’t really good. It just wasn’t bad.

Went over to see friends in Indiana Friday night. This is a pretty regular thing, we try to get together every Friday, although we do sometimes have scheduling problems, like holidays, vacations, or illness. We have been doing this for years. Actually, we have been doing it for a couple of decades at this point. We started after college graduation and have kept it up ever since. Even when I moved to Virginia for five years, the others continued getting together. We originally got together on Saturday nights, but moved it to Friday nights earlier this year because it worked better for work schedules.

Why do we go this, for over 20 years now? Well, for one, we like each other. We don’t agree about a lot of things, like politics or religion, but we still like spending time together. We show up, usually at Linda’s house, and spend several hours talking and playing games.

Guess I forgot to mention the games. That is how we started hanging out during college. Sort of. Most of us met and became friends and started playing games there. We had heard about some sort of game dealing with wizards and dragons and wanted to try it. So we found some Basic Edition Dungeons & Dragons and basically taught ourselves how to play. Our DM at the time was not the best, but we still enjoyed the games.

From there, we expanded to board games, especially Risk. We also played other thing, like Rook, Shogun, and Civilization. We were pretty open to playing about anything, as long as we enjoyed it.

Getting older did slow us down a bit. Jobs made it harder to find the time, I lived an hour away from the rest of the group, then I moved to Virginia. But the others kept getting together and playing games. We went to Gencons (before it was in Indy), Origins (I still get to this one as much as possible), and a local game con. One of us died very suddenly on a Saturday morning, a few hours before we got together, leaving his wife and 3 daughters. And still we get together as much as possible.

These days we mostly play train games. We started with Rail Baron, then moved on to the Empire Builder games. We own all the versions and like playing them, but the India version is pretty much our favorite. Well, I am not liking it all that well after the last 2 weekends. My game both weekends was poor to say the least. But that is how it goes sometimes, you just don’t get the cards you need when you need them.

We also played a couple of games of Ticket to Ride using the USA 1910 cards. We like that version because of the large number tickets available, making each game so different. We also play the Switzerland version on occasion. It can get pretty cutthroat, but is still fun. I did manage to win one game of Ticket to Ride, but again failed miserably at the second.

So it was mainly a losing effort Friday night. An hour drive, got my butt kicked at multiple games, then an hour home. Lots of fun. Wish we could get together this week, but the holiday schedule makes it impossible.

Saturday was more fun. I drove to Kentucky and participated in an orienteering event put on by the Orienteering Cincinnati group. It was marginally closer than the event the IndyO people were running. Considering how badly I did, the less time I had to drive to get home, the better.

I do not expect to do extremely well at the events. I left myself get too out of shape over the last year for that. I go to get out of my house, get some exercise, and basically have a fun walk through the woods. But that doesn’t mean I want to do badly on the course. And this time I did. I was doing the orange course and read the map wrong at the first control. (A minor mistake, after all, how important is reading the map at an orienteering event.) So I found the second control first, realized what I had done, and had to go back to the first control, then back to the second. Given my slow speed, this was a real problem.

So I walked through the woods, occasionally frustrated, usually sweating, and trying to find the shortest way between two points. Since I like the straight line definition, I did some of the sections the hard way. It was mostly fun, except for the cramps I had most of the time in my quadriceps. I didn’t warm up enough before starting, and it was a chilly day. They were painful, and driving for over 2 hours getting home didn’t help. Which was why Sunday was not a fun day at all.

Which pretty much leads me back to my first paragraph. It was a good weekend. Except for the times it wasn’t.

I am not sure about starting this blogging thing. There are already plenty of them out there, and I am not really certain I have a lot to add to the current flood of words that is flowing through the channels of the web. On the other hand, I am not a typical middle aged white male from the Midwest USA.

I admit, there are not actually very many people that are typical. Everyone has their own foibles and idiosyncrasies, some blatant, others more subtle. This means that being normal is somewhat difficult, if your particular oddities are too far from that mythical standard.

And the worst part is that what is defined as normal shifts based on where you are. Normal at a high school in Ohio is very different than normal at Juilliard in NYC. But in some ways, they are identical compared to what constitutes normal at a school in Zagreb or Beijing. Not that most students from that Ohio school would necessarily agree with that if suddenly placed in Juilliard.

But despite the differences between each of those places, I would bet that they all have their in-crowds and outcasts. The in-crowd defines the limits of normality, then spends their time categorizing where the outcasts belong in their exile. The outcasts then have the choice of accepting their place outside of normality or trying to convince the in-crowd that they are not really beyond the pale.

Personally, I was a nerd when I was younger. No, not a geek, geeks were still relegated to the sideshow at circuses back then. Now I am a geek, in a variety of ways, although I prefer the term polymath (my learning may or may not be great, but it is varied). I don’t claim to be of the same capabilities as the men listed at Wikipedia, but someone has to be on the low end of the scale.

Two of the areas I am interested in are traveling and photography, which I have combined at my main site. Other things include reading, gaming, TV, history, and recently, trying orienteering. And I have been known to listen to music and follow some of the politics that has been going on. That is probably something I will comment on from time to time, at least until the general election.

That may be the most useful part of this. Someplace to vent when something really irritates me. I guess I will see.