Highly recommended game

Movies review

So I went to a double feature last night.

Inglorious Basterds sucked.  Seriously.  It fucking sucked. If this movie is even remotely representantive of what Quentin Tarantino’s films are like then the guy is seriously overrated. I certainly don’t mind violence in movies, but 1) the acting was shit, could be the actors’ faults — except some of them are pretty decent actors under any other director. 2) The violence and gore in it was absurd, overdone, and detracted horribly. If you haven’t seen it yet, make sure you’re being paid to go — even a free viewing would be overpriced.

GI Joe, on the other hand, fucking rocked! That is the coolest incarnation of the Joe’s to date. Ray Park was a seriously bad ass Snake Eyes, The Baroness was appropriately fucking hot plus bad assed awesome, same for scarlet, Ripcord was cool, you couldn’t ask for a better Hawk, and Duke wasn’t half the putz he could be in the past versions. If you haven’t seen it — do so. Repeatedly.

I wish this were Photoshopped

This is a sign that has been hanging on a local gas station since it opened over a year ago.

This gas station is on Washington Rd in Augusta, GA near I-20.

Meet Tai Lung

It took longer than expected, but this was due to lack of storage space for backup data from a nearly full 160G harddrive that was going to get reformatted from xfs to hfs+, but I have my new server setup and running more flawlessly than has any past attempt at server config.

The headlesspenguin is now officially retired. In fact, more than that it is dismantled, and it’s most resent RAM, CPU, case, floppy drive, harddrive, motherboard and power supply have been given to a friend.

In its stead is Tai Lung:
A 450Mhz G4 Sawtooth PowerMac tower with 640M of RAM, a 30G harddrive and the headlesspenguin’s old 160G and running OSX 10.5.7.

It is presently, and flawlessly serving all functions for which I needed it. Among them it is the home of:
The (as yet) Unnamed Diary Story
and
The Universal Nexus info site

Both sites currently exist, but have no content because it is late, I’m tired, and then on top of that there’s the reasons that each has as its current post.

The only complaint I have RE Tai Lung is neither its, nor Apple’s fault: UPS broke part of the case. If it weren’t for that it’d be a flawless, perfectly like new specimen. It’s the front “foot” that the case is supposed to rest on. I had to remove the remains of it and the still intact rear one. I’m currently seeking a replacement. Contacted UPS about it the moment I got the box opened — I should’ve heard back in 5 business days and that was almost 2 weeks ago more or less and no call. Fucking bastards.

In any case — anyone looking for a good, cheap, easy to use, stable, powerful server platform: OSX running on a G4 or G5 PowerMac. Got this thing for $12 + about $25 s/h. I could do most things I need/want with 10.3.9, and everything with 10.4.11 but I don’t have 10.4, I do, however, have 10.5. For the average Joe 10.3 would probably do the trick. I’d be using it if it weren’t for a problem with no-ip’s software.

All told I’m happy, and excited. YAY ME!!

Oh, finished writing the new 2^nd chapter of Salandra’s Revolution, but I’ve had no chance to type it up. Look for that soon, and not long after that the 3rd chapter which was started the same night I finished chapter 2.

The headlesspenguin retires

In either 2000, or 2001 I built a computer as cheaply as I could (but avoiding known-to-be-shit parts) and dropped RedHat Linux 7.0 into it. Thus was born The Headlesspenguin. A monitorless Linux box acting as an internet gateway, a file server, and various other capacities along the way.

It has server well and it’s hardware has been both up and downgraded over time as parts became free to hand it down or parts of it were needed to salvage dying desktops. It’s final incarnation is Debian 6 on a Dell Optiplex 667Mhz P3. This machine has been acting suspcious along with issues with the file servers that refuse to be resolved. It is being retired today as I have purchased a PowerMac G4 450Mhz tower.

This machine will be running OSX 10.3.9 (or, if I can get it to install and run satisfactorily, 10.5.7) and will eventually be upgraded to OSX 10.4.11 Server (or Leopard Server, again pending my personal benchmarks on the matter). It shall be taking over all functions of The Headlesspenguin, though it will not be carrying on the legacy of that name. Thus, as soon as all data is migrated over the ‘penguin will be shutdown for the last time.

It was a good run, but not without headaches. So far OSX has proven headache free — something Linux has NEVER been (though it’s better than Windows which has never been migraine free).

Optimus Prime is SO fucking badass!!!

Saw Transformers 2 last night.
THOU SHALT SEE!!!! It is fucking AWESOME. There — that’s all that can be said about it. Anything more would just be over the top.

Year One is funny too. Definitely see it, it’s just hilarious in evey good way possible.

I give up — and other news

Well, I thought I’d found a way to get my url, my web server software, and everything else working through my current network set up — port forwarding! It’s set up according to instructions, but doesn’t work. So I’ve just given up. PCs will no longer be used by me except for my 286 because it’s very well behaved, my P1 because OS/2 is fun to play with, and a 933Mhz P3 that’s there because I think Wizardry 8 was a pretty nice game.

Depending on various factors I should have a new server — a G3 or G4 PowerMac, probably. A Mac of some sort for sure. Anyway, should have it in the next few weeks to a month depending on cash flow and ebay. When this is done, I shall have no more Linux systems. Not because Linux is bad… for PCs it’s the best there is these days — it’s just that this isn’t saying much. Really, Linux is an excellent idea, but I’m no longer patient for certain of its quirks, and I’ve lost the interest in computers to cope with the fact that it (like any PC OS) is slightly over complicated.

I’m keeping my eye on ReactOS to replace the XP running on my P3. So between that, and the fact that I don’t use the damn thing more than an hour a month I think it’s safe to say that Windoze has NOT won any rounds.

Salandra’s Revolution’s new 2^nd chapter has a very excellent reason it isn’t typed yet: I realised it wasn’t complete, I have another few paragraphs to a few pages to write — and then I got writers block 4 sentences into the new content. So… it’ll be up, eventually, but don’t hold your breath.

On brighter news, a story I’m pretty sure I’ve never gotten typed up, or at least never posted, is perfectly suited to being a serial in a magazine/ezine. I was going to see about touching it up a little then submitting it and see what happens. I’ll keep posted here what ‘zine it’ll be showing up in. I also have some short works that are ready for submission if I could get off my lazy arse and type/format them for it. Anyway, if I can get my little works published I’ve got the extra boost when I get my juvie written — always a plus.

In further writing news, Shanny has gotten over some hurdles with her own work. She isn’t posting it though, not any more. I recommend visiting the site and clamouring in the comments that she post her stuff… though I don’t suppose a blog with a readership of like 3 people can get much of a clamour going… maybe link to an mp3 of some toddlers in a pots and pans store?

In gaming related news — yeah, I still game, I just got tired of posting the game sessions it was starting to become more chore than entertainment. Anyway, our game has taken a slight turn for the odd. Anastasia, Richard (her brother in law) and Nick (his best friend) were all borrowing Serena’s (the brilliant physicist who devised a way to cross fictons) ship. Ana is the only one any good at flying… Serena doesn’t, strictly speaking, use navigational computers AND her ship’s navigation system has extra dimensions to set and Ana didn’t turn that part off like she should have (and like Serena, the absent minded sort she is, forgot to mention — she also forgot to mention she does her own calculations so didn’t have a proper computer for it) so they wound up on Mad Monkey island near Kara-Tur. Ana is getting very rude and snarky with a demi-god. So this should be fun.

Serena herself, and her wife Georgia are pregnant by each other — not an uncommon occurrance (well, no more so than going to a sperm bank today) but it normally requires a gene surgeon, not sex. Seems on their own trip bit Toril for a spot of vacation the girls got the blessing of one or more gods.

Lyndsey is bummed because she is on a dagger mission which she expected Ana to be along on, but Ana has finally decided that she is done with the Daggers and is ready to return to the stage and quit. Really, Lyn’s happy — it always upset her a lot that Ana was there in the first place, but she found adventuring with her wife fun and thinks of her husband and wife as good luck charms. Still, she’s got her mom and Ghen along.

In WoW news, Gnomeregan Freedom Force is no more. Steamwheedle Cartel’s public RP is virtually non-existent and the enthusiasm to revive it is just not there. I plan to migrate my SWC characters to Wyrmrest Accord just as soon as finances allow — I will probably attempt to restart the guild then.

That pretty well covers everything. Maybe I’ll start remembering to post things more often so that I can take the time and effort to be more interesting and detailed — and so that I’m not making one big, monthly post that fits every fucking category I use and therefore just get’s dumped as “Journal”…

cheers.

Hurray for crazy time

The rewritten 2nd chapter isn’t typed yet due to a) laziness, b) the power supply for my laptop died c) this is Georgia, officially summer, and therefor ungodly fucking hellified hot so is hard to work up enthusiasm to expend energy to breathe — let alone read my handwriting.

The unnamed Diary thing a) has not yet gotten even one more word in b) Will be back online as soon as i can finish sorting out my server which may require either a bell, book & candle… or a sledgehammer and 2t of C-4.

More WoW character screenshots will eventually be up … my new power supply should arrive from the warranty folks tomorrow or day after, so look forward to that.

Damned PCs

Well.. The Unnamed Diary Story… thingy is a dead link at the moment. Why? Because the damnable Dell that was the server for it decided it was great fun to shut itself off every hour or so. I moved everything to an old computer I had lying around, but it has decided it’s great fun to lock up every 20min or so. I am now waiting until I have this stuff I once heard of called “money” which apparently can be exchanged, in sufficient quantities, for a PowerMac. At that point I shall move it all over into a, probably G4, tower and let sensible hardware run it for awhile.

Thoughts on Mac vs PC

So here I sit a little over 1 year from getting my shiny “new” PowerBook G4 and I think about what I’ve learnt.

First off, let me say that I’ve been using computers since 1989.
My first computer was a Packard Bell Legend IV with a 286 12MHz with 1Mb of RAM and a 40Mb HDD. It ran MS-DOS 5.0 until like 1999 when I bought PC-DOS 7.0 for it. I still, occasionally, use it.

I built, to replace that between 1998 and 2000 a machine that was an AMD K6-2 400 (later upgraded to a 450) with 128Mb RAM up to 640Mb. This ran OS/2 2.0, MS Windows 98/98SE/ME/2000/XP in roughly that order, and various Linuxes from RedHat 5.2 Deluxe to Debian etch.

I’ve used Amigas, Apple II, and more flavours of PC than I care to count.

Frankly — I have to say from the motley collection of OSes (more than I’m going to bother listing or trying to remember) and hardware configurations I really have to say that Amiga rocks.

Seriously — If they still existed I’d kill for one.

Since they don’t a very very close second place belongs to a PPC based Apple with OSX 10.5.x on it. PC’s just suck. Really. Linux makes them suck less, but I don’t care for their architecture. That said, I will readily admit that while I’m pleased with the Intel Macs, I’d rather they’d stuck with PPC. They may have had good reasons to switch (among them not being able to get the G5 into a notebook, and not being able to break the 3GHz range) but damn it — PPC kicks x86’s ass.

To enumerate the various wonders:
1) Apples have a much enviable life expectancy. Shanny’s Mac is older than that AMD monster I made. Both were made with top shelf parts (Apple is notorious for doing this — a credit to computing as few other manufacturers realise there are computer parts that aren’t bought by the pound) yet the Apple is still running exceptionally and with better visual effects than the AMD ever did (partly due to the fact that PPC vs x86 means that this 333 G3 would amount to a nearly 550 P2). And, while I may have a 1989 286 that still works — let’s face it — go looking for systems as old as a Mac 128k or 512k and about the only thing you’ll find is a Mac 128k or 512k.

2) User-friendlier. I, once, as an experiment sat down and built a custom KDE desktop from the ground up. I figured why not see what the most sensible layout I could imagine for myself would be. I assumed I would wind up with something that didn’t resemble any OS out there and would demonstrate the superiority of getting [insert favourite flavour of *nix] and running KDE 3.x on it. I wound up with something so similar to MacOSX that I fetched the baghira set for it and an Aqua style icon set to finish the damn job. Top that off with the ability to, from one intuitive and logical place being able to do all real system administration and configuration work — System Preferences. The only problem I have using System Preferences is, no lie, that things make TOO MUCH sense… I tend to, out of habit, start trying to hunt for them and looking in tangentially likely places for them instead of the sensible place because between Linux and Windows I didn’t expect to find them there.

3) Tech support. This is what I do for a living — Internet Tech Support. Professionally, let me say that Windows fucking sucks, especially Vista. Most of my day is spent fixing, not internet issue, but rather explaining to people that Windows/Internet Explorer/Outlook/Outlook Express has in some way, shape, or form lost its godsdamned mind. You can try to say that more people use any of those than whatever else you care to name — but the ratios don’t match up. When I get a Mac call, it’s NEVER a software problem (well, twice. Once was probably user error caused and was referred to Apple simply because their issue was something from another planet and they had an internet signal so I didn’t want nor have to speak to them any more, the other was Microsoft Entourage was broken). There are, in fact, whole issues that are EXCLUSIVE to Windows. As in there aren’t troubleshooting steps for the other OSes because it doesn’t happen to them. The closest thing to it is actually a quirk of DOCSIS and cable modems — someone swapped the computer connected to the modem and didn’t reboot the fucking thing (the modem I mean). Windows, on the other hand adds things like forgetting how to actually DO TCP/IP networking or forgetting how to form an DHCP request properly, or spontaneously deciding to turn on ‘Work Offline” in every single MS internet software at once, or totally losing track of the NIC drivers and therefor the NIC and therefore the internet connection, I could go on — but it’s depressing. And don’t get me started on Vista and its special list of eccentricities that include all the ones of prior versions and then ADDS NEW ONES!!! Seriously, for every one thing that a newer version of Windows makes easier from my job’s stand point over the prior version it tends to make at least 3 other things harder.

4) Stability. This is technically more like a 3a, or something, but I don’t fucking care take your OCD meds and get over it. This one is sort of multipart though. Windows, not PCs, gets the first bit of this one. Why the fucking hell is the largest selling OS in the world right now the only one to EVER (to the best of my knowledge and not counting OSes that are in Alpha or Beta stages) actually have as an official troubleshooting item something that is more or less “has it been more then (depending on version) 3, 6 or 12 months (to the best of my knowledge it the highest it’s ever gotten is 1yr) since installing Windows? Then the solution to your trouble is to re-install Windows.” What the mother fuck?! No. Linux, Mac (classic AND X), MS fucking DOS for fuck’s sake, OS/2 you name it and you don’t have to reinstall it unless you or a virus fucks it up or hardware fails and an important file or 200000 get damaged. Why does Windows need this? Well, turns out it has to do with that damnable registry. That cumbersome behemoth of doom. A clean install of Windows 1) can be so unstable as to need reinstalled before it has been used, in fact Windows is the only OS that has ever crashed or locked up DURING THE INSTALLER that I’ve ever seen — and I’ve played with ReactOS which isn’t even to Beta yet. 2) has anywhere from about 100 – 3000 registry errors before you’ve so much as installed a single driver. I’ll admit, to learn that one I HAD had to install the program that was hunting for registry errors but the errors it found were nothing to do with its own install (well… one or two were but you can’t install anything in Windows without some minor errors showing up in the resulting entries. Usually missing characters in a pathname or something). From all the myriad attempts by both Windows detractors AND proponents the issue has something to do with the registry just corrupts over time and with usage. Hence people who almost never use their computers, or install a specific set of softwares on it and never so much as install updates after that can get away with a few years trouble free — but they develop problems at what would work out to around 12months of more regular usage. The damnable OS is that stupid snake that’s biting its own arse off.

PCs themselves I find to be less stable in general. I think this is something that would have been avoided if PC architecture hadn’t become open for anyone and everyone who wanted to make a PC compatible platform. Open Source, is generally a good thing — I rather love some of the results of it. The trouble is that the PC BIOS didn’t get the OSS treatment really, and while some excellent manufactures of motherboard, RAM, GPU, CPU, DSP, etc have come (and in some sad cases gone) the methods they have to use to interact with each other seems to open up a few destabilising points. That aside, you also have the flip side with parts that make someone a profit even sold by the pound (apparently this isn’t much of an exaggeration. some of the more ubiquitous varieties of components are sold in bulk — like those rather nameless SiS graphics cards of the late 90s) and companies looking to make a quick buck off of the guy who just wants a computer or just looks at meaningless numbers (clock speed, and ram may be good for comparing an orange to an orange, but a 100Mhz P2 is likely to out perform a 200Mhz P1 due to architectural differences, and an AMD K6-2 on a SoYo mainboard with 1Mb L2 cache runs like shit compared to one on an ASUS with 512K cache … that last one is a real life example).

Apple, as was mentioned before uses only top shelf parts all the way around. Often using NO SHELF parts, as in they’re using custom ordered items. They’ve apparently got some clever people deciding exactly where things should be placed in relation to each other because the performance is generally clean, reliable, fast, and long lasting.

Meh, I’m getting long winded and tired of typing. Suffice to say, I’ve always thought Macs were neat. Especially when I met the original iMac back in 1998 and fell in love with the only machine (then) capable of rendering Chrome effects, animated reflective water effects, and proper fog effects (all in the same area of the 3d game that was what came with that machine and that I regret never learning the name of) — effects that I understand weren’t EQUALLED in a PC until the Radeon a couple years later. I’ve been impressed with them since they were the first (and to my knowledge only) desktop computer to be a restricted export because it was classified a supercomputer and therefore a weapon by the United States government and military. I’ve been, admittedly, jealous at myriad points during the time I was still plodding along with PCs while my beloved used her 1999 model iMac from right next to me… but I will say that after the past year of having one to use and abuse and tinker with and, yes, at one point break (see previous post back around December when I had to use 10.3 for awhile and go shopping for a 10.5 disc) I am hooked. I’m not a lifelong adherent. I mean, if they do like they did in the 90s after Steve Jobs left and before he came back with the stagnant OS and lack-luster “new” models I will drop them in favour of who or whatever might be along to take their place. Until then, Apple makes the single best modern computer and OS available. They are, today, what the Amiga was when it was still alive.

I’m turning off comments for this entry because, frankly, this isn’t a discussion piece this was just me speaking my mind and I don’t give a shit what anyone thinks about it good or ill.