Me

Old School MMORPG

/ hsoi / 6 Comments

Before World of Warcraft (certainly the most successful MMORPG ever), there was the MUD: Multi-User Dungeon.

I remember discovering MUD’s back in undergrad. Had a great time playing them, met some good people, and frankly if not for them I wouldn’t be a computer programmer today. The natural progression was starting as a player, but then wanting to get into the creation side of MUD’s. Certainly you can create worlds without knowing how to code, but I wanted to run a MUD and shape the world… so I had to learn how to program. I picked myself up a book on the C programming language, bought a development environment (THINK C), and got to work. I also recall that at my undergrad institution, the mainframe everyone used for email and such was a VAX-VMS system… no way to run a MUD there. But over in the CS department? They had 486’s running some flavor of Unix (SCO, I think), and I managed to finagle myself an account even though I wasn’t a CS student. 🙂 Good times.

Of course, pure MUD’s were text-based. We dreamed about making graphical MUDs, even thinking of ways to combat the limits of the age. For instance, if all you had was a 2400 baud modem, you can’t be pushing massive amounts of graphics over that slow connection (you kids today think a web page taking 3 seconds to load is slow? back in my day….). Besides, we lacked the time and resources to develop such things, but it was always on my mind.

I guess that’s why modern MMORPG’s don’t appeal to me — been there, done that, got over the addiction.

However, Daughter keeps seeing commercials for various MMORPG’s and they’ve perked her interest. Heck, with LEGO Universe about to come out, Oldest is curious too. However, they all hit the same snag: monthly subscription fees, and Dad isn’t going to pay for it. If they want to spend their own money on that they can, but so far they’re unwilling. 🙂

Nevertheless, Daughter keeps inquiring and it hit me: why not try a MUD? Sure it’s low-tech, but it’s no different from reading a book vs. seeing the 3-D IMAX movie adaptation (i.e. it’s text, you get to use your imagination instead of perceiving someone else’s).

Of course, the geek in me won’t let it be just any MUD! No… my dreams of running my own MUD may have faded but they’ve never left me. I went searching for codebases and found tbaMUD which seems to be a good foundation (I won’t bore you with the lineage). Back in the day, I did things to get MUD servers running on Classic Macs, but it never really worked like people wanted. With Mac OS X being Unix-based and most MUD codebases being biased towards Unix well.. download and see! So I obtained the tbaMUD source, fiddled with it a bit to get it working in Xcode, and ta da… I’ve got a MUD server running here at home. 🙂  It’s not connected to the world at-large but hey… I got to get my geek on, and we’ll see what Daughter thinks of it.

So with that… she should be awake soon. We’ll start up a telnet session later this morning and see what she thinks.

Class AAR: AT-2A (My) Home Defense Tactics

/ hsoi / 4 Comments

Last night KR Training hosted its AT-2A Home Defense Tactics class. While I attended this class a few months ago, this time I hosted the class.

After experiencing the class myself, I wanted to host the class for a couple of reasons. First, it’d be nice to see what Karl thinks of my house from a defense/tactical perspective. Second, I wanted Wife to be involved. Wife cares about defense, she’s very keen on awareness. What I wanted her to get what some “formal schooling” and also some other perspectives on how our house stacked up. Plus hey, it’d be nice to let her finally see what it is I do all of those Saturday’s away from her and the kiddos. 🙂

This class ran like most instances of the class, just different due to it being a different house. There are numerous things I have already thought about, addressed, and tended to, but certainly some new and useful things came out of the event. There are a few things I’m going to work on to improve in the house, and some ideas I’m going to reject. For instance, making ground-level windows undesirable to go through. A suggestion from Karl is to put painful plants at such windows, like grow a holly bush or a rose-bush (all those thorns hurt) to discourage entry. While the suggestion in and of itself is a good one, it will not specifically work in my case due to botanical reasons (e.g. too much shade, those things just won’t grow). However, the alternative is putting things on the inside by the windows to discourage entry, such as large heavy objects in front of the window, or having lots of things that if a window was breached would cause lots of noise (e.g. lots of cheap fragile knickknacks on the window sill that get knocked off). That’s covered.

One very useful thing was addressing some of the “downstairs” issues. I hadn’t thought about one particular area being a “hunker down” spot, but Karl’s examination of things raised a lot of good points. Wife and I are looking at how we can tweak that spot to make it even better. It’s certainly going to be part of our plan.

The main thing to note is that no house will be perfect, all situations are going to have problems (e.g. stairs are just a problem that’s tough to overcome). But the best thing you can do is plan ahead. Examine the home from the exterior and the interior, looking at it with a mindset of “OK, if I was a criminal, what would I do?”. Look for those vulnerabilities. What can I do to make my house less attractive? Do you have children? How could they play into the situation? If say I have to run from my bedroom to the children’s room, what is that path like and what do I have to concern myself with? Can I do things to help improve that (e.g. motion detecting light switches, use of light and darkness)? How are things in the daytime? How are things at night? Every house is different so there’s no one blanket solution, but so long as you take the time to figure it out (and having an expert like Karl Rehn is certainly useful), that’s the key. Plan ahead so when the flag flies you can just go.

This morning, Wife came up to me and suggested some things from her own thinking. It wasn’t stuff that came directly out of the Karl (i.e. direct suggestion from Karl), but rather just how some scenarios played out, some examination of things, some other suggestions… put them all together, and Wife had some good thoughts on other improvements we could do. I must admit, it just tickled me that the class went over so well with her. I know she wasn’t looking forward to the class (she was thinking it’d be akin to some other classes I did, like maybe force-on-force classes), so I was happy to see how engaged she was in the class and how much she took from it.

That Wife got a lot out of it pleased me. Plus it put her a little closer to my wavelength on a few things, or at least she could see where I was coming from. We both got something out of it, individually and as a couple. I think the goals I set for hosting the event were met.

And of course… my “honey-do” list just got longer. 😉

Old Friend

/ hsoi

Apart from being a fantastic time-waster, I must admit one thing I like about Facebook is reconnecting with old friends.

Case in point. An old high school friend “friended” me on Facebook some time ago. While he lives on the east coast, he just took a job with Dell thus had to come down here for some training. He dropped me a line saying he’d be in town and wondered if we could get together. I haven’t seen the guy in perhaps 20 years… wasn’t going to let the opportunity pass.

We went to Threadgill’s last night, had some food, listened to some live music, and just talked for hours catching up on what’s been going on the past 20 years. Oh sure, over the years we heard little things here and there from mutual friends, but there’s nothing that can compare to sitting down with someone and just talking with them.

One thing I didn’t like? I found out that he’s now living almost in the country (foothills of the Blue Ridge mountains) on 3 acres, can hunt there, and the deer are so heavily populated there that he finally got himself a Savage .308 bolt-action and is going to harvest a few this year. I’m most envious. 🙂

The other thing I didn’t like? Being able to say “it’s been 20 years since we saw each other”. Two decades. Face it Daub… you’re getting old. 🙂

But with that getting old, you realize more and more what’s important. Lots of people can come and go in your life, but it’s good to keep in touch with those that meant something. Yeah, Facebook may have a lot of evil things about it from a corporate standpoint, but it’s hard to deny how it and other modern communication technology is changing how social relationships work. Don’t really have to go another 20 years before we see each other again.

No Doves (today)

/ hsoi

Just spoke with my buddy.

The guy that owns the property we’d be dove hunting at came down with something… he’s been in bed all day, conked out. 😦

So, the dove hunt has to be postponed until next week.

Kinda a bummer because I was all pumped up, but also a blessing because well… I’m just not that much of a shotgunner. I spent today working the shotgun dry with some snap-caps, and while I’m pretty sure I’d bring down a few birds, a little more time to get some more practice is a good thing.

Plus, this means I can join the family at the church’s annual fair! Time for gorditas and roasted corn! 🙂

Daemon schism

/ hsoi / 3 Comments

Daemon schism.

I posted a Facebook status message yesterday:

Well, I’m feeling more optimistic about the “daemon schism”.

which would make no sense to anyone but me and my teammate at work. Someone commented on the status update saying they had a Google fail on the phrase. So… I figured I would post it to the blog to it and claim the coining of the phrase “daemon schism”.

And for those curious, I’m splitting a daemon in two.

Dove hunting

/ hsoi / 7 Comments

It’s dove hunting season here in Central Texas.

I know some people dedicated to it. Me? It’s just not my thing.

First, I’m not really a shotgunner. I just don’t shoot them much, thus I don’t get much practice shooting flying things (be it clays or birds). The times I’ve shot skeet I really enjoyed it, but I just don’t seek it out (handguns are my focus). Second, shooting doves seems like a lot of work for little gain. All the feather plucking, cleaning, prep, and so on… just for a little nugget of meat? I guess that’s why if I’m going hunting I tend to prefer bigger animals (e.g. I am dreaming of elk hunting one of these days). The cost-benefit ratio just seems slightly better there. So the dove thing just hasn’t appealed to me.

However….

A guy I know from Scouts and church is an avid dove hunter. Last year we were talking about it and he made comments to me that I should go out with him; I passed. This year he started on me again and I said “why not?”. So I pulled the 18.5″ barrel off my Mossberg 500 (it’s a field version, wood furniture) and put the field barrel back on with a modified choke. I went out and bought some 7.5 shot shells. Got my hunting license with the migratory bird stamp. And… I’m ready. 🙂

Haven’t gone out yet. I’ll be talking with my friend tonight to figure things out, but it looks like maybe this weekend.

I figure why not? Try it. If I get something, great. If I don’t, it should just be fun to get out and try. Lord knows doves are not in short supply around here…. I’ve seen 2 dozen in my yard at times, and I must admit when I see that I have thought about how tasty that could be, if only I didn’t live in the city. 😉

We’ll see how it goes. If any of you are dove (or bird) hunters and have tips for me, please share in the comments.

The Austin LEGO Store

/ hsoi / 6 Comments

This past weekend we finally got to visit the Austin LEGO Store.

Oh, what geeky nirvana. 🙂

Of course, all the store sells is LEGO, and even at 10 AM (opening time) the place was jumpin’. Kits everywhere. You can see the back wall is just bins of bricks (grab a cup, fill it with random bricks). You can build your own mini-figs (3 for $10). It’s pretty cool, and all things LEGO. What I found extra amusing were the people who worked there. Very friendly, very geeky… you could tell they love LEGO themselves and enjoyed working at the store. If they didn’t have to engage a customer (e.g. they greet everyone as they walk in), they’d just strike up conversations about LEGO… one of the workers and Oldest spent some time just talking shop. The workers got to set up the various showcase models themselves and had fun when doing so. For instance, see this model of a Star Wars AT-AT?

Look for C-3Po. 🙂

Here’s some other models that I liked:

LEGO Biker - I love the trike, and the chain. Nice touch.

LEGO Horses, roaming the wild.

Martial arts, LEGO style!

LEGO Sumo!

I’m sure Oldest would be happy to rent a room in back and live there, or eventually get a job there. Boy… wouldn’t that be his dream job. 🙂

Oldest bought a few things, and I even picked up a couple of things. I bought the Kingdoms Advent Calendar and the Toy Story “Army Men on Patrol” set because hey… it’s Army Men in LEGO form, how cool is that? 🙂

Morning ruminations

/ hsoi

Don’t neglect to empty the milk jug that catches your spent primers. You may find the reloading press backs up because the tube doesn’t empty.

While it’s nice to listen to music while reloading, it’s nicer to listen to the sound of silence broken only by the sound of morning rainfall.

I’m getting tired of reloading 9mm… been a lot of rounds loaded and I’m wanting to move on, but no… must stay with it. I see the light at the end of the tunnel, and I know it’ll feel sweet when I get it all done. Must stay the course, must see it through.

When it comes to breakfast, what’s the difference between cornflakes and milk, or chips and queso? It’s all ground corn pressed into flakes consumed with milk product, so have your nachos for breakfast (call it a Bill Cosby breakfast — “this is not your child!”) and be happy.

Seeing ducks in the morning makes me smile.

Seeing my children in the morning make me smile more.

Seeing Wife in the morning, makes me smile most.

It’s easy to find something that will spoil my day… but I’m not going to seek it, something will come along sooner or later. Going to ride my wave of happiness while I have it for as long as I can. 🙂

Savory irony

/ hsoi

I’m well aware of how I look and thus the general way I’m perceived by people who don’t truly know me.

It’s always given me moments of eye-rolling humor throughout my life, especially the past 20+ years that I’ve had long hair.

I get an extra special giggle when it comes to politics.

Why?

Well, most people assume that someone with long hair is not going to be conservative (in the true sense… remember, I politically identify myself with Libertarian philosophy). Consequently, people I may vote for may belong to parties other than Democrat (and typically so), and modern Liberals generally turn my stomach.

But it’s funny… it’s usually those same Democrats and Liberals that tend to judge me by my looks, yet they’re the same people who think judging someone by how they look is a bad thing. Ah, the irony is so sweet, and I get to savor it so often. 🙂