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Geek Ramblings for 11/12/2009

Brad — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 19:57:40 +0000

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 – Infinity Ward Fail
If you’ve been reading any gaming news lately, you know the big deal for the PC version is that there are no dedicated servers. IW shot themselves in the foot here. You cannot choose a favorite server (there are none), cheaters are a lot harder to deal with, no mods, no admins, and from what I’ve been reading, it’s overall a pretty laggy experience. The last PC Call of Duty I played was CoD2. I have CoD Modern Warfare for the PS3, but haven’t logged much time at all on it. Buyer beware for CoD MW2, though. The single player is short, and the multiplayer experience is iffy.

Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic Koala
I’m running Ubuntu 9.10 both at home and at work, and so far it’s been a pretty decent experience. I’ve had some trouble with networking on the work machine, but found the fixes over at the Ubuntu Forums. I have to admit I hardly go there any more as it just seems overwhelmed with a lot of newcomers’ questions. That’s not a bad thing, but it’s just not something I want to wade through, so generally I wander over, search, and then leave. I may get back into being more active, but I’m just not sure yet.

endperform.org future
I’m still trying to figure out where to go with the site. Part of me wants to move the blog elsewhere and do something else with the frontpage, part of me wants to whip up a podcast, and a third part of me wants to just leave things as they are. I’m torn, but I’ll figure out where it’s going to go soon.

Geeking Out: DragonCon, Mac and more

Brad — Thu, 10 Sep 2009 13:48:41 +0000

DragonCon 2009
I had the chance to finally attend DragonCon for the first time, if only for a day. Saturday was the chosen day, because it was the weekend, and because that was the day of the Adam Savage panel, which is the main reason I wanted to go this year. The biggest thing that sticks out in my mind is the lines. It took about two and a half hours to get a badge due to essentially a cluster of a registration area. There were two sections, cash and credit, but these were not broken out until near the front of the line. On top of that, there were only a total of three cashiers and about 7 to 10 registration staff. In my mind, there should have been more cashiers to balance things out, but that’s just my observation. The other line was the line for the Adam Savage panel, which ended up outside and stretching down the block. Thankfully the weather wasn’t full-blown hot, but it was warm enough to be uncomfortable. About an hour later we were let inside to sit and wait longer. The wait was worth it, and I ended up in the third row. Adam shared 100 of his wishes and explained a bit about them, then went on to take questions from the audience. In person he’s great to listen to, and I really enjoyed it. Other enjoyable parts of the con were seeing friends, checking out the vendor areas and of course the costumes. We had caught the end of the parade, thanks to the evilly long registration lines, but it was still a decent site. Everything from Star Trek to Ghostbusters was represented.

As the Apple Ripens…
Snow Leopard is performing quite well on my Macbook. The upgrade process itself took about an hour, and after that it’s been smooth sailing. The only issue I had was due to my own fault. I moved some applications from their default locations, so when the upgrade occurred, I ended up with two copies of some programs (I like keeping things somewhat organized). Performance-wise, there is a definite difference between Leopard and Snow Leopard. Finder is much more responsive, startup and shutdown are a lot quicker, and overall the OS is running fine.

iTunes and iPhone OS 3.1 are out as of yesterday and I’ve performed upgrades to these latest versions. So far, so good, but I haven’t used them enough to really dig deep into them and see what happens.

iPhone’s Near Death Experience

Brad — Fri, 26 Jun 2009 13:15:33 +0000

I had an issue with my iPhone yesterday which I thought was highly unusual. I had upgraded to the 3.0 release of the firmware last week, and things were going fine until yesterday afternoon. While sitting on my desk at work, the phone all of the sudden lost connection to the network completely, which never happens because there’s an AT&T tower on the roof of the building. I figured it was just a random service issue, and to back that up a coworker’s phone was also having problems. Eventually for him, the service came back. For my iPhone, however, the service kept coming and going.

I figured once I’d leave work it would clear up, but my assumption was wrong as I didn’t have any service the entire way home. What’s worse is that when I tried to launch any app, other than the apps the phone came with, they would crash. Multiple reboots later and I’m thinking that my poor iPhone has given up on life. After a bit of research, I decided to do a full-blown restore to factory settings, and to my relief, my phone is working once again. I think part of the problem is that iTunes crashed out in the middle of a sync the previous night, which could have caused some corruption that I didn’t see until yesterday. At any rate, the only loss was the music I had on it, but that’s easily replaced.

Sometime next week I’ll be posting about my top 5 favorite apps on my phone.

DSL, Gaming and Geekery

Brad — Thu, 28 May 2009 13:53:32 +0000

DSL: It Lives
I managed to get the phone line wired up and the DSL functioning. The line itself was a lot easier than I had hoped. It was just a matter of running the line out to the interface device and hooking up two wires. The most difficult part was crawling around under the house. Hopefully, though, I won’t have to worry about going down there for anything else for a long, long time. The DSL service itself has been running well. Gaming hasn’t been affected, and overall we’re happy with it. In the process, I also canceled Tivo and Vonage, saving us a bit more money.

Valve Releases TF2 Sniper and Spy Update
Valve, within the past week, has released a major update to Team Fortress 2, this time with weapon upgrades for the Sniper and Spy both. Details can be found here, but the other major change is the way the new weapons are unlocked, or should I say given out. With previous updates, you had to complete achievements to obtain new weapons. Now, though, you obtain new weapons by pure luck. There are a few people that seem to have an idea of the statistics, but generally you have a chance for an unlock once per hour. The more you play, the better your chances. Of course, there are some people bitching because of all of the time they spent to obtain the other unlocks, and now people are getting them without much work. Personally, I don’t mind it. Everyone should have a chance to mess around with the new weapons, and some people just don’t have the time required for some of the achievements needed.

JustHost: So far so good
It’s been around a month since I’ve switched webhosting, and so far I’ve been happy with the move. The support is amazing. I had an issue and had it resolved within about 2 hours, which is a big plus. The site does seem to be stable, and I haven’t found any real issues yet. I just need to finish getting the site put back together and I’ll be good to go.

The Pit of Despair

Brad — Sat, 04 Apr 2009 02:52:12 +0000

I took the day off of work today for a few reasons, one of which being so I could help get a few loose ends tied up. One loose end in particular was getting the rest of the office set up, or at the very least wired. The problem here was that the cable modem is out in the living room where the cable comes in, and I can’t see spending 75.00 for an outlet in the computer room. The options were to string a cable along a wall or the floor, or drill a couple of holes and string the cable along. I spoke with the landlord at length last night about things and mentioned about the network cable. Without me asking, he mentioned that I could drill a couple of holes and utilize the crawlspace under the house.

Well, today was the day, so I drug out my trusty cordless drill and put two holes in the floor. I had 100ft of Cat5 that I previously didn’t have a use for, so that ended up being used for the run. I fed it down, then it was time to crawl under the house. I’m a big guy, but there was enough space for me to crawl commando-style to the cable, toss it down towards the office, and run it back up through the hole. I tell ya, there’s something about being under a house that’s… interesting. The cable is now strung, with plenty left under the house. I pulled enough up on either side so I could shift things if need be. This weekend, I’ll finalize the run by sealing the holes with a bit of silicon caulk to keep the bugs (not many under there, but still) as well as seal any air leaks so I keep heating/cooling more efficient.

On top of all of this, I’m planning on getting some pegboard in an effort to clean up the mess and tangle of cords in the office, and out in the living room. The living room, of course, will probably end up waiting until we figure out if we’re getting another entertainment center or just cleaning up / painting the pieces we have now. I do plan on taking some pictures of the goings-on, so stay on the lookout for that

Moving: The Aftermath

Brad — Fri, 27 Mar 2009 17:34:32 +0000

The move is complete, and we’re happily in a single-family home. The move itself took around 6 hours and it would appear nothing was damaged. However, Beth’s leather jacket and wedding dress got left behind, and of course when I went back for it, it was gone. The old complex claims that they wouldn’t throw something like that out, but it’s not at the new place and it’s not in the old place. *sighs* We now have DirecTV in the house, and it’s quite good. Comcast could not match their pricing, so unfortunately as far as cable TV goes, they’ve lost me as a customer. I also got rid of Tivo since the service package I have from DTV includes DVR service.

The fun part of trying to wire the home network back up is one of a few things I have to look forward to, aside from the usual unpacking stuff. I need to figure out if running network cable is going to work out, or if I’m going to have to get a couple of wireless NIC cards for the desktops. Unfortunately the only working cable line is in the living room, as the one bedroom had the coax utilized for DTV, one is in the baby’s room, and of course the one room we needed it in doesn’t have it. I called Comcast about adding an outlet, and they want 75.00 to do so. No thanks, I’ll pass.

Still plenty of boxes and some quirks to work out of the new place, but it’s an older house so things are to be expected. On the bright side, it’s starting to feel more like home. I should have some pictures from moving day up by the weekend

Hackintosh Laptop

Brad — Mon, 02 Feb 2009 00:20:32 +0000

So this weekend I decided that I wanted to mess around with my Inspiron laptop since I was going to need to install a 64-bit Windows on it at some point to take advantage of the 4GB of RAM I now have in it. Well, curiousity and general geekery got the best of me, so I decided to see if I could turn this thing into a Hackintosh. I don’t know if I’m going to keep it around. If I do, I’ll go out and buy an OS X license, but I can tell you that with a little bit of work, everything seems to be working fine on the laptop, including wireless. In fact, I’m typing this from OS X now.

So far it’s been pretty OK. The visual interface is nice, and they keep the Terminal hidden, but it’s there if you want it. One thing I really like is how applications in general are handled. For the most part, you download an app, mount a disk image and copy one file to the Applications (or any folder really) folder and it’s installed. No libraries to worry about, just a straight up application install. All in all, I think it’s a decent OS. I just wish I didn’t have to hack it to get it working on non Apple hardware. And yes, before anyone asks, I know my actions are not exactly legal in the software licensing realm, but like I said, if I like it enough I’m going to go ahead and buy a license.

iPhones Invade Our Household

Brad — Tue, 16 Dec 2008 19:34:06 +0000

We took the plunge this year, and Beth and I are now the proud owners of a pair of iPhone 3Gs. So far, they’re working pretty darn well in both their use as a phone and also as the multi-function devices that they are. I’ve loaded my music up and have pretty much moved the Nano to backup status as the iPhone’s capabilities worked out just fine in the car this morning. Granted, the cell phone bill itself is going to rise, but with the uses of the phone I think it’s going to more than pay for itself over time. I can remember a few times where we both wished we had a map or some way of figuring out where we were. The Map feature of the phone is great, and from what I see it’s been pretty close as far as pinpointing where I am, and having a map of your immediate location is a nice touch.

After I get some time of using some of the apps, I’ll post about some of my favorite ones. Oh, and there’s a new Life with Emacs in the works, and it should be out this week sometime.

What's in a name?

Brad — Tue, 21 Oct 2008 16:46:30 +0000

Over the years, I’ve had quite a few online nicknames, and for the life of me, I’m not sure why I haven’t stuck with one. The latest one, geekgamerdad, while it does describe me, doesn’t seem to fit me. Of late, I’ve taken to using ‘thefubar’. I had to add ‘the’ in front of it simply because there are a lot of other ‘fubar’s out there, but it’s a term that’s stuck with me since high school and my BBS days. I still remember people asking me where it came from. Most seem to think it came from that old ‘Tango and Cash’ movie, but actually it’s a term that was thrown around a lot in the fire service. I sometimes miss those days of volunteering with the fire department, but things have changed a
lot since then. I’ve got a wife and child to think about, and the last thing I’d want to happen is to have mommy have to tell our daughter that daddy’s not among us anymore.

This leads me into my next thought. Just how many email accounts do I really, truly need? I’ve got my main one, brad, here at endperform.org; I’ve got geekgamerdad at gmail, I’ve got geek_gamer_dad at yahoo. On the IM side, it’s the same story. So, what am I going to do about it? For starters, I do want to standardize on one username and stick with it. ‘thefubar’ seems to work just fine for me. Of course, if you’re on my IM list somewhere, I won’t change without letting you know what the new username is. I’m just at a point where I want to get everything somewhat aligned, hopefully without having to re-create many accounts.

While I’m on the subject of change, I’m looking to change up my desktop again. I’ve been running with XFCE and AWN for a while, but it’s starting to get stale. At work, I think I may revert back to Ubuntu, just for the sake of sanity and being able to deal with that box a bit better. I may give KDE4 another look, but only at home… I don’t think the work machine has enough graphical horsepower to deal with it. I used to love KDE, but the 4.x series has a way to go to win me back. People are saying 4.2 will be better, so I might wait until then and try.

Lack of Inspiration

Brad — Wed, 03 Sep 2008 17:47:55 +0000

It’s been a while since I’ve written anything, and I can’t really say I’ve been inspired to. In a little less than a week, I’ll be a father of a one year old. So far, so good. She’s going to be a smart girl, and she’s really close to walking. I expect that to happen any day now. Next week at this time, we should be pulling into PA. I’m excited, and I know Beth is just as excited, if not more so. This will be the first time most of the family gets to meet Emma, so that should be fun. Mix in a trip to the Ren Faire and meeting up with various old friends and it spells for a great escape from the usual Georgia things going on.

Nothing really of note on the geek front, sadly. I’ve just been in a bit of a slump. I’ve been seeing a therapist for some grief / depression issues and so far it seems to be helping. Combine that with the best wife on the planet and a loving daughter, and you have a combination that will help me overcome this. It took a while, and some nudging, from loved ones to get me into therapy, but I think it’s going to make a big difference and help me deal with things.

At any rate, I hope to get my geek groove back at some point. Lately I’ve been in a bit of a slump, as I mentioned, but I’m pretty sure it will be short-lived.