Katyrnyn's Strangejournal

Such is the way of things. The young and new arise, while the aged and old fade to dust. Such was Geocities, such is Friendster, such will be LiveJournal. (And hopefully, eventually, FaceySpace.)

Or at least I'm about done with it. Not that I've ever used it that much anyway. There's only one of the six (seven?) of you that still uses LJ with any regularity. And after I launch a non-half-baked website back into the InterTubes I doubt I'll post word one to LJ. And there's this Google+ thing.....

So basically, between the Russians and the silence, LJ just doesn't fit my scheme anymore. So I'm leaving. Sorta. Mothballing, perhaps.

One final gripe for this rant-blog: The iPhone app is irritating. It shows a little red 1 on the app when you have a draft post, acting like a notification of something important. Does it do this for messages? Or when somebody replies to a post? Nope. Just tells me how many drafts I have waiting. Bloody useless.

Posted via LiveJournal app for iPhone.

Full page flash ads from Best Buy that load for every page on LiveJournal drastically decrease my enjoyment of this site, but I'll be damned if I'm going to willingly give money to Russians. Unless they are female, cute, and looking for a husband. Then I'll reconsider. Since the LiveJournal batch of Russians are none of the above, I'll just vent.

I especially like how they try to load the ads on my iPhone, and then fail miserably because there is no Flash.

I've never been a big fan of the Debian builds (deviant in my vocab), but I've used Kubuntu mostly without headache for a year now. (Gentoo got to be way too out of date for my tastes, and was busted anyway.) I'm in the process of setting up my old PC on my workbench, and figured I'd give the new Kubuntu release a test install on the old machine before I upgrade my primary box.

Wow. I didn't know a product could go from usefull to useless in such a short timeframe. Are all of the Debian builds this bad, or is it KDE that has gone for shit? (I would argue that it has always been crap, but it was at least servicable recently.)

It /looks/ like MacOS, but has zero useful features, and doesn't support wireless from the live cd - making it tough to install from where I had the PC set up. And you can't do anything anyway, because the ability to upgrade or install more apps seems to be broken. (Tested after I moved the box close enough to the N.O.C. to run a cable.)

At least it supports ext4. That's the only positive I can give it.

Is there a good Linux desktop replacement these days? Windows isn't an option on my old box as XP service pack 2/3 breaks my video card drivers and most of the free network tools I use require SP 2. Like Windows has ever been an option for me.

Pun intended.

I realize now why I'm so obsessed with Dwarf Fortress, but I'll get to that point in a moment. For the uninitiated, Dwarf Fortress is a modern day text-style PC game that is, at it's easiest, rather complex but an insane amount of fun. It's a mix of Sim City and every text adventure game you ever played, distilled out into perfection. You can play in Adventure mode, where you run around fulfilling random quests, or you can go into Fortress mode, where you build a grand dwarfen citadel. Or not. It really reminds me of Evil Genius, just without James Bond. Find out more at the Bay 12 Games website - I'll leave finding the link up to you. [Im on an iPhone, in an app, and can't cut and paste. Give me Windows 3.1 anyday over this!!]

It occurred to me this morning (while I was spinning about mindlessly on an exercise bike) that I'm obsessed with Dwarf Fortress because I've been trained to be. When boiled down to it's lowest form, DF is nothing more than a 3D circuit diagram. Your dwarfs, therefore, are nothing more than electrons, running about to perform work. Workshops are merely circuit elements, and the halls of your grand Mountainhome are simply traces of copper on a green circuitboard. Filled with twisted and maniacal electrons that have an endless appetite for booze, and love nothing more than to do a hard days work and pass out completely pissed in the proton bar.

Perhaps this is my brain reminding me that I'm still in the wrong line of work? I wonder if Dwarf Fortress skills can be listed on a resumé?

Anyway, since I'm not using this LiveJournal account for anything real, I will begin amuse and bore you with zany stories of insane dwarfs, starting with my latest fort, Axecrow. [And if you haven't already, you /must/ read the stories of Boatmurdered on the Bay 12 Forums, or perhaps on the DF wiki page.]

Why is it that some things will stay dead for years (like me, or perhaps this blog), and then have a sudden onrush of interest from completely disconnected sources? Yes, Fading Suns still has a small and loyal community following, but it really hasn't been mentioned to me by more than one or two people in many years. Most have (thankfully) forgotten my "website," and I haven't been active on the mailing lists since I was in college. Then, in the span of a few days I get three emails regarding the game. Two EFS (the computer game) questions, and one from the guy that built the Jumpgate model pictured on the cover of the rulebook.

Weird.

I'm looking forward to responding once I get home, but I'm rather amused by the timing.

Now that I no longer have a website, I find I need it. It was convienient for uploading stuff, like avatar photos, zip files, and the like.

Plus it leaves me fewer places to rant like a madman.

[I decided to not let a year pass between posts this time, lest LJ delete my account as a cost saving mechanism. Plus I want to test this iPhone LJ app. Unfortunatly it uses the iPhone spell checker, so let me know when you find wonky words below.]

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This is an amazing world we live in. Now, thanks to this nifty new 3G technology, we can watch anything we want, anywhere we want, anytime we want. Stuck on the bus/train and missing your favorite show that you forgot to TiVo? Stream it. Want to watch the NCAA tourney, but you're at the beach on Spring Break? (Why the hell would you watch baseketball if you're at a beach during Spring Break???) Stream it. Need to get your daily YouTube fix, but you're stuck in the hospital waiting on Auntie Em to finish her heart/lung/brain transplant? Yep, you guessed it.

With 3G you can do almost anything, anywhere, anytime. I've done a fair amount of traveling since I bought a 3G phone, and have had really great service in all sorts of places I wouldn't have expected: Downtown Houston; a cornfield in Arkansas; during a 14 hour hurricane - never lost my signal; inside a tunnel in WV (only slightly inside, but still); and even in the concourse of a crowded ballpark in NorthEast Texas during a massive, tornado spawning thunderstorm.

Everywhere, that is, except anywhere within 100 yards of the building where I work, between 9:30 AM and 4:30 PM. Outside of that bubble - great service! Inside - Edge at best. Before 9:30 or after 4:30? Great! During? What's 3G?? Sometimes I get a really good 3G signal, but it's a phantom and won't connect past the first level. (Confirmed by a crude traceroute app I used to have.) Bloody irritating.

As far as I can tell, this is an AT&T-only issue, as the Sprint and Verizon users in our company don't encounter this bug. And it seems to be a recent development, or at least as recent as the Hurricane.

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On another thread, I was listening to some old "Irish" music [Danny Boy was included on the CD, so I can't call it true Irish music. Damned depressing British impersonation of an Irish song.] the other day (St Paddy's Day - go figure), mostly songs I've heard before among the family or elsewhere. Anyway, perhaps I'm being dense, but in the song Black Velvet Band, why was the singer sentenced to 7 years of Hard Labour? I've heard this song a million times in my life, and listened to it a few times throughout the week, but I can't figure out what the poor old dude was "betrayed" of. Am I missing something?? Her eyes /did/ shine like diamonds, though, so perhaps it's irrelevant.

Any ideas? Or was he just a drunken old letch?

[Edit: Apparently the version of Black Velvet Band I was listening to is an alternate version, replacing the lyrics in the middle where the singer explains "his" crime. It would seem that the shopkeeper girl lifted a golden watch from a customer and slipped it into the singer's hand. She then turned him in for pickpocketing to cover her own crimes.]

Yay!!  I've survived one more year!!!

Yes, I'm trying to win an award for the most useless blog ever.  The ability to type two complete sentences in a year excludes me from the running, so I've just disqualified myself.  Damn.

[On a side note, why does Live Journal's spell checker say blog is misspelled?]