Yahoo RSS Feed Reader

I'm a longtime fan of Yahoo! and their "my yahoo" web portal. Usually they've made good advancements and I guess it makes me a bit old-fashioned that I still use it rather than jump ship to other technologies every time something new comes out.

Despite their good record in general, they still sometimes mess up when it comes to Ads. Since Ad revenue is one of their main (if not the main) source of their income, I guess it makes sense that they have ads wherever they can. And as long as that doesn't interfere with my actually reading content, that's all fine and good.

But here we have an example of ad placement ruining the content experience. When I open an RSS feed message to see the full text, a pop-up floating flash-ad obscures the text of the entry. And it has no "close" button. And if I try to mouse over it I'm assaulted by fly-out options - none of which include "close" or a handle to move the ad.

This is a terrible implementation and now that I've become accustomed to getting my RSS feeds as part of my portal experience, I'm inclined to go build my own content page elsewhere rather than deal with this. I'm going to write them a letter. In the past that has been a colossal waste of time. Finding someone helpful at Yahoo is generally far more difficult than what I expect writing my own portal page would be.

CORRECTION: It appears that the example I've shown here was a bug in the particular ad. Which just goes to show me that Yahoo! probably isn't out to kill me, and that those people in the van probably were just lost tourists, not Yahoo!-Ninja-Assassins. Good to know.

These Chiropractors are the Wurst Belchers...

A sign on the square in Marietta.

Theory Shmeory

Never buy any other kind!

If you have to buy a rubber frog, be sure it is a magic lucky frog!

Internet Media - pshah!

Headline writing is probably fun. To someone.
I remember the (possibly apocryphal) story that after Loeb (of Leopold & Loeb) was murdered by a fellow inmate, newsman Ed Lahey got out a headline that read, "Richard Loeb, despite his erudition, today ended his sentence with a proposition." Witty, in that the plea of the killer was that Loeb had propositioned him, then assaulted him, and that in order to defend himself he'd had to cut Loeb 58 times with a straight razor in the shower. (They were serious about self-defense in those days.)

Anyway, since Yahoo! apparently can't even tell a Diva from a Dude - well, I don't expect we'll be hearing about the clever web headline of 200X anytime soon. Unless you count the headlines over at The Onion. Some of those are pretty memorable.

Thanksgiving Traditions.

If it is the day before Thanksgiving, we must be smoking meat at Mr. Gunn's...

Grendel/Hoggle - Seperated at Birth?

Yes, perhaps they were. Or perhaps Hoggle got dropped into the deep fryer after his post-Labyrinth fame had worn out. Either way, I kept thinking that the Grendel in the new Beowulf film reminded me of someone - and I finally remembered who it was. Thanks, Internet!

Beautiful Day!

Unbelievable weather out today!

Surgery set for October 10th

For those of you following along from home, I'm planning to get gallbladder surgery on October 10th. If it is complication free, I could go home as early as the same day, possibly the 11th.

If it were to go poorly (not EXTREMELY poorly, but just kind of poorly) it might take a bit longer than that.

FYI.

First Draft Complete

I don't know how many words the final draft will be, but I've completed the first draft and avoided the Billy-Bass.

Now I just have to flesh out some of the more encyclopedic background chapters and then I can start on my edits.

Bwah-ha-ha.

Mo is out. Now it is Kali vs. Moses.

Playing gods - playtest

Time for more coffeeeeeee

Mmmm. Coffee - then off to see what Radford's game has that Pantheon doesnt besides a prototype...

Michael Shermer starts the day...

A presentation based on his book "Why People Believe Weird Things."

Chupacabara - Pig - Dog - Idiot - Omen - this clip has it all!

This is from the weekend edition of FOX & Friends. I hope somebody watches out for these poor people.

Chin chin 2 for lunch.

Mmmmm. Table mustard.

I saw Michael Shermer!

Neato! He signed my book.

Saturday @ DragonCon2007

OK - There is so much going on at Dragon*Con - and I'm all over the place in my interests, but I've sort of narrowed things down to these choices. This of course ignores stuff like wandering around in the Dealer's room (where I got 20 D&D minis for $1 each!!!).

Jref presentation.

Neat! Be a psychic and win a million dollars!

Mur Lafferty reads.

I pretty much missed this entire thing trying to get across three hotels.

MBA

www.miniaturebuildingauthority.com

Made of resin - not plaster!

Hey curtis!

Last little bit

Almost up to the badge dude.

Registration 1

Harry potter 7 party

Testing autopost of pix from my treo.

Extending Firefox to include D20 search

One of my favorite websites is the D20SRD site - http://www.d20srd.org. They've got a nifty plug-in for the little search drop-down window in Firefox.

Get it here:
http://www.d20srd.org/browserGoodies/index.htm

Nice.

Will we finally see the full Wicker?

According to the BBC website, they are finally releasing the "FULL VERSION" of the classic British horror film, "The Wicker Man." This in contrast to the brutalized 80 minute American release and the previously released 100 minute "director's cut."

Apparently - at least according to actor Edward Woodward - the new version is closer to two full hours. I've been unable to find the specs on it so far, but I'm excited. I love British horror from the 1960's and early 1970's - and this is an exemplary piece with its weirdly behaving discordian villagers, the strangely hip Christopher Lee, and the sexually and religiously repressed Woodward as the cop looking for a missing girl.

This ain't a happy fun-time film. But I like it better than Race with the Devil. (LOL) (Which, by the way, appears to be in re-make mode according to IMDB.)

D&D 4th Edition

Could this be the e-tool I've been waiting for? I'll have to wait and see, but I'm already disappointed to hear they want a subscription based service fee...

Yet, it looks cool in some ways.

Part 1


Part 2


By the way, this makes my June 14th post seem a lot more prescient.

20,000 Words

Well, I made it to 20,000 words. I think I'm still on track to get to a "full Novel" before September 11th.

If I don't here's what happens: I have to put up a Billy Bass on my wall for 30 days.
This "bass of shame" will sing (to my utter humiliation) every time I enter my office, reminding me that I should have worked harder towards reaching my goal.

I really don't want that...

OMG - An actual post about gaming!

A funny thing happened at my most recent gaming session. I forgot about the movement rules in D&D 3.5 - and when one of the other players tried to explain it, I just sat there unable to "get it." Sad. I knew it was a basic geometry principal at work, but I couldn't remember which it was.

First, let me remind you of the movement rules. When you are making diagonal movement the first diagonal step counts as 1. The second counts as 2. The third counts as 1 again. The pattern repeats.

But at first glance, the distance between the diagonal of the square shape compared to the vertical or horizontal size didn't seem different enough to count for anything, and my gut instinct was to count all movement as 1 point. Then, I pulled out a pencil and measured the straight distance across 5 grid squares. And then I measured the distance across 5 grid squares diagonally, and could see the diagonal distance was greater.

Here in this illustration, we see Howard the Kobold who wants to run up and shatter the big jade throne before the golem guards can activate. Howard moves 1 space forward, then 1 diagonal, then 1 straight across, then 1 diagonal. The movement costs are 1 + 1 + 1 + 2 because the first diagonal costs 1, and the second costs 2.Of course the geometric principal that was floating around helplessly in my brain was the Pythagorean theorem. This rule states that relationships of the sides of a triangle are a ² + b² = c². More to the point, it means that the relationship between the length of the sides of the square and the diagonal of the square is that diagonal length is going to be equal to the square root of 2.

We can solve for c using the formula squareroot(a² + b² ) = c
(I couldn't figure out how to make the square-root symbol cover the a & b... Sorry!)
But it always ends up being the square root of 2, which is an irrational number.
Still, if you use a calculator to solve the value, you get something like 1.4142136 - which is slightly less than 1.5.

Since there is no half-square movement in D&D, the rule of diagonal movement costing first 1, then 2, then 1 again is a rough mathematical equivalent to having it cost 1.5 movement to move diagonal. If you end on a 1.5 it costs 1. But if you go two diagonal spaces, it costs (1.5 + 1.5) a total of 3.


Oh Geometry, why did I forget so much of you? And why don't schools use gaming to teach math? Doesn't troop and unit movement seem more fun than just solving problems?

I still remember physics from Nuclear A-School in the Navy - we always dealt with the terrible fates of metaphorical cats. Though we never really shot a cat out of a cannon into a brick wall, we certainly knew how to calculate the theoretical velocity of the cat at the moment of impact. (assuming a vacuum through which to fire said feline, a device to measure the speed of the cat, and somebody to keep the animal rights people from stopping the important experiment!)

Mage Knight Happy Luck Auction

Wow! I won an e-bay auction for a Mage-Knight sample set. It was closed-box and there were no indications what it would contain. I was hoping for some floor-tiles and wall-tiles for the 3-d dungeons - but was blown away to find 110 figures (mostly very useful ones) and a bunch of treasure chests too!

Delight ain't in it. I'm overwhelmed with auction-bliss! At $20 - what a bargain for me!

Postcards from the center of the Earth!

I buy a lot of used books. Sometimes I find stuff in them. I always think about trying to get this detritus back to its original owners, though I rarely find myself able to do so.

In this case, I bought a copy of E. R. Burrough's hollow earth stories - an omnibus edition with "At the Earth's Core," "Pellucidar," and "Tanar of Pellucidar." Inside was a post-card from 1977. It was a guy named "Rob" and sent to Mr. Jim Boudreau in Albany.

I bought the book at a used bookstore in Rochester in 2002.

Here's what the postcard said:

22 Jan 1977
Dear Jim,

How were your holidays? Mine were
great. I'm here in Austria with my girl-friend Martha. I've spent
the last couple of weeks job searching in Vienna with little luck.
Foreigners aren't needed in the labor force! But Martha and I have been to
see many old friends here as well as to the theater and an operetta. Write
soon and let me know if you have a job.

-Rob.

Sent to:
Mr. Jim Boudreau
10 Beach Ave. Apt C
Albany, New York
USA 12209

Anyway, I've included scans of the postcard front & back. If you find this postcard, Mr. Boudreau - I hope you've found work somewhere since 1977! I wonder about you. Did you get to see Star Wars? I heard it was quite the thing that year. And did Rob and Martha ever get work in Austria?

Who knows?

OMG - Talisman!

Finally they are re-releasing one of my favorite board games of all time. Yes, Talisman is coming out again. The new version looks much more like 2nd edition, and is being simultaneously released with a video-game version being distributed through CAPCOM.

Hey - watch the cool trailer with soundtrack!

Gleemax - the huh? An opinion piece.

OK, for a while now I've been watching WOTC's massive license pull with growing interest. I noticed they even pulled the electronic licenses for the e-tools and PCGen community authorized D&D content. Then I saw they were hiring a ton of web developers and artists, and I started speculating that they were going to make their own electronic gaming toolset. That may be true some day, but for now it looks like a lot of that talent was working on this: GLEEMAX

According to the site's first announcement, they will be hosting a lot of things that exist already on sites such as ENworld... but, this will be funded by WOTC - and therefore could look really cool because the artwork and tools are being done for hire instead of as fan-work. BUT, and like the posterior of the great wrestler Yokozuna, this is a big but - unless there is a profit/revenue source for the site I predict nothing much will come of it. There are already more than enough sites out there for fans of gaming, including WOTC's own site at www.Wizards.com.

So what will it be?
We'll wait and see.

Ill Conceived? Or Pure Evil???

I saw Spiderman 3 last night. Ah, movies. I love movies.

In this film (in case you didn't know) Peter Parker deals with the alien symbiont that changes him into a dark version of himself, and which eventually spawns the entity known as Venom. I love Sam Raimi and trust him - but when he tried to show Parker as the "dark" version of his psyche - why did he have to base him on Chris Gaines??? We may never know. Still a brilliant load of fun, but Garth's alter ego should never be used to template popular comics-based heroes in film. That's my 2 cents worth.

Before the Navy...

I found this picture again. It was taken before I joined the Navy - which would make it some time in 1990 - perhaps September or October? These were my friends then - and I'm still in touch with most of them. Surprisingly, everyone in this picture looks healthier, younger and happier now! (hahaha!) I'm just amazed how many of the guys in this picture are now "follicle-challenged."

Success - and just in time for the rain storm

Well, there is still some landscaping to do - but the plants are in. And they sky has clouded up and looks like it is going to rain. Whew! Just in time.



Now I just need to put some mid-sized pea-gravel down on the bottom and do some herbs around the edge of the drain hole itself (on the upper part). But the plants are planted, and nature will do its thing now. (Which probably means that the dang rabbits will eat all my plants down to the little plastic ID tag by tomorrow morning.)

Closer to the Happy Ending

I got the dirt in now - and it is possible that I could have my plants in place as early as tomorrow night. Woo-hoo!

Seperated at Birth - by another time machine?

I've been doing research on John C. Calhoun for my novel. I kept thinking he looked familiar - and not just because I'd seen him in history books. Then it hit me. He looks a lot like Don Imus. Don't you think?

It's not exact - and I have no idea what is up with JCC's hands. I just suggest you don't stare at them, for they may gesture you into madness.

Fiasco or World Wonder?

I'm still working on a project I conceived more than a year ago. A drain hole exists in my backyard that lets water from the neighborhood pour down a long subterranean tunnel into a retention pond at the far end of my 'hood. When I had no kids this was no problem, but after my first was born I got to thinking that if a kid got in the hole it would be bad... so I covered it with a steel grid to keep people out, but let water in.

The hole itself was surrounded by an impenetrable wall of blackberry bushes - which made it less subject to kids, but more dangerous if a ball went over this hedge and needed to be retrieved. To shorten this tale, I conceived of a way to convert the weed and thorn filled hole into a tiered vegetable garden.

At long last I'm making progress. Here are some shots of "before" and current work on the project.

I intend to re-do this in stone at some point, but doing it with lumber is about $300 cheaper than the dry-stack masonry I prefer.

This is a BEFORE view of the project after a neighbor kindly used a bobcat and took down the blackberry bushes for me. I installed the silt fence and began to contemplate what I could do with this. You can get a more detailed picture by clicking on these. My plan was to setup two tiers of garden rows, and then setup some stairs opposite the drain hole. This crude drawing is what I've been working from.
Here you can see the wooden structure. Those walls are 8 foot long 2x4's which gives you some idea of the scale of this earthwork project.
Here's a view of the before state, facing the drain hole. When I'm done, this photo would be taken from the top of the stairs.

Here's the "current" view of progress. I should be able to get plants in within a week barring unforeseen circumstances.
The steps themselves may be the hardest part - but if the Egyptians could do it so can I. Because I've seen dozens of documentaries and I know that when I'm ready, UFOs will appear and beam the steps into place - then give me secret knowledge. And tomatoes. Just in case they don't show up, I'll keep working using shovels, picks, and gloves. (But I just know they will. Aliens love tomatoes.)

MoneyPenny

My son ate a penny. Here is the hilarious picture.
In theory, he understands not to do this again.

Procrastinatus is my Roman Name

It's sad that when I had all the time in the world to write, I hadn't the skill to do it as well as I can now. Yet now when I have the skill, and even when I make the time, I find the world full of distractions - a carnival of minutiae that makes the most banal entertainment seem infinitely more interesting than working on my own book.

I'm certain this is the kind of self-destructive, auto-sabotage that makes most people stay wannabes. The skilled craftsman who never builds, the talented singer whose audience is only the empty car seats on the way to work, and me - a union of wasted potential if we keep up to our old tricks...

I want to finish my book. I'm going to finish my book.

Seperated at Birth - by a Time Machine!?

They favor. The similarity ends there.