The End of 2006

I spent a few hours yesterday running through some gaming tests with my friends to figure out what system I want to use for the upcoming 1200AD campaign I'm starting. The tests were interesting, comparing the "A Game of Thrones d20" with "D&D 3.5" in producing the same battle.

Tomorrow is January 1st - and I'm going to start working on my "real" novel in the morning. I've done a lot of pre-work, defining characters & plot elements. Today will be a real slogger for me as I have to finalize some of the work.

The most important thing is that I don't get bogged down on some of the details, but just keep going. I think momentum will be very important to me for the first draft, which I want to have completed by Feb 28th. When I get my chapters all done I hope to have a word count around 90,000.

I spent about two weeks trying to get my story, "The Angle of Incidence" ready to become a novel - but in the end realized it just didn't have enough material in it. I hope to turn it into a long "short story" and submit it in the future. I really like the story it tells, but to make it into a novel would require troweling on a lot of stuff that might not stick, and might look artificial.

So instead, I'm working on a non-supernatural Thriller. My working title is Southern Knights - and it is the Red-Neck DaVinci Code.

My first chiken tikka masala

This is a photo of my first ever effort at cooking my own Chicken Tika Masala. It turned out pretty darn good. I wish I'd used more yogurt so there'd been more sauce for the rice.

Now I just need to figure out how to cook my own Naan bread, and I'll be able to make one of my favorite meals at home.

Look out General Tso, you're next!

Merry Christmas

I was working on a special geek-christmas card, but due to family illness didn't get it finished in time for the date. Perhaps next year, or perhaps I'll just post it out of holiday sequence. That'll teach 'em.

Waiting for santa

I can't catch up with the past

I'm a gamer. You either identify yourself as a gamer or you don't.

I do.

I've been in a love-hate relationship with computer games since they first became available to me through the VIC-20 and the Atari 2600 Video Computer System Console. On the one hand, I love the way the games let you simulate battle without keeping track of mathematics or having to keep track of hundreds of counters, yet on the other hand the rules of the computer limit your ability to innovate or question the rules as implemented.

The classic example is in Computer Role Playing Games where either the storyline is on a "rail system" where you can only act towards the completion of the programmed plot, or the limitations of the mechanics don't allow you to innovate in your problem solving. For example, if you're playing a rogue in a D&D style computer game and you suspect that one of the King's council is actually going to betray him there is no way to (a) accuse him until the game lets you, (b) poison or otherwise dispose of him to protect the king, or (c) blackmail and/or collude with him to overthrow the monarch.

Or for a more simple example, in Neverwinter Nights (v1) the maps of the inside of buildings are completely different areas than the outside so you can't look out the window and see who is coming because even though you're supposed to be in the same area, you're not.

Anyway, limitations aside, I'm still amazed at the evolution of gaming. Text adventures and arcade shooters have evolved to an astounding degree in the past 30 years... at least on the outside.

But how much have the "GAMES" themselves evolved? Don't be fooled by smoke & mirrors. Yeah, thanks to the work of the graphics card industry, you can now get 3D models with astounding textures, and the computing power to render nearly photo-realistic environments. But if the game is still just a 3D shooter, is it really "better" than Duke-Nukem 3D? Do new weapons and better looking models really make a difference?

Eventually the rendering is going to be irrelevant and what will drive the success of a game will come down to three factors.

1) Marketing: There is a segment (a really big segment) that will buy anything if a hot commercial pushes it. They don't get repeat business this way, but sometimes can clear a lot of inventory.

2) Story: If the game is competently built, an excellent story will sell itself. Games with superb stories and these modern engines can essentially become interactive movies. Half-Life 2 has a great engine and an interesting story. It is essentially an action film where you play the MUTE hero and everybody else yaks all the time giving you the plot through voluminous expository speeches. I wouldn't pay $.50 to see it in theatres, but I happily dished out $50.00 to play the game.

3) Gameplay: If the story is crap and the marketing is crap - the game can still be successful if the GAMEPLAY is awesome & addictive. If you can tell me the narrative of Tetris, Bejewelled or Pac Man, well then you're some kind of very special idiot. Nobody cares about the story, they're just fun to play.

I was originally just going to post a link to the granddaddy of all adventure games , which - just like real casino games - you can now play ADVENTURE online!

My Secret Obsession - very tiny cars

I love little cars. I'm WAY too big to actually fit into one and ride around, but I just love tiny machines that get great gas mileage and yet would fit neatly in the back of my enormous pickup truck.

Lucky me!

While doing research on the ISO Isetta, I found a really neat micro-car museum. I decided to see where the museum was, figuring some day in my travels maybe I could make my way to The Bruce Weiner Microcar Museum if I ever made it all the way to MADISON, GEORGIA!!!

Yes:

The Bruce Weiner Microcar Museum Inc.
2950 Eatonton Road
Madison, GA 30650

Merely an hour and a half drive from my house. Oh, boy! If I didn't have the flu I'd probably go today. But a trip of 90 minutes takes a little planning. Maybe I'll make an event of it.

And I could go check out Crowe's Open Air BBQ, just up the street from the museum. Hmmm. BBQ and tiny little cars - that seems like a good idea for a nice afternoon.

The website says:
Museum Hours:
Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday
1:00pm to 4:00pm
closed Nov 21,22,23 (Thanksgiving week)
closed the week Before and 2 weeks After Christmas
closed the months of JUNE & JULY


That's a small window of opportunity, but it might be doable. I'd just have to burn a vacation day. Though it sounds like it'll be next year before I make it. Oh, 2007 - you're such a temptress with your little cars and BBQ...

Life is Astounding

We are so amazingly privileged in America. I try to never lose sight of that. While I've never "lived off the grid" I am certain that I could survive thanks to my country-ish upbringing. Like the song says, I can lay a trot-line. I believe I can also hunt, grow food, find shelter, find water, etc...

But I can also sit in my bed (like now), write on a laptop which is wirelessly connected to a broadband Internet connection, watch a DVD of "Kolchak - The Night Stalker", and struggle to survive the flu.

I suppose I could also struggle to survive the flu without electricity, but this is more fun. In fact, I just found a nostalgia factory in the form of a website that lets me play classic commodore-64 games through my browser. Now I don't even need an emulator - it's Java, baby!

Still, I wish the flu would leave me and my wife. At least the kids seem to be faring well, though I suspect their inoculations led to my infection.

Remove "UnDock" from your START menu

I am a corporate laptop user. We have docking stations. There is an annoying little menu option when I click START that is perilously close to the shut-down option. It says "Undock Computer" and it annoys me to a terrible degree.

There is a registry hack to get rid of it. Here it is if you want it:

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\Explorer]
"NoDriveTypeAutoRun"=dword:00000091
"NoStartMenuEjectPC"=dword:00000001

[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\Explorer\RestrictRun]

Save that code as "no-undock.reg" and then run it to get rid of that pest.

Humans - a lossy format

You may know by now that James Kim, an editor at CNet, died this week in the mountains of Oregon after he and his family got snowed in on a mountain pass. This story troubled me on so many levels.

Let me tell you my tenuous connection to James. I'm a fan of Tech-TV's Screensavers. Note that I don't say I "was" a fan. I "am" a fan. When Tech-TV merged to form G4, I quit watching because they canceled most of my shows and fired a lot of the people I really felt a kinship to. There was nothing like Tech-TV's shows that really called out to me. There were no regulars on The Screensavers that I didn't feel like would be welcome in my home.

I moved on when that show was canceled, but always kept a place for it in my heart. I had met Pat & Leo at various tours they did here in the south, and in person they were as affable and easy to like as they were on television. Plus, they usually knew what they were talking about, which is a trait that I really prefer.

After The Screensavers ended, I felt a little lost - but had a lot more free hours on my TIVO. Recently I discovered that Leo & Pat (And John C. Dvorak and frequently Jerry Pournelle, plus others) had a weekly podcast called This Week in Tech (or TWiT). On the show I found the same sort of lively, friendly tech-savvy discussion that had made The Screensavers so cool. In many ways, this seemed to be the pod-based resurrection.

Then this past week, tragic news came as Leo & Pat told that James Kim, a mutual friend of theirs, was missing along with his family. My first thought was that they were probably murdered by a wandering serial killer. It never occurred to me that they might have become snowed-in on a rural mountain pass.

Now comes the tragic news that James didn't make it. Going back to look at a video montage over at Cnet I realized that James was very thin. Going for seven days with no food and then setting out on foot to try and hike 30 miles for help in icy weather when you're skinny - that's a formula for trouble. Sadly, James wasn't fat and reportedly didn't have the kind of training and equipment that would serve him well in icy weather.

But fortunately his family was found and his wife and daughters will be OK. I wish he had made it. I'd have much preferred a Reader's Digest style "Drama in Real Life" where James walks 30 miles to get help - only to discover that his wife and kids are already rescued. Sadly, that's not what happened. Whatever caused Jame's death, he was doing the thing he thought most important - risking his own life to try and save his family.

I feel sad for his family, for Pat & Leo, and for Cnet. He seemed like a really nice, funny guy.

A Series of Unfortunate Events - the Music

The Tragic Treasury is out on i-tunes and provides many songs from the audio versions of A Series of Unfortunate Events.

Dungeons & Dragons - The Complete Series DVD

The Dungeons & Dragons cartoon series from the 1980's is available for pre-order and will be released December 5th! Wow! This was a cartoon I totally had to sneak around to watch because it was about Dungeons & Dragons. Sort-of.

The guy at the video store showed me the box but couldn't sell it to me - but it is cheaper at Amazon (CLICK HERE TO BUY - AND DON'T FORGET TO BUY ME ONE TOO).

guess where I ate breakfast

Another "Movie for Gamers Who Like Movies" review

I finally finished my review for Dungeons & Dragons : The Movie. I think it speaks for itself; it just doesn't link for itself.

Peace, out.

Where's the Love?

NaNoWriMo is not just a crazy idea; it is also a charity non-profit which uses its funds to build libraries in Southeast Asia. This year the target goal is $200,000. You don't have to be a writer to help out. Just hop on over to the NaNoWriMo store and make a donation. You can even use PayPal to do it!

Why not turn some of your e-bay cash into a place that will help kids read?

Cream of Coconut

Here's a bit of cooking advice. If you decide to make some kind of beef-curry dish with a Thai flair, be sure that the coconut milk you're adding to the delicious vegetables, peppers, pecans and smoked beef is actually coconut milk. Because if it is cream of coconut and you pour it into your cooking food, it is a sad, sad thing.

Yuck.

I just turned ten bucks of delicious ingredients into smoked-beef-coconut-candy. I can't even phonetically spell the noise I made when I tasted that mess.

Gross, gross, gross, gross, gross. As Anita Blake (no relation) would say, "Gag me with a spoon." Or, just gag.

Why I Like Writing

Although nobody ever asks me why I want to be a writer, I actually know why. I remember as a child being an avid reader from the first grade. My mother had taught me to read before I started school, and the stories in the first grade included a magic car - which I vaguely remember being driven by a curly haired gentleman and the car may have flown. (That's a bit sketchy... Mr. Fig was it?)

We didn't have the plethora of entertainment options then that kids have now, and my mother needed to give us something to do besides watching daytime television. (Daytime TV was geared towards the home-bound housewife at the time, and my sisters and I did enjoy the game shows, but at some point the soaps would come on, and my interest waned.)

Mother would sign us up for the summer reading program at the city library. We would check out books and read them, and sometime around the 3rd grade, I began to read anthologies of science-fiction stories. I read novels too, some of them classics of literature and others classics of children's literature. But it was the science fiction stories that really captured my imagination. Stories about people with time machines, ray-guns, rocket ships, and hyper-intelligent monkey side-kicks were my ticket to other worlds. As a reader, I sought the ambulatory effects that reading such works brought me. But at some point I realized that the stories themselves - though clearly magical works - had been created by mortal men, and that I could become such as them if I wanted to.

I could read these old anthologies, and smell the age on the paper. The fonts were different. The copyrights were from the 30's, 40's and 50's. Some of the stories had illustrations, and many had twist endings that rivaled those on the Twilight Zone. But what really struck me was that this sensation I got from reading these tales made me think that these old men, these dead men, had the same sorts of sensibilities that I had. They had the same sense of wonder, and imagination, even though they were really old - which meant that not just their stories had been captured on the paper, but also a snapshot of their thinking process. They had achieved a sort of immortality through being in print, and I liked the idea of that. I liked it a lot.

A more refined understanding of my feelings came in high-school when I learned more about Aristotle and the Aristotelian rules of drama. On the one hand, there was this famous guy named Aristotle who had produced rules for art. On the other hand, there was this guy named Aristotle who is arguably more well known now than he was 2300 years ago. And that's the magic of writing. You write to some imaginary audience and if you're published, it is possible that two thousand years ago some people may read your words and say, "Neato!"

Insanity. Insanity,

I'd say writing 12,000 words in a day is insanity.
Blogging about it later - even more insanity.
Believing anything in the last 4,000 words is even going to make sense tomorrow?
Insanity.

Punchy. I'm quite punchy now.

Making things fit

I've recovered nearly all my lost word count from losing a day doing tech work. This brings me back close to an average of 2000 words per day, not counting today. That's about what I can expect to accomplish in 90 - 120 minutes, assuming the words will come. If I averaged 1800 words for every 120 minutes that would be 15 words a minute. If I could magically avoid eating, sleeping, pooping, showering, or any other distraction and just keep up that pace I could knock out a 90,000 word book in just under 5 days. But I suspect that it would suffer slightly as my rational thinking wanes a bit after the first 48 hours of no sleeping and no pooping - something I learned in boot-camp.

But 120 minutes is 2/24ths of a day. That made me think of the way my days really play out.
Here are some things I do every day, and some time allocation:
Sleep - 6 hours (25% of my day)
Eat - 3x @ 45 min each. This will be rounded up to 2 hours. (8% of my day)
Work & Drive - 9 to 10 hours deducting lunch in the previous item. (37% - 41% of my day)
Kid time (for me this is playing, homework, diapers, etc...) 2 hours dedicated, and nickel and dimes throughout my waking hours. (8 - 50% of my day depending on circumstances.)

The point here is that the two things I know I ought to be doing are WRITING and EXERCISING. And those are the two things that if I do them give me the most satisfaction emotionally and physically - yet which I find hardest to make time for.

NaNoWriMo has reminded me that getting up at 5:00 am to do stuff is the best way to accomplish things. You only have time for stuff if you MAKE time for it. So combining the military saying of "If you have time to sleep then you have time to work" with the knowledge that if I go to bed at 10:00 pm I can get up at 5:00 am without suffering much, I've been able to meet my goals so far.

The only problems have been getting a virus which weakened me one day and emptied me the next, and trying to squeeze in some computer work. If I don't write in the morning it is terribly hard to get it done during the ensuing day. But I'm betting my best editing work will be done at night, should I ever get that far in the process.

34,000 NaNoWriMo

Well, I caught back up again. Finally. Once I get to 50,000 I think I may just collapse. Now 3/5th of my family is sick with some kind of stomach virus. I say stomach, but that's just the start of the problem.

Maybe this weekend will be very productive in writing - either way, I'm sure using a lot of paper.

An Interesting Windows XP Issue - Part 2

A few months ago I saw an article in Information Week's Langa Letter column on performing a "No Reformat, Nondestructive Total-Rebuild Option" refresh of Windows XP. This article is about an interesting problem I ran into while running the refresh trying to fix a problematic XP system.

The system I was trying to repair had been subjected to numerous internet game installs, and was running rather sluggishly. It also had problems staying connected to the Internet, and getting e-mail. Both of its browsers (IE and FIREFOX) were out of date, and the anti-virus software was expired. There was also a serious problem with the file system permissions. There were two user accounts on the system with similar names, but one was a "user" and the other was an "admin" account. However, when trying to use the admin account many of the desktop items couldn't be deleted and software couldn't be installed because the system said that the installation required administrative permissions - which it should have had, but didn't. I tried creating a new account and moving files to the new profile for the administrator. This resolved the installation issue, but not the files that couldn't be deleted. I decided it was time to run the refresh install.

The refresh went smoothly until it got to screen 17 in the process - where the system required reactivation. However, when I tried to reactivate the system an error popped up saying that the internet could not be reached. Then another message popped up saying that I had zero days to get the system registered. Then the installation was complete and the machine rebooted.

This is where the fun began. The system was configured to use the "Welcome Page" login screen. It was XP Home edition, so that's fairly common. When I clicked on the icon for the primary user (with admin privileges) I got an error message:

A problem has prevented windows from accurately checking the status of the license for this computer. You can not log on right now. Please ask a computer administrator to activate windows on this computer.

The error message flashes for a moment, then the system logs back out to the Welcome Screen. Nice. This account had administrative privileges so it seemed like that should have worked, but no. I did some research on Microsoft's Technet and came up with article 306081 which advised that with activation issues, sometimes the activation software can get corrupted. It talks you through the process of using the recovery console and expanding the activation software off the install disk to refresh it.

That didn't work.

Other websites strongly advised doing a refresh install - like the one I just did. Doh!

(Just to be safe, I did re-refresh install, but same issue.)

I went back and re-read the error message and decided that maybe it didn't want me to login as a user with administrative priviledges - but as THE ADMINISTRATOR ACCOUNT. Only problem there is that the administrator account doesn't show up on the Welcome Screen unless you boot in safe mode.

So I booted into safe mode (with and without networking) and discovered that the Administrator account gave me the same error. In my line of work - and at home, I almost exclusively use a domain and therefore the domain login screen instead of the Welcome Screen. But when I called a friend to describe the problem he mentioned that it was possible to change from the Welcome Screen to the domain login screen - if I could get logged into the system. Which I couldn't.

So I did more research and many sites out there advise that if this happens to you the best solution is to back up your data and just blow the whole system away. But I wasn't prepared to do that - I had one more thing to try. (And it works - so keep reading.)

Here is the actual solution to the problem:
1) Boot the system into SAFE MODE WITH COMMAND PROMPT. This mode of booting works and does not generate the annoying lockout error.
2) At the command prompt type "EXPLORER.EXE" This will launch the windows desktop and allow you to get to step 3.
3) Go to the CONTROL PANEL -> USER ACCOUNTS -> CHANGE THE WAY USERS LOGON. Change that disable "Use Welcome Screen" then save your settings.
4) Reboot. When the system comes up you should be able to login with the Username/Password dialog box. Use "Administrator" as the user, and whatever password your administrator account has for the password.

Now you should be logged in as administrator and able to re-run the ACTIVATE WINDOWS WIZARD and successfully get the system authorized.

I hope someone will find this information useful. I would post it at one of the myriad "Windows Tech Forums" but I'm too lazy to fill out another friggin forum sign-up even to help people.