Fabulous!

As you, by now, are well aware, I'm all about appearances. I'm a firm believer in the theory that while being good at one's job is fairly important, looking like one is good at one's job is crucial.

However, in order to battle traffic every day to get to work before 7am CST, I need to leave my house at dark o'clock. Sometimes my wardrobe choices are, as a result, a tad off.

Of course I've shown up with black shoes and a brown belt from time to time. While seeing this combination in the cold grim light of dawn causes me to twist and freak out a little, I'm disappointed than no one else has ever made mention of it.

Once or twice I've worn socks that didn't match my shirt. I've also made it out of the house with socks that didn't match each other, but since that "Dark Thursday" I keep a spare pair of socks (still in the factory packaging) in the glove compartment of my car.

Today's ensemble crosses into new territory. Today, due to the necessities of laundry proximity, my oxford shirt is dotted with quite a bit of blue glitter. One of the facts of glitter physics that is glossed over at the university level is that glitter, when exposed to atmosphere, coats everything. I don't mean everything on the art table, either. As little as one gram of the stuff can sparkle up surfaces in every room in a single family residence. A tube of glitter, spilled onto the tile floor, will not only stick to the floor but the walls and ceiling in every room in the house and every room of the house next door.

This same tube of glitter, when spilled and rolled in by a long-haired orange cat who would like her belly rubbed, will clone itself. A half an ounce of blue glitter almost instantly becomes ~12 cubic feet of angry sparkle. Angry sparkle which seeks out men's clothes and adds a touch of visual "pop" to everything.

However, I'm in no way upset by the statement this accessory makes. It boldly says, "I don't live alone." This is an important distinction in a geek's persona which can truly only be expressed by glitter on the sleeves. "I'm not going home to a cup of Top Ramen and an evening watching Dancing With The Stars in the dark," it proclaims.

I, as a confident man, can wear glitter outside of a rave and be better for it.

Just as long as none of it sticks to my hands. I freak out if stuff sticks to my hands.

Changing topics:

I stopped at the drug store (oddly appropriate, that) on my way in to work for a couple of 12-packs of Diet Coke (3,693 Coke Reward Points) and scored a couple of things for Mrs. Pr3++yG33kyTh1ng. I managed to find dark chocolate bars which are (according to the packaging) approximately 133% cocoa. These things were actually coating the nearby candies with a hard chocolate shell through two layers of plastic without decreasing their own mass.

Mrs. Pr3++yG33kyTh1ng likes dark chocolate which defies the basic laws of matter. Yay!

Saving Us All a Walk to the Mailbox

Gwynyth decided in first grade to not share things she learned in school about Christopher Columbus with me. Admittedly, I tend to be able to pick out a conspiracy theory in just about anything but to be fair, there is a lot for non-Imperial Spaniards to hate about that guy.

However, since Gwynyth has already grown tired of my seasonal references to "Euro-trash" and my semi-crazed rantings about the definition of "discovery", I come here -- to the familiar pages of Pr3++yG33kyTh1ng, to give voice to my objections.

It is a generally accepted historical fact that the Vikings were in the Americas first. No shock there. I think they even added that to the lesson plan in schools, due in part to a generous contribution by the Ikea corporation. The Vikings had pretty much run out of stuff to pillage in their own regions anyway and repeat pillaging is not only considered bad form for proud Nordic warrior-types it also isn't as much fun or nearly as profitable. When the Vikings pillaged something, it stayed pillaged.

Then there is the story of Prince Madoc who traveled from Wales to Florida in 1170 and started a colony. The fortifications along the Alabama river were reported by Cherokee chief Oconostota in 1810 to have belonged to a tribe called "Welsh" who called their leader "Madok". Fort Mountain State Park in Georgia supports the theory that the great stone wall along one of the mountaintops was the site of the last stand of these "Welsh" who were wiped out in the Cherokee legend of the "great slaughter" of a "moon-eyed" people who had pale skin and hair and occupied the area before the Cherokee themselves.

But okay. Today, for me, is a day to speak of Christopher Columbus, not actual explorers. Those guys can be covered on "Legitimate Discovery Day" March 21st.

Columbus supposedly couldn't get funding for his trip to the "New" World because of the widely-held belief that the world was flat. Except that at the time of his voyage, very few people believed that the Earth was flat -- And no one at all in the shipping business believed it. The spherical Earth idea was the general opinion of ancient Greek science. The actual size of the sphere was in debate and that is why there were a few failed attempts to get funding for his trip -- Most learned people considered that Columbus was using bad math. Since he was looking for a passage to India and (until his death) believed he had found one, I'd say they were spot on about that.

This isn't to say he did nothing worth remembering. We should remember the atrocities he committed against the native people he misnamed "Indians" while he was Governor in the Caribbean. We should also remember that in the end the Spanish Crown only funded Columbus to keep him from going to work for the British through their application of the "better to have the crazy flying our flag than theirs" business theory.

We also must remember that King Ferdinand gave him the impossible job of governing that region of Asia which is between Panama and (possibly) San Salvador, buried him in paperwork and demanded that more and more islands be brought under Spanish rule until other Spanish "civilians" complained and had Columbus arrested and shipped home in chains. His arrest and discharge as Governor was the reason Spain refused in the end to pay Columbus his agreed upon fee for services rendered. Never trust royalty to do anything but skip out on a check.  

So Columbus Day offers us a unique opportunity to learn about bad math, the oppression of native populations, and the joys of working for "the man".

Right now, I'm celebrating by doing about 66% of those things. Later on the party will continue when I skip the walk to the mailbox.

Plans for the End of the Month

I run across a lot of things that just don't add up.

This article, for example.

Every year we all hear about protests and demonstrations against Halloween and all the associated evils, but the real evil is rarely identified.

Is Satan corrupting children dressed up as ninjas and pirates? Obviously not, since children dressed as ninjas and pirates are too awesome to ever be corrupted by anything. What about kids dressed as clowns or Pokemon? Maybe.

Anyone in a "Barney the Dinosaur" outfit cannot be evil, since the sight of that guy always causes me to offer up a brief prayer of thanks to God for the meteor that he sent to take out the rest of the dinosaurs.

The article (for those of you who didn't make it through it) recommended other activities to replace trick-or-treating to ensure that Satan doesn't get near the children. The side bonus is that kids who don't participate in trick-or-treating fall into an easily established "non-dateable" classification which can even follow them to an out-of-state college.

Here is one of my favorite bits:

"Occultic[sic]-oriented rock performers have flourished in this generation. Some rockers even try to persuade teenage listeners to kill themselves and their parents. The influence of the occult has been behind some of the most horrific school shootings of this past decade."

Because the best way to sell a product is to kill your customer base.

Anyway, now that you have your own kids secreted away in some bunker or compound, the article recommends that you greet the neighbor kids with these. Mmmm. . . . New Testa-Mints!

In all seriousness, handing out tracts of scripture on Halloween also has a side benefit. The whole family can spend time together scrubbing egg off the house every November 1st.

"Happy Egg Scrubbing Day, everyone!" I've submitted the idea to Hallmark already and I'm proofing the latest draft of cards. Apparently there was a "Holiday Hole" (as we in the industry call it) between Halloween and "Dia De Los Muertos" which needed to be filled. Specifically, it needed to be filled with greeting cards and little stuffed plush eggs with googly eyes.

Okay. Real evil time. I'm naming it.

The true evil of Halloween is High Fructose Corn Syrup. Moderation mitigates it like a stake through the heart mitigates a vampire. The joy of this technique is that we can fully participate in Halloween and not get our house coated in eggs.

And there we go. Evil averted. That is just what we do here at the Pr3++yG33kyTh1ng Institute of Holiday Evaluation and Diet Coke Disposal Facility.

On The Origin Of . . .

What if those people in Kansas are right and evolution never happened? If they are, I sure hope evolution happens soon.

On the left, we see an art student's rendition of the ancient Giant Beaver -- 14 feet of tree-chewing, dam-building terror which roamed the Earth in long-forgotten ages.

We don't have a lot of information about the life-cycle and personal preferences of the ancient Giant Beaver, but we know the geographic range for this beast extended at one time as far south a Florida. Early Americans chased the creatures northward into the ancient Kingdom known as "Canadon", where the tiny descendants of this ancient terror of the forest dwell unto this very day and have even found a home on our frosty northern neighbor's money.

It always comes back to money, doesn't it?

Yesterday afternoon I bought a comic. Joss Whedon's latest Buffy comic, to be precise. It cost $2.99. Without telling you how much I remember comics costing when I was a kid, I'll tell you that the $2.99 I was happy to pay sat on the cover next to a "/" and on the other side of that was a bit that said, "$3.99CAN".

I'm used to seeing that type of pricing structure on books and magazines. Somewhere in one of my emotional darker places a little part of me always giggles a bit at the misfortune of our snow-coated, moose-hugging friends who have to pay at least a dollar extra for everything.

But now, the monopoly-colored beaver-dollar is worth at least what our own dollar is worth. Canadians are getting screwed by this pricing structure more than ever.

The price for electronic media like games is as much as $10 more in the braille-friendly loonie even with the depressed value of our own currency. Is this part of some conspiracy to hobble the Canadian Video Game Olympics team? Would the plots of the entertainment industry against "le dollar" impact American media geeks in general and (more importantly) me specifically?

Probably not. Canada is another county. A country filled (if media reports are to be believed) with bears and elk and tiny degenerate inferior beavers forever stunted by their life in the ever-present snow.

As such, Canada (and Canadians) are simultaneously above the Great Lakes and beneath the threshold for concern.

But why do we keep them around? I mean, aside from the amusement factor what has Canada done for us lately?

A quick visit to Wikipedia answers this quite simply:

Oil. Canada has a lot of it and only a few billion tons of fresh lumber stands between us and all that goodness.

That is why we play nice with Canada even though all the good actors already moved here. Our publishing industry buys bulk paper from Canada, prints stuff on it, then charges Canadians extra to buy it back. This can result in either a slow bleed of their economy or the eventual total illiteracy of an entire nation.

And either way, they become much more agreeable to our drilling for oil in the land they have already cleared for us.

What does concern me is the inevitable return of the beaver. Warmer climates in the south could bring about their former gigantism. We must be ready, my friends. Remain vigilant. Always travel with a buddy. Never leave the house with wood.

Eyes ever northward-

G

Spam Made From Salmon

I get a lot of email. I get some personal communications, a lot of marketing stuff and newsletters I signed up to get, and more spam than a reasonable person should ever have the unpleasant task of reviewing.

On Tuesday I was included in the CC: list on an email containing a picture from someone's fly fishing trip to Alaska. The person who sent it was a headhunter who (years ago) worked on placing me for a job somewhere or other. The picture itself was almost two megs in size.

I'm going to step away from the basic bitterness that I feel whenever someone talks about going on vacation. I haven't had one myself in . . . Does our Honeymoon count? I think it does. Bitterness counteracts the aspartame.

I was more angered that I was CC: included instead of BCC: included. The ramifications of this awful social faux pas (pardon my french) continue to annoy me this morning.

Every single asshat on the CC: list chose to "Reply to All" to comment on the salmon, inquire about the other parts of the vacation, or make poorly veiled and even more poorly constructed sexual references. And each contained another copy of the two meg image of this guy and his fish.

Each RE: made me shudder with rage at the idiocy and the inconsiderate nature of blindly replying to all on a list where I can't have been the only person who knows no one but the original sender. Now that I'm in their address list, if any of these people click the wrong link or download the wrong application my email address is available to whatever spammer plants a worm or virus on their machine and wants to pick it up and try to sell me something. This sounds paranoid, but anyone who would "Reply to All" into a group of strangers should not be trusted near a computer.

I'm all about the free and open sharing of information, but these people should be set out on a ranch somewhere far away from the rest of us given their own copy of the internet to play on. Every night the rest of us could take turns pressing a button to restore this isolation environment to the way it was before they started playing with it that morning. They would never know. It would be for their own good and for the good of society. Well, our society anyway.

Email would (by necessity) not be allowed out of this isolation environment. Those of us on the outside could email in, though. Otherwise those people on the Isolation Internet would eventually degenerate into tribal factions fighting for survival day-to-day and staking claim to huge swaths of Isolation Ebay and Isolation MySpace. Isolation YouTube would be their sacred lands, where warfare is forbidden by ancient taboo and Nal-Therionel the Dark Lord of the Pratfall holds court. Long may he reign.

Email is a tool that anyone can use. More accurately, email is a tool that anyone can use, damn it. Please don't "Reply to All" unless every single person on the list needs or has requested your input.

/end preaching to the choir

Delusions of Gondor

Oh, no! Not another World of Warcraft post!

Yeah. But actually I'm only posting about how current events in-game apply to real life. I will endeavor to make it tolerable.

So. Three of us (Darrell and Adrian and I) quit the Innkeepers guild we founded in order to join a guild running raids into high-level instances. Since making the switch, I think we have spent more time running around with our friends the current (loyal) Innkeepers.

But anyway. Saturday morning I ran around with the new guild. I helped them out with daily quests and (in turn and just out of niceness) they helped me unlock those quest so that I can do them as well. To a person, they were polite and helpful and fun. I logged off to install the media thing I blogged about on Monday.

Saturday night at around midnight I started my first run with the guild into Karazhan (one of the longest raid dungeons in the game -- like finishing at 5am long) with nine other people from the new guild, including my real life friend Adrian who plays (as is his custom) a Mage.

I thought we did okay, mostly. We'd try to kill a big bad guy and die and run back and try again. The others in this guild have apparently run through this dungeon a lot and know everything Adrian and I were still trying to figure out. About half the time we managed to drop the big bad guy on the first try.

Again, the people in the guild were very cool to me. I got new boots for my character I hadn't actually earned the right to get just because they were a lot better than my old boots.

This is where real life intercepts and I start to go into "efficient effective meeting mode".

Every time we'd all die, there was discussion, as there should be. Blame was directed at the new people and rudeness seemed to appear from nowhere. There was a lot of stress and angst and bitterness I had seen no indication of prior to these events. The whole thing made me a very sad panda.

I want to say again that everyone was really nice to me, but in a lot of ways that made the situation worse as I would generally be on the side of the new people just learning. Hell, I was a new person just learning.

Here is my thinking on effective meetings which applies to real-life and post massive character death in World of Warcraft:

People screw up. I've had jobs where stuff breaks and everyone sits around flinging blame. In the case of a real life deleted database or in-game failure, the person in charge should ask the group what happened. This is especially true if he already knows the answer. The guilty party should be given a chance to accept fault, since that makes everyone feel better. If they do not come forward, the situation should be addressed later, one on one, because in WoW as in life a lot of stuff can go wrong at once and everyone has only their own perception of events. Either way, the meeting should end before blame gets cranked out. In the case of a disaster, everyone in the meeting should have better things to do than accuse and berate. As often as not the person singled out by the group for blame is not truly at fault at all, but having been tried and convicted in the court of mob mentality justice doesn't contribute at all to feelings of team-building.

Now, I could quit the guild. I could find another pretty easily, even. But, by my thinking I have these nice new boots to pay off. Also, they haven't been really crappy in my direction yet. Or even sort of crappy, really.

I shouldn't have this much stress (or really any stress) from a game.

I've been distressed for a while with the state of the directory where our music and video is stored at home. I'm even less happy with what iTunes chose to do with it. Access everything by search? Why can't I look by directory name?

I wanted a web interface for the whole system. Something which displays the files in an easy to understand format and streams them to whatever system accesses them.

This means I needed both a web front end to display and deliver and a database back end to keep everything organized.

I decided to use the computer which currently hosts the files as the server and installed WAMP. WAMP provides an apache webserver and MySQL open-source database engine which runs on Windows.

For the actual engine and page itself, I installed Jinzora. The installation itself was fairly straightforward, with the only addition I found to the official instructions being that the style seems to need to be set to "Classic" during the installation. Otherwise, a weird circle of errors occurs which causes the person installing the system to curse both loudly and vigorously. After installation the style can be set to something less "Classic" and more "Awesome".

Further, I can add new files to the system dynamically without re-scanning the directory again and again.

Yes. Most of a Saturday. On purpose and of my own free will.