Category Archives: Site Archives

Laptop Amusement

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Sitting around at the Tiger Tech Talk at the Seattle Marriot Waterfront, in a room filled with other Mac Geeks. I’ve NEVER seen this many laptops. It’s really pretty impressive. Entire 12 person tables were filled with people’s various Powerbooks at every seat. I don’t know why, but this amuses me greatly… that and the fact that I can turn on iChat and see half a dozen people on Rendezvous. Slick slick slick.

Umm, I can’t really talk about what I’ve been learning, quite yet… they made it clear at the beginning of the conference that this information is Confidential, and pointed out that we signed a general NDA when we signed up for the seminar.
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Need a New Computer

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[NOTE: This is going to be an image-heavy post, so 56k-ers, be forewarned (the images total about 470k together, so it shouldn’t be too bad). All the images are in the extended entry. – Nabil]

A little background: I am a computer user by hobby and (so to speak) by trade. I do graphics work (3d and 2d), I write, I program, I design, I research, all on my computer. This is in addition to blogging, MUDding, chatting (IRC and otherwise), and web browsing in general. When all said and done, I AVERAGE 12 hours a day on my computer, daily, with the range going from 4 hour to 20 hours at a time. I make myself available 24 hours a day for the systems I help administer (the MUD, for instance), as well, so my computer is running (albeit idle) pretty much all the time.

Suffice it to say, my computers see a LOT of use. I travel with it regularly to a variety of locations (whether across the country or down the street to the local coffee shop). As such, despite keeping it in padded protected carrying cases, it sees some physical abuse in addition to just processor cycles. All of which… well it takes its toll. I’m documenting the abuse my current computer has received in the past two years as an example of exactly why I’m needing a new computer now: basically, I honestly don’t believe it will last even until I graduate next year.
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Writing to Avoid Writing

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It makes sense, trust me. As Mickey mentioned last night to me (and which I’ve been saying myself for quite some time), it’s a matter of writing every day, even if it’s just writing about not wanting to write. Right. Correct.

A few things I haven’t talked about from my trip: the early early morning drive to the airport was an interesting (and perhaps intense) experience. We listened to volume 2 of a compilation I’d made, and rode up the empty interstate, stopping in Lebanon for gas and coffee. I remember remarking as we pulled from 91 to 89 that what I dig so much about compilations and playlists that you share with others is that at any time that you put it in, there is the chance that someone else out there is listening to it right at that moment. By the very act of thinking about that, friends become closer, more immediate.

We pulled in for gas, and got out: it was warm for a 4am in November, and I could see the stars clearly in the sky: Orion was in full armor, with all his stars full and bright like they only get during the winter. Riding on, I remember looking back and to the north and seeing the sky start to shimmer, the northern lights illuminating the sky like moonbeams without a moon to originate from. It was a damn good trip.
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Changes Are In Place

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So, in case you haven’t noticed, the changes I alluded to in a previous post have taken place. Criticalgames.com is now up and operational (though not yet fully organized and certainly not populated with content). I’m really excited about it as a project, and look forward to doing stuff with it soon. I am a little concerned that my IRM for nadreck.org doesn’t seem to be functioning as I was expecting, but that might be propagation stuff… I’ll wait a few days before pinging the service folks at FutureQuest (whom all have been MORE than helpful through this process… go buy a package from them, will ya? They deserve your business!).

Until then, I’ve posted a quick greeting message on the Critical Games front page, and will only be lightly futzing with organization until I finish my schoolwork. If I finish it quickly, I may post an actual essay or article before heading to UberCon, otherwise it’ll have to wait til I’m in Vermont (or later).

And no, don’t worry, I don’t plan to stop posting here. This is my blog, and will continue to be my central place for personal and informal writing. DO expect a little maintenance work while I clean up links and such, though.
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BIG Changes Coming

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For those of you who’ve been reading a while, you know that I picked up some domains about a year ago that I haven’t had an opportunity to do anything with mainly through lack of cash to do it right.

No, I didn’t suddenly come into money. However, my web host recently expanded the features included in my webhosting package, meaning that the services came to me, instead of vice versa. Awesome awesome.

So, sometime in the next few weeks, I will be changing my webhosting package into www.criticalgames.com. Criticalgames.org and .net will also work. Nadreck.org will also still work, but only after a fashion: it will redirect you to nadreck.criticalgames.com, which is where I’ll be hosting my blog from then on.

I’m pretty happy about this, though I apologize to folks who will need to update their links list. This arrangement allows for a lot more flexibility for professional growth (game design and writing on gaming, et cetera).

Our nadreck.org addresses will still function (or so they say), so this shouldn’t affect email at all, save perhaps during the actual transition.

Anyway, just wanted to share. I’ll post another update when the site is actually about to go under the knife (so to speak).

Rain in Seattle

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For the first time in several weeks, it is raining in Seattle. It has been sunny and hot for most of the summer, and the entire area is wrapped in a drought. It was discussed on the radio that with the ground where it is, if we got a torrential downpour, it wouldn’t help… so instead, we’ve gotten exactly what we needed: big droplets of water, falling at a steady pace. I can hear the pitter-patter as it falls through the trees outside my window, through which a gentle cool breeze is blowing.

I’ve got Nick Drake playing on my computer, and I’m listening to the rain, talking to interesting people. It is all relaxing in a way that only quiet rainy days can allow.
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Upgraderrific

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I ranted about the high prices and subscription-based model that Movable Type had implemented for MT3 a while back, and said that unless things changed, I wasn’t going to upgrade to it…

Well, they fixed the pricing structure. So I upgraded. I’m just using the free version for now (no money to really spare at the moment, and for the moment at least I don’t need the paid features), and will be working out the kinks over the next few days.

In other news, Eli and I found a really nifty coffee shop in downtown Bellevue with free wifi access. (Oh the joys of http://seattle.wifimug.org.)

Freaky

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Allow me to preface this post by stating that I have dreams with people I haven’t actually MET but know through other means pretty regularly, usually when I’ve been doing a lot with them. A prime (pardon the pun) example would be dreaming that the Decepticons were spying on our apartment after watching the entirety of seasons one and two on DVD, followed by reading up on the full Transformers Metaverse history. What makes the dream in this post a bit more unique is that I HADN’T done any overload prior. In fact it had been quite some time since I’d even read his blog, let alone any of his work.

So, about a week ago, I had a particularly vivid dream. I was travelling with Mickey, and we were in a grocery store somewhere in the northern midwest (I’d say either Minnesota, Wisconsin, or possibly the Upper Peninsula of Michigan), and while leaving the store, ran into Neil Gaiman. Mickey had run back inside to get something, and so I struck up a conversation with Neil in order to stall him, because I knew that Mickey would want a chance to talk to him as well.

The conversation continues, and one or two other people join in (talking about the nature of dreams and the impact they have on reality), until finally Neil simply has to get back to his office, which is in the shopping plaza across the street, in a converted storefront. He invites me to swing by later to finish the conversation, and to bring my wife (since Mickey had still not come out of the store).
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Programming (1)

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So, some of you may be wondering where I’ve been for the past few days… the short answer (ie, ignoring everything else that was going on) is that I’ve been wading through the last few chapters of Stephen Kochan‘s Programming in Objective-C. Useful, well written book that does more for actually teaching the language than most of the other books on my shelf combined.

I finally got through it, and feel moderately comfortable with it, ready to take the next step, and actually try my hand at actual development. Never one for small bites, I decided to dive right into building a MUD server. From scratch. In Objective-C, which none of my friends know and thus can’t help with. Woo!
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Thought Showers

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For lack of a better way to open, the title means very little beyond a reference to weather reports that say “Chance of Snow Showers”. It was going to be “Thoughts Scattered Like Papers on a Windy Day,” recalling a remembered moment from my recent trip to Chicago, but it was too long. Feel free to think of the title as that, though.

School has been going well. I managed to get my first packet in on time, and it’s looking like I’ll be able to pull that off with my second packet as well (don’t want to jinx it, though). I’ve been drawing at a fairly regular pace, though I really should try to step it up a bit. I see progress, which is good, but I still can tell that I’ve got a long way to go before I’d consider any of them “good”.

While we were in Chicago, Mickey, Mickey’s mom, our friend Ian, and myself went to see Too Much Light Makes the Baby Go Blind, which is a regular tradition for Mickey and Ian, and the second time I’ve seen it (the first was in November, 2002). I enjoyed it just as much as I did the first time (possibly more), and found some of the new plays quite engaging (the content of TMLMTBGB is constantly changing… as they say, “If you’ve seen the show once, you’ve seen the show once.”). We went and had coffee and chatted about various things (including UberCon), and in general had a good time.
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