Some random w00t! (Punkadyne Labs (Punkwalrus))

Balticon
Balticon invited me to come back. Sue Wheeler e-mailed me, "You coming? Are you going to respond to our invites?" and I thought, "what invites?" I am guessing they got eaten by the spam filters. I do plan to attend, and I do plan to do programming again. I also plan on shifting gears and being an obnoxious guest this year. I will insist on only speaking directly to the con chair, whom I will call "Squeaky" and never tell anyone why, with all my impossible needs:

"What do you mean I can't have a live camel, Squeaky? I thought it would come with the audio/video request package!! I bet you'd do it for Hal Clement if he was still alive...! Yeah... I see how it is for ol' Punkie..."

Futurama
I found, while looking up Phil Lamar's credits, that there will be at least 3 more Futurama movies. "Futurama: Into the Wild Green Yonder (2009)," "Futurama: The Beast with a Billion Backs (2008)," and "Futurama: Bender's Game (2008)." I liked, "Bender's Big Score," so I am looking forward to a good year of Slurm and Hypnotoad.

SETI
I have been a part of the SETI (Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence) distributed computing program since 1999, and today I crossed over one million credits, ranking me in the 4700s for the whole world, the top 0.5% percentile, and one of the FEW single individuals with that many credits (most are companies like Sun or HP). And at an average of 1600 credits per day, I am still searching for aliens. Woo!

Lego Killing Machines
When I was a kid, my friends and I used to lament that Lego didn't have any real army men or tanks or any Lego sets where we could wage an interlocking brick horror upon the helpless mini-figs we delighted in torturing. Of course, we made our own (usually in the form of marauding spaceships), but they never seemed as cool as a real set. Lego's stance on this was they wanted to promote peace and love and creativity and... they just didn't know boys very well.

Where was this guy when Andy Oman and I were looking for mechanized juggernauts to bring a mini-fig holocaust? Holy tentacled plastic death carriage, man! The video is ever so worthwhile to see mini-figs chopped and flung aside like the helpless, frozen-smiled victim sheep they are. Mua ha ha! Posted in: balticon , boinc , futurama , lego , seti

Productive weekend (Punkadyne Labs (Punkwalrus))

My arthritis is killing me, especially my arms, wrists, and hands. My sinuses are agchk! I am also so cold for some reason.

But this weekend I got a lot done. In order to avoid paying taxes I don't owe, I had to find my old e-Trade paperwork, which I did find, so I'll probably give them a call this week to yell at them. But in the process, I shredded almost five 13 gallon trash bags worth of paperwork. In addition to some old bills I had, I had a lot of catalogs, convention materials, and printouts of various projects I had at work. When I left AOL, I sort of did this whole paperwork dump to a box that contained work reviews, network diagrams, project charts, expense reports and the like. I went from 5 boxes down to one and a half. It felt good.

I also cleaned out a hallway closet somewhat. One of the reasons I clean is that when others clean for me, the "out of sight, out of mind" mentality seems to predominate. Thus, I had a hallway closet that was little more than a trash heap. I am not kidding: I ran into broken yogurt containers, pizza boxes, broken bottles, plastic cups, old busted shoes, crushed boxes, almost a dozen plastic soda bottles ranging from 16oz to 2 liter, and residue from a Hollywood-themed party I had in 2004. There was also a motley collection of old video game systems that date back to the NES and Sega 64 (none of them work, I am sure, but I boxed them anyway). That closet generated 2 bags of trash on its own.

I also straightened out the utility room in our house. I had made quite a mess upgrading our home network to GB LAN and re-installing my SETI array, and so I cleaned that up, and the result you see to the right. There's still a bunch of crap to throw away, but now it's not all on the floor anymore :).

The rest of the night, I played Dungeon Keeper 2. I hadn't played that in a long while, and I saw on a board how to play it on XP (when I upgraded to XP a few years ago, it wouldn't play, which made me very sad) with a patch. I really love that game. That and Quake 2 are games I have never found a decent replacement to. Overlord looks a lot like DK2, as far as gameplay, and Serious Sam kinda replaced Quake 2 for me, but not really.

Of course, I still haven't found a decent replacement to M.U.L.E. either, so I am stuck in the past :)

1280 x 1024 Posted in: closet , dungeon keeper , games , housework , mess , seti