I am so sick of these bastards. Nary a week goes by when I don't stumble across their shit: I have some sort of problem I need to fix, I do a Google search, and wind up clicking on a helpful-looking link — not looking at the URL it leads to — only to find these assholes wasting my valuable time again.
Look — I'm not giving you fuckers money for tech support, especially when there's no guarantee that your answer will have any relevance whatsoever to my issue. All you're doing is wasting my valuable time — frequently when I'm at work and time, as they say, is money. And how the hell do you manage to get all your crap on the first page of every Google search for every conceivable network troubleshooting problem?
It's a gorgeous fucking day. The high is 77 and there's a pleasant breeze. And in Phoenix in April, each gorgeous day could be the last one until fall: in a month, it'll be up over 100.
I was very disappointed that I ran late leaving the house this morning and had to drive instead of biking. But on the plus side, we had an employee barbecue at lunch.
Other than that, we're moving servers around. Lot of heavy lifting and interesting maneuvering. In-between that I'm setting up a mailserver.
Life is good.
Reading: Stranger in a Strange Land. Which, other than making me use the word "grok" more often than usual (though I've used it for years anyway), has somewhat lowered my esteem of Speaker for the Dead, which seems to crib all its best ideas from Heinlein. I guess I'm now down to liking only one thing Orson Scott Card's ever written.
I just deleted 2.8 fuckloads of spam referrals from my stats and banned the sites responsible.
In the off chance that I accidentally deleted a site I shouldn't have, let me know.
If you don't want your site to be banned, then never, ever directly link my stats page.
Looks like I made the winners' circle in the BioWare contest. #3 in the community votes.
Thanks to everyone who voted, and anybody who's found my site through the contest, welcome, and I hope you enjoy my ranting about MapQuest. (Incidentally, dexonline.com has not actually fixed its Mapquest system, and still routinely directs me to Kansas.)
Updated Features to put my mod at the top, and to add my current Pyoko avatar.
(…Ack, damn daylight savings time. We don't do that crap in Arizona. Am I really going to have to change my blog settings twice a year? Laaaaaaaame.)
(I sure hope nobody's got an RSS reader open right now. I've edited this entry about a half-dozen times in ten minutes. And I personally hate when people do that shit.)
Looks like the BioWare voting should just about be wrapped up.
Thanks to everyone who voted.
We'll see how this turns out; I have a good feeling. They're going to announce the winners on Wednesday.
Playing: Dragon Quest 8, Final Fantasy 4, Super Mario World
Reading: The Catcher in the Rye, which I am given to understand is turning me into a serial killer or an assassin or something. I saw it in a Mel Gibson movie.
And on the 141st day, it rained.
I don't think that those of you who haven't spent the bulk of your lives in a desert can truly understand what it's like to get rain here, but I imagine it's much like seeing the snow melt in New York, seeing nightfall for the first time in months in Alaska, or seeing the rain stop in Seattle. Relief and gratitude.
There are few things in life I enjoy so much as the smell of rainfall in the desert — and even rainfall on the dirt and asphalt of the urban sprawl of Phoenix smells pretty good to me.
It's barely sprinkling outside the door right now, but the sky to the east and to the north is dark.
Storm's a-brewin'.
I spent about 5 and a half hours yesterday moving some 200 websites over to a new server.
And it's a good thing I did, because the old server died later that night.
(If you are a pothead like my pothead brother, you have probably already started jabbering about synchronicity as if Buckminster Fuller were some kind of goddamn fairy prince instead of a scientist. If, however, you possess an ounce of common sense, it has probably occurred to you that usually when you move files from one computer to another, it is because it is reasonably likely that the original is going south.)
So, just to recap: four days into my new job, and I have already saved the Internet.
Is anyone keeping track of how many times I've saved the Internet now?
I think it's six.
The contest is closed, and my mod, A Hero's Death, is now available for download and voting in the NWN vault.
If you have NWN and the expansions, please download it and give it a play. With any luck, you'll love it and give it a glowing evaluation.
But play fair — don't vote until and unless you've played it.
Please feel free to leave feedback on either of the following threads:
(I'm going to copy this entry to the top of the page and leave it there until the contest ends, but at the moment I'm at lunch and for some reason b2evo thinks I don't have write privileges for my PHP files. I'd complain about the amount of irritation involved in switching to blogging software, but of course if I were still doing this by hand it would be 3.5 cubic bitches for me to update away from home in the first place.)
Updated A Hero's Death (see previous entry). Fixed a bug in a script I hadn't recompiled. Special thanks to SpoonyGundam for finding it.
The Mod Squad
I've finished my entry for the BioWare writing contest. If you have a copy of Neverwinter Nights, I'd appreciate it if you'd download my mod, A Hero's Death (might need to a do a right-click, Save As, as neither Firefox nor Konqueror seems to recognize it as a binary file), and give some feedback in the appropriate Pyoko thread (warning: spoilers). The contest deadline isn't until tomorrow, so if you notice any bugs I could squash at the last minute, please let me know.
(Corresponding update to Features page.)
