Checksum Arcanius

I’ve never been into the MMORPG (Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game) genre, but this is strill pretty impressive:

Gamer buys $26,500 virtual land

Web Designer and generally 1337 dude Dris has been working on the back end of a future MMORPG (Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game) and because of the great flexibility of SilverFir.net’s setup, asked to have the work hosted here. Naturally, I said yes, and as a result I was treated, along with a number of my friends, to quite a treat today. We each entered our names, then used our arrow keys to move little circles around the screen. Ok, so maybe it doesn’t sound that exciting now, but once we have the game server running as a daemon, we’ll open it up for a public trial and you’ll see why I feel the urge to tell all my friends as soon as I start playing. And then we’ll see who’s laughing (probably it’ll be both of us… yes, its that much fun!)

Tonight, I completed a major software upgrade of SilverFir.net. The process was extremely painless, thanks to Debian‘s excellent package management system. Now all I have to test out is if the system will reboot or not, since among the things I updated is lilo, the Linux Loader.

The experiene has left me thinking somewhat more favorably of Debian over the choice of many of my friends, Gentoo. Gentoo compiles everything from source, which is nice for ultimate optimization, but it takes forever, and really, its packages are no more customizable than what I have with Debian. Besides, I compile from source – without package management – the major server software I use anyway, because I want even more control than Gentoo offers easily – so the rest of the stuff is just helper software that I want to work, hassle free. And Debian does that, Gentoo does not.

For now, at least, Debian remains my distribution of choice.

A group conversation over a math project led me to this new task switcher, a very cool little power toy for Windows XP that resembles somewhat the task switching in Mac OS X, with a window preview to help you figure out which window you actually want to switch to, which is especially useful for when you have multiple instances of the same application open. I suggest it to any user of Windows XP.

I learned from tim about a program called FileBunker that backs up your files to a Gmail account. Since, like Tim, I have a Gmail that I mostly don’t use, I thought it’d be a good idea to back up my My Documents folder. But that was too big, so I excluded my pictures, and it is now chugging away at backing up my files. Or so I assume. For all I know, it could be deleting all my files after sending them to the NSA. But I doubt it. Such is my trust of random programs downloaded from the internet.

The last two nights, I played Dan in some one-on-one HL2: Deathmatch games. I’m not a fan of the deathmatch style of play, vastly prefering the counterstike style round based team setup… but nevertheless, gravity gun duels are incredibly fun. I can’t wait for a gravity gun only map.

Thursday Morning, I awoke around 8:30, dressed for a morning football game in the rain, picked up Scott, and headed to Newport High School’s football field. These days, Scott and I are “old” people (better than 19) so we joined forces with that crowd against the younger crowd. And it was a crowd – it was the largest turkey bowl in my memory. But the numbers only seemed to help the old people; we slammed the younger guys pretty well. So bad, that we had to switch up teams to make it resemble a competitive game again. I wasn’t too productive on the offensive side of things, with only a couple of catches and one interception-shortened series as QB (after the teams got switched), but I also had two interceptions and a very good time.

Unfortunately, I also jammed the index finger on my left hand pretty badly at the beginning of the game. It swelled up pretty well and made me less agressive throughout the rest of the day. And its still hurting, so I may have to see if there was any additional damage. While I’m at it, I might as well have my right pinky looked at too, which has never been up to par after a flag football game way back in my early high school days.

After the turkey bowl, I dropped off Scott, returned home, and made myself presentable for company. And there was lots of company. My aunt and uncle (Dad’s brother Mike and Marie) came from Florida, my sister Robin and her family (husband Dave, daughters Zoe and Thea) came from Seattle proper along with a family friend and her daughter (as an aside, the friend, whom I had never met, showed up first. I looked quizically at her as she drove up, which prompted her to ask, “Is this the right place?” Having no idea, really, I responded, “Maybe…”). Also, my cousin (Christine, daughter of Mike) and her Husband Luca and daughter Isabella were there, along with my brother and his girlfriend (soon to be fiancee) Kaylee. It was quite a crowd, with a good contingent of youngsters mixed in.

Then came the food. We are not always a traditional thanksgiving-feast family, so instead of turkey and stuffing and mashed potatoes, we had roast beef and wild duck, mashed sweet potatoes and baked potatoes (which I mashed myself, because I’m not too much of a fan of sweet potatoes), and various other misundry fruits and vegetables and other items. It was really quite good, but I sure do miss downing those perectly mashed potatoes smothered in turkey gravy. Hand-mashed potatoes in beef juice is still pretty good, though.

After dessert, we sang some songs, which the kids seems to especially enjoy, told some thanksgiving stories (Marie, as a kindegarten schoolteacher, was most excellent at this). Then we mostly hung out and talked and got tired early. Seems to happen when its pitch black by 5:00. I still managed to stay up late, though, because Theo was comign over. We managed to lock the door on him, so when he arrived about 1:00, he had to get my attention by lightly rocking my window. It finally worked, and we stayed up until 300 playing around (albeit unsuccessfully, moslty) with Linux f the Gentoo variety.

The next morning, I awoke late, enjoyed breakfast, and then people started to arrive for the party. With Scott, Dan, Colin, Theo, Ben, Kaylee, Jim, and Julie ready to go, we began to figure out how to enter GPS coordinates into our three units (it wasn’t too hard) and then we began our journey. The first Geocahce we stopped at was called Forest Drive Pipeline, and it was, predictably, by Forest Drive. We took the hard way, through woods the entire time, and then we spent a good fifteen minutes with all of us wandering around in the area until Dan found the cache itself, an ammo box hidden beneath some branches and leaves in the nook of a maple tree. I filled out the log book, and then we took a pink carribeaner and left an alligator clip (as is the custom, you take an object and leave another object).

It had been a while since I’d been out tromping through the woods, and it was good to do it again. I had a lot of fun, and even though I made my shoes and pants pretty dirty, it was well worth it. We stopped at McDonalds for lunch, then we drove to the Red Town trailhead where we started the hike for Geocache #2. This one, which I was attracted to because of its less-than-trivial difficulty numbers and pretty photo, was called Sandstone Falls. The hike only needed to be 1.5 miles each way, but we took the long way on the way there and ended up taking more like a 4 mile hike, which I also enjoyed, but along with soreness from the Turkey bowl, I was moving pretty slowly by the end of the day. Since it was getting past 4 by this point, we abandoned further attempts at geocaching and returned home for fooding.

Joining us at this point were Beth and Maneesh. Clams, french dip (thanks to my wodnerful mom), and caesar salad were the main menu items, and the all were good (I am told, as I cannot speak for the clams, which I did not partake of). We also played Pass the Pigs quite competitively, followed by a few rounds of Setbefore we generally became just a bunch of talkers. Beth and I were unable to rally the troops for a game of Mafia, so I suppose that it will have to wait until next time. If I’m not too old the next time around…

Everyone was leaving around 9:00, so I got Beth and Scott to take home. After droppin Beth off, Scott and I drove all over creation (from Bellevue to North Seattle to Des Moines and back) talking up a storm. I finally returned him at 2:00 am. It’ll be good to have him back for the month of December, even though he’s taking a week and a half off for a swimming camp. Crazy man, but what else should I expect?

Saturday was another busy day, in which I made a brief appearance at a lego league session, went shopping, attended Tim‘s Eagle Scout Court of Honor, got miscommunicated with more lego league stuff, then went to Max’s birthday party at Mary and Jason’s place in Redmond. It was good to see them all again, even if Jen and I aren’t as good at Cranium as we wanted to be. I guess it makes sense that the newly expecting couple should have more of a mental connection than the rest of us. That ended with me taking home some hard drives to try figuring out what was wrong with Jason’s desktop. The drives appear to be not-so-good (aka bad). Speaking of which, my computer is giving me issues as well, but thats not for this post.

Sunday, I went to church, where Max spoke, and where I realized that my old ward (Cougar Mountain) is a lot nicer to attend than the one I was going to most recently (Singles). More people I know, more people I like talking too, better lessons, talks, environment… I think I know where I’ll be next Sunday. After all that, I worked on a linear algebra project, making a program to calculate the determinant of a matrix recursively. Its pretty fast until you get to about 8×8 matrices, and then it slows to a crawl, because recursive cofactor expansion is just about the worst way to calculate a determinant that there is.

Which brings me to today, in which I worked, spilled hot chocolate on myself, got a replacement shirt from Dave (thanks, by the way!), went to class (couldn’t concentrate – too hot, a little sick, and had the computer there to work on the project), and then came home and ate. My Miles One Platinum Visa credit card also arrived. Time to start saving up miles and traveling the world on my consumerist habits! w00t.