Much Lost and Galactica stuff below the break. Some baby and angsty stuff too. I’m just giving you a chance to punch your ejection seat now in case all of that bores you. :-p … Read more
Evan and I got to take part in yet another impromptu family reunion on Sunday (this time on my wife’s side).
(Note fashionable blob of green bean flavored spit-up on my shirt. I hadn’t even noticed it yet!) … Read more
My apologies if I’ve seemed like an asshole the past few days (or at least like more of an asshole than usual) on message boards or elsewhere. I’ve had trouble sleeping and between being exhausted and being in pain (more in a moment) and having a little bit of cabin fever from the “stuck in a submarine with a baby” syndrome. The pain and the lack of sleep came from a lump that appeared, disappeared and reappeared immediately behind and below my left ear. It felt like it was about the size of a bottlecap, but it was resting right on that bone, putting constant pressure on it…hence constant pain. I think to put it charitably I’ve been impossible this week. Also, having a lump suddenly grow on you is very unnerving with or without the pain, so off to the doctor I went. Turns out that it’s an infection that’s set up near the glands back there, so now I’m on these horse-pill-sized antibiotics…and I’m still just having to rough it where the pain is concerned. I can tell that the swelling is going down, but it still hurts like hell. So at this point I’m not much better behaved than Evan is when he’s feisty, only I know more colorful four-letter words than he does (but I certainly can’t do the cute BAH BAH BAH BAH BAH! that he does).
Funny thing about the doctor I saw: I went to elementary school with him. He was the first kid I knew who had a TI 99/4a, and he introduced me to Tunnels Of Doom. I think I may have sold him on the PDF DVD while I was there – I probably need to start carrying a couple of them with me for these kind of eventualities. 😆 We also had a mutual friend with an Astrocade, so with me and my Odyssey2, we were kinda like The Kids Who Don’t Have An Atari and stuck together pretty closely. I’ve wondered more than once how in the world I came across to someone I haven’t seen in nearly 30 years. If I try to look at it from outside the sphere of my own interests and hobbies, it’s like I’m suddenly this fat nerd who’s still playing the games that were out in 1982. I tried to explain that I’m a bit of a historian in that regard, but I’m not someone who’s got an acclaimed book to back up that claim – just a self-published DVD, most copies of which are labeled in Sharpie. I don’t have any regrets for my own life choices, except maybe the Eating Too Much part, but I kinda wonder what the discrepancy was between what he expected to see and what he did see. Really more out of curiosity than any sense of being self-conscious. I am who I am, and I look like what I look like, and I’ve grown into a sense of comfort about both of these things.
Anyway, I’ve taken enough stuff to knock the edge off the pain from this thing (which is still there), so I’m gonna go to sleep.… Read more
From our local cable company’s “slide show of homes for sale” channel:
Not only do you need a better mortgage, but your system is low on virtual memory. Love that house with the big red X on it though – very classy.… Read more
Not too long ago – not even a month ago, in fact – I was raving about the new LaCie “Big Disk” Ethernet network drive I’d gotten, which added a desperately-needed terabyte of storage to my network. After copying most of my media (including my whole directory of Evan photos) to the new drive and making sure it was performing as promised, I started to gradually delete the stuff off the local hard drives on Zen and Orac.
At about the ten day mark, it started getting weird. In short, Queeg started living up to its namesake, trying to elbow out other machines for the *.*.1.1 slot on my router – very weird behavior. LaCie tech support thought that was odd, but couldn’t really offer any solutions, and any attempt to force Queeg to settle down at a specific address rather than a dynamically-assigned one brought about even weirder weirdness.
Then I couldn’t get files from it anymore. BIG problem – kinda defeats the whole point of having a freakin’ outboard mass storage device, no? LaCie tech support sent me two patches, neither of which fixed the problem, and in fact made the thing start acting weirder – I couldn’t modify any settings because the system firmware insisted that the drive was completely out of space and couldn’t handle any more. Then last night, it lost its “shares” – its directories full of stuff that I had moved there from the other two machines. I thought it had lost the data. LaCie’s answer to this was to send a return authorization number to ship the drive back to them, but they said that there was no way they’d get their fingers into the pie on recovering the 600 gigs of data I’d offloaded to the drive.
I know that every hard drive in the world, in every computer in the world, will someday fail. It’s moving parts and motors, which wear out. I accept that. That’s why you’re probably never going to go out of business making hard drives (at least until they’re phased out in favor of stable mass-storage-grade flash drives). But you know, three weeks? That’s a new land speed record. I’ve pretty much made the decision that I’m not going to take LaCie up on their offer – I’m going to return the drive to Amazon and get my money back instead, and get a 1TB internal drive for Zen..by a different manufacturer. Zen’s overdue for getting the dust blown out of it anyway – it needs to be opened up as it is, might as well stick a drive in there while I’m at it.
So, the grade for LaCie’s 1TB “Big Disk” Ethernet Drive is an epic fail – it might be a great product when it works, but when it doesn’t you’re going to be saddled with some of the most inept tech support you’ve ever seen. I’m used to outsourced-to-India call center flunkies not being able to cope when your tech support call diverges from their script. I’m not sure what the excuse is for these jokers.
Also, in the future, I think I need to stop naming my network nodes after cranky-ass sci-fi supercomputers. Apparently the deck’s stacked against me on the hardware manufacturer end anyway, so I need to do myself a favor and stop tempting fate.… Read more
Makes me kinda embarrassed about the first 50 out there with hand-written “labels”. 😳
Sweet, eh? As silly as I feel about the 50 hand-written discs, their success made it possible to go this route. I’m not sure anyone appreciates what a no-budget endeavour the first run was: I blew what I had on blank discs and cases, Flack saved my butt by printing and cutting the covers, and after the OKC show I sweated bullets trying to get the word out to the right outlets. Now the whole project has A Budget. Which is almost scary in and of itself. One thing I did today to cover my own butt – but it’s something I’d been promising myself that I’d get around to doing for some time now – was to grab the domain phosphordotfossils.com (don’t get too excited – it redirects to PDF here at theLogBook). It just seemed like it was better to lock that down now than to have to fight for it later. (Actually, the internet being what it is, I was surprised that it wasn’t already taken by somebody, somewhere.)… Read more
I’ve recently had a flood of new users sign up here at the old blawg (meaning my WordPress blog, for those on Livejournal or Myspace who are wondering what in the world I’m going on about), all of them with very strange and phonetically improbable usernames and Gmail addresses. After googling the usernames to see if there was any history with any of them, I found that there is indeed history…usually stretching back all of 39 minutes or so as the Google crow flies. I’m going to make it a habit to delete these as they pop up (actually, at first I typed “poop up”, and on further reflection this may be entirely more accurate). For anyone legit whose new ID I might have just nixed: sorry. There’s really nothing exclusive to signed-on users anyway, and they still have to use the dreaded captcha – it just makes life slightly easier for frequent-flyer commenters. You’re welcome to try to sign on again, be you boy or bot.
The PDF DVD is selling frighteningly well, and preparations are already underway to start the second print run (!!). I fired off a second round of publicity to sites such as Retroblast, Armchair Arcade, etc. last night before going to bed (well, last night…it may actually qualify as “this morning” if you’re going by what time it was), and reviews have started appearing on DP, so I’ve been hit with a new wave of orders. I’m hoping against hope to get new copies in the works this weekend, because I’m about outta the OEGE limited edition. (Fun fact: I have some clear address labels that I was thinking of using to very cheaply turn the OEGE limited edition into the OVGE limited edition, because I actually wasn’t sure that the first 50 copies would be out the door before August. Looks like I needn’t have worried! 😆 ) Now I guess the real test is to see if PDF:DVD gets Slashdotted. (This isn’t me asking one of my buddies to do this, by the way – as with the reviews, I’m waiting to see if anyone does it of their own accord.) Here in a little bit, Evan and I need to saddle up and go get more bubble mailers, because I have more orders than I have mailers – and I just picked up a bunch of the bloody things on Sunday night!
Also, a little advance publicity here: I’ll be sharing a table at OVGE this August with Brett Weiss, author of the incredibly detailed and massive tome “Classic Home Video Games, 1972-1984: A Complete Reference Guide”, so if you’re looking for two exhaustive works on video game history, hit him up for the book and hit me up for the DVD in one visit. (If you can’t make it to OVGE, I’ve also added Brett’s book to theLogBook.com Store – check it out!) I’ll also have some other DVDs for sale and – odd as it may seem at a video game show – some loose and carded Doctor Who action figures up for grabs too. (Maybe it’s just because all of my friends with similar tastes show up for this shindig, but I never have any problem moving Doctor Who swag at OVGE.) I’m really looking forward to this year’s show.
In other news, I’m getting really good at inducing hysterical giggles in the boy. Two things really seem to set him off: my rubbing my bald head on his belly (don’t ask me why, but he laughs until he’s almost ready to wet himself), and me making a puffer fish face and blowing on him. Perhaps not surprisingly, I never get tired of doing these things because I never get tired of hearing that little guy laugh. It’s enough to make me think I’m almost getting this daddy thing down.
Othello is doing better and is easing back toward eating dry cat food, with no apparent complications. Slowly but surely he’s regaining his body mass; he’s certainly regained his old attitude. 😆 … Read more
My apologies for not getting theLogBook updated on time – I’ve literally spent most of my weekend filling PDF DVD orders (!!). Hopefully everyone who’s gotten one has liked ’em. So help me God, I’m going to go get a new office chair in the next couple of days, so I thank everyone from the bottom of my…well…bottom. It’s a little unnerving to sit down and feel the seat start to slide down to its lowest altitude like someone’s let the air out of the tires. I look forward to not experiencing that anymore very soon! Seriously though, the response to the PDF DVD has blown me away. At this point, my biggest fear is that I’m not going to have duplication nailed down for the second run while the orders keep coming in. I honestly was not expecting it to blast off like it has. I’ve also learned a few things (the hard way) along the way, including how to generate Paypal links that actually do something helpful. I think you guys would be stunned to know just how much I’m making this whole thing up as I go.
Turbo Turtle, a.k.a. Gamera, has disappeared from the yard – hopefully to go kick back in a body of water somewhere. Turns out he was a humongous snapping turtle…not good for Zathras. I really don’t need to step out my door and have one of my toes eaten by a cranky and huge turtle.
Another thing that’s occurred to me today is that everything I’ve been doing pales in significance next to the loss of life in China and Myanmar. I can barely even begin to process the kind of numbers of dead we’re talking about there, much less what can be done about it. Perhaps it’s just as well that I’ve got all these distractions.… Read more
I’d been saying since the beginning of the year that, since Character Options didn’t get the Torchwood license, whoever did would win me or lose me based on the action figure of Gwen. Looks like they win.
That’ll do nicely until I can have a full-sized Gwen sitting on my desk.
The first wave is Jack, Gwen, a Weevil and the Cyberwoman, and yes, they are scaled the same as the CO Doctor Who figures; the part that bites is that you have to order the entire first wave. I don’t need a Weevil or Lisa to make my life (or my increasingly British toy shelf) complete, but I don’t get a choice in the matter. All I can say is that the other three main characters better be in wave two so I can tie off this collection; I’ve heard rumors that wave two will indeed be Ianto, Owen and Tosh, with Captain John, so that would suit me just fine.
You can get ’em here. On a completely unrelated note, I’m going to have some Who figures for sale at OVGE, so make sure your wallet’s bigger on the inside than on the outside!… Read more
I stepped outside this morning to take the trash out, and found that we have a pretty sizeable guest in our yard.
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