Pumanchu

New year, new fax machine, new resolutions

2010-01-01T16:35:44Z

Happy new year!

The family and I attended an awesome roll-your-own sushi new year's party (thanks guys!), and we're recovering.

We had a year-end flex spending crisis, we used our new all-in-one fax machine, and we have some goals for the new year.
]]>
We were able to put our new epson workforce 610 to good use over the break. Powered it up, hooked it up to the phone line, gave it some wireless settings, and off it goes! It's loud when it's feeding the paper, but otherwise silent. The only trick? Finding out its mac address so I could add it to the filters. Unlike every other networked device I've ever bought, there's no sticker with the address printed on it. To find it, print a network report page. Let's also hope, in the new year, that epson learns to add a mac address sticker to their networked devices.

The fax machine allowed us to send in all our remaining medical receipts, so the annual end-of-year spending crunch won't be so tight this year. We made a series of year end purchases to spend through the surprisingly high remainder. Things like glasses, eligible over-the-counter items, and prescription refills.

I would like to point out that CVS is great about procuring your family's prescription purchase history. We got individual reports per family member from the pharmacy, and were able to verify that we had deducted all of our prescriptions. Dominicks' pharmacy would have required an in-person visit, but CVS had it prepared for us over the phone.

Which brings me to the resolutions for the new year.

keep medical spending records in convenient place and fax them in throughout the year. This will prevent the year end flex spending holocaust.
eat reasonably. My doctor says that not only is my blood pressure high, but so is my bad cholesterol. I'm cutting out cheese and beer (yikes to both - I'm from Wisconsin originally!), and signed up for Weight Watchers online to track my eating habits and get some guidance.
exercise moderately. Starting with 30 minutes a day, as recommended by my doctor for the cholesterol. She says it should up the 'good' cholesterol level. There should be great gym membership deals in the new year, but I shouldn't need one.
get home on time. Then I get to see the kids and help out enough around the house.

Sounds pretty average, right? But I've got reason to believe in success: I've already got Cpu helping cut out cheese and provide sparkling water (in place of beer), I've got great incentives to return home daily (thanks fam!), I've got a scale on route via ebates and buy.com.

Let's do it!

Thanksgiving for cygnative

2009-12-03T04:23:40Z

Well, I was thankful for turkey and friends and family. And thanks go out to the author of cygnative!

More than a year ago, I ranted about cygwin and plink not playing nicely. Just before the holiday, I was having trouble getting cwRsync and openssh to transfer files reliably. I vaguely remembered trying plink before, and with a little research found his awesome (and terse!) utility. Working fine.

Erick Wujcik is Still Dead

2009-08-10T11:51:07Z

I had a sad day at work, more than a year ago. I learned, from a Michigan-based interview candidate, that Erick Wujcik had died.
]]>
It was then that I started blabbing about the Amber Diceless RPG, and how ahead of the curve Wujcik had been. Users contributing to their characters, campaign details to the GM, and being given their own free time to roleplay with other characters or fill in backstory, really took the GM off the hook for long periods of time. Everyone became invested, and the GM focused on the work of coordinating play, not coming up with every detail or moment.

Our candidate revealed that Wujcik had been employed in Shanghai (hey, I used to work in China) and that he had spent much of the last few years in San Francisco (hey, I just moved from SOMA!). I really wanted to identify with Erick (hey, we have similar names!).

This guy was a huge impact on me: TMNT and Rifts and the other Palladium RPG books were well thumbed and soda-stained. The GenCon ADRPG session before the book release. The funny black leather cap.

A belated goodbye Mr. Wujcik; thanks for the games, the freedom from dice, and a host of good ideas.

Daggerfall

2009-07-14T01:51:22Z

The shuttle XPC runs too hot for a video card, so I've been retro gaming the last year. Daggerfall was released last week for free, so I spent a little while getting it running.

Got dosbox and installed, following the instructions.

Keymapping didn't work (mapper.txt came out with some unbound keys).

Snagged the source for DOSBox and its prereqs and built it with mingw. Used unicode support with pdcurses.

Bug seems gone, rebound keys.

Made new shortcut to dosbox that runs custom config with batch commands to run the game.

Getting ready to play tonight while mommy and baby are asleep! More on the baby in a bit.
]]>

SET

2009-05-18T05:49:02Z

With the dawning of the new year, I did my best to wrangle once-a-week board game lunches at work. I missed all of April, but May has been SET]]>
The play is simple, the competition is fun, and you can get through the deck several times in an hour. Also, any number of people watching can compete.

This would make a pretty good video game for one of them bar-top units; we got a bunch of pickup players as people went past and asked what we were playing, and the pickup players played with us the following weeks.

Do it: start using SHA256 gnupg signatures

2009-05-18T05:36:15Z

Following some crypto conference news and common sense (even the US government is halting use of SHA1 signatures), this debian admin put together a good howto on upgrading and configuring your keys.
]]>
My windows experience was a little different though. The gpg.conf lives in win32's "Application Data\gnupg" folder, so my prefs didn't stick initially. And I had some trouble getting enigmail to prefer the new key and digest format, so I forced the extra options "-u KEYID --digest-algo SHA256".

BANG!

2009-03-14T01:55:15Z

With the dawning of the new year, I did my best to wrangle once-a-week board game lunches at work. March has been BANG! ]]>
There's a nice balance of being all sneaky and table talking, and the bilingual cards lend a nice frontier old-west atmosphere.

The unfortunate side of things is that some times, a new player struggles to learn all the rules, and gets blown up by dynamite or put in prison, and never gets a turn.

DOMINION

2009-03-02T05:28:53Z

With the dawning of the new year, I did my best to wrangle once-a-week board game lunches at work. The first month was Cthulu Munchkin once a week, and February it was DOMINION.
]]>
Of note: Cthulu was nullified each time he came up, even when we switched to Star Munchkin. And jokes, card reading, tended to stretch out the time.

DOMINION worked out much better: only the first game had to go over 1 hour, and the following games had a newbie each week, and were as long or as short as we wanted to play. Dominion turns out to be incredibly fun and rewarding, and very easy to pick up. Not particularly easy to master combos of cards, but fun getting there.

I wouldn't hesitate to recommend either of these games, with DOMINION winning by an edge: it has a very Cosmic-Encounter-meets-Magic-the-Gathering vibe, where each game differs by which cards are in use, and how they are played, without the complications of either (most rules available on the cards themselves).

Feedburner trimmed back?

2009-01-28T03:20:41Z

Feedburner, which I use to manage and follow my non-existant readership, has recently prompted me to convert to feedburner.google.com. Apparently though, I don't get to keep my per-page stats. And other users have been reporting their own issues.

So where I used to be able to use Feedburner to figure out what pages were getting hits, I am unable to see that kind of stat on the new feedburner.google.com.

Do I really need to run multiple stat engines, google peeps? What gives? For the moment, I'll have to look into my own aggregating and so-on. It could be that something django/rails-y could get whipped together to aggregate my own feeds and stat count. And there's always StatCounter.

Peace, man.

2009-01-09T02:48:37Z

What, you ask, is the best Christmas / anniversary gift combo gift ever? Babysitting our girls for a week-long vacation in Mexico (pics)!

Since it is snowing outside and I am trying to finish working from home and avoid shoveling, let me instead tell you about the first evening Cpu and I spent in Mexico, La Paz, Baja California Sur! ]]> Planning? What planning?
Cpu: Think our parents would watch the girls so we can go on vacation before the baby comes?
Epu: Call over there and see. You know what I've always wanted to do since we lived in San Francisco? Go to Baja and get sick on fish tacos.
Cpu: Hey, we have frequent flier miles enough to get a last-minute trip direct to Cabo.
Epu: Do it. But we probably want to find someplace further away.
Cpu: There's this city, La Paz, a short drive away. Lots of marine life. Snorkeling. Kayaking.
Epu: I'm not ever driving a car in Mexico again.
Cpu: We can take a 3-hour bus from Cabo.
Epu: Sold! Where should we stay?
Cpu: I have some e-mails out. Hey, the German dude e-mailed me back already!
Epu: Great!
Cpu: Oh-oh, these reviews about him make him sound crazy.
Epu: Skip that place.
Cpu: Ok, here we go. Kayak trips arranged from a clean, nice hotel. 65$ bucks a night.
Epu: We love kayaking! Where's the travel scrabble?

Show time.
Cpu and I arranged a hand-off of the kids and packed our things. Everything but my Birkenstocks. I have wide feet, so this was to prove my undoing. It all fit into our carry-ons. I strongly felt the absense of a Lonely Planet guide book, which we probably had on all our other trips. I actually have a strategy for not carrying the damn things.

Irony strikes: our stupid iPod docking alarm clock is now incapable of setting its alarm time, just like the last iPod docking alarm clock. I set the cel phone to wake us in time for a cab. I still can't find my Birks.

Uneventful cab drive. We get dropped off at Internation terminal. After a quick scan of all the lines in international, we note that our airline is not represented. This actually happens a lot, Mexico flights out of domestic boarding area. Cpu tries to call the cab company to get the driver back to take us to our actual terminal. I note the tram on the floor below us, and manage to argue a cranky-morning Cpu into riding the inter-terminal tram just before its departure. Literally, its door closes on my arm. The tram flies to our terminal in under 2 minutes.

We are befuddled by our airline's handling of our flight. None of the self-checkin kiosks will allow us to check into an international flight. After 15 minutes, we find a line where we can enter our information in and check in, and the kiosk prompts us to wait for someone to look over our travel documents (passports). This mysterios someone never arrives, and eventually the kiosk goes blank and resets itself. WTF?!

Eventually, we get it out of the local airline rep that we should move over to the First Class line, which he asserts is also configured to handle international passengers. No kidding? They should put up a sign for that. Unfortunately, there is a long line. Cpu complains to a desk person, who has already had enough before we got there. We end up moving through the line anyways. We get a great clerk who gets us booked just fine. Move through the security line, which is much shorter over here by First Class. Thank god for the early arrival at the airport.

Cpu dumps me off at a bench at our gate with the luggage. I am no good within airports, where I specialize in preparation to ignore the entire trip. She comes back with sandwiches, coffee, a Lonely Planet: Mexico guide book, and noise-cancelling headphones complete with airplane adapters. Sweet. We mock the 'COBY' brand headphones, logotype all-caps and cast in the same font as SONY. Someone is bringing his dog to Cabo with him. Nice. We talk about going to La Paz, which he says we will love.

Once on the plane, the carry-on luggage fits without any problem. We'll find out later that apparently international flights will allow you to check 2 bags per person for free (whereas all the signs are telling us that we need to pay per-bag). Cpu fits the battery into her headphones. We joke about needing the noise cancelling, because we are right next to the engines in the tail of the plane. It turns out, there are no in-flight movie players built into this plane. And no head phone jacks either. We are seated together though, unlike the couple split behind and next to us. Nice.

I tear into my on-flight book Remix, and Cpu starts to watch the climatic ending of her thriller movie Identity. Lessig's book turns out to be an extremely well-thought-out (but sometimes mis-argued) look at what's wrong with American Copyright, and what lawyers and politicians can do to fix it. Someone should send Obama administration a copy, or better yet, send Lessig to make his points in brief. I ignore the rest of the flight, with the exception of filling out our emigration cards. We land, our approach just above a highway, as we hit some kind of mesa and the flaps kick in and roar. We deplane, down the ramp, outside, in full 78 degrees daylight. No snow.

It turns out, if you want to pee in the line before you are officially in Mexico, you are forced to the end of the line. We witness such a pee event, and decide against it ourselves. Our agent used to live in Milwaukee. It must be a sign. Our bags X-rayed again, Cpu makes a break for the potty.

We make it to the shuttle vans, paying in dollars. Take us to the bus station please! And they do. I note the van driver's pictures of his kids. Our kids would love this. Where are our kids?! I sorely feel the absence of any kind of foreign language training that would equip me for reading, listing to, or speaking Spanish. I took the communist combo of German, Russian, and Chinese. At least I speak travel.

El Aguila
Cpu buys the bus tickets to La Paz in dollars. We are getting between 10 and 12 pesos to the dollar. I park myself with the stuff again, while she seeks food and water for the trip. She returns with water and goes out again for food. The outbound bus arrives, but Cpu is nowhere to be found. Long minutes go by, but we haven't boarded yet anyways. She shows up, and we all board the coach bus.

We find some seats, move the window shades aside, and tear into giant bagel ham-and-cheese sandwiches. With freshly fried thick-cut potato chips. Apparently, our options were between these expensive for-foreigners-sandwiches or gut-wrenching buffet food packed into a go box. I think she chose well, but lament the lack of actual Mexican food.

I begin to relax, and take in the magnificent big-box-ification of a once-small resort town. At first it looks only like local Mexican chains, but it doens't take long before the string of American stores kick in. The last day of our trip in San Jose del Cabo, an old-timer expat tells us that 15 years ago, there were only 5 flights a week into the airport (one a business day). Today, he claims, there are more than 100 a day.

Once the bus makes it to the coast and I can see the ocean, I forget all about the chain stores. There are huge manicured golf courses just out of view, and cool grey skies above grey ocean. On the other side, the brown October hills of Sunnyvale have materialized here in Mexico. Only they are full of cacti and rocks.

In Cabo San Lucas, I learn through my listening and pointing skills, that our bus tickets have assigned seats. The lady demurs and takes another seat. A handicapped woman with crutches takes our assigned seats. We feel justified.

The bus gets moving, and the sun gets low. An amazing blare of a movie wakes me from my stupor. Fievel Goes West. By the end of the movie, I get it. Fievel lives in the desert, has friends who are cowboys, and he wants water. It's a story that's been appropriated by the residents. Now I'm thirsty. Luckily, by design the bus stops here and there to pick up passengers and let passengers get refreshments.

It's pitch black outside by the time we roll into the outskirts of La Paz. I get ancy anticipating the transfer from Bus to who-knows-what. We pass the giant big-box-store district and movie megaplex. We arrive at the bus terminal; it's painted a cad yellow heavy on the titanium white, no glaze. Taxi to the hotel, 50 pesos. It's probably walkable, but who wants to walk with their suitcases and bags in the dark through a strange town?

We pull into an alley, and I am like, what the hell? Cpu has read up, and knows that the hotel is tucked away the block, only accessible by a pair of alleys. Our night shift hotel guy -- Hugo -- checks us in, and we grab some water. The room is clean. We unpack, and hit the sack.

Py3k admits, fixes, unicode bad.

2008-12-05T04:21:19Z

Py3k is here, and I didn't even find out about it until the day after release. So it's safe to say I'm not a total python dork. The first bullet point under Text Vs. Data Instead Of Unicode Vs. 8-bit made my day:

Python 3.0 uses the concepts of text and (binary) data instead of Unicode strings and 8-bit strings. All text is Unicode; however encoded Unicode is represented as binary data. The type used to hold text is str, the type used to hold data is bytes. The biggest difference with the 2.x situation is that any attempt to mix text and data in Python 3.0 raises TypeError, whereas if you were to mix Unicode and 8-bit strings in Python 2.x, it would work if the 8-bit string happened to contain only 7-bit (ASCII) bytes, but you would get UnicodeDecodeError if it contained non-ASCII values. This value-specific behavior has caused numerous sad faces over the years. (bold text my emphasis)

Yes, I have had days of work wrecked by this very behavior. It was nice to hear them recognize it.
]]>
For the most part, I naively treated the xml files as ASCII text and things worked ok for awhile. I could use amara, parse everything, and move around and/or rewrite the xml.

But then I was slaughtered by a font with an umlaut in it.

The stupid umlaut actually led me down the 'what is character encoding really?' road, which I probably still misunderstand. But I learned to encode/decode, use unicode raw strings, and avoid file() / open() calls and prefer codec.open() calls all over the place. I stuffed asserts in random locations where enforcing unicodeness was a requirement. I pushed it from the sore spots all the way through every corner of my stupid code, and once I did, code and I were stronger for it.

In short, there were numerous sad faces.

Hopefully, I can figure out the new deal. And hopefully, it's less borked.

Epic Fail Update Casserole

2008-11-25T04:26:25Z

#python IRC users are bitch-asses to activepython users. Who knew. Stupid p4python fails to build under 2.6 and mingw is no help with the p4api libs. Fail.
Curtains incomplete. And to think I thought all 5 would be done by thanksgiving. Fail.
Left pins in the arm of the armchair. Fail.
Still have incomplete blog post re: Erick Wujick's death, all this time. The combo of China, game development, and the slavish devotion I have to ADRPG makes this epic and impossible to complete. Fail.
Door trim for Cpu incomplete until day of birthday party. Fail.
Kids addicted to TV. Fail.
No video game console purchase for the holidays. Fail.
Home answering machine still full of messages. F is for full, and also Fail.

Halloween already? Crap.

2008-10-18T19:53:11Z

No, I haven't started on my costume. How's yours?

Worse, I haven't started on Bpu's or Cpu's. Ipu is covered - she's going as Toto, and Grandma has already put together and sent out the costume. Memo to self: post cute pictures.

This year we have at least two Halloween-themed events, and trick-or-treat falls on a Friday. I am going to be in so much trouble!

What have I been frittering away all my time doing?
]]> ANTLR maxscript grammar continues. Then there's the curtains, which have all their panels cut out, and the north and south windows are already seamed together, but not pleated, nor cut to size.

There's also home maintenance, like taking down the air conditioners, and finishing the upstairs hand rail.

I am also worthlessly addicted to facebook's Dungeons & Dragons: Tiny Adventures. And if that weren't enough, another season of McDick's Monopoly is upon us.

And best yet, today is Sheepshead night! Rock!

Busy busy.

2008-10-13T02:29:54Z

Today was the day of getting things done, which was actually the theme of the entire week. For example, I finally used my Christmas gift certificate for curtain-making lessons. ]]> Textile Warehouse and iron/pin them in prep for stitching).

Also this week, I spent some good time hacking together a lexer for 3dsmax MaxScript, so I can eventually put together a doxygen filtering app that translates it into something like java or cpp. I made so little progress with Flex/Bison (yay, thanks ACM bookshelf!), that I found ANTLRWorks and made some actual progress. I did an all-nighter and flew through the EBNF that comes with the MaxScript reference, debugged and fixed some syntax, and then got to my first left-recursion errors.

Saturday, I took the girls to the farmer's market, bought some grub, a donut for Bpu, and an apple for Ipu.

I got to go fabric and notions shopping with Bpu, and harvested some hardware and tools for the curtains. And the same day, the upstairs hand rail I started a few weeks ago got filled and sanded, ready for staining. My parents came down for dinner and watched the girls while Cpu and I had a night out with some parents from Bpu's pre-school. And I fixed the math operand left-recursion errors in my grammar.

This morning started out by getting my Fantasy Football together and forgetting to do my picks for the pool. Not auspicious. But it was followed up with staining of the aforementioned hand rail, the annual pre-winter oiling of the picnic table, and the installation of a light fixture I bought last week.

Then this evening, we went and hung out with my old college roomates, one from out of town. As luck would have it, one has written his share of grammars with ANTLR and offered to give me some tips. And the other almost got a Cosmic Encounter game started. Awesome!

Pulling the plug

2008-09-22T05:14:55Z

It saddened me a bit today to put in the apache and html redirects for the old homepage. It's finally dead, but also folded into this blog. My last .plan is from Christmas from 2 years ago, so I suppose it's fitting - it's not like I'm keeping it up-to-date.
]]> 20061221 - Merry Christmas, ETA!

F.E.A.R. for 360 is in the can, and PS3 is hopefully on its way in January.

Cpu, Bpu, and I are doing well in our new Chicago home. Let us know if
you are in the Lincoln Square area of Chi-town.

In nerdier news, I'm reading up on building an automated testing tool in the
vilest of languages, C#. The ideas from the recipe book I'm following are the
good take-away, really.

Best to you all,

-e
On re-read, it's a little strange. C# isn't exactly vile in comparison with MFC, although my now solid preference for python is way apparent. iPu is not born yet, and I can't imagine a time without her now that she's here. The F.E.A.R. ports are the last thing on my mind. And yes, I no longer live in Lincoln Square.

Goodbye eta.org, KIT BFF and all that crap. Hello new world.