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November 2004 - Posts

I screwed up Jack's password while trying to reset Amanda's.  The .Text blog software stores passwords as hashes, which we all know is smart.  In order to fix it, I wrote a password hasher, which was silly and annoying.

In doing so, I ran across some urls which were fun to read:
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No, not 2006, not 2008, but the Iraqi elections.  Thought you had trouble between Democrats and Republicans?  How about 160+ political parties for the Iraqi elections?

Electionworld.org

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The SciFi Channel started airing Stargate: Atlantis and I was immediately hooked.  The last aired episode (#10, The Storm, aired Sept 17) was a cliffhanger.  According to TV Tome, SciFi won't be airing the rest of the season 1 episodes until January.  But they're being aired first in Canadia.  This boggles my mind.  Anyhow, thanks to the internet, there's a site with torrents of episodes 11 (The Eye, aired Nov 9 in Canada) and 12 (The Defiant One, aired Nov 16 in Canada).

I'm excited to download them, but I don't know what the implications are for watching tv on my computer.

Update:  Great episodes.  I guess TiVo'll catch them in January.  (By then, I'll probably have watched them all!  Thanks Canadians, muhahaha)

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Yes, I'm anticipating the release of this game.  I explored the open beta and it looks and feels great.  Lots of cartoony interaction and animations, easy progression, lots of flair to pin to your desktop vest.  I've been waiting for a decent DAOC replacement and this one looked like it might be it.  After playing the open beta, I think it'll hold my interest much longer than DAOC did (two level 14 characters; by comparison, jay now and still has like 5 lvl 50's), despite what Jack has to say about my commitment and determination (which I know is a ploy and a challenge). 

Most of the brief time in the open beta was with three characters:

  1. Night Elf Rogue, Piksee, Lvl 9
    This one, ultimately, was the most fun.  The quests seemed pretty straightforward and were a nice mix between exploration tutorials and kill farming.  I started talking to as many NPCs as I could, getting quests and I let them stack up so that I had, at one point, five open quests, which really got to the ocd in me.  I wanted to complete them, like immediately.  At one point, I'd grouped with two warriors and was delighted to see that the game allowed quest sharing so we could all participate in overlapping quests.  Not all quests were shareable.  Definately made for a more collaborative experience.  I didn't explore interaction as much as I would've liked, though I don't really consider MMORPGs to be social worlds like There.  The difference and distinction between these worlds requires a whole other conversation.
    The skills, such as Backstab, Gouge, and Eviscerate appeared to be well thought out - gaining power over a range of levels, requiring some to be used before others, having a recovery period - and added to the fun in the gameplay. I enjoyed a reptilian / pavlovian feeling by pressing the keys in order and watching the lights go blinkie and the status bars go woosh.  By the time I stopped playing Piksee, I had about five different special attacks I could use as well as a buff.  Combat was much more Blizzardian (ie Diablo or DungeonSeige) than DAOC and that was a good thing, in my opinion.
    I tried out First Aid without really reading up much on how all the primary and secondary professions go together.  Also seemed to be fairly straightforward with regards to crafting.  Only at the very end of playing this character when I was mobbed by Gnarlpine Warriors did I need to use some of the bandages I'd crafted.  Leatherworking and Skinning are recommended to go together, though I'm not so keen on wanting to be a pelt scavenger.  Dying, recalling and resurrection were all very easy and didn't really take a toll on playtime for the level I was at.
    The world was enjoyable and fun to explore, if a bit overpopulated.  I'd played on a PST server - servers are divided up by timezone (PST, MST, CST, EST) and by PVP or huggy.  There were limited beta servers available, and only a few times did experience any lag - none in combat situations.
    I didn't get the opportunity to go into an instance dungeon, another one of the intriguing features of this game.  Hopefully, soon.
  2. Dwarf Priest, Gronchbat, Lvl 3
    Played through a few first quests, joined up with a dwarf rogue to complete one, and basically found the world to be enjoyable and understandable.  Spells seemed reasonable and balanced.  It appears that all characters have a distance attack or something that makes up for pulling monstrons.  Both the priests's basic attack spells and the rogues attacks draw aggro a lot more than, say, a warrior's attacks.  Nothing really surprizing, just worth noting.
  3. Undead Warlock, Aarrth, Lvl 4
    I usually don't play primary spell casters or pet classes, but this was a nice experiment.  First off, WOW doesn't allow 3 sequential letters in the name, so my original name of Aaaarrrr wasn't working.  Intro quests were easy, though I didn't stack them up as I did with Piksee, since I knew there was no point in leaving things hanging with the beta going down.  In the last five minutes of open beta, I was able to complete 2 quests and get to level 4.  Nothing exciting, really, since it seems that most of the lower levels are pretty rote.  Doing this the third time made me wonder about the higher levels.

Jay turned me on to the beta (he'd played both the closed and open beta) and also mentioned that the UI can be customized via XML. Some of the mods, as per CosmoUI (appears to be an in-game UI mod aggregator/manager), look really interesting.  Blizzard states that the scripting involved is based upon Lua 5.0, which I'm going to explore a bit more into, since game scripting's always been of interest to me, since Neverwinter Nights brought it to the fore.  There's a .NET version of Lua, too, but the author's page for it is down.  Lots of opportunistic convergence here.

Some urls of interest:

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Firefox Extensions and Themes I like:

Firefox extension tutorial

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Thanks, Dan, for finding the most appropriate image on that site.  Now, if I could just find an image of that perfect advertisement Ian found, Careerbuilder.com's “Maybe it's time to move on.” it'd be perfect.

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So, after me telling them on 11/16 that it (connection cycling, dropping at the DSLAM or somesuch) was their problem (after calling FRII, of course), they said they found something on their end and were going to fix it. This morning, I call because DSL's still not training up and, yep, that's right, a coil's unplugged at the CO or somesuch. Thanks guys. I'm lobbying for a credit.
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I spent an hour today missing the deal with Option.value. Option.value returns a string, not an integer, so "0" + 5 = 15, whereas parseInt("0") + 5 = 5. Yay!
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UML of Ginsberg's 'Howl'
I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by 
madness, starving hysterical naked, 
dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn 
looking for an angry fix, 
angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly 
connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night, 
who poverty and tatters and hollow-eyed and high sat 
up smoking in the supernatural darkness of 
cold-water flats floating across the tops of cities 
contemplating jazz, 
who bared their brains to Heaven under the El and 
saw Mohammedan angels staggering on tenement roofs illuminated, 
who passed through universities with radiant cool eyes 
hallucinating Arkansas and Blake-light tragedy 
among the scholars of war, 
who were expelled from the academies for crazy & 
publishing obscene odes on the windows of the skull,
who cowered in unshaven rooms in underwear, 
burning their money in wastebaskets and listening 
to the Terror through the wall, 
who got busted in their pubic beards returning through 
Laredo with a belt of marijuana for New York, 
who ate fire in paint hotels or drank turpentine in 
Paradise Alley, death, or purgatoried their 
torsos night after night 
with dreams, with drugs, with waking nightmares,
alcohol and cock and endless balls, 
incomparable blind;
...
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This one's for Jack, since it's mainly bile, but also analysis...

This morning, while driving in to work, I decide to see what the former sports station 760, now Boulder's Progressive Talk Air America affiliate, had to say.  Well, this is what.  Marc Maron (I believe) was very adamant about how they're “not going to be obsessive about electoral fraud ... go to black box voting dot org ... contribute money... we're not your hate puppets” -- basically all in one breath.  Second, as I stopped to get a bagel, he started in on how Colorado and other states were some percentage (CO 47%) against Bush.  Really?  Ok.  As I got back in the car, he once again mentioned how he's not a hate puppet but also how he hates other liberals who want to force him into talking about one thing (yeah, right?) where he's talking about “broadening and focusing the Democratic party...”  Pick one, please.  The Democrats are shattered right now, trying to do it all's been their downfall.

It still tickles me that 760 here's a ClearChannel station, the same people who own 850 AM (Rush) and 630 AM (Art Bell).

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Operation Phantom Fury / Operation al-Fajr (globalsecurity1, globalsecurity2)


This operation was initially named Phantom Fury by DoD. It was later renamed Operation al-Fajr (Arabic for Dawn) by the Iraqi Defence Minister
November 8, 2004

Who:

MQ-1 Hunter/Killer, US Air Force picture

Shirts:

10,000 US Marines, US Army, Iraqi; 4,000 participating in the first wave

Insurgents, using small arms and mortars, launch an attack on U.S. forces in Fallujah.  Bilal Hussein, AP

Skins:

  • 1,000 - 6,000 insurgents / foreign fighters

Where:

Fallujah, Iraq (USAToday - excellent flash, acepilots, globalsecurity, cnn)
Approximately 300,000 residents, more than half of whom have fled.

bbc

What:

2004 11 08 2215 GMT  Stratfor reports that no Iraqi army or national guard unit has fought in Fallujah, and that they're being very resistant to manning their positions and moving forward.

The Scotsman reports “Battle for Fallujah begins as troops enter the city“ ..

Overnight, troops seized two bridges on main roads to the west, including the one where the charred remains of US security contractors were displayed in March. Their murders triggered the first marine assault on the city the following month

Witnesses said the Americans were using amphibious vehicles to try to cross the river but came under fire from guerrillas entrenched in the city.

The Askari district drew some of the heaviest fire as the crushing air and artillery bombardment rose to a climax, with US jets dropping bombs around the clock and big guns pounding the city every few minutes with high-explosive shells.

The first punch came from just north of the city, where Marine Regimental Combat Team 1 had been massed on Sunday night. The troops, backed by the 1st Cavalry Division’s tanks and armour, swarmed into the once-teeming Jolan district, the warren-like historic heart of Fallujah.

US artillery had pounded the northern edge of the district ahead of the attack, hoping to set off any roadside bombs and booby traps planted by the insurgents to slow down the advance.

At the same time, aircraft and artillery attacked an insurgent mortar position in southern Fallujah. The US army said it believed that nine insurgents were killed.

Another force pushed into the north-eastern Askari district, the first large-scale assault into the insurgent-held area of the city. Orange explosions lit up the palm trees, minarets and dusty rooftops, and a fire burned on the city’s edge.

US Forces press offensive in insurgent-held district Fallujah, opening major ground assault, AP 11/09/2004 22:29
Two Marines were killed when their bulldozer flipped over into the Euphrates near Fallujah Hours after starting the offensive, U.S. tanks and Humvees from the 1st Infantry Division entered the northeastern Askari neighborhood, the first ground assault into an insurgent bastion. In the northwestern area of the city, U.S. troops advanced slowly after dusk on the Jolan neighborhood The top U.S. commander in Iraq, Gen. George Casey… told reporters in Washington that 10,000 to 15,000 U.S. troops along with a smaller number of Iraqi forces were encircling the city. Casey said 50 to 70 percent of the city's 200,000 residents have fled. Some 5,000 U.S. Marines and soldiers were massed in the desert on Fallujah's northern edge. They were joined by 2,000 to 4,000 Iraqi troops. Capt. Jonathan Riley, spokesman for the U.S. Central Command Air Forces in Qatar, told the AP that an unmanned MQ-1 Predator plane fired a Hellfire missile at an insurgents' anti-aircraft artillery battery in Fallujah, scoring a direct hit.
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Yeah, I'm not kidding. People are depressed, angry, gloating, and acting out.

Amanda's got it in the worst way, too - in her fase.

I think it's safe to say that Michael Moore and his snide pouting has been suffering from chronic adjustment disorder for at least 3.5 years.

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Time to bang that drum and keep the hope alive... of electronic voter fraud. There's some great themes stirring after the Kerry concession. The "winner" theories'll be great to watch. Maybe a conspiracy pool or a conspiracy mad-libs with random theories'll be good to start.

Additionally, great doomsday predictions are rife in the liberal blogosphere. It's amazing.

With regards to the blackboxvoting dot ork and whatnot, I can't help but thinking that there's some undercurrent of neoludditeism going on.
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I've been moved and stirred by many Team America: World Police Sountrack songs, and today, I'm starting out a little rhetorical homage device based upon poignant lyrics.

Given the phrase "Freedom costs a buck-oh-five." please respond as how you think the 1) Democrats, 2) Republicans, 3) Michael Moore, and 4) the Taliban interpret this statement.

Here're my responses:
  1. Not my $1.05, maybe someone else's $1.05; i'm sure France'll give me 0.82 Euros, or Canada'll give me 1.28 CAD.
  2. Great, another tax. Fine. Here's $5, shut up.
  3. 'freedom' is the name of my next mocumentary and you bet it'll cost more than a $1.05 to see it!
  4. Wallah! America's bad, yo. If freedom costs 46 AFA, i'm for save up to AK-47, since that's 430 AFA only.
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