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Below are the 20 most recent journal entries recorded in
BoingDragon's LiveJournal:
| Sunday, January 9th, 2011 | | 10:39 pm |
| | Thursday, December 31st, 2009 | | 2:22 pm |
Year in Review 2009
Hmmm, I'll have to come back to this. At the moment I can't think of what to comment about. A lot happened, and I have to figure out what highlights are actually worth mentioning. There were the usual things that I do every year, like make something for the miniatures show and visit friends for Halloween and such. I need to gather together some media to really illustrate that though. Also the return of my main RP character to active playing! I've got a major family event coming up in early January, so may wait until after that. Which means... I'll have TWO posts in 2010!! For now though, I'm still hanging in there! | | Wednesday, December 31st, 2008 | | 12:31 pm |
2008 Year in Review
Another year, another post! This year I actually left the house a few times. In June, I visited ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif?v=92.1) kagetsume and minor_architect to help out with an ongoing home-improvement project and just to hang out. They introduced me to the world of all-you-can-eat Brazilian Steakhouse cuisine. I went back again for Halloween when rowyn was visiting as well, and we had a blast. You can see some photos and video from it here. I also did another project for the Good Sam World of Miniatures charity event in September, which had a Halloween theme. I decided to use the "Pepper's Ghost" illusion (the 'mirrors' part of smoke and mirrors) to create a haunted cemetery. If you've ever been to the Haunted Mansion in Disneyland/world then you've seen this effect. I managed to get some of it on video, here. It was a big hit. I still have to come up with something to top it for next year, possibly using water. Still roleplaying, of course, and building furniture (giant-drawer cabinets) for storage and display. Also just got a PlayStation 3 to use as a blu-ray player and media-server. May eventually get some games for it (actually I have bowling and Lemmings so far, which fit my videogame attention span pretty well). Thanks to kagetsume my webcounter system is now 21st-century compatible and ready to be expanded. So I'll be working on new counters in 2009 and some new services, including a sort of Counter Marketplace where artists can create counters and charge license fees for their use. I'll post on that when it's ready for testing, since the counter-maker will require a lot of automation and testing. I think there might be a few artists on LJ who read this, after all! Maybe I'll get around to tackling the backlog of RP logs too, and get the Sinai and Mirari sites back up to date. There's even a new Envoy log to post! | | Monday, December 31st, 2007 | | 11:13 am |
Year in Review 2007
Looking back on 2007.. I can say it was better than 2006. No major crises or disappointments for me, other than high glucose levels to deal with. So I'll just touch on some of the highlights - at least, those I can remember. September: kagetsume came out for a conference and stayed a few extra days. We hooked up with tuftears and our role-playing friend Lexi for dinner, and spent the next day hiking around. I've got photos here for now - forgot to put them into my gallery! October: For the past few years, my mother's retirement hobby has been working on dollhouse miniatures. This isn't Barbie's Dreamhouse stuff either, it's $100 to $300 for a single room most of the time. Click here to see our gallery. I've done almost all of the actual construction and electrical wiring for these, and this was our third year showing stuff at Good Sam Showcase of Miniatures in San Jose. I had to rush to complete my project in the two weeks between kagetsume's visit and the show. I decided to do a '21st Century' miniature, in all plastic with machine-cut brass, fluorescent lighting, backlit matte pictures and video. It was the hit of the show, and I'll probably be teaching some lighting classes next year. Its gallery (with video) is here. December: Since rowyn was already planning to visit and minor_architect I decided to go visit them at the same time. I hardly ever travel and this is the first time I've gone to any distance to visit friends. Since it was Christmastime, and since I knew minor_architect liked Ghirardelli chocolates I ordered a gift basket just after Thanksgiving and had it set to be delivered the day before I arrived. Well, that day came and kagetsume told me nothing was delivered! Not wanting to come empty-handed, I ran to CostCo and got a smaller basket, which I then had to take apart and reassemble to make it fit into a box I could check as luggage. Of course, the original box arrived the next day, even though I was certain from checking my records that the order must not have gone through. I really should have taken a picture of it - combined, the baskets came to 11 lbs. or more of chocolate. That Saturday we went to the Conservator's Center, Inc. to meet up with kamots_sawtooth, who was a volunteer and gave us a grand tour. A cow had died from a ruptured uterus at a nearby ranch, and the body was donated to the center. I've got lots of video of the lions chewing on it, along with other photos and such from the visit, in my gallery. Of course, we also all subjected Kamots to the 'sex puppy' ballad that I've haunted him with for 13 years now. Sunday night was dinner at The Melting Pot, which was a first for me. I've never been to a restaurant where you cook your own food before, and the pace of the meal was slower and more casual as a result. A very novel experience for me. There was a minor glitch in my flight reservations that took care of on Monday, and then it was time to say goodbye. On all four of my flights, I chose the rearmost window seat on the right side of the plane, and sure enough the only empty seats were the ones next to me! Christmas was fun with more family showing up than usual (since our 'Family Christmas' is actually held on January 5th to overlap my Grandfather's birthday, and so everyone can show up). I got a lot of good blackmail footage of people-old-enough-to-know-better trying to play Guitar Hero. And that's pretty much 2007. For 2008 I need to try and resurrect my favorite RP character, Envoy, by reconstructing the plot she was in for kagetsume and minor_architect to GM, in gratitude for my torturing their characters for a few years now. Poor Envoy's been in a cliffhanger situation since 2002, when jordangreywolf got his new job and didn't have time to GM anymore. Anyway, Happy New Year everyone! Oh, and I need to go steal some of tugrik machining tools sometime too.. Current Mood:  cheerful | | Sunday, December 3rd, 2006 | | 7:48 pm |
Still around!
Hmm, need to keep up my one-post-per-year record, so figured I'd write something before 2007 kicked in! The past year has been a typical one, with plenty of ups and downs and some sideways shaking. I've lost a relative and several cats, got to meet with some friends I hadn't seen in ages and built some furniture and a miniature garage. At the moment, I'm trying to work through a huge backlog of roleplay logs (2 years worth for one thread) before keeping track of all that's happened becomes a real issue. I've experimented with Flash video and audio streaming, and have decided to convert all of my existing website video to the new format - once I re-edit it all from source. I have not fallen into the black-hole of World of Warcraft yet, at least! I'm just orbiting the white-dwarf that is City of Heroes still. As always, I have to keep tweaking my webserver to get around issues with the webcounter service, and still haven't been able to successfully compile changes to the code on the new machine yet, due to some weirdness affecting the time.h library. I seem to be perpetually behind schedule on some projects, but then that's probably a consequence of not having any actual deadlines for things - the curse of retirement! Still, I'm doing pretty well aside from a few niggling issues. All in all, I hope 2007 will at least be less of the same. | | Wednesday, May 25th, 2005 | | 2:30 pm |
Guestbook relief
Hmmm, has it really been over a year since my last post? I guess so. But now I have something to post that might actually be useful to somebody! For the past year, I've been frustrated by guestbook spam. If you don't run your own guestbook, I'll explain: spammers (usually from Germany, France or Russia) look for guestbooks and post advertisements on them to generate higher Google rankings for their sites. Some (most) use robot scripts to do this by submitting directly to the guestbook code. Others actually do it by hand. It is incredibly annoying and results in constantly having to moderate your guestbook. Now, my original guestbook code was hand-made sever years ago, and in the process of tweaking the site, moving servers, and so forth the management system for it broke down. So in order to delete the various spam entries, I had to manually edit the database. Finally, I broke down and got a basic PHP-based guestbook that used the MySQL database. Unfortunately, for just about every guestbook you can get there is a posting-script that spammers can use to abuse it. After looking around, I found a link to Junkeater.com, a free service that blocks robots and filters content for spam. It needs to sit between your entry form and the actual page that processes the entry. In tests it worked fine, but the guestbook I'd chosen to use was a 'one page' solution, and it broke when Junkeater tried to send the filtered form data to it. I could (and should) just create a second page to actually process the entry that will get around the problems, but before I tackled that I came up with a simpler fix. Because robots send form data to a guestbook from a script, it means that they aren't actually using the guestbook submission form itself. That means that the HTTP variable 'http_referer' which contains the url of the posting page will not match the url of the guestbook itself. Putting a check for this into the guestbook meant modifying a single line of code, and effectively blocks all robots! If you host a guestbook, be sure to modify your robots.txt file to tell search engines not to scan it, too. This makes it useless to spammers. After putting in my little fix, I've only gotten one spam entry, and at least I know it was added by hand. Now I just have create a new submission processing page that will work with Junkeater, and I shouldn't have to worry about it anymore. Of course, having to watch for spam requires that I check my guestbook regularly now, something I never used to do. In other news, I turned 38 yesterday. Whoopee. I've also noticed that my webcounter service has passed the 60,000 subscriber mark, which made me realize that if I could $1 per year from each user, I'd be pretty well off! I'm feeling inspired now to work on the next-gen version of the service, which have better tracking statistics and use Flash-based counters that could include other functions, like clocks, countdowns and 'tickers', the sorts of services I can feel okay about charging a small fee for. Now, if only I could get a license to use Neopets characters.. Current Mood: accomplished | | Thursday, April 22nd, 2004 | | 11:47 am |
A busy month
Hmmm, where to begin? On March 30, my father passed away. He was playing softball, just hit a double, and was walking back to the dugout when he collapsed due to failure of his coronary artery. It was instant and painless, and he was doing something he loved with good friends. He'd have turned 61 next week. I've been keeping pretty busy taking care of all the final details, and will probably still be working on them for the next few months through probate. I take heart knowing my dad when out on a high note while he was still active and fairly healthy, since I know he dreaded the idea of a slow decline with age. Even so, it was going to be his last year playing softball, something he'd done for 30 years. I'm also in the middle of moving servers. The one I've had for the past 4 years has finally reached the limit of what it can handle, as my web counters have hit over 25,000 subscribers. The new machine is three times faster and has twice the memory, and still costs the same per month. So far I've moved the counters themselves to the new machine, and just need to get through the DNS propagation lag and dealing with thousands of people who used the IP address in their counter code to speed things up. If I send out a mail notice to everyone, it'll probably take five or more days just to send the messages (I don't do mass email or maintaining a mailing list for my subscribers, since the only time I need to do this is when the server IP addresses change, and it means each person gets a customized message listing their account information and the pages they need to update. Still, when I do a Google search I can find people using the IP address from 1999, so it isn't a terribly effective system). This weekend I'll work on moving the rest of the server over - websites and user accounts, DNS settings, etc. The only other real news to report is that I'm not reacting well to Claritin-D and plan to switch back to my old allergy medication. | | Tuesday, February 17th, 2004 | | 1:20 pm |
Further Confusion Video
It's taken me awhile, but I've finally finished going through all of the video I've taken at Further Confusion over the years and put up the most interesting bits. I've left out a lot of the events like the Masquerade and Variety Show though since it's better to just get the Con Hilights videos or dvds for those. The video gallery can be seen here. All of the video is in RealVideo format, at either 320x240x384Kbps for basic DSL users or 640x480x768Kbps for Cable Broadband. The links are also there to download the videos rather than stream them. It'll be interesting to see how much of my 300GB monthly bandwidth allotment this eats up! Now I'm going to try and get back on a regular sleep schedule, after being up until 3 or 4 in the morning every day processing this stuff! | | Sunday, December 14th, 2003 | | 12:28 pm |
Pimp Daddy Cockroach
I finally got around to ordering the Further Confusion 2003 Hilights DVD, so now I'm starting to capture the video I took last January for uploading (I needed to make sure I wasn't using the same material that was already on the DVD). First up is the Tiger Tribe presenting Kagemushi with his fluffy new pimpin' duds during his Story Hour. Just click the link below for playback options!
Almost all of the other videos I'll be uploading will be of the live animals from Classroom Safari, since the DVD only covered them briefly, and bits of the Fursuit Parade and Critterlympics that didn't make it onto the DVD either. My only disappointment was that they didn't show the Kaiju suiters demolishing a cardboard cityscape. I missed that! Current Mood: cheerful | | Sunday, October 19th, 2003 | | 10:21 pm |
Hello, Deer
More backyard deer sightings to report: this time, an entire family showed up. 7 minutes of video on them is available here. In other news, I tried to build a big-screen home theater system out of leftovers last month. I ended up building a 90% new computer system to run it though, since the leftover hardware I had just wasn't up to the task (I did reuse some memory, the DVD drive and the sound-card though). Everything else I got off of Ebay fairly cheaply, including the SVGA LCD projector. Big tip: businesses sell their older projectors rather than pay the $200 or so it costs to have the LCD panels cleaned. If you aren't afraid of getting into the guts of electronic devices, you can do it yourself. I now have an 84" screen for under $800. I've also still been working on miniatures for my mother. Now we're doing 'room boxes', which are display cases for single miniature scenes. The first finished one can be seen here. They're supposed to be given away as Christmas gifts, but now my mother doesn't want to part with them -- I figure she'll get bored of them when there's no further decorating that can be done though. Also dealing with a surprise houseguest; my mother's fiancee's brother, who is unemployable, bipolar, hypo-thyroidal and alcoholic. So far he's started going to AA, but is still working on the daily bathing thing. It's a bit like having a convention-goer around all of the time, only less manic and able to form complete sentences (why are the people with higher IQs so often saddled with some sort of chemical or physical disability?) and carry on genuine conversations. But still scary looking. I'm getting back to GMing a weekly game on Sinai now that all of the PCs are available once more. This week: frogs, French accents and Ninja squirrels. I really wish I could do a French accent though... | | Wednesday, August 20th, 2003 | | 2:44 pm |
SoBig is a Big Pain
I hate email viruses and spam. Who doesn't? But what I really hate is getting 'failed delivery' emails from them because they were sent with my email address forged as the sender. Why? Because it's on my website. Even my mother started getting these a few weeks after she started using Ebay. It was always just a nuisance, back when I was getting two or three of these replies a week. But today I got over 200 of them! Not just me, but people I work with who also have contact addresses on their websites. Some of them were concerned enough about it that they shut down their mail servers in case they had been hacked. So, in case anyone reading this has ever gotten a spam email or virus with a sender address of 'boingdragon.com', it was not sent out from here! And if people were a little smarter about dealing with file attachments, these viruses wouldn't be getting loose in the first place. That's the really frustrating part of it: my or anyone else's email domain could be blocked because of a complete stranger's moment of carelessness. You can complain all you want about the virus writers themselves, but in the end it's the clueless and the careless that end up spreading them. This is my first rant ever. As the tech-support person for various domains and servers, I'm sick of having to deal with this sort of thing after spending hours and hours making sure machines are secure and unable to propagate spam. RANT RANT RANT! Grrrrrrr! I'm going to go burn some junk mail now too. Why can't the Sierra Club lobby against third-class bulk mail as a waste of trees? Or OSHA do something about it... carrying all that extra junk that just gets tossed out anyway can't be good for mail carriers' backs. Or... nevermind. I've gotten off track... RANT RANT RANT RANT! Growl! That's more like it! }:) Current Mood:  annoyed | | Thursday, August 14th, 2003 | | 12:33 am |
Baby Raccoons Debut
At least two different mother raccoons have started to bring their babies around now. Each one appears to have three, although there's usually only one or two that are brave enough to come out of hiding with them. Using the Night Shot mode on the camcorder since the babies are light-shy, I got some video and put it up here in RealVideo format, as usual. I'll need to dig through some older tapes to find the one were I captured the sound of their calls. I usually leave out the sound from these clips since it slows down the video and usually involves nothing but crunching sounds and the occasional growl. }:) I stayed up way to long processing the video, as I need to get up early to go install my grandparents' new DSL equipment. Current Mood:  sleepy | | Tuesday, August 12th, 2003 | | 10:36 pm |
Chcolate. Mmmm..
I ran around a bit today, but the most noteworthy thing is this little dessert I picked up at Mollie Stone's in San Bruno:  It wasn't as rich as it looks though: a sort of chocolate-mousse cake with about the same chocolate-density as pudding. Chocolatey, but not melt-your-brain chocolatey. Got some video (in Night Shot mode) of one of the new baby raccoons and its mother - her other two kids were too shy to come out. I'll probably put up the video tomorrow sometime. Current Mood:  hungry | | Sunday, August 10th, 2003 | | 10:43 pm |
The Buck Stops Here... for lunch
One of the local deer, a young buck, came into the back yard today to do some browsing. Naturally, he came through the big gap in the fence where two fighting bucks had damaged the posts a few years back! Threw him some apple slices, which he liked, but eventually he got spooked and took off. Video of it is available here. Also visited with friends last night and did some online RP, which is weird when almost everyone involved is in the same room. It's not good to see your GM grin like that, after all. Current Mood: amused | | Tuesday, July 29th, 2003 | | 11:40 am |
Burning Bandwidth
Weee! I got my cable-modem installed on Friday, and as the only person in the neighborhood to have one I'm enjoying from wonderful speeds. So far I've used it to watch a few videos, but mostly I've been uploading video clips of my own - mainly better versions of my older raccoon and skunk videos, which are now hereI've got more video to convert and upload still, from stuff I recorded with my digital camera, and more new video from the camcorder. I may put up the video I shot at Further Confusion as well, although I'll need to get permission for some of the performance pieces, since Kagemushi sells his own videos and I don't want to duplicate stuff that may be on the official FC 2003 highlights video. I'll be doing the live-animal stuff first though, in any case. I've also set up a website for my mother's dollhouses, and she's already complaining that some of her friends can't access it - apparently U.S. government networks aren't any more diligent about refreshing DNS caches than anyone else, so it'll probably be a few more days before the site name fully propagates. (For the curious, the site is miniatures.boingdragon.com) So far, I'm very happy with broadband. }:) Current Mood: chipper | | Monday, June 16th, 2003 | | 8:01 pm |
Stalking a Stag
It's that time of year again, and I caught this guy grazing away right across the street from the local high-school, where a softball game was in progress.
I was able to get a couple of minutes of video (an honest to goodness 'stag film'!) but it will need a lot of editing to get out the jerky bits and long pauses of the deer just doing a statue impression. Now my allergies are tormenting me for traipsing around in weeds to get the drop on a deer! AHCHOO! Current Mood: groggy | | Thursday, June 5th, 2003 | | 1:05 am |
Catfight
Typing with a band-aid on your index finger is weird, but that's not the subject of this entry. I was watching TechTV tonight, and they showed a 10 second video of two cats doing... something. I've never seen a cat do what the black-and-white one in the video was doing, although my old cat used to react the same way as the other one in the video did when I'd try the same stunt on him! I dug up the clip, here it is:  It's about 1.7MB and plays okay in Windows Media Player. Current Mood: amused | | Friday, May 9th, 2003 | | 9:24 pm |
8 Years of Ignorance
The internet has changed a lot since I first experienced it back in 1986, when the killer app was USENET. Back then, I'd print out articles or jokes or whatnot that struck me as funny. All while browsing on a glorious VT-100 terminal, or if I was really lucky on a Sun Workstation powered by the mighty Motorola 68000 processor -- think Mac Classic with a 17-inch monitor and a 3-button optical mouse. At least, it felt like 17-inches back then. I've been running websites since 1992, not long after Mosaic was first released, but it wasn't until 1995 that I decided to put together a website of my own. In my quest for content, I turned to some of those old printouts and found a funny parody of the sort of self-defense ads you'd find on the back of comic-books, "Learn the Secrets of Llap-Goch", the ancient Welsh art of self-defense. After having it on my website for nearly eight years, someone finally pointed out to me that it was from a Monty Python book! With all the wonderful tools that exist today -- well, Google -- I was able to quickly confirm what I never could have back when I put it up. There are dozens, if not hundreds, of pages out there with the Llap-Goch ad on them, and even one with a scan of the page from the actual book! The book in question is The Brand New Monty Python Papperbok, which is currently out of print. Still, it was pretty embarrassing to find out about this after so long! I've since removed the page and put a link to another version of it on my homepage that has the actual source credit for it and an image of the actual page. It also illustrates the other changes the Web and Internet have gone through since they were founded. Back in the olden days, it was all about freely sharing information. Today, new technologies have turned it around to who owns information -- mainly media content, such as music and video that (relatively) easy to swap, copy and whatnot. Back in 1986, the idea of using the network for piracy would have been far-fetched, while in 2003 it's become a major issue. I turn 36 this month and I'm already feeling like a dinosaur. "In my day, we had Z-Modem and 1200-baud and Gopher and we liked it!" Dagnabbit! Current Mood: distressed | | Sunday, May 4th, 2003 | | 9:34 pm |
Things I learned today
Today I went to a little going-away party for octantis and learned the following things, in no particular order: 1) While effective, a Scottish pole-axe is not the best utensil for slicing watermelon. 2) When someone is trying to suppress the hiccups, don't make them laugh. 3) There is an awful lot of unintentional porn in video games, and the people that test those games know exactly how to find it. 4) Mosquito larva are resistant to bleach, and swim backwards. 5) Talking during a movie isn't as disruptive when the movie is subtitled. 6) Oranges can be used as baseballs, but only when you use a Scottish pole-axe as the bat. 7) You know you're getting old when people around you talk about having been too young to appreciate 80s cartoons. 8) Twice in a row, I got onto Highway 85 going South when I wanted to go North. Twice! I don't think this really counts as something I learned, other than: read the on-ramp signs more carefully. 9) When a bit of carpet is on the road, the Highway Patrol cars will weave back and forth drunkenly across every lane until everyone stops, then the officer will get out and pull the bit of carpet off to the shoulder. 10) Carpeting must be much more dangerous than it looks. Current Mood:  thoughtful | | Tuesday, April 22nd, 2003 | | 6:56 pm |
I've finally done it!
After much (okay, a little) prodding by friends, I've finally joined LiveJournal! Now that you're done cheering, you might be wondering who I am. While I've been on the internet since 1986, I'm best known for my character on FurryMUCK (yes, that BoingDragon), and for the little animated dragon (and other critters) webcounter service I've been running, more or less, since 1995. What do I dream about? What are my goals and ambitions? What's my shoe size? These and many other fascinating bits of trivia are the sort of thing you will not find out by reading this journal. I may jot down some thoughts or observations I think are interesting, but don't expect any personal info, rants, opinions or gossip. What can you expect here, then? Surprises! Or not. Mostly ramblings or little announcements about whatever project I'm currently working (or procrastinating) on at the moment. Oh, I might talk about the roleplaying games or worlds I'm in now and then too. So stay tuned, I could say something brilliant at any moment! Current Mood: chipper |
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