I appreciate that Thor, despite being a god, takes safety seriously.

It will seriously change your home heating bill. I installed on in January, and it's been revolutionary. Love being able to change the set point from my iPhone. Also, the "auto away" functionality is just as smart as they claim it to be. So cool.

Now that the month is approaching that I will actually need to turn my heat back on, something like this is quite tempting. Granted our winters aren't half bad in Seattle, but still I wouldn't mind cutting my bill by a bit from now till next May or so when I can turn the heat back off again. What would really do the trick is probably having my ducts set up in at least two zones, one each for the upstairs and downstairs, and a more efficient furnace. But its hard to jump for a new furnace when ours is in good shape and isn't all that old.

In California those with PG&E are required to have a SmartMeter. It will record your energy usage on an hourly basis which you can view online. Nice "free" technology we end up paying through with higher rates. I guess what irks me here are the progressive rate structure which charges you more per kWh the more you use. Yet they don't change demand, only usage. In my opinion how I have my AC set (to allow the house to warm up during the week while I'm gone then cool before I'm home) increases my hourly demand in the late afternoon (~4 kWh/hr) then leaving it at my house temperature all day long (which would have it flatline around ~2.5 kWh/h. That swing demand is what is hard for untillities to handle, not consistent baseline. I don't know, when I get down to it, insulation will do more over the long run than any thermostat gadget, IMHO, boring as it may sound.

i thought dudes already had a biological mood indicator?

That shit's going to get in the way later.

If this is what D&D is normally like, I would play... Joooosh, Katy... Mike... Internet can help make this happen right?

The justice system in Japan must be awesome.

Man, I want a subscription to Japanese CourtTV. Or to see their version of Judge Judy.

The group is amazing, they do some really interesting and wonderful videos.

Say for the average home consumer, who doesn't think too much about security or worry about losing data, but knows they should have backups. What are systems that are very affordable and easily forgettable once in place?

I know that a drive failure on our main computer would be catastrophic in terms of losing important documents, though mainly 10+ years of digital family photo's. But I'm really too lazy to set up any kind of back up system where I have to do anything. I also don't worry a lot about security. Really it would be nice to have something automatic and worry/thought free. Any advice?

Uh... stand by. New disks appear to have cratered the NAS device.

Would you recommend something like this (www.lacie.com)?

About a month and a half ago, the hard drive on my Macbook Pro started acting up. I'd been taking frequently backups, so I wasn't going to be losing anything, but it's still a pain to pick up and put down elsewhere whenever you have to do it. I transferred a subset of my files over to my netbook, and have been using it as my daily driver since. The user experience is... well, shit, given the cramped keyboard, the bad touchpad, and the screen with about 2 degrees of viewing angle, but it would do.

Getting back from the trip, I ordered 250GB SSD as replacement (the original drive having the same capacity). It got in yesterday, and I spent the evening trying to put things back together. Here's what happened.

1. Spent two hours doing a bit-for-bit copy of the original drive onto the new drive using the Mac OS X installer tools. This failed miserably, despite being as close to the original disk configuration as possible. The machine would only bootup and give the vague "folder with a questionmark" response.
2. Re-installed Mac OS X Snow Leopard on top of the original (leaving my original user and application files in place). This yielded a successfully booting machine, but logging in to my user account, all functions that required encryption of any kind were broken (including: HTTPS traffic, verification of system updates, etc.). No amount of keychain repair seemed to address the issue, and I was forced to create a new user account alongside the second one.
3. Cruising around for a while, putting configurations back into place, I was finding that a number of files were corrupted (more specifically, filled with "zeroes"). These are files that were transferred directly from the original (though, somewhat questionable) drive, and should have been identical to their original contents. This made for some interesting behavior, as very basic files within the machine were completely broken, yet didn't really indicate much when it came to the user interface. For instance, ITunes reported that its library was "damaged," but didn't indicate that the library database had been replaced with zeroes. (shrugs)

I still have to figure out how pervasive the corruption is. If it's just a few files (and unimportant ones), I can reload them from backups. If it's more, I may as well start from the ground up with a fresh partition and installation. I'll lose a good portion of my original configurations, but I won't be at risk of random corruption of more critical files.

I am, however, glad to have had a backup prior to this process (and subsequent corruption). Recounting here so maybe my mistakes can serve as a lesson to others.

I'm not sure I want to know the answer, but....IP tracking tool?

I keep coming back to this thread. I generated these numbers/graphs because I found an interesting way to generate them. Now, unfortunately, my brain is drawing uncomfortable conclusions that are hard to ignore.

First: I apparently have a fairly consistent productivity/burn out cycle. I work feverishly on a project, and then tend to not return for months, if at all. The new idkfa rendering system, the game projects, and the novel writing tool projects, all seem to follow about the same cycle, and towards the end I burn myself out, and afterwards either do nothing, or find another project to focus on.

I understand why certain projects are exciting to me. I don't understand why I pursue them when they are interesting/relevant to so few people (and usually, only to me). I'm excited about them as I'm working on them. But it's rare, if ever, that I'm happy about the time I spent doing them afterwards, much like how a painter is never happy with their work, and never feels they are finished. My sense of satisfaction, while greater than zero, rarely matches the time investment.

It's hard to justify a hobby that takes 4-5 hours a day (or more), particularly as the graphs show that they take weeks or months before I eventually burn out. I maintain a functional routine: I pay my bills, clean my house, mow my yard... but more often than not, I'm merely meeting the bare minimum of what's required, and never feel like I'm getting ahead of things. The goals and routines I try to adhere to (exercise routines, reading, family and social commitments, etc.) limp along while I apologize for them and go on nattering about seen/unseen posts on idkfa.

Recently, I thought back on my telecommunications simulation game (secure67.nocdirect.com), which got me thinking about interesting possibilities for the game again. What if part of your "mini-game" was pointing cell phone towers in real-time to capture the most customers at any one time? What if you had to schedule the tower direction according to time of day, maybe to account for more people working in a downtown area during a work day, or towards park or festival during the weekend? The more I thought about this, the more I thought about how it would work well in a tablet-app or phone-app setting, where you would drag around "reception zones" when you weren't busy trying to manage the other parts of your cell tower infrastructure, maximizing utilization while at the same time managing public relations, customer opinion, device contracts, research and development, spectrum licensing, etc.

I asked myself why, for all my searching, I'd seen nobody attempting this before. Then I had a sobering thought: the reason would be first because none of that is "fun," and second, all of that is very, very hard to program. Thousands of work hours would go into such a project, and the game simply would not be fun.

I think at some point I have to accept that while my ideas may be unique, or innovative, or marginally useful, just by virtue of the fact that I came up with them isn't enough to justify the time commitment. I may be a reasonably competent programmer, and my talents might allow me to solve something that others might not be able to otherwise, but that doesn't mean that every project I undertake *should* be done. The likelihood of my ideas being the next big thing are next to nil, as there are those that are more intelligent, more accomplished, and more focused than I could ever be, and they more than likely have a better perspective on what is important and what is considered "toy-making."

I feel particularly negative about this for a number of reasons, one of which is I simply don't have a project to keep me occupied and excited about something currently. I feel listless and unfocused. The fact that I'm in between projects makes me wonder if I have any better or worse objective reasoning when it comes to my time commitments for hobby programming. At the very least, I feel that could reason on the subject without the potential for distraction.

That said, the present seems like a good opportunity to implement change. For the foreseeable future, I'm going to walk away from my computer-related hobbies and projects and focus on other things. I don't think code maintenance or repair is unreasonable, as things are likely to break, but fixing them won't involve the time commitment of building entirely new systems from scratch.

Bahahahahah I wish all magic was that ridiculous. Magic indeed!

My exposure to similar events is limited to attending NY Comic Con (which I was actually hired to work (and I was hired through a model staffing agency, compounding the weirdness of the situation)) and walking through a Star Trek convention in SF once when I had rehearsal right next door.

First, if working in the tourism industry has taught me anything, it is that, for the sake of mass producing a "special moment," the industry of event making must necessarily destroy some of what makes that moment special in the first place. In order to create a moment like getting to encounter your idols, you have to create a line and a room and a demand and a horrible, horrible Q & A line at the microphone. You also have to almost nearly kill that which you're marketing, just as you would mine a natural resource almost to the point of decimation only to back off in order to prolong how much of it you can capitalize upon.

I'm not entirely convinced that this is wrong or bad. The only reason why people are able to have a magical Alaska experience in, say, Denali National Park is because there is enough infrastructure to get into the park, just like Cons wouldn't exist if they were only built for small numbers of people. Everything is a business, most especially our dearest and closest religious experiences, because those things which are closest to us are the things for which we are most willing to sacrifice.

A brief related tangent: when I worked NYCC I was there at the behest of an agency that generally staffs models to do things like catering and event staffing. There was nothing model-y or glamorous about the job, except for perhaps the fact that we were getting paid $20 an hour to stand around with signs pointing to the registration desks. It was, though, interesting to see how the couple of nerds and myself in our little model/actor/musician group immediately bonded with the attendees instead of with our co-workers, and how little our co-workers understood the idea of arriving at the con at 4am to be the first to get in line to wait for another 4 hours to be in the front row to see Joss Whedon speak on a panel about the Avengers film. In that sense, my sense of community with the people there was sparked as a reaction against the people who weren't part of the "nerd group," and I think this holds true in society at large.

You're right, though, in recognizing that, despite shared interest, people still aren't friendly in the sense that they're going to start talking to you unsolicited. But then, I don't imagine you, Josh, were very forthcoming in sparking conversation with them either. I think a large part of community building is finding the smaller groups in the large; for the most part, this means being the only gamer in a society which doesn't care about gaming. But in a situation where everyone's a gamer, it requires being in a smaller sub-group which forces friendliness and community, because 70,000 people becomes too large a community to even count as a connected, interpersonal network.

All that being said, at both NYCC and the ST SF con I found people very friendly and open to conversation. People in costume were more than happy to take pictures and talk about their particular fandom and people with similar tastes did, by and large, end up connecting on some level at some point during the weekends. I think we have this false idea of the nerd community being this great friendly party where we all rejoice in how ostracized we've been growing up, but really, when it comes down to it, nerds are antisocial, so of course they aren't going to cultivate an outgoing friendly atmosphere, even at a con.

Man, so much sadder than I would have thought, lol.

Bought a season pass the first day they were on sale ;)

Free water bottle here I come!!

My hero!

What's the sign-up cost? And this is just a 5k? If so, I'm interested now that I got the "okay" from the doc.

EDIT: Might be making a trip with my dad that weekend. But give me the info anyways ;)

Best of luck to you, friend. Keep 'em safe.

Good luck! It's a totally different ball game when you're responsible for other people - I learned this rafting last year.

As a follow up, this was an interesting trip with a lot of firsts for me. Besides just leading a group of two new climbers who I've been working with for a couple of months, a fourth member of the party had never been on a big mountain before, had never climbed, and I had never met in person was also coming with. The guys all did very well and we actually made good time on each leg of the trip.

We did in fact summit, which I will admit I was surprised by. I had my doubts about altitude sickness and once we were up there weather also became a factor. On our move up to the high camp a lot of people were coming down saying the wind was too much. Some professionally guided parties were leaving the high camp saying that they were expecting 70mph winds that night. We decided to continue and set up know we might have to leave if things got really shitty. The wind was pretty bad all night, to the point that I had convinced myself that we would have to head straight home the next morning. But as luck would have it the wind died down about 1am and I made the call to at least give it a shot. It was eerie to be the only team on the mountain. I saw no other parties anywhere on out side of the mountain, we were totally self reliant as there was no one we could turn to for help in an accident. The entire clime was very cold and windy but was actually in great condition with the climbing much more direct than two years ago.

Overall I'd say we had a good time and that isn't to say that we didn't get frustrated at times with each other. Sometimes pretty angry, but climbing is a hard activity which leaves you cold, tired, hungry and physically and emotionally drained at the end of a trip.

I'm glad for a break for a bit, from climbing, riding, camping... not being at home on weekends for a couple months now. But I am wondering what my next big adventure will be, and when I'll be ready for it.

Oh thank goodness.

The words of a prophet.

Tread lightly. The Internet is quick to anger (though, you're definitely on the right side of the argument, seems silly to discard illustration the way they do).

Its definition sort of indeterminate, even within the game. The game (Doom) was developed by id Software, which I assume lends the "id" prefix. Most places cite "Keys and Full Ammo" for the rest, or "Killer Fucking Ammo" in some places.

Really, though, it was an available, game-related, nerdy domain name that me and my father came up with back on August 20th, 1999.

Huh. Which is today. Happy birthday, idkfa.

If the Honda has retained its resale value, and doesn't have any gross mechanical issues, I'd say go ahead and sell it if the Elantra is an economical/practical choice

I had a hard time getting rid of my 85' Bronco (we'll say emotional attachment). But then gas prices doubled for a period of 6 months, and made the choice pretty easy. Sadly, last we saw anything of it, it was left abandoned and immobile in the south Anchorage Carrs parking lot with its plates/VINs removed. My dad made sure the authorities knew we'd sold it to my sister's then boyfriend some months prior.

See if you can find it a good home. But keep in mind that it is an expensive tool, not a pet.