wolfwings

Farewell, Furp. I've known you almost as long as I've been in the fandom, off-and-on as is my way in life... you always were there when others needed you, including me. And you were, in many ways, why I tried so hard to find those that didn't like me, to try to find out why so I could hopefully change myself for the better.

0:00 - Victory, Not Vengeance Nation - Beloved (6.8MB MP3)
1:09	It's colder than before...
1:13	The seasons took all they had come for...
1:18	Now Winter dances here.
1:21	It seems so fitting, don't you think?
1:24	To dress the ground in white... and gray.
1:30
1:35	It's so quiet, I can hear...
1:40	My thoughts touching every second, that I spent...
1:45	Waiting for you...
1:50	Circumstances afford me, no second chance to tell you...
1:55	How much I've missed you.
1:57
2:02	My Beloved, do you know?
2:05	When the warm wind comes again,
2:09	Another year will start to pass.
2:12
2:16	And please don't ask me why I'm here...
2:20	Something deeper brought me, than a need to remember.
2:25
2:29	We were once young and blessed with wings.
2:34	No heights could keep us from their reach.
2:37	No sacred place we did not soar...
2:40
2:43	Still great things burned within us!
2:47	I don't regret the choices that I made.
2:50	I know you feel the same...
2:53
2:57	My Beloved, do you know?
3:00	How many times I stared at clouds;
3:04	Thinking that I saw you there...
3:07
3:10	These are feelings that do not pass so easilly.
3:16	I can't forget, what we claimed as ours...
3:20
3:54	Moments lost and time remains!
3:57	I am still proud of what we were!
4:01	No pain remains, no feeling...
4:05	Eternity awaits!
4:07	Grant me wings that I might fly,
4:11	My restless soul is longing...
4:15	No pain remains, no feeling...
4:18	Eternity awaits!

I'm sorry, I just couldn't transcribe any more of the lyrics at this point... Enjoy the song though, I hope.

After trying in vain for a couple months to get the VPN to work's Cisco 5500 working under Gentoo, I had a reason to nuke-and-pave my install. So I decided to try Ubuntu since I'd heard it 'just works' there. That part was, mercifully at least, true. And yes, installing packages in seconds instead of minutes was nice to be able to just dump thirty packages.

But I've had to manually tweak and repair more files under Ubuntu 8.10 to correct fuck-ups by Ubuntu's updater, and even had it corrupt my filesystem just using the reboot menu option, that I officially don't trust it any further than I can throw it. Get back here, Gentoo! Time to just knuckle down and set up a proper CHRooted 32-bit and no-multilib 64-bit install this time... *starts backing up all the Steam games to avoid re-downloading them for once*

Anyone else out there with a widescreen display wish there was better two-page-layout support out there, both for webcomics and PDF readers outside of Windows?

And that's just one gripe. As a game-developer, how do you handle both widescreen, and tallscreen? Do you always lock their FOV to the vertical and short-change tall-screen (1280x1024) users? Or the horizontal and short-change wide-screen users? Or do you automatically give them the FOV that'll guarantee that non-4:3 users get an advantage over 4:3 users? And how do you include support for Triple-Head gaming, something a lot more gamers are playing with again? Now... combine Triple-Head with wide-screen or tall-screen gaming! Feel your head exploding yet? =^.^=

So, beyond the griping so there's something to discuss, how would you think it best to handle three-screen gaming? We'll assume all three screens match at least, but this re-inforces the whole 'field of view' problem.

Do you slice off the top and bottom so the middle screen can keep a 90-degree field-of-view if they're using widescreen monitors?

Do you end up providing a 318-degree or 330-degree instead of a 270-degree view?

If you supported >90 degree field-of-view before (TF2 supports up to 110 IIRC), do you cap it for triple-head view or allow them to see 363 degrees around themselves? Yes, more than a full circle.

The 'industry standard' right now appears to be 'calculate the vertical FOV from the given horizontal FOV as if the screen was a 4:3 monitor, then use that across the rendering area' which is relatively simple, but runs into the above issues when you hit triple-head-land, and admitedly short-changes the 1280x1024 users. There's just no 'good' answer, sadly, I'm afraid. :-/

...going right over there... and circling around for a year or two. It might turn into a fursuit in time for FC in 2011, at worst I'm hoping 2012. More once I get the concept art back, that'll be a month or so, since like usual in my life I'm taking my bloody sweet time with things.

So far patience in my life has pretty much always been rewarded though. So yay! Fullsuit, ahoy!

Turns out there's now a local Capoeira group in Kansas City! They meet three days a week on the Missouri side, and on Saturdays on the Kansas Side, at a time schedule that's actually quite compatable with my work schedule. =O.o=

Current Mood: ecstatic

I was bad enough that my roommates took my phone and car keys away, to guarantee I wouldn't go into work, and one of them that worked at the same company went in instead after calling my boss for me. So... yeah, +1 Delerius for a'while there, still feeling blearg now though. Didn't feel bad at all until I got home from work yesterday, suddenly BLAM, I'm toast.

Upside - got my taxes done. Well, federal is punted off. I'm doing the state by hand since it's a pitance and I refuse to pay $30 just to get a $80-100 return faster, compared to my $1300+300 federal return + stimulus check.

All of which is going for a down-payment on a fursuit, hopefully a quadruped by BeastCub. If not, I'm not sure who I'll go with. Now... to get a duct tape dummy assembled. And once I have my tax-return in hand I should have another $1.5k in the bank, so I'll have the entire cost of the fursuit saved at that point in spades I think. Complicated part, need to find out if it's possible or if BeastCub would even be willing to attempt a cross-purpose bodysuit and build both a quadrupedal and bipedal set of arms/heads. Or even if she'd rather just build the forearm braces and let someone else build the actual suit for that matter, especially since I saw quite a few very awesome avian fursuits at FC this year so I'm not sure who I'd want to go work now.

So... who among my wide and varied friends list would be willing to tackle a fursuit/quadsuit combo based on BeastCub's braces, some time before next FC? I'm budgetting $3k for this, is that about right? If nobody, I'll poke BeastCub directly once I have cash in hand/bank.

Now to wait for

wolf_nymph to get back to me about doing the concept art, since the only thing I'm dead-set on is having her do that part because of how wonderfully she's able to blend avian & canine forms nicely, especially for the head, and she seemed jazzed about the idea when I spoke with her briefly at FC. So the earliest I could get this actually done is all the way in like... June/July anyways, if I recall the schedule she mentioned.

Current Mood: artistic

Well either everyone out there shares my odd dislike of pepperoni, or they didn't read the poll and thought the toppings picked were what I'm going to get. *laughs*

Okay... so, it looks like a pork-sausage pizza, a mushroom pizza, and a plain cheese are my best bets, combining that poll with my experience of what gets hoovered up at the pizza feed at RCFM that I help organize and run each year.

And for soda's... case each of 7-Up (normal and diet), Sprite (normal and diet), Coke, Pepsi, and I'll splurge on a keg of Virgil's Root Beer. So... about $45-50 on soda's, and about $100 on the pizza's sounds about right to pseudo-surprise the dealers den. Just have to vet it with Ops and what-not at the con first, I don't think it'll be an issue at all though beyond verifying how we can notify the artists without getting in trouble with the hotel. Since it won't be open to the public, only the registered artists, I think it'll be fine.

...at one previous con before I've done this, and I'm trying to figure out if it'd still be appreciated, and seperately if it'd be best to do this on Saturday, or Friday afternoon?

Head out to The Pizza Box and pick up 3-4 of their Uncle Sam enormous pizza's to deliver them approximately when the dealer's den closes. To the dealers den, specifically for the dealers den folks.

Cost is something I can afford by myself, but I'm wondering:

Should I?
Safe toppings!
Favored toppings.
Help on drinks?!? I have no idea what to get to go along with. =-.-=
Or do a lot of artists just hate pizza?

( Poll inside! Table-sitters especially, please vote! )

Current Mood: geeky

...he landed it so gently even after sinking and washing 4.5 miles downriver one of the two engines is still attached to the jet.

That, right there. Call him what you will, I want to be able to have as many pilots call him teacher as is humanly, and more importantly humanely, possible.

Airline ticket? Check.
Hotel room? Check.
Slim-line Air/Car/AC charger for laptop? Check.
Power-splitter accessory for slim charger and phone tip? Check.
Extremely over-engineered bag? OhMyGawdCheck...

And seriously... when I can honestly think, "Damn... these secondary removable straps actually do make pretty good belts," and am considering wearing one to work as such because the damn belt by itself just oozes indestructable? Wow. This is at an apex of one of those multi-value triangular things, pegged way the hell over in durable and adaptable with no care for being sleek, it's the type of chunky that someone that drives a Jeep would love. And I'm not kidding, the secondary removable straps are better built than some purpose-built belts I've bought from stores before. My only complaint now is that the secondary detachable bag doesn't have it's own dedicated cell-phone holster anywhere on it for when I wear it without the main bag, which feels a bit like saying the sky isn't quite a green enough shade of blue for my liking.

Still, it looks like I'll have... one bag on my trip to FC. Big-ass shoulder bag, laptop in one half, clothes for the trip in the other half, and roll on through.

I knew I couldn't find the time before FC to start this, but I'm going to get off my ass about this starting Feb. 1st with whatever I create while on my FC vacation and immediately afterwards. I'll post details as to where the results will be later.

60 minutes spent being creative, every day. Results to be posted at least twice a month. Maybe stories, maybe pencil/pen stuff, maybe even just old-fashioned pixel or ASCII/ANSI art, at least at first this is a goal of building up my creativity, and try various forms of artistic expression. I just want to _create_ but every time I sit down to do so... I feel like I'm grasping at straws and never getting a good grip because some switch in my brain is jammed.

Current Mood: artistic

...is a matching set of 16" x 12" x 9" 'Briefcase' and matching 6" x 8" pouch in a lovely chestnut color.

The former is about the same size as the 'laptop bag' I've been carrying, albeit much deeper, but much better layed out for my purposes as well. If/when I get the dock for my laptop, I'll be able to stuff the whole kit-and-kaboodle into this bag without fear. The latter is about the same size as the 'daily carry' pouch I already had, but thinner and also better dimensions for daily use for my purposes. And it clips onto the side of the main bag so it'll only count as one carry-on for airline travel.

Saddleback Leather may hype themselves up a fair bit, but this ended up being about what I figured I may have to pay to have a bag constructed to my specs, and it's around the same dimensions I was planning to get regardless. So... thanks ~~batnwolf~~Mom!

Current Mood: thankful

I'm a long-time text-mode console user, from DOS 2.11 on my Tandy 1000EX all the way until now. One of my pet peeves with most VGA adapters has always been that they transparently upgrade (and I use the term loosely) the standard 8-pixel font to 9 pixels by leaving the 9th column effectively zero, except for a narrow range of characters.

This makes a lot of the custom fonts from the DOS days or old text-mode UI's not display very well, due to this one column being pixel-doubled, and some of the fonts from back then are very readable while looking much cleaner than the default font, especially on laptops. It also makes a lot of the ANSI/ASCII-art available out there look like crap.

Another annoyance I've had for ages is blink. I've basically never seen it put to good use, and disabling it has an interesting side-effect: It allows 'bright' or 'high-intensity' background colours in text-mode. This allows for such simple niceties as black text on a bright-white console without the entire console looking washed-out because it won't go above a light gray. Or it just disables blink if you're like me and you dislike things like that.

Well, the old-fashioned method of stuffing a half-dozen port IO commands simply doesn't work under newer 64-bit distributions of Linux, even if the hardware supports them. So... I coded up a simple combination tool that displays the entire in-memory font, disables blink, and sets the font-width to 8 pixels wide. I'll admit I've only tested it on my ThinkPad T61p, but that has an modern 8-series NVidia card in it so if this still supports these IO's just about everything should.

( Source code. Warning, requires root to run! )

Current Mood: accomplished

Go here, read some real facts about CPSIA.

Enjoy games and stuff from Europe? Kiss some of it goodbye.

Enjoy telescopes or microscopes? Some are already bailing on the market for specific parts like the only maker of spare light-bulbs for numerous models of microscopes.

Enjoy reading books? Amazon is already poking their vendors to cough up the certifications. For books.

Build a toy from wood you bought at Home Depot? Guess what, that needs to be tested too before you can sell it at a craft fair. And it doesn't matter if you claim it's not for kids or for decoration only, if it happens to look like a rocking-horse small enough for a kid to ride, the law applies.

This... it's just plain nuts.

Current Mood: shocked

...of all the roller coasters I've ever been on, none did I love more than the beat-up, forgotten little monster known for my whole life as Flashback, at Six Flags Magic Mountain.

A bit of backstory, for those just tuning in. Flashback was not the usual 'loping' coaster, as I refer to them. (Screw the normal coaster-fanatic lingo, I don't like it.) Most sent you up a hill, romping around for a'while, sprawling out all over creation.

Flashback was 1900 feet of track, in a space less than 200 feet long and around 50 feet wide. Intense barely begins to describe it, but it's not the "scare you" intense many coasters today go for. Neither was it intense in the G-forces it subjected you to.

It was intensely intimate in my opinion, diving swoop after diving swoop that felt like one was flying. It's barely a minute long, but in later years it was often so uncrowded I (personally) got to ride on it without having to get off the ride three times in a row... and looked forward to doing so again some time next summer when I hoped to take a long vacation and drive out to California to visit my family out there.

It's been demolished.

Current Mood: crushed

I just found out the card I sent didn't get there! It wasn't anything special or custom like the absolutely wonderful pair I got from you both, but I'll be trying to arrange to get something out to you by New Years at this point at least. I did get the holiday cards you sent to me though, thank you so much!

Wieder einmal, meine Entschuldigung für die Verzögerung.

( Technical rambling ahead. )

Current Mood: cynical

Current work layout is generally quad-head at this point, the two 22" 1680x1050 screens from my company workstation, another of the same driven by my laptop, and my laptop's internal screen, those two VPNing in from inside the building over the DMZ wireless link; initially over my cellphone tethered over bluetooth.

I'm enjoying it enough I started to seriously consider buying the advanced dock for my laptop for home use, then I re-checked my old figures... and my jaw proceeded to hit the floor. Undocumented features of the T61p model:

The DVI port on the Advanced Dock supports DVI-DL on this video chipset
This video chipset supports 1xDVI-DL to 2xDVI-D splitter cables to drive two screens
This video chipset supports single video modes up to 8192x8192, most cap at 4096x4096
This means the Matrox 1xDVI-DL to 3xDVI-D splitter boxes could be used with 3x1680x1050

So... um... in theory if I do get the advanced dock, and the $180 video card with the same exact chipset as my on-board video chipset and 2xDVI-DL ports, my laptop could drive a six-screen configuration by itself. And that's before considering trying to hunt down Matrox 1xDVI-DL to 3xDVI-D converter boxes. And said dock works with the next (current) generation of ThinkPad's as well, though I'd possibly have to swap video cards depending on what's on-board 3 years from now.

Or I can just say 'forget all that' and buy the mini-dock for $150 or so, and 'settle' for only 3 screens. =^.^= That's definately the more sensible choice... but this really puts into perspective just what a $3500 'portable workstation' laptop is capable of, even if I scored mine for only around $2500 with almost a better warranty than my car has.

If you haven't played Half Life 1, or any of the multitude of mods and user-made content for it... It's $0.98 right now. Yes, a buck.

...just know that I am out of fingers on one hand for the number of times I've had a fever of 106F or higher in my life now. I was on my ass from approximately November 10th, 22:00 until today.

( WAY Too Much Information. )

Then began the next 48 hours of gulping down water, then inching back up to 7-up, then V8, then some plain boiled rice noodles, then finally some plain pasta noodles with a tablespoon of olive oil and sprinkle of parmesan and mint, and some Activa for desert, etc. Been there before, I know the drill and my preferred route. Still farting toxic purple clouds of sewer gas, but that'll take a week or so to clear unfortunately.

I... still have a hard time believing he's gone.

Also... VPNs are officially a pain in the ass under 64-bit.

Widescreen... so much promise. Unfulfilled, that is.

Stimulus? Well I've got $1500 of it right here...

Ooh... okay, 2009 is already shaping up to be AWESOME!

Blearg! First time I know of that I've caught ConCrud this badly.

Dealers Den Pizza Delivery, Part 2...

So... FC...

Okay... not only did he land it...

FC Preperations are a go...

Going to make a late new years resolution.

And the most amazing christmas gift of all...

How to disable blinking and 9-pixel fonts on the Linux console.

Okay... first we get all paranoid about the solder... now this?!?

I guess I really don't fit in, here on the ground...

ping lizkay and <lj site="livejournal.com" user="suzidragonlady

Wow, the Linux ACPI interface is kinda half-borked.

So... yeah... I'm addicted to multi-monitor usage now.

Wow... 10 years already?

And for anyone that's tried to contact me in the last week...

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