wolfwings

...I never realized how strange most find my preferred 'alchoholic' drink of choice, and figured I'd both share it, and ask others what wierd mixed drinks or combinations of food they enjoy and were surprised others found wierd?

Mine? A tot of 2 or 3 parts plain Vodka, 1 part balsamic vinegar, served neat, meaning room-temperature.

It can take some hunting for just the right pair of vinegar and vodka, but the desired result is a bone-deep warmth just above the back of the throat almost immediately, no bitterness left from the balsamic. I'll admit the description is likely very poor by actual drinker's or connoisseur's standards, as I don't partake enough to appreciate or know the lingo myself very well.

A fancier version is known as the balsamic vinegar martini but I'm generally not willing to go through that much trouble just to make myself a quick drink.

...when I can honestly entertain the idea of buying the hardware to hook up 7 external monitors to my laptop.

Hell, the key is is a useful combination for many desktop users if you don't want to deal with slapping down multiple video cards and the hastles that entails: Six screens, one card.

PNY's Quadro FX570 has two Dual-link DVI ports.

Not that useful by itself, but Matrox makes the wonderful TripleHead2Go Digital Edition that takes one DVI-DL input, and splits it out into three DVI-D outputs. DVI-DL's limitations prevent using anything higher than three 1680x1050 screens, you're stuck with only two outputs if you run at 1920x1200.

So you'd end up with six 1680x1050 screens driven by one video card. In my laptop's case, that card would go into the Advanced Dock which also reveals a DVI-D connector powered by the on-board video card on the laptop. Which happens to also be an FX 570, albeit the Mobile version.

So in theory I'd be staring down (at a limit) two 1920x1200 screens (the laptop's internal 15.4" screens and one external) and six 1680x1050 screens when hooked into the docking station, all digitally driven end-to-end. Would cost about $1000, which isn't that bad a total cost as far as I can tell for driving six screens digitally.

...there is one minor splurge I'm going to do for myself since it's getting to be icky weather out there. Get a coat.

But I don't like most standard coats. I prefer longer sorts.

But most trenchcoat styles lack some features I like, and many of those that have those features are only available with lots of useless junk because they were used in a movie somewhere, like buckle-front and the like.

Anyone out there care to help draw up an overcoat design for me to my specs?

...and felt I had to pimp out this website/pseudo-blog.

<a href="http://glassyeyes.blogspot.com">Glassy Eyes</a>

How's $8 for a cheap pair of <i>prescription</i> plastic eyeglasses sound?

How's $90 for a pair of hingeless titanium eyeglasses sound?

And yes, those prices include simple non-bifocal frames. Sure, the $8 ones aren't scratchproof, and will wear out in a year or two... but they're less than the cost of a burger at some places that claim they're "fast food" these days. Who cares?

...but it's really driven home just how well I was trained growing up with my finances, to an extent I've only realized it's usefulness since this recent global economic collapse we seem to be experiences.

I never really appreciated it, or my intuition and dump luck/Karma helpnig out, until I look back at my timing for things. WaMu? Used to bank with them, bailed about 2 years ago when they jumped some mental shark for me and went from cool to a cyst on my ass. Floated more-or-less bankless briefly, then of all things ended up with US Bancorp. Which appears to have been one of the least impacted major national banking whatever-the-term-is.

But I'm being faced with an honestly wierd decision now, especially in light of the current economic situation. I may well be able to save over $1k/month into the bank, and I'm wondering if I should just sock that away, or start paying my car off as fast as possible first? (Already checked, no early repayment penalty.)

So, thoughts out there, folks?

Remember how I've raved about my Thinkpad T61p?

Apparently Lenovo's been having such a hard time sourcing the video card modules used in it due to the NVidia headaches with their 8-series chips that they've discontinued it entirely. And none of the replacements are anywhere near the performance for the price/battery life yet. =O.o=

Upside though, their new replacement models are all running Intel integrated and ATI dedicated video chipsets again, so apparently I got a quirky, one-off monstrosity of a workstation/gaming laptop with my T61p.

Somehow I ended up wandering the Inhuman webcomic website and ran across this article he write. How Inhuman is not a furry webcomic and I read that... it's a slog. And suddenly, it went from piles of what felt like useless weasel-words, to a pair of paragraphs, back to weasel words again bouncing around in a box. That whole rant... all three or four screens of it... really boils down to this, and it's a very valid point:

Furry comics are essentially completely human characters dressed up in animal clothes. It does not matter if you were to strip them of their fur. Jack could still be the grim reaper, Mab could still be a fairy magician, Vinci and Arty would still be a gay couple struggling with their problems. The fur is unimportant to them.

It describes his core definiton he's basing his entire argument/rant around, and taken in that context, no, Inhuman is not a 'furry' webcomic. It's much more in the vein of Farscape or Star Trek or even Star Wars than Jack, or Dan and Mab's Furry Adventures. But his definition of 'furry' likely doesn't match the definitions of many of the people reading the comic, I'd imagine. And I fear that struggle to fight the label the general readership wants to apply to him for ease of pulling in other readers for him may end up backfiring in the long term, despite the really lovely art style and decently engrossing story so far.

...and I'm not sure if I want more folks to pimp out the little D&D 4th Edition interactive character sheet I made or not. I'm leaning on the side of 'sure, tell folks about it!' at this point though, and pondering ways to make it auto-translate (or at least machine-translate until I get 'true' translations donated) to foreign languages now as well... Not much to translate, admitedly, but I do need to add a small help-link to the page I think as well.

Don't ask how... well, beyond asking about the 6-hour drive for what Google estimates is an 8-hour drive. =^.^=

Anyways, phone is (310)735-7838, room is #221, http://wolfwings.us has all the details updated for the con, formatted for viewability even on a tiny-screen low-end cell-phone.

Current Mood: bouncy

Some like Neopolital style.

Me? Detroit Greektown all the way. (Not the best place, but the best easy-to-link to one, like many great pizza's and other "street vendor friendly foods" the best places rarely have an on-line presence.)

What about all of you out there?

From what I've seen... no. And not 'completely secure' or anything, just as secure/best-practices as HMAC passwords versus plaintext. But there's just basically no way to even remotely secure password-changes that I can find that won't hand the 'keys to the kingdom' to anyone that gets a copy of that one, single HTTP request to the server.

There's a couple of 'public key' based ideas, but they're flat-out not possible in JavaScript due to speed over-heads.

So... Internet Lunatics... anyone know of some research I missed somewhere to provide some cost-effective (in both runtime taken and actual data needed to be stored server-side) method to protect password changes?

Yanked from quelyntr's post here.

Rabbit Valley's having a nifty 'by the pound' promotion.

Adult is $2/pound, half of it will be Adult-only works.
Mature is $1.50/pound, 2/3rds of it will be Mature-only works.
General is $1/pound, all of which will (obviously) be General-audience works.

If you're patient enough to wait for Media Mail shipping (3-6 weeks in the US) you can get a LOT of furry stuff on the cheap. Only guarantee besides no duplicates in a single order is that it'll all be printed material, but could be anything from comics to fanzines to 'any printed material' to quote their website.

( SQL )
( Inside! )

Once that's all done, coding up the actual website will be relatively minor by comparison for the core structure, but that's the intent. Keep the PHP code unobtrusive for main page-content, allow easy styling of the website itself and integrating with other tools like forums and what-not.

I already have the core website-infrastructure code done on the PHP side. Mostly it should be sitting down with a couple nice artists I know that are going to be working with me on the website, and kit-bashing things together so we can show a few ideas to the rest of the convention staff; then fully flesh out whatever folks decide looks best.

And when this is all said and done? I'll be packaging up the raw scripts and minimal website code with all styling stripped out, and punt it up as an archive for others to use. I'm tired of hearing about folks struggling with making a website for their convention/get-together/whatever, and why have a dozen other folks re-invent the wheel? That, and I figure I'm using best-practices as I understand them, so I'd like to give others a chance to look over the code and hopefully warn me if I'm doing something that's causing a larger hole than it's covering up.

( ...MySQL/JavaScript/PHP wankery about making HMAC code for all three platforms follows. )

Current Mood: predatory

3 months ago? Hadn't touched SQL beyond issuing a couple of SELECT statements.

Now? Writing an HMAC-based-login system in PHP with account-credentials for the MySQL login that can only call specific stored SQL functions that operate as black-boxes and return single-value responses or null.

Um... yeah... I should have picked this stuff up years ago so I could put it on my resume.

Current Mood: geeky

My little character-editor isn't so little anymore, handling:

All the 'officially playable' races from:
- Players Handbook #1
- Monster Manual #1
All the 'player' classes from the Players Handbook #1
Skills and Training
Attribute Bonuses from levelling up
Showing you your total:
- Skill bonuses
- Save bonuses
- Hit Points
- Healing Surges per day

So what should I work on adding next?

I'm specifically NOT adding a 'level up' feature, you can just change the level you're designing for non-destructively and modify options as you wish, far easier than implementing the specific 'retraining' rules that many GM's love to modify regardless.

I'm also specifically not aiming for this to be a live play-aid at this time, it's meant to speed up the initial character-creation or planning character-progression and stat changes over time. So what, on here, would make this more useful for 'sketching' out character ideas for folks?

Current Mood: accomplished

...such as PathGuy's 4th-Ed Character Creator, I feel a lot better about simply punting this out publically since I think it's more-or-less finished at a starting level. It doesn't handle feats or powers or anything but stock-book-1st-level currently, but it's very functional on any newer browser.

I'd especially love to hear if it works at all on any cell-phones, I honestly don't think it can in it's current state, but it might. I'll work on a revision to deal with those later, this one's meant for full-blown PC's on limited-bandwidth connections, the entire thing is only 6kb to download, or 3kb if you have a browser that supports gzip compression. Opera and Safari are relatively untested, but I've had reports it works.

Anyways... my interactive 4th-Edition Character Creation Helper.

When you keep trying to shout down, "I disbelieve!" when people bring up issues in a concise, understandable manner... and then when five staff members resign, one after the other, and almost all state the problem and why they're resigning... and others start going (quite loudly) Whiskey Tango Foxtrot...

...switching the mailing list to 'moderated' status does not engender goodwill, IMHO. I've never seen that work.

Current Mood: pessimistic

...why is it, during what I keep hearing is an economic downturn, that I'm getting job offers from people I've done minor contracting work for previously out of the blue, when I'm not actively job hunting?!?

Just... confusing, I guess. Is IT maybe booming compared to the overall direction of things, perhaps? Only explanation I can have for it. I'm seeing people get hired out of my IT company to better-paying jobs on a bi-weekly basis on average since the beginning of the year (in a company of under 100 employees) so either the entire IT industry is in a boom, or at least over here in Kansas City, Missouri it is. =O.o=

...there's a 'returned unopened/cancelled CTO' new T61p available on the Lenovo website here that (aside from still being a T7700 versus a T9500 CPU) matches mine point for point, for $1500. Even if you tack on $600 for the warranty I got, it's $200 cheaper than I got it after weeks of sales-coupon combination-attempts and wrangling.

Proof even my taste in alchohol's is strange...

It says something about my finances...

Quick request for all the artist types out there...

I know I have a lot of friends that wear glasses...

Okay... it feels really strange to hear all this doom-and-gloom talk...

Apparently, I'm a ninja.

Ya' know... sometimes less really is more.

Okay... apparently the link's trickling out there...

I'm at MFM!

So what sort of pizza do you like?

Secure non-HTTPS password-change protocol... does one exist?

Like furry comics?

Status so far of the SQL work...

For anyone working with HMAC logins...

Well... I'm officially neck-deep in SQL.

So... what to improve now?

Since other sites have posted one publically without reproach...

Wow... way to listen to your attendee's...

Um... yeah...

BTW... if anyone out there wants a laptop like mine...

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