Today school is closed, again, for no discernible reason. No new snow. None predicted for today until late tonight. Clear roads. Cold, but not dangerously so.
I know it’s a hard call to make. I just wish there was a little more consistency in the criteria.
Long, long ago (2004-2006) I played a game called Ghyll. You can still witness the carnage at http://www.gamegrene.com/wiki/Main_Page I am sure that I’ve told many of you about it, since it was tons of fun.
In short, it’s a fictional wikipedia, with a turn-based system of writing the entries. Collaborative fiction meets encyclopedia.
I’ve wanted to do one of these again for many years – this was about 10 years ago – and have finally started it up. I wonder if you’d be interested in playing, and/or if you know other people that might be interested. They don’t need to be “writers”, necessarily, just people with a sense of humor and some imagination.
If you would like to play, I’m setting up the website, and you can create an account at http://lexicon.tm3.org/ Game play is as-you-have-time. If you skip a round or two here or there, nobody minds. I’m still in the process of setting things up, and will let everyone know when the first turn starts. I expect that we’ll start the first turn in the next week or two. Meanwhile, read the front page of the site, and the FAQ that is linked from there, if you want to play.
Up until about 9 years ago, I had a server rack in my home office. At one point, there were as many as 12 servers running on it, running websites, DNS services, email , NNTP, and a variety of other services.
I blogged about this a while back.
As time went on, I started to recognize the benefits of running services in the cloud. This meant everything from moving email to GMail, to running web and DNS on a hosted server at Rackspace (then known as SliceHost).
Eventually, I had no computers in the house at all, except for my work-issued laptop.
A little while ago, I started to miss my servers, for many reasons. I still run some mail services on my VPS at Rackspace, to do things like mail aliasing for a variety of domains, and of course I still run all my own web servers there. But there’s something about having a server that you have to physically maintain that keeps your skills going in ways that you just don’t have to when it’s out there somewhere.
A year or so ago, I found a refurb Dell machine for next to nothing, and put CentOS 7.1 on it. That released in April, so it must have been about then. For a while I didn’t do much with it, other than test OpenStack installs. But after a while I brought up a Minecraft server on it, running the Bukkit distribution of Minecraft, to play with family members. Then I opened it up to a few friends.
This Christmas, one friend did a treasure hunt for her kids in the Minecraft world, which was incredibly cool. I’ve seen them on the server a number of times since then.
When I posted on Facebook about this a few days ago, someone from ArcLight responded, saying I should host my server there, which brought on this trip down memory lane. No, Seth, while I appreciate the offer, and I’m certain you’d do a better job than I, running it myself was the entire point. Thanks, though, and I wish you well with your business.
I received this email this morning:
Notice that ‘Apple’ is misspelled, and the grammar is slightly weird.
This links to the following site:
… where it asks me to input my Apple ID and password. Presumably, at that point, they can use that to make purchases on my credit card. Assuming, of course, that I have an Apple account, which I don’t.
This type of attack is called “Phishing” and is the easiest and most effective Internet “hacking” technique, since it requires almost no talent, and relies on the trust (or gullibility) of the target.
If you receive an email like this, delete it. If you’re not sure, manually type in “apple.com” in your browser and see what information they have on your account.
First fire of the season. By this time last year we had already gone through one load of firewood.
For the last 9 years, we’ve been coming to The Pub, a locally owned restaurant serving British pub-style food. Over the years, what we loved about it was being regulars. For a while, they’d even bring us our order without asking what we wanted.
Then, things started changing. It became part of a larger chain of stores across Ohio and Kentucky. This seemed awesome at first. But management was ever farther away, and the decisions were less about the customers and more about the dollars.
The first big blow was that our personalized mugs went away. Seems a bit silly, perhaps, but it was a decision by management to favor new and single visit customers over regulars. The single visit customers complained that we had a mug and they didn’t.
Gradually, “our” waitresses left, and we’d hear “is this your first time to the Pub?” More often than not.
Then O’Shea left.
Then Mark left.
Then they changed the menu and removed a lot of items less familiar to the the American audience. Which was kind of the point of a British-themed place.
And today is Leigh Ann’s last day.
Time to find a new place.
Reading this article about the death of links has renewed my determination to post more on my own website this year, and not just write on Facebook and Twitter.
Ironically, probably almost all of you are reading this in Facebook.
Vincent
“Sit anywhere.”
He pushes some things off of Paul’s chair –
a swirly sky of stars,
a couple sleeping on a hay stack.
I stub my toe on pair of old black boots,
brush my elbow on some cherry blossoms,
and sit.
“Just a few things I’m working on,
they’re not done yet.”
He wipes a smudge of paint from his cheek,
gestures with a paintbrush,
getting yellow on the floor.
So much beauty scattered about
it’s hard to squeeze through
without knocking over
a vase of dandelions.
The first time I came to Japan, I was coached to be worried about offending. Do things exactly right, or you’ll offend. Hold the business card the right way. Don’t show the bottom of your feet. Bow exactly so at exactly the right time. Otherwise you’ll offend and ruin everything.
It’s important to learn about a culture you’re going to visit. You don’t want to offend. You don’t want to make an obscene hand gesture by mistake. You don’t want to say something that means something different than you thought.
But my experiences in Japan have been very different from what I was led to expect. The people are so kind, so patient, so polite. People give gentle advice on the train when they see you sitting in the wrong seat, or when you’re likely on the wrong train. People help one another with luggage. And nobody seems itching to get offended when I forget and cross my legs or write a note on their business card.
Traveling around the world is awesome because people are so different in different parts of the world, but it’s also awesome because we’re all so much the same.
This week my son did something he’d been encouraged not to do, and suffered the consequence of his decision. Such is life. It got me thinking.
(Don’t worry, it was a diet choice, not anything life-changing.)
I want to say to him …
Son, it’s not that older people are so much smarter than you are, or that you’re especially stupid – neither of these is true. It’s that we’ve been around longer, and so have endured many more stupid things, and either done then (and it hurt) or watched other people do them (and seen them hurt), and want to save you from that consequence.
As a bright young man, you can respond to our admonitions in one of three ways.
To an external observer, 1 and 2 look an an awful lot alike, but they are, of course, subtly different. #1 is youthful arrogance or self-confidence, resulting in foolishness, while #2 is often your desire to experiment and experience. After all, you learn best when you learn for yourself, right?
However, #3 is always the best choice on school days when someone else is going to have to be the one to pick you up at school.