Category: Geekery

  • But the queens we use would not excite you.

    “So, Karel. Where the hell have you been lately? Four days without an entry?”

    Too busy to write in my journal? Guilty as charged. I don’t like to let things get so far ahead of me, but I’m not going to beat myself up about it either.

    Things have ramped way, way up at work. The in-house streaming project is about halfway done, depending on how you look at it, and suddenly it’s gone from Novelty Project to The CEO Wants It Done Yesterday. In the immortal words of Sam Beckett (the quantum leaper, not that other one), “Oh boy.”

    Add to that the fact that no less than twenty Compaq desktop computers are due to arrive early next week and you can see how busy the rest of December looks for everyone’s favorite little grey duck.

    But wait, there’s more! The computer that manages the access key-card database died Friday (or some time earlier) so we can’t add or remove key-cards from the security system. And that’s not all! The AS/400 started complaining of ethernet hiccups Thursday morning, and as of midday Friday the diagnosis is that there’s a “bad client” on our network somewhere. Guess who gets to go around the building trying to log clients onto the AS/400 until it breaks?

    And each of those four projects is supposedly my Number One Priority. Great, guys. Get me three assistants and I’ll get right on that. Or maybe that, instead. Or perhaps that. Yeah, anyway…

    Early in the week I was shooting the breeze with Gary Hilliard, Market Engineer for Entercom Portland. He’d handed me an unread PC World (or somesuch) and somehow we got on the subject of digital cameras. He offered to loan me his HP PhotoSmart C618 for a week or two. (He wants it back before Christmas. Damn.) I’m getting a kick out of the little machine, though I’m not entirely happy with some of its quirks. Nevermind that the output quality isn’t always stellar, I’m glad just to have the use of the thing for a while. (See the new Gallery for the results.)

    So far I’ve spent about three hours on the reconceptualized new anime music video. My current goal is to build a sort of visual poem out of a few very specific visual sequences from Akira. I suppose I’m trying to break out of the “stick to the original timeline” mentality of my previous three videos. Wish me luck. If this works, it’s going to be far and away the coolest thing I’ve done in AMV creation. If it doesn’t, the video will be nigh-unwatchable. No middle ground, folks, as there were in my previous projects.

    I’ll wrap up by telling you about the coolest part of my week so far. The local grade-school chess clubs met this morning at a pastel-painted school in SE Portland to engage in a mock tournament. The kids were both invited and I wanted to go along, so Wendi dropped us off on her way to go shopping. Also in attendance were the male half of the Bourgo family (Michael and James) and one of Lilith’s “demonspawn.” Michael and I shot the breeze in between my attempts to shoot various attendees.

    With my (borrowed) camera, you silly person. Sheesh. I’m not that antisocial.

    Erica may have been the star of the national shindig back in the spring, but it’s Alex who shone brightest this morning. After seven rounds of play, he stood undefeated with six wins and a draw. He couldn’t quite corner his third victim… er, opponent. Such is life.

    My daughter’s refusal to eat her breakfast may have played a part in her shaky performance. She complained of an inability to concentrate after her first two (victorious) matches. I’m hoping she learned an important lesson today about the correlation between nutrition and performance.

    And now you know where I’ve been all this time. Tomorrow? A long, long day at the office. Wheee!

  • I am a novelist!

    NaNoWriMo 2002 Winner

    50,179 words. All done. I did it.

    YEAH!

    I want to thank everyone who encouraged me along the way. I couldn’t possibly have succeeded without you. Thank you!

  • Look, I’m desperate here. Somebody throw me a (back)bone.

    So here’s the saga of DSL at the Kerezman abode:

    The Company discovers that we have trade with our ISP for DSL accounts that aren’t being used. Company says, “Hey Karel! If you pay for the Qwest line, you can use this traded-out DSL account.” Karel says, “Hot damn!” And then Qwest says, “Sorry buddy. You’re too far away and you’ve got some weird voltage on your line so even if you weren’t too far away it almost certainly wouldn’t work.”

    Argh. All kinds of folks are lining up for a chance to kick me around. I finally, after five years, convince the company to help me out in the broadband department and I can’t have it anyway.

    I’m all out of bright ideas. (No, cable is not a bright idea. It’s freakin’ expensive.) That troublesome 50k modem is going to be with us for quite a while longer, it seems.

    Again, argh.

  • Lightening The Mood With Giggle Queries

    Okay, so that last entry was dark and unhappy and angry and so on. I got it out of my system, so I feel better now. We still have big problems to fix, but presumably we’ll get through them.

    So, how to convince my loyal readers that I haven’t flipped what passes for my lid? How about a search-query roundup? Yeah, I haven’t done one of those in a while!

    • I don’t know why my website gets so many cheerleader-related searches. “cheerleading quotes”, 16 instances so far. “cute quotes for cheerleaders” showed up recently, as did “celina cheerleading.” Hey, I’ll cheer for Celina any time…
    • By virtue of having linked to it, I too now take search hits for the latest Internet sensation, The Lord of the Peeps.
    • It’s no surprise that some of our fellow netizens are typical HNGs, but why am I taking so many search hits on “aeka naked” and “ryoko naked”? I just hope that whoever was searching for “ryoko and kagato” didn’t find what they were looking for. I mean, that’s almost gotta be a fanfic somewhere, right? Bleah. And don’t get me started on “ryoko father”. Speaking of ill-wishes, I hope that one cannot “download sailor sex text game”.
    • What the hell is up with the “ascii” searches? Is ASCII-art enjoying a Renaissance or something? Let’s see: “ascii powerpuff”, “ascii johnny bravo”, “ascii bowl of chicken soup” (?!?), “ascii cool things” (gee, be a little more specific will ya?), “ascii moon”, “ascii badass” and “ascii schmuck”. And that’s just from the most recent week’s logfile, folks.
    • In the Further Fun With Naughtiness category we have things like “spanked at home” and the verbose “how to convince your girl friend that she should be spanked”.
    • Probably because I’m a sucker for surveys, or at least used to be, I get searches like “fun surveys to ask friends” and “fun surveys that i can forward to my friends” (that person later searches for ‘how to win back the friends I pissed off by forwarding too many surveys’, right?)
    • I’m a low-key gamer geek, but I’m not sure how people found me via these queries: “quake arena wav frag left”, “epic megagame keen” (oh, the hours I wasted playing Commander Keen!), and “where can i play minigolf on the net”.
    • I like games, but I love anime. Most of these queries don’t surprise me that much: “cowboy bebop audio files” (CB music is the best, bar none), “pixie misa” (who I share a birthday with), “sailor moon music to hear on the net” (I recommend Sailormusic.net), “ghibli museum in japan” (I wanna go I wanna go I wanna go), “armitage iii dual matrix” (sucked ass), and “tenchi muyo mpeg animemusicvideos” (made a couple, yes).
    • In the potpourri department, we have “super fuzz movie” (I remember watching that when I was a kid), “clever thoughts” (not gonna find those here, pal), “windows media encoder and steaming” (didn’t you mean “streaming”?), “hate reading quotes” (so you must not have enjoyed landing on this website, huh?), “accidents horrible unusual” (oooookay…), “mwaah”, (I used that a lot when writing) “thumbnail theater”, “bridal fashion mpeg”, “pegasus bedroom wallpaper” (I don’t want to know), “what is a website tagline” (if you have to ask, I don’t think it can be explained to you), “organic webshooters” (I hope they liked my Spider-Man movie review), “cartoon violence” (I’m all for it) and last but not least… “find me a fun website now, dammit”. Geez, pal, what am I? Your personal servant? Find your own damned fun website. Oh yeah, and the bozo who’s looking for how to “send other peoples email to yourself” can go directly to hell, thanks.
    • I’ll conclude this overlong wrap-up with the Duck category, including “sinister duck song” (?), “duck sex” (double ?? with whipped topping), “duck diapers” (um, no), “duck quotes” (this website’s chock full of those, at least), “duck duck grey duck”, “cutie duck” (you’ve got the wrong duck, ma’am), “old duck cartoon” (would that be Daffy or Donald?) and finally “duck geek”, which I’m afraid I resemble all too closely.

    There, all sweetness and light again. See? All better. (Denial? What’s that?)

  • Just one more collective to be aborbed into

    Because almost everyone else is doing it, I figured I might as well get on the blogrolling bandwagon. Besides, it makes easier the task of adding sites to the Blogs of Note. (I was doing the database entries by hand. Yes. I know. Go ahead and laugh at my puny programming skills.)

    So now the Blogs of Note is powered by blogrolling.com. Now only that, but there’s a cute little RecipRoll widget to show some of the sites that have your favorite little grey duck on their blogrolls. Neat, wot?

    While I’m here, allow me to point out a couple of new additions to the list. Bears Cave came via Captain Rooba (and the NaNo event), and I found Annessa.net while visiting The People’s Republic of Seabrook.

    Last and certainly not least, there’s Ball and Chain. My wife finally couldn’t stand the weight of jealousy she felt at all of the attention I receive via this website, so now she’s got one of her very own. Pay her a visit, make her feel welcome. Maybe we can shift the balance of jealousy in my household… *grin*

  • So, Karel, how’s that writing thing coming?

    In between fiddling with That Damned Laptop and my NaNo project pages and Quatro, The Undead PC… I have managed to churn out 5,000 words or so over the course of three days. This means that I’m actually on track, oddly enough.

    The laptop trouble turned out to be entirely the fault of Mandrake 9.0, the KDE portion of which is hopelessly befouled. I installed it onto one of my desktop PCs at home and had even worse performance than I did on the laptop! Desperate to get a Linux-based writing utensil working, I installed (sigh) RedHat 8.0. It’s working, but I’m not as happy as I would have been with a good Mandrake rig. Oh well. Once November ends I can blow it straight to hell and try something else.

    A fair portion of my weekend was spent at Java Vivace in NW Portland hanging out with fellow WriMos. An impromptu kick-off party was held Saturday afternoon, while yesterday was our “more regular” semi-impromptu meeting. I got there early yesterday and managed to get most of the day’s quota done between bites of omelette and sips of cocoa.

    As an aside, is it just me or do coffee shops have the world’s worst hot chocolate? Bland, lifeless cocoa is the bane of my existence. One of the banes, anyway. It doesn’t get better with whipped cream, I can assure you. Someone, please, point me towards a place that serves really tasty and sweet hot chocolate.

    To sum up, not only am I solidly on track but I have a working progress chart, backup copies of my work on almost half a dozen computers, and a new group of friends to chat with both online and in person. And I’m sure we’ll stay in touch for at least a couple of weeks after November has passed…