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Looking For Quacks In The Pavement

  • A Duck In Vegas, Day One

    Years ago I became the “Kaseya Guru” where I work. So, when the opportunity came for a most-expense-paid trip to Kaseya’s annual conference, I decided to give it a whirl. New experiences broaden the mind, and there’s value to us in hobnobbing with our contacts at the company as well as chatting with other users. Great idea!

    Unfortunately, this meant flying. To Vegas. Days before payday.

    The flight itself wasn’t actually terrible, but getting out of bed at 5:30am on a Sunday is nearly against my religion. (Yes, I’m an atheist. Shut up. It’s been a long damned day.) Then there’s the security theater to get through, please take off your shoes, sir you forgot to remove your laptop from the bag, and so on. After all that, wait. The plane ride itself wasn’t terrible, as these things go. I’ll never be a fan of air travel but I can manage. Descents do bad things to my stress levels and innards, mind you.

    Let’s talk about shuttle buses and Vegas. For $6.50, you get to be hauled from the airport to your hotel… eventually. Unless you’re staying at Hooters, which was the first stop on the itinerary. I’m sure those newlyweds are in for decades of wedded bliss, you betcha. The Four Seasons? Last stop. Oh, and along the way, some guy tries to sell you on various amenities available, complete with stand-up-comedian patter. Dude, I’ve been up since oh-dark-thirty, shut up and let me get to my hotel in peace.

    And then I learn a priceless, by which I mean expensive, lesson about hotel reservations: If you don’t have a proper credit card but only a debit card, they want to “authorize a charge” amounting to possibly hundreds of dollars, in anticipation of your use of, say, the bar in your room. Great, but I don’t get paid ’til Thursday, I don’t have $300 sitting in my account right now. Even if I cleared out savings, the money wouldn’t be actually available until tomorrow. After some back-and-forth, they settled for swiping my card and going on a “cash” basis in return for my agreement not to use anything from the bar. (Like I was going to? Three bucks for a candy bar, are you mental?) Fine, great, I’m sure I’m the last person on the planet to know this. I’m sure the hotel staff are having a nice chuckle somewhere at the rube from Portland. Whatever.

    Of course, right now I’m craving a candy bar, or pretty much anything at all. See, I didn’t buy any food on the plane, breakfast was at 6:30 this morning, and as I write this nearly 12 hours later I don’t expect to be provided dinner for at least another 90 minutes.

    At least the two hours of “pre-conference” material was interesting, consisting of a Q&A session with various technical types. Good stuff. Now, can I eat something, please?

  • Velan The Reticent

    You may know him as “that guy responsible for Two Lumps,” but James L Grant is a multi-talented badass. Case in point? He’s about to self-publish the first in a planned series of riffs on the Conan mythos (The Barbarian, not The Ginger Talk Show Host) called “Velan The Reticent.”

    And since he’s making it available as an ebook, I will purchase a copy for my Nook Color once he gets that bad boy out the door…

  • Electronic Bookery

    So… I may or may not have purchased one of these earlier this week. Ahem. There’s an unconfirmed rumor that this may-or-may-not event transpired after playing with a particular person‘s recently acquired similar gadget.

    At any rate, I’m amused at one particular aspect of the “ebook” phenomenon. I understand that the way most dead-tree books will become a pile of ones and zeros is through being scanned and treated with an Optical Character Recognition program, then (allegedly) proofread by a human being for error correction. The problem seems to stem from the fact that proofreaders get tired and/or bored partway through a job.

    Case in point? Fred Saberhagen’s “First Book Of Swords.” Toward the end of the book I saw an entire page in which the letter “I” was turned into the number “1”, each and every time. Earlier, I saw a lowercase “y” turned into a lowercase “v”. These are understandable glitches on the part of the OCR software, but a proofreader paying any kind of attention should’ve caught them.

    I don’t know what to make of another little quirk, namely that text in italics tends to be several point sizes larger than the normal text around it. This could be a problem with the particular book rather than the platform. Time will tell. I’ve only purchased two ebooks in my life so far and the other one’s not downloaded yet.

    Ahem. That is, hypothetically speaking… aw, who am I kidding? Yes, yes, I’ m a sheep. I own a Nook Color. Baaaaaa.

    So how is the device itself? Generally I like it. I mean, sure, if I was just going to read books all day I’d have gone for the regular e-ink device and called it good… not to mention saving $100 and potential eye strain. A big selling point for me, however, is having a 7″ screen WiFi device with a decent, working web browser. I can read books and surf the Internet? SOLD.

    And to answer the geeks out there… no, I’m not going to “root” my Nook Color and turn it into a full-on Android tablet. I like the machine just the way it is, and don’t want to “break” things for the sake of being extra-geeky.

    Yes, yes. I’ll turn in my alpha-geek membership card now. Big deal.

  • A Gel-Free Zone

    Somewhen between six and eight weeks after the last time I get shorn, I go in and tell them to do it to me again.

    This is all well and good, and a couple years ago I found a franchised salon-type shop whose people do good work. Every now and then, however, I get a new person who doesn’t know what I don’t like, and because I’m not paying 100% attention to what they’re doing I find myself with styling gunk in my hair by the end of the visit.

    The irony, if that’s the correct word to use because gods forbid I misuse that word in this day and age, lies in the fact that when I was running around with much shorter hair I gelled the hell out of it every morning. I was going for that youthful spiky-haired look or some-such. One day I grew up, grew out the hair and threw out the goop.

    All of this is to say that I spent all day yesterday going to comb my hand through my hair on subconscious reflex and ending up with sticky fingers. Damned hair gel, anyway.

  • State Of The Karel, April 2011

    I let it get away from me again, didn’t I?

    Let’s be honest: Not much newsworthy happens in my life. Each week looks mostly like the one before it. The big difference in the last few weeks is that I spent several of them very, very sick. Two rounds of the Death Blarg Of Blargish Death takes a lot out of you. Also, I burned through all of my “for-spending” tax refund money before the end of March. One shiny new 37″ flat-screen TV, one new computer full of LEDs, two flat-screen computer displays, and a bunch of random odds and ends later, and I have… more stuff. I did spend some of the money on important things, mind you… I own several more books than I did at the start of the year, for instance! I ran out of money before I could acquire a new bed, but, them’s the breaks.

    Work is flying me to Vegas early in May for a vendor conference. I’m 100% not thrilled about flying, let alone to Vegas, in the Age Of Being Groped By Security Apes. But them’s the breaks. It should be an interesting conference, hopefully worth the indignity and bother.

    The webcomic is winding up its second year of production, and I’m looking forward to taking a short break in May to recharge my creative batteries. I’ve also been reading up on photographic tricks and techniques, which I intend to put into practice going into Year Three. I also need to upgrade the shooting environment. In particular, my desktop is looking a bit the worse for wear.

    My adorable rugrats are pretty much all grown up now. One’s most of the way through his first year at DigiPen up in the Seattle area, and the other is out of school and looking to start working so she can get out on her own. I’m proud of them both, albeit for wildly different reasons.

    In addition to the usual couple-times-per-week diversion that comes from playing City of Heroes, some of my gaming time goes to Puzzle Quest 2. Think of it as Bejeweleder’s Gate, if you like: It’s a gem-matching game grafted onto a computer-RPG. That may sound absurd, but trust me, it works and it’s addictive as hell.

    So… what about you? What’s new in your life this spring so far?

  • Two hundred of them?

    I can’t believe that I’ve posted two hundred of these things over the course of nearly two years. Even more mind-boggling is that a few dozen people read them every week.

    So, I’ve accomplished that, at least.

    Wow.

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