Robert’s blog (1.0)

Every vote counts.

Not mine. For President at least.

Texas has gone to the Republican candidate in every Presidential election since 1976.

I see no reason to believe that trend will be reversed this year.

Presidential elections are winner take all. You win the state with the slimmest margin above 50%, you get all its electoral college votes.

So, forgive me if I don't get overly excited about this Presidential election.

Oh, I'll vote for President. I'll hope against hope that my candidate will manage the miracle of winning Texas. I'm not going to be a bit surprised when it doesn't happen, though.

Just because my vote won't help doesn't mean my candidate won't win, of course. There are other states. It's just hard to get to excited about voting when your vote doesn't count.

Keeping all this in mind, however, will--I hope--help keep me focused on the parts of the ballot where my vote does count.

It seems Iyad Allawi has said he is considering instituting martial law, if necessary, to achieve security.

I wonder about the wisdom of this announcement. It seems to me that, if I were an insurgent, I'd love the new government to declare martial law. That would probably create a lot of ill will among the populace towards the new government & strengthen the insurgent position.

Sure, I can understand that martial law might be necessary to establish security. Do you really want, however, to encourage insurgents to redouble their efforts to create chaos by announcing this plan?

I've set up a message board. It's a place were you can respond to these blog entries. (Feel free to start threads on past entries.) I've also set up a place to talk roleplaying games, & there's a place for general discussion as well.

Currently, you do not have to register to read or post. Well see how that works out.

I've put a thread in the general section to discuss the idea of an online bible study. Maybe we'll get a play-by-post roleplaying campaign going as well.

Andre Norton's Quag Keep is the first D&D novel. The copyright date is 1978. That puts it contemporaneous with the OAD&D Players Handbook. That's the year after the first Basic Set and four years after OD&D. It's two year before the World of Greyhawk will be published.

I checked this book out of my high school library but didn't manage to get past the first chapter or two. I recently found a copy at a second hand book store.

The premise of the novel is that the fantasy world of D&D is a real parallel universe. The game has created a connection between that world & ours. The setting is Norton's version of Gygax's Greyhawk. Not unlike how each Dungeon Master who uses Greyhawk creates his own version of the setting. It is interesting to see how much of the published Greyhawk was around--presumably in the original Lake Geneva campaign--prior to 1978 when she would have been researching it.

It seems to me that Norton isn't too interested in accurately reflecting the feel of the game. She's basing the setting off the game, but that's about it. Still, she perhaps comes closer than many works of fiction that actually bear the D&D name. I might have liked the story to fit the prototypical D&D adventure more, but--as I said--that's not really the author's goal.

Overall, it was OK.

Apple's iTunes uses a digital rights managament system called FairPlay. Basically, this attempts to limit you to using songs you buy through iTunes on only five computers, no portable players except iPods, and burning to CD.

It does not prevent you from plugging the audio out from your computer into the audio in of another computer and making a copy with no such restrictions. Likewise, you can burn the song to CD and then use iTunes to rip it back into an MP3 without the restrictions.

One may argue that such circumvention isn't really a problem because it results in a second generation copy. The thing about digital media that really worries the people who worry about such things is that digital copies can be perfect. They've come to accept that imperfect copying is something they have to live with. The copies made through these methods will be less than perfect.

So, why not just sell second generation copies without DRM instead of perfect copies with DRM?

I read this comment online recently:

I think this sucks.
vs.
This sucks.
See the difference?

Yeah. The first case uses four words to say what the second said in two.

The person who wrote that, however, decried the latter as "an opinion presented as a fact". He took issue with someone's expression of "his opinion, presented as fact".

That is ridiculous. Especially as the quotee is a published author who should understand his craft better than that.

I try constantly to eliminate "I think" and similar extraneous phrases phrases from my writing as I learned in 10th grade. Everything a person writes is their opinion. (OK, except when writing "in character" or something similar. Sometimes.)

Yet, it's hard. I have a natural tendency to soften my statements. That persons rant, however, encourages me to try harder.

I think.

I would think that fans with the money would buy the book simply to support Conan. Without support we won't ever see anything in the future. Show that its a world people are interested in. If you can afford it.

Kersus on Dragonsfoot

It seems like I keep reading this line of reasoning about so many things these days. People imploring me to buy a such-&-such product, not on its merits, but to support such-&-such because otherwise we won't see any good such-&-such products.

You know what I think? I think that if a crappy such-&-such product sells well, we'll see more crappy such-&-such products instead of more good such-&-such products. Heck, wouldn't I, as a fan of such-&-such, rather see no such-&-such products on the market rather than see the good name of such-&-such ruined by being associated with lots of crappy products?

My favorite case of this was when Fluid was telling people that, although their Master Tools product wasn't going to have any of the features people were really looking forward to, that everyone should buy it if they ever want to see those features in a future product! There's still a hint of this on their website: (They renamed the product eTools.)

WotC is considering the development of a new mapper. However, the determining factor in this decision is to see how well version 1 of eTools does at market. We'll post any news on this matter here to the Fluid boards when it happens.

Ha!

That said, the Conan product referenced in the quote above may not actually be crappy. I'd probably buy the second printing if I didn't have higher priorities for my gaming dollars right now.

I really enjoyed Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban. I thought it was much better than the previous Harry Potter films. This film has both a spirit and a focus that the others lacked.

<shrug> Maybe it helps that its been two to three years since I've read the book. :)

Hogwart's has changed. The castle, the grounds, Hagrid's cabin. Oh, it's still recognizable. Bits of it are the same. Kind of fitting for a place such as it is. It may have felt a bit smaller, but it felt more magical as well.

Michael Gambon's Dumbledore is different. I liked him. As much as I liked Richard Harris, I never really cared for his Albus Dumbledore.

And Dawn French was fun in a cameo role.

Well, I finally finished the modifications that I'd started I-dunno-how-long-ago to my blog script to produce a RSS feed.

What is RSS? It's Rich Site Summary or Really Simple Syndication. It's a way for a web site to provide a short list of headlines or a summary of recent changes.

You can use an aggregator to track RSS feeds. Aggregators can be stand alone applications, web sites, or a plug-in/feature of a browser or newsreader. I'm currently using My Yahoo, which has an RSS aggregation feature in beta testing. To use an aggregator to keep track of my blog, just copy the link from the RSS icon over there on the right. (In Mozilla, you'd right-click on the icon & choose "Copy Link Location".) Then paste it into your aggregator.

Let me know if you give it a try. (I can't imagine anyone reading this doesn't know how to contact me.)

Some years ago we bought an HP scanner so we could email photos to grandparents & other interested parties. When we got a digital camera, naturally the scanner saw much less use.

When Apple finally got Mac OS X off the ground, I began considering becoming an Apple customer again. As MS Windows 98 caused us no end of trouble on my wife's computer, we eventually bought her an iBook.

She fell in love & used her new Mac to do all kinds of new things. She started doing a little video editing & made some video slide shows from family photos. She enjoyed it so much, she started Keepsake Digital Media.

We had a use for the scanner again. We thought we'd been smart to buy a USB scanner from HP because we could just download Mac drivers & use it with the Mac. Turns out, though, HP saw no reason to write Mac drivers for this particular scanner.

So, I did some searching & came across Hamrick Software. They have a program called VueScan that runs on MS Windows, Mac OS X, & Linux. It works with a wide variety of scanners and, lo & behold, ours was one of them.

(Begin heavy sarcasm:) Now one thing you have to understand is that manufactures of computer hardware, like scanners, typically do not give out the information needed to write drivers for their equipment. For some reason, they are deathly afraid that someone might write a bit of software that can turn an expensive paperweight into a functioning wonder of technology. The horrors of such third party work actually opening up new markets for them must keep them up at night. (Rant over.) So, I suspect Hamrick had zero help from HP in writing their application.

In any case, I was happy that Hamrick could offer what HP couldn't, software that'd let us use our scanner with the iBook. We downloaded the program, & it worked beautifully. So, we paid the price & soon had the serial number that would remove the watermark from scans.

Then, one day, the iBook got sick. Some data was lost. We searched & searched, but we'd forgotten to make a copy of the VueScan serial number.

For a long time we didn't need the scanner, & we put up with not having it working at times when we might liked to have used it. One day, I really wanted to scan something, so I decided to hook it up to my MS Windows 2000 machine that I have almost exclusively for those cases when something refuses to work with the Mac or Linux. Guess what? HP has drivers for my scanner for Windows 98 & XP, but not 2000!

Then Keepsake got a job that required some scanning. It had been a couple of years, but I took a chance & took a trip to the Hamrick website. I was surprised to find a form for getting a new serial number. Unfortunately, we couldn't remember the correct email address & credit card number that would convince the form to send us a new number. So, I sent an email, & shortly, we had a new serial number waiting to be tried.

We did have a bit of trouble getting the new serial number to work, but that was easily solved by downloading the latest version of VueScan, which was probably a good idea anyway.

So, the scanner & the Mac are happily talking again thanks to the very good folks at Hamrick software. I wish my experience with every product & company could be half as good.