I am going to be using the website I have been working on for the past year for storing the information about my attendance at Further Confusion. Feel free to my con page at Furspots. You can also see other people who are going to Further Confusion. You can also sign up for an account there easily that marks you as going to Further Confusion too. There are no more invite codes for anyone who has seen me talk about Furspots in the past so please go sign up too if you have a chance.

I hope to see you there!

Since everyone else is doing it, I am going to chime in on this one.

Short summary: This year fucking sucked!

Long version:

Most of the people on various private filters of mine have gotten most of this story already but I am finally just going to write it all out.

In the last year, my job has gone from "OMG best place to work evar" to "absolute soul sucking hell." I know the economy sucks and everything else but I could not take it anymore and so I have turned in my resignation. My last day will be January 16th. At that point I will be shoving the last of my stuff in my Jeep and driving to Sunnyvale where I will be at least temporarily living with the Squeaky Hallow group. This group being the rented out with inaki, tixen, ... and so on. keskitsune is already up there and I can't wait to be with my love again.

I haven't done anything at all exciting this year as the above mentioned soul sucking hell of a job has made me very depressed and unmotivated for the past few months. The biggest thing that I'd like to bring up is Furspots which I have been working on with indicoyote. This has turned into an absolutely awesome project and we hope to go into full release sometime around FC as well. I hope everyone who hasn't decided to sign up yet will ask me for an invite code and sign up. We plan to make this the most awesome furry social networking site out there. We haven't pushed many updates lately but we have a huge update that is soon going to be merged in and pushed out that will add a number of new features.

I look forward to being up in the bay area for next year. My goal for the next year is to figure out where do I really want to go with my life. I have quickly realized that working for other people sucks and I know I have the skills now to head out on my own. I really want to either start my own bootstrapped company or possibly just work in consulting for a while till the awesome ideas hit me.

A number of people I know have been having an absolutely horrible 2008 and I really hope that everyone's next year is better than what it was. Here is to that too. Happy New Year everyone. It really can't get worse I hope.

I just signed up for the social network for Nine Inch Nails. Quite an interesting site, some parts aren't fully working yet but I had to mention something.

They have a just released feature called user classes. Think of them like the deviant types on DeviantArt which give you the ability to say what type of user you ware. The ones on nin.com however have options like "man trapped in a woman's body" "woman trapped in a man's body" "animal trapped in a human body" "furry" "/b/tard". Yes furries make the list.

Even better though in sexual orientation they have "Not gay, but know how to party" and yet again "Furry." We have made the list :P

So yeah, just a little tidbit of interesting furry infection into another world.

I think we have a winner at this point for worst possible cover ever. Don't listen to this unless you really want to damage all ability to believe that good music is still out there to be created in the world. It really is that bad.

This is Everlast covering Folsom Prison Blues. And he uses a sample from Insane in the Membrane by Cypress Hill.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VOngsHeOPas

http://community.livejournal.com/furspots/1643.html

Also you can check out http://furspots.com

We are trying to help people manage their furry identities and you only need a single account to do it.

If you want an account feel free to IM me or comment and I can make you an invite code.

This is a very early alpha so databases might get flushed so please testing only for now. We'll be doing a much more full release soon where other people than beyond the admins can invite other people. But for now, bang on it. Also tell us what you like or would like to see once you've got a handle on what we already have.

Crypto

If you are one of the 10 people on my friends list not to have watched Dr. Horrible yet, you can watch it again free on Hulu. Without that the rest of this post will make no sense.

I have already purchased the goggles that Dr. Horrible wears. I need to spray paint them silver but otherwise they are already quite awesome. The biggest problem is that I need a lab coat. And it turns out that the style of lab coat that he wears is custom. So this is what I'm looking for.

I'm am looking to commission a custom lab coat. In the red color that he wears at the end before joining the Evil League of Evil. I will pay for all the materials, shipping, as well as $15-20 an hour for your labor on it. The main requirement I have is that I want to have it in my hands by Halloween.

Is there anyone out there looking for a little sewing job? :)

Crypto

Casting Call:
Its inevitable that as we read each other's journals we create mental pictures of each other. Post this on your own journal to find out who your friends see when they read about your life.

Two Rules:
1) The person must be in the movies or on TV (but doesn't have to be an actor/actress). The person can be specific to a role (e.g. Jennifer Elhe's Elizabeth Bennet) or just the person themself. I'm loosening up the restrictions and allowing fictional representations as well like cartoons or comics.
2) Post a picture!

I'm interested in what you think.

After a bit of a hiatus, I'm running around on SL again. Got lindens burning a hole in my pocket. If you wanna see me around, my name is as always TheCrypto Doctorow. I should be around again tonight.

I haven't posted in a while. I've turned 21 and as part of my debauchery I am heading to Yuri's Night this Saturday. Right now, Kes and I are in a Motel 6 in Lost Hills, CA on the way to SF. Our plan is to get up in about 5 hours, shower, caffinate, and then be on the way again. I will post another update when we get to SF.

As a nice way to start the trip, when I picked up the car at the Dollar Rent-A-Car, he looked at my information and said "Ahh, you had a birthday recently, going up to SF, how about a free upgrade to a Mustang?" I took it, a little lower gas mileage but a getting a silver Mustang to drive around SF in is pretty damn nice.

Crypto

If you really want to strike, a single day of not posting anything will do nothing. You end up saving everything you would have posted for the day before and the day after. I am intentionally breaking the strike right now.

Every few months a chain email goes out stating we should all stop filling up our gas tanks for 1 day in order to show those people who our gouging us for fuel. And every time, not a single oil company notices. We all end up filling up our tanks the day before or the day after.

If you really want to leave, there are plenty of doors. There is the Wordpresss door, the many LiveJournal clone sites like InsaneJournal. But no, you all stay here for one major reason, everyone else you know is here and you can friends lock things and everything else.

And also, take this in context of what people are complaining about. That you can no longer make an ad-free LiveJournal without paying for it. The ONLY people who would notice the change are people who have been on this site for a while and wanted to create yet another account. Yes, they might have paid for their main account. But what they should be asking for instead is the ability to manage multiple accounts from a single paid account. That would solve the problem.

I bought a permanent account at the last sale. You know why? Even after all the shit they had pulled before? Because the entire architecture to this site is open. You can go to Danga and download all sorts of tools that are used by more than just this. Memcached is used by practically every major website out there. Hell, you can go to the SixApart Code site and download the entire code of LJ. In fact, sites like InsaneJournal aren't "cloning" LiveJournal. They download the most recent code, edit a few configuration settings, and buy some hosting. That is it.

The ONLY reason I would leave LJ is if they started closing that. Then you know there is no more recourse.

I will admit that I am currently working on a competitor to the Livejournal system that is mainly for people in the furry fandom. I hope that people will migrate there. And I also plan to make it quite easy for you to migrate your friends and everything else from LJ to this system.

My point is simply this, there are plenty of doors if you are fed up with the direction that LJ is taking. if you really are fed up. Take one of them. Don't say that you are just going to stop posting for one day.

Crypto

In approximately 3.5 hours. I will turn 21 years old. However, I have no idea what to do this weekend. So please. Suggestions are needed. Offer places to go, things to drink, things to do. Anything and everything is accepted.

As a note: This weekend I only have Saturday and Sunday off. I am going to work on next weekend getting Friday off as well so I might be able to do bigger things that weekend.

Crypto

I've found two very interesting articles recently and I have been meaning to blog about them. The first article is Five Reasons Sci-Fi pwns Fantasy. In that article he explains some reasons why a Sci-Fi universe is better than a Fantasy universe. The list can be summarized as:

1. No elves.


2. Guns > Swords.


3. More unique plots.


4. More hopeful outlook.


5. The XKCD factor.

I can agree with a number of these. The elves one is a bit of a stretch but he is going for stereotypes here. There was then a response article One Reason Fantasy pwns Sci-Fi. This is a much simpler argument and has only one point.

1. It's accessible

This is a response to the XKCD factor saying that it isn't fun to have to need to read about nanotech in order to understand the plot of the book you are trying to read. That geeks aren't everyone. That is why Fantasy is still the basis for more MMORPGs than Sci-Fi.

Now, I think that both of these arguments actually work together and push for a third genre which is always sort of pushed off to the side, Urban Fantasy. These work on both levels and create a better list.

1. No elves if you don't want them. And those elves in urban fantasy are different from those in fantasy.


2. Guns > Swords. But you can have both gun and sword fights going on, even at the same time and not feel like bringing a knife to a gun fight.


3. More unique plots. The complaint against the plots in fantasy is you are just pawns. In urban fantasy, you are usually much more than that.


4. More hopeful outlook. Urban Fantasy can be grim like in World of Darkness, but there is always built in some glimmer of hope that things will be made better soon by you.


5. It's accessible. Everyone knows the myths that Urban Fantasy stuff is based upon and it makes it much easier to get into that mind set.

So Urban Fantasy pwns all.

You've all seen here. Here goes.

"Everyone has things they blog about. Everyone has things they don't blog about. Challenge me out of my comfort zone by telling me something I don't blog about, but you'd like to hear about, and I'll write a post about it."

I look forward to seeing what people ask.

This weekend, because of the speeding ticket I got when driving to Yuma in July. I was unable to defend against the ticket by mail. So I gave up and did traffic school.

I am really pissed off. Out of the 40 questions on the final exam, a little less than half actually had to do with traffic safety. In fact the majority was reciting statistics about public transportation. How is this supposed to help you be a better driver. It just proves to me more that traffic tickets are just a way for the city to make money.

The thing that pissed me off even more is that I hate learning by rote. Rote learning dulls the mind. But that is all that this test was. Just lines of statistics that you had to memorize and commit to memory. One of the question didn't even involve the statistics at all but instead was remembering the set of years in which the statistics were taken over.

More posts coming soon.

I have bought 2 routers for my apartment, and both of them have sucked in some way. I originally bought the Netgear open source router. That died pretty quickly. Then I bought an small home business Linksys router. This one works better than the original, but it still loses connection quite frequently to my computer even though it is no more than 10 feet away from me.

Here are the list of features I am looking for:

Fairly cheap. Hopefully no more than $100 for the router.
Wi-Fi
Not suck
Hackable if I can get it.

Also, a note, on an average weekend day we have 6 devices connected via wireless and 2 or so wired in as well

Crypto

When I was a kid, my parents bought a computer the same year I was born. They spent $5000 at the time for a top of the line machine. My dad told my mom "We'll never have to buy another computer ever." The computer was a 286 with a 30MB hard drive and 640KB of RAM. Of course we all know computers have surpassed those levels of technology by leaps and bounds.

When I was a kid, I used to play hours of a game Cosmo's Cosmic Adventure. I only had the free shareware version which my parents had on 5.25" floppy disk. I would load that game up quite often. I pretty much had it at the point where I had memorized exactly how to play the game. I would load it up and in a few hours I had beaten the game.

The sad part was that at the time, the game was shareware. The first episode was given away for free in order to entice people to buy the second and the third episodes. When I was a kid, I was never able to convince my parents to but the expansions so I could see the end of the story. And by the time I had my own money, Apogee had been bought out by 3drealms and the license went into limbo. To add atop of all of that, my 286 had long bit the dust to.

A few days ago, I remembered this game from playing Super Mario Galaxy and some various nostalgic discussions. So I went looking around and found that 3drealms had made freely available for download the shareware version.

With a bit more research I found that they are also selling the whole game for only $10 bucks. And there were some suggestions to the ability to use DOSBox to run the game. So a couple of downloads later and an apt-get install. I was running Cosmo's Cosmic Adventure again. On Linux, an OS that hadn't even really been dreamed of when this program was written. On box which was hundreds of thousands of times more powerful than the original box I played it on as well.

Tonight, I finished the game after having played it in a couple of blocks. I do remember the moves almost as well as when I did when I originally played it. I beat the game no problem and without even any glitches from DOSBox. I am currently in the process of ordering the full game so I can finally play through the end and see the whole game.

Now why would I write up all of this? I see a problem where we are losing parts of our culture because we are unable to archive the media that is out there. Had Apogee just folded and the assets had liquidated the game would have just been nostalgia, and maybe a couple of people who had bought the registered version would put it up on some pirate site. Which could still be lost if enough takedown notices are sent to the rest of the site and not enough copies exist.

I know I am preaching to the choir here. But please, feel free to check out Cosmo's Cosmic Adventure. It is a short game, only $10 from 3drealms. And shows what even old computers were powerful of doing.

Crypto

Eventually, I'll get back to update on the last two months. Maybe even do a decent con report at some point. But for now I want to explain what happened today.

I was on the way to work. A coworker of mine was with me as we carpool. I get on the offramp for the exit to work. I get up to the stoplight behind one car. The car in front of me goes as the light turns green. I push down on the gas and the car goes nowhere, in fact I feel it rolling backwards. I try going again, car goes nowhere again. I repeat this process a couple of times and eventually my passenger says "Restart the car." I do so and the car doesn't even turn over. So at this point I am stuck in the middle lane of a busy offramp with a car that won't move.

I call AAA and they call a tow truck and the CHP. After lots of people honking at me and otherwise being rude since my car was broken, the tow truck finally shows up. The CHP never does. I get my car towed. I had called Kes and other people and through some googling on the symptoms it sounded like my on board computer for the car had died. Well this either means a real cheap fix or a you need to buy a new car fix. So it gets to the shop, I'm picked up by some coworkers for lunch and finally get into the office around 1pm. Which sucks.

So for the next couple of hours I'm stressing as I don't know what is going on with my car. Eventually I get a call back and I pretty much scream with joy as are not only fixing the problem with my car, but also fixing other lingering problems that I were having, and the total bill comes out to only $500 for the whole thing. So I will have my car fixed tomorrow and it will run better. This makes me very happy at the end of a pretty crappy long day.

I used that dragon generator to generate myself...didn't take me long but for some reason I want to show it off because it is just so darn cute.

( Cute for cuteness )

Crypto

This weekend, I saw Vantage Point. And I am quite confused as to why it is getting such bad reviews. I might have a theory about it but it involves some spoilers at the end.

This movie is about having 8 different vantage points on the same scene. The basic scene being the president gets shot. For the first part of the movie, the same 20 minutes are played over and over again from different vantage points. Each one of those 8 replays ends with a flash of white before it goes black. A little clock in the corner ticking up till noon.

The first few are a news van parked outside, a secret service agent, a member of the local police, and an average citizen. The first plot twist which was revealed in the trailer was that the president that got shot was actually a decoy and the real president is actually hiding in his hotel room. This is the point where the story begins to turn and change into a very different movie.

( Spoilers beyond here )

I would suggest seeing this movie and ignoring the reviewers. You will have to suspend your disbelief for a few parts of it, but if you ride it like a movie and don't nitpick till the very end, you'll see a very interesting film that has a very subversive idea hidden inside a very nicely hidden shell.

Well, I'm a bit late aren't I.

But I have good reason to be!

I just moved into a new apartment!

It is a bazillion times better than my old place. I actually have space to move around. My own bedroom, yet I am still able to keep a roommate. My whole old apartment including the bathroom and the bedroom was as big as my living room and kitchen are now. This is absolutely wonderful.

I hope to keep you all up to date more now that I am in this place. I will also be sending off some new years resolutions soon.

If you want my new address for any reason. Just leave a comment.

Crypto!

Since I am planning on staying 99.9% disconnected from the internet during the day given that I have just completed my 16 hour day at work. I would like to make sure that my thanks are out there now so that I don't have to worry about posting them tomorrow.

The biggest thing that I am thankful for is keskitsune. She is the most wonderful person in the world. She has completely turned my life around. She has made my less stressful, more full of wonder, kept me more motivated, and has just been a wonderful partner all around. Thank you Kes. As I have said to you many times before. You Win.

The next group I want to thank are my friends new and old. From kessedrian and waywind from way way back in the Drake Chat days, something which I should reminisce on in written form in the not too distant future. To the newest friends that I have made like bossgoji and krinndnz who have opened my eyes to a whole new community that I have sat on the outskirts of for a while and you finally pulled me inside. To the group in the middle like stevefoxx, tarnac, nicholasdamally, and ferrel, who interestingly enough I will be seeing most of tomorrow. Thank you for pulling me out of my little hole and finally putting me together, as well, introducing me to Kes and helping the two of us along.

Now that the people are out of the way, showing you a bit of how I rate people in this world, onto the more intangible things.

I am thankful for my job. A job which keeps me motivated. A job which doesn't treat me like a cog in a machine. A job where I can be who I am and they don't look down upon me. A job which can keep me there for 16 hours in a single day after a series of 9-12 hour days recently and I don't feel pissed at all about it. I love where I work and I hope that this place works out for the best.

I am thankful for where we are right now. A time where I can share these ideas with just some presses on a keyboard and the click of the mouse and anyone can read what I have discovered or said. A time where I know that if there was ever a problem in my life I would just have to post it on here and someone would come along and pick me up without missing a beat if it came down to it.

Finally, I am thankful for my health. I still worry because of other issues that I am still working on. But for the most part my body works as it should and nothing is chronically wrong with me and I am working on keeping it that way.

Thank you. And I hope everyone has a Happy Thanksgiving,

Crypto

It is currently the wrong 4:20. That being 4:20 AM. This is a time that I should not be awake and typing this vigorously at a computer. I am blaming this ENTIRELY on that today work had a "happy hour" to celebrate halloween. My company is weird I know. Anyways, since they were mostly offering alcohol and not being of legal age myself I passed on that. But they did offer Red Bull. So without even really thinking I downed 2 in about a 30 minute period about 12 hours ago at this point. 12 hours later I am not even feeling the slightest bit of tiredness. My eyes are wide open and I am typing far to fast. In the past hour, I have also written 872 words for my NaNoWriMo story (View stats here). Thank you to all the people who I have rambled to in this caffine induced haze. I really need to cut caffine out of my system completely. I have it so often that ingesting that amount which for some people is there morning pick me up (Looking at you warren_ellis) that if not having much in the last 3 months since FA:U does this to me. It just isn't worth it.

The last two weekends updated again, I need to get these in earlier. And I really should be working on NaNoWriMo instead but I need to get this out too.

Two weekends ago, I went to Toorcon. That was very interesting. I'm still processing some of the information that I collected from there. But it was very good and I will probably be linking to some of my favorite talks from there as soon as they put video up. Best thing learned there, you can turn a browser into a VPN using TCP ported to Javascript tunneled through to flash.

Last weekend, I had krinndnz down for a weekend, very fun to be about. We mostly just hung out and talked. Spent a bit of time wandering around Balboa Park but otherwise just enjoyed her company. Much fun was had. Hopefully she will be down with us again for FC at the latest.

Tonight, I went up to Oceanside for a halloween party with some friends that I have up there. We had lots of interesting discussions, some good food, cake, and watched Evil Dead 2 and Fido. Fido is a very interesting movie where the zombies become a slave class through a control collar. I would highly recommend it for funny horror stuff.

Now everyone is up to date on what the hell I am doing.

I hope everyone had a pleasant halloween!

I just got Ubuntu 7.10 installed from the beta. It took me a while to get everything up and running again but now that I do, I am very glad I upgraded. I don't have a single unsupported package installed anymore (Except Opera but that doesn't count because it can't be but that's a whole other issue. As well I need to write about my experiences about switching over to Opera soon.) But anyways, MP3 support can be added automatically. Flash support in Firefox is also automatic. There is no more need for tools like Automatix or EasyUbuntu, everything is handled by tools in the core system. I'm even running an unstable version of Compiz Fusion, there is no access to the config tool by default but it seems to work well.

The only instability in my computer at the moment seems to be from Opera which I think is just a sideeffect of trying to copy some of the databases over from a backup. I just cleared out all of those old databases and hoping that'll fix some of the issues. Otherwise everything is going just great under the new system. It's fast, it has less cruft, and the right versions of all the tools I use.

Edit: Deskbar is awesome, written in Python even it looks like, but seems to be very prone to corrupt it's pickled history database. Hate pickle! Awesome only other instability I've run into. Clearing out history on Opera seemed to fix all the issues there.

In convenient LJ cuts for each day for your convenience.

( Thursday )

( Friday )

( Saturday )

( Sunday )

Anyways, that's this weekend. You'll be hearing from me more soon I hope :)