One more Espresso shot

One person has responded to various mailings (Concom or Natter, not sure which) saying they tested positive after Minicon. I waited the optimum days for an antigen test and it was negative. Knowing that Antigen tests are not as good as PCR tests, I also took a PCR test a couple days later and that was also negative. I did wear mostly a KN95, although for one day I used the double-cloth "beard" mask.

For the post-mortem: If we are not yet to the Endemic stage for next year, along the same lines of some things quadong said, we need to do a better job of marking where masking is required and where it is optional.

Don't judge me; you don't know my life.

Ok, actually if you can read this you know it pretty well. Anyway spiderplanet and I have a new summer ritual. After work we sit out on the deck and drink a beer, to celebrate that we are both still alive and able to enjoy said beer. I might have had a wee bit more than beer of a higher ABV than would leave me sober.

GenCon is underway and there are games, Games, GAMES!!! I only ended up with three, but I enjoyed one greatly today. The inaugural D&D (5e) Season 10 Adventure League. Up in Icewind Dale, for those of you familiar with the Sword Coast of the Forgotten Realms. Tomorrow is a new world with D&D 5e rules, and Sunday is StarFinder Society. Now, I have played StarFinder before, but not SFS.
In the middle of that, is my usual group playing Eclipse Phase 2e on Saturday. Our group is on Mars after traversing the Titan/Exergent Zone [bad place] to rescue some scientists from their bunker.

GenCon has a thing called the Looking Glass, which lets you look at the dealers that would be there, and three different streaming channels, in case you want to stay involved while you don't have a game. For taking something the is 60k+ people in person and spinning it into an entirely online event, they are doing a heck of a job.

I send out an email to a group of people based on a meeting earlier in the week:
What is the first thing I get back?
"Is this dynamic for everyone?"

Argh. It is not like you even needed to get to the long part of how we get there, it was literally in the first sentence! And the second sentence!
I did not even get into decisions needed or implementation details, just explained what data we would need to do the summaries and dynamic bits they want.

I get it, people are busy, and don't like reading anything more than a headline or the old 140 character limit tweet. But geez, if you are going to ask a question, please read enough to see that it is already answered. The email was only 3 paragraphs, and even on my laptop screen you don't need to scroll to see all of it.

On the evil FB today, there was a link to an Ars Technica article about the History of LiveJournal. It brought about that early sense of wonder for a long-form blogging. I had the lifetime subscription to LJ, because I had a little money to throw at them in what, the early 00s? So many icons, so much fun making them.

You know what I miss? Having conversations without ads. So very few memes. Maybe it was the time, maybe it was the platform.

And then the dark times came. The sales of LJ. Moving the servers to Russia. Taking away https. The stupid silly games on FB, like trading fish to your friends. I threw out a page a notes that I had of which friends needed which kind of fish. Yes, that note got cleaned up in the last 3 months, despite the fact that I haven't played a game on the Facebook for years.

LJ, MySpace (I don't Tom ever sold our info!), Blogger. Good times.

I have the newsletters I wrote for our gaming group in college, but I don't think I have the html from my website when I had a personal one. And I hand coded that monster with an early vi implementation on Windows (bow before my geek cred ;-P) because those graphical tools like HoTMetaL just didn't cut it.

Well, now I am older and need to sleep. Good Night DW.

In honor of http://www.speakoutwithyourgeekout.com/ :

Hi, my name is [insert nymwars name here], and I am a geek. You can tell because I use brackets. I have been a geek for a very long time. Occasionally, just how long hits me in the face when I answer an innocuous question, such as, "oh, how long have you known [that person]?" "Yeah, we did this project together in our Sophomore year of high school in 1987, so 24 - oh fuck, am I that old?"

High school was not the best time of my life. It was not horrendous, but I cannot understand people who think it was great. I was a geek, I think the word then was nerd. I was not tall/strong enough for football, so I did stats for football. I did sports medicine for football and volleyball. I was cut from the Tennis team (bite me, I still believe it was an unfair cut) I was in the Math League. Oh, yeah. Extra math, after school, extra curricular math. I lettered in it twice. I was also co-captain of the Future Problem Solving team for two years. Two more letters.

I played D&D, AD&D, Role-Master, and D&D in space (Star Frontiers). I read books like Dune. I burned through a Vic-20, Commodore 64, and then an Apple IIc clone - the Laser 128. I purchased a 286 in my sophomore year of college and it was new. We had an Atari 2600 and then a Nintendo (Konami code FTW). I gave that Nintendo to my nephew several years ago.

Best Buy has a long and sordid history of offense. News of false imprisonment, failed customer service, failed "Optimization" service for PCs and TVs. The offense today was another joint effort between Best Buy and Geek Squad.

First, some reminders about Internet and Network speeds.
Most cable connections to the Internet run between 8 - 12 Mb/s (aka Mbps - Megabits per second). DSL is about the same at the high-end, if you are lucky enough to have fiber-optic, you might get 20Mb/s.

That being said, do you ever get 8-20 Mbps of download speed? No. Just No. The websites/download sites are capped on their end as to how fast they will feed you data. That is why downloads are not instantaneous. Many download are very quick, but the speed is still regulated by the site.

Wireless speeds:
A - no one uses A.
B - 11 Mbps
G - 54 Mbps
N - 300 Mbps (approximately - N standards are either still in Draft mode, or very recently become official)
N+ - BS

Notice how even B exceeds most capabilities for Internet connections.

What I have done with B/G in my house:
Simultaneously: multiple torrents downloading on multiple computers, streamed near-DVD quality movies from Netflix, played MMORPGs, chat, surf the net.

Back to the offensive part:
Best Buy/Geek Squad has a poster by the WiFi routers proclaiming that
G is good for general Internet
N is 'adequate' for streaming music, movies, games
N+ is really what is want for streaming movies, music, and games

WTF?! N is adequate? Yeah, for a definition of adequate like getting 80mpg is adequate for a car, or how the Bugatti Veyron is an adequate sports car (0-60 in 2.46s, top speed 253mph).

So, if you really, really push to max out your incoming pipe (assuming you have fiber), you still can not saturate your G wireless, unless you are trying to maximize your connections within the house (like say copying blue-ray disks to and from multiple computers while surfing, downloading, streaming music and videos and games. So, if you really have to try to saturate a G network, how the fuck are you going to possibly saturate an N network today? Yeah, didn't think so. Adequate. Dumbasses.

edit: fix typo

No, this is not about Sandman.

There is this little punk. Mom's Basement dwelling punk. He has decided to declare war on our corp. This, in and of itself, was no big deal. He is not good at PVP. He has many alts (queue BSG music). He apparently has plenty of real money, because he (legally) converts it to plex to fund new ships and hiring mercenaries. These have been more an issue, but not unsurmountable. We have had a few good fights and with the exception of one merc corp, come out ahead. We have ignored him, we have sparred with him, we have camped him. We have destroyed around 1 Billion isk worth of his ships, which is over 10 times the amount of losses from him. He will not go away. Very sad. Due to his whining on the killboards, other corporations have declared war on his corporations. He thinks it is us paying them, but we do not care to spend isk that way. Also, it would gain us nothing. I think the next official war is about to start. Time to fuel up and check the ammo on the hunting ships.

So, the world did not end. Not even close. Not even when I had a migraine so bad I wanted it to. It will not end in 2010, 2011, or 2012. Beyond that my Magic 8 Ball still says, "Hazy, ask later" or some such enlightened psychic answer.

In 2009 I learned to brew beer. That is perhaps my most crowning achievement of the year. Perhaps longer, but I am still tired and caffeine deprived and not entirely certain. Besides, if there is something more impressive, it will not appear in my feeble brain until _after_ I click "Post."

From a work perspective, I became a better Project Manager and fairly successfully managed a large project in which I had two core engineers, two significant contributors, and two more supporting engineers. It came in at just over 5000 hours. It did mean frequent, and I do mean too frequent here, trips to IA. Not that IA is a bad state, they passed Gay Marriage ahead of most of the country and you can buy booze in the grocery store, so they are more progressive than many places I have traveled. I had to go to Topeka, FFS.

mle292 and I painted the living room and kitchen. We also had the main bathroom redone - down to the studs and subfloor and back to a very nice bathroom. The house has color now. The bathroom is black and white and Central Mauve (purple) with yellow accents. The living room is Water Sprout and Sagey (light and darker greens). The kitchen is Glorious Gold and Feather Plume (looks like peach to me). We, and by we I mean mostly mle292 and I assisted, put in new light fixtures in each of the rooms. The kitchen has so much light now it needed a good scrubbing because all of the dingy spots are now visible. Still some touch-ups, cleanup, and putting-away to do, but we are mostly done. Not bad for a week of vacation.

Speaking of vacation, I took a few short vacations, one for Marscon, one for Anime Detour, and another for Convergence. Our trip to Chicago was canceled for a variety of reasons, not the least of which was my project was supposed to go live that week and I was in Iowa Sunday night to Thursday night the week before and after. Such is life. Fortunately, we did get to see the most important people in Chicago when they came and visited us here.

I finally saw all of Farscape Season 1. Also very impressive for a list of achievements, I know.

In 2010, I resolve to... Hmmm. No resolutions. They don't work anyway. And speaking of work. Back to it.

We rallied to our scout and he had probed out a new wormhole exit into a safe point in space. We had a short trip back to our HQ, bring approximately 200M isk in loot and salvage with us. We split it all up and I am 41m iskies richer for the effort.

Over the past two months the Corp has had five sanctioned wars. As head of the military, I have been exceeding lax in my handling of the war and offered to step down. My resignation was declined. I was required to be elsewhere during these wars and it pained me to see the ship losses mounting. Fortunately, the Corp has enough standing with many other Corporations that getting clones is not an issue. Jump and Medical clones are wonderful technology. I make sure to have a current download at all times.

There is a new sanctioned war starting today. I have built two new ships just for this war, plus my usual hanger of ships, several of which are built explicitly for war. I have reviewed the recent losses suffered by the declaring corporation and it seems we will have to have massive DPS in order to break their Neutral Remote Repper strategy. At least RRs become valid war targets once they initiate their Reps. I plan to make it painful for them to participate.

I hope to collect enough loot from their wrecks to pay for the new ships.