The expanses of WolfWings' land
scratched on the wall for all to see

02:56 pm - Woot... Google Voice Get! *ding*
Heads up, if you signed up to request a number back when it was still Grand Central, check your e-mail box! I did, and just got my phone number offer.

(785)WLF-WNGS1 commentLeave a comment

03:55 am - Fursuiting at Zona Rosa in Kansas City, Missouri, USA on July 18th! Who's going?
So who's going? I'm planning the event as an all-day thing. Bottles of water and WHO-recipe rehydration fluid will be on hand and plentiful with straws, transportation to/from a staging area will be arranged. Space to change on-site is being looked into and discussed with Zona Rosa staff next week once I have a near-final headcount of suiters and handlers. Thus, this post to get that headcount! Pass the word around too!

pistolpup has offered to host a bit of a cookout/BBQ at their place that evening and help provide crash space for out-of-towners so folks can drive home on Sunday.

Rough schedule:

• 08:00 HANDLERS Meet at staging area for pre-event meeting, get water bottles, etc.
• 09:00 SUITERS Meet at staging area near Zona Rosa.
• 10:00 Start suiting at Zona Rosa until it gets too hot.
• 12:00 Lunch break! Just wander Zona Rosa and avoid the heat. LOTS to do.
• 16:00 TENTATIVE Second round of suiting as it cools off.
• 18:00 Head to pistolpup's for the evening.

Here's to hoping this becomes a regular thing! =^.^=

EDIT: Staging area confirmed thanks to happy coincidence. And it's nearby! Map from staging area to parking garage at Zona Rosa.10 commentsLeave a comment

03:01 pm - This is officially the month of upgrades for me...
...upgrading from living in a crummy (albeit spacious now that I'm the last one here) apartment.
...upgrading my laptop to 8GB of RAM.
...upgrading my phone to a BlackBerry 8820.
...upgrading to owning two fursuits, one still in the 'finishing concept art' stage but both mostly payed for.
...upgraded the local furry community to have a very successful brunch event I hope to keep monthly or better.
...getting the local fursuiting community together for more regular events I also hope to keep monthly+

A lot of it was just really good timing, I'll admit, like some fursuiters about to move out of the area in a couple months and some that just moved IN this month will make the first 'semi-official' fursuiting event fairly large (9-12 suiters + 4-6 handlers confirmed so far), and the brunch was just dumb luck of me knowing about a restraunt that specialized in delivery, but that has a good amount of table-seating inside that sits mostly unused. NewEgg had a sale on the RAM. Upgrade cycle came up on the phone plans. Etc. Even the second fursuit was based on lucky timing heavilly, but I'm not complaining in the slightest.

I just hope the next three months are half as good as this month's been, leading up to MFM. =^.^=2 commentsLeave a comment

11:43 am - And wow... 8GB is an odd upgrade for memory on a laptop.
It's... less that software can run faster that I've seen, and more that suddenly... the hard drive just Stays Off even when I'm intensively gaming. Played TF2 for 2 hours, the hard drive never spun up until I exited the game and loaded Chrome which can easilly top a gig of RAM usage in very short order. That's... kinda freaky, but also shows an SSD isn't that needed just yet for laptops, at least for those that can just shove so much RAM at a problem as to make it go away. In this case... MONDO disk cache and keeping all your gaming settings stored on an on-line server instead of on the local machine, which the Steam Cloud allows for.

So... yeah, TF2 at 960x600 w/ 16:4x MSAA for more than 2 hours on battery without any power alerts or anything is kinda nice. Left 4 Dead I can cheat: Cat all the resource files before I load the game, level loads are FAST. =O.o= Like... CPU-limited fast on single-player mode.

Now to go tinker with VMWare more... can finally start working on building out a good set of front/back-end VM's w/ HA support from the load balancer back and including MemCacheD support across the board as well for a side-project I want to work on.0 commentsLeave a comment

07:38 am - Yay... amazing what two minutes with a butter knife and some packing tape can do...
Let me fix a little box-fan for one, the C-clip holding the fan-blade tight against the motor's drive-shaft had worn loose, letting the fan-blade mount polish the drive-shaft to a mirror shine. So... no grip, no fan-blade-spin, no air.

About 90 seconds ravaging that mirror finish with a butter knife, two inches of double-sided packing tape wrapped around it, and wedging the fan-blade assembly back on... I have a working fan again. Quietly drying out my fursuit head, I couldn't resist romping around my apartment for 5-10 minutes just because, one of those, "Pinch me so I believe it's real!" type of things... I really did buy a fursuit just to have something to suit in for the next couple of dozen months until my own gets made. =^.^=

And squee... makes me even more excited about adjusting it to really fit me well. Need to do a couple minute things, re-glue down the flaps of fabric holding the digitigrade padding in place, that's honestly about it. And shorter the legs up by hemming them internally, no major issue there either.

Anyways... gonna go zonk out soon. So... g'night, everyone!5 commentsLeave a comment

10:02 pm - If anyone out there can't connect to Yahoo Instant Messenger:
Yahoo is upgrading their login servers piecemeal to force use of a Captcha to log in on their web-interface, and changing their IM login protocol entirely at the same time. The new protocol is already understood, but nothing out there currently supports it except Yahoo's official client still.

This page explains the situation in a bit more detail, though the list of IP's seems out of date. Only the very last one at the end worked for me.

Oh... and on a side-note, I need name suggestions! The husky I was romping around RCFM as is officially becoming mine, but the poor fellow lacks a name! It can't be WolfWings, since that's being made already and is distinctly NOT a husky... so... name suggestions? I suck at naming things. =-.-=7 commentsLeave a comment

10:56 pm - Patch Together seems kinda awesome...
...and I want this toy design to get made so I can buy one!


Adorable blue bunny bunyip by rosequoll0 commentsLeave a comment

09:22 pm - Man... so close, but the glue gun doesn't get hot enough. =-.-=
Had to re-sole the feet I was using after the last run, they got thrashed soles after Wild Nights, and at RCFM one nearly failed and I had to band-aid it with hot glue. Stomping around Zona Rosa blew the other one out, and both heels detached... yeah, time for new soles on those feet.

So, MUCH pulling and grumbling later, Pistol got the foam-rubber exercise-mat soles out, and I peeled all off the glue from the sole of the mind-condition Vans inside. Cut out new soles... stick the first one in, glueglueglue... wait, why is the shoe flopping around still?

Yup... low-temp glue and high-temp soles = no stick. So... off to pick up some high-temp glue and a high-temp glue gun tommorow, we'll sort things out then. =^.^=

But yeah, definately looking into getting a pair of Vans now after wearing the maround and marvelling at how comfy they are. =O.o=6 commentsLeave a comment

12:40 pm - Fursuiting at Zona Rosa on July 18th!

Set up a Google Calendar Event for the next fursuiting excursion. By default will send an e-mail reminder 1 day, and 8 hours prior to the event, feel free to add yourself or invite others to it:

0 commentsLeave a comment

09:31 pm - Okay... found one place that's AWESOME for suiting!
As long as they're made aware you are NOT promoting anything, and are just there to show off your costumes and have fun, Zona Rosa open-air mall is perfectly alright with groups of suiters + handlers wandering around and taking pictures for a couple hours at a stretch.

I'm going to approach them and some stores that reacted positively about setting up a spot to change in/out and keep an ice-chest in over the next month, I think Abercrombie might say yes, of all things. =^.^=

Pictures to come later, just had to get up briefly to hit the can, then more sleep... then work. Zzz...1 commentLeave a comment

11:12 pm - So yeah... I'm heading over to Zona Rosa tommorow morning-ish.
Borrowed pistolpup's suit again, or at least parts of it. Going partial-suiting at Zona Rosa (outdoor mall), walk around a'while until I'm too hot/tired to keep going, then head home. Partialing first to feel out the place for fullsuiting later, see how some of the stores react, and also since I lack a proper spotter I'd rather have something I can don/doff inside my car or a bathroom instead of needing a full changing room, Just In Case.

Does anyone local out there want to tag along? I'd still only partial, but it'd be more fun as a group excursion and to have someone else to take photo's/video's. I even have the camera you can use! =^.^=

Anyways... laundry now, then bed before I head out.3 commentsLeave a comment

04:18 pm - Today, I actually had to rush to drive somewhere.
Those that know me, know what that means. I had to rush documents to the middle of BFE with physical signatures on them, because the asset-management company won't take electronic anything for offers for property.

So... yeah, they have a custom offer package for the exact amount we offered on the loan-approval certification, forms signed in triplicate, etc, etc. I even sealed and edge-matched the envelope off-canter and pinned it shut, and got a delivery-reciept dressed up more as a courier than myself... THEN revealed I was the actual one making the offer as I scurried out the door.

So, yeah. Poke a gryphon and try to say they didn't do things the way you want them? *applies letter of requirements like a blunt instrument to spirit of requirements*

I was nice, and polite, I just planned the delivery to leave their head spinning a little. =^.^=

Now... Zzz... *THUD*2 commentsLeave a comment

08:53 am - Okay... THIS is the type of news I like to wake up to in my e-mail box...
( WolfWings, changes have occurred in your automated realty searches. )

Um... I'm a ninja? =^.^=

Now... off to furry breakfast!

10 commentsLeave a comment

03:36 pm - Well... Plants vs Zombies is certainly pretty.
But I've realized why I love Defense Grid so much more. You can experiment as you go, it's not "OMG, I made a mistake at 2 hours and 58 minutes in a 3-hour level, I have to slog through the whole thing AGAIN!" but much more like Prince of Persia: Sands of Time: No, wait, that's not how it goes. *back up, try again*

Still challenging, but lets you focus on the challenging parts, not the long slog TO the challenging parts.

Anyways... ( ABC Meme, ganked from Tisket )4 commentsLeave a comment

01:01 pm - Anyone have any plans this weekend?
This gryph is BORED.

I want an excuse to get out of the house. Anyone out there in the Kansas City area (or maybe 200 miles radius of there) want some company? Or want to meet up and just hang out or something?

I'm serious here. I just want to get out of the apartment if I can this weekend, and do instead of sit and think. Anyone need their brake pads replaced? Gutters cleaned? Some non-tedius physical task would be great. I'd say let's go suiting... but then I keep remembering, wait, no suit of my own yet. *laughs* Happy to be a handler if someone wants to go suiting out in public or something.

Hrm... there's always the Macy's mall, that place is so many leap-years beyond dead seems ideal for something to go on there... *ponderponder*

Yeah... lazy-bird had the lazy trimmed off of him, wants to be active-bird now between the experiences at RCFM and it turning into summer finally. =^.^=12 commentsLeave a comment

04:41 pm - OMG... I may own a house soon.
First visit to the place was... well, kinda awesome. It's a 3-bedroom, 1-bath that was doubled in size by adding a very large 'front room' with another bedroom and bathroom using super-modern materials. Looks like they retrofit the whole place with new electrical, all the systems look very good.

Even has a 2-car garage with a big load of shelving inside, set up to still use for parking but store stuff too. It's... kinda awesome.

But, it's UGLY as sin on the outside to most folks. Commercial metal-structure on the new portion, old-school (we're talking 50+ year old-school) siding-over-wood-over-frame, with what looks like someone lopped a metal-panel diner from the 50's into pieces and turned it into walls for the other side. All the panels are new manufacture, but it's that type of 'rigid 3x3ft square panel' design with pre-fab limitations on sizes, windows and attic vents on that side are all that style... even the roof on that section is metal shingle. =O.o=

They even closed off the original 'entrance nook' into a closet on the old 'living room' which I might open back up. Would make it TRIVIAL to rent the other 3 bedrooms out, they'd have their own bathroom even. And the water heater and HVAC system is by that bathroom, very hard to describe but incredibly easy to perform maintenance on those components there.

Very much an 'unsellable because it's so kooky' type of place... I'm gonna drag some friends by later this week to look it over, pics to be posted later... I'll probably offer $68-70k, see if the asset-holding company nibbles. And the best part? It's outside of the 'metro' of Kansas City, so it qualifies for USDA loans which are INSANELY good, even compared to the fixed 5% loan w/ 5% down I qualify for in the first place. But it's still less than a 10-minute drive to/from the airport.

Hrm... pilot flop-house for the secondary bedrooms, maybe? *ponderponderponder*11 commentsLeave a comment

01:20 am - *fretfretfret*
Gotta head in to work soonish... finally coming down off the con-high I've been riding for the last... gah, damn near half a week now. It's hard to have PCD when you're still floating, but it was definately there.

And now trying to decide... $1k to get into suiting Right Now or not... mostly at a toss-up because I'm not sure if I want something on the cute-side like Beef Jerky or not.

Thoughts?4 commentsLeave a comment

03:44 am - So... now for a proper RCFM con report.
Edit: Pictures!

I have to say this first. Before RCFM this year, much like Corsi Mouse, I've never had any form of Post-Con Depression. I go back from a con feeling good, purified from focused effort without having to concentrate on maintaining a societal mask of propriety.

I was, for the first time in my life truly able to understand the term ( tears of joy. )

And now... ( ...the actual con-report itself. )

So... yeah, depending on how FC goes this year at it's new hotel, I may be focusing on RCFM more myself now. *laughs* At the very least... suiting! Yay! OmNomNom! Must do that more, and soon! And thank you so much, pistolpup, it really made RCFM an utter blast instead of me likely just sitting in the LAN room all con if I hadn't had that suit along!

I can honestly say I haven't felt this energized in months. Yes, I'm exhausted, but I'm... full of strength I didn't have before this con. Even at work I've noticed it, I'm more assertive now, more comfortable in my own skin, after getting a chance to really unwind in another skin... the ritual of switching skins like that really let me unburden myself in a way I don't think I have since the last time I could fullsuit.25 commentsLeave a comment

07:23 pm - Back from RCFM...

...will fill in FAR more details later.

• Didn't suit anywhere near as much as I wanted to.
• But did suit FAR too much. Thanks, pistolpup, for the loan of the suit!
• Got bit by the bug so much I actually went back upstairs, unpacked enough of the suit to partial, hand-washed and dried the undersuit, and romped back downstairs for 4 extra hours instead of sleeping those 4 hours. =^.^=
• Got to see likeshine and painteddog briefly at least, which was good. But nowhere near enough.
• Pizza Feed went well, helped out a bit there too.
• Missed the Furp Toast on actual Memorial Day since I hadn't heard about it. =-.-=
• Abused my CB far too much on the lightning-fast drive home to get here in enough time to sleep at all before work, to avoid calling off from work.

5 commentsLeave a comment

08:49 pm - Okay... City of X? You're being a pain in the ass now.
Previously, I had all the visual bells and whistles working just fine under CoX. Suddenly... that broke. Looked into it... they appear to have re-worked their video-card abilities detection routine, and this time it's far more dependant on a lot of registry results instead of just OpenGL capabilities strings.

Side effect? It breaks under all forms of Linux WINE out there. So you're stuck using the low-quality graphics framework that disables most features, if not the 'emergency fallback' framework that disables ALL features in the game.

Still appears to work flawlessly under Cider, the commercial closes-source WINE-based suite though. It appears they added some secret sauce that's been pre-coded into Cider but specifically breaks all the documented work-arounds for Linux. In fact, ALL of those workarounds now force you to the 'emergency fallback' graphics framework, while resetting all video-card options in WINE at least returns you to the low-quality framework. So... yeah, malicious coding at it's finest, it appears.0 commentsLeave a comment

02:16 pm - Well said!

Star Trek. Go see it. The director has balls big as planets.
- drewkitty

1+ comment(s)Leave a commentLink

12:40 pm - Okay... the SixAxis/DS3 is a lot more sane now...
...but I need a little help, I just can't find any good way to pre-process the accelerometer/gyroscope data from the thing. qdot, you have any math in your back pocket somewhere? Specifics:

10-bit X/Y/Z accelerometer, data returned unsigned. 4G range, centered on 512. Lowest 2-3 bits flicker madly at rest on a table.

10-bit gyroscope, no idea if that's the right term but it's what everything calls it. Indicates how much rotational velocity the controller has around the axis that goes straight up through the face of the controller if it's set down on a table. Unknown exact velocity mapping, approximately 180 degrees rotation in 0.9-1.1 seconds just barely pegs the meter. Clockwise is lower, counterclockwise is higher.

I'd like to return full six axis results, if it's possible from these values? If a reduced set of values is the best we can do, that's fine too. Right now I have the HID Descriptor coded for -128 to +127, if someone thinks raising the range is useful, I can and will.

Since the Linux-USB list ignored my e-mail asking if it was the appropriate place for HID discussion and if there was anything I should know to make this patch more likely to get accepted (likely due to my name not looking real enough, I'd imagine) I'll just drop a patch on them, see what they say then. But I'd like the patch to be damn high quality, so I don't want to screw up the accelerometer handling if I can avoid it. :-)5 commentsLeave a comment

02:38 am - Friggin' Sony... okay, screw trying to play nice. *CHAINSAW*
I've officially had it with how wonky the SixAxis is. It's returning multi-byte values in big-endian format it looks like, no wonder they didn't reveal the accelerometer data over the USB interface... they can't, since USB specifies little-endian data order. (Basically, all numbers are byte-swapped. 1 becomes 256, 256 becomes 1, 257 stays the same, etc.)

Previously, I was trying to 'play nice' and just modify Sony's HID Report Descriptor and continue using the existing parsing infrastructure in the HID stack, as all the other devices in the kernel currently do. At this point, screw that, I'm re-writing the HID Report Descriptor to something ultra compact and very sane to read instead of the 148-byte monolith of standards-breakage it is now, and just use the HID Report pre-filter hook to re-write the raw bytestream.

Now... to decide on an axis-ordering... comments, anyone? I'm trying to decide if I should just shove things in like this or not since from what I've seen the R3 stick is the least-used outside of L3+R3 specific games, so this layout would make it easiest to use the PS3 controller as a 'generic gamepad' in most games:

+ pad becomes X/Y
L3 stick becomes Rx/Ry
R3 stick becomes Z/Rz

In effect I'm trying to match up the results to the stereotypical Gravis USB Gamepad layout as far as possible.

And oddly, while the Linux Input stack supports buttons that return analog values ...well, many games don't like those because they're highly unexpected. =^.^= Makes for 'sticky button' symptoms, as many games just check 'are you 0?' for is a button pressed or not, and a button can 'last report' a 1 or 2 instead of a 0. I'll crowbar the values to 0 when the 'button' sensor says 0, as it's a proper way to reveal the functionality and will work for all instances as far as I can tell.

And I have to say, all this HID-hacking really gives me a lot more respect for the robust control-binding interface the MAME developers built. I used to wonder why they supported such complexity, now I'm realizing it's actually very capable, since it can support far more advanced control interfaces easilly than the typical '16 switch' gamepads most of us grew up with.2 commentsLeave a comment

02:25 pm - Well... the HID protocol is actually kinda nice.
Was able to make a small modification to the existing Sony-Quirks HID driver for Linux to replace the stock HID Report Descriptor (basically, the device describing it's own protocol format) with one that works a lot better for actual use. All the buttons that can, only report as analog now, the 5 digital-only buttons report in correctly as digital-only buttons, AND the accelerometer data is available though I have to tweak the HID Report Descriptor a bit more to make it work best still.

Next, tweak the cross-pad to show up as a single pair of axes instead of four, so it's more usable as a left/right and up/down input. Then just need to add some tunables to switch some inputs back to pure-digital, and look into some code to process the accelerometer and MEMS gyroscope into simpler translation/rotation inputs in the actual input driver itself.

Last will be getting rumble and LED-control working, but I'm already looking at having to actually retrofit the kernel HID drivers to support out-right replacement of the HID Report Descriptor instead of simple in-place modification. I'm not sure if that invasive of a change will fly or not...

Oh, and a quick link for anyone else curious about the actual HID protocol: The USB Implementers Forum's HID Development Page has a link to their HID Descriptor Tool, and above that links to all the various HID documents. HID's very easy to tinker with, I'm finding out.4 commentsLeave a comment

11:22 am - Well it's not perfect... but it works at least.
Not of THAT much use except perhaps to illustrate a simple PThread system with rudimentary triple-buffering, since I'll be rolling this information into some work I'm doing modifying the existing 'Sony Quirks' HID Driver for the Linux kernel to use a similair reporting metric instead of the '28 axis and 19 buttons, many of which either duplicate information or are ALWAYS zero' morass the stock controller returns.

Mind you, many games don't like applying an analog button to a digital action, but I find that to be their problem, not mine. Now to figure out how to report these axes mappings using the HID spec...

Last note, this is also an attempt at trying to apply both Literate Programming and the Linux Kernel Specs (which are remarkably similair to my own, and I understand the reasons for the differences and think they're better so I'll adopt them) so if anyone wants to glance over the code, feel free. The 'test.c' file was quite a bit more slapdash than the rest that I actually tried to polish up as much as I could, and the Makefile is so short and simple as to be ignorable.

PThreaded SixAxis HIDRAW interface kit0 commentsLeave a comment

09:50 pm - Finally found a decent game-controller for laptop use.

Amusingly, it's one of the Dual Shock 3's for a PS3, running cabled over USB for now until I find time to sort out why the Bluez stack is so braindumb when it comes to HID devices since 3.x. I understand making something depreciated, but when it's the version people still prefer to use because it Just Works I don't frankly care how much nicer the newer codebase is, if it still doesn't work for many things the older codebase did.

Upside? Learning how to add a patch to an ebuild via overlays on Gentoo at least.

Tinkering with the actual device, I'm running into another oddity... the HID reports the device is sending back have all the information in them such as the accelerometer and gyroscope measurements, but ARGH the main input-device results are almost unusable they're so cluttered, having an axis AND a button-event for the majority of the inputs on the device. =-.-=

Is it wrong that I've written (in the last 60 minutes) a POSIX-threaded triple-buffered and fully asynchronous framework for dealing with the HIDRAW values for this device? I'm not sure if it's just a coding-toy for myself, or if I want to look into actually making this into an actual userspace joystick driver to better support the PS3 controllers akin to the XBoxDrv system. I'm leaning more towards the latter, and I'm wondering if I should expose the accelerometers in their naked XYZR, or pre-process into something like yaw, pitch, and roll.

Though I am happy that the core monitoring routine for the device is just a poll() call, minimal 'did we get a full report?' test, and a decode followed by a lock/update/unlock. The actual mutex-locked update is only 'copy two pointers' so it's vert fine-grained, and the client-side update routine is also the lock/update/unlock sequence. The naked decode routine can be used if needed, as well.

7 commentsLeave a comment

11:35 pm - Thoughts on hex-grid movement...

...since I'm working on retrofitting a vector-based movement system to an old FASA game (Interceptor) I've realized a few traits I didn't realize before until I tested them via brute-force to verify things to myself.

When you sum things up in a vector-movement system as applied to a hex grid, there's two basic mergers that let you quickly simplify things down to a single pair of vectors that will always be on neighboring sides of the movement hex. I.E. A single fixed line on a 360-degree circle, common sense but neat on how things simplify down.

First, a hex grid to work with:

    __
 __/#W\__
/#A\__/#E\
\__/  \__/
/#Z\__/#D\
\__/#X\__/
   \__/

Yes, I'm being a bit lazy on the labelling, deal. Long story short:

• 1 #A + 1 #E = 1 #W.
• 1 #W + 1 #X = 0.

Yes, it's minor, but I felt like sharing. Oh, and interceptor critical-hit sheets if you want good-quality scans, and the live WIP for the by-hand re-building I'm making of the sheets into pure PostScript to be made into PDF's eventually.

4 commentsLeave a comment

07:38 am - The only funeral I've ever been to was one I had no business at...
...but all the funerals I belong to, I've been unable to reach.

My grandfather.
My best friend.
One of my guiding lights.

And yet, this time... as I sat at my house watching my world encased in undrivably-bad late-season snow that never got plowed, realizing I couldn't make it to yet another funeral that was truly important in my life... I was at peace. A band I'd never heard before trickled the only song I know of that could compete with Believe by Savatage for a song of pure, sorrowful redemption...

Thank you, VNV Nation. Beloved... Believe... I have so many ideas flowing in my heart and soul every time I listen to either of these songs.

And no, I don't know why I'm posting this... just... overly thoughtful tonight.0 commentsLeave a comment

06:29 am - Notes for my own benefit mostly...
( ...possible AMC Eagle w/ Jeep 4.0l build details. Since I can't make it to Furp's funeral, I'll tinker with this stuff instead. )0 commentsLeave a comment

08:57 pm - I... still have a hard time believing he's gone.
Farewell, Furp. I've known you almost as long as I've been in the fandom, off-and-on as is my way in life... you always were there when others needed you, including me. And you were, in many ways, why I tried so hard to find those that didn't like me, to try to find out why so I could hopefully change myself for the better.

0:00 - Victory, Not Vengeance Nation - Beloved (6.8MB MP3)
1:09	It's colder than before...
1:13	The seasons took all they had come for...
1:18	Now Winter dances here.
1:21	It seems so fitting, don't you think?
1:24	To dress the ground in white... and gray.
1:30
1:35	It's so quiet, I can hear...
1:40	My thoughts touching every second, that I spent...
1:45	Waiting for you...
1:50	Circumstances afford me, no second chance to tell you...
1:55	How much I've missed you.
1:57
2:02	My Beloved, do you know?
2:05	When the warm wind comes again,
2:09	Another year will start to pass.
2:12
2:16	And please don't ask me why I'm here...
2:20	Something deeper brought me, than a need to remember.
2:25
2:29	We were once young and blessed with wings.
2:34	No heights could keep us from their reach.
2:37	No sacred place we did not soar...
2:40
2:43	Still great things burned within us!
2:47	I don't regret the choices that I made.
2:50	I know you feel the same...
2:53
2:57	My Beloved, do you know?
3:00	How many times I stared at clouds;
3:04	Thinking that I saw you there...
3:07
3:10	These are feelings that do not pass so easilly.
3:16	I can't forget, what we claimed as ours...
3:20
3:54	Moments lost and time remains!
3:57	I am still proud of what we were!
4:01	No pain remains, no feeling...
4:05	Eternity awaits!
4:07	Grant me wings that I might fly,
4:11	My restless soul is longing...
4:15	No pain remains, no feeling...
4:18	Eternity awaits!

I'm sorry, I just couldn't transcribe any more of the lyrics at this point... Enjoy the song though, I hope.10 commentsLeave a comment

05:20 pm - Also... VPNs are officially a pain in the ass under 64-bit.
After trying in vain for a couple months to get the VPN to work's Cisco 5500 working under Gentoo, I had a reason to nuke-and-pave my install. So I decided to try Ubuntu since I'd heard it 'just works' there. That part was, mercifully at least, true. And yes, installing packages in seconds instead of minutes was nice to be able to just dump thirty packages.

But I've had to manually tweak and repair more files under Ubuntu 8.10 to correct fuck-ups by Ubuntu's updater, and even had it corrupt my filesystem just using the reboot menu option, that I officially don't trust it any further than I can throw it. Get back here, Gentoo! Time to just knuckle down and set up a proper CHRooted 32-bit and no-multilib 64-bit install this time... *starts backing up all the Steam games to avoid re-downloading them for once*5 commentsLeave a comment

04:41 pm - Widescreen... so much promise. Unfulfilled, that is.
Anyone else out there with a widescreen display wish there was better two-page-layout support out there, both for webcomics and PDF readers outside of Windows?

And that's just one gripe. As a game-developer, how do you handle both widescreen, and tallscreen? Do you always lock their FOV to the vertical and short-change tall-screen (1280x1024) users? Or the horizontal and short-change wide-screen users? Or do you automatically give them the FOV that'll guarantee that non-4:3 users get an advantage over 4:3 users? And how do you include support for Triple-Head gaming, something a lot more gamers are playing with again? Now... combine Triple-Head with wide-screen or tall-screen gaming! Feel your head exploding yet? =^.^=

So, beyond the griping so there's something to discuss, how would you think it best to handle three-screen gaming? We'll assume all three screens match at least, but this re-inforces the whole 'field of view' problem.

Do you slice off the top and bottom so the middle screen can keep a 90-degree field-of-view if they're using widescreen monitors?

Do you end up providing a 318-degree or 330-degree instead of a 270-degree view?

If you supported >90 degree field-of-view before (TF2 supports up to 110 IIRC), do you cap it for triple-head view or allow them to see 363 degrees around themselves? Yes, more than a full circle.

The 'industry standard' right now appears to be 'calculate the vertical FOV from the given horizontal FOV as if the screen was a 4:3 monitor, then use that across the rendering area' which is relatively simple, but runs into the above issues when you hit triple-head-land, and admitedly short-changes the 1280x1024 users. There's just no 'good' answer, sadly, I'm afraid. :-/2 commentsLeave a comment

08:34 pm - Stimulus? Well I've got $1500 of it right here...
...going right over there... and circling around for a year or two. It might turn into a fursuit in time for FC in 2011, at worst I'm hoping 2012. More once I get the concept art back, that'll be a month or so, since like usual in my life I'm taking my bloody sweet time with things.

So far patience in my life has pretty much always been rewarded though. So yay! Fullsuit, ahoy!14 commentsLeave a comment

12:11 am - Ooh... okay, 2009 is already shaping up to be AWESOME!
Turns out there's now a local Capoeira group in Kansas City! They meet three days a week on the Missouri side, and on Saturdays on the Kansas Side, at a time schedule that's actually quite compatable with my work schedule. =O.o=2 commentsLeave a comment

04:35 pm - Blearg! First time I know of that I've caught ConCrud this badly.
I was bad enough that my roommates took my phone and car keys away, to guarantee I wouldn't go into work, and one of them that worked at the same company went in instead after calling my boss for me. So... yeah, +1 Delerius for a'while there, still feeling blearg now though. Didn't feel bad at all until I got home from work yesterday, suddenly BLAM, I'm toast.

Upside - got my taxes done. Well, federal is punted off. I'm doing the state by hand since it's a pitance and I refuse to pay $30 just to get a $80-100 return faster, compared to my $1300+300 federal return + stimulus check.

All of which is going for a down-payment on a fursuit, hopefully a quadruped by BeastCub. If not, I'm not sure who I'll go with. Now... to get a duct tape dummy assembled. And once I have my tax-return in hand I should have another $1.5k in the bank, so I'll have the entire cost of the fursuit saved at that point in spades I think. Complicated part, need to find out if it's possible or if BeastCub would even be willing to attempt a cross-purpose bodysuit and build both a quadrupedal and bipedal set of arms/heads. Or even if she'd rather just build the forearm braces and let someone else build the actual suit for that matter, especially since I saw quite a few very awesome avian fursuits at FC this year so I'm not sure who I'd want to go work now.

So... who among my wide and varied friends list would be willing to tackle a fursuit/quadsuit combo based on BeastCub's braces, some time before next FC? I'm budgetting $3k for this, is that about right? If nobody, I'll poke BeastCub directly once I have cash in hand/bank.

Now to wait for wolf_nymph to get back to me about doing the concept art, since the only thing I'm dead-set on is having her do that part because of how wonderfully she's able to blend avian & canine forms nicely, especially for the head, and she seemed jazzed about the idea when I spoke with her briefly at FC. So the earliest I could get this actually done is all the way in like... June/July anyways, if I recall the schedule she mentioned.24 commentsLeave a comment

04:59 am - Dealers Den Pizza Delivery, Part 2...
Well either everyone out there shares my odd dislike of pepperoni, or they didn't read the poll and thought the toppings picked were what I'm going to get. *laughs*

Okay... so, it looks like a pork-sausage pizza, a mushroom pizza, and a plain cheese are my best bets, combining that poll with my experience of what gets hoovered up at the pizza feed at RCFM that I help organize and run each year.

And for soda's... case each of 7-Up (normal and diet), Sprite (normal and diet), Coke, Pepsi, and I'll splurge on a keg of Virgil's Root Beer. So... about $45-50 on soda's, and about $100 on the pizza's sounds about right to pseudo-surprise the dealers den. Just have to vet it with Ops and what-not at the con first, I don't think it'll be an issue at all though beyond verifying how we can notify the artists without getting in trouble with the hotel. Since it won't be open to the public, only the registered artists, I think it'll be fine.0 commentsLeave a comment

10:33 pm - So... FC...

...at one previous con before I've done this, and I'm trying to figure out if it'd still be appreciated, and seperately if it'd be best to do this on Saturday, or Friday afternoon?

Head out to The Pizza Box and pick up 3-4 of their Uncle Sam enormous pizza's to deliver them approximately when the dealer's den closes. To the dealers den, specifically for the dealers den folks.

Cost is something I can afford by myself, but I'm wondering:

• Should I?
• Safe toppings!
• Favored toppings.
• Help on drinks?!? I have no idea what to get to go along with. =-.-=
• Or do a lot of artists just hate pizza?

( Poll inside! Table-sitters especially, please vote! )0 commentsLeave a comment

09:15 am - Okay... not only did he land it...
...he landed it so gently even after sinking and washing 4.5 miles downriver one of the two engines is still attached to the jet.

That, right there. Call him what you will, I want to be able to have as many pilots call him teacher as is humanly, and more importantly humanely, possible.13 commentsLeave a comment

11:21 am - FC Preperations are a go...
Airline ticket? Check.
Hotel room? Check.
Slim-line Air/Car/AC charger for laptop? Check.
Power-splitter accessory for slim charger and phone tip? Check.
Extremely over-engineered bag? OhMyGawdCheck...

And seriously... when I can honestly think, "Damn... these secondary removable straps actually do make pretty good belts," and am considering wearing one to work as such because the damn belt by itself just oozes indestructable? Wow. This is at an apex of one of those multi-value triangular things, pegged way the hell over in durable and adaptable with no care for being sleek, it's the type of chunky that someone that drives a Jeep would love. And I'm not kidding, the secondary removable straps are better built than some purpose-built belts I've bought from stores before. My only complaint now is that the secondary detachable bag doesn't have it's own dedicated cell-phone holster anywhere on it for when I wear it without the main bag, which feels a bit like saying the sky isn't quite a green enough shade of blue for my liking.

Still, it looks like I'll have... one bag on my trip to FC. Big-ass shoulder bag, laptop in one half, clothes for the trip in the other half, and roll on through.6 commentsLeave a comment

10:59 pm - Going to make a late new years resolution.
I knew I couldn't find the time before FC to start this, but I'm going to get off my ass about this starting Feb. 1st with whatever I create while on my FC vacation and immediately afterwards. I'll post details as to where the results will be later.

60 minutes spent being creative, every day. Results to be posted at least twice a month. Maybe stories, maybe pencil/pen stuff, maybe even just old-fashioned pixel or ASCII/ANSI art, at least at first this is a goal of building up my creativity, and try various forms of artistic expression. I just want to _create_ but every time I sit down to do so... I feel like I'm grasping at straws and never getting a good grip because some switch in my brain is jammed.0 commentsLeave a comment

10:02 am - And the most amazing christmas gift of all...
...is a matching set of 16" x 12" x 9" 'Briefcase' and matching 6" x 8" pouch in a lovely chestnut color.

The former is about the same size as the 'laptop bag' I've been carrying, albeit much deeper, but much better layed out for my purposes as well. If/when I get the dock for my laptop, I'll be able to stuff the whole kit-and-kaboodle into this bag without fear. The latter is about the same size as the 'daily carry' pouch I already had, but thinner and also better dimensions for daily use for my purposes. And it clips onto the side of the main bag so it'll only count as one carry-on for airline travel.

Saddleback Leather may hype themselves up a fair bit, but this ended up being about what I figured I may have to pay to have a bag constructed to my specs, and it's around the same dimensions I was planning to get regardless. So... thanks batnwolfMom!1 commentLeave a comment

08:30 am - How to disable blinking and 9-pixel fonts on the Linux console.

I'm a long-time text-mode console user, from DOS 2.11 on my Tandy 1000EX all the way until now. One of my pet peeves with most VGA adapters has always been that they transparently upgrade (and I use the term loosely) the standard 8-pixel font to 9 pixels by leaving the 9th column effectively zero, except for a narrow range of characters.

This makes a lot of the custom fonts from the DOS days or old text-mode UI's not display very well, due to this one column being pixel-doubled, and some of the fonts from back then are very readable while looking much cleaner than the default font, especially on laptops. It also makes a lot of the ANSI/ASCII-art available out there look like crap.

Another annoyance I've had for ages is blink. I've basically never seen it put to good use, and disabling it has an interesting side-effect: It allows 'bright' or 'high-intensity' background colours in text-mode. This allows for such simple niceties as black text on a bright-white console without the entire console looking washed-out because it won't go above a light gray. Or it just disables blink if you're like me and you dislike things like that.

Well, the old-fashioned method of stuffing a half-dozen port IO commands simply doesn't work under newer 64-bit distributions of Linux, even if the hardware supports them. So... I coded up a simple combination tool that displays the entire in-memory font, disables blink, and sets the font-width to 8 pixels wide. I'll admit I've only tested it on my ThinkPad T61p, but that has an modern 8-series NVidia card in it so if this still supports these IO's just about everything should.

( Source code. Warning, requires root to run! )0 commentsLeave a comment

07:47 pm - Okay... first we get all paranoid about the solder... now this?!?
Go here, read some real facts about CPSIA.

Enjoy games and stuff from Europe? Kiss some of it goodbye.

Enjoy telescopes or microscopes? Some are already bailing on the market for specific parts like the only maker of spare light-bulbs for numerous models of microscopes.

Enjoy reading books? Amazon is already poking their vendors to cough up the certifications. For books.

Build a toy from wood you bought at Home Depot? Guess what, that needs to be tested too before you can sell it at a craft fair. And it doesn't matter if you claim it's not for kids or for decoration only, if it happens to look like a rocking-horse small enough for a kid to ride, the law applies.

This... it's just plain nuts.5 commentsLeave a comment

12:22 am - I guess I really don't fit in, here on the ground...
...of all the roller coasters I've ever been on, none did I love more than the beat-up, forgotten little monster known for my whole life as Flashback, at Six Flags Magic Mountain.

A bit of backstory, for those just tuning in. Flashback was not the usual 'loping' coaster, as I refer to them. (Screw the normal coaster-fanatic lingo, I don't like it.) Most sent you up a hill, romping around for a'while, sprawling out all over creation.

Flashback was 1900 feet of track, in a space less than 200 feet long and around 50 feet wide. Intense barely begins to describe it, but it's not the "scare you" intense many coasters today go for. Neither was it intense in the G-forces it subjected you to.

It was intensely intimate in my opinion, diving swoop after diving swoop that felt like one was flying. It's barely a minute long, but in later years it was often so uncrowded I (personally) got to ride on it without having to get off the ride three times in a row... and looked forward to doing so again some time next summer when I hoped to take a long vacation and drive out to California to visit my family out there.

It's been demolished.5 commentsLeave a comment

06:27 pm - *ping* lizkay and suzidragonlady
I just found out the card I sent didn't get there! It wasn't anything special or custom like the absolutely wonderful pair I got from you both, but I'll be trying to arrange to get something out to you by New Years at this point at least. I did get the holiday cards you sent to me though, thank you so much!

Wieder einmal, meine Entschuldigung für die Verzögerung.1 commentLeave a comment

04:42 am - Wow, the Linux ACPI interface is kinda half-borked.
( Technical rambling ahead. )1 commentLeave a comment

01:51 am - So... yeah... I'm addicted to multi-monitor usage now.

Current work layout is generally quad-head at this point, the two 22" 1680x1050 screens from my company workstation, another of the same driven by my laptop, and my laptop's internal screen, those two VPNing in from inside the building over the DMZ wireless link; initially over my cellphone tethered over bluetooth.

I'm enjoying it enough I started to seriously consider buying the advanced dock for my laptop for home use, then I re-checked my old figures... and my jaw proceeded to hit the floor. Undocumented features of the T61p model:

• The DVI port on the Advanced Dock supports DVI-DL on this video chipset
• This video chipset supports 1xDVI-DL to 2xDVI-D splitter cables to drive two screens
• This video chipset supports single video modes up to 8192x8192, most cap at 4096x4096
• This means the Matrox 1xDVI-DL to 3xDVI-D splitter boxes could be used with 3x1680x1050

So... um... in theory if I do get the advanced dock, and the $180 video card with the same exact chipset as my on-board video chipset and 2xDVI-DL ports, my laptop could drive a six-screen configuration by itself. And that's before considering trying to hunt down Matrox 1xDVI-DL to 3xDVI-D converter boxes. And said dock works with the next (current) generation of ThinkPad's as well, though I'd possibly have to swap video cards depending on what's on-board 3 years from now.

Or I can just say 'forget all that' and buy the mini-dock for $150 or so, and 'settle' for only 3 screens. =^.^= That's definately the more sensible choice... but this really puts into perspective just what a $3500 'portable workstation' laptop is capable of, even if I scored mine for only around $2500 with almost a better warranty than my car has.

6 commentsLeave a comment

10:20 pm - Wow... 10 years already?
If you haven't played Half Life 1, or any of the multitude of mods and user-made content for it... It's $0.98 right now. Yes, a buck.2 commentsLeave a comment

10:31 pm - And for anyone that's tried to contact me in the last week...
...just know that I am out of fingers on one hand for the number of times I've had a fever of 106F or higher in my life now. I was on my ass from approximately November 10th, 22:00 until today.

( WAY Too Much Information. )

Then began the next 48 hours of gulping down water, then inching back up to 7-up, then V8, then some plain boiled rice noodles, then finally some plain pasta noodles with a tablespoon of olive oil and sprinkle of parmesan and mint, and some Activa for desert, etc. Been there before, I know the drill and my preferred route. Still farting toxic purple clouds of sewer gas, but that'll take a week or so to clear unfortunately.8 commentsLeave a comment

12:49 am - Proof even my taste in alchohol's is strange...
...I never realized how strange most find my preferred 'alchoholic' drink of choice, and figured I'd both share it, and ask others what wierd mixed drinks or combinations of food they enjoy and were surprised others found wierd?

Mine? A tot of 2 or 3 parts plain Vodka, 1 part balsamic vinegar, served neat, meaning room-temperature.

It can take some hunting for just the right pair of vinegar and vodka, but the desired result is a bone-deep warmth just above the back of the throat almost immediately, no bitterness left from the balsamic. I'll admit the description is likely very poor by actual drinker's or connoisseur's standards, as I don't partake enough to appreciate or know the lingo myself very well.

A fancier version is known as the balsamic vinegar martini but I'm generally not willing to go through that much trouble just to make myself a quick drink.9 commentsLeave a comment