Posted 4:24 PM by Tim
I promised more, and so there is.

Over the holiday, I organized a little tourney. 8 people from the Midland area showed up including Wayne and me. We had removed ourselves from eligibility for the prizes, but played anyway. It wouldn't have been sanctionable, since I played as well as judged. In the end, Wayne came in first, undefeated through the day, and I came in second, losing only to Wayne. A great showing for our decks, other than the fact that our opponents were seriously outmatched.

The local store (there's only one out there) managed to pony some small prizes, and we all dropped by the place after the tourney. The store is small. Really small. Fitting Wayne, my brother-in-law, the store owners, their son, and me into the place was pretty tight. Add in the other 5 tourney players and it's really crowded. I played a game against the store kid and beat him handily, and picked up a few cards. Most of the stuff there is a good prize. Some of it is way overboard, and some is far below what I'd expect. It's the only place I know that has 50+ Rancor though.

I tried to get a game fo D&D going over the weekend too. I had meant for the game to run over two days or so, but that never materialized. We managed to play about 2 hours or so before calling the game to go to the movies. We saw The Two Towers, which was really good. I loved the huge battle scene animations, and I have to wonder how many times they needed to run the shots before they found one that they liked. It'd be cool to learn a little more about the program that they used to come up with the huge battles.

Posted 11:26 PM by Tim
I've made several attempts at posting lately. All eaten by Blogger.

To sum up: Went to the in-laws for Christmas (well, Boxing Day). Organized and played in a tourney, and basically got along alright. Tried to get a D&D game off the ground and managed to get in about 2 hours of play before calling it to go see Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers.

More tomorrow.

Posted 9:09 AM by Tim
I just got an email from a friend of mine. While I love getting emails, it's the kind of email that annoys me. It was a wonderful dire warning about Hotmail shutting down. Of course, it was a massive chain letter, and not a real warning. Allow me to present a bit of a public service announcement on my own behalf:

Chain letters are not legitimate forms of communication. Especially for warnings, etc.

Most of the chain mail that I get is of the "warning" variety. The rest tends to be of the "promotion" variety. The warning kind usually says something like, "Hotmail is shutting down!" The message usually includes some official-like blurb about the many new sign-ups, and a lack of resources. I'll cut and paste for emphasis (edited to make it more readable):

----

{snipped around three pages of forward lists}

READ THE PARAGRAPH IF YOU WANT TO KEEP YOUR HOTMAIL ACCOUNT!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Dear Hotmail User,

Because of the sudden rush of people signing up to Hotmail,it has come to our attention that we are vastly running out of resources. So, within a month's time, anyone who does not receive this email with the exact subject heading, will be deleted off our server.Please forward this email so that we know you are still using this account.

WARNING WARNING

We want to find out which users are actually using their Hotmail accounts. So if you are using your account, please pass this e-mail to every Hotmail user that you can and if you do not pass this letter to anyone we will delete your account.

From Mr. Jon Henerd

Hotmail Admin. Dept.


Our hotmail system is getting to crowded!! We need you to forward this to at least 20 people. I know this seems like a large number, but we need to find out who is really using their account. If you do not send this to at least 10 Hotmail members, we will delete your account. Sorry for this inconvenience.

Sincerely, Director of Hotmail Services

Aaron Lopez

Please do this! Some of my friends have already gotten deleted and you aren't allowed to send it back to the person who sent this email to you!!!

----

There's a couple of things that should tip you off that this isn't a legitimate email, and that's without even reading the email. The subject line of the email had smilies in it. They were frowny faces, but I don't think that a lot of business mail uses them - even in email. The mail came to be via a forward (lots of them), and not directly from Hotmail. Which seems like a pretty odd way of trying to do business with your customers.

Reading the email you'll note that there are several really bad vocabulary uses. Like, "we are vastly running out of resources," which is almost funny. "Quickly running out" is a much better wording, and correct. The notion that Hotmail is running low on resources is also pretty absurd. Hotmail is owned, funded and fronted by Microsoft. It's the public's major stopping point for them. If it turfed, there would be a lot of upset people. The idea that Hotmail can't tell who's using it's services is pretty silly too, and shows a lack of understanding about how this "intarnet-thingy" really works. There are a lot of systems that are out in the real world that can't tell you who (or how much) a service is being used, but Hotmail (and most of the internet, really) isn't one of them.

The message of the letter is pretty off too. They're crowded, so they want to keep only the people actually using the service. They want you to send the message out for them though. I guess they're too busy trying to find more resources? You have to send it to 20 people, none of which can be the person who sent you this email. Well, 10, if you haven't got 20 friends. And if you don't receive this email (or was that, send this email?), you're going to have your account deleted. After all, they're tracking this email around, even though they don't know who's using Hotmail.

These things just bother me.

Posted 12:59 PM by Tim
Wayne went to see Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers last night. He's itching to go see it again. I must admit that I rarely watch a movie in a theatre, much less, twice. There have been a few notable exceptions. The first Lord of the Rings was one of them. I think I'm going to try to finagel a viewing with Brenda at the end of this week.

Posted 8:26 AM by Tim
Gahr. I'm still slightly sick. It's working it's way out of my system.

I suppose it's time that I mentioned Christmas. It's only 8 days away!! I haven't done any shopping yet. Poor me. No car means that getting to the mall isn't easy. I intended to do some shopping last weekend, but the illness got me, and I didn't do much of anything. I'd go shopping this week, but getting the car can be difficult. I'm going to try to get it tomorrow if I can. As I said, I have everyone to buy for still. The malls are going to be the death of me.

Posted 8:46 AM by Tim
I'm sick.

I hate being sick. Most of the time, I can shrug off an illness. I can just keep working through it, but now and then I catch a real cold of flu or something. That's when I have problems. I've got some kind of nasty flu right now, with all the amenities. I'm not liking this at all, of course. There's nothing that can be done for it, other than rest and fluids. That's pretty much the deal with any illness.

I'm having trouble with both of those though. The rest bit is bad because I'm just not able to get any sleep. I have to go to the bathroom every 20 minutes or so. That doesn't leave a lot of time for sleeping. Fluids are nice, but every bit of food irritates my stomach, and that's just not good. So everything is being taken slowly today. I'm moving slow, and trying to drink slow, and just doing everything slowly.

I think I'm going to take a three hour long shower now.

Posted 9:47 AM by Tim
I just took a look at the archives for the blog. The first post was November 1, 2001. That means that I had my one year anniversary over a month ago! (45 days past, really). Happy late anniversary to me.

I started the blog simply because I could. And that's led me to do several other things just because I could. Like the NaNoWriMo thing, or several other things that I can't quite recall now. Trust me, they're there, in the past somewhere. Well, despite being late, here's to another year of senseless rambling.

Posted 2:56 PM by Tim
Some days I like being houseDad. Other days I really, really don't. Today is one of the "not liking it" days. I overslept today, which automatically makes the day run late. I had to yell at the girls (rather loudly too) to get them to do the simplest things. We've been in a rush everywhere. I forgot what time they needed to go back to school this afternoon (I figured it out), and as a bit of a topper, I'm swamped in housework and my daughter is playing "guilt the busy daddy."

For those who don't know, the guit game goes like this. Find some activity that requires 2 people. Insist on playing it. Play a nice game of it. Daddy goes to do some housework. Play a halfhearted game by yourself until you get bored (about 1.2 seconds). Whine about lack of daddy. Say fun phrases like "nobody wants to play with me," "nobody loves me," and the classic, "too bad you're not playing because the game is over." Do this until daddy freaks out and yells at you.

I'm not sure why my youngest daughter doesn't play well on her own. Maybe it's because she's always had the older sister to play with? Anyhow, there's very few activities that she's able to do happily on her own. Which really sucks for me, because I already find my day far too short to get anything meaningful accomplished.

Posted 3:18 PM by Tim
I've been trying to get this place clean today. It's not going very well. First, we've got a lot of junk, and second, it's everywhere. Organizing even one room leads me into a number of other rooms, carrying things that should have been in there already, and taking things out of there that should have been in the other room.

Whenever Brenda cleans a room, you can see that it's cleaner. Whenever I do it, the room never looks any better, and all the rooms around it look worse.

Posted 11:28 AM by Tim
How to make money from home.

1. I have no idea.

Thanks for coming!

No seriously. It's been the main idle thought lately (next to the editing), and I really have no idea. I've broken it down into a few categories though.

1. Make something and sell it.
2. Get contract work that can be done from home.
3. Prostitution/Porn. (This is really a subset of #1)
4. Get a job.
5. Sell drugs (another subset of #1)
6. Magic.

I really like #6. Not just because it could stand for practicing enough to win money on the pro tour, but also that it means sitting at home while checks come from the ether somewhere while I sit on the couch and watch anime. You know, MLM, or running some kind of mail scam. But that means moving a lot.

#4 isn't really practical, because it means that I'm not at home most of the time.

Both #3 and #5 are subsets of #1. Make something and sell it. While making drugs and/or porn isn't that hard, I don't think I want to go that way. Neither make me a great role model for others, eh? So, I'm left with the things that I can do at the house. Right now, that's going to be writing, programming, crochet, sewing or such. Not a lot that really sells.

Writing and programming are both also in #2. Home contracts. I'd love to get one, but they're not easy. The problem is that I'm an unknown variable right now. Nobody knows what I can do, and I don't have a lot of references. Getting a few references isn't too hard - if you're willing to work for free, or are very connected. I'm not that connected out here, and I don't know any place looking to give me work for free. I've got a reasonable idea what to do for programming, but not for writing. I suppose that I'm supposed to write something and submit it, but I don't know how to do that. I'm not even sure where to get started. I did read about a novel prize thingy, and I think I'll probably look for more of those to try to submit the novel once it's finished with editing.

I really wish I knew what I was doing.

Posted 11:24 AM by Tim
Well, the weekend was nice. We went to see the in-laws and I 'discovered' a new card shop. A little mom-and-pop organization near the in-laws. Nice people, but the store is really small. That's not terrible, but it does mean that they aren't going to be having any tournaments in the near future. They barely had space for a little card table in there, but it was in use the whole time I was there.

The son of the mom who was running the joint was there. I hadn't brought a deck, so he loaned me one of his. A big fatty vampire deck with an average casting cost of about 5, I think. Pitted it against his burn deck, which neatly included Furnace of Wrath. Lotta big burn real quick. Surprisingly, it went 2-1 against the burn. I swapped over to another deck he had and wished I had kept the vamps.

I figure that if I were in the location, that store (it being the only one around), would be like a second home to me. Dunno what else I'd do with myself on the weekends.

Sunday saw me back in KW for the VTES games. Met several nice people and managed to have one game. Unfortunately, I managed to take the table, ousting 3 other players myself. The last guy and I split the last point, meaning the table went 3.5 and 0.5 points. That's not a bad showing really. I thought about the game afterward and noticed that I probably wasn't being aggressive enough at the end, focusing too much on ousting the others and not on getting a few solid hits in against my predator. No issues. Just something to think about for the next game.

I've been doing some editing on the novel still. I'm finding that the average rate of editing is about 1 page per day. There are 100+ pages, so I'm looking at about 3 months of slow editing. If I pick up the pace a little, I can probably have the thing edited by mid January. Gah. It's only the first edit too. After the edit, I'll need people to read it critically and point out anything that's confusing, strangely worded or that doesn't read well. Maybe I'll submit it to a publisher or something.

Posted 11:10 AM by Tim
Tonight is the TGIO meeting for NaNoWriMo for the KW writers. I'm really looking forward to it.

Tonight, tomorrow and all this weekend is going to be pretty rushed. Parent-teacher meetings, the TGIO meeting, a visit with the in-laws, a VTES game and more. Should be pretty crazy overall. But, it should be nice. I think I'll take the novel along with me to get in a little editing during the quiet parts of the evenings. If we have any quiet parts.

Posted 8:02 PM by Tim
So. There is a lot of lost time in my life now.

Little bits of time fall by the wayside far too often lately. When I went to work, I had to maximize the time I was at home in order to get anything accomplished. I didn't have a lot of open leisure time, but I did have a little bit of time here and there. Now that I'm not working, I have a lot of time that seems to go towards leisure. I'm just not allocating it very efficiently.

I've tried to find a way to make better use of the time that I have, but so far it hasn't been working out very well.