The USS Quad Damage

Migrating to a new site has some distinct issues, one of which is that google hasn’t indexed it yet. It’s only been a recent occurrence that googling for the USS Quad Damage will lead you to our new site. As such, we haven’t been enciting any search terms… at all…

This means I don’t have entertaining info on the shady types who’ve been browsing our content. No more “Kari Byron 3D Ass” to laugh at as a silly search term. Nope, only our faithful 10 or so readers are here every day, including us 5 (that is, if any of us actually visits).

A part of me thinks it’s the flaky rails that’s causing it, but I haven’t seen any “Application Error” messages in a while now. It’d be nice to know how to stop that from happening completely. I didn’t want to start paying for a website just to have it work less well than the free one. Anyway, hopefully it’ll all be good, and the new search terms will come flying in soon. For anyone new that enters, Welcome! We have all the Kari Byron 3D ass you can handle!

I got F-Spot just recently. F-Spot is a photo manager for Gnome (which is an operating system on the loonix platform I hear). I got talked at by a person who told me to organise my photos, and he talked about how great Photoshop elements is. I then got talked at again (can you believe it?) being told how great iPhoto is. I asked if the “i” was for “idiot”...

I got talked at by a guy at Sun about how there’s no applications on mono (which is the .NET framework for loonix) but F-Spot is, and so is Beagle, and they’re both the roxor, except they is crash all the times. I’m gonna stop typing like that now.

I like how F-Spot is a double pun on G-Spot, and F-Stop!

PingMag has been an on-again, off again website for me. Sometimes it has these excellent articles on design, like this one on storyboard design. Other times, it’s just got dumb crap you don’t want to read. Most of all, though, it’s yet another website that one must visit, and I’m not even remotely through the gamasutra articles…

It’s episide 10 in season 10 and was aired in the USA on the 25th of October.

He’s an article on it called “South Park lampoons Irwin death”.

Don’t let the title fool you. Whom ever wrote the article devoted almost 3/4 of it’s text to Bindi Erwins new DVD. Now thats journalistic integrity!

If you like coping and pasting it’s very simple to create two complete articles by simply skipping the few words used to link the two amalgamated articles as well as adding a full stop.

Follow these five step by step instructions if you don’t know how.

Step one copy “SOUTH Park’s creators have made a cartoon poking fun at Crocodile Hunter Steve Irwin’s death” from the bald introduction paragraph and place a full stop after it.

Step two copy paragraphs 2 (the first one after the bald paragraph) to 6 and paragraphs 16-17.

Step three create a new document for the Bindi DVD

Step four copy “Bindi prepares to launch a fitness DVD “taking the bite out of obesity”.” from the bald intro paragraph.

Step five copy all of paragraphs 7-15 and 18-23. with the exception of “The timing could not be worse after ” at the beginning of paragraph 7.

I’ve known for a while about Dancer in the Dark, a sort-of musical starring Bjork. The interesting thing about it originally (for me) was that:

1. It was regarded as actually being a good movie (ie: with a good performance by Bjork, despite the fact that she’s not remotely an actor;
2. The only reason that she agreed to do the film is if she could sing the songs; and
3. The guy who directed the movie absolutely hated her.

I’ve wanted (mildly) to watch this movie just because of that. I don’t care about the story or anything as such, but it’s made under such strange circumstances with such a weird lead actor that it becomes an interesting story. Tonight, while watching “At the Movies with Dave & Margaret”, I saw a little montage reel where they celebrate 20 years on television. This is pretty neat in itself, and probably worth a post where I discuss how everything they both say ever should be written down for easy searchability. Hell, they’re getting old now, so I’d like to be able to generate some sort of “bible” with regards to movies when they die, so I can say “what would Dave and Margaret have thought about this movie”, or “WWDAMHTATM”.

Anyway, I found something interesting regarding “Dancer in the Dark”. Dave gave it a 0, where Margaret gave it a 5! I believe it’s possibly the only instance on the show where their opinions have differed this much. Hell, it’s the maximum possible dynamic range for their opinions. Generally the difference between the movies is about 1 star, possibly 2 if they really argue about it, but this is an entire 5 stars out of 5!

I thought “Wow, I’ve gotta see that movie!”

Now I can blog using drivel, which is a blogging program in gnome. This implies quick and immediate blogging from me. Now you can expect up to the second information about my current state of mind.

... current mood… apprehension!

Broadcatching is a word I learnt of recently when I found out about the vehemently named “democracy player”. The player is quite cool (except that it, too, is written in python), and so is the idea. Being able to get videos at the click of a button is a good thing.

I’m an idiot. I forgot to add Tim to the list of users, which means when I migrated from blogger, all his articles got attributed to me. Hopefully there’s a way to change the author of an article so I can re-attribute them to him. Luckily, he’s only posted on here about 3 times over the course of the 3 or so years we’ve been blogging, so it shouldn’t be too much of a hassle. In the meanstwhile, you won’t be able to get posts by Tim (well, you will, but it’ll seem like I posted em).

Incidentally, because I haven’t added people who’ve barely ever posted (like Tristan and Moh), their posts (or post, as it may be) have also been attributed to me. I actually intended to do that, but not with Tim.

Last night I found myself unable to sleep, so I allowed my mind to wander and skirted many strange issues as I am wont to do. Come daybreak, I reaffirmed something crucial - that for me atleast, there are three important things that are valuable in life... these being health, happiness and love.

Health is relatively straight-forward, your physical and mental wellbeing allows you to journey through life and affect every aspect of it.

Happiness is difficult to define in a general sense because it is so particularly individual. Many could argue that it is a state of mind and I see no inherent flaw in that perspective, but whatever it is - in our minds, (personal and wide-scale) happiness seems to be the driving motivator to continue and progress.

Now theres love. I can't even rightly contemplate the complexities involved in the many forms that love manifests. It seems to be a purely emotional and somewhat instinctual force that leaves within us a desire to love others and to be loved by them. In my normally logic driven mindset, love is an anomaly that I can't properly express or understand, but that desire for it has been prevalent throughout my life.

I don't often notice, or even like to admit it, but I am an extremely fortunate and lucky person. I am of (questionably) sound mind, able bodied and yes, even a much loved person by those close few individuals who bless me with thier friendship.

This morning I made sure to witness the surise. I basked in the rays of breaking light, I breathed in the cool morning breeze, I thought about those people dear to me and I couldn't help but smile. In that brief moment, I was truly happy.

I've been feeling ill since this morning, and I'm trying to figure out why. Originally this was going to be an angsty piece about how my life sucks, but I know better than to blame my mind for something that could well be a physical problem.

You see, I moved out recently, and I'm not sure I've been taking care of myself. My diet's changed, probably for the worse. I also haven't been getting any exercise, to the point where I'm actually slightly worried about my health. The entire point of moving out was to get more exercise and learn to make my own food. I haven't done either. I could blame the fact that I'm completely uncomfortable in the kitchen (living with two other people, it isn't as easy to set up a good personal space), but I know better. It's really my own fault, and I really should put the effort in to make myself a good meal each night.

As for the exercise, I'm really NFI for that one too. All I've got is the fact that I wake up later, so I get home from work later, which gives me no exercise time. The only thing I can really do is make the effort to wake up early, and come home early, and then I can worry about exercise.

Work isn't doing so well. Considering I have plenty of time to spend at work, I seem to be spending that time but don't get all that much more done. Even the extra stuff I get done doesn't seem to go too far, there's always work to fill the gap. Everyone's pressing to get more stuff done from me, and I don't seem to see much from it. The more work I get, the less time I spend sucking up effectively, which is probably the only thing that'll get me an actual increase in my paycheck.

I don't think I'm "burning out", because the work atmosphere is easy and relaxing, it's just that work isn't how I imagined spending my life. I don't want to spend the majority of my day at some place doing the same bloody thing all day. I don't understand it, because people have it orders of magnitude worse than me, but don't complain. I don't understand why I should sacrifice my time and energy doing something for a machine which ultimately doesn't care about me. I guess I just have to balance things out. Maybe I'm getting a little too much of my work friends. It's fun playing games at lunchtime, in the evenings, on weekends, but there can be too much of a good thing. I question my own nerdiness at points like that. I'm a nerd, but I'm not that much of a nerd.

I'm furious at the problem I've had with my laptop. Unfortunately I've got no resolution to it. I've been a punce when I really should've been a lot more assertive the whole way through. I should never have paid for something I hadn't opened up first. I shouldn't have trusted the company to actually make an effort returning the thing, I shouldn't have trusted them to get it back in good time. It's been four months now, and I still don't have my laptop.

Words cannot express the things I want to do to the people at that company. The people at the top. I don't understand how the company got so big, I don't understand how those guys are making more money than me. I don't understand why the law can't help me, I don't understand the situation at all.

I also don't understand the resolution. I can't take to them with a hacksaw, even though I've imagined destroying their lives bit by bit, complete with details of how their families would suffer, and I'd "promise" to end their suffering when they gave me that laptop, only to make that suffering a thousand times worse.

I feel inept as a metalhead and a gamer. I should have the answer here. I feel like a coward with my tail between my legs. I should fucking know what to do, considering I know about strategy and how to win, and I have so many demons from which to draw my inspiration. There's so much I could do, but what would be the right thing to do? Here I'm paralysed. They're not worth my hate, but I still want some sort of justice.

Gigantour this Sunday, Nevermore the weekend after, and Metal for the Brain the night after. Hopefully that will herald the end of all the bullshit, and the beginning of a new year. Hopefully I'll have some perspective then.

I added the "excerpt" field of typo onto the article submission page, so we can type a little subtitle for the title. Unfortunately, what you're adding isn't really an excerpt, but more a "description" of the article. I'm also re-using a currently existing field in typo to achieve this. Something tells me that's a terrible idea. However, I spose it'll do for now. Unless something happens to actually destroy the excerpts, we should be fine, and maybe eventually I'll migrate to using a proper "description" field for real.

So there seem to be some issues with the site so far. First, there are some wierd "application error"s that come up every now and then. Sometimes in Ruby, and sometimes in Apache. I'm not sure if these are bugs in Apache and Ruby, or if the server is actually killing these procs because they're taking too many resources. I don't mind the pages loading a tad slower (they'll be cached next time anyway), but I seriously don't want application errors... ever!

Secondly, the site's .htaccess is not setup properly, which means that going to "http://www.quaddmg.com/blog" won't work, you need a trailing slash. As soon as I cbf I'll fix it up, but it's been enough work getting the site to this level.

Thirdly, the blog is at http://www.quaddmg.com/blog/, not http://www.quaddmg.com. I originally had it internally redirecting, but this causes issues with URL rewriting on ruby's part. I wouldn't mind having it at http://blog.quaddmg.com, and use other subdomains for other things, but I'd like a default redirection to the blog. I'll set that up when I have time.

Fourthly, I need to set up capistrano. Originally when I read about it, I thought "why? I've got such a simple site!", but within 15 minutes I was thinking "ah crap, I've now gotta change a bunch of URL's from 'localhost' to something else." A decent deployment system would really come in handy.

Fifth, there's still a few links here or there that either aren't complete yet or mistyped, and I've gotta fix that up. Hopefully a subdomain will correct those problems.

Sixth, CSS is not quite cooked. I've gotta put a bunch of work in to get things like quotes looking good.

Seventh, no favicon. I think people often use favicons to keep their bookmarks under control, and having one is a really quick way of having someone know "oh, that's quaddmg". I'll do one soon.

Eighth, no 404 pages. I really should write some so they look reasonable, at least, and hopefully it'll help draw the site together for even when things go wrong.

I'm also having minor issues with Site5. They came highly recommended, so I put down a year's worth of mullah to sign up with em, but my experience so far hasn't been all that grand. First, the wierd "Application Error" problems, and now the jail shell isn't working properly, so I can't login and do minor things.

Eating lunch when all of a sudden I get an image of a samurai commiting sepuku... was my hunger satiated? (testing post facilities)

...then you shouldn’t be here!

This is the official USS Quad Damage wallpaper in widescreen & 4:3.