I believe those of us too old to believe in magical all-knowing, and allegedly all-powerful magical beings in the sky who choose not to use their power for good on this rock we call home, need a new holiday.

Christmas is irrelevant. Only the hardened Christians believe that Christ still belongs in Christmas, while everyone else just seems to treat it as a time to spend time with friends and family and to give them unwanted gifts. Sometimes ones that you’ve received in previous years that you’ve rewrapped for someone else. The whole event is a sham.

Who actually likes spending time with their families? Right, well, those that do don’t need to wait until the end of the year to go see them. Go see them on their birthdays, go see them when something exciting has happened in your life, or just go see them when you’re hungry. They’ll feed you.

If you need to be motivated by peer pressure into being a loving and giving person once a year, then that love is probably pretty shallow. Read the rest of this entry »

So yesterday I found I had Internet access. The work they did on my line last week must have worked.

So now I can catch up with Rift, download the beta of Star Wars: The Old Republic, and look at lots of naked women. Yay. Oh and hook up my PS3 again, and download long-needed updates for my computers.

And pay bills.

As a mod on Reddit’s /r/rpg “forum,” I had the opportunity to get a preview copy of the Legend RPG, soon to be released by Rule of Cool.

Interesting things about this release:

• It’s a d20 system aimed to be simpler than 3.5 (and possibly Pathfinder)
• It’s getting an initial digital-only release
• All proceeds are going to the Child’s Play charity
• The target price is expected to be in the US$8-10 region*

Other supplements will follow, and there has been mention of a forthcoming monster manual type book, and they will also eventually see print releases. The preview copy I got had no setting background, other than flavour text of the races, and it had no creatures ready for the GM to use. However, there are a bunch of racial tracks than can be used to generate monsters. More on that later.
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The very first thing I did when organising services for my new house was to call TelstraClear to get a cable modem installed. After that I called to get the power and gas connected. So that should give you an idea of my priorities and how much I’m raging over this.

Install of the Internet connection was set for Wednesday 19 October. The usual “some time between 9:30 and 12:30″ business. So I take the day off work, drive out to the new place and sit around for 4 hours. Which wasn’t that easy to do because there were no chairs. When nobody shows up, I called them up to ask. Here’s what happened, quoted below in this email I sent to their complaints department.

I have just bought a house at     redacted     , Wellington, and had arranged to get a TelstraClear cable modem installed there. Installation date was Wed 19 Oct between 9:30 and 12:30.

12:30 came and went, and so I called asking what time I should be expecting an installer, as I already had to take a day off work and had driven out to the new house costing me a fair amount in petrol.

I was told that nobody was coming out and that you had mailed me a letter on Monday the 17th. To the new house. Which was unoccupied. Standard post takes 2-3 days to deliver, and the install was booked for 2 days hence.

The letter that did arrive was addressed to “Spirow” Harvey, and I was told that the problem related to my driver’s license number not matching my name. The full name on my driver’s license was also relayed to the call centre person when I was setting up the account, however, I’m not sure if that got through correctly.

I did get a phone call on Friday or Monday asking if my name had a “W” on the end of it, but nobody thought to mention that the license didn’t check out and that nobody would be coming to install the service.

Instead, you wrote me a letter and requested that I resurrect a fax machine from the 1980s and fax through my driver’s license. I asked what compensation I’d get and was offered a whole $20, at which point I laughed quite hard. That would only just cover the petrol cost for that day, not my lost time at work. After asking for the helpdesk person to discuss a reasonable compensation plan with their supervisor, I was assured I would be phoned in 24-48 hours.

That was almost a week ago.

So you’ll be happy to know that I’ve gone ahead and got an internet connection from a company who cares, who are happy to actually pick up a telephone to call me back, and who have chosen to hire New Zealanders instead of cheap foreign labour connected via some second rate voice over IP to save even more money.

I’m not interested in your services now, so please cancel everything you may have done for me up until now, and accept my apology for putting you through such a heavy workload for nothing. It won’t happen again.

So that’s it. I delayed getting a connection from a different provider in case TC called me back. And the following weekend was a long weekend, so I had to wait until today (Tuesday 25th) to sort it out. But I’ve gone with Snap, who have an awesome site set up (although one qualm is that it doesn’t tell you that a new line will be a $199 install, it just adds $199 to the setup fee), and they’ve even taken the time to call me back. They’re pretty easy to deal with, and they only charge $5 a month for a static IP (Telecom charge $20/month) and have a $2 a month option which makes all Google and YouTube traffic free.

But it could take a few weeks for them to get Chorus around to do the line install, so I’m going to be sad in the pants for almost a month.

Picked up the keys yesterday, christened it, and discovered it has an awesome flusher. Most pleased.

I thought it was weird when the property agent handed me a single solitary key, given that the house has 4 ranch sliders, 2 back doors, and one front door. And a garage, and a bunch of padlocks locking up the crawl space under the house. Oh, and all the windows have locks. So I’m looking at this one key like a retard who’s just gone into an ice cream shop and been handed a mince pie, and thinking, well, OK, I was going to change the locks anyway, no big deal.

And found these inside the house.

So I has keys. Hopefully a locksmith can get this down to a manageable level.

Joe Brockmeier has written a good piece on why Richard Stallman needs to step down as the face of the Free Software Foundation.

I’ve gone to see Stallman a couple of times when he’s come to New Zealand — the first was in the 90s when I was still in my Linux advocacy stage of life, and Stallman’s ideologies didn’t sound as insane as they do now. Seeing him talk, I saw a great man who was a fount of wisdom, speaking of a life and a culture I wanted to live.

The last time was a few years ago, when I was at a stage where I’d grown tired of all the zealotry. That time, all I saw was a hippy with a scraggly beard, unwashed hair, spitting bile like some street preacher.

As with anything people are passionate about, some go too far. They think that their worldview is a utopian worldview and that everyone else should dance to the same tune. In the religious world they’re called fundamentalists, and in the tech world they’re called fanbois. Windows, Mac, and Linux fanbois all exist. They’re all as insane as each other, and they’re all wrong.

Richard Stallman is one of those who argues the absolute extreme of his possible worldview. I used to think that was quaint, and that the world needed thinking on each end of the scale, and to some degree I still do, because they help rational people gauge where the line of sanity is. The problem is when that thinking crosses the line into thinking people dying is good for their cause. Sure, Stallman is all talk and spittle, but as Gabrielle Giffords found out, having an extreme right-wing nutcase suggest that your death is a good idea, someone will follow through for you.

What do I think is the right worldview? People should be free to make their own choices, not have other views rammed down their throat.

One size does not fit all. Our constant wars should be testament to that. People believe in everything from doing things differently on their computers; to choosing a different platform to do their work or to play their games on; to how they license the code that they put their own effort into; to the worshiping of mythical beings.

I don’t care about your way of life. I don’t care what you think of my way of life. Deal with it and get over yourself.

While the FSF does good work, Stallman has shown that he is an irrational fundamentalist, and he is only doing harm to an otherwise good organisation.

The Internerds have all been aflutter over the last few days after it was announced that Monte Cook has returned to Wizards of the Coast in their R&D department.

Who is Monte Cook? He helped design such ruleplaying games as Rolemaster and Dungeons & Dragons 3rd edition. I’ve never been a fan of his work because it tends to be unnecessarily complex, so I’m not looking forward to whatever he does at Wizards.

Of course, it’s entirely possible that he is simply working on 4th edition — perhaps to help it come out of its perceived quagmire. Releases are down, Essentials probably wasn’t the hit Wizards were expecting, revitalising old favourite settings like Dark Sun were underwhelming at best, and the company is probably looking to move on, make a bit of cash, and create something new and exciting. I mean, if they hadn’t been thinking about 4th edition, or 4.5 for the last couple of years, then they’re probably failing their investors.

I think it’s safe to say that Yes, 5th edition is imminent. And has been since 4th edition was released. But that’s not to say it’s immediately imminent. Maybe it’s safer to say it’s forthcoming. If Wizards are directly working on 5th edition now, then it could see a 2013 release. I doubt it will be sooner because they have to write the rules and playtest the shit out of them.

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It seems that the only new addition to Google+ since its opening-closed-beta-day, has been games.

And this apparent lack of interest on Google’s part has just given Facebook time to catch up. Google+’s Circles have now effectively been added to Facebook as “subscriptions” — in other words, people can now subscribe to other accounts to be able to see their public posts. This means that you can follow the public posts of people who you aren’t “friends” with.

This was basically Google+’s killer feature — now the world can go back to Facebook because they also have non-personal-account pages and event management. Google’s just been left in the dust, another of their toys relegated into obsolescence, irrelevance, and soon to be obscurity. Just like Buzz.

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I’m kind of happy with the theme as is now.

I found some javascript copper bars, but they require a “canvas” which means that I don’t think I can overlay that stuff over or under a logo. But I might fuck around with it and see what I can produce anyway..

Although ideally, I’d have an ASCII logo like this:

or this:

or:

I’m trying to create a custom theme, so the site will look a bit retarded when I break stuff every so often.

That said, I’m trying to make it look even more old school. I think I’ve successfully got it looking like an Amiga CLI with a header inspired by cracktro text headers. If I was any good I’d do up a decent logo using ACiD DRAW, but I’m not even going to pretend I am. If an old scener sees this and wants to do me one, I’ll make sure beer and pizza make it your way.

The tough thing now is integrating the plugins I have.. Fancybox (the image viewer) is going to be the most interesting. But my wireless is playing up and I keep losing the connection to my server. Have I ever mentioned I fucking hate wireless? It offends me almost as much as a bowl of tomatoes. Their sickening red squishy innards… yeeeuuurrrgh.. Bastards.