Voyager 2

by on August 22, 2007 at 11:05 am
Posted In: News

Pity I didn’t see this sooner. Voyager 2 was launched 30 years and two days ago.

According to JPL it is currently 7,653,000,000 miles from Earth (approaching 80 AU; double Pluto’s average distance from the Sun), and moving at about 34,000 MPH (relative to the Sun).

I remember very well the excitement surrounding each of Voyager’s planetary encounters when I was young. Apollo 11 was before I was born. In fact, the only memory I have of the Apollo project is when Skylab came down. The Voyagers were my space program. A decades-long mission to boldly photograph where no one has photographed before.

I expected at the time that we’d be following up with manned missions soon enough. That (and many other developments in the space program) has been a disappointment. But the Voyagers themselves have never disappointed. They continue to operate, long after their expected lifespan, long after we thought their transmissions would be too faint to track.

The best celebration I can think of for the Voyagers is this video about a portrait of the Solar System taken by Voyager 1.

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It’s fun time!

by on August 17, 2007 at 12:54 pm
Posted In: MMO

Okay… so I haven’t talked about WoW for a bit. The reasons for this are one, I haven’t been playing as much lately, and two, the original point of writing up WoW adventures was to talk about humorous incidents and maybe talk about some of the more impressive things we’d seen.

So, while I have been playing, and there’s been a good number of runs through the BC instances, there hasn’t been as much fresh material of late.

However… this needs to be told. ^_^

Wednesday, after Micca was up and running again, we managed to scrape together a group for Shadow Labyrinth. Blanc and Dunain had a quest item to pick up, and Thermidor had two quests to do.

In general, we have problems with the third boss, Vorpil, who’s a pure annoying fight at the best of times. However, a previous attempt last week stalled at the second boss, Blackheart, who is usually a pushover for us. This week… it got strange.

Blackheart isn’t very tough at all for a boss himself. The problem is that he will regularly mind-control the entire party to fight each other. It’s random and chaotic for who’ll end up fighting who, but the party can do much more damage than he can. Also, what ever random things you do can end up burning a lot of mana. Usually, it ends and we pick up the pieces and go on to finish him off after about the second bout of party mind-control.

This time we got unlucky. Thermidor got finished off during the ‘fun time’, and Dunain barely survived, only to be taken out by a cleave before he could bandage. Down two people early, I thought it was going to be a failed fight… but Blackheart couldn’t finish off Blanc, Jariedthe, and Asclepius. So… we ran back for the instance. Right after arriving, Blackheart randomly targeted Thermidor and ran for the entrance himself! o.o

We ended up bailing out a couple times while Thermi and I tried to get ourselves up and running again, before rejoining everyone in the front hall of the instance to finally finish the fight.

Other than that silliness, everything went very smoothly.

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Micca LIVES!

by on August 15, 2007 at 4:31 pm
Posted In: Life

It all started with Adobe Premier.

It has a nasty habit of slowly developing problems over time, and a week ago it got to the point where Smudge couldn’t do anything with it. So this last weekend we wiped the C: drive of Micca and started over from scratch, which is the only way to get Premier working again.

That means re-installing a lot of software. I actually made a checklist to make sure I got everything, and it took nearly the whole weekend. Premier was installed nearly last, so there’d be fewer things to upset it. The only things that turned into an adventure was WoW, which took several tries over four hours to get going (first time it’s been a problem) and the sound card, where I’m still trying to understand just what it takes to get the external box working correctly.

Yesterday, Micca developed a problem. Windows reported hard drive failures and crashed, and then the machine stopped booting. This isn’t the first time we’ve seen the problem, and it does seem to occur right after a major software rebuild (I seem to remember last time it was three incidents over two weeks just after doing a complete rebuild to dispel Roxio.)

Before, opening up the case and fiddling with the drive cable seemed to fix things, and I’d been planning on replacing the cable if it happened again. Well, it happened, but that didn’t help. The machine just stuck at “Verifying DMI pool……”, right before it should start launching Windows.

So, I started experimenting. I disconnected the hard drive, so it could boot off of CD if the HD was interfering. No luck. I reset the BIOS. No luck. No matter what I did, it always halted at the same place. I finally calledfor a second opinion and he suggested experimenting with the RAM as ‘DMI’ is ‘Dynamic Memory Interface’. We went over and borrowed some RAM in case ours had gone bad, and a floppy as a final try to boot from an alternate device (all my floppies disappeared during The Move, I know they’re around somewhere). Still no luck. That left one final device that was a common thread: the motherboard.

I had been trying to avoid that conclusion. Replacing the motherboard isn’t that expensive on this type of system, but it means taking everything apart. But, it was the only thing left.

So, instead of trying to cram a rebuild into an evening or leaving Smudge computerless for the rest of the week, I stayed home today and went motherboard shopping. Socket 939 boards are no longer common, and I ended up with two choices, a cheap one, and an expensive one. The cheap alternative, was pretty close to exactly what Micca had, just by a different company. The expensive one had a completely different chipset, and some nice features. It had SATA-II, a Firewire port and extra PCI-Express slots, including Crossfire capability (2 video cards for one monitor – really high-end gaming video stuff – doesn’t help animation rendering as that’s on the CPU); oh, and it had cables and slots that would glow under UV, it’s meant for a case modder. In the end, I went cheap. The parts that I cared about on the expensive board weren’t worth the $50 difference that the rest of it pushed the price tag up to.

So, Micca goes from a Abit AN8 (um, yeah, the same one Tracy might be having problems with) and now has a MSI K8N Neo4-F. Thanks to the wonders of modern Windows, it accepted the new motherboard with barely a hiccup. (I remember Win95, where it was easer and faster to reinstall windows than to wade through everything it needed when the motherboard changed.)

Which leaves a question: What caused the motherboard to go bad? There’s a possibility that the power supply isn’t very good (it was cheap) and damaged the motherboard. So… I need to ponder getting and installing a new one before it kills this board too.

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All I Needed to Know About Statistics I Learned From Star Trek

by on August 1, 2007 at 11:27 am
Posted In: Life

Yanked from Fanthropology:

Analytics performed upon Star Trek episodes confirm that the red-shirts die much more often than anybody else. However, if Captain Kirk “makes contact” with an alien woman, the red shirts are much more likely to survive. Full text of the article is here: http://www.clicktracks.com/insidetrack/articles/kirk_analytics.php?source=nws072007 . It is totally worth reading and the graph just killed me 🙂

Hilarious, but informative….

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Wargaming news

by on July 27, 2007 at 8:24 am
Posted In: Boardgaming, News

Okay, I still need to examine the GMT Games pre-order list and talk about all the things I’d salivate over if I had the money and space (who am I kidding? I salivate anyway).

MMP got another nasty shock when it turned out that a wall had shifted a hex on one of the reprinted boards for Few Returned. Oddly, the playtesters are reporting that it was correct on their pre-production copies, so no one is sure where the error came from. MMP is going to make sure that it is correct when they do the bulk reprint of all the maps soon, and will try to make sure that the new version gets distributed (mostly by including it free in the next couple of products).

MMP has also announced that they’re running low on Hollow Legions (again – they did a reprint some years ago) and the next project will be a new version that will include the desert rules (which needs updating to second edition rulebook format) and the desert boards from West of Alamein. This completes a transition that started when they reprinted the British in a European Theater of Operations based module instead of including the desert rules with them. Speaking of which, that module, For King and Country, is out of print because they’re out of boxes and some of the maps. When the map bundle gets printed they’ll offer FKaC in baggies until they can get new boxes printed.

Once all that happens, the main system will be in better shape than it has been since AH was sold to Hasbro (with the RB and all the core modules except the two Pacific ones in print). Here’s hoping it won’t take too long.

Valor of the Guards sounds like it’s nearing the end of the proofing stage. Don’t know when, but it still sounds like well before the year is out to me. Also sounds like work is going well on the Last Hurrah materials which will be included in the Doomed Battalions reprint, and the only thing holding that up.

Promises made for the next batch of things going up for pre-order: Hollow Legions (3rd ed, with Chapter F, 7 boards, and more OOP scenarios), a reprint of ASL Journal 2 (the only one I’m missing…), Kingdom of Heaven (I’ll know what that is when it goes on pre-order…), and some new International Game Series titles.

Meanwhile, it looks like there could be multiple new items for Federation & Empire. Reprints will take four (of eight) slots of the new run of double-sided counters, ISC War needs two, leaving two empty. One may go to ‘Sheet W’ (wishlist) with spares of ships people are likely to run out of; and the other to Tactical Operations, which would have a minimum of new rules, and mostly be new ships (mostly from R11).

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