Cruftbox: My Box of Cruft

It’s 12:30AM and I’ve got Warcraft 3.

I got to Fry’s about 11:30 and was amazed to see a parking lot full of cars. Wow, I guess there will be a few people here.

I went inside and there were Fry’s drones greeting people and handing them flyers about special midnight deals on crap. I ignored the tempting model rocket kits and George Foreman grills and walked over to the software section.

Sitting there was a displa with only a few copies of Warcraft left. Not many people around. I grabbed a copy and thought, “Boy, that was easy and it’s not even Midnight yet.”

The fry’s drones began to restock the displays with more copies and then I moved up to the front of the stores and saw what was going on. I could hold the game before Midnight, but I was not allowed to buy it yet.

Alot of people were buying the big Collector’s Edition verison with a bunch of dumb ass stuff inside. Fuck that shit. I only pay extra for the id Software tins…

I waited for a half hour for the clock to hit Midnight. In line was the a expected clumps of 20-something guys with the occasional girlfriend tagging along. People were loudly discussing their experience in the Beta. What suprised me was the number of mothers there. There was at least a half dozen moms there with their young teen sons buying them Warcraft. Now that’s love.

Just before H-hour, all 30+ front cashregisters were manned by Fry’s staff. Since I had time to kill, I made the rough estimate that there was 200+ people in line to buy the game.

The watch on the lead Fry’s drone hit 12:00Am and the selling began. I was in the first wave of 30 to hit the registers. Three minutes later I was walking by the Fry’s Door Nazis with a smirk on my face as they asked me to show my receipt. Continued walking right out the door much to there chagrin.

Time to load the game…

It’s 10:52PM. Warcraft 3 is released in 68 minutes at Fry’s in Burbank.

I’m thinking about going, but if I go it will be a moment of uber-geekdom.

I wonder if they’ll have beers? Will I be the only one?

ONE
If my wife had a weblog, it would be something like lifewithageek.com, except there’d be more about quilting…

TWO
I have been a bit jealous of my younger brother and the Washington, DC area weblogger get-togethers he attends. He tells me they are great fun and involve much beer drinking.

In my search for a similar meeting place in Southern California, I stumbled upon meetup.com. A site devoted to enabling just this kind of gatherings.

If you check out this particular Meetup you will find it only has 3 people involved. This is where YOU come in. YOU sign up and attend and then it will be a big rollicking par-tay!

So far, it’s 2 votes for washing my caps in the clothes washer and one vote for washing them in the dishwasher.

I’m kinda leaning toward the dishwasher since it involves doing something out of the ordinary.

My mother-in-law tells the story of steaming a fish in the dishwasher. I need to try that…

How do you wash a baseball cap? I think tossing it in the clothes washer would be bad.

What is the correct method?

It’s Sunday afternoon and I have lots to do. Instead, I’m on the computer.

OK, time to get some things done around here. Damn internet…

As I wander around the net aimlessly, I see lots of cool things.

Some of these things are cool in a way that most would not think cool, like this and that.

There are plenty of things like Homestar Runner that everyone should laugh at heartily.

I see other weblog sites that have style like geekychick.net and brassjarproject.com.

When I look at Cruft it lacks the same kinda style. Not that I want to copy those sites. This page looks a little locked into the whole late 90s IE vs. Netscape era when the last vocal minority of pre-WWW internet users still held back the relentless assault of Flash and CSS.

I checked and the current cruft page has been basically the same for 2 1/2 years.

I guess I still believe in Jakob Nielsen’s ideas on usability, but it’s so fucking boring sometimes. I don’t like to be fucking boring.

The time for change has come.

I don’t know exactly what, but the wheels are in motion. It will probably involve the cruftbox.com domain I’ve had waiting in the wings for a while.

Stay tuned.

I forgot to post this earlier.

I drove past The Linux Truck last weekend. Looks like kel-tek.com and linux-911.com are doing some advertising.

So if you need Linux help in the San Gabriel Valley, you know who to call!

This email exchange made me ponder my future as an eccentric ranter…

I played multiplayer Neverwinter Nights last night. I met up with a group of Yoshi’s friends and we started playing on some server they knew of somewhere. We were all basically clueless as to what to do in multiplayer.

We found our way into the jail level and started killing. I could tell that most of them were EQ players since the wanted someone to ‘pull’ the monsters. We UO players never developed the ‘pull’ technique because it doesn’t work so well in a isometric perspective game. In the NWN perspective, you have a good view of your surroundings and can see who’s inbound from every side. In first person perspective games like EQ & DaoC, you can’t see what’s behind you easily, so everyone worries about pulling from the right direction.

Another factor is that the monsters typically cannot be soloed in EQ. In NWN, most of the low level monsters are easily soloed, but tend to attack in groups. UO players would have designated two players to the attack of the most powerful monster straightaway, while the rest of the group cleared the low level monsters and tossed heals.

After a while, the server simply evaporated. My wicked cool deer hat was GONE! Earlier, I had brought a NWN server on the girls computer. It’s a 1GHz box, so in dedicated mode it’s fine for running a server. It’s called “The Kitty Server”, since it runs on the girl’s Kitty server. Everyone logged into the server and we started to play. I had to boot a random player that was killing all the NPCs and turning everyone evil. Muah-ha-ha-ha, the power of the console…

Enough, it’s time to head to work…