Cruftbox: My Box of Cruft

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…

I saw that there was a $10 digital camera on sale at OfficeMax today.

You can see the camera here.

There’s a OfficeMax nearby and I called and indeed they had them in stock. They are $15 with a $5 mail-in rebate.

At lunch, I headed out with Brad and Yoshi in search of this ‘too good to be true’ deal.

I bought two. Yoshi bought one.

They are basically webcams that allow you to take up to 27 320×240 pixel images without being connected to the computer.

Here are the images. I converted the 225k bmps to jpgs for web viewing. There is no degradation in quality from this conversion.

We tested webcam mode and it works as well.  So if you want a cheap webcam, this may be your answer.