I just heard on CNN that George W. Bush is a candidate (albeit one of over a hundred) for the Nobel Peace Prize.

Over the past 3-4 weeks I’ve been setting up a new aquarium in my office (or rather, near my office since all I have is an 8′ x 8′ cubicle cluttered with 8-10 computers). I’ve had an aquarium in the office for almost three years now but have been meaning to upgrade it for some time. The old aquarium was my first; I’ve since set up three other aquariums so this was my chance to apply all that I’ve learned and design a better aquarium.

What’s mainly new about this one is that I’ve dispensed with all artificial décor—namely plants—and planted five different species of aquatic plants: an “onion plant” (Crinum thaianum), two java ferns (Microsorum pteropus), two giant hygrophilas (I think) (Hygrophila corymbosa “angustifolia”), three jungle val plants (Vallisneria americana), and a bunch of java moss (Vesicularia dubyana).

Things are going pretty well so far. By introducing filter media from the old fish tank, I was able to cycle the tank within three weeks while keeping ammonia at trace (non-measurable) levels and nitrites below 2 ppm. The plants are growing well: I’ve already had to prune the onion plant’s leaves, and the java fern is developing 4-5 healthy offspring plants (which grow off the tips of the mature plant’s leaves). My golden chinese algae eater does a great job of cleaning up any algae that appears, and the half-dozen scissortail rasbora transplanted from the old aquarium are schooling with the four giant danios.

Last week I mentioned to some of my friends how we were already starting to fall behind the technological curve, much like those people who can’t figure out how to program their VCRs. The specific example I cited was “texting”—the exchange of short messages via SMS (Simple Messaging Service)-enabled mobile phones. I’ve heard it’s quite popular amongst teens today, often used as high-tech replacement of note-passing. However a quick survey showed that none amongst us (my twenty-something friends and I) had ever done any texting, confirming my example.

With that in mind I’ve decided to fight obsolescence and keep up with the technological trends. Specifically I’ve been sending SMS messages to my friends and getting the hang of text entry on my mobile phone’s keypad. So far no-one has sent me any SMS messages back but I’m still trying to push the envelope, and send out enough messages to evoke a response from someone…

I’ve been neglecting this website for the past few weeks for a number of reasons.
Foremost I think is that as a side-effect of my main workstation still being down, I haven’t been spending (as) much time in front of a computer outside of work, and hence haven’t had as much opportunity to log any thought that might come across my mind. Also, my work, projects and (dare I say it?) social life have been keeping me rather occupied.

I installed a TurboNET adapter in my TiVo box a couple weeks ago. Instead of getting program information updates via modem, my TiVo now fetches this data via the Internet. What’s more, I can control my TiVo through a web browser; the upshot of this is that with my firewall configured just right, I could make programming changes from any web browser anywhere. (Granted I’ve rarely felt the need to do so.) What’s most interesting about having a networked TiVo is that I can download the recorded video stream to another computer, record it onto a VCD or writeable DVD disc, save it as a video file on my laptop, etc. My experiments in this domain have so far met with limited success—the video stream tends to have extraneous bits of random data. Furthermore, decoding and re-encoding the TiVo data into a format I use (for example DivX) is a rather slow and labour-intensive process. The software for extracting the stream isn’t quite ready for prime-time yet but I’m betting it will continue to improve.

Been mostly coasting along the past few weeks, working, hanging out with friends… nothing much to report really.

My dual-Athlon workstation is still busted, though only because I haven’t found the 4-6 hours probably necessary to isolate the problem. It started acting up—crashing randomly minutes after booting Windows—not long after I upgraded video card… though using the tools at my disposal I’ve determined that the problem itself is unrelated to the new vidcard. Unfortunately my Web searches have turned up nothing about the symptoms I’m seeing, so I have no other recourse than to pull out pieces of hardware until (hopefully) the problem goes away, thereby isolating what hardware is causing the problem.

In the meantime I was able to boot the system long enough to transfer my Neverwinter Nights saved-game data off to my secondary system. I played NWN on the latter and finished the game about three weeks ago in fact.

Being one’s own “IT department” has its upside and downside. The former being that I don’t have to put up with any stupid IT decisions and policies (is it me or do all IT people eventually turn into tinpot dictators?); the latter being that—well—I have to fix all my own problems. The fun and novelty aspect of the latter has kind of worn off after ten years of maintaining and building my own personal computers and I’m really starting to come around to the philosophy that having fewer computers—and smaller, simpler ones—is a good thing.

Feeling a bit down after today’s bad news… Though it hardly came as a surprise; not just because of rumours I’d heard in the past few weeks, but my general sense that the PC market being a downwards trend and NVIDIA’s growth being an upwards one, the two curves would (nevermind the mixed metaphors) inevitably collide.

Anyway I take solace in the fact that it’s all unimportant in the grand scheme of things—the sun will still rise tomorrow, and life will go on. And when I think, “What’s the worst that could happen?” I find myself remarkably at peace… It’s all about not fearing change, I think: knowing that no matter what happens, I can deal with it—and come out the better for it.

It’s been a relatively unevent past couple weeks; my time has been mostly divided between work and Neverwinter Nights. Last night, my character killed her first dragon:

Did a few upgrades on my computer systems… Got a GeForce4 Ti 4200 video card for my primary workstation, moved some drives over to my secondary machine.

While upgrading my secondary system (a 1200MHz AMD Athlon Thunderbird machine built out of inexpensive components), I discovered that the CPU cooling fan did not spin and had likely stopped spinning since the last BIOS upgrade a year ago. It turns out I had upgraded the system with the firmware for the wrong systemboard, as when I corrected that issue the CPU cooler started working normally once again. The most amazing thing is that the system has never shown any problems, despite the CPU and heatsink heating up to 80-90 degrees Celsius.

I’m spending my third Canada Day south of the border at work as it is just a regular work day, but I’ll be proudly flying my flag outside my cubicle today. Seems only fair since Americans have recently become even more flag-obsessed than ever before, and it’s almost impossible to turn your head anywhere and not see the stars and stripes.

Spent a few hours this weekend framing some posters I’d gotten for my apartment: panoramic skylines of Toronto and Montréal; a photo of the lighthouse at Peggy’s Cove in Nova Scotia, Canada; a shot of a beach with palm trees leaning over the ocean at Playa Buyé, Puerto Rico.

Got the frames cheap from Frames By Mail, and got the plexiglass and pressboard backing from a local Orchard Supply Hardware store. (Side note: Home Depot is really useless when it comes to customer service. Even if you can find someone who works there (and they’re surprisingly elusive considering they’re dressed in bright orange aprons) they’ll typically hardly lift a finger to help you.) At OSH, on the other hand, you have customer reps going out of their way to offer their help…)

Actually I ended up getting Lexan, a much stronger form of plastic glass than plexiglass. (Thick Lexan is used for “bulletproof” security applications.) It took the nice OSH rep who was helping me out almost an hour to cut the one sheet of Lexan into the custom-sized pieces I needed. Obviously Lexan is overkill for picture frames, but because the plexiglass and Lexan sheets were in the same “bin” I didn’t notice I was getting Lexan until well after they’d cut it. Lexan costs 2-3 times as much as regular plexiglass; luckily the OSH cashier also couldn’t see the difference, and charged me for ordinary plexiglass.

Tried out the new 3D computer roleplaying game Neverwinter Nights the other day. Actually I’d installed it at work to test it against our video cards and drivers, but I was hooked instantly and didn’t manage to tear myself away from it until some six or seven hours later. NWN is pretty much the computer-based RPG I’ve been waiting for over ten years, ever since I played SSI’s rather poor adaptation of Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, Pool of Radiance.

At around the same time as those computer-based RPGs (CRPGs) came around, I was an avid role-playing gamer, playing the paper-and-die-based AD&D and Star Wars RPGs with friends and with members of a local RPG club. CRPGs were a big disappointment to me, as they always locked you into fairly restrictive plot lines, and the rigid and crude framework of the computer games themselves took away a lot of the flexibility and possibility that I found inherently appealing in RPGs. Ever since then, CRPGs seemed to be more strategy and statistics-based games than true role-playing.

CRPGs did have the definite advantage of automating some of the more menial tasks of paper-based RPGs: tracking character statistics, automating game data and calculations (e.g. what roll of a die would be required for one’s character to succeed in a certain type of task, etc.), and so on. But to me what was really missing was the ability to have a human arbiter (a “Dungeon Master” or “DM” in AD&D-speak) to run the game and add life and imagination to the interactions one would have with elements in the games (i.e. with other characters or monsters, with various settings and objects).

To some degree, NWN still has those restrictions when played in single-player mode, though I’ve found the game engine offers enough possibilities to keep things interesting and allow for very flexible character development. The big appeal of the game, however, is that it allows players on the Internet to play with and against each other in games controlled by a DM, using game materials (maps, scenery, monsters, etc.) made by third parties. So the “ideal” CRPG I envisioned a decade ago may have finally come to be.

Now, if I could only get it to run on my system at home. For whatever reason the game tries to start up, then exits silently without a hint as to what went wrong. Aaargh!