News from Great Castle Wilson

  • Dungeon Siege (1)

    The first time I played Dungeon Siege, I found it to be too shallow as an RPG and gave up on it fairly quickly. This time, I decided to give it a bit more slack — basically, I treated it as an “RTS with only Heroes” and found it to be a lot more engaging. I played it right through to the end; my only complaint being that by the time I reached the end my characters were so uber that it wasn’t a big deal finishing off the end boss.

    Oh well. It was a good waste of time while waiting for Elder Scrolls: Oblivion.

  • WordPress 2.0 is out

    I will probably take a stab at moving this site over on the weekend. Given how well it goes, there may be some downtime. (Yes, I’ll backup everything first.)

  • Christmas is half over.

    Christmas was lots of fun this year. I got up early and fed the dogs (as usual) but Dennis and Deb slept in until after 8am. Once we were all mobile, we checked out our stockings and our “Santa gifts”, which this year were new TVs for both the living room and Dennis’ room downstairs. Actually, Dennis got our “old” TV (which is a top-of-the-line 35″ Sony CRT) + a cable connection of his own + the PVR, so he was quite pleased. It also came as a complete surprise to him, which was an added bonus.

    The new living room set is this one:

    (No image available.)

    Every year, we alternate who we spend Christmas day with between Deb’s parents and mine. This year it was Deb’s turn so, after playing with our new toys a bit, we scrambled around the house, breakfasting, showering, dressing and packing up Christmas gifts, and then headed over to Stacey’s place for a day with the Marshalls. Since we all brought our intra-family gifts as well as the inter-family gifts, there was a massive pile of presents under the tree:

    public/IMG_0048.JPG (Image no longer available.)

    We spent the rest of the day there, except for a couple of hours that I went home with Dennis to let the dogs out (and have a nap ;-)). Supper was a massive turkey. It was so large that even Grandma Marshall’s largest roasting pan couldn’t hold it!

    In summary, a good time was had by all. We even spent some time in the evening playing and singing Christmas carols with Katie on piano and Deb and I on cellos. Next year, we may even practice before hand, which will make it even more fun.

    Tonight we head over to my family’s place for the second half of Christmas, with supper and presents with the rest of the Wilsons.

    Peace, all. May your entire year be as much fun as Christmas has been for us. Ho ho ho.

  • The war against spam

    *sigh*. Time to ramp up the arms race against the spammers. The tool that has been successfully killing every comment spam for the last three months is now starting to fail occasionally. I guess I’ll have to get out the bigger guns.

    Oh, and a quick message to the spammers themselves:

    Hey, morons, I moderate every post to this site. No one but me will ever see your comments, and I don’t care what you are selling. I know you’re too stupid to just go away, but isn’t it nice to know that you are totally wasting your time. Have a nice day.

  • Snowboarding season has started

    Dennis and I went with Randy and Tim and Katie to Pakenham last weekend. We’ve all got season’s passes, so we wanted to go up and get our photos taken and maybe get in a few runs. As it happens there weren’t many runs open, but there was lots of snow on the ones that were, and we had a ball. Tim tried out snowboarding for the first time (and I’m sure he’ll be much better in no time. :-)).

    Of course, I’m so out of shape that I only managed about 2.5 hours before I had to give up, and at that point I was so tired I could barely move. Oh well, as long as I keep at it, I should be in *much* better shape by the end of the season.

    Deb and Stacie are going to take downhill skiing lessons this year, which means both families will likely be up there every weekend once the lessons start in January. It should be a tons of fun.

  • Battlestar Galactica + iTunes != Canada

    Ok, now I’m pissed. As long as it was just Desperate Housewives, I couldn’t care less that we couldn’t download TV shows on the Canadian iTunes Music Store. But now we’re talking Battlestar Galactica!

    Hey, whoever is holding up progress: I want my iTMS TV!

  • Palm LifeDrive 2.0 Update

    Palm has indeed (finally) come out with the rom update that they have been promising for quite a while. Given how long it took to get here, I would have hoped the install would be less painful, but it did work — I think.

    Part of the problem is that they didn’t include the standard “Here’s how you tell you’ve been updated” information on their website. That, plus the fact that it shut off part way through, and I had to reset it to get it to finish, makes me wonder whether I actually got the whole update or not. I’ll play with it tonight, to see if I can figure that out.

    A worse problem was that, on the first sync after the update, it (together with The Missing Sync) caused all my contacts to be thrown away. Luckily, I managed to catch this before a .Mac Sync happened. Reseting my sync info fixed the problem on my Mac and the next sync fixed the LD too. The alternative would have been too frightening to consider: .Mac would have happily taken the trashed contact info and distributed it to all my Macs, almost guaranteeing that it would have been an unrecoverable problem.

    Oh well, I didn’t brick the LD, and the Mac’s (appear to) still have all the right data on them, so I guess I can declare this as another typical Palm update. oao.

  • Six 13-year-olds!

    My god, I think they’re more trouble than 13 six-year-olds. It’s Dennis’ birthday party tonight/tomorrow and my house is rapidly being turned into a disaster area. With a bit of luck, the walls will still be standing tomorrow, but beyond that all bets are off.

  • The wiki is secure.

    Everyone can still read the wiki, but you now need a password in order to edit it. *sigh*. How sad is that. I have sent the password out to a random selection of people, but if I miss you and you want access, just send me a note and I’ll give it to you.

  • Script kiddies versus the wiki

    For the last few days, some moronic cretin from Russia has started spamming my wiki with pages of random drug sites. Although it is trivial to revert the pages back to their uncorrupted states, getting up and doing this every morning has become sufficiently frustrating that I have decided to enable authorization. Once I have done this, I will send out an email to all obvious candidates to grant them access.

    My frustration with this whole situation has prompted me to post this to the main page of the wiki:

    Spammers really are the single greatest threat to the future of our society. Religious terrorists are a distant second place. I formally curse all spammers as follows:

    Your children will die of a disease that would have been curable, except that you put such a drain on the internet that the communication needed to discover the cure did not happen.