And today was going so well up until then . . . . Here's the deal - last week was non-productive for yours truly and not for any great reasons. Monday was holiday hijinks so that's understandable and Thursday got a little broken up by taking Schrodinger to the vet (no big deal - just annual checkup and booster shot), but I just never got a groove rolling on last week. Which means I roll into this week with a few leftover items - two in particular were that I need to backup the Mac (which I take very seriously these days :-)) and the monthly update to the linux box which hosts hiddenjester.com. On the writing front I wanted to do my final grammar edit on Chapter Four of Playing Cops & Robots and I had a brain flash - all three of these tasks can run in parallel because they use different CPUS and displays. The laptop has it's own screen, the linux box can grab the shared CRT & keyboard and once I have them both cranking I'll take the hardcopy of Chapter Four and my red pen into the living room or outside depending on temperature. Swell, flip the display over to the linux box - and it's all screwy. It looks like it's got a loose connection, but tracing all of that seems solid. Eventually I decide to reboot the box and see what happens. What happens is a black screen. Oh joyousness. OK, pull the box out and crack it open. Well there's a bunch of cat fur and dust inside it of course, but I expect that. After cleaning that out I can see there's a fan on the motherboard that isn't spinning. But that shouldn't prevent booting. I mean there's no POST beeps, there's no nothing. The DVD and the HD briefly access and then nothing. To cut the long story shorter that fan isn't working but that doesn't seem critical. Still I get to go to Fry's today. Yay. What was really broken is the GeForce 2 video card seems to have just crapped out. No real explanation - it just won't boot with that installed anymore. Fine - I've got an old ATI Mach 64 card lying about. It's PCI but I don't really care about the graphics performance of my linux box. Next - XWindows (the graphical system for Linux) won't start. Don't know why - the configuration looks good but the screen doesn't start successfully. The system itself is running - the web and mail server are up but the system update I wanted to do is now a graphical program - I don't think there is a character equivalent in Fedora Core 3 anymore. I finally punted on this - XWindows has one odd/cool feature in that you can run the display on a different computer. So I fired up X11 (another name for XWindows) on my Mac, logged into my linux box and ran the updater. I'm watching it reboot post updates now and assuming that goes well I'll post this. And drive to Fry's to replace the frackin' fan. But I'm going to spend at least two or three hours on this exercise today (more if I want to actually fix the graphics problem - but I'll probably see what a cheap AGP graphics card runs at Fry's) - and I still haven't looked at the Chapter Four edit - or started the backup on Kool-Aid. UPDATE I tried some hacking about and it's great comedy. Apparently the older card won't support 32 bit color (That doesn't sound right to me - but that's what it says in the log.) and the ATI driver won't support 16 bit color. Nice.

Statler and Waldorf (the Muppet balcony guys) are doing movie reviews now - go here I'm not sure how I feel about this - there are some funny lines in this episode, but these two don't like anything - so doing positive movie reviews is inevitably out of character. Yet the fundamental goal of the website is to drive movie traffic - so it seems like a bit of a conflict. In the first episode they give a pass to one movie and then savage another. (shrug) It seems to work OK, so my initial review is cautious optimism, with a healthy dash of "let's wait and see".

We've mostly recovered from the Tiki Party on Saturday (with the notable exception of my sad Burnout 3 save which got nuked). The house is basically clean again (well, I need to run one more load of dishes, but that's minor) and I fixed the toilet that got broken. The scary giant inflatable monkey was deflated (verdict - Heisenberg says it's still scary even deflated) and life goes on. It was a fun time, hope everyone else enjoyed it as well. In other notes Chapter Three of Playing Cops & Robots went out to those reviewers who sent back Chapter Two. It was a bit slower because I held it for a while while I did major surgery on Chapter Four. Chapter Four isn't quite out of the ER yet, but I'm past the start enough to feel the segue from Three to Four is now solid. Chapter Four is the first place where the current outline diverges markedly from the first draft - in fact the original Chapter Four splits into the current Chapter Four and Chapter Five. If you reviewing for me and you don't have Chapter Three that means you owe me comments on Chapter One or Two :-) I've been very quiet on both blogs in June, which is a bit ironic because it is the first month in quite a while that I felt productive. A couple of things brought that about, mainly me adopting a fairly fixed schedule. I actually have a schedule I've drawn up now that rules my Monday - Friday workweek and it says when I should be writing versus web surfing, versus doing dishes and fixing toilets. That sounds stupid - it took a while for me to try it, but it lead to another interesting trick. I've been using the Getting Things Done methodology and it was helping - but I was unhappy with how much writing I was doing. One problem I was having was that I only had one "context" really - at any time I could tackle any problem. Or read RSS feeds. And it all seemed sort of equally important. The schedule let me create artificial contexts - and the difference has been huge. So now I have a "Domestic" context and a "Writing" context, and if it's 9:30 in the morning I know it's time to stop reading web crap, and time to stop messing with whatever and just write (and I mean write in the looser sense - including editing and the like). I can not worry about domestic crap because I know it has time coming up so I can glibly slide things onto a Next Actions list and off my mind for an hour of writing time. Anyway, for some reason cutting through some blockage professionally dried up my blogging impulse. I'm hoping there's a steady state in between - we'll see. On the gaming front I must admit that I'm quite enamored with Canvas Curse on the DS. That's currently a Gamefly rental, but I wouldn't be surprised to find in a few days that I buy it. It's the game that Yoshi's Touch and Go is the tech demo for. Don't get me wrong - I'm still angry at Nintendo milking it that way - Yoshi's is a travesty and they shouldn't be selling it. But I admit Canvas Curse is fun. And I'll probably go ahead and buy Meteos this week - I've already read two positive reviews and I'm inclined to buy anything from Mizuguchi. So much for my "no more DS titles that aren't pre-screened" line - although I could be snarky and say it only applies to first-party titles. I've also fiddled with Jade Empire and Bard's Tale briefly before circling back to concentrate on Sly 2 and GTA:San Andreas. I can talk more about any of these titles if anyone asks. There's also an interesting discussion about Gamefly impacting my game impressions. Here's a short version - I sent back Jade Empire at a point where I would not have quit playing a game I had already invested $50 in. I expected Gamefly to save me the occasional $50 purchase. I'm somewhat surprised to find out it raises my quality bar. Moving my buy/don't buy decision bar from before playing to after five to ten hours of playing is a very interesting thing. Again, I can talk more on this point if anyone cares.

How in the world did I miss this story in March? Georgie stop it!. Please! We're begging you! You managed to finish the prequel on some sort of "high note" (admittedly by lowballing your first two shots but we'll take what we can get) But c'mon now? 3D? WTF?

Karin and I just watched episode 6 of Samurai Champloo and boy were we surprised to see a cameo by Chuji! (He plays the European, naturally!) Good work Jeff!