Catsmas went well.

So I managed to survive Christmas with my family. Actually I like all but one of my family. I will not say which one so they can wonder if they ever read the blog ... not likely. We were not able to give many presents due loss of job and illness. We were able to get all the children something and at least a book for the others. That makes it OK. All of our friends agreed to not exchange gifts. That messed up one friend who always gets her presents ahead of time. She will however be able to give them as birthday gifts later.

Everyone else was generous with us. A number of gift certificates and clothing items. My wife got three hats which she needed. One looks very 20s so she can wear it during my friend's 1920's adventure game. I got a nice tea set with good tasting tea. My wife hates tea so it is all mine. Now we will eat all the chocolate and fruit that we got. Sadly we got no no monkeys as they are so delicious.

We both got sick this holiday and had to hide in the bedroom and cancel a plan to go to dinner at a family member's house. I have fully recovered, but my wife still feels bad. Hopefully we can go to her sister's tomorrow and hit the bookstore with our 5$ off coupon at Borders. We got 40% off one book and got a coupon for five off another. This is buy one get one free basically. I wish I had bought more to get more coupons.

I do plan to go to Costco next week to look at 1TB external hard drives. This way I can perform better backups of my laptop and have a place to store my torrents.

But we did not get a cat this year so it is not truly Catsmas. Ours ran out when my wife was in the hospital this year. I think she wants one, but I cannot think of a way to get one into the house. Oh well, I can try something next year.

In the mean time I will continue to work on my Castle Falkenstein campaign. I feel I will be the only one running any role playing games for the next six months. I will need to get to work on the next three adventures to keep up with everything. I plan to do a lot of planning to get real Victorian culture and history into the game.

Python ... run It's a snake!!!

I just started to learn to program in Python. I can get by in Perl, so I thought it would just be learning the syntax. This is true except that the indentation rules were not clearly expressed in the Python tutorial that I was using to learn. Once I figured out the indent rules by if/elis/else statements were simple.

I plan to mainly use the language to automate the Free BSD (no need to buy a mac) Apache server. I may switch back to Perl if Python is to hard and cannot do what I want to. Since I want to put it on my resume. I am hoping to do some of my management of the Apache server using it for internal work. Everything else will be FTP into it. I am looking for a free URL translation service for my DHCP enable IP. Way too much to use a Comcast static for business class cable.

Most of the management of the Unix server will be handled by a combination of various sh, perl, and awk scripts.

I will update on my success on making Python handle Vista. I hope I can do something with it.

Castle Falkenstein Game

I ran a CF game last Saturday. Sadly two of the players could not make it, so I switched games on the rest of the game. The original game was to be a weekend gathering on the birthday of Enrico Falgori the famed CF opera singer. I ended up using a single player adventure for my wife and altering it to include the other 3 players.

They did well with the game. I think I threw one person when I had a Guild of Calamitous Intent handbook under their pillow. They had not seen the Venture Brothers, so they were real wary of the entirety of it. I just thought it was cool to put in, but I had wanted to put more sword fighting in the game. I put in a rule that caused the players to be in trouble if they used firearms in a fight with the guild. This way I can have more of a swashbuckling feel to the game while still allowing the players to use guns against non-guild forces.

I also introduced their guild assigned nemesis: the Night Baron.

The game only took seven hours with a food break. Very quick for our group. Had they known that the meeting with the Night Baron at the end would turn into a tea party they may have gone through much quicker. The group will travel back to Alexandria and pick up the rest of the group. Once that happens they will travel to Napels for Falgori's party. Most likely to be run in Janurary 2009.

And yes the Night Baron was taken from Detective Conan. I changed the outfit to white, but I just liked the look.

Laptop Back Yeah!!!

OK, I just got my laptop back from repair. Thankfully I had an extended warranty from Costco. It took over a week to get back, but I did not have to pay for the replacement of two hard drives and the motherboard. I can handle a week of no PC for several hundred dollars.

I was fairly happy this time, but the last time it was horrible. Costco sent it to Micro Medics. They were awful. I am a network engineer that manages servers, I know what I am talking about. They were to replace the motherboard (video chipset) and one hard drive. The laptop has two and they knew that. They were told by Costco all of the problems from the ticket system that they share. This is what they ended up doing.

The replaced the motherboard fairly easily. The thing is a mess to get out so I will give them some slack for that. However, that is where they stopped. They then installed the OS (Vista Home Basic 32-bit) onto the 64-bit system that has Vista Ultimate. I sent them the system recovery disk for the to use. They did not even complete the restart and powered down by pressing the power button after the first load. When I started the PC I saw the Windows is starting for the first time message. This is really bad thing to see on a repair. If they did not run through the load and test functionality they should probably be fired.

Costco called me back as I was determining how bad Micro Medics was, and they had Micro Medics send me a UPS shipping label. Micro Medics were not able to copy and paste my email address out of the ticket system, so they sat for three days on this. Costco was the one to get me a new box shipped. Micro Medics used standard ground on it.

Once I sent it back, they took over a week to work on this. I got it back with a new hard drive, but the OS was still Vista Home Basic 32-bit. The second hard drive was not even added to the computer using the disk management snap in. At least I was able to fix everything myself. A grandmother would have sent it back a third time. Micro Medics sucks a lot.

If you ever have to send anything into Costco to get repaired under warranty, ask them to send it to another vendor than Micro Medics. They have several that they use.

Starting Post

OK, I am starting this blog, just to rant and complain about standard stupid things. The main reason is to get my Castle Falkenstein Role Playing game some higher page ranking on the good ole' Google.

I am just trying to get higher on the search for "Castle Falkenstein alternative rules". It does not even show in the regular search for "Castle Falkenstein". With the blog I can discuss our attempts to game and what ever may strike me. Pretty sad and pathetic is it not?

My search for Falkenstein stuff was frustrated when a lot of the archived material was removed from a HDD when I sent in a lap top to be repaired. Fancy HP gaming lap top with 2 hard drives. The techs did not understand that HDD1 is the second hard drive, with HDD0 being the first. They then reloaded the OS on top of HDD1, noticed that it was not correct half way through and reloaded 32-bit Vista on a 64-bit processor.

I used a fancy undelete program at work to recover most of the information, but my anime in MKV and OGG was a loss along with some of my Castle Falkenstein stuff. I will be avoiding Mico Medics from now on.

Now I will start to back up to the web with the Castle Falkenstein web site. Please take a look at it. I would like to see Castle Falkenstein prosper even if the publishers only have an electronic copy available.

Check out the R. Talsorian CF website. They have to be good they have an Anime Mecha.