I’ve known my wife now for 15 years. One of the things I love about her is that she is a talented story teller and writer. Whether it’s a fictional story or a story about a funny thing that happened to her that day, I think she has a knack for unfolding a story in a funny and entertaining way. She tells me I’m biased, but I’m not the only one to tell her that she should be writing for a living. She also has a pretty healthy ego and confidence about herself, but when it comes to her writing she just refuses to put herself out there in any real way. I’m not sure if it’s the fear of rejection or whether she really doesn’t have confidence in her work, but she will only share her work with a few people and some of her writing she won’t even share with me.

I’ve tried for years to convince her that the Internet is a good place for her to familiarize herself with sharing her work in a semi-controlled way. Several years ago, I set up a completely anonymous website for her to post her stories and get comments and feedback from people. No one would know it was her work, but she could get some valuable insight into whether her stuff is any good beyond what her loving husband says. As blogs, podcasts, and social media sites have come along, I’ve tried again and again without much luck to convince her to give it a shot and go “online”.

The closest I got was for her to agree to record an audio version of one of her books and let me serialize it on a podcast, but in the end she backed out when we started discussing technical details like what to call the podcast. For someone who will tell every stranger we meet on the street our life story, she claims she doesn’t want to share anything about herself online. She refuses to sign up for Facebook, saying that if she wanted to connect with someone she knew, she’d just call them (yes, honey, I know). Even dismissing the whole writing angle though, I just think it would be cool if I could send her messages on Twitter.

So, the other day when my lovely wife walked into my office and announced, “I want you to set me up with a blog,” I think you can imagine just how long it took me to recover and pick my jaw up from the floor. Even more shocking was that she passed the “what do you want to call it” seriousness test. So, I helped her create a WordPress.com account and configure her very first blog.

I can’t promise you’ll get to see the results of her great American novel, but she’s already posted a couple of stories. One is the background story for the name of the blog and the other is her take on a funny incident that happened last night. Before I sent you off to read it, let me give you something to compare it against. My post to Twitter regarding the incident last night was, “just spent 20 minutes chasing a small bird around the house. Caught him with a towel over the cat litter box and let him go outside.” Now, keep in mind that Twitter purposely limits messages to 140 characters (why it’s called microblogging) and go read my wife’s tale of the same incident. See if you can’t see what I see.

The other day I watched the video for “It’s Pitch Black” by MC Frontalot which is a tribute to text adventure games. The chorus is, “You are likely to be eaten by a Grue. If this predicament seems particularly cruel, consider whose fault it could be. Not a torch or a match in your inventory.”

This brought back some of the old text adventure games I used to play. I remember Zork, Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Leather Goddess of Phobos, and several others I remember but don’t recall the names. I remember sitting for hours every day after school trying to solve the puzzles and typing endless commands like, “pick up book” and “put book in backpack”. It was like reading a book, but one that you could interact with and control the outcome of to a degree.

In some cases, I bought the Infocom hint books. These books contained clues to get you past the more difficult parts of the game, but they allowed you to control how much information and how quickly they gave you hints. Each question was answered first with vague answers and then they got more specific, finally just outright revealing the answer. The innovative part is that you’d use a marker to reveal the answers one at a time as you needed them.

When I was in college, the Internet was more widely available to me, and I discovered multi-player text adventure games like MUDs, MOOs, MUSHes, and others. One particular MUD was responsible for me ducking into the computer labs between classes to kill goblins and shrews. I spent many, many hours building and scripting objects in more than one MOO and even ran my own MOO (LynxMOO) where I met some lifelong friends.

If you Google my name, you’ll find me listed in the credits for enCore, a distance education project using MOOs. If I remember correctly, I scripted an overhead projector object which the professor could load with pre-prepared slides and as she advanced to each one the text would be displayed to all of the students at the same time. The enCore project still exists and they have switched their focus to providing a web-based interface for text-based MOOs.

I suppose you could say text was the basis for my fascination with MMORPGs. I’ve played at least a dozen different MMORPGs over the years and I’m currently active in two. I play Tabula Rasa every day with a great group of friends from my time in Neocron and Neocron 2 (where I was also a volunteer GM for 2.5 years). I also casually play Eve Online. Tabula Rasa is very fast paced and intense so Eve provides a calmer, more social experience when I’m in the mood for that.

Back to text. Surprisingly, text is not dead. You can find plenty of places to play text adventure games online, including the original Infocom games. There is still an active community for MUDs, MOOs, and MUSHes. In particular, I revisited a MUD a co-worker introduced me to almost 5 years ago called Medievia. They just celebrated 17 years of being online and they are still adding features!

They now have a special font which allows them to easier draw ASCII maps of the world and sound triggers that can be configured to play specific .wav files when certain events happen in the game.

I was surprised how quickly everything came back to me. I remembered where things were in the world, how to cast specific spells and when. What dangers to avoid and where to go to level. Strangely enough, it was like picking up a book you haven’t read in a while and finding new details you never noticed before. I think I’ll pop in from time to time to see how things are going and maybe kill a goblin or two.

For at least 6 months, my family has been harassed by one very persistent telemarketer. I have received postcards, letters, and flyers in the mail. My wife and I have received calls on at home, work, and cell phone numbers (home number registered with the Do Not Call Registry). Most recently, they somehow got my son’s cell phone number which was just activated with a brand new number less than a few months ago. The cell phone was intended for limited use by family and for emergencies and we haven’t given it to anyone. That means Verizon Wireless either sold the number to them or they are war dialing known wireless exchanges (most likely the latter).

The amazing thing is that I was not able to get the company’s name until today. They are using an automated system to call and play a message informing you that your automobile warranty will expire (it’s always the 2nd and final notice) and you should contact them to secure a renewal right away. If you listen to the message, you are given an option to talk to a representative or have your number removed from their records. If you choose the second option, the call immediately terminates (and obviously doesn’t remove your number).

Both of my vehicle’s factory warranty expired some time ago and I have an extended warranty through my credit union. I have no need for their services, but I have talked to a rep numerous times to find out who they are and why they won’t stop calling. If you talk to a rep and start to inquire anything about who they are, they hang up on you. If you ask them to remove you from their list, they hang up on you. If you ask to speak to a supervisor, they hang up on you. If you say you want to buy their service they ask for make, model, and VIN number and have no idea who you are otherwise. If they are supposed to be renewing an existing contract, why don’t they ask for my name or other information to lookup my account?

The calls started out weeks apart, then became several times a week, and now they are several times a day to different numbers. I recently had another run in with another telemarketer who wanted to give me a free cruise which followed the same pattern, but after yelling and screaming and threatening lawsuits they have finally stopped calling (so far). The numbers which show up on caller ID are always bogus – if you call them back, it’s a disconnected number.

The rep my wife talked to today apparantly wasn’t informed that he was supposed to hang up on anyone who asks what the company name and/or business location is, because he actually gave it to her after giving him enough fake information to make him think she was really interested. They are National Auto Warranty Services out of St. Lous, MO.

It would appear that National Auto Warranty Service is already in a bit of trouble with the Attorney General of Missouri for calling people on the Do Not Call list, providing misleading and false information, and failing to honor requests not to be called. It would also appear that things were going so well in Missouri that they have now branched out nationwide. You know it’s bad when people leave comments on your company’s job postings.

If they’re sales and marketing tactics aren’t bad enough, I’m sure you won’t find it any surprise that even if you do buy one of their warranties you may have trouble getting your claim paid or cancelling your policy.

(Click on the photo to view the larger version or here to view the album)

As if finishing up my final semester of grad school wasn’t stressful enough, the professor for my Capstone class went missing around the beginning of March. He posted our mid-term exam on March 5th with the due date to be prior to the start of Spring Break a week later.

At the same time, we had two major assignments due – a research paper due on March 31st and a case study on April 16th. Students had plenty of questions about both assignments, but professor wasn’t responding to e-mail or questions in the (online) classroom. He did post an announcement on the 30th that we could have a deadline extension for a week and the Powerpoint in the syllabus was optional and required only for the face to face class. WHAT? Why couldn’t we have known that before we did it?

As the deadline for the next assignment started to get closer, the students were wondering why we hadn’t been assigned a case study to work on or assigned to groups. The assignment was supposed to be a group project and we’re supposed to be assigned a case study to bring up to date. The deadline for the assignment came and went with no word.

Finally, this week we heard from the professor that he was on an emergency business trip to the UK and Ireland and he had no Internet access. That’s a relief that he’s okay and that he’s back now. I just curious how this will all be resolved. As it stands, I have no graded work so far in this class and the final us coming up in a week or so. Am I passing? Am I failing? I don’t know.

I wouldn’t be so worried, but I’m flying out to Maryland for the commencement and I’d really like to know I’m going to walk the stage.

I’m pretty active on Twitter (mostly lurking anyway), but it’s taken me a while to really get into it. For example, tonight we had a large storm come through the area. I’m also a ham radio operator and I’ve been to weather spotter training, though I haven’t volunteered. I prefer to stay home and listen to the other spotters on the ham radio. So, tonight I decided to twitter what the spotters were saying since I knew a few people from the area had started following me on twitter.

It was a really cool experience to interact with other people in the same area and having the same experience. Afterwards, I noticed that I gained several new followers all from this area. Maybe I’ll do more weather spotter twittering in the future.

My biggest challenge has been explaining to friends, family, and co-workers what Twitter is and why they would want to use it. Fortunately, Tony Hsieh, CEO of Zappos.com has done a better job than I ever could. Have a look.

Beginner’s Quick Start Guide and Tutorial to Using Twitter

Infected Novel

2nd place and voted strangest shape

Originally uploaded by craig010101

Congratulations Brock on the 2nd place finish in the Pack 348 Pinewood Derby! He also won the honor of the most unusual shape!

This was posted on a forum I read regularly. Sorry, I don’t know the author.

Being Old in America
ALL ABOUT BEING BORN BETWEEN 1930 and 1980….

First, we survived being born to mothers who smoked and/or drankwhile they were pregnant. They took aspirin, ate blue-cheesedressing, and tuna from a can. They didn’t get tested for Diabetes and there are no Ultrasound photos of us in the womb.

We slept on our tummies, in baby cribs layered with lead-paint. We had no child-proof medicine bottles, doors or cabinets.

We rode in cars as infants and children with no car-seats, booster-seats, seat-belts or air-bags. We got older and rode our bikes without helmets. We even…hitch-hiked! No one drove us toschool in an SUV. A special treat on a warm, summer day was to ride in the back of a pick-up truck. We never fell out.

We drank water from the garden hose, not a plastic bottle. We shared one soft-drink with four friends, and we all drank from the same bottle. No one actually died from this.

We ate white bread and real butter. We drank whole-milk and Koolade made with ‘too much sugar.’ But we weren’t overweight because we got plenty of exercise playing outside. School recess was mandatory, twice a day, and always outdoors.

We would leave home in the morning and play all day — as long as we were home before dark.

No one was able to reach us all day. And we were O.K.

We spent hours building our go-carts out of scraps. We’d drive down a hill, and would be surprised to find there were no brakes. We ran into the bushes, and learned how to solve the problem…by ourselves.

We fell out of trees, got bruises and cuts and broken bones…and we lost teeth. There were no lawsuits from these accidents.

We ate mud-pies and worms. The worms did not live inside us forever.

We kicked-the-can, made up games with an old tennis-ball and a stick. Contrary to what we were told, we never put out someone’s eye.

We had Little League tryouts, and not everyone made the team. Those who weren’t picked, and their parents, learned to ”deal with” the disappointment….And it was unheard of for a parent to bail us out of jail. If we broke the law, they actually sided with the law.

We did not have Playstations, Nintendos, or X-Boxes. We did not have 150 cable-channels, or color-TVs, or VHS, or DVDs. Nor did we have CDs, Walkmans, surround-sound, personal computers, Internet, chat-rooms or…cell-phones. Instead, we went outdoors. We rode our bikes, or walked to a friend’s house and knocked on the door, sometimes just to talk.

There are more ”things” for children today. But we had the most important thing a child can have. We had the freedom to fail….We are generations of risk-takers, problem-solvers and independent thinkers. We have created an explosion of ideas and innovation. We learned “to deal with it all,” perhaps because as children we didn’t “have it all.”

Thanks and a hat tip to my friend in Hammond, Indiana

Also, I would add, that I survived having my feet xrayed in the shoe store, even thought it was fun!