fwaggle.org

This weekend marked the return of our tiny town’s yearly city-wide rummage sale, so we went out on the hunt for some good deals. For the most part, there really wasn’t much… no baby clothes that’d fit Duncan (tons of girls clothes though), no cool PC stuff (except an ancient 6800GT card that’s not much use to me), some guy selling franklin mint style knives and probably fake mens diamond watches, another guy selling furniture for almost brand new prices, etc.

I did manage to pick up a laser printer for dirt cheap ($5), and after a bit of tinkering it actually works (the toner cartridge wasn’t seated correctly, which led me to think I’d screwed myself). It’s in really nice condition and is not actually that old (only a few thousand pages according to the built in calculator).

I also picked up a whole-house water filter, which is great news because our old one exploded last winter and we’ve been drinking bottled water (the biggest rip-off on the planet) ever since. I need a couple fittings to connect it up and then we’re back in business. Huzzah!

I love getting stuff in the mail. I hate waiting for stuff, but getting stuff rocks.

So I was thinking about setting up something like this, except on Half.com instead – because I love getting cheap PS3 games and there’s a ton of them on Half that I wouldn’t mind playing. Obviously it’d need caveats, like I don’t want every sequential copy of Madden ever made… but still.

Lately all I get is junk… credit card offers, rv insurance quotes (because I signed up for something to get free stuff and now for some reason people think I own boats, RVs, etc). I wouldn’t even complain if the credit card offers were decent, but the last one I got was like 30% APR and a $75/year fee – screw you guys.

So I was thinking if I set up a script or a site where I could put some money in every so often and it’ll buy me shit when there’s good deals on it.

… and I kinda like the idea.

I’ve always felt that barter shouldn’t really be taxed, but I suppose if you were going to keep track of barter with a pseudo-currency like Bitcoin, I can see paying taxes on it.

MumbleDog is now accepting BitCoin payments on a small basis, but we’re not really advertising it. All our bills are in USD, and we don’t really want to open the flood gates and risk having to try and convert a bunch of Bitcoin to USD in a hurry (or worse, get caught with our pants down having them devalue over night and have to dig into our operating expenses savings accounts to pay bills we should have had money for), so we’re not pushing it very hard.

What I can’t figure out is why so many folks are in such a hurry to turn BTC into something it’s not – talking about inventing hardware-based crypto-currencies to make an effective BTC coin, keeping track of IOUs or made-up-cash advances from a central issue seems to pretty much defeat the purpose of it to me (not to mention that inventing your own currency and printing notes is what got Liberty Gold in trouble to begin with).

Basically my issue with the whole thing is that Bitcoin skirts currency regulation because it has no innate value – it’s only value stems from your ability to convince other people it has value. When you start making an actual currency with coins and notes and such, you pretty much can’t do it without promising value. Sure, there are local currencies that pretty much amount to vouchers usable in a particular town or county, but that’s not what people are suggesting – they want an actual currency backed by something and redeemable.

The fed has a pretty good monopoly on that right now, and treading on their ground is done so at your own peril. I like Bitcoin the way it is – keep it worthless beyond the perceived value, and everyone can participate (well, if they can get their hands on some BTC anyway).

I’ve had a long-running fued with FedEx apparently – it all stemmed from somewhere in the mid-to-late-90s, when a friend was trying to mail me some FreeBSD discs via FedEx and they turned around and said that Victoria wasn’t a state or province in Australia.

Tasmania I could see, but Victoria? Nope it definitely is.

Lately it seems like they have a real issue sometimes finding our house. Some stuff gets here fine, other stuff it seems like they use any idiot excuse in the book. UPS aren’t as bad, our regular driver knows us so ridiculously well that it’s borderline creepy.

I understand that because of the orientation of the driveway, and the way in which the patio was built from the old porch (with the door coming off the back side of it) that our house almost looks like it might be on the other street rather than the one our address is on, but come on.

What do I gotta do, put a shiny glow-in-the-dark address plaque on the front of the house? Knock a wall out and put the door back on the front? Spray-paint 12 foot tall letters on the side of our house?

I have no idea how a kid from Sacramento moves out to Indiana and suddenly falls in love with the New England Patriots, but it happened. He has a patriots sticker on the back of his car and everything.

Around here, not liking the Colts is pretty much a capital offense – I’m excused because I don’t really like football, so it’s more indifference than not liking them (though I got absolutely sick of hearing about them when they won the Superbowl), but driving around with a Patriots sticker on your car is just plain heresy.

I was thinking about for a troll-football gift, getting him a colts sticker and putting it on the back of his truck as well, and seeing how long he drives around with it for before he realizes.

How many times am I going to get done with all my MumbleDog work, decide it’s time for some TF2 or some other game, and then realize with no small amount of horror that it’s 2:30am?

I’ll crawl into bed and likely make Duncan and/or my wife stir because for some reason when I’m trying to gingerly get into bed when it’s far too late, I have all the finesse and body mass of an elephant.

We really need one of those fancy memory foam mattresses where you can jump on them and not spill the wine.

Shaina bought a ’99 Grand Am that’s proving to be much more trouble than anticipated – it was expected it would need some work, but I think we bit off more than we can chew.

I’ve got a sneaking suspicion it needs head gaskets, which is quite an involved job for someone like myself (who is mechanically inclined, but by no means a motor mechanic).

If I may digress for a moment, moaning about this on Twitter got me positively spammed with keyword spam about things like my use of the word “job” (which wasn’t even used in the employment sense). I’m not entirely sure what word(s) I used to elicit a response about herbal hgh releasers either.

Anyway, as I was saying… this thing is just making me so mad. I replaced the thermostat, even though I’m not convinced it was bad, the housing leaked so at the very least it needed to come out. Now for $12 it’s worth more than my time to just replace the thing while I have it apart and be done with it (as most of the shit in front of the intake plenum has to come out on this car), and it doesn’t leak now.

But the damn thing still overheats – I thought it was boiling out the coolant, but I’m starting to wonder if the damn thing isn’t drinking it. The water pump is on it’s way out (there’s fluid coming out the weep hole, and I think it’s what’s singing at about 4krpm), but it’s not leaking enough to explain the massive disappearance of coolant.

There’s no coolant in the oil, nor oil in the coolant, and I didn’t notice any white exhaust… but now I sniff for it, maybe I’m imagining it but I think it smells sweet.

It is sure an interesting project, possibly more so because it’s not my money being spent on parts for it… but man I just want to take it out somewhere and torch it.

Duncan’s maternal grandma bought him a V-tech “laptop” for Christmas, and he didn’t really take much of an immediate shine to it. He’d play with it for a second or two, then take great delight in closing it and throwing it on the ground.

Lately though, he’s really taken a shine to playing with it. He’ll sit in his little chair and “takka takka takka” for ~10 minutes at a time occasionally, just listening to it talk back to him as he hammers it’s novelty oversized buttons.

I really need to pick up a decent soldering iron and some MOSFETs to see about fixing our laptop. Sometimes it’d just be nice to lay in bed a while and browse, and my phone is great but not really comfortable for any length of time. I thought about looking at miniportables or “netbooks”, but I really don’t know about that dinky screen resolution.

We spent so much money on that damn laptop, and having it just sit there depreciating is really depressing.

So I’m cooking hamburgers last night on my wife’s George Foreman grill, and I came to a funny but obvious realization: the human brain is weird as hell. You see hamburgers on a “Foreman” reminds me of World of Warcraft.

Huh?!

You read that right. The first time my wife picked up a Foreman at a yard sale was when basically everyone else except me went out shopping one summer saturday, and wound up doing a complete yard-sale crawl of Bluffton. One part of the loot was a George Foreman grill.

The day before, my wife had installed the trial for WoW for the first time (we’ve since done about four or five trials)… as they left, I decided to jump on her computer and see what all the fuss was about. I didn’t think I’d like it for some reason, and while my instincts were essentially correct for my long term attention span to it, for some reason on that first day I found myself absolutely glued to it. I made an Orc and went off on my jolly adventures paying scant attention to anything going on around me.

The next thing I know, everyone is piling back into the house, and I’m positively starving.

My wife plugs in her new-to-her Foreman to see if it works or if she wasted $3, and I proceed to cook some hamburgers on it… and I don’t know if anyone else experiences this when they eat something they’re craving when they’re absolutely starving, but it was one of the best burgers I’ve ever eaten.

So any time I cook a hamburger on a Foreman, I think of World of Warcraft.

Other things trigger more obvious memories – going down a gravel road down a steep hill always reminds me of my maternal grandparent’s house when I was really little, I’m not entirely sure why. Spam comments on my blog like from people with names like “massage therapy program online” might evoke different memories because of some silly filler text they might put in to make you click “accept” on the comment.

It’s really weird, but for some reason now I have a hankering to kill some beasts and eat a fat juicy cheeseburger.

I’ve spent the last few days really hacking on Mumble a lot. 1.2.3 just came out, which is a fantastic release – it’s still got a long way to go, of course, but it’s really making great strides. But the good news is that the feature freeze is done with now that the release made it out, which prompted me to get back into the swing of things.

I started out by hacking together an update for the FreeBSD audio/murmur port – I’m reasonably familiar with Murmur, so it didn’t take much. I don’t think the maintainer used any of my stuff, but it prompted them to get it updated rather quickly, which is a good thing.

Next, I turned my attention to the audio/mumble port, which is the client. I’m pretty well out of my comfort zone working on the client, but I gave it my best shot anyway and after a few days of hacking and testing, I managed to get it all the way updated. Again, I sent my stuff off to the port maintainer, and I’m waiting to see what happens.

Finally, I hacked together some entirely new functionality… a context menu option to copy a URL to the current channel. This copies an entire mumble:// URL, which you can then paste to your friend and they can join you. Until I started mucking with the MIME stuff, you could also paste it into the Connection dialog and it’d automagically favorite the server for you as well – I hope to fix that later.

I’ve still got a lot of work to do on it, for what’s still a reasonably trivial patch. The best part is I’m learning a ton every time the commit gets sent back.:D

It’s not like information technology jobs are easy to come by out here in the sticks, and it’s been more than a decade and I’ve only ever seen one thing (in Canada) that I could really see myself being happy doing. MumbleDog is that thing – if it can put a reasonable income into my family’s pocket and I can basically get paid to sit and hack on the Mumble client all day, I’d be absolutely thrilled.