Schinckel.net

I ran out of Espresso Grind coffee last week, and, not having enough money to buy anymore, went without until the cashflow had fined up a bit. Rather than drink the posh that passes for instant coffee, I went without. And it was horrific. I didn’t really realize how badly I need a coffee in the mornings until I actually had my first coffee in some time this morning. And immediately I felt better. So, it seems I am totally addicted to bass, um, coffee. Caffeine is something that is quite unusual in my body: I can have a coffee right before bed and yet drop right off immediately, but if I go without in the mornings, I am my normal, grumpy self. It’s not until I have the drop of Java that I become a shadow of a respectable person. Anyway, whilst the cashflow is still looking shaky, it turned out I had enough on my Hudson’s card to grab a bag of freshly ground good stuff. And I’m sure my students will thank me.

Scheduled downtime tonight on my WoW server - so rather than do anything else, I created a spreadsheet showing costs and potential profits for various items my characters can make. So now, I know the lowest price I can sell stuff for, and what items are the most profitable. And, it’s not always the more expensive items that are, percentage-wise, the most profitable. But, you do need to make and sell less of them. Which means you aren’t relying on 100 people to all be wanting a particular item, just maybe one or two. However, it has given me a lot of ideas about where to spend time in terms of manufacturing ocer the next little while. And, I’m not making this data available, for a couple of very good reasons. I worked very hard to input the data, and I don’t want anyone knowing what my profit margins are like, and undercutting me, or anything like that…

Someone told me today when I mentioned I had seen this film that this title is what they know _James Bond _as. Because, that’s what he does. Kiss, Kiss; Bang, Bang. Even with the colloquial meaning of Bang here in Australia, that’s still somewhat true. This film nearly lost me in the opening sequences. Sure, the young magician act was magnificent, and well done, but the party was poor. It was almost like the pre-screening audiences had totally missed all of the salient points, and there was a percieved need to bring in a narrator to bring everyone up to scratch. And if it can’t be done subtly then they took the easy way out: stopping the film mid-frame, and having the narrator talk over the top. Cheap. Luckily, as soon as the party was over, things settled down to a better tempo. The parallels between the film, and lives of Robert Downey Jnr and his love interest neatly intersected with those that were present in the novel on which the film touched many times. Downey Jnr himself was good as the lead character (and narrator - Grr), although since he was supposed to be playing a 34 year-old. Surely they could have actually found someone a bit younger, or who looked a bit younger to fill this role. Or did they find a nobody, train him up nicely, giving him detective lessons, just to get Downey at a cheaper rate? (In joke - watch the film and you’ll get it). The star of the show was undoubtably Val Kilmer, in the delightful role of Gay Perry, a formerly (?) gay private detective. Michelle Monaghan makes a very good struggling actress, and looks very nice with not much on. The big surprise is that of Harlan Dexter. A very old, very balding Corbin Bernsen is almost unrecognisable as the former star of LA Law. I didn’t even realise until researching for this review that it was indeed him! This film is most definitely worth a watch. I’m half tempted to re-edit this and remove the silly narration scenes, but I’m way to lazy to do that.

…that’s Dreamz with a Z.

I went into this film with an idea in my head as to what it would be about. There has been a significant amount of advertising, and, to be honest, it looked good. With not being a real fan of the Pop Idol-type shows, but knowing more than enough about them to understand even the most in-jokes, I felt I was fully prepared for whatever the movie threw at me. I was surprised. Whilst the film was poking fun at the popularity contests that are the current crop of New Talent shows, it went far deeper than this into it’s satire of American family and political life. With a title sequence that had music reminiscent of a civil war flick, I was unsure as to if I was in the right theatre. If it wasn’t for the teaser where we see just how shallow and self-absorbed Hugh Grant’s character is, I would have asked around, or even ducked out to see the number on the door. And the opening scenes, with Dennis Quaid took a few seconds for me to adjust. He is clearly a parody (and a very close one!) of the current US President. Whilst at times he looks a bit like George W. Bush, as soon as he walks, talks or moves, he clearly becomes the kind of person you clever Americans have elected again.

Maybe it is time I read newspapers. I’ve learned a lot this morning. It turns out North Korea and Iran are not like Doctor Octopus and Magneto at all…

The lack of understanding of current affairs, the ease by which he is pushed around by his staff, the cluelessness as to what to say, Quaid certainly hits the nail on the head. It seems like it’s way over the top, but this nagging feeling inside me keeps saying this is exactly what Bush is like behind closed doors. A spoiled little boy who was pushed into the presidency by his parents and advisors, and doesn’t really know what he’s doing. Someone who doesn’t realise the laughing stock he is internationally, and possibly even nationally. Perhaps, if Bush read the papers, then he might not be so likely to follow the whims of his handlers quite so easily. And the characters involved more directly in the show are magnificent as well. Mandy Moore in her second real satire movie (she was in a rather anti-fundamentalist christian movie some time ago) simultaneously manipulates the population and her family and loved ones. She certainly is shaping up to be the next anti-establishment sweetheart.

I’m not physically attracted to other people, but if you want me, I’m yours.

I’m not sure who this movie is aimed at. If it were my audience, then I’m sure it would be a hit. Those people that couldn’t stop watching Farenheit 911, loved Three Ki_ngs, and were somewhat scared by _Wag the Dog. But Mandy Moore seems to still have a younger, less politically astute or aware following. And the lack of impression that this is actually a political satire in the advertisements seems to indicate that it is a film for the fans of American Idol, a chance for them to laugh at the show they love and themselves for loving it. Don’t get me wrong: this is not a film that was funny all of the time. There were plenty of moments that just didn’t ring true. However, it kept me entertained for most of the two hours. Certainly looks a whole lot more fun than The Da Vinci Code.

I have my own domain name, schinckel.net, which is registered with MyDomain.com, and has several sub-domains, which are mainly shortcuts to other sites I manage. Including this one. I also use their email forwarding service, and have it forwarded to my Gmail account. Which is pretty good, but occasionally they have a glitch, and email doesn’t get through, or is delivered late - in some cases up to a week late. This is usually not a big issue for me, as most of my email contact is not urgent (I tend not to use it for business or work purposes), however for my partner it is a real issue. Having a reliable MX server is important for her. I’ve also recently been accepted into the Gmail for Domains programme beta, and am going through the process of setting this up. I won’t create a tutorial - if you don’t know enough about how to do this, I’m not going to try to help you out for free, but I will detail some of the issues I have come across. The first account you create will be the admin account. I set this up as an admin@ address, and then decided I wanted a matt@ address also. I then deleted this, and created a pointer from matt@ to admin@. Later, I decided I would recreate the matt@ address, and use a seperate account for admin related email, even though I will have my email client check both accounts. But, I get the error:

We were unable to create matt@schinckel.net as a new account because you recently deleted an account with the same username. If you or one of your users needs to receive mail at this address, you can create matt@schinckel.net as an email list or nickname.

The Read More page then indicates:

I deleted a user, and would like to recycle the username. What are my options? There are a couple of things you can do if you’d like to recycle a deleted username.

• Create an email list with that username immediately.
• Wait five days, and create a new user with the deleted username.

Guess I won’t be going live for another 5 days… The other main issue I am having at the moment is with account creation. Sometimes (rarely) it works, but mostly I get the following error:

Failed to create account! Service is unavailable, please try again later

I’ve also set up a URL forwarding, so that mail.schinckel.net points at the right location on the gmail servers. This is seeming to take a while to propagate, but it will make it much easier for other users.

Well, my character in World of Warcraft has made it to Level 30. Last night, after a massive 9 hour session, I finally got there. It’s funny, but I think I’m spending more time in Azeroth than at my job…

We’ve recently gotten a heap of new iMacs (the intel ones), and I’ve been helping the IT guys set them up - including things like cloning the partitions from one machine to the rest. We did come across an issue where the cloning seemed to fail - the way we solved this was to format the drive first. I think it was a permissions issue: because the files were write-protected, Carbon Copy Cloner failed to overwrite the settings. Which meant that they booted up looking the same, although all of the new applications were installed. The other problem we had is that the Proxy Server settings needed to be changed. The new machines were fine - the settings were made before the cloning occurred, but the old machines still had an invalid setting. I tried using AppleScript, but since the only way to do this is with UI scripting, which is notoriously hard to do right, and tends to break when applications are updated, or even just recompiled. Finally, it twigged that I could just copy the preferences file from one machine to the rest. Because the file is protected, you will need Administrator rights, and you may need to move the original file out of the way first, via the Terminal. You could also do this using ssh, which would mean that the other machines wouldn’t even need to be logged in. And the file in question is: /Library/Preferences/SystemConfiguration/network.plist or something similar. I’m not at a Mac to be able to check right now.

Well, I’ve pretty much spent every spare minute I’ve had in the past week or so playing WoW. It’s a kind of addictive game, to say the least. I’ve managed to get my main character up to Level 25, with a bit of help from Blasta. For those of you who don’t know what World of Warcraft is, it’s a Massively Multiplayer Online RolePlaying Game (or MMORPG), where basically you run around killing monsters, collecting loot and trading with other players. The thing that sets it apart from other video games is that you play with (and against) real people in real time. For instance, I have a group of friends who live in Melbourne, and they have started a Guild, of which I am a member. They often adventure together, and at times I join in. I have also teamed up with people from around the world, most notably a couple of Canadians. There are a variety of races and classes that one can play as in the world of Azeroth, which anyone who has played any of the Warcraft series may remember. They are largely very similar to the classes and races one might see in Dungeons & Dragons, or many other fantasy settings: Elves, Dwarves Gnomes and Humans; versus Orcs, Trolls, Tauren (Minotaurs) and Undead. Players can be Warriors, Mages, Paladins, Priests, Shamen, Hunters, Warlocks, Rogues and Druids. The game is more than just hack-n-slash, as there is a robust economy, where people can trade found items, but also develop skills in manufacture, and create their own products. For instance, my character has Leatherworking skills, and can create various types of leather armour, and I can sell these to other players through a server-wide auction house. Other people have specialised in manufacture of metal armour, weapons or magical items. If you happen to be on the _Hyjal _server, then give _Ibukan _a hello, and we can hook up and kill some baddies together.

If anyone in Adelaide has downloaded the Macintosh version of the WoW 1.10 patch, and would be kind enough to pop it onto a CD for me (WoW-1.10.0-enUS-patch.app), I will gladly collect it from you, and pay you in beer, wine or your chosen liquor. I’m stuck behind a 56k modem, and the wait is killing me. 360Mb before I can even think about playing WoW, and I’m only at 7.13Mb. According to the Blizzard Downloader: About 38 hours remaining.

Just spent four full days in Melbourne. It was cold. Went over there to catch up with some old school friends of mine, whose birthdays parties we’d missed in the past 12 or so months. Was drunk pretty much non-stop for three days. Used to be able to do that without blinking. Have to blink now. Bought World of Warcraft after having a bit of a play over there. So, you may never hear from me again, apparently… Oh, and this one, from xkcd.com is for Wayne: