Umbral Echoes Blog

Today I talked to the company owner Steve about my desire to eventually move to White Wolf.  The reasons are many — more challenging technology, more of a mentoring environment (where I’m at, it’s all self-learning), and more than anything I just feel at home with the White Wolf crew.

It went as well as can be expected; Steve said that the news was “really crushing,” but he understood where I’m coming from.  I did make it clear that I haven’t decided 100% on this yet, and also that White Wolf will have to pay me at least what I’m getting now for me to be able to make this move — and also that I won’t leave OneBookShelf until things are in a state where that’s not a huge blow to the company.

And in unrelated news, I’m giving my Alienware laptop to Kirstie, and getting a new Dell one for myself.  The specs are about the same, though the Dell will have a bigger hard drive and a slightly better video card.  And of course right after buying that, I saw a tablet PC that I’ve had my eye on for a while on sale for 30% off.  But for anyone interested in that kind of thing, click here and configure the system, then enter code NB3075 for 30% off (brings it down to about $770, or $720 if you pay with PayPal).  Actually, I could cancel the Dell order I suppose.  Hrm…  I needs go spec a system and compare.

So I’m reading the headlines from a computing newsletter I get, and this immediately jumped out at me:

A German Aerospace Center Space Agency research team led by Sami Haddadin has developed a robot that intentionally hits people in the face…

Now, the research is aimed at making robotic machinery that works near people able to detect if it hits a person.  But that first sentence had me laughing out loud.

This week, we’re running a promotion at work giving away lots of free RPGs.  For those interested in such things:

ThanksGiveAway Promotion

A selection of products each day, until Friday.  Last weekend, I got the fun of setting up 6 new download servers in preparation for this.  While I was at it, I also spent some of my personal time tweaking a publisher tool for sending out mails, which was received with praise along the likes of, “Shouldn’t you be doing something more important than this?” and, “I hates it!  Make it like it was!!!  Change is BAD!!!!”  The second of which is expected (and somewhat deserved, since the page didn’t work so well when the email list was in the thousands), since every time we do anything, various small publishers invariably liked things better how they were before.

If we’re to believe them, then apparently RPGNow in 2005 was the pinnacle of perfection.

In other news, we finally got a Wii.  I thought it might be useful to have since we’re having the housewarming party this Saturday.  Which you’re invited to, if you’re reading this.  Yes, you too.  But please RSVP if you are coming, so we know how much pizza/beer/etc. we need to get.

But I digress.  The Wii is as fun as the hype claims, though the boxing game is very hard to control.  I perform the exact same motion 5 times, and I end up with a jab-jab-hook-nothing-jab.  Cary bought Zelda, and has been spending lots of time with that — except at the moment, since he’s currently at the White Wolf company retreat and no doubt seeing just how many beers it takes to damage the liver.  Kirstie has been having lots of fun with Rayman, which is a fairly insane game composed of tons of mini-games which involve you (a duck) abusing bunnies.

Don’t worry, these aren’t cute bunnies.  These are bunnies that you’d see in a Roman Dirge or Jhonen Vasquez comic.

All right, back to whipping the servers into submission.

I now have pellets, and a calibrated scope. Fear! Of course, it’s getting cold, so there probably won’t be many more squirrels trying to chew my deck away this year. But I’ll be ready for next year! Fucking tree rats with beaver*-teeth.

In other news, Jared and Niquie came down to help us with painting the old place. Thank goodness for that — we were supposed to have more people, but the only other person that showed up was Kirstie’s boss. A shame, too; had Grem shown up, there would have been 3 people there with biology degrees, and they would have undoubtedly hatched some plan for world domination through the genetic engineering of amphibious raptors with computer hacking skills.

The new house is great, but sweet Jeebus will I be glad when we’re completely done with the old house. Still need to get a few odds and ends out, and hire a maid to clean the place. New carpet is going in tomorrow.

* The dam-building sort, not the “IT HAS TEETH!!!” sort, you sicko.