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:
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.
…to the Notheast Side? We signed on the house yesterday, which would have taken 25 minutes (we were signing the papers faster than the lawyer could handle), except we had to wait around for an hour or so for the confirmation on the wire transfer that was supposed to have taken place earlier that day. But that finally came through, and all was well.
The previous owner had some stuff left in the garage still, so when he came to get that afterwards, he also gave us a walkthrough of the house — showed us how to work various things, told us about any little quirks, etc. He also let us pick through some of the stuff he was about to move out, in case we wanted any of it, and he even gave us a pellet gun (we live in a wooded area, and squirrels are a problem). The women out there will probably have horrified expressions right now at the thought of shooting a cute little furry thing. Squirrels are tree rats with bushy tails, and some have even taken up residence in our chimney. I plan on getting in a lot of target practice.
Awesome Features of New House
Obligatory pictures are beneath the cut. There are too many rooms in the house to post pictures of them all, so these are just a few highlights. Continue reading
We got final approval on our loan, and were also approved for a closing date of the 26th (pending that being okay with lawyers and agents and so forth). Woot!
We will be having a combination housewarming/Kirstie’s-birthday party on Saturday, November 17th — we’ll probably start it around 6-ish, but details to follow. You’re invited. Bring friends or random miscreants if you dare. Birthday presents are not compulsory; your presence is a more than adequate gift.
I’ve been thinking about the concept of democracy a lot lately. Or at least, I’ve been gnawing on it in the back of my brain anyway. I’ve come to the conclusion that democracy doesn’t work. And I don’t just mean this flawed two-party democracy that we live in, but democracy as a whole.
For the record, I’m a libertarian in theory. I think that people should be free seek happiness as they please, so long as it doesn’t encroach on other people’s ability to do the same.
That having been said, people at large are idiots, and don’t know what’s good for them in the long run.  Or put another way, people are inherently selfish, and are fine with taking from society at whole if it means more for them individually. Some people expect that the government should pay for all of their health care. Some people see no problem in getting permanent disability pay, when they don’t actually have a disability that prevents them from working. What ever happened to, “Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country.”?
I like the idea of democracy in general — having one person make the final decision on things for an entire population seems awfully silly. But I think voting should be both a privilege and a duty, but not a right granted to everyone.
Ideally, I would say we should do away with Congress, and a much larger number of qualified individuals (i.e. both intelligent, and know the issues at hand) should vote to enact laws and policies. These people wouldn’t be elected by the masses, because the masses don’t know what’s good for them.  There would be some sort of unbiased procedure for determining who “qualifies” to vote on what. And those that qualify, would be duty-bound to vote.
I know this could never work, because inevitably the process of choosing these “enlightened citizens” would become biased. So like all other such ideas, not so great in practice. But I feel like some day, that’s what it will come to through some combination of technology and social evolution.
Last night was White Wolf’s official office opening party. There was a snake dancer, a fire eater, a magician, and of course… an open bar. Two, technically. Cary was already drunk when we got there at 9, and things only got more interesting from there.
I got to catch up with some people I hadn’t seen in a while, and let everybody know that I’d be moving near the office.
Now that I don’t fear jinxing it, Kirstie and I are officially moving to a new (well, pre-owned, but new to us) house in Stone Mountain, about 3 miles from the White Wolf office. The inspection was yesterday, and we actually got to meet the previous owners — one of them, anyway, as it seems to be a divorce situation. His name was Marcell, and he was very cool. The inspection went well, and Marcell will be fixing everything that the inspector found wrong, other than some double-pane windows that had the seal between them broken. Those cost about $5,000 to replace, so I don’t blame him. Slightly less energy-efficient this way, but it also makes the windows fogged — which is a good thing, since the windows in question are bay windows around the bath tub.
We sign on the 30th, and have the movers booked for the 1st. For some reason, Kirstie didn’t want to move on Halloween — go figure. Then, next month, we are going to have a big housewarming/Kirstie’s-birthday thing. There will be beer, and grilling, and strippers. Okay, maybe no strippers (unless we get Cary drunk enough, but that’s not hard to do).
Pictures of the new digs forthcoming, since the pictures on the MLS site don’t do it justice.
Then will be the annoying part… getting our current house ready for sale and putting it on the market. Cleaning, painting, recarpeting, cleaning… and then some more cleaning. And then waiting for it to sell, which we expect to take at least 6 months, probably more like 8 or 9.
Looked into house buying, and got some good and bad news. Good news is that if you’re buying a house right now, then you’re in luck. Bad news is, if you’re selling… not so much so. The market is over-saturated with houses, and our neighborhood in particular has like 12 other houses up for sale. So to sell our place, we’ll need to do lots of cleaning-up, and even then we can expect it to take 6-8 months, and possibly more.
So, looking at our options for house buying, we figured that if we lived close to work and put ourselves on a shoestring budget, we could actually afford our current mortgage, plus that of a new house. With some financial aid from our room mate Cary, this is actually a very solid possibility.
The plan now is that we get a new house ASAP, move in there, clean up the old one, and then put it on the market. The only kink in this plan is… we’re not sure if the bank will actually give us a loan for another house. But, we’ll be talking to our loan officer tomorrow. And if that goes well, we’ll look for a new place starting Monday (as well as begin packing).
So, wish us luck!
Went to my friend Sam’s birthday party on Saturday evening, which was good times. Lots of wine, and Monkey came out for the occasion too. Met two Marcs, and Sam’s neighbor Yarra (no idea how it’s spelled), who was a European gal — I believe she was from Denmark or something — that could have been Steffi Graf‘s younger sister.