General

There’s this commercial… friends tell me it’s from Verizon Wireless advertising their new RAZR phone but really, I can’t watch it all the way through… it’s just… You’ve seen it? This guy is standing around in, perhaps, a party, and this woman comes in and jams earbuds in his ears which blares out five seconds of some song, then she claims to need them back to answer a telephone call, yanks the earbuds out of his head and walks away. She turns back, laughing a little at him, as the guy (this is shot from his perspective) staggers about a bit. Then the commercial flashes this picture of some guy named Keith Urban as displayed on a cell phone. ...

*Note: I just found out that it sucks to be stupid. Guitar Hero II was released today. If I’d known it was coming out so soon, I would never have bought Final Fantasy 12. * If you know me, or live near me, you can’t escape my Guitar Hero obsession. Guitar Hero 2 comes out this month and I’m trying my darndest to finish Final Fantasy 12 so my PS2 will be free to rock out come release date. This new version lets a friend play along as bass. I’ve been hinting to my son that he’d better be working up his GH skills cuz I’m not going to be satisfied with him strumming the E string over and over. I played bass in a college band and I’m not doing that again. The lead guitar would tell me to take a bass solo and I’m like, huh, I’ve been playing the same four notes throughout the entire song and now you want me to solo? Solo what? Stan Jordan, I am not. ...

* Note: My decision to take the pencil sketch and redraw and ink it in Photoshop over the objections of the assistant sales manager for the line who said the sketch’s roughness was “why we liked it,” was vindicated when the sales manager said she liked it, but needed the background to be a blue gradient to match the backgrounds of the models in the brochure. Woohoo! And just another note: Photoshop CS2 is a real dog on my cheap work computer. My uncle Bruce Holloway is a professional illustrator. We visited him this summer while we were out in New Hampshire. He has this beautiful state of the art Mac and Photoshop setup, and he works on the second floor of a reconverted old barn with floor-to-ceiling windows looking out over picture-postcard rural New Hampshire beauty.* ...

[ ](http://picasaweb.google.com/brendahol/SuryaHavenGirlSpring07)[ ](http://picasaweb.google.com/brendahol/SuryaHavenGirlSpring07) Surya/Haven Girl Spring ‘07 Just finished a new Haven Girl brochure and put it on the web via Picasa 2. People inside the company are even asking for me to put things up here; it has truly become a useful way of getting high resolution pictures of our lines to people for use in advertising. The JPEGs Photoshop CS2 made look a lot darker than the original TIFs. I wonder if this is due to the TIFs being in CYMK and the JPEGS in RGB. ...

Nashuya sent in a little song she wrote after doing the Haunted House quest in West Freeport. She’s not usually this happy, but she made level 45 while doing it. *Everyone is happy on this happy Halloween Helping undead butlers keep the study clean Dusting sweeping rearranging keep me fit and lean All is done! The Butler’s ghost quickly leaves the scene* ...

Sure, millions have written, asking, “Tipa, I know and agree that Blue Oyster Cult is the most kick-buttingest rock band EVER, but they have SO MANY GREAT SONGS! Which songs should I have on my Hallowe’en playlist?” Well, that’s a great question. BOC isn’t just Eric Bloom, Donald “Buck Dharma” Roeser, Al & Joe Bouchard and Allen Lanier, especially since this classic lineup hasn’t been together for years. Sandy Perlman wrote many of their early songs based around a mythology of alien visitation and supernatural control of humanity that would make HP Lovecraft and millions of trick-or-treaters feel right at home. ...

Okay, you’re trapped between three hungry raptors, 20m apart from each other. All of them accelerate at 4m/s/s. The wounded one has a top speed of 10m/s, while the other two top out at 25m/s. You run at 6m/s. The raptors will always run directly at you. At which angle do you run to survive the longest? Wondrous Inventions linked to a webcomic artist who drew a comic asking this very thing… and everytime I’d browse his blog, I’d see it and try to guess how I’d figure it out. ...

I am spending all my EQ2 time on the Echoes of Faydwer beta at the moment, so there’s not a lot to post about EQ2 until they lift the NDA. Enjoy the next couple weeks of ramblings about life, television and IT :) It took years to stop thinking of myself as a programmer after the dotcom bust put me and thousands like me out of work. Years of complacency left me without the kind of specific skills to get jobs in a suddenly far more competitive world. Sure I’d programmed in Java for four years, but was it J2EE? Did I use JDBC? I knew Javascript, but how about Perl? PHP? I knew basic SQL, but could I explain how to use explicit joins to optimize a complex SQL SELECT statement? ...

Coming so close on the heels of my last letter, you might think there’s been some emergency – but we’re fine, all are well. Adventures just won’t let us rest! Should the Rivervale Gazette ever ask about us, just tell them that all is well. I wish the courier that bears these letters back through the veils of time to the Norrath-That-Was could bring some word from you. But that is not the bargain we struck, when we agreed to be torn from our own humble homes to this future world of danger. Our purpose here remains unknown. Yet we struggle on and keep the name Tanglewood alive. ...

Dear Mother; I am having the Big Bend scribe write this letter for me. I don’t think I can hold a pen at the moment. I apologize for any drool marks or bits of loose skin you might find here. The ogre writing this letter is none too tidy. SCROG CLEAN! SCROG GOOD SCRIBE, U’LL SEE. Scrog, just write what I say! No, don’t write that. No! I’m just trying to tell you.. Why do you write down everything I say? Stop! SCROG JUST DOING WHAT SCROG TOLD. ...