Happy Halloween!

Halloween is a favorite holiday. It's got it all. It's got candy. It's got parties. It's got activities after dark. It's got things you do with your family. It's got things you do with your friends. It has skeletons and bloody scythes. Yes, it has it all.

For me, Halloween also has about 5 hours raking leaves, mulching them, and putting them into big yard waste bags. It has blisters. It has burning eyes from all the leaf dust. It has no time for lunch, much less workign out. It has that tired feeling you get from a job that is not well done, but done, and that gives you only the satisfaction of knowing your lawn is less likely to grow mold over the winter.

But it also has pumpkins! We had a bumper crop of Jack-o-Lanterns this year and if I'm not too lazy I'll post some small pics of them later. Each of us carved one. My own has a neurotic, weepy/scared face which just suited my mood today. One daughter's is kind of angry skeleton and the other's is Frankenstein's monster on acid, and my wife's is just demonic. No wonder my poor orange guy is all freaked out - he keeps weird company.

I hope everyone reading this, imaginary or not, has a fun and enjoyable Halloween, with just as much candy as you like and no more fright than you can handle. And remember - if you eat too much candy, you can always run it off tomorrow *place demonic laugh here*

Torchlight Update

In the interest of being fair, let me say that I've got Torchlight up and running on my PC. After thinking about it, and checking their support forums, I found that there were two issues. One was that the installer puts MS C++ Redistributable 2008 on your PC even if you happen to have that same redistributable or, in my case, a full version of MS C++ 2008 installed already. That was creating the Buffer Overrun error. I fixed that by removing the redistributable that the installer had put on the machine. The other was that good ol' Norton was detecting the program as some kind of threat and not allowing it to connect to the internet for program registration. I can see why it might do that, I've seen it happen before with small press applications. But what bugs me is that Norton Firewall would then decide that ALL attempts to access the internet were malicious and thus, I would be unable to access the internet with any program after trying to start Torchlight. Which would lead to a shut down, and all the rest. I got around that by turning the firewall off long enough to get the thing registered, then put the firewall back on (so I wouldn't get caught with my electronic pants down). Fortunately, the program does not access the internet other than for registration, so it doesn't keep hanging. Also fortunatley, it looks like the developers are already working on a patch that may address this or other issues.

So far, the game seems quite enjoyable, but I haven't gotten to play it much because I spent all my playing time getting it to run. But I have played it enough to know that it does not suck (so far).

AdamThinks.com - There's An App For That

I happen to think this is hilarious. The iPhone seems like a cool smartphone, and mad props for innovation, but Apple's opportunistic decision to selectively waive its normally fanatical dedication to proprietary technology to sell apps (which coincidentally help sell iPhones) just burns my cookies.

But maybe Torchlight does?

I frigging HATE IT when programs won't run. I actually got enough work done at work today that I had a night off. I was going to spend it playing this new game, Torchlight, which looks to be just the bee's knees. I'd love to tell you about it but, well, I can't. Because I can't get the fragging thing to run. When I try it first gives me a buffer overrun error, then essentially freezes my internet connection and then won't allow me to enter in the verification codes because it can't access the damned internet. It can't access the internet because it's f*ing up the goddamn connection! The conflict seems to come with the MS C++ redistributable package or something. I've spent an hour and a half trying to figure it out, with many MANY system restarts, and nothing. Not one piece of luck. What an INCREDIBLY frustrating way to spend $20 and an evening. @#$!@

Others are playing the game, and liking it, so I'm assuming it's a weird combo of my system set up and the software. They just released it so eventually they may get enough people with this problem that they'll post a fix. Or not. RIght now I'm too annoyed to care. If I had purchased a boxed version of the game, I would have set it on fire by now.

So I'm just fooling around on the linux box for the moment. Even though the hardward is a bit buggy, and even though I'm finding linux to be confusing as hell (cause I'm just not that used to it or saavy with this stuff), it's VERY stable and that makes me love it.

MS Visio doesn't suck

It's always a treat to find a MS program that doesn't suck. I'm currently writing this on my linux box which, although it does reset itself from time to time due to a bad heatsink on the mobo, boots SO much faster due to not being an MS program :o) But I spent a lot of time today using MS Visio and I have to say, it didn't suck too bad. Visio is a drawing program, mostly for diagrams, flow charts, and that kind of thing. Like EVERY MS program, you do quickly have to get out of all the templated, pre-set crap that they assume will just be soooooo helpful, and get to where you can tell it what you actually want it to do. But once you do that it works. I'm doing some diagrams for an upcoming presentation where I'm reporting on this SEM/CFA modeling (if it would mean anything to you, you'll know what that means) and I've seen people do diagrams in Word, in Powerpoint, and now (myself) in Visio and so far Visio is my favorite. The arrows go where I want them, it's easy to insert text for each path you draw, circles are circles, squares are squares. It doesn't take too much to make me happy.

So, if you happen to need to do a bunch of path diagrams and you have access to it, Visio is not a bad way to go. If you don't, just use the Openoffice.org Draw program - that will work almost as well. When I used it in a grant application though I found that it's figures tended to be a bit fuzzy and weird on printout.
There ya have it. Geek out, world.