Monthly Archives: April 2007

Rocky Mountain Pinball Showdown

April 29, 2007 – 8:52 PM
(image courtesy of pinballrebel.com, because i forgot my camera and my cell phone was dead) Jalen and I headed down to the Jefferson County Fairgrounds today for the Rocky Mountain Pinball Showdown 2007, and man, did we have a blast. Imagine if you will over 100 of mostly-showroom quality pinball machines from the last 50 years with unlimited free play and no lines (well, there was a bit of waiting to get on the Addams Family machine, but that was somewhat expected as it’s THE BEST PINBALL GAME OF ALL TIME). It was heavenly. In addition to such classics as Fireball, Centaur (which has some really cool speech synthesis and artwork that totally freaked me out as a kid) and Xenon, they also had this amazing Joust cocktail machine where you could play head-to-head pinball! Apparently these were prototypes, less than 500 were made. I can see why — there’s long periods of the game when all the balls are on one side of the machine, leaving the other player to just umm, twiddle their thumbs as it were, but the concept is so cool it’s a shame they didn’t mass-produce these. Also got an opportunity to play some vintage wood-rail pinball machines such as Yuma (released in 1950) and Scuba (released in 1970). Gameplay is a lot slower than on “modern” machines, but the sounds, feel and even “smell” of some of these electromechanical games is very charming. What was amazing about these games in particular was how little pinball machines had advanced in those 20 years. We also saw the Alexander clan - Dave, Erin, Daphne and Hunter were there. I had a feeling I might see Dave, it was cool to see everyone again, haven’t seen them since we went camping at the Sand Dunes last spring. I have to say, once we’re in a living situation where we can have a rec room, we’re gonna have to get a pinball machine.... Read More »
wally | No Comments

Why stupid pride will be the downfall of this country

April 28, 2007 – 4:51 PM
Stephen of the Thinkery pretty much hits the nail on the head here: “Millions of people have been duped by the modern GOP, and instead of rising up to hold them accountable, they now actively participate in deceiving themselves. They intentionally choose to believe the talking points distributed through the rightwing media, because it would damage their God damned pride to face the truth. And long after George Bush and Karl Rove are merely unhappy memories, this nation will still be stuck with those who would rather use a lie to soothe their troubled psyche than act like grownups and face the truth.” Man, this statement is so true. Instapundit’s whole raison d’ etre these days is to find whatever little scrap he can grab and cling onto to avoid coming to the terms that he was about as wrong as you get on the most important foreign policy issue of our generation. It’s hard to overstate how much trouble this ill-begotten war has gotten our country into, yet millions of people won’t accept that simple truth that’s right before their eyes, because damnit, they’d have to admit they were fucking wrong. I’ve seen members of my family, people whom I love and respect on most things, twist themselves into the most absurd knots, because they simply don’t want to admit that everything about this war was a huge fucking mistake, because to admit a mistake is to admit weakness, and they can never never do that. It’s amazing to me how many people share the same mindset that Bush does in that regard. One really has to wonder what it’s going to take for them to figure it out.... Read More »
wally | Posted in | No Comments

The mountains aren't always sweet.

April 24, 2007 – 7:41 PM
If you had told me on Saturday, when it was like 70-75 Fahrenheit here at our house in the mountains, and I had my sandals on, that, on Tuesday, I would be shoveling the 20+ inches of snow off the stairs and pulling my wife’s Explorer out of a ditch, well, I wouldn’t have believed it. Also, the cable internet connection, which was down for most of the day Friday, has been down since 2:00pm MST. Also, the power grid here in the canyon went down maybe 10-15 times in about 90 minutes. I think my UPS is fucked at this point. Some days, living in the mountains really sucks. I’ve been up here for eight years now, and I think I’ve had my fill. It’s beautiful and peaceful and all, but now that we’ve got two kids and no family backup, it’s becoming an increasingly insurmountable challenge just to make our lives work. Sigh.... Read More »
wally | Posted in | Tagged , , | No Comments

Qmailsucks.org

April 24, 2007 – 4:45 PM
I’ve been meaning to get this off my chest for a long time, but if anyone is considering installing Qmail or the Qmailrocks distribution, here’s a word of advice: don’t. Now, I should point out that for many years, Qmailrocks worked just fine for me. The problem is, Qmail is stuck at v.1.03 because it’s creator is some kind of weirdo that doesn’t want to take the time to update it, but won’t allow the project to be branched and further developed, so if you want to update Qmail with modern SMTP features such as SMTP AUTH, STARTTLS, etc. you have to modify it with an increasingly-large patchset, many of which are incompatible with one another and of which any one could take down your production mail server for the better part of a day. Plus, it uses the absolutely ancient ezmlm mailing list manager, which was a great idea in 1999 or 2000, but pretty much sucks these days. Now, let me explain why I hate the Qmailrocks.org distribution in particular. Sure, it ships with some goofy settings that don’t really make sense in a production environment, but what really irks me is the support model. Qmailrocks has a web forum, which is comprised mostly of stuck newbies trying to figure out easy shit like permissions problems. It also has a support mailing list, of which there are no easily-accessible-or-search-able archives, which means you can’t easily look up a question that might have been asked before. Now, if the list was populated with really helpful people who didn’t mind seeing the same questions asked over and over again, that would be one thing, but it’s not. In fact, it’s populated by the kind of poorly-socialized, smarter-than-thou computer nerd that responds to legitimate, well-formed questions with a link to Eric S. Raymond’s How To Ask Smart Questions document, which is their (well, his) way of saying that you’ve asked a stupid question (I should also mention that I’m always annoyed when anything written by ESR is suggested to me). Additionally, the guy basically takes an attitude that if you haven’t, like him, spent many nights reading the Qmail source (I’m guessing, based on his online demeanor and general lack of socialization, that the guy has plenty of nights at home alone to devote to reading source), that you’re unqualified to not only run Qmail as your SMTP server, but also unworthy of asking a question in his little virtual clubhouse. I will say that I’m grateful for some of his little tools, and he did wind up giving me some useful advice, but given that getting legitimate questions answered on the mailing list initiates such a large amount of feather-fluffing on these guys’ parts, I decided to give up on Qmail altogether and migrate to a commercially-supported Postfix, vPostmaster. So if you find yourself in a position where you’ve got to set up email for the small-sized (or medium-sized) company you work for, and have not found yourself in the midst of people who think that “email server” == “Microsoft Exchange”, then by all means, avoid Qmail like the plague, and check out vPostmaster. (slightly edited for clarity and grammar)... Read More »
wally | Posted in | No Comments