I just setup Cyrus IMAP on my FreeBSD box, so I can do server-side mail folders and Sieve filtering on my personal mail server at home (cooper.homedns.org). I figure that I’ll have to move all my mailing activities here once I manage to finish my schooling at WPI in a few weeks. In addition, I’m currently compiling the FreeBSD 5.3 kernel so I can upgrade to it this week. I’m a happy geek :).
Monthly Archives: November 2004
Future Plans
House-building update
So, I got good news from the bank yesterday: They’ll be happy to give us a loan. In fact, they’d be okay with loaning $100,000 more than we think we need right now. They just need two things from us before we sign:
- The value of the land. This may be difficult to know for sure, since the land was a gift and not sold. We may just give them a random guess and hope that they’re happy with it.
- How much the house will cost. We’re currently anxiously awaiting word from our builder on that (as well as when he’ll start drilling the well).
So, things are going quite well. We got blueprints a few weeks back, but I didn’t post them since we don’t have them in digital form since we don’t have a scanner and they’re on much-larger-than-normal sheets of paper. Does anyone have a scanner that could scan tabloid-sized-or-larger sheets of paper? (At the moment, the bank has our copy, but we should be getting them back at some point… And there are more copies at my parents’ house.)
Unhinged wackiness
Yesterday, we attended the Magic Unhinged release tournament at That’s Entertainment. Unhinged is a wacky and funny set. (“I attack you for three… and a half!” is just the beginning.) I did fairly evenly, as I tend to do, going 2-2-1. Jessi, on the other hand, did amazingly well, doing 4-0-1 in the swiss rounds, her draw being with me. She didn’t do so well in the elimination rounds, but she still ended up in 4th place out of the 32 players there.
There’s a promotional Unhinged life counter (that counts in half-points for you) that was only available at these events on this day, and they went to the top 3. I managed to trade with the 3th place person for his, though, so we have one. I think I probably got the better end of the deal, but it’s very hard to judge the value of something like that. (There were roughly a thousand of these tournaments around the world yesterday, each giving one of these to each of the top 3, so I’d guess that there are roughly 3000 in existence.)
So, I’m contemplating that since the set is relatively small, I may try collecting the entire set. There are only about 45 cards that we don’t have, and they should be relatively easy to acquire since the set isn’t tournament legal, so there won’t be any killer Standard decks driving up prices on the chase rares. I’ll probably be trying to trade for them after the event I’m running on Dec. 3rd at WPI, and/or opening packs I have leftover from running that event. (Anyone interested in casual Magic really ought to come to that event; it should be a lot of fun.)
In other news, I went to bed at 11:15pm, woke up at 12:45am, and couldn’t get back to sleep. I’m tired but not sleepy, or something. So, I get to go through today on an hour and a half of sleep. Whee!!!
Bug of the day
Today I discovered this IE bug. Luckily, that site documents it and includes an odd workaround.
But the best part is that it includes this cynical and accurate quote: Why is this happening? Don’t ask such silly questions! This is IE, remember? Conformance with the specs is only to be hoped for, not expected.
Update: And then, I spent a lot of time dealing with this IE bug. Why is IE still so broken?
Halo 2 Excitement
People who are interested are invited to a Halo 2 impromptu fragfest tomorrow at my parents’ house. They have both room for us and largely-sized televisions. We’ll probably be there starting at about 10 in the morning or so until we get tired.
Let it snow, let it snow, let it snow
Well, it’s now officially Winter. It’s the first snowfall of the season, and there’s already some accumulation on the ground.
Halo 2 is awesome
I must concur with the rest of the world that Halo 2 is just completely awesome. It’s just a very well-done video game.
Microsoft must be happy, too… 2.4 million copies on Day 1, with $125,000,000 in sales… And that’s not counting people like me, who aren’t quite as hard-core Halo fanatics and waited until the second day to buy it.
PSA: IE Badness
There are reports of a fake email (purporting to be from Paypal) being received. There’s a link in it. If you click the link to open it in any version of IE except that with XP SP2, your computer would get infected. MS hasn’t yet released any patches for the IE vulnerability that’s being exploited. Surfing the web with IE is not currently safe.
In other news, Mozilla Firefox 1.0 came out today, although I’m still very partial to Opera.
Plea for comments
So, my last several posts haven’t been commented on, likely since there wasn’t anything particularly commentable about them. So, here’s my plea to leave a comment. Ask me a question, make analogies about far to the right I am, or invite yourself over for supper sometime. Hijack my journal entry for your own nefarious purposes. Let’s converse about nothing in particular, or everything all at once. Just say something, so I don’t feel like nobody likes me anymore :).