I’ve never messed with disqus before, but I figured since everyone talks about what good integration it has with octopress that I’d give it a shot.

It took all of 5 minutes to add, including the time to regenerate the site. I registered at disqus, edited my config to include the special name or whatever disqus calls it, regenerated the site, and boom! Comments. Not that I expect anyone to leave comments, of course.

Also, I wanted to try cloudflare too, as I’ve heard good things and I was curious what kind of analytical information they’d provide. I was also curious about what sort of malicious traffic I might see at omfgoggles.net, my old url, as I was constantly having hosts bang on the door (when it was a WordPress site, I had a ton of additional security that detected brute force attempts and the like). It takes 24ish hours for it to generate stats, so I’m anxious to see how that turns out.

As an aside, I’m a little hesitant to allow cloudfire to manage my authoritative dns, as I don’t know whether it’s reliable. I’d imagine it’s alright, but probably not as alright as my paid provider, amazon aws. Route 53 is a good deal if you have a lot of sites that need authoritative dns.

i started this stupid blog in 2006, and it’s been through various stages of neglect. i’ve always kept wordpress up to date, because i don’t like getting owned, but i’ve never been a big fan of juggling plugins and platform updates and whatnot. i’m not a fan of dbs, and i’m certainly not a fan of php. so, today, i decided to experiment with octopress.

it’s like a breath of fresh air.

i don’t have much experience with modern web technolgies like jeckyll, ruby and rails. this is really my first foray into that whole world. there’s quite a bit to it, and a bunch to wrap my head around, but the whole “flat html files w/css” is already making me a helluva lot happier. no db to manage, no php, super fast, no plugins. it’s great. it also gave me the opportunity to try out heroku – a version of this site is running on there as well, but i figure if i already have my own server, i might as well just use it instead.

heroku is pretty cool; their engineers leveraged amazon aws to a build multi-tenant container-based app environment where you can deploy web applications in an extremely scalable way. they offer up a free single concurrency instance, complete with 200ish MB of space for assets and things. you can deploy directly to the platform using common utilities like git. all-in-all, it’s pretty cool, and learning about this stuff is opening up some new doors to additional experience i don’t really have.

so, since twitter bought posterous and gutted their team, all the content i had been too lazy to move from posterous’ servers to my own has been removed. i dunno if i’ll bother trying to re-add all my old posts, as it’s several hundred posts from 2009-2012, but i supposed it could be a project for me to undertake at some point.

i thought to myself, as i always do, that i’d be posting on this space more frequently. of course, i totally forgot half an hour later or something.

2011 went by way too fast. we had some good stuff and some bad stuff going on, just like always. more good stuff than bad, though. we were able to keep our house, cadie’s dad kicked cancer in the nuts, ~250 sq mi of my favorite part of NM went up in smoke, i acquired a couple new toys and i started an IT and infosec consulting business.

in other news, i deleted my facebook account because i was tired enough of it to do it finally. cadie had successfully thwarted my attempts to delete it over the years, but i just couldn’t rationalize trying to keep up with it. i wasn’t getting much out of it anymore. i only really interacted with a handful of people, most of whom i talk to or interact with on a regular basis without facebook. so, for now, you can still find me at ze twittar and now on google+. follow / add me on either if you want.

this has been a good year for games. i generally only preorder good stuff, and so far, there have been 4, soon to be 5 titles i’ll have preordered this year.

1. The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings

 

 

1. From Dust

 

 

1. Deus Ex: Human Revolution

 

 

and the two remaining games, yet to release –

1. Battlefield 3 (October 25)

2. The Elder Scrolls: Skyrim (November 11)

Of the ones I’ve played so far, I’d have to say that Deus Ex and TW2 are tied for game of the year. Both continue two of my favorite IPs ever (Deus Ex and The Witcher) and both were supremely good games, almost perfect in both cases.

Deus Ex is my favorite game ever, and to say that I wasn’t breath-taken by Human Revolution would be a lie. At first, I was a little bummed because it felt very console-ish. (Of course, I don’t mean to say consoles suck, I play games on both PS3 and Xbox, but my PC is significantly more powerful than either machine, so in most cases, I’ll get a game on PC before I select it on a console.) – but the second I completed the prologue and saw the intro credits and opening cinematic, I knew I was in for something amazing. Easily one of the best games I’ve ever played. The soundtrack by composer Michael McCann is one of my favorites, regardless of medium (game, tv or film) and the environments, characters, dialogue, writing, animations, everything was really excellent. Character models are great, the engine (Crystal Dynamics engine, which is odd, since that’s an RPG engine…) does some of the best lighting I’ve seen in a game. All around, it was better than I imagined it would be. I finished this in a week (I only play 2 days a week)

The Witcher is also another favorite title of mine. It was a total sleeper hit, with excellent writing based on the short stories by Polish author, Andrzej Sapkowski. It played really well and was extremely brutally violent, and felt very “adult”. Lots of games pile on violence, but everything else is very ordinary. Temeria is rife with racism against non-humans, and it all just feels very “real”, I guess. The Witcher 2 has many of the same elements, with even more darkness and violence added to it. The engine powering TW2 is easily one of the best I’ve ever seen. The texturing and character models are second to none, the recorded speech and music were absolutely phenomenal. I’ve yet to finish it yet because I didn’t want to rush it. I’m in the final chapter of the game, and I want to put it off til I absolutely have to finish it.

I’d seen trailers for From Dust a year ago or so, but it never hit me that it was a game by Eric Chahi, who wrote & created the game “Another World” which came out in the early 90’s. I found that title a bit late, when it became available on gog.com, and I was blown away. The artwork and music in it stand up very well despite being nearly 20 years old. At any rate, after seeing Eric Chahi’s name on From Dust, I knew I had to buy it. I fired it up and really enjoyed the whole experience. It’s a “god” simulator with a really nice, totally neutral approach to the whole divinity thing. Instead of being an omnipotent bearded man in the sky, you’re “the Breath”, a natural force that can manipulate the world. You can’t directly interact with people, you don’t need them to believe in you, you simply exist to help them on a journey to different planes of existence. You can move lava to build walkways, divert water, all the while, helping to turn each “world” green with trees, water, grass and animal life. It’s a pretty inspiring experience. The gameplay is mostly puzzle based, but there’s such a diversity to each map that it keeps it fresh. I was really happy with this title as well.

Like I said, good year for games.

I’m just happy I don’t fly that often.

Also, can’t really say I’m surprised that the federal government has yet to publish this data in a human-readable format. (i.e., a way that anyone who isn’t a biophysicist could read). Next time I fly, I might have to stuff some radiation exposure badges in my pants or something to see how much I’m exposed to.

-------- Original Message -------- <br />Subject:   ARE YOU TRULY DEAD? <br />Date:     Mon, 20 Jun 2011 23:43:22 -0430 (VET) <br />From:   WESTERN UNION  <br />Reply-To:  <a href="mailto:[email protected]">[email protected]</a> <br />To:  <a href="mailto:[email protected]">[email protected]</a> <p />  <p />  <br />DEAR VALUED CUSTOMER, <p /> I NEED TO CONFIRM THAT THIS IS TRUTH BEFORE WE RELEASE YOUR FUNDS TO <br />THIS GENTLE MAN. THIS OFFICE WAS CONTACTED BY MR. SCOTT E U. ANTHONY WHO <br />CLAIMED TO BE YOUR BROTHER. HE PROMISED TO PAY THE NEEDED FEE AND CLAIM <br />THE FUND AS YOUR NEXT OF KIN. <p /> HE SAID THAT YOU WERE INVOLVED IN A CAR ACCIDENT LAST WEEK AND DIE. WE <br />NEED TO CONFIRM THAT YOU ARE TRULY DEAD BEFORE WE CAN RELEASE THE FUND <br />TO HIM. WE BELIEVED THAT YOU ARE DEAD BUT AS A FEDERAL OFFICE, WE NEED A <br />PROOF FOR RECORD PURPOSES BEFORE WE CAN RELEASE THE FUNDS TO HIM. <br />THEREFORE, YOUR SILENT IS A CLEAR PROOF THAT YOU ARE DEAD. <p /> NOTE; WE WILL COMMENCE ON THE RELEASE OF YOUR FUNDS TO YOUR NEXT OF KIN <br />FROM FRIDAY 24th JUNE 2011. BY THEN: MAY YOUR SOUL REST IN PERFECT <br />PEACE, AMEN!!! DO NOT FORGET TO CALL US IMMEDIATELY AT ( +229 988 564 01 <br />) E-MAIL CUSTOMER CARE.......( <a href="mailto:[email protected]">[email protected]</a> ) <p /> THANKS AND GOD BLESS, <br />WESTERN UNION DIRECTOR BENIN REPUBLIC <br />MR, MARK JAMES <br />+229 988 564 01

the usps is silly. we’ve had lots of our mail returned to sender with an invalid address (lots of different things, magazines, parcels, etc) and in every case, the printed label was 100% correct. i emailed to see if maybe there was some quirk with our address or something that could cause mail to be returned, and they forwarded it to the local post office who said that our regular carrier “regularly notices your mail has los ranchos de albuquerque as the city or no zip code” and “we’ll deliver these messages, but we don’t see them” – how can you know this is the case if you don’t see the parcels? hahaha

finally figured out how to get DNS to traverse my SSH proxy at work. my environment at work is windows xp, and this also works on both vista and windows 7. first, you get traffic flowing over a kitty or putty ssh proxy. if you don’t know how to do that, search for it. to get dns traffic to pass through the proxy, you can do one of two things:

1. you can pass this variable in your chrome shortcut:

--proxy-server=socks5://proxy_ip_or_host:whateverport#

in my case, this didn’t work because it defaulted to using socks4, which doesn’t properly support DNS query traversal.

1. you can install the proxy switchy extension, configure the proxy in proxy switchy as “socks5” via radio button. if you’re using the dyn internet guide or opendns, you can use one of their test pages to determine whether it’s working.

like i said, the first method didn’t work correctly for me in xp. the second method was equally easy to do and worked correctly.

it’s that time again – updating the look of my blog. unlike the last 4 years, i’m not going to bother building my own theme. i just have no desire to do it right now. all i need to do now is find some widgets for last.fm/zune that aren’t all gaudy. maybe i’ll build my own widgets and make backend api calls myself to get the data instead of relying on one-size-fits-all stuff. dunno.