Hey World of Warcraft players, listen up. Curt just informed me that anyone who signs up for the Azeroth Advisor in the next month will be entered into a contest for a free sketch of their character done by Todd McFarlane. For those who don't know, Azeroth Advisor is a free service that sends you newsletters customized to your WoW character with advise on how to get the most out of the game. So yeah, go sign up!

BTW, yes it is free and personalized for you.

Finally my mythtv experiment is stabilizing. Most of the kinks have been worked out, and all that's left on my checklist is to figure out power management. Which really is more of a question of figuring out what I want, not how to do it.

Anyway, let's look back first at how I got to where I am. It started with Jenn bringing home a Dell desktop from work. It's a P4 2.8 Ghz, 1 GB RAM, desktop machine. I had originally thought she might use it as a gaming rig to play Warhammer Online with me. But that game fell kind of flat, and I had some trouble upgrading the video card. It turns out, due to the desktop format of the box, it requires a low profile card. Also, it's a bit old, so the slot is AGP. It's actually kind of hard to find a low-profile AGP video card these days, especially if you want it to play the latest video games. I ended up buying an nVidia 6200 on Amazon for $50. That actually doesn't really hit the requirements for WAR, but I had read on some forums that some folks had some success with it.

And it did work, but I think then the RAM became a problem. The disk was thrashing all the time, and the game was playable, but only barely. I bet it would've driven Jenn crazy playing on that thing. So what to do with a reasonably good machine with a mediocre video card? Well, how about a MythTV box?

So I bought a TV tuner card for it. I got a Pinnacle PCTV 800i card again from Amazon. It was $75, less $25 from a gift certificate I had lying around. I know now that you can find these cards for even less, but at the time it seemed like a reasonably good buy. I installed Mythbuntu, and got it sending signal to my monitor via an svideo cable. Things were looking good.

Only, then I read about how most cable signals are encrypted, and the only stuff my TV would be able to record are the few channels sent over the clear. I didn't want to set something up that was going to make me lose all the extra channels I pay extra to get. What a pain! A little research turned up the idea of using an IR blaster. I bought one of these, a serial blaster that could send signals from my mythtv box to my cable box. That way the cable box still does the decryption, and the mythtv box sends signals to the cable box to tell it when to change channels.

Of course, after I ordered the thing I discovered a female serial connection at the back of my cable box. It's a motorola DCT2000 series box, and I figured what the heck, maybe I can just connect a serial cable and ditch the ir blaster. Sure enough, it worked. Well, almost.

I downloaded this channel changing program to communicate over the serial port. It could change the channel just fine for most channels, but it didn't work with channel 1. We have Comcast for our cable, and channel 1 is their Video on Demand channel. We use it sometimes to stream some free movies, and occasionally even a for-pay one. It's easier than going to Block Buster (which it turns out isn't even there any more).

A lot of experimentation, and I figured out that the channel changing program was reporting the channel switch to 1 as a failure, even though the box was actually successfully switching. This freaked out mythtv and made it just exit out of tv watching mode. I tried supplying the -blind and the -force flags to the channel program, which should have worked, but these just broke channel changing completely. Turns out, mythtv was too impatient for how long the channel changing program was taking. I found one more flag, the -t flag, which scales the timeout for channel changing. So my channel change command now looks like:

/usr/local/bin/channel -f -b -t 0.2 -p /dev/ttyS2

Eureeka! It works, and I can change to channel 1, then use the cable remote to work the menus and watch on demand stuff. The only thing left was to get the remote working instead of using the keyboard and mouse. More on that little adventure later...

OK this is super geeky, and only my fellow programmers will get it, but yesterday I wrote this bit of python code:



For anyone that knows Python, it's kind of mind bending in its simplicity. Basically, it's an object that has every variable and method you could possibly conceive of. Yes, the following code will execute just fine:



So basically, the __getattr__ method is called when an attribute (that is any variable or method) can't be found on the object. In this case, the object just returns itself. What's more, it's callable with any number of parameters. So you can call any method with any number of parameters on it and it won't complain.

Oh sure, it doesn't actually do anything, but that's just a minor bug. The summary is, I just wrote all the code that can or ever will exist. I guess it's time to find a new career.

This morning at Dunkin Donuts they were playing Christmas carols on the radio. I don't know, it still feels a little early to me.

I think the Warhammer game is going well. Last night was our second session, and everyone seems pretty excited about it. One of the players kept having his character look for 'young maidens' to flirt with. Personally, I'm always torn about stuff like that. On one hand, I love that he's trying to develop a personality for his character. On the other, I always find it a little awkward flirting with a guy in a falsetto voice.

One of the other players cinched it for me though, by implying that the girl in question had syph. I figured, what the hell, this is Warhammer right? I just said to the flirting player, sure, you convince her to go to bed with you -- make a Toughness roll. He failed, and so I flipped to the disease section of the book and gave him a case of the Kruts. Awesome, hilarious, and it didn't require me to flirt with him in a falsetto voice.

In unrelated news, I received my TV capture card in the mail yesterday which was the last required piece to start my MythTV experiment. Jenn was able to buy her old computer from work for $90, and I've been trying to figure out what the heck to do with it. My solution: MythTV. Think of it like the Linux version of Tivo. Mostly I'm hoping it'll be a reliable replacement for the VCR. If it adds anything cool, all the better.

Wouldn't it be easier to just buy a Tivo? Yeah, probably. Not as much fun though. I'll post updates as I proceed.

Nothing really special this weekend, which I think is what made it so nice. I got a huge amount of sleep Friday night -- didn't wake up until almost 10. I don't think I've slept that late since college.

Did some painting, but not much as the sun out on our back porch is really horrible. One of the big draws for me getting new windows out back was the ability to use my painting desk during the winter. It turns out, however, that the sun comes right in those windows during this time of year to shine directly in my face while I'm painting. So instead, I convinced Jenn we really did need curtains back there and spent a good chunk of time affixing curtain rods and hemming up some too-long curtains we bought at Target. They're all done now, and I'm hoping to have another slow weekend soon to put them to use.

We saw Zach and Miri Make a Porno on Saturday afternoon. The movie was very good, and I'm a bit disappointed how empty the theater was. Also, can you believe that some TV stations cut the 'Make a Porno' part of the title from the ads? I mean, at that point why run the ad at all? They still have to tell you what the movie's about, right? If they don't, isn't that a bit sketchy? I could see some right-winger being really pissed off that they went to see the latest romantic comedy and it turned out to be about pornography.

Anyway, otherwise the weekend was really chill, and I quite enjoyed it. Sadly, we've got lots to do in the upcoming weekends. It'll be nice to see folks, but I'd also like some more quiet time painting out on the back porch.

My mp3 player has been missing for quite a while, which really sucks for my walk in to work. Though this may have been masked by the fact that two of the three podcasts I listen to have vanished. The Durham 3 haven't posted anything to their site since August. I can only assume that they are no more. The Sons of Kryos have announced that to keep things fresh for themselves they're switching to a video format. I can understand where they're coming from, and a change in format is better than completely vanishing, but it still doesn't help me have something to listen to on my walk to work.

Which leaves only The Game's the Thing, my least favorite of the three, but the only one that's still producing shows. I got a hit on my RSS feed to that show this morning, and there are now 5 episodes from them that I haven't listened to yet. So I figured I'd better figure out where the heck my mp3 player is.

And I found it, in my gym bag. Makes sense, I used to listen to stuff while at the gym all the time. Though it's a bit disappointing to think it's been that long since I last went to the gym. Well, at least I have my mp3 player back.

I happened to be typing an address here in my town into Google Maps, and I noticed an interesting feature. It seems you can attach random photos of places to Google Maps. There were some pictures of the Mill where I work there. But what really caught my eye was this photo:


Yeah, that's a canoe, stuck in the middle of the river that runs right through town. I go by that place all the time. It's pretty funny actually, though a bit sad for whoever owned that canoe.

Got a few Halloween pictures to share. The first batch is of Zombie Hunt that happened back at the beginning of the month. I didn't get terribly good pictures of it, but I figured since this was a Halloween post, I'd share them.

After that you get to see this year's Jack-o-Lanterns! Woo hoo! I carved my this year with a dremel, my first power tool created jack-o-lantern. It worked pretty well, except that the only bit able to really cut didn't go deep enough. But it made a very easy line to follow up with a regular knife.

Yesterday Jenn and I visited the old Alma Mater for their Fall Weekend, which I think is something akin to most school's homecoming. We don't have a football team, so I suppose we needed a special term for it.

It was fun, and yet weird, to visit the old place. Sort of like visiting home when I was at college. I suppose it too will eventually lose that surreal sense of quasi-familiarity as the years of my attendance drift further into the past.

My 10 year reunion is coming this May. I'm tempted to try and contact some old classmates and try and bully them into attending.

Jenn commented last night that I barely ever post to my blog anymore. It's true, I've fallen out of the habit. It's not that I don't have things to post about, I just never seem to get around to it.

It's probably because work is so engaging right now. I've never been involved in a project this big, and this early on before. There's so much to be done. I probably should pace myself better, but it seems every day at work I spend every minute working. A break now and again wouldn't be such a bad idea. Maybe I should start trying to spend my lunch hour doing something other than work too.

Anyway, enough about work, let's talk about gaming.

My game is falling apart. Which honestly, isn't such a terrible thing. I mean, it's a bummer and all, but that game never seemed to get its legs. I wish I could explain it better than that, but I can't. It just never got to that point where I was really excited about going every week.

Jenn quit the game ages ago. She says she hates Savage Worlds. I can understand why it's not her cup of tea. The system isn't very granular, which means your stats are derived from your character development, rather than the other way around. I think Jenn is the sort of player that needs the system to do something interesting to her character to give her something to build on, rather than wanting the system to support the ideas she came up with on her own. Me, I like both sides of the coin, but I can see how this style isn't for her.

Wait, how did I start analyzing Jenn's gaming style? What I really want to talk about is our new game. Jenn's been hankering back to the good old days of playing Warhammer FRPG, and I've been reading the Gotrek and Felix novels, so we've been tossing around the idea of trying to get another group together for that. We played a one-shot last weekend with my brother Max, and Adam, and one of the Mikes from work. It was a lot of fun, but with Max being so far away and Adam's wife about to give birth any day now, it was clear it wasn't going to evolve into a regular game.

Mike recommended I email around work to see if anyone else there might want to play. I've tried this in the past, but we've had a lot of new employees since then, so I figured I'd give it a whirl. Amazingly, by the end of the day I had six people interested. Add myself and Jenn to that number, and of course it's too many.

Worst part is, the last two to talk to me was a guy here at work who's currently GMing another game and his wife. He was excited about getting the chance to be a player. Of all of them, this is the guy I'd probably most like to play with. Other GMs always make the best players, and I can totally sympathize with his wanting a chance to play.

Of course, I have no real fair way of cutting anyone off the list other than simple first come first serve, so I had to tell him no. Bah, I hate doing that. Why is it that whenever I want to start a game, I have either have too few or too many players?

Well, I guess given the option I'd go for feast rather than famine. At least I know I'll get to play.