Archive for October, 2004

Ack. I just found out that my next app is going in front of a design review committee considerably sooner than I thought. This means I have twenty thousand forms to fill out and lots of preparation and panic. Yay for committees.

And now a word from our sponsor… Okay, not really, but this might sound like an ad. If like music, and don’t have Rhapsody, give it a try. I’ve found all kinds of new music to love in the last few months I’ve had it. It is the best $15 a month I spend. Even more fun is the facts and info you can find about the music and artists as you listen, and the great cross referencing to allow you to find similar artists when you find something you really like. A perfect example is the terrific soundtrack for the Bollywood movie Between Heaven and Earth by A.R. Rahman. It is bombastic epic Hollywood at times and very different from any other movie scores I’ve heard other times. It really rocks, but I’d never have picked it up at a music store, because I’d never heard of this guy before. There’s a 7 day free trial, so give it a shot if you’re even slightly interested.

Fah. Mondays suck. Particularly when they are after a week long vacation. Egad is it hard to wake up at 0630 after shifting to some European timezone. It didn’t help much that the day has been crap overall. I had 1.2 billion emails waiting for me, and two meetings. Sigh. Did I mention I hate meetings? I think I did. If not, let me mention that I hate meetings. And then Zidane fell over and hardlocked around lunchtime. He’s been doing this about once a month since we got him, and Brian and I are pretty much stumped at this point. I’m thinking memory, he’s thinking hard disk, but we’re both guessing. What’s most frustrating is that there’s nothing in the logs to help diagnose the problem. We even started logging the output of ‘ps aux’ to a file every minute to see if there was some sort of runaway process or something that was breaking things. Nope. It just STOPS. Sigh. Smart checks on the disk report no problems. Things that normally go to shit with bad memory, like kernel compiles, work perfectly. The only other clue we have is ocassionally tar will report a corrupt tarball that isn’t really. One ’tar xjf’ will fail, and then a second will succeed on the same exact file. That makes me think memory, but who knows. I suppose we should ask Rackshack to run the ram through a checker. If that works then we’ll have to bite the bullet and try a new disk, which means migrating everything again. At least we have most of it scripted now after the Rocket to Zidane weekend marathon move. And of course our monitor that notifies us when Zidane’s being cranky had silently failed a few days back and so I didn’t find out about it until I tried to check my mail. We had about 40 minutes of downtime (from 1154 to 1238 EST) instead of the usual 5 minutes. So I spent most of my lunch trying to figure that out. Goddamn thing was blowing up on a config file that was exactly the same as the goddamn example in the goddamn documentation. I decided to use the brute force method of software repair and commented the stanza out. Yay for violence. I hate computers.

Yay! Happy Birthday to Molly!

A musical cookie to the first who tells me what game this is from. This should be a good bit easier to guess than my first song, I think. (hope) I’ll let you know what the first song was in a few more days, if nobody’s guessed.

I guess nobody knows or nobody is reading this. It’s probably the later. Oh well. I’ll give a big hint… 3. It’s the sequel to a text adventure, but it isn’t a text adventure.

No guesses. Bah. Does this mean I need to give some hints? Very well. Hint 1: It started as a PC game, but was released on the Sega Saturn as well. (I don’t know if the music is the same in the Saturn version) Hint 2: It’s fairly old. (released 1993) I’ll give a few more out later if nobody guesses.

Free musical cookie to whomever guesses what game this is from.

I have quite a few regrets already in my fairly short life, most of which I’d not talk about in a “public” forum. One recent one was brought back to light this past Sunday afternoon.

I spent nearly my whole school life (5^th-12^th) at a military boarding school: Admiral Farragut Academy. Farragut is a great school, and nearly everything good about me that isn’t due to my parents is due to Farragut. The thing I remember most about the school is how much the teachers really cared about their students, and would take the time to help with anything, anytime.

During my long “stay” at Farragut, I made many friends with whom I’ve since lost touch. I also made friends with many of the teachers. Commander Dennis Fillman (not really a commander anywhere but at Farragut, but that’s how I knew him, and how I think of him) was one of them. Cmdr Fillman died this past January, and I found out Sunday.

Cmdr Fillman was the band and music director. It was due to his urging that I started playing clarinet and then trumpet. Playing music was one of the joys of my life. I really can’t express the feeling I got while playing together with the band. The band quickly became the highlight of my time at Farragut, and Cmdr Fillman became a very good friend.

Cmdr Fillman could be very cranky at times; he even drove me to tears on one occasion. But nearly all my memories of him are good, and he could be such a joy to be around. He was also an amazing musician. We used to call him “the one man band.” When he had his Toy Boat setup in place (Toy Boat was the name of the two person band he played with) it was truly amazing to watch and listen. He would play two keyboards at once with his feet playing twelve thousand foot pedals all the while. He would play one keyboard while playing a miced trumpet, trombone or you name it. (The trombone had valves!) He’d play and sing. It was amazing and beautiful.

Molly and I went to see Toy Boat perform my senior year. It was there I first heard Cmdr Fillman’s partner and girlfriend Linda sing. Together they really had a great sound, and it was so much fun listening and dancing and then chatting with them during their breaks.

I could say a ton more about him, but I remember him most for the music that he brought to my life. And now he’s gone, and I never even went to visit after graduation. I meant to, and I almost did on several occasions. I never got around to it. What a fool I am.

Thank you Commander Fillman for the music; I will never forget you.

I picked up two highly spiffy games today. Star Ocean: Till the End of Time and Shin Megami Tensei: Nocturne. Both are highly excellent. Star Ocean features lots of excellent voice acting, and some amazing character animation, the likes of which I’ve not seen since Kingdom Hearts. It also has some excellent fully orchestrated music and a great start at a fairly predictable but interesting story. The translation seems to be top notch, and lacks the odd dialog elements that some of Square’s stuff has had in the past. Shin Megami clearly lacks the budget and flash of Star Ocean, but it makes up for that with style. It sports some very flashy cell shaded graphics, and a fairly unique soundtrack that has lots of electric guitar and pipe organ fun. No voice acting so far, but the story is highly unique which should make for a great play, and the translation is pretty good, but not perfect and not as polished as Star Ocean’s. Now I just have to figure out which to play through first. I really ought to limit myself to one game purchase at a time.