Today’s unavoidable spontaneous purchase was a copy of UberGoober on DVD, not because in many ways the title reflects who I am, but because kidding aside it covers Board, War and Roleplaying gaming, all of which I spent a good part of my youth playing. It’s Trekkies for Dungeons and Dragons nerds, basically, and while I’m no longer a member of this crowd the sad little secret is that sometimes I wish I still was 😉

Anyway the DVD is apparently pretty good. There’s a review on RPG.net if you’re interested.

Ok this is pretty silly but it cracked me up when I stumbled across it today, it was a .sig file in a posting to a threaded discussion board, reproduced verbatim:

“In a perfect world… spammers would get caught, go to jail, and share
a cell with many men who have enlarged their penisses, taken Viagra and
are looking for a new relationship. ”
— Anonymous

Check out this customizable stamp service – you can use any photo you like and they’ll make a sheet of stamps you can use to send mail in the US. They’re not cheap, at just under $1 a stamp once you factor in shipping, but what a cool idea and well worth the price it seems to me. These would make a good xmas gift for the folks.

Ok….so maybe I am enjoying 6 weeks off from work a bit too much 😉

I just got back from a kayaking clinic in western MA at Zoar Outdoors paddling instruction and sales. It was fantastic – I took a 2 day introductory whitewater paddling clinic with Nick. I have 5-6 years of sea kayaking experience and I still felt like a total novice. I only came out of my boat once but there were numerous times where it was a near thing, and while I could paddle in a straight line and turn my boat effectively, some of the other critical skills like leaning and bracing were difficult for me. I want to get a boat and get out on the water and practice now, there’s some moderate whitewater within 10 miles of my new place so my next mission is to find a way to get the boat in and out, which is tough since I don’t yet know a soul up here.

I can’t say enough good things about Zoar – they instructors were great and the whole experience was really really positive.

One aside about Zoar – they’re located on Route 2 in western MA. Driving Route 2 west of them towards NY is fantastic – I intentionally got up at 4:30 AM so I could have the road to myself, and it was one of the best driving experiences I’ve ever had – the road winds itself through the Berkshires and if you have a car that’s fun to drive it’s just an awesome experience. Taking 30MPH turns on the side of a mountain at 75MPH? Get yourself a Mazda 3 and try it, if your sense of fun is similar to mine, you’ll have a grin pasted from ear to ear for the rest of the day. 😉

Hey all,

Yes, I’m back online, been that way for 48 hours, roughly. I’ll get back into the swing of posting shortly, I still have some niggling issues to deal with on the server end plus I am in vacation mode here. Short version of the last 3 weeks – I moved, major hassles including a uhaul truck that wouldn’t start. I unpacked in the sweltering heat, and I went camping on Lake George and once again it poured on us (though for only 1 day of the 5). I’ll get some pictures of the new dwelling and the area up online this week and get back in the posting groove as time permits, which still may be a week or so off due to other vacation plans and the start of the new job.

Just a head’s up – tomorrow, Thursday the 15th, the server is going down. I will be down at least a week and possibly even longer. This website and its domains, as well as the other services running here, will be unavailable while the server is down. Wish me luck in the move and hopefully the server restart will go smoothly 😉

I’m moving my household to Greenfield Center NY starting this coming Friday afternoon, the 16th of July. As a result metamusing.net will be going down for at least several days and possibly for as long as a couple of weeks as I relocate the server that runs this site and get internet access up and running at my new house. Keep your bookmarks – either:

daves-place.dyndns.org

or:

www.metamusing.net

will be back up and running by the end of July, geek gods willing.

Sick and tired of heading to some website from a link only to discover you need to register in order to access the material? No more! Check out Bugmenot.com, a handy database of working logins for tons of websites. How these folks are managing to not get sued I don’t know, and this is probably illegal to use in at least some states, but damn it’s still tempting. Let your concience be your guide 😉

It’s no secret I’m a big fan of wikis these days, in fact there are 4 of them running on this site without most of you folks knowing it. Anyway, I stumbled across a very handy one today at LinuxQuestions.org. Check it out if you’re looking for a useful reference resource for linux, or just to see how a well managed wiki can work.

So I’ve been house hunting in the Saratoga Springs region of upstate NY. I made contact with a retiree couple who built their dream house on a mountain lake 20 minutes outside of Saratoga Springs. 4 bedrooms, 2 story cathedral cielings, full glass southern facing, passive solar heat, a hot tub, oil heat to supplement the solar, a giant fireplace, it abuts undeveloped state land with thousands of acres of trails….it sounds like absolute heaven. $800 a month. I should jump on it right? Except there is no high speed internet access – no cable, no dsl, no nothing. I’m so completely conflicted by this. Basically my entire personal and professional life revolves around the internet. This would be a radical life change for me. Mostly the prospect of trying this is freaking me out, but there’s a small part of me that thinks it would be interesting to try out a different lifestyle. This would force me to do it. I have to decide by the end of next week – partly I’m going to base the decision on my visit to the house, I’ll meet up with the couple in Saratoga the week July 5th. If it’s half as nice as it sounds I bet I will be convinced to go for it. Then I’ll need to figure out how to handle a bunch of stuff, including this website.

Anyway, what would you do? Glorious house on the lake but in digital isolation? Or something else not nearly as nice, but with cable and internet and more convenient to town, the store, and so on.