Brian's Blog

This may be a bit of a knee jerk reaction on my part, but after reading In the job hunt, the stigma of being laid off is hard to erase at CNN.com I noticed something. All of the people they profiled were in high ranking job positions like CEO and VP. What about telling me how unemployment effects the average job seeker? Honestly, I don't really care about the "woes" of the upper class.

This is from my login fortune this morning. I though it was funny, maybe once I finish my coffee I'll regain my normal sense of humor.

Boss, n.: According to the Oxford English Dictionary, in the Middle Ages the words "boss" and "botch" were largely synonymous, except that boss, in addition to meaning "a supervisor of workers" also meant "an ornamental stud."

Well, back to the coffee...

Unfortunately for my bank balance I've found myself getting back into playing Magic: The Gathering again. As I've sold off most of my old collection I started picking up some singles and making decks with what I have.

All that aside, one of the things you need (for those who don't play) is a way to keep track of your life total. Usually we just use a 20-Sided die which can have a tendency to be a bit inaccurate as it's easy to bump. For this reason there are flat life counters that have a disk that you spin to change the number. The trouble is, none of them were all that nice looking in my opinion. In my adventures to find a decent counter I found Magiclifecounters.com. These things are way cool in my opinion. They are a bit more expensive than standard flat counters but they make up for it in the uniqueness. To get an idea of how they work check out their video.



The price of the counters varies depending on what card you use as you have to buy the card since they are made from real MTG cards.

My Icy Manipulator and Swamp from Unhinged look really nice.

When I was really into Magic the Gathering (MTG) a few years ago there were a fair number of local gaming stores. One of my favorites of the time was The Encounter in Allentown. I used to go to their MTG tournament on weekends and just hang out there for some fun and games on weekends. Back then the store was reasonably well kept, organized, and clean. And even if it wasn't all that clean and organized the people were nice, both the other customers and the people who worked there. That seems to have changed though.

I introduced a co-worker to MTG a month or so ago and he wanted to know where he could look at cards. Of course, my first thought was of The Encounter. We headed over with me expecting to find it much as I remembered it. Instead what I found was a bit of a dive. There was so much stuff on the counter I couldn't see through the top of the glass at it's contents. Everything on the shelves struck me as dirty and almost dusty. Additionally, the back gaming room was a sty even by my standards, and I'm pretty messy. Let's face it, most gamers aren't exactly known for their organization and cleanliness so it's not like I'm holding them to a high standard. There were also giant piles of stuff in the main part of the store.

Let me say though, this may not be the way they normally are. I understand that they had just come back from two back to back comic/gaming shows which may account for the disorganization. Still, it leaves a bad impression. Especially if a new customer walks in.

I know I've gone on about organization and cleanliness a bit now but that's not really the deal breaker. A place can be cleaned, no biggy. And they did just come off of those shows, so I'm going to give them the benefit of the doubt in that regards. What has turned me mist off is the customer service. My co-worker, Mike, decided he wanted to call them to see if they had a few singles rather than driving over to ask. He called both the Allentown store and the Stroudsburg store asking if they had any Blightning in stock. A few examples of the replied received were:

"I'm 14 hours behind! I don't have time to look up singles!"

"I'm not supposed to look up singles!"

"There's no such card."

That last one was given after we provided the MTG Card set and name. According to Gatherer the card sure as hell does exist.

My first thought is that there was a bad apple employee who answered. That thought was dashed when he got a similar reply from both the Allentown store and the Stroudsburg stores telling me the problem is systemic rather than an individual.

I'm not going to totally discount The Encounter yet. I think I'll give them a visit in a month or two and see how they are doing. Until then, the preferred alternative is The Portal Comics and Gaming. If the Encounter doesn't shape up The Portal may end up being my go to place for geeky games.

For those of us who are unfortunate enough to have to use Windows Vista for work this may be useful. One feature that is nice in Vista is that it can automagically group similar windows into a single spot on your taskbar. I don't know the exact number where it actually start grouping but it seems to be somewhere around 5 or 6 by default. For me this caused more clutter on the taskbar then I wanted. I wanted it to start grouping at around 3. Unfortunately this isn't as easy as it should be and requires a quick registry edit.

Here's how I did it:

1. Run Regedit.exe
2. In regedit navigate to HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\Advanced
3. Create a new DWORD key called TaskbarGroupSize
4. Assigned TaskbarGroupSize the value that you want it to start grouping at.

It seemed to not work at first when I did it but logging off and back in worked to have it re-read the registry settings.

I just installed Ubuntu 9.04 on my laptop. As I usually do I went and started experimenting which usually gets me into trouble. This time I was turning settings on for Compiz to see what they do. Let's just say my laptop doesn't like the blur option at all. My screen was totally useless and blank except for the window borders. I thought, "Hey! No biggie, I'll just find the Compiz config file and turn of blur in there!" That was when I discovered that Compiz was putting it's settings in gconf rather then a text file. The problem being that I know zero about gconf and even less on how to edit it from a command line.

So, the situation was my laptop w/o a usable GUI and me not knowing how to fix it. From running Slackware on my main system I'm used to everything being in a nice, easy (usually) to edit config file. I did find some info on editing gconf at the command line but those didn't work easily so I gave up on them.

I don't want to belabor the point here but the long and short of it is that I installed something called Compiz-Switch and had to fly blind and click where I remembered the terminal icon to be on my desktop and blindly run compiz-switch to turn off Compiz so I could get to the GUI and turn of blur.

That was sort of a PITA to deal with and would have been fixed in about 2 seconds had the config been stored in a flat file. Maybe I'm missing something about the advantages of gconf but I much prefer flat config files. Maybe someone can fill me in on the advantages?

Compiz does have an option to change where it stores it's config settings. In the advanced options of the Compiz Configuration Manager just choose "Flat File" for where to store it and it will then put the settings in ~/.config/compiz/compizconfig/Default.ini which can be easily editing with any text editor.

I just had an unusual experience in customer support from a technology company. The reason it's unusual is that I am actually satisfied so far. My Nintendo DS Lite's R button has decided to stop working so I called support up. They are sending a new DS advanced replacement style with the only cost to me being $5 for shipping as long as I return the busted DS on time. There were no arguments or extra troubleshooting. They simply took me on my word that the button doesn't work (which is the truth).

I guess I'm just so used to the crap I get from HP/Dell/Microsoft support that when it happens as it should it's ranked as "unusual".

Well, I finally gave in and joined Facebook. I've been resistant to nearly all forms of social networking because they generally seemed stupid but I guess I was at least partially wrong. I am a member of Linkedin but that is with the purpose of keeping professional contacts in the event that I need to look for employment. I never saw what else I could get out of social networks until now.

It's kind of amazing how many people came out of the woodwork that I lost contact with. It's kind of cool.

White House spokeswoman Dana Perino said Wednesday it was "despicable" for AIG to send its executives on a $440,000 retreat at the posh St. Regis resort, south of Los Angeles, days after getting federal bailout assistance.

I'm not really all that surprised that something like this happened. At the very least the White House is making noise that they are highly displeased AIG did this. Hopefully they will put some bite behind the words and demand that AIG return the frivolously spent cash. Call me a pessimist but I have little faith that will happen.

A small part of me wants to say that $440,00 isn't that much out of the $85 bailout loan. Still, it's the principle of the matter. They got the tax payers money (read that as our money) to help them out of bankruptcy and supposedly help avoid a larger economic crisis. Not to play in a fancy resort.

A short post after ages of blog neglect.

After watching the VP Debate last night I have to say Palin did a better job in the debate forum than I thought she would having seen her previous performances in the media. Of course, my expectations were so low that just the simple fact that she was able to form complete sentences made it look good. Even though the debate went better for her I think she is in way over her head.

Biden of course handled himself well. He's been in the Federal government for years so he knows how to handle himself. Even so there have been things I've heard on him that don't get me totally excited either.

To avoid going into along post making me look up sources and check my accuracy I'm just going to say neither of the VP candidates gets me excited. Palin down right scares me and Biden has made choices in the past that I don't agree with. Between the two I'd have to go for Biden, not because I like him but because he is truly the lesser of two evils.