slaingod

So I’ve found my favorite place to farm for the main leatherworking materials, borean leather and arctic fur, in the lastest upgrade to World of Warcraft. Unfortunately, it seems like the best places are those where not having done some of the quests that cause phasing. In particular, I had heard that Valley of Echoes in Ice Crown had some fast respawn monsters if you hadn’t done the main quest lines there. But alas, I had already completed those, so I read that the Sons of Hodir cave in Storm Peaks had a lot Jormunger snakes and Bears. However I found the respawn rate to be lacking on these…but that may only be because I haven’t completed the quest lines for the Brunnhildar female Viking village.

What I did discover is my new favorite Borean Leather farming spot. So to reiterate, I haven’t done any of the quests in Storm Peaks, so I am in the ‘Phase 1’ where the Brunnhildar Warbears and Warmaiden riders are sent to battle the elite giants and wolves in the valley. The Brunnhildar Warbears spawn as fast as you kill them, as it seems there is a minimum number of monsters that need to be alive to keep the battle in the valley properly sustained. You can just kill the Warbears, as the Warmaidens die when they are dismounted by the bear dying.

You can manage the rate at which they come to a certain extent by choosing where you kill them: back up if they come to fast so it takes longer between kills for them to respawn and run out to where you are. You want to be positioned sort of near the cave entrance, but a little closer to the village. If things pile up too quickly, just move to the cliff wall near the cave so that a few of them pass to join the battle with the giants, rather than attacking you.

Best thing is, IMO, the Warbears don’t drop loot, they are just skinnable, so your bags don’t constantly get filled with garbage items you have to vendor or discard. Just like the boars at Oronok’s Farm in Shadow Moon Valley for Knothide Leather. And because you are in a different phase than most everyone else who has done the quest line, you are basically able to farm unmolested by other toons on PVP servers.

So whenever I prepare to buy something I tend to agonize over every little decision. search engines are great, but you really have to know what exactly are looking for to find what you need. Otherwise you end up spending hours and hours searching through the same pages over and over. That’s basically what I did for about a week recently. I needed a new shopping cart as the one I had was beginning to show its age. It was big, wide, too wide to fit through most New York City grocery aisles, rattled and shook, and it felt like the wheels were always about to come off, until they finally did.

So in my grand tradition of hunting and gathering in cyberspace started searching for pretty much every combination of “cart, grocery, shopping, aluminum, casters, foldable, collapsible, etc.”. I finally came across my first contender, the polder aluminum cart pictured below. It really seemed to have a lot of features are looking for, such as being narrow, having rubber wheels, and being lightweight. But the reality was far far removed from those perceptions. This is arguably the worst product I have ever used for its intended purpose. Where to begin? First, the handle is too short and too close to the cart so you can’t really walk or pull it without it blocking your feet. Second, the wheels are barely held on by tiny little plastic clips, which the instructions didn’t even properly indicate how to use. The front wheels were also entirely too small intended to catch on tiny little sidewalk cracks, almost causing a pitch head over heels every few feet. Finally, the cart that I received a manufacturing issue where the brake would engage every few feet, making the card essentially useless without modification. Before realizing all the other issues the cart had, I had taken a Dremel to the brake, thereby removing any chance I had of returning it.

So $60 later I was back to the drawing board. Armed with my new knowledge and my desire not to waste my existing purchase entirely, I struck upon the idea of finding a much sturdier handtruck style cart and then attaching the light weight aluminum foldable basket portion of the cart from hell. I finally found something usable at handtrucks.com(I know, who knew!) in their folding hand trucks section.

there were some other products that might have sufficed, but I went with the high-end Wesco folding aluminum handtruck for about $100. This car is pretty amazing and it collapses up into a pretty small area for discreet storage. It has awesome rubber tires, can hold 150+ pounds, and it is very lightweight. Once I received this, it was now time to turn part-time cart. At this point I took a hacksaw, and cut off the arms and wheels of the crappy Polder cart leaving just the foldable basket. Now it was just a matter of being able to attach the basket to the handtruck and a quick release manner. in the pictures below you’ll see that I use reusable zip ties, but I have since moved on to using Velcro Velstrap (2 inch wide by 3 foot cut to size ) as my quick release mechanism, which I found at CyberGuys for around $10 delivered.

Below you can see the final product of my efforts minus the Velcro with some added foam grip for the handle. this bad boy doesn’t grab some attention on the street, as easily the most maneuverable cart in the store. It is lacking the second set of wheels so does require a little more effort to manage when fully loaded, but all in all it is a huge improvement and should last for a really long time, and the handtruck will find other uses besides just holding the basket.

For a long time I thought selecting all even numbered pages wasn’t easily doable in Finereader (whereas Omnipage Pro had a special option to do so). Sometimes this is necessary when working with Save & Load Blocks, when the even pages have a different layout than the odds. So recently when faced with this again, I realized I could do this in FineReader, and while a little less intuitive, it is actually more flexible then the standard way in Omnipage (though this technic could very well be usable there as well).

Here is the gist of it: Under View, select Batch Window->Batch Window Maximized. Then resize your application window so it only shows 2 pages, as in the window below. You can now use your mouse to drag select all of the even/odds, or only some of them if needed. Note, this only works if you don’t have any gaps in your page numbers.

Seems like a weird question right? I was taking the subway home and one side of the car was filled with ads saying:

• Are you CALM enough?
• Are you STRONG enough?
• Are you COOL enough?
• Are you CLEAR enough?

What were these adds for? NYS Child Protective Services looking for people to apply. I wanted to add a couple:

• Are you ROBOTIC enough?
• Are you EMOTIONALLY CRIPPLED enough?

because it sounds like they are looking for people with cast-iron stomachs who don’t feel anything. They probably are, that’s what’s sad. Every face on the ads was stoic, mask-like. Made me want to curl up into a ball, not apply for a job.

So I made a trek to BB&B yesterday, on 6th Ave and 18th St. (NYC). I hadn’t been in several years, so my list of things I needed had gotten pretty long. Plus, it is impossible to go in there and not walk out with twice as much as you expected. (As I was standing in line to have my purchases scheduled for delivery, the woman in front of me was saying the same thing to the delivery coordinator, who I’m sure hears that at least once a day.) My goal was to spend less than $1000, and I pulled through with only $850.

I got a humidifier, which I’ve been needing as it just gets dry with my boiler heat in the winter, even though winter is officially over. Nothing worse than itchy skin. I probably could have gotten it on sale in a week or two, oh well.

But the coolest little things I’ve found so far, are these little metal cans with magnetic bottoms, and clear tops that I put my vitamins and a couple of spices in and then stuck to the fridge door, clearing off the Boos prep table of those 4 jars/bottles. Only $2 a pop. And then I got a combined pepper mill/salt shaken, to knock down the number of things on my prep table to just the one.

Also got a coffee maker, as decaf coffee has replaced cigarettes as my vice of choice since I quit smoking. I know, I know, ‘DECAF??!?!?’ I’m sensitive to caffeine in general, so decaf, which still has like 1/6th of the caffeine of regular coffee, gives me a little buzz. Plus I drink a lot. And with my sleep patterns so messed up, half the time I wake up at 2am and have to wait for hours until my local cafe opens, or I wake up at 6pm right after they closed. And the nearest decent coffee is about half a mile away. Not that I don’t need the exercise…

So I’ve thought more and more in recent months about why I still use Windows, as opposed to Mac OSX or Linux.

In my grand tradition of bulleted lists, here are the main reasons I am sticking with Windows currently:

• Newsleecher: Best USENET client period. I could give 2 shakes about the Supersearch feature, but for raw indexing speed, download speed, unRAR and PAR checking, etc., Newsleecher has no competitors.
• uTorrent: Best BitTorrent client period, though I could probably find a suitable replacement on OSX if necessary.
  
• mIRC: Best IRC Chat client out there, though I could probably find a suitable replacement on OSX if necessary.
• Microsoft Office VBA (Visual Basic for Applications): I have a number of VBA macros/forms for Word I’ve created over the years that I use. I believe that some older versions of Mac Office may have VBA support, but have never looked into it.  I’ve tried out Open Office, and it just doesn’t have everything I need or look as nice as Office 2k7. I know a lot of people hate the new Ribbon interface, but I actually like it.  With just a couple of customizations, I rarely have to leave the ‘Home’ ribbon now to do anything.
  
• Abbyy FineReader OCR/Omnipage Pro: Still the best  platform for OCR period. 
  
• HP Scanjet Drivers: For some reason my ADF scanners drivers cost $10 to get a CD from HP for OSX. Retarded.
• Directory Opus: The best file manager on the planet. Hands down.
  
• G-Force Visualization Software: The best audio visualization (trippy lights) software on the planet.
• Hardware selection: I build my own systems from the various parts suppliers out there for cool and quiet yet powerful systems, such as custom cases, top of the line motherboards, good memory, etc.
• Occasional gameplay: Windows is still king when it comes to games. Wine/Cedega may be usable, but that isn’t enough for me.
• Overall familiarity: I just have a lot more experience solving problems on Windows than on Linux/OSX.
• No official support for my Logitech diNovo Edge.  Supposedly most features can be made to work in OSX using ControllerMate, but I haven’t seen mention of the scrolling features, which would be a deal breaker.
• It is nice that TV Guide data is built-in to the Media Center (though obviously it is also theoretically built-in to the price of the Windows).

Updated:

• AutoIt automation script language: a great way to do some things people never intended you to do with their programs…I’m sure there are others out there that do the same, but AutoIt is a great piece of software that can do almost anything, even if the code is a little ugly at times.
  

I would like to get off of Windows for a number of reasons:

• Tabbed consoles/command lines: Windows doesn’t support tabbed command line prompts properly
• Cost/DRM: Windows is getting more and more expensive and paying for a product laden with restrictive DRM is counterintuitive. I don’t trust Trusted Computing initiatives.
  
• Virus whoring: Windows just has more security issues than I would like.  I haven’t had too many problems personally, but the way things work on Windows, it is too easy for garbage to get into the registry/startup folder/services that you don’t want or need.
  

It is possible to run OSX on typical Windows hardware if you are resourceful. This would almost certainly be more palatable to me than Linux:

• Nicer interface than say Ubuntu, although the gap is narrowing.
• All of the benefits of Linux software generally (through MacPorts).
  
• Adobe CS3 Products: Flash, Photoshop mainly… It might be possible to use these with Wine on Linux but I just couldn’t trust critical developer apps to Wine at this stage.
• True Microsoft Office, although the latest Mac Office gets rid of VBA support, so there is a limited timeframe of say a couple of years before the one with VBA becomes completely outdated. Again, MS Office is supposed to work in Wine, just not sure I would trust it completely.
  
• Non-alpha version of Adobe Flex Builder (though this will obviously get better once it reaches full release build, but I’m just not sure how committed they are to a Linux Flex Builder).
• Safari:  I use Firefox almost exclusively because of Firebug, but being able to test on Safari is helpful as a developer.
  
• G-force Visualizer: Apparently there is a Mac version.
• Drivers are at least available for my HP Scanjet scanner, even if they do cost $10.

In either OSX or Linux, I could set up my system to be Dual bootable, meaning I could say put aside 20-30GB of harddsisk drive space just for installing Windows and a couple of apps or games that I needed to use occasionally.  Or I could look further into Parallels/VMWare on OSX which let you run full Windows applications inside a ‘virtual machine’, typically with better compatibility than Wine, though with lower performance historically. I have a dual boot MacBook now, and it spends about half its time in Windows XP simply because my Vista x64 doesn’t support my HP Scanner.

Maybe when I get a free weekend, I will look at putting OSX on my Windows hardware, just to try it out. And I do have multiple systems, so I could leave one as Windows and move the others as needed.

So in my dealings with various document communities out there (first rule of Fight Club = Don’t talk about Fight Club), I see a huge inefficiency out there, and single points of failure.  This has led me to the think about ways in which these various problems could be solved.  Here are the main problems with these communities I see:

• Format proliferation: Everyone has a favorite document type they want for their particular viewer/reader application. HTML, TEXT, RTF, DOC, PDB, LIT, etc. 
  
• Versioning Issues: Many times these documents are flawed when initially released and require iterative improvements.  And while many documents adhere to the community standard version rules (which are themselves pretty lax), many do not.  So when combined with the format proliferation mentioned above, it can be challenging to find the best version of a document out there, and clogs up hard drives with all of the various versions. Both this and format proliferation also increase the time it takes to search for and retrieve the document the user wants.
  
• Single or few points of failure: Many documents that are older no longer get served by many of the community members, or if those members decide to no longer be involved in the community, whole swathes of documents may be lost.  While there is a certain level of redundancy built in to the system, it is not the type of redundancy that leads to a long-term healthy document library. Also, in many cases there are choke points for document distribution.  There are several brave and dedicated souls who contribute the bulk of the effort and bandwidth required to provide the  document library maintenance and distribution capability. But this leads to longer download times and strain on these ‘backbone’ users.
• Proofing Effort: Again, because of the release cycle and existing methods, there is a barrier to entry for new and less dedicated users to contributing to the community by editing flaws found in the documents. Ideally, as each and every reader was reading their document, they would be able to easily indicate corrections, that would then propagate to the rest of the community without having to deal with the whole verisoning/format/duplicate files issues.
• Lack of Anonymity: Due to the nature of some of documents, there may be liability if any individual is recognized as the creator/distributor of the document, so creating some sense of anonymity would be preferable.
  

So my idea is to create a p2p application that incorporates solutions to these issues, while hiding much of the complexity needed to solve them.

• Create a standardized, extensible format (XML based presumably) for document encoding. Provide converters for all of the major file types, with user customizable styles, so when files are released they can be converted to the user’s contentment. Provide for all standard document entities and formatting, as well as the aforementioned extensibility to allow for more arcane formatting innovations. 
  
• Provide for Wiki style versioning of these documents, where anyone may be allowed to edit a document for corrections, but that the entire history of corrections is preserved so that malicious edits can easily be reverted.  Limit edit size and frequency to prevent mass malicious corruption.  Create a voting/approval system whereby corrections can easily be undone for any malicious edits on a mass level.
  
• Create a giant massively redundant distributed and encrypted database to store these encoded documents.  Users would be required to provide a minimum amount of shared space on their hard drives to store file indexing information and database storage (say 1GB minimum).  Many ‘power users’ would obviously provide much more space.  Most document communities are around the 1TB range.  Ideally, many users providing 100GB or more of storage would allow for redundancy on the order of 10x.  Users would not know which files/portions of files they were hosting.  Popularity would be used to provide more redundancy for those files requested by many users, while still maintaining a certain level of redundancy for unpopular files or for users entering and leaving the peer group.   This would avoid the problems of other p2p communities hopefully, where files may be available shortly after release, but quickly disappear if not for a few dedicated seeders.
• Provide for decentralized pseudo-anonymity where all file requests would be delivered through an intermediary user, who acted strictly as a conduit for that request.  This would double the bandwidth requirements for the system, but should fall well within the realm of acceptability considering these are mostly text documents, while providing a level of security to everyone in the community.  More research would be required to see if there was a way to make it truly anonymous, without the need for centralized servers.
• Create reader/viewers for all major operating systems and devices, that allowed the user to read and edit the documents seamlessly.

Anyway, this is an idea rattling around in my head. Not sure if it could ever go anywhere, but it would go a long way in my opinion to solving a lot of the inefficiencies inherent in the existing communities.

If you haven’t noticed from my blog postings, I like bulleted lists.  It just helps me order my thoughts as well as makes it easier for me to edit/correct/add ideas without having to search for the right place to say it.  This probably corresponds to the ‘outline’ phase of actual writing, but then I was never really that great at writing to begin with. :P