Sheep Guarding Llama

After about seven years, I have a MUD up and running again as of this morning.  I am excited.  I started playing MUDs (multi-user dungeons) in 1994 when I helped to run one for the University of Iowa.  It remains, after all of these years, probably the best video game experience I have ever had.  I loved playing that MUD for the two or three years that I managed to do so.  That MUD, way back then, was CircleMUD which was not exactly new even then.

When I started getting into running my own UNIX systems around 1997 or 1998 while living in the house in Greece, New York with Josh one of the first things that I did was acquire CircleMUD myself and run it inside of the house.  It was pretty useless since you had to be inside of the house to play it but we had the three Intel 486-based Linux 1.3 systems on the metal folding table down in the basement where you could set up and log in.  Some people did that and I learned how to run my own MUD.  It was a great learning experience and I learned how to do a lot of things on UNIX because of that.  It just wasn’t very good as a gaming experience.  It is funny looking back now because that felt like it was so long after my early MUD experiences that I had while living in Michigan but, in reality, it was only a year or two later that I was running my own at home.

In 2004 and 2005 I built and ran a CircleMUD server myself.  It was good fun and we had a decent number of people using it including my cousin Jeremy who thought that it was awesome.  This was the first MUD that I ran that had any number of players.  We probably never hit twenty people at once and normally were lucky to have three, but it was a start and it was fun.  Being CircleMUD it was showing its age and lacked a lot of features that one would think would have been added by that point.  So it was fun but it would have been nice to have seen someone pick up the old CircleMUD code and improve on it.  But it was so ancient and based on older DikuMUD code that I am sure that no one wanted to touch it, especially as it was written in C and that had lost all favour as a MUD platform by that point.

So our CircleMUD system only ran for a year or two.  Basically we used it during the little more than a year that I consulted with Wegman’s in Rochester – having the MUD up and running allowed me to log in while I was out of town, on the road doing overnight systems administration work and stay connected with everyone back home needing nothing more than a telnet session that I could use from the server room while waiting for system upgrades and Robocopy scripts to complete.  It was perfect at the time but I didn’t have time to keep dealing with it after moving to New Jersey a few months after the Wegman’s contract had completed.

So now I have discovered CoffeeMUD which is Java-based and vastly more advanced than CircleMUD.  I got it installed and up and running on one of our servers is Mississauga where it can actually run indefinitely and has, effectively, unlimited resources.  Getting the game up and running is only a beginning, though, unlike CircleMUD which came with a huge amount of pre-built game world, CoffeeMUD is a blank slate and “requires” that I build the entire game world myself.  So this will be a lot more interesting because I am actually designing and building the game myself but it also means that I can’t just press “go” and have a game for people to play.  This is going to take some work.  So I am setting myself a goal of making, approximately, ten new rooms every day so that the game grows regularly but nothing crazy.  It will take a few weeks before it is ready for people to start playing but when they do it will be my game, designed by me, that they are playing and not just some game that I am running.  CoffeeMUD is a lot more advanced than CircleMUD, there is a lot of learning for me to do.

I did some general work today but not nearly as much as I should have done.  Being home alone for two days makes me really productive.  Being home alone for a few weeks makes me melancholy and makes it hard for me to do anything.

I got the first batch of dishes done, finally, at least.

Watson wanted to get out of the house this evening so around seven I drove down to Addison and picked him up and we drove to Irving to hit Fry’s.  I have been needing some power strips.  Pretty basic stuff, but I need them so, whatever, worth a trip I guess.  I need one just for Liesl’s room so that I can get her little television and Nintendo Wii hooked up, along with the AppleTV.  We never use the Wii so figured that having it set up in her room would allow her to play her Dora the Explorer game and hopefully get her hooked on some other games too.  We don’t have a lot for the Wii but she doesn’t go through that many games anyway.  What is funny is that the television that we have in there isn’t much bigger (or maybe isn’t bigger at all) that the iPad!

While we were at Fry’s I managed to find a nice graphics card that appears to be better for Dominica’s desktop than what I have been seeing online.  I was pretty excited to find something to get today.  So for $99 I got her a really nice Nvidia GT 640 with 2GB of RAM to upgrade her desktop.  This does three big things for her.  First it frees up a big chunk of her system memory that no longer has to be shared with the graphics card giving her, effectively, a pretty big memory upgrade – plus, of course, the graphics memory is way faster than the system memory anyway.  The second thing is that it moves her from the cheap, ancient on-board graphics cards to this amazing powerful, new one.  And the third is that it takes her from needing to use the onboard, low-end GPU to drive one analogue monitor and a USB adapter to VGA dongle to drive a second analogue monitor and instead gives her dual digital output plus one analogue output from a single card so that she will have a triple monitor setup and all from one card!  Very nice update indeed.

After Fry’s we went to Taco Bueno and grabbed a bite to eat.  Then I drove him back to Addison, it was only nine thirty and he was falling asleep in the car, and then went back home.

I wrapped up the last twenty minutes of Harold and Kumar’s Christmas which I had watched most of at some point prior to going down to Houston for Christmas and then I finished watching Goldeneye which Dominica and I had started weeks ago in our march through the James Bond movies.

I hooked up Dominica’s new graphics card and got all three monitors working while watching the movies.  Her desktop situation is so much better now.  Having three monitors is going to be awesome for her and having them all match will be wonderous as well.  Overall it was a tiny amount of money for an incredible amount of desktop improvement.  She should be very happy and quite surprised when she gets home on Tuesday afternoon.

I am fully back home in Dallas now.  Slept in my own bed last night and will be here until the girls return home next week.

I went into the office this morning.  Boy was it empty.  There was hardly anyone there at all and absolutely nothing happened all day.  I mean I got a few package installation requests, but maybe five or ten minutes worth of work.  It was crazy how slow it was.

I skipped lunch today, no real reason to need to go anywhere.  Best to stay in the office and not be tempted to go eat something that I shouldn’t eat or spend money that does not need to be spent.

Went home after work.  Left a little early as there were no deployments tonight.  I do love the freeze but hate needing to be in the office when nothing at all is happening.  This is pretty silly.  I could be getting a lot done at home rather than being in the office doing nothing all day.

Watson was bored again this evening so talked me into going out.  After being in the office I don’t tend to be all that productive anyway so, whatever.

Again, not a late night for us.  We are getting old.

We played more of “Ticket to Ride” in the kitchen this morning and I had my last of the holiday junk food before going onto a strict diet to try to recoup the ground that I have lost over the holiday of binge eating all of the desserts that are all over the house.  I spent a bit of time with Liesl and Luciana this morning.  I am leaving today to go back to Dallas and will not see them for a week!  This is going to be one long week.  Dominica and the girls are driving back up to Dallas on the first of January because Dominica needs to be in the office on the second.  So I will hopefully get to see the girls at home one afternoon as soon as they get back since I will be off from work that day as it is a holiday and then I will stay home with them on Thursday while Dominica is at work.  But it is a long weekend between now and then.

We had the car packed and ready to go so that as soon as noon hit I was able to get on the road and drive north.  It was just a few minutes after noon when I pulled out.  It is a cool and drizzly day in Texas.  It drizzled on me the entire drive from Houston to Dallas.

There were some traffic issues so it took me forever to make the trek.  I had to stop along the way too to hit a McDonald’s so that I could use the WiFi and do some work for the office.  I have my BlackBerry in the car so that I can make sure that no one is looking for me in between stops.  It was a very light afternoon so I was able to make the whole trip with only the two stops to work.

It was after five thirty when I got into Dallas.  I did a little work and got the car emptied out and around eight or so Watson came by and picked me up and we went to Redneck to hang out for a while.  Normally we go on Friday and/or Sunday nights but neither of those nights work out for us this week and we were both available tonight so we decided to just go there tonight instead.  That worked out well for me since I am still eating food today and can get my favourite thing there, the avocado veggie wrap (sounds boring and looks terrible when you read it on the menu but it is actually amazing) tonight and really should not after tonight as I am going strictly on my diet again.

We were back home before midnight.  A very early night for us, but we both have to work tomorrow.  I will be physically in the office although I suspect that there will be very little need for me.

Today is our family Christmas day.  My internal calendar is all off this week trying to figure out what day is what.  Today is Wednesday and officially I am back to work today.  Yesterday was the actual holiday that I had off.  That feels weird.  And originally I was driving down to Houston on Tuesday (Christmas) morning but ended up, at the last second, driving down on Monday night.  So even my intended schedule is all off in my head.  My plan is to drive back up to Dallas tomorrow afternoon so that I do not have to drive in the dark at night.  I was pretty tired driving south to Houston on Monday night and would prefer to not have to repeat that.  I wasn’t dangerously tired, just painfully so.  Driving the Spark with no cruise control when tired is extra annoying on a really long trip.

I slept in a bit today but we tried to get Christmas going around nine.  I didn’t get to really participate much this year because I had to work so I set up in the “media room” which can see the living room on our old theater seating that they have in there (I am so used to it being in there that until just now as I am writing this update I forgot that that was our seats that we bought for what we thought would someday be the theater room in the basement but never so much as got a television put down there before we moved out and then went into our living room in Carrollton for a while but didn’t make any sense there.)  So I got to watch the kids open presents to some degree and I popped in and out of the room regularly.  There was not that much going on at work.  Very, very little.  But I needed to stay logged in as there are only a few of us covering this week as so many people are on vacation.

The big gift for the girls is an Apple iPad 2 for them to share.  This is perfect as they currently have just the one original iPad that Liels commandeered from her father. I haven’t been able to use it myself in forever.  I forget that I ever actually had one.  Now they won’t have to fight over who gets to use the iPad and they can have one in use while the other is charging.  They get serious use around our house.  The Grice kids got two iPad 2 tablets to share between pairs as well.

Dominica and I got money to put towards a Roomba floor cleaner for our house.  We are trying to decide if we want the vacuuming model or the sweeping model.  Our lives are a constant challenge of trying to keep the floors clean.  I got a very cool penguin beer stein from the Utica Brewery too.

This was a great Christmas for Liesl.  Being four is like the perfect age for Christmas.  It is magical and exciting.  She had a such a good time with everything from the stories last night that grandpa read to the kids to waking up to all of the presents under the tree this morning to unwrapping presents and the whole experience.  Luciana is still pretty young for it all and isn’t sure quite what is going on, but she had fun.  Liesl was especially happy to get the My Little Ponies that she had been hoping to get.  Her collection is really something at this point.  I think that she got seven new ponies today!

This evening there were a lot of board games played.  Everyone really loves Emily’s new game “Ticket to Ride” which is a strategy board game where you have to build train lines across the country.  Kind of difficult to explain but pretty easy to play.  They played a few games of that and then later on in the evening I joined the group to play a round of Munchkin, which Emily also got for Christmas.  Munchkin is a classic and hilarious adventure card game.

Liesl was upset that she couldn’t play Munchkin but I told her that she could sit on my lap and play and that I would help her.   Then she was very happy and did her best to play the game.  It was very adorable.

I decided to sleep in a lot this morning.  I’ve been getting behind on sleep and I had nothing that needing my attention this morning so I stayed in bed until ten or later.  At nine-ish Liesl came in and got into bed with me and snuggled for a long time.  That was really sweet.

I got a lot of downtime today.  There was nothing going on this morning so I got to see the girls a lot.  The weather in Houston turned nasty today.  It stayed warm this morning, in the mid-seventies, but we got really high winds and some rain.  It was pretty nasty.  But at least I was down here and not driving in it.  It was snowing up in Dallas.  Most of the country was getting really awful weather today.  We are pretty lucky down in Texas.

Dominica’s parents flew from Albany directly to Hobby (Houston) on Southwest and were only delayed a very little bit because of the weather.  They took off half an hour late but they worked hard to make up the time in the air.  Unfortunately the flight was the least of their worries.  Dominica and Francesca drove out to pick them up and were gone for hours even though the airport is right around the corner.  It turns out that even though the flight was direct, Southwest “misplaced” their luggage.  And not just one bag, all three bags (is it just me or is that extra suspicious – an accident would have been just one bag, right?)  This kicked off a day of luggage disaster.

The Southwest screw up of the luggage was so lengthy and complicated that I’m not even sure that I can real describe all of the problems.  Needless to say every conversation had with Southwest turned out to be the airlines lying about one thing or another.  Southwest Airlines at Hobby refused to even answer the phones and relied on Dallas to handle the calls for them.  One agent would tell us one thing and the next would inform us that they had been lying and that something completely different had or would be happening.  Southwest even made the outrageous claim that they can’t tell where luggage is because they don’t track things that go on their planes because they “aren’t FedEx.”  One would hope, of course, that as they carry humans rather than packages that they would be more careful, not less careful, with what they ship!

After hours and hours of fighting with Southwest they finally called and said that the luggage had been found and that they had it.  We were holding up Christmas dinner pending getting the luggage sorted out.  So a few people ran to the airport to pick up the luggage.  I advised to leave someone behind because Southwest, after lying left and right all day long, was not to be trusted and there was no way that they were going to reliably keep the luggage for them.  So for an hour or two they were out trying to get the luggage and when they got back it turned out that I was right – Southwest didn’t give them their luggage claiming that it had already gone “out for delivery.”

So since we were already holding up Christmas I told them that I would stay behind at the house and wait on the luggage delivery and everyone else could go ahead on over to Joe and Britt’s house and get on with Christmas dinner.  Southwest said that they would be calling before arriving at the house but we couldn’t trust that they would simply not call and use that as an excuse to claim that we weren’t available for the drop off.  So I stayed at the house.

I got to watch How to Steal a Million with Audrey Hepburn and Peter O’Toole which wasn’t too bad.  And I got caught up on SGL.  And earlier in the day both Liesl and Luciana took turns snuggling with me on the couch.  I got a lot of time with them today.  We have all really missed each other.

I was right that Southwest never called.  Everyone got back from Christmas dinner and after many hours of waiting on their truck Dominica’s mom had given up and called them and Southwest said that the truck had never gone out (um, then why did they refuse to give them the luggage at the airport when they were there many hours ago?) and that they weren’t even considering delivering the luggage until tomorrow (no guarantees on tomorrow either, just a guarantee that it wasn’t happening today.)  To be extra ridiculous, Southwest shipped the luggage across the city so that they would have to drive extra far to go try to pick it up (remember they’ve already driven around for hours following Southwest instructions today.)

This time Southwest finally was willing to give them the luggage.  It took quite literally the entire second half of Christmas day continuously dealing with it from our side to get that luggage back.  Southwest never once took any initiative to be helpful or truthful.  They lied left and right and never intended to do anything to get that luggage back.  Losing luggage on accident happens.  Lying about it and being jerks was something they did for fun.  Southwest has some seriously crappy people working there.  Not just to do this to people but to do it on Christmas!

I’ll certainly be reconsidering any Southwest flight plans that I was thinking about using in the future.  I don’t care how close they are to our home, I don’t want people like that staying in business.  Their customer service department refused to even respond to us today.

At ten Dominica and I had to run out and drive all around trying to find more wrapping paper and Scotch tape so that we could keep wrapping presents.  So many presents.  We ended up getting about sixty dollars worth of wrapping paper and tape just for the extra “last minute” wrapping needs.  That is kind of crazy.

So that was my Christmas.  Sleeping in, waiting on luggage and running around.  Not ideal.  But at least it wasn’t the day that we were celebrating Christmas.