iPhone settings for Sonic.net

This seems to come up a lot, though Sonic.net does not officially support the iPhone interface and therefore has no public documentation on the subject. To get an Apple iPhone to use email properly, using IMAP, for a Sonic.net email account, follow these steps:

If this is your first mail setup, start by tapping Mail
Otherwise tap Settings
Tap Mail, Contacts, Calendars
Under Accounts, tap Add Account…
Tap Other
In the New Account window tap Name and type in your Full Name
Tap the Address field and type in your Sonic.net (or domain) email address
Tap the Password field and type in your Sonic.net password
Tap the Description field to change the description name if you wish. (Optional)
Tap the Save button
Tap IMAP
Under Incoming Mail Server, tap the Host Name field and type in imap.sonic.net
Tap the User Name field and type in your Sonic.net username
The password should be filled in for you from the previous screen
Touch and scroll to the Outgoing Mail Server section
Tap the Host Name field and type in mail.sonic.net
Tap the User Name field and type in your Sonic.net username
Tap the Password field and type in your Sonic.net password
Tap the Save button at the top of the screen
Mail will verify your settings by connecting to the server

To confirm your settings are correct:

Tap Settings on your home screen.
Tap the name of the account you want to check the settings for. A settings summary should appear.
- The Host Name is your incoming mail server, imap.sonic.net
- The User Name is the Sonic.net account name of the mailbox you’re using
- The Password field should contain a series of dots
For your outgoing mail server, the SMTP should be mail.sonic.net. Tap this to view more information about your outgoing mail server.
- Tap mail.sonic.net to see its settings
- Server should be ON
- Host Name is mail.sonic.net
- User name is the Sonic.net account name of the mailbox you’re using
- The Password field should contain a series of dots
- As you are likely to communicate on your iPhone on a variety of networks, Use SSL should be ON
- Tap Authentication for authentication settings
- Password should be checked in the Authentication screen
- Server Port is typically 25. Many networks block port 25 access to anything but their own mail servers, so it may be a good idea to specify an alternate port. This can be accomplished by replacing mail.sonic.net with mail.sonic.net:587 in the Host Name field.
Tap Advanced for additional settings

This is in no way an endorsement of Apple, the iPhone, nor IMAP.

National Novel Writing Month

It draws near. Thirty days of nonstop wordcraft. Thousands of would-be novelists descend upon their notepads and keyboards, pouring ideas into fresh works of fiction. The goal is clear: 50,000 words of fiction in thirty days. Start on November 1st, finish before December 1st. The prize is the intrinsic satisfaction of having written a novel.

Last year I gave it a shot. I can fabricate all manner of excuses, but frankly I ran out of steam, got dissatisfied with my premise, and couldn’t gut through the second half of the work. I came away with a greater respect for those who have gone before, the wordsmiths that put pen to paper and bore through it. In theory it looks simple, start telling a story and keep going. In practice I found it was quite difficult. I could have told the story I had in my head in 10,000 words or less, it turns out. Clearly I’ll need to take a different approach this time around, pace myself and my plot, and avoid getting to the goodies too early.

As an extra hurdle this time, I’m spending much of the first week of November in Washington DC. I expect to be kept thoroughly occupied. I invite any brave souls out there to join in the struggle. Check out http://NaNoWriMo.org/ and keep your powder dry till the 1st!

Unfriendly Burrowowls

Everybody knows the burrowowl lives in a hole. In the ground. Why the hell do you think they call it a burrowowl, anyway?
— The Dead Milkmen, Stuart

I’ve been around on the Internets for a while. I was using this hunk of junk before they were pluralized. Back when we all thought it was a big truck we could just pile things on. Back when NCSA Mosaic was new and mysterious, and tools like Gopher and Archie were the rule of the day. I remember the rise of WWIV bulletin boards here in Sonoma County and thinking that 9600 baud was a bit excessive. And a bowl of soup was a nickle. Anyway.

There are some things I’m just too old and crotchety to quite understand. It’s a pretty long list, so I won’t get into everything. Instead I’d like to just comment openly on web forums and friend lists. I participate in a couple of web forums (fora for you guys that took a semester of Latin) where I have been a reasonably-frequent contributor. Heck, I’ve made nearly 4,000 posts on the Privateer Press site. I was comfortable that in the twenty-two years I’ve participated in bulletin boards and their more recent analogs were open books to me. You acquire an account by whatever means the sysops make available to you, you operate under an alias, you have to live with the fact that the sysops and mods have absolute editorial control should they choose to exercise it, et cetera. I’ve even (reluctantly) become fairly fluent in BBcode.

What I can’t for the life of me understand is why people I don’t know, that I’ve never met, that I don’t actively exchange private messages with, sometimes whose screen names I do not recognize, will add me to their friend lists. When I get a message that says “somedude has successfully added you to their friends list,” my immediate reaction is negative. Who the hell is somedude? Since when did somebody get to unilaterally make friends with me? What kind of horrible standards does this site have for determining a baseline of friendship? Did the word “friend” change on me, did I miss that memo?

When my kid shares a plastic dump truck at the park, he’s made a friend. It’s a shallow ad-hoc friendship that doesn’t even necessitate the exchange of names. Two little kids being nice to each other at the same time are friends. The older you get, the more involved and stringent your requirements for friendship become. You start sorting people out into categories of “classmates” and “teammates” and “acquaintance,” and save the term “friend” to apply only to people towards whom you extend a measure of genuine trust and concern and camaraderie. The natural development of social caution and skepticism contracts your willingness to recognize friendship in strangers.

This doesn’t jive with some anonymous assclown suddenly sticking a label on your web persona. Not even at its loosest, most innocent, pure form of toddler playgroup friendship sees this, where even a hint of reciprocity need not apply.

I have standards. If you only know me as Burrowowl, I am not your friend. If I posted an encouraging comment on your weblog, that is not an exception. I agreed with you at the moment about that very narrow topic of discussion. Reading the “About” page and seeing my full name doesn’t earn you special consideration. To me you are whatever paper-thin mask you hold up in front of your screen as your online persona.

Pity Party

The Republican Party here in the US has fallen on some hard times. The party of personal responsibility has prominent factotums refusing to honor congressional subpoenas. The party of high moral standards has been hit with a series of embarrassing corruption and inappropriate-sex scandals. The party of fiscal conservatism ran the federal government’s budget into the dirt and pushed for a $850 billion bailout for a financial market they are widely perceived as having failed to regulate for the past seven years. Their presidential candidate has hung his hat on a maverick persona that relies heavily on his reputation for opposing pork-barrel spending; but he pushed for, lobbied for, and voted for the $850 billion bailout laden with pork. Their vice presidential candidate… Well, I don’t think there’s a lot that needs to be said there.

I’m kinda feeling sorry for them at this point.

Code Geass Concluded

As hoped, after fifty episodes, Code Geass is done. Lelouche vi Britannia’s struggle is over, and we have our winners and losers. There are certainly some plot threads that were left unresolved — the interaction between Lloyd and Rashata comes readily to mind — but not many, and none that were prominent to the story. The final plot twist was appropriately dramatic, if not unpredictable. Not to spoil anything, but calling his plan “Zero Requiem” was a dead giveaway.

Over all, I’d give Code Geass an A-. Very much a worthwhile investment of about twenty-four hours of viewing time, a series I’ll likely remember fondly several years from now, and one of the few multi-season shows I’ve been willing to see through to the end recently. I give them credit for maintaining animation quality over the haul and for finding such an entertaining way to mix together so many Japanese animation tropes (particularly the ones I normally avoid). Partial credit for easing off a bit (at least towards the end) from the continuous escalation of scale and power level so typical of the action genre. Deductions for the overabundance of “just as planned” hare-brained plot twists.

The very stones themselves are burning

Why the hell aren’t you playing Dwarf Fortress? Seriously. What the hell?

“But there’s a learning curve!” you complain. Use the wiki.

“But what’s with the ASCII art?” you whine. Well, when I was a kid we didn’t have fancy bump-mapping and realistic lighting techniques. Take your ASCII art and like it, or if you just don’t have the stones, try one of the tile sets.

“What the heck is this all about?” you bleat. It’s about mining. And booze. And craftng. And fighting. And beards. And murderous elephants. Good stout-hearted Dwarf stuff.

Dwarf Fortress. What can I say about this wonderful, horrible game? Well, it’s free. That’s an important point.

It’s an economics / strategy simulation game. People have called it a RPG, but that’s because there are Dwarves and the occasional goblin siege, not because there’s any actual role-playing going on. It’s also an adventure game, but I find the fun to lie with building and managing a settlement.

It’s also ugly. Very ugly. That horrible picture atop this post is a screenshot of the first floor of my current project. I understand that some of the weaker-stomached folk out there don’t remember Rogue and NetHack and the eyestrain-inducing splendor of staying up all night playing video games on a green monochrome monitor. Such people are weak. Beneath my consideration, unworthy of even my disdain.

It’s also tremendously deep. Not deep as in “the Dwarves delved too deep and worked the accursed adamantine veins” — though that happens too — but deep as in many-layered, characterized by nuance and complexity. Dwarf Fortress is a wondrous sandbox for you to play in, unconstrained by a set scoring system or victory condition. There’s no wrong way to play Dwarf Fortress, and no right way. You can build your settlement above ground or dig deep into a mountainside. You can erect self-aggrandizing monuments to your own genius or establish a humble community of poor dirt-farmers. You can erect stout defenses and staff them with expertly-trained axedwarves and marksdwarves, or you can take a more pacifistic route. The pacifistic route can result in genocide by goblins, but that doesn’t mean it’s the wrong approach. Just because there’s no right way to play doesn’t mean the game won’t exert some pressure on your bustling little community.

If you can bear with the learning curve for, say, an hour, and you can suspend your desire for 21st-century computer graphics for the duration, Dwarf Fortress is a tremendously rewarding game. Go get it; it’s not even six megabytes, and runs on Windows and Macintosh.

This has got to end

Fourty-nine episodes into Code Geass and I just can’t wait for the final episode. Not out of a great burning edge-of-my-seat anticipation of the latest cliffhanger. No. At this point I’m watching with the morbid curiosity of a driver that slows down and glances over at the upended sedan in the median. That guilty little tug that makes you need to know something you don’t really want to know. I’ve already remarked on the silly procession of shocking revelations, crosses, double-crosses, triple-, quadruple- and pentuple-crosses. It’s still going. Happily, it has been several episodes since any new loose ends have been introduced.

Code Geass has been an interesting show, very well-produced and executed despite its manifold thematic problems. Its producers took a broad array of weaknesses and forged them into strengths, but could not seem to get past its cast of over-the-top, too-clever-by-half leading characters. Here’s to hoping there won’t be a third season!

IK4e

It remains true that Privateer Press has no intention of publishing Iron Kingdoms: Full Metal Fantasy roleplaying game material in the 4th edition Dungeons & Dragons rule set. It also true that I have no intention of doing the work necessary to convert the existing IKRPG material over to 4th edition. That does not mean that I won’t do some of the grunt work making Mediawiki templates that may be of use to those that are willing to do the heavy lifting. The Gobbernomicon seemed like a reasonable place to do the work.

The 4e Power Template had to cover a lot of variability. Some are usable at-will, some once per encounter, some only once a day. Some are attacks, some are utilities, some have side-effects, some have multiple targets, and so on. Happily, Mediawiki’s markup language allows for “if” statements and switches and such, through the addition of the Parser Functions extension.

Though I consider the power template to be a work in progress, I have also undertaken to create a creature/NPC stat-block template. A lot of the same things recur in the game-mechanics of each monster. Everything has an Armor Class and the three secondary defenses (Fortitude, Reflexes, Willpower), they all have hit points, etc. By comparison, the monsters seem easier than the player character abilities. I guess that’s appropriate.

Please feel free to hammer at them a bit, tinker under the hood if you like, or give feedback about the functionality or documentation. Otherwise it’s likely to suffer the ravages of interest drift and laziness. Don’t make me sic /tg/ on it.

Common Sense vs. Reality

Logtar recently stirred up the pot a little on his blog by commenting on the evils of recent Republicans. That’s all well and good. There’s plenty of stuff for everybody to point fingers at. What got me riled up enough to participate repeatedly in the conversation that followed in his comments section was the notion that increasing taxes removes the incentive for people to do well, to outperform, to excel in their fields.

At first blush, this certainly makes sense: why should I try harder if I won’t get rewarded extra for it? Ah, but that isn’t what actually happens. If I bust my tail to make an extra $10,000 this year, the government will take away a portion of it. Let’s assume I am in the highest possible tax bracket already (because that is the strongest the tax deterrent gets, the deterrent is less pronounced at lower brackets). That means of the additional $10,000 I worked my keister off for, I have to give $3,500 of it to Uncle Sam. Those bastards. How dare they? Why did I waste my time? Oh yeah, because now I’m $6,500 richer for my efforts, have improved my standing with my coworkers and employer, elevated my reputation in my industry, made my kid proud of how awesome his dad is, and the thousand other reasons (including income) that I try to do well at my work.

The chart at the top of this post shows the top marginal income tax rate in the United States from 1930 to 2005 (in red, the aggressive color of the evil government stealing your money) compared to the year-to-year percentage change in gross domestic product (in blue, the serene and peaceful color of economic progress and the production of wealth). Due to the sharp differences in scale, I put the GDP on a logarithmic scale. Forgive me. I put it together to see whether the common-sense argument really holds up. During my entire politically-aware life (from the later Reagan years onward) I’ve heard the same thing over and over again: the economy is being strangled by the tax system. High taxes are stifling our economy, preventing investors from doing their part, preventing businesses from expanding and innovating, and preventing small start-ups from hiring new employees and keeping our economy healthy.

The numbers don’t seem to support this. We see that when taxes are at or above 70% for the top income-earners, we see similar growth as when those taxes are are or below 45%, with wild variations that make it difficult to draw any causal correlation here at all. We know that when the tax rate on top-performers is 100% plus a trip to the GULAG (the old Soviet system) things don’t pan out that well, but when it’s 91% and the accolades and respect of the community, it seems to go pretty well.

Standing on soapboxes claiming that the nasty liberals are going to take away your cheese is, at best, bullshit. The problem isn’t how much the government takes from your paycheck, it’s what it turns around and spends the money on and whether we’re getting a good return on our investment. When Eisenhower used tax funds to build the highway system, private enterprise was able to take advantage of new infrastructure to build, expand, and optimize their private endeavors. When vocational training and after-school programs help kids stay out of trouble and get jobs, we don’t need to spend as much money policing and jailing. When billions of dollars just up and disappear because some government contractor isn’t keeping track of anything and nobody’s minding the shop in Washington, we just plain lose out.

So maybe I just like polls

I’m never one to turn down an opinion poll via phone or postal mail. Oh, I’ll decline to participate in silly weblog polls, but I am often of the opinion that five minutes spent answering a couple of questions about how you feel about public transit is probably a heck of a lot more influential than the ballots I cast every June and November. As a part of a smaller samplings, my opinions get amplified, whereas in a state with 34,000,000 people can kinda down me out a bit.

Pollster.com has spent some time sitting in my list of links over there to your left, but it’s a carefully-collected and calibrated resource aimed at serious people. I wanted something automated. Something web 1.9. Something with the cojones to just scrape together some raw data and cook it down into a sanitary, easily-digested format. Something that blindly aggregates other people’s RSS feeds. Today I found it in Perspctv.com.

Shall we play a game of “let’s make some numbers say anything we want them to?” I love that game. Let’s start with “McCain is a media darling getting disproportionate news network news coverage compared to his polling numbers.” Your turn.