Burrowowl

In case you missed it, Andy Kaufman made his triumphant comeback on Sunday, as promised. He has even been courteous enough to provide us with a blog so we can keep in touch with him. Nice to see you back, Mr. Kaufman, I’ve been a big fan of your work, though I think that the whole Jerry Lawler thing was a bit over the top. There has been some healthy skepticism about his death being a hoax itself being a hoax, but I prefer to believe whichever version of history is more uplifting and inspired by the cleverness and wit that our creator endowed us with.

At times, working with my gracious employer can seem like a comedy of errors. There are procedural, management, staff, and structural issues that can seem large when you’re on the inside. Every little inconsistency and mistake is magnified by one’s proximity to the source. One such example is the day to day hassles you encounter when you’re in a room with the folks who do the maintenance and deployment work in a relatively large data center. Then in the course of digging through a frequently-viewed website, you decide to follow a “hosted at” link.

Please note that the image on the left is three years old, so it is not only possible but likely that things have been rearranged, rebuilt, moved, upgraded, and otherwise improved. The machines depicted on the left are from terminus.au, an Australian company that does network services and web design. They host the Australian Mensa Society, so I trust that this photo isn’t representative of how those folks do business or the reliablity of their service. I’m just glad I don’t spend fourty hours a week working with the poor guy that has to take care of that system.

The center image above shows that, regardless of the scruffy-looking guy in the hawaiian shirt (no, that’s not me) we have a neatly arranged series of locked cabinets to house our equipment, as well as that of our customers. This means that even if you fill up 48U of rackspace with your own sillystring mess of Cat5 and power cords, it won’t constitute an eyesore for others who may access the data center.

The image on the right is an example of the king of painstaking, possibly anal-retentive, work that our NOC folks put in to keep everything well-managed and pretty. Tidiness is a symptom of diligence, and sometimes in our daily lives we forget to appreciate such things.

In the interest of fairness, I should probably follow up on this post with some shots of my own (poor to nonexistant) cable management at home, where I have a single computer, a DSL bridge, a switch, a wireless router, a couple speakers, and a rat’s nest of associated wiring inadequately hidden behind a desk. Those is glass houses should not thrown stones, as they say.

In a continuing effort to make more and more manga available to the English-reading public, Random House’s Del Rey branch has released the latest Ken Akamatsu series. You may remember Del Rey as the company that kept your local library stocked full of science fiction and swords & sorcery works when you were a geeky little kid with no allowance. or maybe that was just me.

I’m pretty sure that I haven’t had a five-year span during my life in which a Del Rey publication didn’t somehow work its way into my hands. It is good to see them nudging into this niche of the industry.

Mahou Sensei Negii is being published under the title “Negima,” for reasons that escape me. It follows a child prodigy from his graduation from Wizard’s school through his pre-ordained first job as an English professor at a Japanese high school. Because this title is by Ken Akamatsu, creator of Itsudatte My Santa and Love Hina, this is an all-girl’s school.

Unlike previous works by this author, there is no strong romantic entanglement between the male protagonist and the veritable harem of female protagonists, which is refreshing in a way. Don’t let the “mature reader’s only” sticker fool you. The target audience of this story is young men with no real-world females in their lives. The ecchi content here may be scandalous in the eyes of a Missionary Baptist preacher (and I’m pretty sure Jack Chick wouldn’t appreciate the pantyshots), but it is all totally harmless and non-explicit.

This weekend I finally broke down and picked up La Pucelle Tactics. It is a “tactics” game in the spirit of Final Fantasy Tactics, one of my all-time favorite video games. In the tradition of tactical RPGs, you effectively are managing an army of heroes and monsters as they track down and do battle with a horrible menace that would otherwise destroy the world. Invariably, this menace is a corrupt church. La Pucelle Tactics is no exception.

The nominal main character is a headstrong, brash, somewhat obnoxious young woman named Priel. If she reminds you of Tomo from Azumanga Daioh, you aren’t alone. As the story progresses, you have the option to forgo attacking a foe in order to try to “purify” it into joining your group. This, along with the ability to replay scenarios that you’re already defeated, allows you to customize your fighting force to a great degree.

So far I have about six hours of gameplay in, and so far it looks great. This isn’t one to buy if you can’t handle super-deformed sprite animation. If you absolutely must have bump-mapping, cell-shading, and crazy particle effects to have a good time, then save your money. If you like games that force you to think, pick it up.

It looks like the folks who make Movable Type, the CMS that I use to manage this site, have finally put together a more feasible licensing structure for their extremely popular product. As Mena Trott, co-author of the software explains on her site, this software has been used by literally thousands of freeloaders such as myself, as well as many commercial enterprizes.

In the past, MT was available absolutely free of charge, as “beggarware,” for non-commercial purposes, or a trivial flat-rate fee for commercial sites. Now it’ll cost folks $69.95 or more to get a proper copy with support. With the release of version 3.0, they will start limiting the number of sites and the number of authors for each lisence, making it possible for Six Apart to actually do business and pay their bills. It will still be available for free, with no proper tech support and a limit of one author and three sites. Were I willing to give my Sister my password so she can continue to publish the Kane Boys site, I wouldn’t run into any problems with upgrading to the free version of MT3.0 in the near future.

Alas, I am not in a position to blow the $69.95 on a multi-author license, and am against sharing passwords as a matter of principle, so it now becomes a very real possibility that this site will be switched over to an alternate CMS. The front runner in that is Drupal, and open-source project that has a lot of interesting features, and only a handful of drawbacks that I am aware of.

This potential changeover isn’t a matter of spite or malice, and I certainly don’t hold it against Six Apart that they wish to charge money for a quality product. The new pricing isn’t unreasonable, unfair, or unwarranted. I’m just a tightwad about such things.

Hat tip to Chunkbot for bringing this licensing change to my attention a scant 24 hours after it was announced.