Burrowowl

Every couple of years here in the the lovely North Bay / Wine Country / Redwood Empire / NorCal we see some actual weather. By actual weather I mean weather that genuinely merits news coverage. The area immediately North of the San Fransisco Bay has a pleasantly-uninteresting climate, with summers being largely rain-free and only creeping above 100° a few days out of the year. We almost never have days that remain below freezing after 11am, snow is almost unheard-of, we’ve never had a tornado or hurricane hit anybody. The only thing that keeps land prices here from allowing only bona-fide billionaires to live here are those pesky fault lines.

Unlike other parts of the country, we don’t really get a “winter” to speak of, instead getting a season that more closely resembles a slightly-chilly springtime elsewhere. Temperatures dip below 60°, our annual 6-month-drought takes a break, and the hills turn a lovely green. That’s a normal winter. This year, things are taking a more interesting turn, seeing day after day of precipitation, much to the dismay of folks that have recently purchased insanely over-priced homes in places like Healdsburg and Napa.

This tendency is why you almost never hear about us when the national news gives reports. Chicago may be socked-in with snow, hurricanes and tornadoes tear apart the Southeast and Midwest, and everybody’s national weather map has a pretty little rain animation permanently-glued atop the Pacific Northwest, but you almost never hear anything about Northern California. This is why most people don’t know what good internet-based resources we have around:

Paul Grosso’s Weather Page has been steadily providing accurate information from a variety of sources for over 10 years now. It used to be located on Paul’s personal webpage at Sonic.net, but has since graduated to its own domain name and everything. Not the prettiest page in the world, but a great resource. Amongst other things, he provides a great cross-section of North Bay river-gauge graphs.

Speaking of Sonic.net, they’ve recently made available weather.sonic.net which gives information from right there at their corporate HQ on the West edge of Santa Rosa. In addition to providing your typical temperature and wind information, this provides a handy hour-by-hour look at the rainfall during an interesting week such as this.

Well, here’s to hoping you have a dry place on high ground, and a happy new year, folks!

I know that on general principle, one shouldn’t reward usenet spammers by actually plugging their advertised websites, but an exception positively had to be made for ANTOLL MA. This particular site, as spammed in a variety of Tacoma, Washington newsgroups (how I came to visit those groups is another matter unto itself), details a bewildering array of numerological new-age cult-ish ramblings the like of which I haven’t seen since my roommate bought a VHS tape regarding nazi airbases in Antarctica.

A representative sample follows:

For three years, everything happened naturally and with ease. Mentally I had been preparing myself for a week for the 5th and 6th June 1978. However, my preparation was interrupted by a friend who asked me to go and see him, I hadn’t planned that. She thought she could come to the meeting with me and with her daughter, a well-known actress at that time. I was completely perturbed. At that time, I used to think that meetings were very confidential. In 1978, no major observations, 1979, the same thing. The contact was lost. The years went by without the slightest confirmed collaboration of the phenomenon. I attempted therefore to understand the meaning of Antoll Ma and especially the importance of the days with contact. The number six appears a lot. 6th June 1975, 6th June 1976. The month of June is, in itself, the sixth month of the year. Why not the 6th June 1977 rather than 5th June 1977 ? That would have naturally given 666 by concatenation. The number of the beast of the Apocalypse. At that time, I had dreaded making contact on 6th June 1977 because I would have thought that I was being contacted by evil powers, even more so, because I didn’t really know the meaning of the Apocalypse or 666. I decided to find out. That is to say, gather the different elements together with the intention of finding a meaning for the mystery in order to study it and find out its secret. Often, I went to the Literature faculty at the University of Aix-en-Provence in order to be alone in a classroom. I wrote the words ANTOLL MA in large letters on the board and then stepped back to see it better. Underneath, I wrote the dates of each contact and stepped back once again. Finally, I ended up finding the reality of a countdown. The countdown starting with 6 gives 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1, 0. Seeing as each of the letters of the first name could contain two contacts and that the name MA is the final step, being zero, I obtained a sort of double countdown, 66, 55, 44, 33, 22, 11, 0. Putting the series on the board in the following configuration…

Additional fun links follow

• The World Grid
• Otis T. Carr’s antigravity device (patented)
• The Coral Castle
• Free Energy

For years now, I’ve struggled with the existence of prestige classes in the d20 RPG system. I understand the desire to have them; they provide an underlying rule set to accompany a significant variation on the core character archetypes that are normal classes. They are “prestigious” in that there are necessary prerequisites to gaining entry into them. They are “classes” because progression in a PrC takes the place of the normal progression through a normal class.

Since the 3rd Edition Dungeons & Dragons Players Handbook was released in 2000, Wizards of the Coast has been on a fairly-steady schedule of monthly releases, putting out additional skills, feats, spells, classes, and prestige classes that can help mold their rule set to whatever setting you may wish to run it in. They’ve re-released the Forgotten Realms and Greyhawk, as well as Eberron and a number of environment-type-based settings (Frostburn etc.).

All told, there are currently 652 prestige classes published by Wizards of the Coast for the d20 system. This doesn’t count the plethora of prestige classes present in OGL products like the Iron Kingdoms, Midnight, or Warcraft. Granted, many of these 652 PrCs are repeats (Archmage, Incantrix, and Wayfarer Guide are some that show up in two books), but this is a truly-obscene preponderance of customized character rules, and likely indicative of either a fundamental flaw in the system’s underlying mechanics or something far more insidious in their marketing department.

This season’s anime offering has been pretty slim on watchable content, hence a severe slowdown in updates. Additionally, the propensity for scanlation groups to go shoujo on me has me rather discouraged. There is a bit of a light at the end of the tunnel in the form of Shakugan no Shana, a title with heavy Mahoromatic influences (without the meido costumes).

The story revolves around an unremarkable high school student (stop me if this sounds familiar) that encounters a cute girl with crazy magic powers that is fighting the forces of darkness… No, it’s not quite like it sounds. The unremarkable high school student doesn’t have fifty beautiful girls corresponding to the twenty-odd harem-anime stereotypes trying to woo him. The unremarkable student, Yuji, is caught up in a strange shadow-reality in which supernatural beings are consuming the very existences of mortals and replacing them with temporary placeholders called “torches.” It it very quickly revealed that Yuji himself is just a “torch,” and that he had died some time prior to the start of the series. He finds himself oddly allied with a Flame Haze, a supernatural being that hunts down and destroys the villainous supernatural beings that are consuming folks’ existences.

Once the basic premise has been roughly established, Yuji grapples with the nature of his existence as a temporary replacement that is doomed to fade away while the Flame Haze deals with a succession of supernatural opponents in big, flashy battles. At least two fansub groups are bringing this title to the English-reading world, so give it a shot.

Recently I’ve brought my own dedicated Linux server online, which has opened me up to a whole new world of technological problems that I had previously left to others to worry about. One of these problems is security. On November 29th, DYAD Security released an advisory regarding a exploit for the Webmin package. Happily, the Webmin folks were quick to patch it, releasing version 1.250 on November 30th. But what does one do if he has an older version? Upgrade.

Contrary to popular belief, the Linux intelligentsia are actually correct in their statements that it can be easy to set things up. Sometimes. To my surprise, this is one such instance:

Log into your webmin interface as root. By default this will put you into the Webmin category. Follow the link to “Webmin Configuration.”

In the Webmin Configuration page, follow the link to “Webmin Upgrade.”

You can be a Linux badass and upload your own copy of the RPM, or you could be a hardcore pencilneck and rebuild it from source. Personally, I clicked the “Upgrade Webmin” button.

Depending on the speed of your upstream connection, as well as the load on Webmin’s Sourceforge peers, it can take several minutes for the download to complete. The current version, 1.250, is only 9.02 megabytes in size (RPM version), but on the day or so after a bug-fix like this, don’t expect your 100Mbps connection to top off. The update runs itself all the way to completion by itself, and does not require you to restart anything manually.