I just created a new Skype account where I'm trying to get the most possible contacts I can without destroying my beloved Mac. So far nobody is adding me. I guess I could post my Skype ID here, but I'd have to see if people are OK with me doing that first. I've also been trying to find Pokémon cristle and hook up Tiler Spivy's lua script to a gameboy emulator so I can play the game, of course, I don't think the script works with voice over. So yeah, that's basically all I've got.

Dark, glad to hear things are going well with the new wife. 

I feel like I've been away for a long time, during my latest "Aprone falls away from the audio game scene" episode.  I am trying to now ease my way back into my old routine of checking email, checking these forums, and coding.

Weeks ago I had made an extremely unpopular admin decision on Swamp, that had a group of people in an absolute uproar.  To make a long story short, enough people were chucking insults and hate mail at me that I threw my hands up and said "F this."  I stopped working on the new Swamp code I'd been working on for a while, and took a little time away from the community.  I didn't plan on taking a very long break, but other stuff found a way to keep me away longer.

A good friend of mine lost his house and needed to move in with us (my wife and I), so a ton of time was spent organizing and moving things around in preparation.  I work on so many different kinds of projects that someone could easily label me as a hoarder.  The house is filled with everything from wires and gears, to sheets of scrap metal and plastic.  My poor wife, haha!  Our plan was to give the friend half of our garage space, a room in the basement, and extra storage space in an adjacent room.  Sounds easy enough but freeing up that space meant a major undertaking of cleaning out the whole house, organizing, and throwing away a ton of stuff I'm least likely to actually use any time soon.

The Swamp/Castaways server was going to have to be moved into a different room, which meant running a new electrical outlet to where it would go.  My basement only has the 1 "finished" room and the rest have only a single electrical outlet each.  Cable (TV) also had to be fed through the ceiling and walls to run it into the room my friend would be staying in.  I'm too cheap to pay an actual electrician, so all of these changes were mine to handle. 

After tearing up and replacing the carpet in his new room, and replacing the door frame that the previous owners installed themselves incorrectly (holy crap that was a pain), everything would have been set.  It was at that time that my wife was willing to move our second floor (a bungalow style room) down into a room on the main floor, while moving the main floor's contents to this new basement room.  The change would give our friend the entire second floor of the home, which has more space.  The friend was quite excited about the new idea, so that became the new plan.

I'm sure many of us can imagine the effort needed to carry chairs, sofas, entertainment centers, and book shelves between rooms of a house (and between floors).  I'll spare those details, but will comment that the 200+ pound electric treadmill was the least fun to move 2 floors from the upstairs to the basement.

An internet cable had to be ran up to the second floor through a wall, and the only way to make it work was to cut the end off.  Of the million tools, a cat 5 cable crimper is not one of them, so that's something I'll fix in a few days.

Some close friends invited us up to a lake house, so this whole house altering project was split with a 5 day trip up north.  We had fun, fished, and spent some time on their boat.  Our car has been dying for a long time.  Like, a Long time!  Way back when I did those See Munkey recordings, someone even commented on how terrible my car sounded, haha!  So anyway, the long drive up north brought about a terrible new noise coming from the car, and we had already both wondered if our vehicle would survive such a trip.  On the drive back, 1 hour from home, the engine blew.  Boom!  Blew a fist-sized hole in the engine and shot metal onto the freeway.  We are now in a new car, which Jennifer is thrilled about, and of which I am nervously optimistic.  Jennifer wanted to lease a brand new car because she has had to deal with our unreliable one for so long, and I've never been a fan of using something I do not own.  When some moron dings up your car you can normally just shrug and live with it, but on a lease I'll have to pay to repair any damage when it gets turned back in.  So yeah, I'm less comfortable about this arrangement.

That's about it for me I think.  I apologize to anyone who has been trying to get a hold of me.  Well, I should say I apologize to anyone wanting to get a hold of me for normal reasons.  To people flinging insults and anger, I'm glad you wasted time writing stuff I never read, haha!    I'm so back logged on missed messages that I believe I'll just hit select all, and delete.  It's a crappy thing of me to do, but realistically I'm not going to go back and read weeks worth of missed stuff.  218 unread emails, 50 "recent" unread skype messages... sheesh, no thank you.  ROFL!

Brian, I have it estimated down to about $0.29 per day in electricity to run the actual server.  Extra internet charges to have the higher upload/download speeds are harder to estimate.  Since I would have the internet even without the server, the extra I pay to bump it to a higher plan could be the amount to consider, but it's hard to really split it up that way fairly.  If you already have internet at your house, running a server can be as cheap as $8.50-$9 per month.  Keep the monitor off (LOL, I just thought about where I'm typing this message!) because the extra power from the screen can raise that cost by 50%-100% depending on various factors.

It's a windows server, yeah.  I use a linux server (through Yahoo) to handle my actual website and about half of the account security stuff.  I've debated moving everything over to my personal server to save a bit of money and also stop all those lousy times when Swamp/Castaways won't sign in, which is an issue with Yahoo's side of the security checks.  For the time being, keeping things separate helps me feel a bit more secure because someone would need to access data from both servers to really comprise anything important, and that is a lot less likely to ever have happen.

@Brian, I've seen the odd episode of Bleache. It sort of looked like a more serious version of Dragonball with swords and spirits instead of martial arts and sort of semi futuristic craziness, which isn't a bad thing, although I've got so many other things to actually watch or read or go through it's not on the priority list for the moment, heck when we get back to England I want to start into season 4 of buffy the vampire slayer.

@Aprone, With the house moving it sounds like your life is turning into Dog who hates toast, having to move the banana to family monster toaster room etc . 
Seriously I do sympathize, there was a point when as a child it seemed my parents were taking it in turns to redecorate each room of our house which of course necessitated moving all the contents of one room into another room, there was one point my mum would grab anyone who came through the door, hand them a sheet of sand paper and get them sanding her douglas fir doors, up to and including the local vicar .

I'm always impressed at people who can do all of the carpentry/electrics/plumming type of stuff. Other than obvious things like changing bulbs I've never really had a practical aptitude that way, apart from the fact that stuff like rewiring a plug is dam difficult without vision, so have generally restricted myself to more interlectual/artistic type of things.

As to how the new wife is, well who ever said I had an old wife?  ---- actualy scratch that, there is no oold wife!" there never has been, and that hole at the bottom of the guarden is dug up just because it needed digging, and what do you mean that there are reports of a missing woman seen around my house! she's not missing, she just went into the guarden that's all. It wasn't her fault, she had a liking for mushrooms, yes, perfectly ordinary organic mushrooms, no I never knew tthey were poisonous, how could I have known! You think I went to all the trouble of researching mushroom types then growing them from spaws then filtering them to extract the poison for a poisonous mushroom pizza? I just wanted to give the lady a nice meal and a good rest, she wwas so tired after all.

Hmmmm, methinks I'd better stop this line of conversation before  I say something incriminating since I'm perfectly innocent and would never even think about murdering anyone, ---- might do it, perhaps have done it, but wouldn't even think! about it! .

Seriously, my lady is extremely well (and since she emphatically dislikes even normal mushrooms the above digression is entirely pointless). Again I don't have a lot to report other than relaxing and generally spending time on things. Yesterday we all went swimming which was nice, and my lady had the distinct pleasure of seeing me act like a total nutcase as I attempted a canonballl! ACtually the diving board was cool and I did manage to remember the diving I used to do. I'm not exactly the most athletic of people when it comes to jumping around, but that was fun, as was the swimming. We then went for icecream and I forgot the cardinal rule of living in this country never! order a large, since they're gigantic!

I'm still reading through magician by Feist. It has actually picked up when we got into the second world, indeed to say that medkemia is pretty much just D&D land, kalawal is remarkably unique both in culture and even in wildlife. Feist even shows some glimmerings in the direction of character, albeit I don't like the hole women who don't like someone and then randomly do a complete switch and suddenly fling themselves into the arms of male characters for no readily apparent reason.

That being said some of the magic stuff is fun, even if I don't exactly rate Feists' description of such. I probably will do a review of magician, just because I think it probably needs someone to point out the book's strengths and weaknesses rather than just goin "this is the best thing ever!" or "this is the worst thing ever!" as inevitably seems to happen, especially with books that have been around for a long while and have something of cult status about them.

Dark there are times I wish I Didn't know how to do all of that stuff!  Everyone from in-laws to cousins regularly call upon me to help with household repairs and other manual labor type stuffs.  Not that I'm complaining, I like to help, but every once in a while I consider gifting another relative one of those "home repair for dummies" book sets and twiddling my thumbs evilly while I wait for my plan to work.

Well CAE, I'll toss something new into the mix and maybe it will jog your memory and you'll know what you were going to talk about.  I just finished a fairly annoying clean up after a project failed.

Jennifer has a cousin who has an interest in backyard metal working, more specifically, he wants to make some tools/items by pouring molten metal into self made molds.  (Heh, firefox says "moulds" is spelled incorrectly so I went with "molds")  I don't have a proper foundry and haven't had spare cash to build one, so I've been making due with what I have... a steel dish shaped fire pit.

Because I don't get to spend time with the cousin very often, I have been trying to work the bugs out of the process by myself, to make the most of when we are together.  A few weeks ago I had time to melt down some zinc (our aluminum stand-in until we have a proper foundry (which is our iron stand-in since it's unlikely we can make a foundry capable of melting iron)) but I didn't have an actual mold handy.  Earlier in the week I had a little time to shape out a clay mold for a big pair of pliers, and setting it aside to slowly dry.  Today I believed the mold had set long enough, so I once again fired up the foundry and forced the neighbors listen to the sound of my shop vac, haha.

I wasted a ton of my charcoal because I had the blower incorrectly positioned without realizing it, causing most of the heat to be sent away from where I wanted it.  That was a bummer because I'm using charcoal I made myself previously, and I only have a limited supply before I'd have to spend hours making more.  Aprone is too cheap to buy charcoal, as we all expect, but also it's because the charcoal briquets used for cook outs are not real charcoal.  Those are real charcoal ground up, mixed with sand and a few other things, and then compressed into that briquet shape.  Good for low heat cooking, but not ideal for a foundry.

So once I had the blower back on track, it didn't take long to get things ready.  I slid my clay mold out from where it had been heating up and I put on my blacksmith gloves (the only safety equipment I use because I'm too cheap to buy any and the gloves were ones I Found a decade ago).  You have to scrape slag off of the surface of the molten metal, and I personally use a long gutter nail that fell off of my house years ago.  One of these days I need to find something better, because it is pretty terrible for the job.  Today I wasn't thinking and picked up the nail with my non gloved hand a few minutes after scraping the slag!  Ever notice how you can't drop something fast enough when it's that hot?  Like time slows down and you're waiting for stupid frig'in gravity to take it away from your open hand, but the hot nail just slowly saunters its way away when it feels like it.

So yeah, I felt sorta stupid after that mistake.

Next I assumed my usual metal pouring position, which is an idiot crouching on his driveway, wearing a blacksmith glove on one hand and holding a garden hose in the other, clutching it as if it were a defensive weapon.  So I start to pour, and wouldn't you know it, the clay mold wasn't entirely dry all the way through.  Crap.

A rapid series of loud pops send chips of clay and molten drips of metal in all directions.  I of course jumped back and readied the hose to defend myself if necessary, but there was nothing I could do to save the mold.  It took about 20 seconds before the violent popping stopped, and it looked like a bag of glitter had been mugged and violently beaten in a dark alley.  Tiny metal drips had sprayed everywhere, and they tended to harden in the frantic splash shapes they made upon impact.  So basically tiny dots of metal, with razor sharp spikes and edges sticking up everywhere.  I spend more time barefoot in my back yard then I do wearing shoes, plus I have 2 small nephews, so my only option was to clean it all up.

I spent a lot of time slowly crawling around the driveway with a flat screwdriver and pliers, prying each splatter off of the concrete.  It was Not fun.

The final piece of bad news is that the mold was shredded.  I knew it wouldn't survive the pouring, but the goal is to have a good metal cast in exchange for killing the clay mold.  What I had was a mangled mess of metal, sort of in the shape of the 2 pliers halves.  The escaping pockets of steam had shredded it as it was hardening, so there is nothing I can do to salvage it.  Yep, that was a huge waste of time and effort, but at least I can tell myself I learned something.  Next time I'm going to convert the foundry into a kiln so I can fire the clay mold ahead of time.  More than ever I see how important it is to drive out any and all moisture before trying another metal pour.

For anyone wondering, the zinc tools would be inferior to store bought steel tools in basically every way.  Zinc can be pretty strong as long as you make the tools thick enough, so low impact stuff such as pliers should be fine.  More than anything they are being made just for bragging rights, where he can show off that he made them himself using 99% natural methods.  When we finally have all the bugs ironed out, the method we are using would work (if scaled up) to forge iron tools out in nature.  We're missing iron ore and police would shut me down if I properly scaled up the foundry, but our scaled down version is accurate otherwise.  It's a very cool project, albeit a dangerous and frustrating one.

Aprone, I am mostly jealous of your skills (but not of having to ply exploded zinc fragments from the driveway ).

Dark, the 80% rule is a Japanese thing, the idea being to eat until you are 80% full; if you're actually full, you've probably eaten too much, or so the idea goes. Also, last I heard, Japanese drinks are sold at the same price regardless of the size, under the notion that you'd buy the size you want, instead of trying to do some amount of drink vs price optimization. Granted, I don't know if this means smalls are more expensive, or larges are cheaper!

@Cae, I'll have to check that one with my brother about the Japanese drinks, though I always thought the idea in Japan was rather like that which 18th century ladies used to have in Britain where it was seen as most impolite not to leave at least a little on your plate. Admitedly, this was partly so that you didn't appear to be committing gluttany, and partly for the much more practical reason that often the servants got the left overs so being a greedy git would literally deprive someone of food.

Either way, large portions here in AMerica, are really! insanely large.

Well not a lot to report other than a severely bashed knee, the acquisition of actually quite a cool bronze unicorn from my inlaws to take back to Britin, and my finally finishing Feist's magician!

Really I was glad to finally get through it, since even though there was stuff I liked, in general the book was a disappointment, partiuclarly the generic fantasy elements, shallow characters and occasion when one protagonist took it into his head to object to the gladiatorial games by blowing the hell out of the stadium and everyone in it with his magic, killing all concerned. As I said in my review,   even 20 years ago the idea of a lone maverick taking it into his head that social justice was lacking so destroying a public building with personally acquired weaponry, taking out a lot of innocent bystanders under the belief that they're guilty or some real or imagined social ill is probably not one which will sit well with a modern reader .

DEspite stuff I likeed in the book, I really! hope feist improves in whatever of his books I decide to read next.

Enspired to actually see what the fussis about regarding pointy horses (though admitedly Guy Garvril Kay did have an incredibly cool one in Fionavar), I'm starting the humourus collection, zombies vs unicorns, which should be fun .

I've had a decent amount of progress with my game engine, but nothing particularly presentable-- I made a sound demo for the first version of the sound engine but I'm not sure if it's a recording of the newest version or not. I guess I'll need to make another one when I've got more work done on it.

Besides that, things have been pretty good. I've been putting together a costume for a LARP (live action role play) and it's been going decently well. Though the boots I have to break in before it happens are killing my feet...

@Dino, I'd be interested to know about your costume too. I have a lot of friends who are larpers, but have always confined myself to tabletop rp with dice and a gm because I don't like the idea of playing a constantly blind character and not being able to participate in battles or run around fields or cast spells by throwing balls at each other, heck even those larp events which are more like historical reinactment with people doing their own smithing and armor making and camping and what not would be a bit of a pest for someone photonically challenged, or at least they probably would be for me with my less than practical bent to that type of thing .

@Aprone, we did get back okay, actualy the plane journey was as good as it could've been given we had the front seats with a massive amount of leg room and a free seat between us, so other than the child who persisted in kicking my seat, and the general craziness of newark airport (which was so amaizngly corwded and complex it's ridiculous!), it was okay, or at least as okay as could be expected.
I actually started playing champion of the gods from choiceofgames on the plane, then realized my iphone was totally lacking charge due to the fact that I was charging the pet chip scanner used to check my guide dogs chip which we bought after the airport found her chip unscannable at christmas, so I had to knock off fairly soon to leave enough charge in case I needed my phone in the Uk, ---- oh and the bloody scanner still! didn't work, though luckily the airport new my dog so that was okay.
Still, I'm sorry to have stopped in the middle of champion, which, other than some severely irritatingly stylised dialogue was looking rather fun in a traditional fantasy with a bit of an ancient griek flavour way, hopefully i'll be able to get back to it at some point in the future though right now things are a bit crazy and I'm alternating sleeping, learning music and packing like a demon, as well as supporting my lady who has to do the same.

Now  unfortunately we've got equal amounts of running around, getting music together for aims music school and such. I've been cast as oberon the elf king and my lady is puck, which should be fun, or at least it will be now I know the bit I'm supposed to learn and sing .
We're also doing some bits from westside story including one hand one heart and officer crupkey, crupkey should be awesome since i've asked for the part of the guy who pretends to be a social worker and has the horribly bad falsetto, I'm quite looking forward to squeaking "he's no good!"  .

All that being said both my lady and I are rather frazled, and it doesn't help that my victor cable has bust and I've needed to send the hole thing back to humanware for repares, and since I've found it very useful at music school the last two years for portable note taker and also instant music playback device of what I need to sing (well everyone else has their written music to go from), i'm a bit sorry I'll be without it, not the least because I'll miss books, but hay.

Humanware have said they'll have it back by wednesday so hopefully I'll not be without for too long. It's amazing how useful certain bits of technology get to the point that being without them is a right royal pest!

I think that, although we are slowly becoming able to use more and more mainstream technology, there will still be a need for some blindness-specific devices, e.g. braille displays. Sometimes, it is just more convenient to use a digital book player such as the Victor Reader Stream than an iPhone app, while at other times, the opposite is true. It is nice to have choice about what we use.