Archive for September, 2007

Quiddler

Published by Sean Et Cetera on September 29, 2007 in Uncategorized. 0 Comments

Last weekend, Meghan and I were looking for something to do on Friday night. We decided to go to Ben Franklin’s and get a puzzle. While there, we also looked at some of the games, and we ended up picking up Quiddler. Aside from an odd name, Quiddler is billed as “the short word game”, and that it is.

The game consists of a deck of 118 cards, each labeled with a letter (A through Z) or two (QU, IN, ER, TH, and CL) and the point value for that letter. The goal of the game is to use these cards to create words, which are worth the total value of the cards. There are a total of seven hands played in which you try and make words, each providing more letters than the previous hand. The first hand starts with three cards, the second hand has four, and so on until the seventh hand which has ten cards. (For those who think in formulas, that’s x cards per hand, where x = the hand number + two.) By only being seven hands long, a typical game should last around half an hour, give or take.

Sure, there are some stipulations to how the game is played:

  1. Words have to be made of at least two cards, not just two letters (as the card IN would be a word).
  2. For every letter that isn’t used in a word, you lose the point value of the card. Your point value for a hand can never be less than zero, so you don’t have to worry about negative numbers.
  3. Word restrictions are much the same as Scrabble.

Meghan and I have played it a couple times, and it’s a quick alternative to Scrabble. The game cost us less than ten dollars, and is made by Set Enterprises, which makes a couple other card games, one of which, Xactika, caught my eye before I picked up Quiddler.
I’m curious as to what my brother would think of it, and have already excepted the fact that he’ll deem the game as “too easy” and before too long, when I play the game with him it will be in a form called Über-Quiddler, which will probably start with eight cards, minimum word length of three or four letters, increase cards by two each hand, and play until the last hand has thirty cards. Or something else equally ridiculous. We’ll also be playing Über-Scrabble at the same time too.

Dust and such II

Published by Sean Et Cetera on September 27, 2007 in sean-ward.com. 3 Comments

The issue I always run into with different styles is that most styles are not, apparently, made for those that want to display code that doesn’t then bleed onto other content. The solution always requires adding something to the .css, which tends to be like such for me:

pre {
 font-family:monospace;
 display:block;
 background:#eef;
 white-space:pre;
}

code {
 font-family:monospace;
 display:block;
 background:#eef;
 overflow:auto;
 white-space:pre;
}

I should be fair, cause I didn’t check the posts in the VB6 category until I switched from the default K2 style to the headless style, which is interesting, but I don’t know if I want to keep it or not. I think the lack of a header forces the site name (and optional description) to be only as long as it needs to be. That, and instead of having a banner image, you can use a 210px x 300px image, which give you more options.

Anyway, in order to get the code to display properly, I need to use the Code Markup plugin, which appears to be compatible with WP 2.3 (from what I can tell). I guess my only issue with it is that I have to write the code with <pre><code> at the beginning and </code></pre> at the end, but I guess the way it has to be for now. At least there’s a plugin available to resolve the issue.

Dust and such

Published by Sean Et Cetera on September 25, 2007 in sean-ward.com. 1 Comment

I saw Jim’s site and got inspired to change mine, as well as update to the new version of Wordpress (2.3). Despite the fact that it’s been released for only 2 days such far, I dove in. However, there appear to be some issues with the new theme I want to use, so this entire process will probably take a week or so.

Mourning dove nest and the stupid things people say

Published by Sean Et Cetera on September 25, 2007 in Uncategorized. 2 Comments

Mourning dove and babiesOne morning early this summer I saw some students examining the tree. That evening, I stopped to take a look, and at eye-level was a mourning dove nest. A couple days later (May 21) I stopped back to take a picture of it.

After I took the picture, a guy passing by, perhaps a professor or instructor said something along the lines of “they aren’t too smart when they pick a spot for nests”. Well, while you can’t see the entire tree, it’s not very tall (only 20 to 30 feet) with no easy way for a hawk to get into the branches. And despite the nest being 6 feet off the ground, it’s also in a place where it would be difficult for a hawk to get in there. Being in the middle of campus, there’s also small chance of a house cat wandering over and bother the nest. No, I think that overall, this is a good place to nest.

After he walked away, I realized that it was just part of the arrogance of man to say that. Yes, mankind has selected all sorts of great places to build dwellings. Without creating a list, just think of all the places where people live or have lived despite any natural disasters that happen with a regular occurrence.

Yeah, animals got nothing on our ability to pick a place to live.

Working on an old comptuer is fun

Published by Sean Et Cetera on September 14, 2007 in Uncategorized. 1 Comment

My downstairs neighbor had mentioned a couple weeks ago that she was going to be getting a computer from a friend and would like me to take a look at it and clean it up so she could use it. Overall, she wanted the following done:

  • Clean up the computer by removing any old programs
  • Install something so she could type up documents
  • If possible, see if it could get online

I could see no harm in doing so, and on Wednesday night, I went downstairs to take a look at it, thinking as I was doing so that I have some memory from computers that I had 5 or 6 years ago that I can possibly throw in, depending on the computer. What awaited me was a Packard Bell Multimedia C110 with accompanying monitor and speakers. Needless to say, that scrapped the memory idea. The C110 has the following characteristics:

  • Motherboard: PB 680 (I think)
  • Processor: 120 MHz Intel
  • RAM: 16MB, which was two 8MB 72pin EDO sticks (max 128MB)
  • HDD: 1GB
  • Operating System: Windows 95
  • Available slots: 3 16-bit ISA and 1 PCI (of course, the possible max combination is 3 ISA or 2 ISA and 1 PCI), all of which was off of a ISA riser

I had to mentally consider what I could do here. I expected a machine that was barely able to run XP, but instead I had a computer that might not have been able to handle Windows 98. I actually debated, after hearing the noises that are standard for a computer like this, if it was really able to handle Windows 95, but it was running it, and that all that mattered. Looking in the back, I was surprised that the computer had PS/2 connectors for the keyboard and mouse instead of a 5-pin Din AT and 9-pin serial ports, respectively. That’s one thing that would be easier to deal with anyway.

I carried the computer back up to my apartment and got to work. I of course opened it up, but I noted that the silver seal sticker had never been broken, meaning that this was the first time since leaving the factory that the case on the computer had come off. Surprisingly, there was little to no dust inside the machine. In some sort of irony the universe is known for, the same day I showed the staff in the office a 14″ long 8-bit ISA card, I was working on a computer that had more ISA slots than PCI slots. At least it had that PCI slot, and it was being unused, as I needed that for the network card so I could download OpenOffice on to the computer.

Ah, the network card. I knew getting it installed wasn’t going to be a cake walk, I so I wasn’t surprised when it asked me for Windows 95 Disk 19. I knew that I should be able to just check C:\Windows\options\cabs\ to get the files I needed, but it didn’t want to let me manually type it in. I knew I had a CD around that might do the trick, but I wasn’t certain. Sure enough, I have Windows 95 CD that was living with other outdated software in a tub in the closet. Once I tried to use that to get the drivers (it didn’t want to because the Windows 95 on the CD was newer than the one on the comptuer), I was finally able to manually type in the location of the cabs. That meant I could end the process I was starting of using the included program to create the installation floppies. All 30 of them. I at least remembered that to check on networking I needed to use winipcfg.

Getting the computer cleaned up, while easy, probably took the longest, as I had to make sure that what I was uninstalling, or deleting, wasn’t being used elsewhere. At the beginning, there was just under 15MB of free space on the 1GB hard drive. By the time all was said an done, there was 494MB of free space. That includes OpenOffice and IE, but those programs proved interesting to install. First, I tried burning the necessary OpenOffice installer to a CD-RW on my XP machine, but the CD drive on the C110 did not like the disc. Why not just download OpenOffice onto the C110? That’s because there was no non-dialup browser available on the computer. IE and Netscape were at some point on there, but I only know that because of the directories that were left behind.

I didn’t want to install IE, but it was the easiest option available. I tired using the February 2004 CD that Microsoft gave out with updates for their different operating systems, but it did not include Windows 95. I couldn’t use a burnt CD, apparently, to get IE onto the machine, so I decided to try my luck with the Windows 95 disc I had. Sure enough, I was able to use the explore option to navigate to a directory that had an installation program for IE 3.01, which is good enough for what I need. Once I got that installed, I was able to download PKUnzip and then OpenOffice 1.0.3.1, which was the last version to have legacy support for Windows 95. OpenOffice did require me to get the DCOM95 updated from Microsoft as well. Interesting fact about IE 3.01: pretty much every page I went to threw a javascript error of some kind. Once I was done with that, the C110’s foray into the Internet ended, as the poor machine couldn’t handle most of what was out there anyway.

Thus ended my work on a computer that is at least 12 years old. Since she had speakers that required a power supply she did not have, that meant I was able to remove a pair of speakers from my collection that I’ve had for years. All in all, it was refreshing to work on that computer since it was so old, as it meant I actually had less things to worry about compare to a Windows XP or Vista machine that a student at BGSU might use.

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