Category: Uncategorized

Back in The Wonders of CSS I mentioned that I was working through my site updating the various pages to be somewhat standards compliant. Who would have thought that a schlub like me would have so much stuff kicking around in cyberspace.

It may not look it at a quick glance, but I have a lot of stuff on this site. In any event, I finished converting all the stuff except for the software I run this blog on. That is going to take a bit more work I think since the software itself probably needs to be fixed up. Besides which, I expect I’m probably going to iterate through this "let’s c hange the site style" game a couple more times before it’s all sorted out. Great fun, really. At least the blog is one file to tinker with rather than one file per entry.

One thing I did discover is that I have a number of items that never got webified in the humour section. Folks might find them entertaining. I believe I snagged them from the gopher homestead before it went offline.

Anyway, that’s enough babbling for now. I now return you to your regularly scheduled procrastination.

Not being a web developer, I don’t often take the time to play with my web site. Today, however, I had occasion to tinker with CSS for a project at work. While I already knew about the benefits of CSS, I hadn’t taken the time to actually do anything about it yet.

Now, my web site has been mashed and mangled together over the better part of a decade. What this means is that it’s seen various tagging styles come and go and a vast number of variations in browsers come and go. Even my taste in formatting has changed over the years. In fact, the wayback machine may provide you with some idea of what my site used to look like. (Search it for www.l-w.net.)

As many of you can no doubt imagine, the code is in quite a state of inconsistency between various pages and so on. It is in various states of compliance with various standards for HTML.

At some point, I converted everything to very basic layout and removed most of the inline formatting tags. This is as far as I got in revamping the code to be coherent. Until now.

I am now in the process of redoing all the static pages on my site so they validate as strict html 4.01. I am also tossing in a style sheet so I can change the basic look with a lot less hassle. Of course, I will no doubt discover a wonderful new thing that will require a complete redo again, but so be it. At least I can change the colours of things without editing every page now.

Eventually, I’ll also convert the blog into the new format. Right along with the ability to post comments and all that jazz. But then, I did use to be writing a mud, too.

As noted previously, I am currently relocating to a new apartment.

I have recently been making some serious progress at moving things. So much so that I had to clean up some trash that accumulated at the old location. It is absolutely astounding how much junk a person can accumulate over two thirds of a decade. That said, I’ve basically got the bulk of the really big and heavy stuff moved. I’m not left with a rather large amount of small stuff that needs to be tossed in boxes and transported.

If all goes well, I should have most everything moved by early next week and I’ll be able to do the final cleanup and move out inspection and all that jazz.

On another note, things are going well in the new location and it does truly look like I will save at least as much money as I thought.

Furthering my theme of "Great" things, here is the first installment of The Great Relocation.

I am currently in the process of moving into a new apartment. This is intended to save money and allow me to pay off some of my accumulated debts. How well this works, only time will tell.

The major feature of this relocation is that I am taking on a room mate. This room mate happens to be my sister. She wanted to move into a larger city to improve career opportunities but couldn’t afford it on her own and I was looking to save money. So we came to an arrangement and all the necessary arrangements were made.

The culmination of all that arranging is that on March 28 we took possession of a new apartment and my sister moved her stuff down from Camrose on March 31. I started moving my stuff on April 1. Since I have a one month overlap between my old aparment and the new one, I am able to make the transition a lot more calmly.

So, as things stand now, all my audio/video stuff, my computer gear, my pots and pans, and a number of other random widgets have been relocated. I’ve basically moved half the stuff. The other half is all packed and waiting to be moved. And the other half is waiting to be packed up and moved.

Yes, I know that makes three halves.

One side effect of the move is that my broadband internet access is down for a while. It has something to do with insufficient infrastructure being available at the new location. I do have a dial up connection with my employer but it does limit the amount of internet access. As a result, I’ll be somewhat rare on the ‘net for a while. This is not necessarily a bad thing, however.

Look for more on the Great Relocation as things develop.

The other day, I was at a somewhat upscale restaurant when one of my pet peeves was triggered. Don’t get me wrong, the food was excellend and so was the service. The peeve that bugged me so much was this incessant use of the word "we" when the speaker clearly did not include himself in the group. Some examples of this type of situation:

• "How are we feeling today?"
• "Are we going to have anything else, today?"
• "Aren’t we a cute little one."
• …

It should be noted that there are plenty of cases where the above statements would be perfectly acceptable. However, if you want to know how I am feeling, ask that. Using the term "we" requires me to make a divination about your state of being.

Conventional wisdom seems to be that using the so called "royal we" is a good thing. Personally, I find it insultingly condescending. That is, it implies to me that the speaker is doing me the great courtesy of taking the bother to include themselves in my life. These days, it is clear the most speakers simply use it as a canned mannerism since they’ve grown up hearing it continually.

The gist of this rant is that the word "we" should ONLY be used when the group referred to includes the speaker. Thus, if I am acting on behalf of a company, it would be appropriate. If I am asking you for your opinion, it is not. Of course, the same should be said of the other formations of the first person plural.

Over the past year, I’ve taken a lot more notice of the structure underlying economics. I’ve observed a number of interesting commentaries on such things in places where one would not necessarily expect to find them. The one which really got me thinking about it was a book called Voyage from Yesteryear.

In this book, the author, James P. Hogan, describes two competing economic systems. I will refer two these two systems and "scarcity economics" and "abundance economics". Scarcity economics attempts to allocate resources that are of limited supply compared to demand. Abundance economics attempts to allocate resources in which there is no shortage compared to demand. Each of these systems would tend to yield a method of thinking which would pervade a society. Thus, scarcity economics would lead to a society whose primary motivation is obtaining scarce resources. Likewise, abunance economics would lead to a society that is not obsessed with acquiring resources.

Mr. Hogan takes these two premises and brings them into sharp relief. In his novel, a colony ship is sent out to a nearby planet to escape from the apparently impending doom of the Earth. Once there, the machines aboard the ship construct the infrastructure necessary for a human society to survive then brings the human colonists into existence through artificial gestation. This structure yields an entry group of humans who have never known the ingrained ways of doing things on Earth and, indeed, have never known the problem of scarcity.

Fast forward a few decades. Rumours of the impending doom of Earth turn out to be premature and a group of humans, whom I will call Terrans for clarity, set off for the colony, bringing all their culture and beliefs with them. They ultimately arrive at the colony and are baffled by what they discover. Apparently nobody is in charge of anything. Everyone simply strolls down to the store and takes what they need. Everyone is so open and apparently honest that the Terrans distrust them.

The resulting, inevitable, clash between the Terran ways and the colonists’ ways ultimately results in the colonists prevailing and most of the Terrans simply adapting and assimilating into the colony. This may be wishful thinking but I would like to think that this would be the result. Of course, the colonial socieity is presented as somewhat utopian while the Terran society is somewhat dystopian but it is presented in such a compelling manner that it causes a person to really think about it.

Since reading Mr. Hogan’s novel, I have been observing my world with a more critical eye toward the economic substrate. Being something of an initiate into the Hacker culture, I have encountered a number of discussions of it. Most of these discussions indicate the Hacker culture is a gift culture, meaning that one gains prestige from sharing. The Art of Unix Programming by Eric Raymond discusses this phenomenon better than I can. You can find a pointer to it at Eric’s web site.

The world at large, however, is, of necessity, largely scarcity driven. Historically, the resources needed for survival have been scarce thus yielding a society where the accumulation of resources is viewed as success and yields prestige. Yet recent modern society has been attempting to apply these scarcity rules to resources that are essentially infinite.

To illustrate what I mean, let me take an example. Consider a book in digital form. For example, Mr. Raymond’s book mentioned above. Eric can make a copy of the book available to me essentially without cost. Now I have a copy of the book. But Eric still has his copy. The same applies to digital music, videos, and so on. The same also applies to ideas. I have an idea on something. I share it with you. Now you can use my idea. Yet your use of the idea does not prevent me from continuing to use the idea. So basically, we have resources that are infinite compared to demand.

Of course, this begs the question of whether the person who had the idea or the person who wrote the book, or the song, should have some compensation. This is where a society based in scarcity has a problem. In order to live, everyone must acquire some amount of scarce resources, regardless of the infinte resources they acquire or share. Yet much of our modern society is involved in the creation of these infinite resources. The current wisdom seems to be that we need to pretend that these infinite resources are finite and apply our current economic system to them. This has met with very limited success. (See the current situations with file sharing and so on.)

Unfortunately, some sort of mass paradigm shift is needed before things will change. Fortunately, as technology advances, the scarcity problem for basic needs should become less. This may finally allow for the paradigm shift that seems to be necessary. I say this because it seems that it is impossible for a gift culture and a selfish culture to meet in the middle, especially when the gift culture requires the selfish culture for its own survival. (There can be no culture at all if everyone starves.)

Bleak as things seem now, we do seem to be on the cusp of a major shift in economics and culture. Here’s hoping that Mr. Hogan’s dream comes true.

For some reason, I found myself pondering mortality today. I found my thoughts taking some interesting (well, to me anyway) turns. For those who might be interested, I will share these thoughts.

It occurred to me that in the fact of mortality, self awareness is, quite possibly, a curse. In particular, self awareness combined with an imagination and reason. Any being equipped with those tools is able to recognize death and also to consider its implications. And these implications are frightening when faced with a survival instinct or even just a desire to survive.

We, as beings capable of pondering death, are well equipped to understand this. Based strictly on the science available to us today, death indicates the end of consciousness. Of self awareness. To any self aware being, this concept is terrifying. Given our frame of reference, we try to comprehend what it will be like to not be aware at all. This is ridiculous. It won’t be like anything; with no awareness, nothing can be. It can’t be painful, or beautiful, or anything else at all.

But suppose the death of the body is not the end of the self aware mind? Suppose there is a soul that continues after death? This, then, gives meaning to the question of what it is like after death. This opens up a considerable number of possibilities ranging from eternal bliss to eternal torment. And we have no objective way to quantify this if it is true. This leaves us with either believing or not.

For the sake of argument, suppose the soul does live on after death. This would be a sort of immortality. Assuming conditions are not terrible, would this truly be a blessing? To live forever, conscious through the long millennia of creation. What then, when the universe ends? Or perhaps the soul would live in a different universe? Would the soul persist after the heat death of the universe? What of a different universe that never ends? What would be worse?

My pondering followed this line. Being self aware, what is the worse fate? To be conscious until the end of time? To be conscious for some time after death but to end anyway? To simply end at death? I arrived at no answer at all. On the one hand, to simply stop at death would definitely end any suffering or pain. Yet to live on would give yet more time to enjoy consciousness. To live until the end of time and see the end of all things, perhaps that would be worse. Yet, along the way, one would have to endure the seemingly endless millennia.

Perhaps age determines the answer one would give to this question. Myself, I think I am young enough yet to hope to live forever. Yet I also begin to dread this possibility. Yet I still dread the thought of simply ceasing to be in a few short decades (should I live that long) even more. And still, even though I know the ridiculousness of it, I continue to wonder what it would be like to not be at all.

No doubt, everyone with a telephone has experienced the scource of the telemarketer. Well, pehaps those on cellphones may not have but most everyone else has. Email spam almost has the telemarketer beat for sheer disruption factors.

Traditionally, telemarketers would have a human being on the other end of the telephone. This makes it possible for the annoyed recipient of the telephone call to interrupt the sales pitch and demand to be placed on the caller’s "Do Not Call" list. Since I learned of this trick, I have been continually making this request and, lo, the volume of telemarketing calls I receive has plummetted. It should be noted that most of them will simply ignore any request that does not use the specific term "do not call&qhot;.

Of course, there are a few who simply will not accept that you have no interest in their product and that calling you repeatedly will not change your mind. Some of them even ignore the request to be placed on the do not call list. At one point, I had to threaten AT&T with a harrassment lawsuit before they stopped calling, sometimes multiple times in a single week, to sell me long distance service. And a local newspaper called me like clockwork every Friday for six months before I got frustrated and made a similar threat. Interestingly, in both cases, I was INSTANTLY removed from their lists and I have never received a call from them since. This seems to indicate that there is no excuse for the "do not call" requests to take up to six weeks to be processed.

All of this is, of course, relatively easy to deal with. After all, you have a human with whom you can argue. The current plaque seems to be autodialers with voice records on them. You pick of the telephone and get this recording. You cannot cut off the recording. You cannot demand to be placed on its do not call list. You can only hang up on it. And hope that you do not get a repeat call. While I have not been receiving a large volume of these calls, they are on the rise. Soon, I’ll have a much more disruptive set of spam from these telephone clowns than in my email where I can take remarkably effective steps to prevent even having to see it in many cases.

To all of you out there who think voice recording on autodialers are a good way to solicit business, think again! All it does is piss people off. If you feel you must telephone me, do so in person. Even if you use an autodialer, at least have the courtessy to have a human being on the other end of the line.

There’s one more thing that is truly annoying, however. If you are going to telemarket me, at least have the courtessy to speak the predominant language of the area you are calling. In my case, that is English. I don’t mean merely being able to recognize a few words like "yes". I mean have the courtessy to have someone fluent in English calling me. And, make certain that person does not have an accent that is so thick as to be incomprehensible. That means do not have someone with a heavy Portugese accent calling people in Alberta. And it goes the other way, too. Don’t have someone with a heavy English (pick your variety) accent calling people in China! After all, if I can’t understand your sales pitch, what’s the point of calling me anyway?

Even better, don’t bother telemarketing me at all. I never buy anything that is telemarketed. Well, I might, but not because of the telephone call. I will never say yes on the telemarketing call. After all, how do I know you are who you say you are?

Today I read a most interesting essay by Eric Raymond. This essay is entitled "The Myth of Man the Killer". In this essay, Eric presents a fairly compelling argument for why the idea that humans are basically violent is simply not true. It may well be that he is wrong but it is an interesting counterpoint to the usual arguments. Eric has written a great deal more which is available at his web site at http://www.catb.org/~esr/.

Back in the fall of 1995, I became involved in a project spearheaded by two students at Augustana where I went to university. One Warren Lam was doing a special project which involved setting up a Linux based server on the university network. Apparently, he had set up a mud based on CircleMUD 3.0. Then Neil Sather got involved in the mud project. Eventually, Neil brought be in on the project at the administrative level. This was in November.

Now I had been playing a MUD called TheVoid for some time at this juncture. I had also tried out several other muds and generally had a preference for Circle based MUDs. In particular, I had a great liking for the way things had been modified on TheVoid. In fact, I had been playing on TheVoid for about a year at this point.

It turned out that Warren very quickly dropped out of the picture as far as the mud went. However, Neil and I continued with it through December and later into January. It had become clear to me in January of 1996 that the CircleMUD 3.0 codebase was not working out; it was still in beta at that time and was missing a lot of core features. So at this point, I decided to bring everything in on a CircleMUD 2.2 codebase but with some significant modifications. To this end, I spent many hours working on code on the server, either over a 2400 baud modem connection from my computer in my dorm room or in the computer lab.

Then, on February 1, 1996, I swapped in the new modified Circle 2.2 codebase in. This was the beginning of AugMUD as it exists today, with its 100 mortal levels and 5 classes. Then, as time went on, many folks played on AugMUD as it had come to be known but there was a problem.

The player base was severely limited by the fact that the university’s connection to the internet was terribly slow. As a result, outside players simply couldn’t connect efficiently. This dearth of players meant that most university students would spend most of their time playing their pet muds rather than AugMUD. Neil, who was calling himself Toktorill on the mud, and I, calling myself Lost, made a number of efforts to change this but very little ever happened. Also, by this time, Warren had bowed out of the project entirely since his special project was finished.

Through the summer of 1996, the player base remained small. We had a couple of remote people playing on occasion but not much actually happened. I was working in the computer department of Augustana that summer so I was able to keep an eye on the operation. There was a small upsurge in the player population when classes resumed in September but things continued along pretty much unchanged.

Eventually, Dragonlady, Shadowspawn, and a number of others became involved and got promoted to immortality. We now had a bigger problem than no players; we had a very large percentage of players also being immortals with the associated powers. Basically, playing the game became a lot less fun than it might have been. Oh we did have our fun, including the “poof wars” where the immortals would terrorize each other (and the mortals) by creating ridiculous messages for when they appeared and disappeared in rooms.

During the winter term of 1997 (January through April), the first real attempt was made to get the game organized. By coincidence, this was also when a decent speed internet connection arrived on the scene. As things moved along, however, all our grand plans derailed due to lack of time or committment from those involved. Then later, all work stopped short as final examinations and graduation loomed for many of us. So the status quo basically persisted through the spring of 1997 even though several new areas were added and code was added to the game.

Then, as if by magic, in June of 1997 players started to arrive. The following months saw the arrival of Cotu, Greizl, Rawther, Quinn, and a number of players. It also marked the beginning of a fued between myself and Dragonlady whom I had ousted when the game became popular. Basically, Shadowspawn and I were the ones running the show at this point. I made a couple of bad choices at this point, the most notable being that I raised Quinn to immortality. He quickly abused this position and I ended up site banning him.

I was also unemployed at this point and under increasing pressure to find a job. But I was living in a tiny town in the middle of nowhere so this was a difficult process. As a result, I spent a great deal of time working on AugMUD. The most notable thing I did was add a publication system to the game. I never did bring it completely up to the vision I had had for it but I got it working.

Eventually, I procured a job at the beginning of August in 1997 and moved to Calgary. Greizl began working on some major updates to the code at the same time and we had trouble with Rawther going power mad. I also undertook a major rewrite of much of the code to improve the overall backend of the game. By January of 1998, Greizl and I had worked out a schedule during which I would bring my computer online during certain hours and he would log in remotely and do a lot of work bringing my code rewrite into line witih what he had added to the live version of the game.

Then, at the end of April (I believe it was, anyway) of 1998, the new code was brought online. This was the second wholesale update to the code and the only player wipe to actually affect players. This was also the last player wipe to ever affect the game.

The following years were the high time for AugMUD. I worked on code. Greizl worked on code. We had up to ten people logged in at any given time. Greizl had become Game Master and we began creating positions such as Chronicler and so on.

Eventually, the old guard as we came to be known began to tire of running things. Greizl bowed out in 2000 and we had a lot of politics for a while. We also created a sort of constitution and did all that jazz. It even worked for a while.

Then, the server we were running on was hacked. This was inconvenient. However, the administrators at Augustana handled it very badly. They rufused to tell anyone what happened. They even refused to acknowledge that anyone asked them about what happened. This occurred around the end of January in 2001. Fortunately I had been making regular backups and snagged the latest one and brought AugMUD back up on my server. This bit of bad luck proved to be one more nail in the coffin of the playerbase.

Oh, we continued for a time. But as time went on, it became clear that players were not finding us again or refused to put even 5 minutes into a search at mudconnector and so on. Eventually, I moved the mud to potnoodle once I brought it online and this provided stable connectivity to the whole operation. But the player base continued to dwindle. Even worse, the immortals that were running things began to feel time crunches and so on and the immortal population dwindled.

This dwindling happened rapidly. Eventually, there were so few of us left that we had to put our rules of operation on hold and fall back on the old ad hoc method. Then, I began to really feel the burnout of running things and bowed out in December of 2001.

My successor proved to have tireless energy for a time then simply dropped off the face of the planet. As of now, it’s been nearly a year since she logged into the game itself. And many others have simply dropped out of the running too. Yet I find it is sad that a once very proud game simply ceased to be fun. Our playerbase is back at the levels it had before the June 1997 boom; we’re now relegated to being an old hangout for the old timers of the game.

I have been feeling this sorrow about the state of AugMUD for a while now and finally decided to act on it. I have now unretired from the game and have effectively taken up the reigns again simply due to the fact that nobody else is. As when the player boom hit in 1997 and I was the only administrative type active, I again have full control of AugMUD. This is not a power thing so much as the facts of things. So lookout AugMUD, Lost is back!

One of these days I think I’ll take the time to look through all my logged material and do a detailed history of AugMUD. However, that’s not for this forum. One more note, though. The feud between myself and DragonLady ended long since when I realized how childish the thing was. Hey, children don’t have a monopoly on childishness.

Also, anyone out there who used to be associated with AugMUD and who wants to contribute, send me your anecdotes and memories of AugMUD so I can write a history of the game.