Well, the chickens are finally coming home to roost. It appears that my nvidia cards that I am using are too old for Nvidia to update their linux drivers to work with the latest Xorg. This is effecting not only my System76 machine but now my main workstation running Slackware-current. Oh this is killler.

I briefly thought to myself, well I could drop back to slackware 12.0, but hells no. I have two other choices: 1) Buy a new video card or 2) Use the open nv driver. Right now I have settled upon choice 2. The open nv driver works pretty well and does provide some 3d support. The downside is that the 3d support is not as good as the binary nvidia driver. Some of the games I tried to play were very, very slow. Alas, we shall see if I get a new video card in the near future that uses the newer nvidia drivers.

Bums me out there a bit, but what can you do? I will tell you what, throw support behind open drivers. So maybe I will look at intel or ati. But I wonder how their support is for 3d games?

The beer that made Milwaukee famous is back! Kick back a six pack and relive the good old days. Well, those good old days were not for me, I was much too young then. Maybe you old folks can remember more than me.

Anyway, it was a nice Christmas Eve present the wife brought me. That’s one more notch on my belt on the tour of good old American beers. What will be next?

Well, we made it through the weekend and lugged all our big stuff over here on Saturday with the help of some friends with pickup trucks. Man, moving our stack-able washer and dryer was hell. We had to take off the front door to the house and the door to my office to get it in. Yeah, it’s in my man cave. Not too manly is it?

So we get everything in and start setting up. I plug in the TV and my myth box and no cable. They were supposed to have it hooked up on Friday. So I test out other cable drops in the house and no go. I call the cable company and here they decided they would not come out because of an outstanding phone bill from when we canceled our phone service back in May. Neither the wife nor myself were aware of this charge and they never contacted us. Instead, they just did not show up. So I paid the bill and they said they would be out next Friday. A week without the babysitter! The horror.

To top it off, my internet service was not going to be transferred until Monday, so that meant two more days with online service. My plan was to move my server over here late Sunday night for when the guy showed up on Monday. That did not work out so well. I ended up knocking the power out Sunday afternoon and it would not boot up without a keyboard plugged in. I had moved all my stuff the day before so no keyboard. Alas, that meant my domain and email were down for 24 hours. Well a bit more.

I took Monday off for the internet hookup and they guy did not show until 5:00. But, the good news was that he had to hook up the cable service to get the internet working. The bad news was that they gave him the wrong ip addresses which I found out after a call to their support about 15 minutes after he left when nothing I was doing would work.

Anyway, I hope to have some pics of the man cave up soon, I just have to do some more unpacking.

Well, Saturday we move the big stuff. The apartment is pretty empty. I look forward to setting up the new office the wife and I will be sharing.

As I clean out the office here I note that my systems are very dirty again. I need to get some canned air and blow them out before I move them. Why mess the new place up?

Today we got the keys to the house. It’s a bit after 8 and I want to get things rolling. So I figure it’s a good idea, and so does the wife, to start moving my comic books. I just lugged 12 long boxes down to my car. I now have to transport them 10 miles or so and unload them into the house. Man-oh-man, those things are heavy. This is the karmic payback for collecting these past 25 years.

Well, less jibber-jabbing and more moving.

About three weeks ago I won an ebay bid on the Dungeon Board Game. Man I was psyched! I played the crap out of this game with my friends back in the day. It must have been 20 years at least since I last played the game. It’s very difficult to find and even more difficult to win on ebay. Alas, it arrived on a Friday and that night the kids and I played a few games. We’ve been playing off and on now and tonight was the first night Erin was able to play. Man, it’s good stuff. The kids picked the rules up no problem and have been taking turns winning.

Seeing how they have taken to Dungeon excites me because this year I got the family the Dungeons and Dragons 4th Edition game. Now the wife insists that it’s more a present for me (I’ve acquired the Starter Set, Players Handbook, Monster Manual, and a few Tile Sets already) but I steadfastly hold, it’s gonna be a family game.

I started playing Dungeons and Dragons right before I entered Middle School (6th grade). I received the Basic Edition for my birthday and I remember the day I opened that box set up and pulled out the dragon dice and B2 – The Keep on the Borderlands. I spent hours reading the rules and that modules and then even more mapping out my own dungeons on graph paper.

I must say while I find playing Druids and Rangers fun, I think I much prefer to DM (Dungeon Master). That’s just me I guess. D&D not only piqued my interest in fantasy but it paved the way for other role playing games like Marvel Superheroes, Call of Cthulhu, and Star Frontiers. In fact, I could say that D&D was directly related to getting me into my comic book addiction.

Back when I started playing D&D the game was receiving some negative press by various groups declaring it was Satanic and that kids were killing themselves acting out the game. Sounds like the complaints against video games today, huh? Anyway, more so than being a game D&D was also an incredible tool for me in ways very un-satanic. You see, I was never the best at English and writing and infact I recall being in a remedial English class in 5th grade. I did not know it was remedial at the time, but looking back, yeah it was. But getting in to D&D helped increase my writing and communication skills to a point that, not realizing at the time, pulled me out of the remedial classes and into a life long love of literature and writing. I went from the lowest reading groups to the higer ones. I went from C’s and D’s to all A’s. I moved on to college working towards a minor in English (why I did not major in that I don’t know). I graduated and continue to enjoy reading and writing mostly poems and short stories. I had some work published, which was a thrill, and continue to rely on these skills as an asset.

Yeah, D&D really helped me out in ways unexpected at the time. I look forward to playing with the kids and further expanding their imaginations. A bit of time with the family away from the television lost in a fantasy world where we communicate in different ways, problem solve and hone both sides of our brains. Good stuff.