dpk’s weblog

Just made an offer on a cute little house in West Seattle. I’m excited, because the price is reasonable and it is approximately the same commute distance to/from downtown Seattle. It’s the best house we’ve looked at, and it doesn’t appear to have anything “wrong” with it — at least, without an inspection. That’s up next.

I guess some people will waive inspection just to buy a house. Seems insane to me. I would guess that home owners insurance and/or home warranty companies would have some trouble with that, too.

I’ll find out tomorrow if my offer was accepted, or if I’ll be hanging out at the fax machine, getting my initiallin’ hand ready.

Not long ago, perhaps in the mid-1990′s, a young Japanese girl had a vision… (This link is safe.) I have no idea if this is legitimate — the person he references only has one hit on Google, and it’s at this site.

These may already exist, but I was not able to find them with Google (perhaps that itself means it doesn’t exist).

• Interior pet door – Great for people who have pets that sleep with them, and still want their privacy. It would be installed by carefully cutting a rectangular hole on the opposite side from the hinges, saving the panels so they can be attached to the door itself once it is in place, for aesthetics (if desired).
• Cat activated faucet – Our cats love running water. My cat in particular loves to beg for us to turn on the bathroom sink for her. It would be excellent if there were a way for a cat to turn on the faucet, using their weight on the rim of the bowl. It could be designed with a timer and a sensor (in the overflow drain) to keep it from overflowing if the sink is clogged.

These two devices, combined, would have allowed my cat to get her own water this morning, at 5:00AM. Ugh.

I’ve added the Moderate Trackbacks plugin ot this blog. This means that trackback entries will now go in to the queue along witih posts, which means there may be a (significant) delay in them showing up. I’m not entirely sure how the whole trackback scheme is supposed to work, so bear with me on this.

When I played EverQuest, Saga of Ryzom, or Ultima Online, and now World of Warcraft, I primarily play solo. Most of these games are designed to play in groups. Often, that requires joining up with random, anonymous people you’ve never met before, and will never meet again. Given that your character in these games are part of a particular “class” (for the most part), these random, anonymous people tend to judge you on your class alone, and often your equipment. Groups are always of limited size, so they will pick the “best” random people they can to fill the group.

Obviously, this is not optimal for those of us like me who are “casual” players, unable to get (and uninterested in getting) the best of the best equipment/spells/items.

My idea (although I don’t claim that I am the first to come up with it, I just haven’t seen it in a game I’ve played) is loosely inspired by Planetside’s gameplay. In Planetside, there are three factions of warriors, and you’re playing PVP against the other two factions trying to take over bases. Everyone in your faction is working towards the same goal. Everyone in your faction near a base is working towards the same specific goal — taking over the base. When the base is captured, everyone gets a porportional allotment of experience for being part of the assault.

In more traditional MMOGs, the PVE ones, I propose eliminating the concept of “grouping” as it stands. In its place, I propose that every player automatically join and leave “groups”, as they arrive and depart from dungeons or buildings or small outdoor regions. As long as you’re within the group, and killing things, you get a share of the experience from everyone killing. You can spend half an hour and still help out the “greater cause” — the elimination of whatever pest it is the game is having you kill.

This takes care of a number of problems:

• No more “kill stealing” — Since everyone’s working on the same goal, and everyone shares in the experience, there’s no more need to worry over kill stealing. You can feel free to help that guy who’s trying to solo more than he could handle.
• No more “we don’t need any druids|warlocks|warriors” responses when people want to join a group.
• Less crowding in popular zones — As more people show up, there would be less XP to go around, so people would naturally spread out more
• You can contribute even if you don’t have much time to play. You don’t have to join and then leave a group, causing hard feelings if you have to leave early.

Of course, the traditional way of splitting XP earned from kills would have to be redone, so we don’t end up killing a dozen creatures and getting 1 XP for our troubles. That would be a trivial modification however.

The key to it is its automatic nature. Nobody would ever get left out, even on accident. Another bonus is that “raids” (massive attacks on enemies) are automatically handled with no additional code.

I haven’t been able to find a place to have a good debate on this idea, so I guess I’ll leave it here and call it good. Anyone can have it. I hope to one day play a game which takes advantage of this. Soloers win. Groupers win. Everyone has fun.

So I’ve finally decided to buy a house. Well, I’ve decided to borrow enough money from the credit union to buy a house, in any case. If you’re looking, I’ve found Windermere’s PropertyPoint application very appealing. I can use it from work, even, because it isn’t Java or Flash. I probably won’t be using them as a realtor, since I get some big discount if I use someone else, but as far as I’m aware the MLS means they list everything? *shrug*

Been waiting a couple weeks to hear back from the CU about my loan (when their website says it would take hours or days). It’s like they’re allergic to making calls themselves — every time I call they ask me if I’ve sent some other paperwork in, as if I knew to do that. Ah well. Everyone says buying a home is stressful — with all this waiting I can see how. I just want them to either say yes or no, soon, so I can figure out what I’m going to do. If “no”, I’ll probably just move in to some cheap apartment closer to town and save up for a while, switch credit unions, and try again in a few years. (I never thought I’d be planning years ahead of time).

Update: Just got approved. Time to shop!

If you ever find yourself in my situation, where installing some updated port from a relatively freshly done cvsup ends up breaking a couple dozen other programs because it decided to upgrade several libraries, you might find the following for loop useful:

cd /usr/X11R6/bin && for m in $(for l in $(for j in $(for i in *; do
ldd $i 2>/dev/null | grep -q "not found" && echo $i; done);do
egrep "bin/$j" /var/db/pkg/*/+CONTENTS;done | sort -u | cut -f1 -d:);do
grep " ORIGIN" $l;done | cut -f2 -d: | sort -u);do
cd /usr/ports/$m && make && make deinstall && make reinstall;done

Obviously, the above is evil in itself, so it should be considered a “quick fix” and nothing more. Enjoy!