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I finally figured it out! I've been trying to remember the name of a series of travel-size games I had a kid. They were little plastic games in a audio casette shape. A board unfolded from the casette, and the spinners usually acted as dice or some other form of random number generation. The games had little magnetic pieces that folded into a flip-up storage area.
Finally, I have found them! They are called Flipsiders, and I had five:
Some of them were actually very fun games, and they were excellent for travel. I admit that I wasn't that partial to Ghostly Estates, but I played a lot of Dragon Master. If anybody has these and is interested in selling, contact me. Consider this offer valid indefinitely.
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I'm back from Baghdad. I'll post photos and write up more later. But for now, you may wish to know that Marwan, an Iraqi colleague of mine since 2004, is answering questions.
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The conference is over, and we just finished a two-day training session for our resellers. We've had a lot of focus recently on improving the quality of VSAT installations. It's been 6 years since the fall of Baghdad; we can now move beyond the "just get it done" mentality and really focus on the long game.
The training has been really good for me as well. To provide the training, we partnered with GVF, an organisation focused on improving the quality of the VSAT industry world wide. This has really filled in a lot of the gaps in my knowledge. Despite all my experience learning on the job, I have a lot to learn. And the program has done a lot for our NOC engineers and resellers. For a smart person, most corporate training is a waste of time. But I must give GVF credit: they really provide a good program at a low price.
One of our trainers is an experienced VSAT engineer named Onno. He's got a wicked sense of humour, and a lot of experience in VSAT installation and radio theory. We're trading knowledge, as he's weak on IP networking and that's my area of expertise.
The weather is a bit unusual for May in Baghdad. We had clouds and occasional cold winds on Sunday, and at 30°C it has been cooler than usual the rest of the time. It is perfect weather for late nights at the shisha cafe. We've been alternating between the hotel bar and the adjacent shisha place. It is important to keep your buzz carefully balanced between the warm glow of alcohol and the dizzy relaxation of apple-flavoured tobacco.
I told the boys about my last post and invited them to reply to your questions. They haven't had any free time, and won't until at least tomorrow afternoon. But hopefully they'll have something to add to the discussion in a few days.
We've heard some gunfire and mortars, seen the usual Blackhawks moving in pairs, and even saw a predator drone fly directly over us last night. But it's otherwise been quiet. Even inside the secure perimeter, life seems much more sedate. People aren't very jumpy here. More friendly. The boys say it is much better in the city, too.
I'm still disappointed that we haven't been able to leave the airport, but I understand why the decision was made. Also, I think if I were to go out into Baghdad proper without Jayme, I'd find my stuff on the front step when I got home. It's not that Jayme is afraid for me. It's that she wants to be with me when we return, together, to our old home.
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I last saw Baghdad in October 2004, speeding through the streets of northern Baghdad in the back of Emad's Chevy Caprice. I miss those days. For Jayme and I, Baghdad became our home. We had friends, a home, a life there. A twisted life that our friends in America couldn't conceive of, but we were happy. We didn't want to leave.
By this evening I'll be back in Baghdad. It's been four and a half years, and I wonder what I'll recognise. I'm going back for the Connect Iraq 2009 conference, a communications conference that Talia is organising. We've got a large number of ministers, industry professionals, and our own business partners attending. I'm especially impressed by our western partners; many of them were wary when we told them where we wanted them to fly.
Unfortunately we'll be limited to the borders of Baghdad International Airport's secure perimeter. So I won't get to see my old home or favourite restaurants. But I'll get to see a lot of my friends, and I'm really looking forward to that.
What questions do you want me to ask them?
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I just voted on the Wikimedia licensing change. And they gave me a neat encrypted receipt!
Welcome Tjwagner!
Thank you for voting.
If you wish, you may retain the following receipt as evidence of your vote:
SPID: 9052
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Update at tolaris.com, wherein I have a shiny new way for the whole family to waste time.
Note: I have no intention of posting on LJ whenever I post at tolaris.com. Tolaris is a very technical blog, and most of my friends here are not that kind of geek. If however you do jive on the deep geeking, I suggest the LJ syndication or RSS feed.
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And now, sleeping Beanlet!
Beanlet is still in no hurry to walk, and she's not even interested in crawling. For the past week she's been pulling herself to her feet with help, and making moves like she might crawl but rapidly loses interest. She's more content to hold things and touch them. Jayme thinks she already takes after me - analytical and deliberate. That tickles my ego but really I just want her to grow up happy and ready to face the world. She'll be her own little person, not a little me.
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![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) feyluck is visiting us for the holidays. She's been a wonderful help with the Beanlet. She goes home soon, and we'll miss her when she's gone.
And then, we played Munchkin.
( A savage tale of betrayal and foul play )
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Last week, JWZ posted about Warner Music's demand to remove their videos from YouTube, and the resultant harm Warner's musicians will suffer as a result of it. That led to this thread, wherin an artist asked for the ability to deny licensing rights to "objectionable" companies. She specifically wanted a label that would allow her control over who licensed her work.
John Buckman, the owner of Magnatune, is a friend of mine. So I asked him if Magnatune offers that to artists.
Quoth John Buckman, reproduced with permission:
'I exhibit quite a bit at indie film festivals (such as SxSw) and I've also licensed music to over 2000 films in 5.5 years of business, and the number one complaint film makers have is that the music rights holders exert creative control over them. In order to license a track of music, they have to submit a script, and a storyboard (if there is one) and it's quite common for the music rights holder to ask for changes or to outright reject the request. This makes music licensing quite tedious, and is one reason why film-makers both employ a music supervisor and also tend to stick to a small number of trouble-free vendors.
On a personal level, I am very pro-creative-person, and dislike the idea of creative people interfering with each other in this way.
As a businessman, I think there is a market opportunity in being a no-censorship music licensing company, and the number of indie films I've licensed to tends to bear that out.
It may feel awkward to the musician to give up this "right to reject" power, but there are good reasons for it.'
I can see why unwoman would want that control. However, she seems to want it for political purposes, not censorship of content. Her point of view raises the issue of what defines "objectionable" with regards to a company, but that is another issue.
If you were an artist, would you want this control? If you were a rights company? What is best for society as a whole?
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The proud grandparents have been asking me to set up videochat between our homes (read: web baby monitor). Thus, I have finally created a Skype account. From my research it's the best way to do this between Windows and Linux users, but if you have any suggestions I'm open to them.
So now I need to test it before I try to make it work with the less techno-savvy grandparents. My username is TylerWagner, and I'm registered via my normal email address. Let's waste time together!
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I rarely post just to reference a link, but I can't put it better than Bruce Schneier just did. Especially this bit:
The Internet is the greatest generation gap since rock and roll. We're now witnessing one aspect of that generation gap: the younger generation chats digitally, and the older generation treats those chats as written correspondence. Until our CEOs blog, our Congressmen Twitter, and our world leaders send each other LOLcats – until we have a Presidential election where both candidates have a complete history on social networking sites from before they were teenagers– we aren't fully an information age society.
Molly provides a lighter view on the same.
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Safety tip for fans of Crystal Head Vodka: do not carry your vodka home in your luggage. This will cause the TSA to toss the entire contents of your bag, then reassemble the bag so poorly that they can't zip it shut. Then they will mummy-wrap the entire bag with TSA inspection tape and leave you one of those oh-so-polite pamphlet inserts explaining how they are making the world more safe and free.
Dear TSA: you are hurting America. Please stop. Also, thank you for not drinking my vodka.
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We reached San Francisco last Tuesday, the 4th. My dad met us at SFO. We stayed with him and my step-mother Patricia at their house in Daly City for four days. On Wednesday, Dad took me to DC Tattoo.
( Pascale, under my skin )
Dad got his tattoo almost as soon as he knew Pascale's final name. He sent me a photo of it in August, 10 weeks after she was born. It seemed fitting to celebrate the birth of my daughter by getting my first tattoo, for her, with my dad.
I am extremely happy with it, and I love looking at it. I've worn shorts all week to let it heal, so I've had plenty of time to admire it. Jason Harless, the owner of DC Tattoo, is awesome. The photo doesn't do justice to his skill with shading. Thanks, Dad!
OK, so the music is cliché. I couldn't resist.
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Jayme, Pascale, and I are off to California for a short holiday, starting tomorrow. We're visiting my family and then hers, and some friends while we're in SLO. I'm away for two weeks, while Jayme and Pascale are staying another two to spend time with the new grandparents.
And here's the bonus: they're bringing feyluck back with them! Morgan gets a working holiday in London, Pascale gets a new auntie, and we get an extra pair of hands with the baby work. And we all get a fun Christmas together. Hijinks ensue!
Unfortunately, Pascale has been running a fever. She hit a high of 38.2 today, which is pretty worrying. We dosed her up with Calpol and put her under very light covers to sleep. The worst of it appears to be past us now, but Jayme and I will be sleeping lightly ourselves.
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Well, I finally did something with tolaris.com. Would one of you with a paid account please syndicate it? Here is the LJ syndication feed, courtesy bandicoot.
I intend to continue using LJ for personal matters; tolaris.com is my technical blog. I've found little interest from my friends on technical matters, and until recently my blog wasn't indexed on Google so what I did write about wasn't helping many people. Then I realised that I didn't really have any privacy and you can all find my name and employer quite easily. So I opened up everything, added tags, put my name on both blogs, and linked the two together.
Within a week of starting tolaris.com, I got my first comment thanking me for solving someone else's problem. That makes it all worth it. I feel like the web has given me so much, so unbelievably much since I've had access to it, and I really want to give back more.
For the last four months, my life has been two things: Pascale and work. Pascale is awesome. slownewsday has been posting daily photos of her on her blog. She giggled for the first time yesterday. When she smiles, she charms complete strangers into adoring silence. She's got me wrapped around her little finger already.
Work isn't awesome, but it's pretty good. We've accomplished some good things lately, but for all I feel good about what we have done, I'm super frustrated by difficulties with our biggest hardware provider. They are showing serious growing pains. Worse, they have an absolutely criminal stance on security. We work very hard to analyse and patch every issue they generate. Then I chew granite when they reply to my carefully prepared issue report with "the issue isn't really that important" / "it's been documented for the last 4 major versions, and has a work around, so that's like a fix" / "we're not going to fix it". Success rate at actually fixing issues I report? 3 issues in 37 reports in the last 3 years. It's basically not cost-effective for us to report issues anymore, because the time I spend writing the reports outweighs the benefits gained from the issues that do get resolved.
My current favourite reply? "Oh, that remote root exploit our software upgrade caused? Just change the root passwords, because we're not going to fix it." Get your act in gear you clowns, before someone starts writing metasploit modules targeting your platform. They won't have to work very hard.
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Arriving way, way late to the party, I've decided to tag my back entries. A few friends have requested this, especially for the Iraq entries (Jul 2003 - May 2005) and my LASEK vision correction (already tagged).
The problem is, I can only do it so quickly. I've done some of them, but if anyone is interested in helping me out, I'd appreciate it. So I've allowed anyone on my friends list to add tags to my posts, and created a bunch of tags covering everything I could think of. To suggest a tag, please leave a comment.
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Last night Colin and Sarah came over, and we ordered Chinese takeaway.
( Fortune cookie, you are a dick! )
Colin didn't even want a fortune cookie - we forced him to open it! I won't make him do that again. But I am going to open the fortune cookies from now on, just to see what they say.
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Today is German day at the Belafonte. Instead of saying "Beanlet", we are saying "Kleine Bohn". We also have a delicious Kartoffelsuppe on the stove, courtesy Kleine Jayme.
In other news, I have been back at work full-time for the last three days. Kleine Bohn is experiencing yet another growth spurt and is constantly feeding. It's been hard on Jayme but she isn't complaining. She's a super hero.
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