Just in case you’ve never seen such a thing:

Unfortunately, the last 4 battleships were decommissioned several years ago. A very good friend of mine was on BB-61 when the turret was blown up. Thankfully, he survived. I think this might still have some deterrent value, even in today’s world.

For those who might not know, the Navy tried to blow up (or at least break the keel of) our ship.

Yes, you can feel the deck drop out from under you, and yes, this is not a pleasant experience. On the positive side, this is one tough son-of-a-bitch ship. Incoming missiles? No problem. 6500 men, all working towards the same goal.  BTW, can you imagine the feeling as bulkheads are blown out of place, as rivets are snapped when several hundred tons of TNT are exploded 500 ft from your ship?

This is the ship that I was stationed on for 4 years, the USS Theodore Roosevelt, CNV-71. This is not a mock-up image or an artist’s concept, but the real thing. Unlike President Wilson from so many years ago, we weren’t “too proud to fight.”

Not sure if other carriers went through this… it’s one hell of an experience.

Well, the world doesn’t seem to have become significantly worse (or extinct) simply because the Mayan calendar expired today. Apparently, it was only one of their calendars that said that, anyway.

Since determining that I couldn’t afford to have $1300+ tied up in my day-to-day laptop (MacBook), and didn’t want to be beholden to Microsoft for every single aspect of my computing, I did some research and finally ended up with a Dell Latitude D630. The machine has proven to run Xubuntu 12.12 flawlessly. I did change the original Dell MiniPCI Wireless card to a more common Intel card, but the initial boot had only the existing hardware installed and didn’t require any trickery to get it running like so many laptops do. The only specific items required for installation were the latest nVidia drivers and the wireless card drivers. Everything else worked out of the box.

The D630 in question cost $80 from eBay, with an additional $12 for the Intel wireless card, $22 for 2 extra GB of memory, and $75 for a 1 TB external hard drive that was hacked apart for the drive (cheaper to buy the external unit than an equivalent internal unit, go figure). The machine has a Core 2 Duo CPU running at 2.2 GHz, so is pretty peppy no matter what I do. The memory is a total of 4 GB, which is enough space to run VirtualBox and Windows XP, although I haven’t used it for quite some time. This laptop has been in constant use in this configuration for over 2 months, which is probably a record for me. I usually reconfigure or change about once a month, but I just don’t have time right now to do so.

Time to drink to the Mayans; their prophesies might be wrong, and they might be a blood-thirsty race, but they were quite adept at many things while they lasted.

Generally speaking, I’ve been involved in RPGs to one extent or another since I was around 11 or 12. While many people disparage them, thinking of them only in terms of Satan or nerd-dom, the reality is that I learned a great deal and expanded my horizons far beyond what would otherwise have happened.

I’ve played many different games, although I started out with the Basic and Advanced D&D books. I moved on to AD&D, Traveller, Space Opera, Boot Hill, Gamma World, and many, many others. I tend to identify myself as a geek, however, as I generally understand the inner workings of things, not just the rules and regulations associated with nerd-dom.

I’m an avid reader and RPGs only increased that vice (can reading be a vice?). Over many years, I learned a great deal from fantasy, sci-fi, and non-fiction. Much of what I learned was then expanded into further learning, often resulting in much deeper study.

As it happens, I’ve ultimately moved away from RPGs slightly as there is little time these days to engage in such activity. Truthfully, so many games exist these days that it’s a daunting task to take them all in. Frankly, some of them are crap anyway, but it’s hard to spot them sometimes without study. What amazes me is the number of games that seek to capture that D&D (Greyhawk, Original books, Red and Blue book), AD&D, or other feel. Many of the games seem to be devolving because the rules have become so overwhelming that people simply can’t deal with them. Of course, at $100+ for initial entry (basic book, monster book, and game master book) required for many games, it’s no surprise that people are backing up and re-thinking this concept. RPGs are great, but the companies tend to be blood-thirsty in their pricing.

More to come…

I recently enrolled with Columbia College (http://www.ccis.edu) to work on my Computer Information Systems bachelor’s degree, following a successful 2010 graduation with a Business Administration associate’s degree. Classes began on Monday (Ethics and Programming I), which should keep me busy for the next couple of months.

Columbia College is nice in that they are regionally accredited, offer a brick-and-mortar presence with real sports teams, and do not market their degrees as “on-line” like so many other institutions. Further, my experience was that the classes were at least as comprehensive as those I attended at the University of Kentucky several years prior. Oh, did I mention that they are very veteran friendly and provide a lower cost per year than many other institutions? Depending on your goals, Columbia College might be a good option.

Unity is an interesting development, but it’s very distracting to me so I wanted to disable it. However, quite a few instructions I found weren’t terribly clear. Basically, you need to login to Ubuntu after specifying to use Ubuntu Classic. If you are already logged in, simply log out. Once the user prompt is shown, click on the user name and then look at the bottom of the screen. The login type will be shown as Ubuntu. Click on it and then change to Ubuntu Classic. Now login normally and you’ll get the window manager layout that you are used to.

I’ve decided to offload my homebrew and vintage items to http://obsoletekit.marstella.net in order to organize things better.

Accidentally purchased an Apple //c last week on eBay. I never expected to get one for less than $20, but figured I’d take the chance… Due to incorrect title, the thing never got another bid, so now it’s mine!

Anyway, it came with a disk containing a couple of games, but in very poor condition. The //c itself is yellowed (of course) but otherwise seems pretty good. Something I hadn’t noticed was the UK keyboard instead of US. No big deal. Running print peek(64447) reported 255, so it’s the original ROM version.

Since I had no disks, I was wondering how to create one from a PC when I found the ADTPro project on sourceforge. Turns out that since Apple II series was designed for potential cassette-based loading, there is a way to load the O/S through the serial port and then write out to disk. Fortunately, I’ve scrounged several 5-1/4″ disks from around my old stash, so now the only problem is that I’m getting an error every time I try to transfer the O/S. I just haven’t found the right speed, or my cable isn’t sufficiently shielded. But it does work. I get the ProDOS screen after transferring, although it craps out depending on what you try to do (due to the transfer error). Still, I’m on the way.

Pics later.