Stupid Foot

Last year I was turned on to Puzzle Pirates by Three Rings. If you don’t know anything about Puzzle Pirates, it is a MMORPG where you are a pirate and you join a crew and sail around attacking other people. You control the sailing and attacking and pretty much everything else through the act of playing puzzle games.

I played the game for a few days before I thought that there must be some way to autopilot the puzzles which would allow me to make in game money for doing little work. After a small amount of research I fount SCAR Divi.

SCAR Divi seems to be mostly centered around building bots for RuneScape. I have written several bots for Macroquest 2 back in the day so I figured writing a puzzle solver for Puzzle Pirates wouldn’t be too difficult.

In the span of a few hours I threw together a simple proof of concept bot that would play the Bilging game pretty well. I tinkered with it here and there for a few days and ended up with a pretty capable bot that would sit and play Bilging for hours on end making me a tidy sum of pieces of eight.

I’m betting that Three Rings didn’t like the fact that I had several accounts running my little bot for days on end which is probably why my computer was tainted.

It has been colder than usual recently. Florida is not supposed to get cold. Florida is the land of shorts and a t-shirt on Christmas day. It was 56 last night. That is cold and not supposed to happen. I’m pretty sure there was a memo sent out about this. I’ll have to get my people to contact Florida and make sure that the memo is read.

Brrr.

I was at Publix last night and found these. I almost had to buy them because they had Mickey Mouse on them.

Disney Eggs

I came across The World’s Smallest Postal Service on reddit.com tonight and just placed an order for my wife for our anniversary. This is one of the most awesome hand-made things I’ve seen in a very long time.

I just got off the phone with Funai Corp’s Customer Service about my Sylvania 6842THG 42″ plasma TV. I spoke to Eddie, badge number 1358. Eddie told me that he was scheduling a pickup for another warranty repair.

I was told to pack it back up in the box I used last time, the same box they shipped it back to me in, the same box that is pretty banged up. I’ll be driving the TV back down to my parents to pack it up and let it sit there and wait for them to call me to schedule a pick up.

They only up side to this is Eddie told me that if they were unable to solve the problem this time that they would “do something different” which I’m hoping means replace the TV outright. We’ll see how this goes. I’m not holding my breath, going by past experiences this isn’t going to end well for me.

Great, cops have all roads to my house closed. How the fuck am I going to get home?

After lots of testing and poking with a stick we have decided that the ease of use that WordPress offers along with the bazillion plugins, themes and widgets make it a better choice for what we want to use this site for.

I just found out that NPR is cancled The Bryant Park Project. I’ve been listening to the BPP on the hour commute to work. The two hour show made it easy to listen to the first half on the way to work and the second half on the way home. It made the long, long ride bareable. I really did enjoy the younger format of the show and will miss it.

After being frustrated with the permalink redirect problems I was having last month I pretty much stopped writing anything. It was not just the permalink issues that caused me to stop it was the mad rush to get everything ready for our daughter who is now just days away from being born.

After quite a bit of putzing around with wordpress I finally gave up and used mod_rewrite to fix the urls. The changes I made can be explained like this.

If mod_rewrite is available, turn the rewrite engine on, set the rewrite base to the root of the url. The RewriteRule works like this, Any request made to this site for example this post: /2008/06/15/a-followup-to-wordpress-25-permalink-redirect-plugin-issues.html. The bolded part of the request is stored in $1 and redirected to /2008/06/15/a-followup-to-wordpress-25-permalink-redirect-plugin-issues with a 301 (moved permanently). the new request for /2008/06/15/a-followup-to-wordpress-25-permalink-redirect-plugin-issues is then handled normaly by wordpress.

That is the contents of my .htaccess file and so far it seems to be doing just what I wanted.

<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteRule ^(.*).html$ /$1 [R=301,L]
</IfModule>

# BEGIN WordPress
<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /index.php [L]
</IfModule>

# END WordPress

My wife and I were watching TV tonight and a commercial came on for Dairy Queen and we looked at each other and as if on queue both got up and headed for the car. That is some powerful advertising, to make you jump up and go by the product right now.

I must hand it to them, it really is a the best thing ever, vanilla softserve icecream and Reece’s peanut butter cups. Mmmm