House of Jorob

Nick Cobbing Captures Dutchman Gert on Ice

Here it is July already.

And naturally I'm thinking of glaciers.

Well, no.

But it's a great lead-in, dontcha think?

Dutchman Gert owns the Noorderlicht, a century-old schooner.

Captain and ship sail the waters of the Arctic Circle.

Off Greenland.

Where there's, y'know, ice.

Terrifyingly large blocks of it, floating in the water.

Nick Cobbing has created a masterful collection of photographs depicting Gert's sailing those waters.

Take the longer journey, the one called Long Gallery.

Well worth your time.

Julia Nunes: A Voice, A Ukelele, and a Whole Buncha YouTube

I developed an addiction during the early days of MTV.

When it played music.

MTV being what it is in this century, I don't support my habit there, very often.

But I still have the jones for music vids.

Among other places, I troll YouTube for music.

And there I found Julia Nunes.

She's got a pile of vids on Youtube.

All set in her dorm room, playing her ukelele and singing.

Lots of covers.

Seriously.

Some of them have over a million views.

So I kinda sat up and took notice when one of my fave blog sites recently picked her up as one of the best examples of Internet Wonderful-ness.

Seems she's opened for Ben Folds, is on tour in England, and has an her second album out, entitled I Wrote These.

I love it when talent blossoms.

Playstation 2 Back In Business

Hard to consider something released in 2003 as vintage.

But that's what the .hack series feels like to me tonight.

A closed environment, the World in .hack contains no live interaction, no on-line components.

But it fakes it pretty well.

I pulled out .hack//OUTBREAK the other night, after digging through a pile of Playstation 2 8MB data cards in search of the save points.

From .hack//MUTATION.

I'm running on a Playstation 2 lately because my PS3 lost its ability to output video.

Blind.

Well, blind and flickering. Blind on the HDMI channels, and flickering in and out on the S-Vid.

Either way, enough to warrant invoking the Best Buy guaranteed repair/replacement that came with it 18 months ago.

Then my gaming PC-- the one held together with baling wire, duct tape, and powered by a hamster wheel--gave up the ghost. No more DDO and WoW til that get's taken care of.

Those parts-searches on eBay are killer.

I had kept the Playstation 2 because....well...it's hard to get rid of things like that.

Plus, I still had two more episodes in the .hack series to play through.

And one or two more games from the 2003/2004 time frame.

And on my PS3, those series didn't port at all.

So, while I wait for Best Buy to figure out whether they need to repair my unit or replace it, and while I search for parts for the PC, I'll retro out for while and give Kite and company a run.

Quick Test results

Well, both the missing posts turned up on my FB profile.

Flagged as being posted about 6 hours ago.

One was written June 18.

The other, June 20.

OK, so maybe that's when they were released from FB Purgatory.

Either way, its working again.

Back to randomness.

Quick test of the facebook posting process

This'll be supplanted real quick, but right now I'm testing the FB posing process. Went out and got a username on FB (instead of the numeric thingy that I've had for so long) and all of a sudden the next blog post didn't make it to the FB account.

World of Warcraft: Deldodin's Blog

First thing I do when I get my mount

First thing I'm gonna do when I get my mount is pull up to a bar and order a round on the house.

Not because I'm celebrating having completed a long and laborious trek to reach mount-having status.

No.

I'll be celebrating being able to reach the bar without first having to climb up the friggin stools like a monkey-boy.

Flagon of Mead, anybody?

Author's note: Deldodin is a gnome, a rogue living in the realm of SteamWheedle Cartel.
I've decided to post his more coherent writings.
When I find one.

Word Clouds and the House

Been posting for a while now, and thought it'd be fun to play around a little with Wordle, the cloud generator.

The larger the font, the more frequent the word.

This is what House-of-Jorob looks like in a cloud:

I have no idea why Titanic is so big.

Or Rachel.

Looking at it, I think Wordle didn't hit the archives, just the last couple weeks worth of posts.

WTF. 

Looks nice, though.

It's easy to Wordle any page.

Just hit this link and enter a URL.

The Java application does the rest.

Poker on FaceBook

So I'm playing poker now.

On FaceBook.

Texas Holdem.

Zynga makes the applet and it runs pretty well.

I'm still playing at the "Friendly" tables.

Minimal buy in, pots don't get too crazy.

Took me three months of watching others play before I finally stepped in and sat down.

I fold a lot these days.

Some of my poker buddies have winnings of well over a million bucks.

Me, I'm floating in around 30 - 40 K.

Of course, its all play money.

That's what makes it so easy to strategize on other players styles.

It ain't real money, so people tend to reveal themselves faster.

I doubt the real thing operates the same way around the table.

But this will do, for now.

No Rachel in the Belmont

Old news by now to track junkies, the announcement by Preakness winner Rachel Alexander's co-owners was released late last week.

Details are here.

Too many races, too little time between them, put her at risk.

I'm disappointed.

But I'd rather see her miss the Stakes this weekend than shorten her career.

The neat thing about this is it sets up Calvin Borel, the jockey who won this year's Kentucky Derby aboard Mine That Bird and rode Rachel Alexander to the winner's circle in the Preakness, to be the first ever jockey to win the three jewels in the Triple Crown on different horses.

Harry Nicolaides: Lèse majesté Followup

Harry Nicolaides received the minimum sentence permitted under Thai law after pleading guilty in mid-January, 2009.

For insulting the king.

Three years.

Details are here. (The text of his offending prose is here.)

A month later, he received a royal pardon.

He returned to Australia having spent almost six months in a Thai jail cell.

For insulting the king.

I suspect there will be a book coming out of this.

Hopefully he won't be scheduling any book signings in Thailand.