Rick Wang's Weblog

Lately, in between free time from studies at the local community college, I have taken to MMO's again! The direct intent this time is to achieve a wide range of horizontal experiences across many games. I revisited FFXI but did not find it worth resubscribing to. My Guild Wars account sees pretty frequent play, and I bought a few more months of EVE Online. I've also tried MapleStory, RF Online, Exteel, and some others. Next on the list are Anarchy Online, Dungeon Runners, and Shadowbane. I'm also somewhat in the process of looking for a multi-game guild that shares the same exploration ideals I have, and does not get bogged down in grinding any one game for too long. To help me keep track of these gaming experiences, I have signed on xfire and GuildCafe. I've put more effort into the GuildCafe site due to its social networking potential and hopes of meeting fellow gamers who are also anti-elitist and anti-grind.

This is my xfire signature, a great way of tracking gaming hours:


GuildCafe on the other hand, provides better options of entering and storing character summaries from various games. GuildCafe also seems more geared toward MMORPG games while xfire seems more geared towards FPS games. I see much time spent gaming in the near future!

I added the original Disaster Zone journal entries to the current site incarnation. Unfortunately, the modification dates were off and the filenames did not list the hour and minute. These early entries also contained no titles, so I had to make them up as I read them over. Much of the content no longer applies, and many of the links are broken, but I only made spelling edits. It was quite a trip down memory lane, remembering the dark and isolated upstairs room of Kevin McCoy's Las Palmas townhouse ($500/mo I think?). I wonder how he is doing today?

Just got back to my parents' place in Rancho Cucamonga this past Saturday. With so little stuff to move out of San Diego, it was a quick and painless process. However, I already miss the central location of University & 30th Street in terms of activities to do throughout the day and wide selection of foodstuffs. I will also miss living independently, but I will most definitely not miss paying rent. Rent is seriously an additional tax on the poor as far as I am concerned.

While here in Rancho Cucamonga, the immediate plan is to take some time off and recover from a mild cold, then hit the local community college with solid effort. I plan on taking a Chinese language class as well as an auto shop class. The jury is still out on whether Chaffey College is close enough for biking, or whether January is cold enough to take the bus. After one semester of taking Chinese language classes, it is off to Taiwan or China for a few years at least. It is time to start looking up job professions abroad, particularly in teaching English. Thanks to Google search, I found a few places to pursue hobbies over the next few months. Gameology in Claremont looks to be the closest location for board gaming while Galli's might be the place for wine and live jazz.

I'd also like to note some good news. Previously, when I accidentally wiped my /home partition, I was rather distraught. Pieces have been recovered since through the Internet Time Machine and partial backups, but the mother lode was when I realized roses, my old server, held data up to May 2005! Those extra two years from my last backup, June 2003, meant the restoration of some UCSD data, early MMORPG data (FFXI), and assorted emails. I also found the first and second iterations of this website, as well as some of the hosted media files. Now, the only things left missing are the endgame FFXI files (the picture I miss most is soloing Tarresque), Guild Wars files (including 100% map), and EVE Online files (many, many beautiful screenshots).

Spending time with the family has been great despite my illness. I may miss the culinary diversity of North Park, but I missed Mom's good old home cooking even more. You can't go wrong with simple, healthy, cheap, and filling foods. Playing board games with the family was rather fun, with Connie winning at Acquire and Mom winning at Puerto Rico. To top it all off, we had our first vegetarian Christmas dinner ever.

After two weeks of phone tag and miscommunication, I finally moved into an apartment in North Park. In the end, I had to fax over a copy of my 2006 tax statement to prove that I had made money in the past and I was indeed who I claimed to be. I find this method of validation to be quite weak, as anyone can take a 2006 tax form and fill it out in any way. Instead of providing my real one, I could have easily plugged in some good looking and believable numbers, with the receiving party having no way of verifying those numbers. It is a weak form of validation imho, but apparently it was more convincing to the apartment management than a signed bank assets statement with the bank manager's business card included! Bureaucracy FTL.

Anyway, this new apartment is looking pretty good. I tried to keep to my initial promise to travel light, and did not even bring a bed! Instead, I borrowed an old bamboo roll-up mat my parents had. My parents were also kind enough to drive down to San Diego from Rancho Cucamonga, help me move light assets to North Park, and move the heavy assets (not too many of those) to Rancho Cucamonga. My new roommate, Haitham, seems like a cool guy but apparently he can do without Internet access in the house. That being the case, I will do so as well! It is incredibly liberating to have disasterzone run offsite.

The folks at North Park are noticeably friendlier than the folks in Sherman Heights. People in Sherman Heights were nice too but the language barrier made it somewhat difficult to communicate. I've felt helpless with my extremely limited Spanish. By contrast, North Park is an English speaking community. It seems friendly to small businesses, and the crowd easygoing and nonpretentious. If all goes well, perhaps I will stay in North Park for a while.

Some live to be seen, to be envied, to be loved, to be hired, desired, or admired. However, living life this way defers judgment of self-worth to the other. Maybe I am missing the point, but why not live just to be alive?

Lord, make me an instrument of Thy peace;
where there is hatred, let me sow love;
where there is injury, pardon;
where there is doubt, faith;
where there is despair, hope;
where there is darkness, light;
and where there is sadness, joy.

O Divine Master,
grant that I may not so much seek to be consoled as to console;
to be understood, as to understand;
to be loved, as to love;
for it is in giving that we receive,
it is in pardoning that we are pardoned,
and it is in dying that we are born to Eternal Life.

Amen.

Saint Francis of Assisi (translation from wikipedia)

God, give us grace to accept with serenity the things that cannot be changed, courage to change the things that should be changed, and the wisdom to distinguish the one from the other.

Reinhold Niebuhr

Recently I have been playing a post-apocalyptic war game called Armageddon Empires. The premise is fairly simple. Machines and aliens fought a major war on Earth with the human race caught in the crossfire. After some time, the fighting shifted to other planets and the remaining machines, aliens, humans and mutants duke it out in the ruins of Earth. The game combines elements of board games, traditional hex based games, and card game to approach war games from a new angle. From what I can tell, board game influences include Dungeons & Dragons, Warhammer 40K and Settlers of Catan. Video game influences may include those along the lines of SSI's 5-Star General Series, the Daisenryaku series and Dune 2. The card game influence from Magic the Gathering is clear as well. In Armageddon Empires, the player draws cards from a deck and play them on the game board. Cards can represent structures, units, upgrades and actions. People, supplies, energy, and technology are resources gathered from various locations on the game board and spent to play cards or attempt to gain the initiative.

As much as I support free speech, and consider spam to be free speech, there is simply a point where too much speech starts to have a negative effect. While I have no problems with hearing cross-chatter in public areas, I would take issue with hearing cross-chatter in a private area such as my home. By defining my email box as a private area, it is reasonable to expect that it is also not a free speech zone. In other words, I am justifying the act of blocking spam sent to disasterzone.net.

With so many ways to combat spam, I did some research and decided a big chunk of the spam can be cut out simply by using a dns blacklist. I settled for spamhaus's ZEN DNSBL, which has rejected 86/87 spam mails sent to disasterzone.net within the past 24 hours. All of the legit mails (I have been monitoring which IPs got rejected) came through fine. I'm not too worried about the 1 spam mail that made it through, further tradeoffs in mail filtering are just not of interest to me at this time.

I stumbled across the idea of using a VPS (virtual private server) to host disasterzone while I proceed to move about. It would be too much hassle and downtime to take down freedom and set it up with a new IP each time I moved. First, I tried out VPSLink due to their tempting $8/mo basic plan. I was granted access almost immediately thanks to the excellent web interface they have set up. However, I quickly realized that 64 MB without swap would be insufficient to run Apache/PHP/MySQL. I experimented with the various distributions and the second tier setup, getting Slackware 11 to work reasonably well with the Link-2 package. However, Slackware is very hands on and I did not wish to repeat the process should I make a mistake and need to reinstall. I read much of their excellent documentation in the forums and community wiki and learned much about running Linux in a VPS environment.

Despite the many positive things about VPSLink, I felt their second tier package at $15 was not competitive with many of the other offers found via Google. Upon further research and armed with some rudimentary firsthand experience, I decided to try out RapidVPS. They are not as sleek as VPSLink and have less OS images to choose from, but the package deal was much better at $10/mo. I also like the vibe in the RapidVPS forums, which seems to be relaxed and passionate about their business as opposed to coldly professional. It feels much more welcoming, personal and alive to be in the RapidVPS community. I hope the arrangement works out and I can keep disasterzone there for a long time!

Still using FreeDNS to point to my site until I figure out how to use RapidVPS's DNS servers. While it is ideal to have DNS scattered about, I would really rather consolidate to avoid having too many logins. With that said, FreeDNS works well and is actually free!

One of the most common memes I recall from my online gaming days was get a life. The meme and its variants were used over text chat, voice chat and message boards. Although many others have already deconstructed it, it is still fun to think about and I want to jot down some of my thoughts.

First, imagine a comparison between an Olympic runner and a championship hot dog eater. Both endure countless amounts of training and physical endurance, yet the Olympic athlete would be considered a hero while many would tell the hot dog eater to get a life. The irony is striking. The only difference I can see would be Olympic athletics are accepted by the mass culture while hot dog eating competitions are not. Yet, within the subgroup of hot dog eating enthusiasts, I would expect the champion hot dog eater would be considered a hero. Given the relative nature of worthy feats versuses unaccepted feats, I believe the phrase get a life should be replaced by conform to mass society. My response to that of course, is fuck mass society.

To illustrate my point, recall that a few years ago, an online gamer who died of exhaustion after several days of uninterrupted play. I remember seeing mocking responses to the stories along the lines of what a loser and wow, he had no life. If we apply my argument, then it is clear that the dead gamer was being mocked for overly indulging in video games, which is not a socially acceptable norm. The mocking serves to remind everyone else that such deviation would not be tolerated. I find this attitude disturbing in a free society where people are supposed to be able to define their own lives rather than have it defined for them through conformity. How do we know that the dead gamer did not achieve some sort of enlightenment through those long hours of play and collapsed through sheer joy? Who are we to tell him how to live his life? Lastly, why should a person care about how a total stranger halfway across the world chooses to live? Athletics may be one person's life. Sex may be another person's. Materialism another, and fashion yet another. Gaming was his life and we should respect that.

As for me, I hope to someday be able to say adventure and exploration were defining cornerstones of my life. I'll be happy to die broke and alone as long as I get to live in all the places I would have never been able to otherwise as a professional careerist.

Lately, with the realization that I would soon be out of San Diego, I have renewed my effort to cover restaurants, businesses, and locations that I have not previously visited. This has led to many confused employees at women's clothing stores and high end jewelry stores due to my unkempt appearance and arrival via bike with backpack. Perhaps the most memorable quote I have yet to hear was when a business owner declared most of his customers were tourists with lots of money and looking to spend it. He then smugly asserted that he was more than happy to take it from them! That absolutely made my day, and I appreciate the candor about the commerce in Gaslamp as a whole. Its been a few weeks since my last post and I have quite a few locations to make note of.

While no specialist in the ways of food critics, I find myself rather irritated by the reviews I see in newspapers and magazines. It seems to me that food critics operate purely on the pleasure principle, deriving their enjoyment from the consumption of high quality foods and expensive atmosphere. I disagree with this philosophy completely. As I am a person who eats out for every meal, I sometimes think I would be able to write a better review than what I see as thinly disguised advertisements that usually describe prices as "reasonable" and various foods they sampled as "excellecnt". They're not critical reviews, rather, they have an interest in drawing readers of the magazine or newspaper to actually go eat at the reviewed place. What I want to propose is a fundamental change in the food and restaurant review system.

Since the last post, I have made progress in exploring more music, games, movies, and literature. Regarding music, I borrowed some CDs from my neighbor, G.F. Handel's Messiah and Rush's Moving Pictures. I also got a load of Arabic songs from a classmate. The Handel CD can be best described by a combination of operatic and religious vocals supported by classical music. It was a much appreciated new experience in hearing a style I have not had much exposure to. However, due to lack of familiarity in the style, no tracks stood out to me in particular and I simply ingested it as a whole. The songs seem to invoke the same feeling as epic scenes in movies. On the other hand, the Rush CD was much more accessible because I had prior experience listening to some other progressive rock groups such as Dream Theater and Savatage. I found the track Vital Signs to be rather memorable, with the call that "Everybody gotta deviate from the norm". The tracks Tom Sawyer and Red Barchetta were also memorable. The Arabic CDs, unfortunately, were less than memorable despite sounding wonderful. Since I do not know how to install the Arabic script on Linux, I was left looking at gibberish for song titles and other useful information. I'll definitely listen to it more in the future to compensate as it is a beautiful language to hear.

This past weekend, I finally got enough courage to re-attempt my all time favorite jogging trail going through Black's Beach and Torrey Pines. I was introduced to this trail while studying at UCSD by a fellow fitness enthusiast, Dan Abrams, whom I have since lost contact with. My good friend, Ben Parcher also knew of this trail and we would occasionally jog it in place of a morning workout. However, during my time at UCSD, I never managed to make it up the hill without stopping. The sight of that immense hill after doing 5 miles on the beach was disheartening despite my familiarity with it. Sadly, the most I had completed was 1/3 the way up, only to the first bend.

This time, due to some of the distances covered and hills conquered (Laurel Street is memorable in particular) in the walk/jog P.E. class at San Diego City College, I managed to build up my willpower and endurance and make it up the Black's Beach hill without stopping! It is a true testament to my improved force of will and also reassuring confirmation of reasonable physical health. With Ben as my witness, we proceeded to celebrate with well deserved smoothies from Robek's Juice in the Costa Verde shopping center. This route is also viewable via Google Maps