RPG Articles

This seems to be a great malware scanner. Use it, if you’re a sucker and use Windows.

Edit: Scratch all of my dumb convoluted theories kids. Turns out, and I told him to check on this a month ago, they shut his account down due to copyright infringement, specifically downloading old episodes of Heroes. The best part is that only one technician, out of something like 6, actually bothered looking at his account and finding the issue.

Sometimes a device will fail in a way that is, to put it gently, retarded. Radiator thermostats stick closed, a dhcp device will issue an immediate expiration of leases just as it dies, a sensor will report that everything is just fine, and all that sort of thing.

This is about a cable modem.

The person who has tolerated me the longest, my friend Art, has been having internet issues. Specifically he can’t connect to it. He would get issued an address in a 172 range, which is a private subnet, which is a problem since he connects directly to a cable modem and should be receiving a publicly routed real boy ip address. In Windows it would also be assigned a gateway in the 172 range.

Did I mention he lives several states away, so I had to handle this all by phone? Yeah, good times.

So we plunk away at it, do a repair install, try a different NIC, and so on. I remember he has a router so I walk him through setting it up, but I’m pretty sure he goofed and plugged the cable modem into one of the 4 internal ports, a fact that would set my diagnosis back a ways.

Cox said everything looks fine (a foul lie), and said he should power off his modem for 10 minutes and try again. Try not to fall for this people, make them wait it out with you if they insist on such a time. There’s no real difference between 10 seconds and 10 minutes, aside from some heat maybe.

He doesn’t have another computer and knows only technophobes apparently, so trying another computer is out of the question. So I convince him to download Ubuntu and burn a livecd of that. We boot up and…. a 172 address greets us. We look in resolv.conf, however, and guess what? There’s Cox information in there. A 24. gateway and a Cox search domain.

So we hook the router up again, double checking the connections this time, and lo, he has a real (local) ip and can hit the router’s configuration page. Meanwhile it’s acquired the same bogus info he was getting, so here’s my theory.

The modem broke, and can no longer obtain an ip, but is set to do some weird fallback behavior and is assigning an ip based on that, plus a default gateway that it’s set to search for initially, or something very much like that.

He’s currently out getting another modem, so we shall see.

Try not to get too specific. Like if you want an engineer to build you a car, don’t start specifying his tools for him, like saying “Yes, now do that, but only using erector sets”.

It’s retarded, and counterproductive.

I see this sort of stuff a lot-

“We are basically seeking someone with medium to advanced html skills and would prefer the design be done in Dreamweaver.”

Naturally it’s because they think they can maintain the site on their own with Dreamweaver, but of course if they knew Dreamweaver that well they’d just do it themselves. In the meantime you’re saddling someone with a program that produces painful and imprecise code.

As a reader I have some tips that would make your books more enjoyable, at least for me.

Read more Stackpole. When he’s off, it’s still fun. Remember fun?

Don’t make cheap knockoffs of characters from the original trilogy. Knockoff anyone you like from the new movies, because nobody remembers them anyway. Try something new, like characters you made up.

Resist the urge to make your protagonist’s nemesis Darth Vader. Vader only had one nemesis, and that was Palpatine. A good argument can be made that his actual nemesis was himself. Either way, it isn’t Jackhole McJedi, your wet dream sock puppet. Bear in mind that should you decide to do this, we will know well in advance that the outcome is either Jackhole’s death or abyssmal failure.

Reign in the cortosis weave, alternative force sensitives, force dampening, and alternate energy weapons just a little. Show some damned restraint and stop jerkin’ it to your “brilliant” idea.

Not everything in the universe needs to happen on Coruscant, Corellia, or Tatooine. The galaxy is a gigantic place, not a handful of worlds.

If you read a book and it features a species you think is cool, don’t just automatically use them or mention them. For instance, not everyone in the universe knew the Noghri existed. Really just Vader and some Imperials. That sort of thing. I’m just sayin’, you may as well check stuff out before you use it.

A droid shouldn’t be Batman’s utility belt. Pack mules would strain under the gear you guys sometimes assign them.

As a closing thought, perhaps you should learn to not spastically jump from scene to scene, leading us on a vapid chase while your cast, who probably haven’t met each other at all yet, follow dead end tangents for two thirds of the book.