Sungak – Page 10 – The Kind Healer

Full Circle

[This is a local re-post of an article submitted for the October GoMe Newsletter. They’ll be pleased to note that I’ll be submitting items for the next couple months, in part inspired by ‘recent discussions’ within the community. Stay tuned, and hunker down…]

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For the first time in three years, I stopped by NYC during 9/11 this past week. The event meant a lot to me, as I lost co-workers (who were also good friends). But, it also drastically shaped who I was, and how I would eventually find – and interact with – the overall Myst and Uru communities.

I have always had problems with losing people – I made very few friends when I was young, and changes I made to my life since then have caused me to want to actually do something as a ‘personal rememberance’ for those losses. That is, in part, why I now work late at night (as of Dec 2001).

Despite my starting Uru via the Ubisoft ‘Accounting Error,’ my first full introduction to their community was actually with the launch of Until Uru. As part of that, I joined my first ‘external’ forum at Guild of Greeters (since their shard was the first I heard about). About six months later, that was followed by Uru Obsession, due to the ‘Pats Parade. Active involvement through other forums has grown and shrunk over time, as well as (nowadays) through MystBlogs.

And with that, I discovered friendship through community – something that was new to me, being in prior groups that were normally devisive. We’ve had our own issues of course, but overall its been much better than some of the groups I’ve been with. I’ve also experienced loss within this community, which I’ve used as a force for keeping things alive in my own way. Either through Second Life(tm) or external events (like local game conventions – including, currently, a LARP), I’ve continued to promote Uru and its potential both as a game itself and its unique community.

So, here we are, full circle. MO:UL, our second attempt, is gone, and we’re into a Second Interregnum. We are awaiting yet another attempt at rebirth. And, most of all to me, we’ve lost community members that we all care about, and who will not see that rebirth. That, again, has re-charted my own course; I am not as interested in MO:RE as I am the community as a whole, and will foster that as much as possible.

–TSK

Old Google, eh?

After noticing a couple posts on MystBlogs about Google’s 2001 database, I ran two queries:

T_S_Kimball – none. Expected since I only started using that moniker in 2003.
sungak – first hit was a sunmanagers mailing list reply that sited me as a respondent.

Not bad really. But I wonder if they’ve sanitized this listing the same way they do now…

–TSK

Wild Wild Wall Street?

[The standard disclaimer regarding the following being my opinion, and not that of anyone I work for, applies as it always has. Just need to make it more implicit this time…]

As some of y’all know, I work in the Financial Sector as a SysAdmin (aka computer nut ;) ). It’s – normally – a fun and challenging job, and one that even now I have great respect for (hence why I don’t talk about it much, to be safe regarding its ethics policy).

But last week was, in short, nuts – even for me. I’ve made comments earlier in the year regarding Reg-NMS, and the fact that it threw away all my old capacity calculations. Well, that’s happened yet again, three times, in three days. *sigh* Ah well.

I had planned to make several comments regarding the past few days news, but they’ve been going in so many circles its not worth it. Instead I leave this entry with more practical advice:

Sit down. Take a deep breath, and Relax. Convince yourself that today will be a good day, and then find a way to make it one. Rinse and Repeat… :)

–TSK

PS – Really, though, we need to sit back for a few days and see what falls out of the tree-shaking going on. So far I’ve seen nothing that makes me worry. Concerned? Yes. But not worried.

Going Forward…

I woke up this afternoon to one of my ‘forward looking’ dream-images (some of which, over the years, have come true to varying degrees). This time, it was a series of weblog posts about various things in the Myst community, but nothing at all related to Uru itself.

This makes me wonder if I really am at a new state in my life, regarding Uru. I’ve said to several people now two possibly conflicting statements:

1) Uru *can* work, but it needs some dire work to get there. This is the essence of my old ‘Response to Rand’s Letter‘ post on the Ubi forums, and even five and a half years later I stick by that.

2) With MO:UL’s closure, I’m not going to participate (other than Guard appearances for stuff like the ‘Pats Parade) on any successor. My #1 gripe at the Ubi Shutdown was that we never got any real chance to see Uru stand on its feet in a ‘paid’ format, and that’s all I ever wanted. I’m not going to get into what happened with MO:UL that made it not survive – plenty of discussion there already! – as that is not the point to me. I got to finally see it as a paid service, and as the cliche goes ‘my work is done.’

Now, I want to stress that this does not mean I don’t like Uru, and don’t want it to survive. Go back and re-read my first statement, including the Ubi post, as well as various forum posts over the years. I care, end of story. If you think otherwise – again, spend a couple days and read through my posts on UO and GOG forums, as well as here on the weblog. Then come to me with a good (and non-flaming!) argument, and I’ll listen.

But, as of last year, my focus has shifted (possibly because of the first Interregnum via UU). To me, the community itself matters more than what venue(s) we seek together. Its what drives me today as a whole – even outside that community. I still talk about Uru, and evangelize about it (though to a MUCH lesser extent than I used to). My main talking point now is its extensive and friendly community; Though not without its detractors (who constantly remind me of Prokofy) I think we do better than most groups.

And that’s something I can really rally around, until the end of time if needed.

–TSK

Upgrades, Part 2

Two good pieces of news in the notebook front:

-> Pulled out the 40 gig from its little case (the one I’ve been using to make it my Debian Slug disk) and looked up the part number on Toshiba’s site. It’s a 5400 RPM, and is the same size as the old Sager and HP disks. I can live with the 100 Meg/sec spec as given, that’s more than I’ll normally draw in most instances, other than installs. The 16 Meg buffer is a *very* nice plus though!

-> Debian ‘lenny 2’ installed just as beautifully as Etch did, with the added bonus of a working wireless card (after getting the firmware setup of course – for which a link to the appropriate instructions was included in the ‘dmesg’ boot sequence). That is a first for me and Linux, and doubly pleased when I discovered that in Linux, I had more hotspots mapped out and with better strengths than in WinXP (most locked though, good move in an apartment building ;) ).

So, new plans:

1) Put 40 gig disk in HP, re-install ‘Lenny 2′ and get wireless up again.

2) 60 gig disk goes in the external case (which is USB-2 and FireWire), re-format with ext3 and FAT16 partitions. Probably 40/20, respectively.

3) Drop a VirtualBox Guest OS (WinXP) on the external disk. See if I can get the old Half-Life games running on it, plus a couple other things that are needed for work (and is only in, or works better with, Windows – like the Exchange webmail, that is a damn sight better to use in IE).

The eventual goal – if this all works – is to look into converting the desktop to Linux, or a Linux/WinXP dual-boot (the latter by dropping in a new SATA disk just for Linux). It will be nice to finally use all 4G of the current system’s memory; It can hold 8G IIRC but I’d have to consider a dual-boot with Vista instead of XP to make that upgrade a more viable reality.

The only major issues I see in the games department are Oblivion (’nuff said) and perhaps Uru (though the CC variant I believe will run on Wine OK). Hence the sad need for a dual-boot – I don’t know if even a Quad-Core will be able to run something like Oblivion in a VM well.

–TSK

PS – As so the NSLU2 ‘Slug’ body, its been put away again. Once I’m happy with Linux on the HP, it can sit on the table when not ‘on duty’ and be used as the long-duration login system. Lord, I did not realize how much I depended on UNIX console access until I actually tried a system without one…