Sorry about the lateness. I wanted to make sure I could post this. Now with her permission I introduce Static! It's from her screenname, if you were wondering. By the way, this might seem offensive, it's only the tip of the iceberg. For the next few days you will hear some Static. I had to say it.
=)

Time to hire a good Sys Admin

You may or may not have heard about the SEC's "porn scandal". Honestly in business it's not that surprising that employees are surfing porn. That's pretty common place. What I find surprising is that this is not regularly snuffed out by the system administrator(s). Same thing with the National Science Foundation, a guy surfing porn over 331 days?

Just so you know NSF and SEC, I am ready and willing to take a sys admin job that will make sure your employees stay on task, and keep your systems running smooth. =)

Another sketchblog tommorow, look forward to it!

To read more about it the original blog entry is here. You can find more specific information about the claim in this news article. I made this one specific for today, it had very little impact on my life, so may not be the best for a sketchblog entry. Expect more journal type entries later on.

Ah technology, you never cease to amuse me. Today I found out that on the 23rd someone from Australia googled me. Sadly I'm not informed of this every time I'm googled, but I have been informed on this specific occasion. I am very curious as to who did it.

I went shopping today and bought some more books... Alot more books. I spent way too much. So it's time for me to find more work to make up for the loss. Oops, that money was supposed to go to my new computer. On the plus side I got a scanner today, so it's time to commence uploading!

Look forward to my random scribbles from here on out.

=)

My birthday!

Today I turned 25. I would have forgotten it, had I not gotten a call from my sister saying happy birthday. So today continues on like any other, but perhaps some gifts will arrive. Who knows. =)

I decided to pick up Dragons of Autumn Twilight. So far I am amused. The book is part of a series however, so I'll have pick up the rest of it later on. That's really all there is to report. I hope to have a scanner before the end of the month, but so far I've had to send one back due to a huge crack in the scanning plate.

That's all for now, thanks for reading.

Soon, soon

I know that most of the people who read this, if there are any who indeed remain, are hoping for some sketches. I am glad to say I have plenty to scan as soon as my scanner arrives. I suppose I should ask any out there to comment, just to let me know that I'm not just talking to myself.

I hope you all had a good spring break. That is if you indeed did have a spring break. I have recently finished some programming projects, and I hope to get permission to talk about them from my employers. Because honestly they are currently the things that are taking up most of my time.

On another note I've been working on gaming worlds. I've been really enjoying coming up with NPCs and adventures for them. Honestly I hope kind of wish that I had a local gaming group. I'm tempted to put up fliers at the university and the local 'gaming' shop. In reality the closest thing to a local gaming shop is in fact a comic shop. It's quite a nice place, but sadly I've gotten to go there only once. I really should go and see if any gaming groups are recruiting rather than wining about it online. =P

Also if there is anything in particular you want to see in my sketches or hear about from me please feel free to leave that in a comment too.

A week of boredom

Well I guess it's about time for me to update here again. My life is sadly very boring. I am still scanner-less although that will hopefully change soon. And you'll start seeing updates in graphical form.

I've decided I needed to get back into gaming. Not just computer gaming, that's never really stopped. No I'm talking D&D, shadowrun, GURPS, anything really. The game has never really mattered, I can throw myself into a character and have fun. Yes the pen and paper are calling. Unfortunately all my friends in the local area have either graduated or moved away recently. So I found another way,

rpg.net has a play by post forum and it seems that people also recruit for games over IRC and skype there as well. I just signed up to be either the player or DM in a 3.5 game. I've been making worlds in my free time. I guess I had been hoping for this kind of opportunity. Either way I'll be happy to have some kind of gaming going on. I might even join in another game. I'm in the middle of a few projects right now so I don't want to stretch myself too thin, but I still have plenty of free time. Once I'm finished with the biggest job I should have plenty of money and all the free time I could want.

Well that's my boring life for this week, hopefully within a week or two you'll see the return of the comic journal. I'll try to be more interesting as well.

Gaming distractions

Well it's a little late this week but here's an update.

So as far as MUDs go I decided to try out two of the larger ones out there. RetroMUD and Achaea. So far Achaea has won me over to at least keeping a regular appearance there. The people are friendly and the world is wonderfully indepth. Sometimes I wish there was more possibility for out of character discussion but the role playing aspect of it keeps the game interesting. RetroMUD has yet to really suck me in. It seems like most of the people on there are just idling or really busy. There is some discussion going on but sadly it seems that the mud has seen some hard times recently. I give everything a fair shot though and I admit that I have only been on RetroMUD for about an hour and a half. So I'll try it again soon and find out if I just caught it at a bad time.

On other gaming fronts I am glad to hear of the arrival of the newest version of Dwarf Fortress! Honestly though the April 1st release date along with website overhaul had me skeptical. But I could afford to be since there still isn't a release out for linux. I suppose that it's also good to note here that I have switched to linux fulltime. It's just more comfortable. Sadly it means I must wait even longer for my sweet sweet dwarf fortress, but in the end I can deal with that.

Moving away from games I am doing freelance programming work once again. If you want some programming work done feel free to email me! Katewissen AT gmail. I'll work with your budget. So that's going fairly. I'm not making as much as I would like, but I'm also free to work on my own projects. Recently I started working on a MUD client. I'm going to try to get some feedback from some devoted mud players as to what features they like to have in a client.

I don't know where this will lead to, but it's always nice to have some little extra projects in your portfolio. And who knows, maybe people will like it. I'd love to follow in Toady's footsteps and develop things for a living on a strictly donation based setup. Provide things for free and rely on the kindness of your fans. Ah well a girl can dream...

Well maybe not 3 times a week. I kept putting it off and here it is one week later. So perhaps at least once a week with sporadic updates in-between. Anyway, what I've been up to this past week, well I've been reading. I may end up giving some book reviews after I finish each book. As of right now I'm reading two: Evil Genius and Code Complete. One fiction one technical manual.

Another thing I've recently rebooted was nethack, where I recently got my first ascention! This was spurred on by a friend of mine recently getting his. I was always closer to doing it than he was so I teased him about it, but never actually did ascend. So in order to not be left behind I stared an account on NAO the nethack.alt.org server, and proceeded to prove my superiority. After this I started to feel nostalgic toward some of the games of my past so I decided to pick up MUDs again. Sadly I have not found a MUD that suits me just yet, but I have not tried a few of the big names yet either, I like to give some of the smaller MUDs a chance. If you know a good one please share.

A little programming here and there, but nothing worth sharing at the moment. If anything comes of it I will start posting progress reports as well.

An update!

Yep, I'm back. I know I said that before, however I underestimated the amount of work I had to do when I got back to school. Well I'm taking a semester or so off to take care of some debts that have arisen. There are other reasons but paying for stuff is the primary reason. I do plan to be back next semester, and if nothing else I'll be there 1 year from now. But I'm sure noone comes to read about my financial woes so I'll skip that and get right on to what I've been up to the past eight months.

School went pretty well. I didn't have much time for socializing, sadly. Between grading undergrad's programming projects to my own projects I was too busy to meet up with anyone. I may have lost a few friends that way. I wasn't ignoring anyone, but it may have seemed that way. I need to learn to turn on my IM client every so often. Either way that was pretty much my life up to December. After which I joined family for the holidays. It's awkward around most of my family most of the time. December is particularly off putting. To put it in the most mild way I am still quite atheistic, and they are quite devout catholic. We differ on most opinions. My sister is also atheistic but manages not to talk about it. She always was smarter than me.

So that went as you might figure. Then of course I returned to my apartment to find it had been broken into. Yay! My computer equipment that wasn't stashed away was gone. Even my favorite monitor. I will miss that thing. But of course worst of all my latest work was on there. I have backups but they are at least a month old. So if nothing else you now know some of the things I am currently paying for. It's a sticky situation, and sadly insurance doesn't appear to cover the full costs. Mainly I'm missing a scanner that wasn't even mine, and my nice shiny computer. Plans to rebuild my computer are underway. I can make it stronger, faster, better. But data lost is harder to replace. Oh they did leave one thing that made me laugh. My beloved Model M keyboard. It apparently was too old for them to bother or they just didn't have room for it. Either way I am glad to have one thing left. Oh I suppose my mousepad was also spared. =)

All drama aside the rest of my life has been rather relaxing. It's nice to sit back and take some time off. I got to do alot of reading recently. Managed to do some programming for myself for a change. That's pretty much it. The last few months have been work and relax, with empahsis on relaxing. I've even ignored the news specifically to avoid getting riled up over things I can realistically do nothing about.

This seems to be rambling on a tad so I'll end it here, I hope to have a new scanner for some new art to go up here soon. I'll even take questions or topics to discuss. I think this blog needs to be more active so I am making sure I do something on it at least three times a week. I will probably run out of stuff to say though. So please feel free to ask about anything.