A sprawling water-themed 32- to 64-player death match level for Quake 2 that was started in 1997 and still remains unfinished and unplayable.  May Will get finished in 2010.  If so, before Duke Nukem Forever comes out—if that ever gets done—or late 2010. (Updated 2010/07/31)

The ISP hosting my three websites and a dozen email accounts disappeared from the Internet for 36 hours last week, starting on Thursday morning at 10:00AM and ending Friday night at 9:30PM. If the outage had lasted less than 24 hours, I would’ve shrugged my shoulders and went on with life. Outages do happen from time to time. I started looking into alternative web hosting when 24 hours came and went, and discovered that my domain registrar, DirectNIC, could host my websites for half the monthly cost that I was paying. By the time the outage was over, I had already transferred my websites over. This was purely a business decision.

A more detailed explanation can be found on my writing blog.

If you find any glitches on the website, send an email to  This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it .

On a related note, this blog is on hiatus for the summer. I'm planning to finish the content conversion from the legacy website that I started in January 2008 and add other content that I haven't gotten around to yet. I'll blog about these updates from time to time. General blogging will resume in October.

I drove up to Sacramento to be with Dad (a.k.a., Angry Senior Citizen) for Father's Day. He was snoozing at his patio table in the front yard when I got there. I put the daisies on his table. He woke up and frowned. A live plant meant he had to water it. However, he wasn't going to give me grief about it. First, it's not a card. Second, I made the pot from white clay and a plum-colored glaze last summer. Third, when my four-year-old, four-inch long convict cichlid fish died a few weeks ago, it ended up as a fertilizer in the pot because it was too big to flush down the toilet. His frown disappeared when a hummingbird flitted over the orange flowers. He has never seen a hummingbird in the trailer park that he lives in. A little color and something to care for in his life won't hurt. We spent our time tracing down the history of his old anvil.

I recently got a promotional letter from Wells Fargo Bank that I could earn a free movie ticket from Fandango by making 30 purchases with my debit card over the next two months by pressing  the "credit" button or requesting to sign a credit receipt.  A great deal, right?  Nope.  If I got a free movie ticket, the bank would make extra money by charging the higher fee for credit transactions that the merchants have to pay out of their own pocket.  Or, the way I see this situation, Mary is being screwed over to give Peter a free movie ticket and make Paul richer.

I love hanging out on the Wall Street Journal comment pages to provoke the tea baggers into having a hissy fit.  They're like strange animals trapped in small cages at the carnival sideshow.  Poke, poke.  See how they growl, hiss and snarl.  The tea party movement doesn't like the term tea bagger, which they first started calling themselves in the spirit of the Boston Tea Party until people started sniggering at them because it meant a certain sexual position often used to humiliate the person on the receiving end.  They're insulted if you use the term—even more so if you're a moderate conservative and not a pinko-communist liberal scumbag—and call you crude and ignorant.