Before I head out the door to the salt mines I just wanted to take a moment to wish everyone a very merry Christmas, Happy Holidays (and Happy Hanukkah, which coincides with Christmas this year…) Merry Festivus and all that other stuff.
Since 2005 or so I have always paid full price for my phone, but normally I purchased them from my provider. In the long run it’s much cheaper because you aren’t paying finance charges. From ’99 until maybe three years ago I was with Verizon and grandfathered in the unlimited data plan as long as I kept purchasing my phones like that. In 2013 I needed to upgrade my phone so I went into the Verizon store in Carrollton to buy a new smart phone. The salesman refused to sell me a phone and lied, telling me that even if I found a Verizon store to sell me one they would knock me out of the grandfathered plan. Of course it was a bald-faced lie at the time but I was so pissed off that I walked out, went across the street to AT&T and took all five lines and $400 a month to them.
Of course at that point I had to start paying for my data and was locked into a plan again lol. I went ahead and picked up an HTC One and used that until the Nexus 6 came out. For some reason I went ahead and decided to “upgrade” to the Nexus 6. After having to have it replaced five times I bought one unlocked from Amazon and started using that. Unfortunately that meant I was still paying for a phone I wasn’t using (which is in a box, ready for me to sell on Swappa or eBay.)
My line went month-to-month yesterday so I just finished canceling that line on the account!
Although I have had the line on AT&T I have had it forwarded to ad have been using Google’s Project Fi for the last 18 months. Maybe a little longer. While the coverage isn’t quite what my wife has I really haven’t had any problems with it and I live in a semi-rural area. I keep a pre-paid Verizon Hotspot for those times that I might not have coverage through Fi (which uses T-Mobile, Sprint and US Cellular towers.) My daughter has been off of AT&T and also using Project Fi for a few months now as well.
I now have three lines left on my AT&T account. One goes to month-to-month in February, one in June and one sometime in 2018. Ugh. Whar’s funny is that my bill from them will drop to somewhere around $300, maybe a little higher. I have two on Project Fi and my bill is a third of what I am paying AT&T.
Regardless of what provider anyone uses I can tell you that the nicest feeling in the world is to not be locked in to some jack-ass provider that’s holding your feet to the fire with their shitty plans. Buy your phones outright and go month-to-month. If you really want to save money shop online every month for pre-paid plans. Most of them have deals and you can switch providers. I’m not going that route since I really like Project Fi (which, knowing Google, will disappear at some point in the next few years) but if you do, just set up a Google Voice account so you can use the same phone number for all of them. You can actually use Google Voice to ring on your mobile and landline (does anyone still have one of those?) at the same time.
Finally got around to adding BCR Game Server to the BBS tonight. Check it out on my board or hit them up directly here.
I’ve added a couple of LORD IGMs to the game. I don’t like a lot of them but
as I was a beta tester and support site for Joseph Masters’ stuff back in the
day I have always liked Sandtiger’s bar and used Lord NPC as well. I’ve added
those and Barak’s House as well.
If you have any particular IGMs that you would like to see added, please feel
free to let me know. Nothing weird that takes away from the game or gives too
much advantage though.
I have moved the BBS to a Windows 7 32 bit machine. This may lead to issues with some of the software, so if something is not working please send me an email. In the long run it means that I can run most of the older 16-bit DOS games that I wasn’t able to before. It’s also a dedicated server so not having to share resources with the stuff running on my personal PC
Also, I seem to be having some sort of issues with comments here on my site. Anyone reading this, please leave a comment for me. If it doesn’t work shoot me an email, a tweet, or leave me a facebook message.
I’ve updated a few things here and on the BBS this week.
First off I created a separate Twitter account just for the BBS and my home automation system. Also figured out how to interface the BBS with Twitter and have it send automatic tweets as well. Also did a short tutorial on how to tweet from Mystic BBS that explains how it works if you are interested.
Added a couple more message networks and you can also check my seti@home status from the BBS now as well. Full on geek mode this month goddammit.
There’s a couple more things but I can’t remember what they are off the top of my head. At soccer practice with my daughter at the moment so my attention is elsewhere
If you tried to log in to the BBS last night or send mail I apologize for the downtime. While Windows 10 has been rock solid for me as an OS it has the nasty habit of rebooting whenever it wants, regardless of what you tell it to do.
I fell asleep before it had finished unfortunately.
For the time being I’ve pretty much given up on trying to get old DOS doors to run under Windows 10 64bit. I know with DOSBox and possibly Doorway it’s possible but I’ve been messing about for a couple of days and not made much progress. I may return to it later and switch gears. Possibly try qemu to get it working.
Still have a lot of configuration to do but am going out of town to Denver next Friday for an Ingress Anomaly so some of it may have to wait.
The games that are there are working fine, some are native Mystic games, some are actual 32 bit doors and the rest are running on either BBSLink or DoorParty.
I’ve gotten some more finished on the menus and prompts. Still have a ton of stuff to do and not enough time of course.
I’ve also added a few new games. If anyone know where to find it I am attempting to locate the win32 version of LORD that was in testing a few years back so that I can have a local version. You used to be able to request it from Michael Preslar but unfortunately his web site (and the file request email) is down. Don’t know if that’s permanent or not.
Also looking for someone that’s half decent (or dare I say awesome) to design a main login screen. The old green one I did that I’ve had for years needs to go.
Menu Headers are finally finished the way I want them. I’m certainly no artist but like the way they turned out. Really it was just a matter of finding the font I wanted. I still have to “install” them in each menu where they aren’t showing yet and also change some of the commands (and the way they look.) I don’t like some of the commands as I don’t think they are needed. I also want to change the way some of them are worded as well. I should be able to get to some of that this afternoon after work.
Here’s a generic example of what the headers look like. I Originally tried to take the top header from my old menus and delete everything else and it just didn’t look right. After looking at some other board’s examples I dug around and found a font I like.
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