Merlin decided to stand in as Dungeon Master for our last D&D game.

At our last D&D game, Merlin decided he had been a spectator long enough and got directly involved in the game. He is quite the copycat. It’s a pity I couldn’t have snapped this picture a half-second earlier, when he was sitting down behind the screen and looking directly at the camera.

Two orcs are getting blasted by Todd's wizard using a 3x3 area effect: probably Thunderwave

Playing D&D 4E pretty much requires the use of tabletop miniatures (or some equivalent, like cardstock counters). During one of the early sessions of our current campaign, I realized that the wizards in particular were using a lot of area effects. Probably that’s because wizards have access to first-level powers that can be used at will.

I found that fussing over where exactly to place these area effects was slowing down the flow of play. So I went to a craft store and bought some pipe cleaners and made a few simple outlines of 3″x3″ and 5″x5″ areas. In Fourth Edition, all area effects are square, so you really need only a couple of different sizes.

These work amazingly well. Now every time one of the wizards casts a spell, his player plunks down the pipe-cleaner outline and we can all tell at a glance which monsters are going to have a bad day.

Warning: Apparently these carefully shaped pipe cleaners are the best cat toys ever according to my cat Merlin. So if you leave your pipe-cleaner templates unattended on the table, and you have a cat, you can expect to find them the next day, under the couch, crusted in dried cat spit and mangled into postmodern art. The one in this photo is all kinked because it has been resurrected from just such a fate.

My cat Merlin, acting like himself

He stand on top of it, leans over, and drinks from the stream in midair. I think he does it because he used to stick his head under the stream and it would get wet. Rather than just drinking from a different part of the basin, he came up with this solution.

At my house we have a word for this: “floofy,” derived by combining “fluffy” and “goofy.” And now you have some insight into what it’s like to live with this silly animal and his floofy sister.

Incidentally, our cats have a drinking fountain because it has health benefits. Cats prefer their water aerated and if most cats are given standing water in a dish, they’ll dislike it and end up not drinking enough to stay hydrated. If your cat’s nose it not moist like a dog’s, it’s because she either has a cold or is dehydrated.

Merlin enjoys his Drinkwell Platinum pet fountain, but if you don’t have a platinum budget you can buy a less expensive pet fountain, or just train your cat to drink from the tap (yes, cats can be trained!).

The fuzzy culprit at the scene of the crime.

Last May, I bought an XBox360. I enjoyed it a lot, until last night. I tried to turn it on and nothing happened. The power indicator didn’t come on. The familiar low hum of the hard drive was silent. Nothing.

It turns out I was one of the lucky ones. My problem was that my cat likes to crawl into the entertainment cabinet and lie on top of the XBox360, and he managed to kick loose the cable from the power supply.

Many others are not so lucky. There is a common problem with the XBox360 known as the Red Ring of Death, which basically means that your fancy $500 cutting-edge game console has turned into a very expensive brick.

The Red Ring of Death is a lot more serious.

I know two other Xbox360 owners. Both of their machines died within the first year of ownership. So out of this admittedly small sample size of three (myself and two others), 67% have had their XBox360 kick the bucket in the first year. Take that into consideration when you’re trying to decide which gaming console to buy.

Morgana sleeping on top of the computer desk. She only looks innocent.

The first incident came within a couple weeks after we adopted Morgana (and her brother, Merlin).  Morgana pranced across my keyboard as kittens are wont to do, and somehow hit a keystroke combination that changed the input language to Tamil.  So I would type a Roman letter on the keyboard and a Tamil character would appear on the screen.  It turns out this was quite a pain in the neck to fix because I had to search the Web to find how to reset the language, yet I couldn’t type readable English into the search engine.

Well, Morgana has done it again.  Last night she scampered across my keyboard, and immediately my monitor looked like this:

Morgana shifted my root window nine inches to the left. How!?

Notice how half the monitor is blank, and only half of the desktop is visible — and, I would point out, the wrong half! The half with the menu on it that opens up settings I could change to fix this problem? That’s the half that’s off the edge of the screen. Moving the mouse did not cause the screen to scroll to the left so I could get at those menus.

I am at a complete loss to explain how she did this. I’m using the KDE desktop (from the kubutu version of Ubuntu) with compiz as my window manager and the Emerald theme manager. There are a lot of keyboard controls for compiz but I would never have imagined one that does that.

Even worse — KDE was set up to preserve all changes to my desktop settings, so logging out and logging back in didn’t fix the problem. My desktop was permanently skewed 50% to the left, courtesy of Morgana.

The solution was simple, but only because the problem occurred on Linux. Almost all Linux applications are configured via text files. KDE is a Linux application and follows that convention. Therefore, I was able to log in via a failsafe terminal session (which doesn’t launch the KDE desktop) and edit the text files containing Morgana’s configuration change. If I were really a KDE whiz, no doubt I could have found and reversed the one change she made. As it was, I didn’t want to spend a lot of time or effort on this, so I simply backed up and then deleted the configuration files. Sure enough, when I started KDE again after that, the desktop session manager didn’t find any saved configurations, so it automatically created new ones and saved them for me.

Technically, I lost all my personalized settings such as my desktop wallpaper and menu customizations. But those settings are not really lost because they’re in the backups of those text-formatted configuration files that I made. If I wanted to spend the time and effort, I could use Linux text-searching tools like grep and diff to find what Morgana had changed in my old files, undo that, and then restore my old settings. I happen to think it will be quicker and easier to re-create my custom settings than to try to make sense out of those configuration files, but the point is that I have a choice.

The principle that Linux uses text files to configure applications may seem simple, perhaps even quaint to a modern user who’s familiar with configuration wizards and graphical control panels. When that principle is applied consistently throughout the thousands of configuration files on the computer, though, the benefits are huge. Configuration information is exposed to the user; it’s easy to search, easy to back up, and easy to change even if there’s something seriously wrong with the desktop display (for example). That’s one of the reasons I prefer Linux.

Merlin's playful face

I am just recovering from a major re-organization of my computer’s hard drive and I don’t have my full cornucopia of cat photos on disk yet (they’re on a backup DVD).  But this one was on my camera.  This is Merlin demonstrating his trademark “playful face.”