ben says

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Originally uploaded by TomHiggins.

cheseeee

Hobbit In The Wild

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Originally uploaded by TomHiggins.

The Great Outdoors

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Originally uploaded by TomHiggins.

Heather and Isaac kickin back in the wilds near Detriot Lake

Isaacs First Rage Burger

Raging With The Newest Higgins
Originally uploaded by The One True b!X.

While not partaking directly of a rage burger he has gotten an indirect fix via the mama. The family that Rages togther...does something togther that Im not too sure of yet.

He Of The Pipe

bob
Originally uploaded by fourthirtythree.

Bob though calls all to hear and all to give and all shall pay...which makes perfect sense. Confusion confusion.

Bob vs FSM ?

Flying spaghetti monster

Flying spaghetti monster
Originally uploaded by Hil.

Have I been wrong my whole life? My search for placement in the world, the dead ends of bogus organized relgious mobs and spiritual crime syndicates..now only to be shown the face of the Flying Spaghetti Monster

Old Song, New Venue

ToneCall

by tomwsmf

from Music for Dozens

Isaac Comes Home

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Originally uploaded by TomHiggins.

Mothers Milk and Mothers Decaf

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Originally uploaded by TomHiggins.

Isaac made it to the Urban Grind not long after his being home. Dawn is still on the decaf as Isaac is on Dawn. The things we do for our kids.

Aug 3rd - Hello Baby

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Originally uploaded by TomHiggins.

Isaac Higgins enters the world, podcast and blog to follow.

Ben at 3

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Originally uploaded by TomHiggins.

July 27th, Ben hit the big 3. Gifts and cake ruled the night. Ben read us this book cover to cover, well he made up his own story based on the pictures. At the age of 3 he tells more cohesive tales than Rove and Bush Inc.

Rage Burger 7/28/2005

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Originally uploaded by TomHiggins.

Probably the last rageburger before Isaac is born. Rage On.

The Patio For Not Much Longer

Tom's Patio
Originally uploaded by Scuttle.

A few months back Scuttle crafted us a screened in patio/deck dealio which made our house much more than it ever was. Sadly we are saying goodbye to it and the whole house. From SE to NoPo, where of course a new screened patio will be commishioned. Next one I will build the cat5 drops into the works.

Zoobombers

Zoobombers
Originally uploaded by Trevor Blake.

Trevor snaps the Portland idea of a parking garage. One day soon, when I have shed some mass, a zoobombing I shall go. Until then its NoPo bombing for me.

Macker and Tom

Macker and Tom
Originally uploaded by hangry.

The biggest things in podcasting? By girth ...yea, that would be us. So how is it my wife is 9 months pregnant yet I look like Im about to deliver? Something has got to be done.

MirrorMirror Tom

MirrorMirror Tom
Originally uploaded by TomHiggins.

Looking up into the mirrored roof of the VanDaminator.

Teepee Comes To The Picnic

Teepee Comes To The Picnic
Originally uploaded by TomHiggins.

Take one city park close to the house, a couple of sandiwiches, some seltzer...add a laptop, an open access point and skype ... your everyday picnic is turned into a Global Picnic.

Liberation Fronting

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Originally uploaded by TomHiggins.

We stick our swords into strange beasts in our lives. Some fight for freedom from, some fight for freedom to, some just like to run around like swashbuckling doers of dare. We all need a cool drink though,

Swing on

What Podcasts Do I Archive?

I listen to a bunch of podcasts. Some I like, some I fast forawrd thru quickly, some I cant wait for every week, some I am responsible for. Mostly though any podcast I have grabbed since Jan 2005 is archived over two local machines[1]. I am not doing the depth of archiving that Jason Scott is doing with his collection, this is more my slice of faves.

So what podcasts am I listening to and archiving. Here is the list. Am I missing any good ones? Any of these make your toes curl? Comment away.

[1] If you happen to be connected to my netowrk just head over to http://10.11.25.120:8888 for the older stuff and http://10.11.25.15:8888 for the last month or so of podcasts.

Baby Shower Booty

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Originally uploaded by TomHiggins.

Dawn and I would like to thank Rebbeca, Kevin, Mack, Brenda, Heather, and all the others who made lasts nights all gender Baby Shower/BBQ a smashing success. Here I am with the weapon of choice of every dad. Operation Pewpy Sheild continues.

Solar Projectile On Earth

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Originally uploaded by TomHiggins.

We seem to have had a small Solar event at last nights Baby Shower/BBQ. Kevin evidently has the power to summon the solar eruptions for his BBQFu. Tasty

Operation TASTY FREEEEEEZE

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Originally uploaded by TomHiggins.

Bush's new plan for sending vehicles with even less armor into the war on terrorism. The new PopCyKill 2000 will deliver brain freezes, icey tounges and tasty treats to the Iraqi theater of opertation.

Onward To Victory

The Bix Ben MindMeld

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Originally uploaded by TomHiggins.

"Come to me my XMen...and you too Ben"

Padwan Ben

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Originally uploaded by TomHiggins.

There is a Dark Side young padwan

Her Hammer His Head

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Originally uploaded by TomHiggins.

Found at a recent outing to the local Fred Myers...Scutter holds Her Hammer, a crafts tool for the woman in the family. His woman though will use it mostly to bash in his head for the gender slur. Beware of scutters bearing gifts

WSMF Blog 2003-2005

Between this and that , blooger and blosxom, things get said and posted and forgoten and refound. These things can be found here and also here.

audblog audio post

The world has lost one of the few people who through my life made me feel better about being me. "There's only one person in the whole world like you." He made us smile in times of trouble, he made us realize it's OK to be who we are, no matter what that was. In a world of intractable fundamentalists, he planted the seeds of tolerance. "Children aren't responsible for wars. The least, and the best, we adults can do is to let our children know that we'll take good care of them, no matter what." Off on that one way ride to the Land of Make Believe, he will always be our nieghbor.

The Enlightened Leader BenWallyLemPooPoo welcomes you to the Nation State of WSMF. Come see how we run the perfect nation and even join in to run your own.

The People's Republic of WSMF awaits your visit.

Volume 2 Issue 1 of Countermoves is ready for mass consumption.

Public Domain Doomed?

The Supreme Court gave an unpleasant 7-2 decison to lock in long term copyright controls All the works that should have fallen into the Public Domain are now locked out of the PD for a lifetime or two.

Most works made after the 1920's will never go out of copyright

Disney has been a major force in pushing this through. Its more important to them to keep control of the Rat than for our country to have a rich and vibrant public domain as envisoned by Jefferson et. al. A tip of the slave hat to Sonny Bono for his great works in shackling works.

So the companies keep thier works, the courts rule you can extend on demand, and the Public Domain is locked up.

The Case-

The Arguement-

The Decission-

The First Dissention-

The Second Dissention-

With the RIIA forcing legislation to "tax" all netcasting it was only a matter of time before a new/old method took to the wires. PeerCasting works by having each listener of a channel become a relay so others can listen. The more folks that listen the more folks can listen, each giving what they can to realy. The client does all the realying and bandwidth limiting for you, the interface is easy to use, and offering up conent is a snap. I had a test server up, but truth be told Im just not up for netcasting at the moment. Head over to the WSMF Listening Room and grab a few audio goodies.

Holiday Joy from the new house, click on the happy faces for the very large versions

Having a house makes many things possible. Aside from more room to play with the kids, setting up community networks, hanging with friends, sitting by the fireplace with the love of my life and cooking there is this ....Brewing. First step...Cider My eventual goal...Fred

To counteract the lack of activity here on this webpage our family life has been bustling with action. Since our last entry we have taken a trip to South Dakota, purchased a new house, moved into said house and are now in the process of unpacking the plethora of objects into our new surroundings.

Benjamin and Heather are both growing by leaps and bounds. Pictures and video will be made available to those who care to see them via our new DSL net connection, which once again has given me the ability to set up web servers, zope servers and a host of other networking goodness.

The new home and the new DSL have also allowed me to enter the wonderful world of wireless networking not just in the house but as part of a community networking system. The Portland Personal Telco Project is the one I am hooking into locally as well as using SeattleWireless , Freenetworks.org and NoCat as jumping off points for learning all the new voodoo not just for the tech aspects but for community building aspects. Once again an opportunity has arisen to make open communication between people possible. Lets hope it gets wide spread use before the corporations and the govs find ways to regulate down to sterility.

At one month of age young Benjamin Wallace makes his first run in at Yankee.Stadium.

At 12:45 pm Benjamin Wallace Higgins made a crash entry into the world. After a night of on again off again activity a C section was called for near noon. Seems the little hacker was messing with the internal cables and got three turns of the umbilical cord around his neck for the effort. Ill have to teach him about the art of cable bundling. Benjamin Wallace came out at 6 lbs 13 oz 20 somthing inches tall and doing what all Higgins boys do best... feed and sleep. Mother and Child are doing great.

Off we go to the Hospital..Looks like its go time
Benajmin Wallace Higgins is on his way.

Go Time Is Close

Its getting close folks.....This mornings doctors visit found the mama dialated to 3 cm. Doc Lloyd says within the week, I bet Benjamin is here this weekend.

Countermoves is proud to announce that it is now part of the Sourceforge Open Source Community. A new site is being hosted on the Sourceforge servers to facilitate distribution of the Countermoves publications, several mailing lists and discussion forums, game development collaboration tools and a host of other services which will make interaction between the game developers, players and readers more efficient.

You can find the new Workspace, News, Message Forums, Files section on the navigation bar near the top of the new Countermoves page.

The net never ceases to amaze me. I heard about this some time ago and it finaly found its way on to a browser near me. I have one publication out in the wilds already...Dang life is good.
The Karma of Literature... BookCrossing.com

Have I mentioned lately how much I love Heather? Well I do, shes such an amzing kid. Dont belive me? Just ask her . Shes the cute one at the bottom of the pics.

The Gallery Of BennyHannah Higgins

Friday was the day mother and child went in for the latest round of family photographs. The process was mindblowing. Seeing our kid unfold on the ultrasound screen was like watching some bizzare mix of shows from The Learning Channel, Science Fiction Channel and a Fellini Film.

A little explanation about the name BennyHannah. If the critter is a boy his name will be Benjamin Wallace, if it is a girl then her name will be Hannah Kathleen. Up until Friday we have been calling the kid BennyHannah. After the pictures...well you tell us what you think.

Here are a few of the highlights...

The Face Off

The Face Off (with subtitles)

The 2001 Shot

Kicked Back

The Backflip

Boy or Girl? You Be The Judge

Hack your Garmin eTrex
There are a number of ways to modify the handy little GPS unit that the TeamWSMF has equiped themselves with.
First off you will need a cable to hook your PC to your eTrex. The Dingos from downunder have a great page showing the possibilities for getting the cable. This .cz based eTrex Fan page will show you how to make your own cable.
The next stop should be an upgrade of your firmware from Garmin's site, if you need to rev up to the lattest version.
Then there are the hacked firmwares. These add features like new map symbols. You can also find kits to make your own modifications to the firmware. Careful with that axe Eugene, the unit you turn into a worthless pile of plastic just might be your own. Messing with firmware hacks always has its dangers, so measure twice cut one.
The Palm ---- eTrex Connection
Take a handy eTrex GPS unit, most any old Palm Pilot and link them togther with a cable and what do you get?
With these apps for the Palm you can grab the data from your eTrex and have your Palm show you movable maps, routes, traces, and all sorts of views of where you are and just where you are going.
There are apps made just for the eTrex to allow the Palm to store tons of data that you can move into the eTrex' limited memory when you need it.
Most of the apps do not require the lattest or greatest Palm units, most will run on the older ones that you can pick up on the cheap.

We did our first weeknight Geocache, this time with Heather as our GPS toting navigator. She did real well and even found the cache. I included a picture of her showing off her find.

02/25/02 - Beginners "No Brainer"

Geocrazy Weekend

Dawn, the baby to be and I took off this weekend to finaly try out our new eTrex GPS unit. It was the first time we have gone Geocaching and man did we ever have a blast.

From late Friday afternoon till early evening on Sunday we were out in the Big Red Beast finding various geocaches from as far northwest as Astoria, down past Canon Beach, deep into the trials on hiway 26 and in various spots in between. Here is a list of the spots with descriptions and even some pictures.

02/22/02 - I Hate I-5 XII (Gee Creek) (Washington)

02/22/02 - Brady Hill

02/23/02 - Astoria Colum

02/23/02 - Gerassimos

02/23/02 - Arch Cape

02/24/02 - Youngs River Falls

02/24/02 - Sunset Hiway Marker

02/24/02 - Wolrds Largets Sitka Tree

02/24/02 - The Left Handed Band Saw

02/24/02 - Where Four Counties Meet

Officially Official..We are having a stork visit.

The Higgins House will sprout our newest Bloger some time in late July -early August. Names have been selected for both major genders. Ultrasounds jpgs and womb like mp3s are not an if but a when. The rights to stream the birth have been flatly turned down. Oh well, cant win em all:)-

Zine--The zine is called Countermoves and its humming along nicely. There is a yahoo group for it whcih you can go and join if you wish.

Jean Shepherd Netcast--I have been running the 24 Hour House of The Perpetual Ponderings of Jean Shepherd for over a year now witht he same 12 or so shows. Well this weekend I received a package of 8 cd crammed with over 800 of his shows all in mp3 and ready to netcast. There is now a special page for it which of course is hosted at Blogspot.

Zines. The word conjures up images of unearthed arcanea, underground lore and the days when we knew less then we thought and learned more than we knew. Maybe I’m waxing poetic but over the last few years the hankering to not only read zines but also make them has surfaced again. So I am doing a game zine.

Not an ezine, though there would be a pdf version of it, but a real honest to goodness printed on paper, Xeroxed, and stapled zine. Not a super gloss single focus publication nor a mimeographed anything goes fanzine but something in between.

No I’m not turning neoludite and shunning all ezines, blogs, ASCII files and etexts, it’s just that I want to make something I can hold in my hands and read on the crapper. Having access to a printer that does Booklet Printing and purchasing a Big Assed Stapler have solidifed my resolve.

Living in Portland OR I am fortunate to have the Independent Publishing Resource Center close by when I’m ready to get into the thick of the deed. One great web sites to jump into the world of zines and zine making is The Zine and Ezine Resource Guide .

The inspiration for doing a game zine is both a long yearning to do another zine, and places like Warpspawn, Games Cabinet, and the freebies section on PBEmporium. Games cabinet hasn't been updated in nearly a year, which bums me out. Warpspawn has so much going on all the time with new rules sets coming out I think we could easily get a full game or so in an issue with variants and the like.

Id also like to tap into reviews, articles about micro and macro strategy games as well as puzzle games, cheap ass style games and other games that make the mind work for its keep.

Id also like to make the zine freely distributable, that is while the articles themselves are copyrighted to the authors who wrote them anyone who grabs the pdf of the zine could print out copies for themselves and their buds so long as its not altered in any way and no fee is charged for the zine itself.

I have no aspirations whatsoever of making a dime off this project, I've been in too many projects to know that if you think your even going to break even on costs your mostly off your rocker. So knowing that going in I am thinking the cover price should be 0$. Im at a point in my life where the cost to do this as I see it being done would be less than many of my other projects.

With the PDF of the issue available folks can grab it, print it out and run off a few copies to seed to their game circles, local game stores, or where ever they think it would be good to have them. I myself would be able to run off and staple about 100 copies or so. Guerilla Distribution.

If you are interested in this drop me a line at tom@wsmf.org .

When you can not be there in person sometimes it helps to just see whats going on. I've been watching NYC from my office palantir all day, its good to see the beat returning.

Here and Back Again
In recent months I have been starting several projects which has ment this space has reamined unchanged. Now that the other projects are under their own speed I can refocus back here. If you have come here from the WSMF.ORG address then you will know some of the places I have been spending my time. Look to the column on the side of this page for a list of most of the places you can find me online.

WFF n Proof Rides Again
Ever have that urget o go back and regain the old Wff N Proff star? If you grew up with this game your probably right there with me. Well it may not be the game but the MetaMath Site sure does take it to new limits.

Gallery of CSS Descramblers
A vast lists of all the ways people express the means to descramble data encoded with CSS. Included are source code listing, pictures, movies and even songs. So while the push is on to restrict this message it spreads even wider. Good work Judge Kaplan.