Originally published at Fresh, Hot Wastes of Time. You can comment here or there.

This is about a game called Violette’s Dream. The ARG is to promote the release of a first person shooter called Velvet Assassin, due out soon.

The upshot is that I went to get a cache hidden in Fredericksburg, Texas, found a phone number in it, called it up, and had an out-of-game conversation with the person at the other end who works for the game publisher. He’s going to meet me on Monday to supplement my cache goodies with actual gold. I’m not sure yet what kind or quantity (he wanted to keep it a surprise), but it’s certainly not your ordinary game swag.

There were some hiccups along the way; the cache had been in Fredericksburg for 3 weeks or more waiting to be retrieved, but there were no takers. I hate to see a game stall like that, and it’s a pretty drive out there, so I decided to try to talk the family into going out there to pick it up. When I told my husband that it was supposed to be the second part of a cache one of the characters discovered in France (full of money), he readily agreed. Our first trip out there I thought I just needed to pick up a book from a bookstore and follow instructions hidden in it to another location. Instead, I had to do some role-playing and have more of a grasp on the game than I did; I had to claim I was one of the characters and pick up a second book.

To our frustration, neither book had any markings, so we came back home to regroup. When I thought of looking at them with a black light. Doing this revealed writing in both books, and although I then had the address of the storage place that was the next stop, I had no idea what unit number or combination for the lock.

A cry for help both in-game (a PM to one of the game characters) and out (a post to Unfiction wishing that a shadowy character would contact me with advice) got me more than enough help. The PMs contacted me while remaining in character to help me with the unit number and combination lock code.

We got the cache this morning with no hitches and it was an ammo can (which hubby promptly claimed as his own) with some foreign currency in it, a replica bar of Nazi gold, a letter of instruction to the operative who the cache was originally placed for, and a card with a note to call a phone number - “out of game.” It turned out to be the person I mentioned earlier, and he was very excited that someone had gotten the cache. Sounds like it’s the first of many.

I imagine they won’t have as many problems getting someone out to retrieve the subsequent caches if they’re giving away gold!

I’ve got a little photo gallery of goods online if you’re interested. I’ll post an update once I have my Monday meeting.

The campaign also paid for a TV ad to distance McCain from President Bush. The ad's script read, "John McCain stood up to the president and sounded the alarm on global warming ... five years ago." McCain later reversed his position and stood with Bush on the controversial idea of offshore oil drilling.

I definately woke up out of the wrong stage of sleep this evening because I have been irratable all evening!  It started with not wanting to come to work and then getting here and being IRRATE at all the stupid things going on in the office.  I do not feel repspected at all at work now, which is really strange since I always have in the past.  I feel like, while my loyality is in Andy, his is with Laurie and it is all a bunch of bull shit.  I think that if he likes her so much and she needs the money so much (she is scoring the studies) than she aught to be performing the night studies herself if Andy thinks that she is so great and doesn't respect me enough to trust me scoring studies.  Also when there is a problem with the equipment and I ask to have it fixed, it gets ignored until it blows up in someones face, like Dr Billy or Andy and then I get blamed for it not working when I have been asking to get it fixed for months.  NOT MY FAULT!  And if you get belts to go on patients that are not adjustable, how do you expect a 400lbs patient to where the same belt as a 100lbs patient?  IT'S COMMON FUCKING SENSE, PEOPLE!   I can't be expected to pull a new belt out of my ass.  They should have the right equipment to begin with, it is not like I opened this fucking lab.  RARRRRR!  And I can't believe they fucking scheduled me to work tomarrow when I have worked four nights in a row all month and have to for the rest of the month.  I am really tempted to just not show up.

So this whole OpenID-through-LiveJournal thing isn’t working out. To their credit LiveJournal has done a lot to support OpenID, but they’re not doing enough. Their OpenID support is still half-baked. I thought I would show my support by being an early adopter and bearing with it, but that has not worked.

(Skip to the next paragraph to avoid the tech talk…) There is a technical design flaw with OpenID that is easily worked around in implementation, but LJ has decided not to do so at this time. Because OpenID is decentralized by design, anyone can set up an OpenID server, create hundreds of spammy accounts, and post crap everywhere. Other online services (for example Blogger and WordPress) deal with it by using spam detection. If something looks spammy, it either gets outright prevented or flagged for moderation. This has the added bonus that it works for everything, not just OpenID. It detects spam in anonymous comments, in “burner” accounts (where people sign up, post spam, then never use the account again) and so on. LiveJournal, on the other hand, assumes all OpenID accounts are spamming scum and therefore limits what they can do. I can’t post links in comments. I can’t post pictures in comments. I can’t post embedded media. People can’t even properly link to me, as Ariock found out when he tried to use the “lj-user” tag. OpenID accounts are third-class citizens, behind paid accounts, behind free accounts, and just above anonymous spammers. LJ could solve the problem by introducing spam filtering (which would also help filter spam from anonymous accounts.) This basically blacklists certain kinds of posts. Or even easier, they could hook up the OpenID accounts to their e-commerce system so that OpenID people could have paid accounts. This would basically whitelist the people who paid. But no. LiveJournal continues to do nothing.

So what is going to happen? Posts will continue to be published on the brianenigma_rss feed. My reading and commenting on LJ will switch from netninja.com to BrianEnigma. Once again, this administrative post should be the last thing you see here in this particular journal a while.

What does this mean to you? Probably nothing. If you are on LiveJournal and have me on your friend list as the OpenID netninja.com, you probably also have my original BrianEnigma account on there, too. I don’t think my OpenID account has collected any new followers that were not on the first account.