Whilst poking around Friday, I found a nice Ruby script which converted from Simple PHP Blog, which I’d been using, to Wordpress, which… is what this is. I have been building a custom theme for Wordpress but it is far from done. Also all the categories have been flummoxed… still, it is a beginning. Argh… half the articles have been cut off midway. I’ll have to fix the script and redo this… ...
He’s smiling for the camera! Just 17 weeks old at the moment. There is some concern that he may have Down’s Syndrome; Ally had to have amniocentesis today so they could get some amniotic fluid for testing. They had Matthew’s conception date off a week, so it’s likely just an error in the original test, which depends upon an accurate date of conception. Anyway, we know now that he is a boy, he has five of the things that he should have five of, two of the things he should have two of, and so on – he is looking very healthy. ...
Removed Dead Ranger blog. Guess the Dead Ranger finally got tired of waiting for Vanguard. Removed the Prophetic Fate link. I took down the message board for the guild - I hosted it here - so the link no longer worked anyway. Guild was dead. Removed my Java Applets page. I do need to get those in shape to prove to potential employers that I can program, but they weren’t really in a usable state. ...
Whilst perusing (it’s important to use Britlish when talking about) the BBC NEWS website, I read an article about blogging; in particular their own blog. Down With Blogs! they screamed. Including their own. But what was this mention of something called “Pooterism”? Journalists have their own takes on blogs - broadcaster Mark Lawson, for one, says that “although the word blog suggests attitude and subversion, it’s really just a hi-tech kind of diary and carries the identical risk of Pooterism”. ...
I was out in the warehouse this morning, installing new software on the UPS machine… and during this long, dull process, was looking at the computer itself, an old Gateway, the flat kind you put on your desk and sat a monitor on top… Whatever happened to computers you put on your desk? I’ve used towers for years… I think the last time I used a desktop one was back at Digital Research… and even then, those stretched the definition of desktop. To the computer pictured above, add another box (two feet wide, foot and a half deep, half a foot high) for the 20 megabyte hard drive. I didn’t actually set a monitor on that behemoth; it was on a side table. I used a DEC VT520 terminal to talk to it. Command line. CP/M 68K. Yeah. ...
Live Update #25 is bringing new tailoring recipes to EQ2 - casual clothes, just for looks. I am all about looking good. It’s why my defiler alchemist has a special robe for brewing potions, and why Dorah has a new robe every day. I just can’t wait to get my crew in stuff like that below. Nashuya in particular is going to look fantastic. Just have to get my tailoring up. I have been grinding it… from 22 to 27 in the past couple of days… limited only by belladonna roots. The new crafting system just makes them vanish. I have plenty of the boiled leather I need to get to the next tier, but it seems to take about 70-80 belladonna roots to get through each level. I have toned down the grinding on cloth armor a bit, but as backpacks (which use two roots, and haven’t got much spam in them) recede in level, they give me less and less experience. ...
I guess it was only a matter of time before some company found a way to glean polling information from blogs. CNN has a story about how automated programs search millions of blogs to determine how people feel about the issues of the day – in this case, rising gas prices. But the most surprising part is how they automatically categorize people by age and gender. From the article: Umbria uses speech patterns to determine the age and gender of blog posters and divides the blogger population into three age groups: ...
Whilst perusing the lists of bots indexing this blog, I noticed an unfamiliar name, GigaBlast. They search through blogs with a natural language interface, similar to what Jeeves claimed to do but never quite managed. My mission: Ask it something that would refer back to RP & RL! what is roleplaying and real life? Many of the interesting responses pointed to a game called “My Life With Master”, a link I was hesitant to follow at work… but it’s actually a pencil-and-paper roleplaying game about a minion who struggles with self-loathing and weariness as he obeys the commands of a capricious master. From the errata for the game: ...
So what does having a 1650 x 1050 monitor get you these days? It’s a Viewsonic 2025wm, and I’ve been droooling over it for awhile. I didn’t buy it for gaming, really - I bought it for doing everything that isn’t gaming. And it is very very nice for that. But for gaming… well, in EQ2, I can see my whole inn room, pretty much… Or in EQ1, see an entire cleric-unfriendly vista at once… but I’m not bitter. I love Depths of Darkhollow. No, really. ...
I know, I shouldn’t have bought it. I can’t really afford it. But I love my widescreen monitor. And I haven’t even tried to play a game on it. Took me about half an hour to teach Linux about it, mostly because of a stupid typo I made in the xorg,conf… but since then… movies… being able to work on the new website design, watch a DVD, touch up graphics with the GIMP… ...