I haven't been tinkering a lot lately. Not because I haven't wanted to (well, that's not quite true) but because I've had other stuff that I wanted to get out of the way. Basically, I couldn't stand the impacted shitpile that I call an office-cum-workshop in its current state anymore. Figuring out how much floor space I had a few weeks ago really got to me and I decided to do something about it. I've been spending a couple of hours every day (after work and over the weekends) going through one thing at a time (one stack of drawers …
"The truth of the world is that is is chaotic. The truth is, that it is not the Jewish banking conspiracy, or the grey aliens, or the twelve-foot reptiloids from another dimension that are in control, the truth is far more frightening; no one is in control, the world is rudderless."
--Alan Moore
I've been thinking about that quote a lot lately.
In the month or so since my last post I've been basically keeping my head above water and trying to live as productive a life as possible. It's easier than it sounds, oddly, but it costs a lot …
Children of the 80's will no doubt remember the shelves and shelves of little white paperbacks with red piping from the Choose Your Own Adventure series, where you could play as anything from a deep sea explorer to a shipwrecked mariner, a volunteer time traveler, or anything in between. If you're anything like me, you also spent way too much time looking for mistakes in the sequence of pages to find more interesting twists and no shortage of endings (most of them bad). I can't say they went out of print for a while but they did become harder to …
Back in June of 2011 Neil Gaiman went on a hastily assembled book signing tour to promote the release of the tenth anniversary edition of American Gods, one of his most famous novels. Neil's book signings (just ask anyone who's met him, you always find yourself calling him 'Neil' forever afterward) are always a good time, though this on was held at the National Press Club so it was a little more understated than most. After being introduced Neil talked a little about the circumstances surrounding the book's publication, namely, that it had originally been a great deal longer but …
If you're anything like me, at some point you started to run out of room for your dead-tree editions and started downloading e-books. While you no longer have the tactile experience of reading e-books you have to admit that having a fixed-sized device with which you can store hundreds upon thousands of texts makes life a lot easier, plus, not everyone can read comfortably on a laptop or desktop display. Enter Amazon's Kindle, the darling of the e-book reader market which not only lets you buy e-books wirelessly (which can either tank your bank account or save your sanity while …
I'm not counting these in the duplicates category because it really does help to have multiple copies of the core book for a game you're running. Nevermind the fact that we have four copies of second edition and two of third.
Does anyone else find it amusing that a cast metal and plastic drum is manufactured by a company called Touch the Earth? This is about as far away from their ideal as you can get without hopping a space shuttle.
Attention secret societies: you're really doing it wrong if your handbook wound up at Barnes and Noble.
Mist rising off the river near the Kennedy Center after a few days of rain.
A selection of four-resistor sound sequencers built on breadboards. Toward the end of the night we had a veritable symphony of beeps and boops sounding through HacDC
Work and life's kept me too busy to post much lately, so I'm trying to play catch-up in between driving all over creation for work and finishing preparations for the wedding. To that end, I'll try to outline everything going on, not only so that I can square away everything going on inside my head, but possibly to help others in the future, should they find my website.
First off, Lyssa's bridal shower was yesterday afternoon. Her parents, sister, and aunt drove down from Pennsylvania to set up and cook for the party. Lyssa and I have been going bonkers …
If you normally browse my website directly (i.e., not using an RSS feed aggregator of some kind) you'll see that I made some major changes to the front page late last night. For the past couple of days I've been profiling load times and such like, and discovered that I could improve the code and structure markedly with some changes. I've been using the Firebug and YSlow plugins to see where the bottlenecks were, and as a result I removed a half-dozen or so badges from weblog directories that did little else but add to the page loading time …
I arrived in New York City somewhen around 1400 EST5EDT, after getting turned around in Penn Station (what kind of adventure would it be without my getting lost, after all?) and being sent in the direction of the hotel by a wary yet friendly security guard at the office building I'd blundered into. I finally got to the Hotel Penn, which they really did a nice job fixing up since the last time I'd been there (though the air conditioning was still pants, which became a common complaint that weekend). I wandered around for a while because I had no …
