There’s something about not posting for a while that makes it very hard to think of a title for an entry— not to mention a subject. Part of the deal with blogging is getting into a rhythm, and I think I’ve broken mine a little.
health & fatness
Well, my appetite is certainly back… in fact it has kind of overshot and I can’t seem to stop eating. Especially chocolate and sweet things. I’ve just hit my upper weight threshold (at which it was agreed in advance that my girlfriend would find me unattractive) so now I have to either burn more energy or consume less, or maybe both. It’s all going on around the gut of course, so when I let it hang out I get that Kermit the frog look happening.
Obviously exercise is the thing I need most, but it’s slow going building up enough fitness again just to do basic things— even walking can still take it out of me. I managed to attend soccer with workmates last week, which is another way of saying I ran after a ball for about 10 seconds before nearly collapsing of exhaustion and then dragging myself off the field.
The meds I am on tend to give me the shakes at the moment too, which is getting on my nerves a bit and makes using chopsticks and shuffling cards rather a challenge (especially at the same time). I’ve always has a bit of a shaky hand, but now it’s obvious enough that other people aren’t even pretending not to notice, and I tend to spill sugar when spooning it into a cup.
intepid.com
One reason for the recent lapses in posting is that I have been getting more interested in the technical side of blogging, being well sick of Wordpress (as previously mentioned), and am now seriously intending to migrate to my own simpler, leaner system. The new system will use more dynamic tag-based categories, and allow better integration of posts and comments, minimizing page reloading. This will all be done without using AJAX — I’m pretty sure I can get all the functionality I need using a little Javascript and some good ol’ fashioned HTTP GET and POST requests.
Another stupid acronym that I’ll be avoiding is XML-RPC… what a waste of time! Trying to use this for offline synchronizing has been more trouble that it’s worth, especially with the poorly documented/implemented MetaWeblog API in Wordpress. Again, for my needs HTTP POST will suffice just fine.
So basically I plan to have intepid.com running leaner and smarter and based on very vanilla technology. From the reader’s point of view it may not be so different, but for me it will mean great satisfaction as I take a simple concept and make it [relatively] simple again.
jujuedit
I will release a new version with fixes soon… I mean it! There are some serious problems that need to be addressed, and the fact that it doesn’t currently support unicode pathnames is ridiculous. I have loads of good feedback, bug reports and feature suggestions to work through, some of which I’ve already implemented and others I plan to work on some time in the next few weeks (I’m suddenly going to get much better at time management you see).
drivey
Oh gawwwd… poor poor Drivey. Fear not however; hope is not entirely lost, since I now have a very satisfactory developer environment up and running on the Macbook (after pretty much leaving everything on hold for more than a year). Incidentally, my last post about Windows on a Mac has generated less traffic per word than any other post on this blog. I’m starting to wonder if I’m out of my demographic here, and might have to host a dreaded reader survey to work out why people visit. I suspect more pictures are in order.
television
Yes, evil television. I have been catching up on shows like Heroes, Lost and 24 (as well as a little Veronica Mars). Being in hospital got me started, and now I’ve gone and bought a DivX capable DVD player so there’s no stopping me.
Some observations:
-
Lost has become as annoying as I feared it would, with the Survivors continually missing the opportunity to call "bullshit!" on the Others. How lazy is the writing when the bad guys can endlessly get away with accusing the good guys of being hypocritical, no better than they are etc… this is a very tired and very very stupid device to create moral confusion where there is in fact none to be had. If someone abducts you or your pregnant friend, you are allowed to shoot them— it’s fine. If someone gives you this smug smirky little self-righteous smile like they’ve proven something when you lose your temper, you have every right to get even angrier and shoot them again.
- Dumbass text / fonts — is it some kind of secret clue that there’s a rendering glitch in the O of the opening LOST title as it swoops into camera? And what’s with the proportionally spaced LED font used in the 24 titles? If it weren’t so fundamental to the show I wouldn’t find it so irritating, but seriously, it’s just STUPID to use a font like this [Note: If this sort of thing doesn’t bug you then you probably shouldn’t be reading this blog]. Note that both Lost and 24 have continued with this careless disregard for typography across multiple seasons!
-
Heroes comes close to turning me off with its persistent (but by no means unique) misrepresentation of the concept of evolution. Other TV shows guilty of this confusion of evolution and ambition/power/destiny: ALL OTHER SHOWS BECAUSE TV WRITERS ARE SUCH POORLY EDUCATED HACKS. So because it’s only as retarded as every other TV show featuring humans with advanced powers, I have to let this slide. Otherwise I find it remarkably addictive.
water damage
In the past two months I have managed to ruin three different items by submerging them in water:
- Swatch Irony, a nice chunky watch I found a while back is now dead because I took a bath and forgot to remove it beforehand.
- Nokia 1110, which stopped working after I left it in a puddle of spilt water on my hospital tray. I expected this to come back to life bu it never did.
- iPod nano (1st gen), which I inadvertantly put through a full wash cycle. To my surprise this one has mostly come back to life, with the only problem being that it doesn’t seem to want to turn itself off anymore, so the battery runs down overnight. Apart from that all other features appear to work perfectly. While it was fully dead I went out and got myself a 2nd gen blue one, so it wasn’t all bad.
If you live in New Zealand, are good with C++ and 3D coding and comfortable learning new APIs every second week, then my company (the one which pays my salary, not to be confused with Jujusoft) probably wants to talk to you.