A Simple Way To Go Faster Than Light That Does Not Work

Dear everyone in the world:

It may come to pass that I care about something which you don't particularly care about. While I welcome your indifference and resultant nonparticipation -- lord knows I do my fair share of that -- I do not think much is to be gained by loud utterances of the OH JESUS DRAMA WHO CARES GET A LIFE variety.

I realize that you may come from online communities where emotionally charged disagreements happen all the time, and where yours is the standard and accepted reaction to it. I do not think it's a hammer that's applicable to every variety of online resolution management, though.

Yours etc,
jmac

Also I just made an LJ feed for planet_volity, which gets stuff from Planet Volity. (Which usually seems to be about a day behind. Is this normal?)

Example of why I need better production values on my show: http://media.engadget.com/videos/Eng_Cat_PSP_vs_DS.mpg (Because it's quite clever, and contains nerdy catfighting. Beep beep beep bonk rowr.)

I am a hair's breadth away from crumbling in my resistance to buying a Nintendo DS, even though I never bought more than the two at-purchase-time games I got with my Game Boy SP two years ago. (It did take me like a year to get through every last bit of Wario Ware, though, and I enjoyed every minute of it. (And yes, I know there's a DS version of that game now...))

But I discovered yesterday that at $130, it's cheaper than I thought it would be, making it indeed half the price of a PSP, just as that educational video pointed out. And I just discovered that the internets are full of hairy hackers who've already published programming libraries for it, including some that take advantage of its 802.11b wifi. Ohh sexy.

VV's budget includes a line-item covering the purchase of a pile of potential "target systems" like this, but... I may jump the gun a little on this particular one.

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Sorry I don't swap out my userpic more often. Who knew I'd like to use the Reverend Sir Doctor's portrait so much. I really do, too.

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Oh, I just remembered that I did in fact get two other Game Boy games, later that year: Final Fantasy Tactics, which is great and addicting but I got burnt out on, and Super Mario 3, which I physically lost cuz those cartridges are so goldang tiny. And the DS media are supposedly even smaller! I will have to set up some kind of wee storage system for them I guess.

Ew, gross, my neighbors at the Deisel are playing Monopoly. I am probably feeling something faintly akin to what my kid-lit-crit pals feel when people gush over Harry Potter. Here's a quarter, kid; go buy yourself a real board game.

They look like they might be a would-be couple getting to know each other, too. Oh no, they're doing it all wrong. This is what Kosmos's Games for Two line is for, you knuckleheads. Ah, I cannot watch. O the calamity.

I am going to start an LJ community called monopolyfree just so I can make indignant posts every time I see people with the gall to bring their Monopoly sets out in public where I have to listen to their dice rattling. I will call these people monopomoos.

I will show them. I will show them all.

Tags are working exactly as I hoped, and this really took me off-guard! Suddenly, posts I made nearly four years ago are right next to posts I made yesterday, when certain tags are clicked. Combined with my starting to use Xjournal, a kickass client that makes it very easy to pull up and edit any historical post, this creates a small dilemma: should I repair posts from the past? I'm running into a lot that have broken but repairable links, or incorrect information, or plain-text references to people who have gotten LJ accounts since then.

Rather more unsettling, a friend emailed me to say psst while pointing to a post that was far more frank about my feelings regarding certain FOAFs than I would write in a public post today. The post was from 2001, when most of my RL friends were not yet LJ friends.

I marked the post as private, and will have to pay more attention to this sort of content as I continue my tagging mission. (Which is taking as long as I expected; I'm not even through January 2002 yet!) I pray that I do not accidentally cause awkwardness as old posts start to bubble up. I actually don't think that I will cause actual anger, even if I let some tricky posts slip by; I am not a cranky meanie. But still. Feel free to call me out on anything I say, even if I said it a long time ago.

I'm using XJournal to add tags to all my past posts, starting from the top. (I'm also using it to drop tags into new posts, like this one.) The app has a great post-history browser and a simple tag interface, so it's working very nicely, but it is going to take me a long time to finish. Weeks, maybe months. I have made a lot of posts over the years. At least I am having fun puzzling over some of my earlier ones, filled with pointers that no longer resolve.

For example, detail of one post from late 2001:

There is some weird stuff going on, things I wouldn't want everyone to read, and which a month ago I would have posted here, but I've more or less blown my cover since then. I guess I'll make it a friends-only post, if I make a post at all, even though the number of LJ friends I have is WEE. (If any of my anonymous (but RL friend) readers would like an access code, please bark at me. Note that this will do little more than grant you read access to emotionally gushy posts, so this might not actually be a feature.)

And then the next day:

Re: mushy I have fallen out of what ever frame of mind I inhabited when writing previous entry. This was assisted by LJers pawing at me in meatspace on Wednesday for more details, yum yum yum. I love them, and yet, those in the room would could see auras could no doubt see the cheezy CG effect of overlapping armor plates dropping clack-clack-clack over my psyche like with the Batmobile.

This is not to say that taking inventory of all the strange goings-on, and how my past fits into them, wouldn't be a good thing. But I really do need to write for myself first, and then we'll see about issuing the press releases and whatnot.

For the life of me I can't say now what in the world I was talking about. Seriously: nothing was going on, as far as I can remember. Nothing for me to be coy about, anwyay. I just don't know.

Ah, crap. I accidentally wiped this post. Now you get silly pictures without any context. Ha! Ha! Ha!

I can't link to the only good image I could find of Karl, so you get this instead.

Sorry, but I couldn't resist adding Livejournal-flavored text to it.

Originally I linked to this photo but I am too lazy to tell the story about Charles and neckties and anime conventions again.

$PROF1 just wrote me back.

Hi. Thanks for your message, and your interest in our research group.

I could meet you  this Wednesday at 11:00am. Does that work for you?

Eek. I am now very excitable. This is sure to mess up my evening, when I'm supposed to be writing. This is definitely sure to mess up my LotR plans for 12:01 Wednesday morning in Belfast, Maine, too. Do I want to attend this crucial appointment on no sleep? I happen to know that I don't have much problem putting off sleep for a day if I have to, but... hrm.

Well, if I do go, I'll be able to sidestep the vaguely thorny issue of carpool politics with one fellow moviegoer, who lives on the route I'd be taking but insists that I should drop my car off at his house (in Kittery, on the ME/NH border) and then let him go the rest of the way, since he told me (on a mailing list) that I am the scariest driver he's ever encountered. Asked to defend his position, he said that I drove too slowly to be able to react to obstacles or other danger in time. I could talk about what I think of his driving, but I think that sentence says everything that needs to be said. I am happy that I now have an excuse not to humor him.

Last night I talked to two Lab expats at just as many parties that cthulhia and queue dragged me to (well, cthulhia acted as the primary dragging force, of course) and they basically just repeated what my sponsor told me. Actually, they said, "Oh, you've talked to [$SPONSOR] already? Then you know everything you need to know." This helps in its own way, I reckon.

One of the parties was also the first where LJ was brought up as a topic, after cthulhia introduced me to some people using our LJ usernames (half-jokingly, since I knew some of the people iRL anyway ("RL"?)). She actually misspoke mine (using my Unix username/real life nickname/domain name, which is not "prog") and I corrected her, which I guess dooms me all the more to admitting my LJ addiction. So it goes.

Or so it goes until the book is done, anyway.

Weighing speaking for its own sake versus saying at least something. The latter wins out; a completely empty page looks like its owner just doesn't care. I think I'm OK at introductions, anyway.

Hello, world. World number two.

This is my secret-identity weblog; I have had other, more obvious ones for a while now, but a cohort invited me to get an account here so's we could be Friends. Hurray! I further rationalize that my geeky side is curious about the technical and user-interface facets of a popular weblogging system, as I'm interested in hacking on these sorts of things, so I've given myself a research grant to waste time here. Thank you, self!

I picked the name 'prog' because it was the first thing on this page that looked easy to type.

I have no plans regarding using this blog versus my other "social" one. Well, maybe: I have a stated policy on that one never to mention anything I wouldn't want all my friends and co-workers reading. Does that necessarily imply that I'll feel encouraged to gush my little heart out all over this one? Consider the follow-through: would you want to read a journal filled solely with gushly goo? Yii

Well, we'll see. Nice to meet you.