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

• classicaljunkie volunteered to help clean up my tags, found the LJ page that lets you mass-delete them after sorting by usage, and (with my blessing) nuked all tags I've used only once. This cleared up well over half of my alloted 1,000 tag-slots. So, my new posts have tags again. Aren't you pleased.

• I have a copy of the volity.net webclient alpha mostly running on Brie, my creamy white MacBook. This is very important, not just because Brie's become my primary all-sorts work machine, but because I left volity.net's codebase in a sad state when I last touched it, way out of synch with Subversion. No more of that.

The webclient daemon's regression tests all pass again, as of this evening, and I'm raring to write more tests. Recent work for clients saw me learning to really learn to rock Test::WWW::Mechanize and I am honestly looking forward to writing a mechanized agent that will try to play Tic-Tac-Toe games over the web and report back to me. (I may need to write and install a deterministic TTT bot to complement it.)

I have a goal to launch the damn alpha by April 1, and feel it's entirely realistic. I'll miss it only if I get too distracted by pay-money-work, which isn't impossible, but even in that case I'm gonna get a lot of good work done.

• My consulting business's brand-identity work is down to negotiating business card design, which is just a peewee version of the website's design. I am nearly there! I will be so happy when I can finally announce the business's name and identity loud n proud, though I haven't been exactly keeping it a secret in the meantime. (Have begun renegotiating my open contracts to point at the company, rather than at me personally.)

• Idled in the The Burren with taskboy3000 this evening to discuss the format of upcoming Gameshelf shoots, the likes of which you have never seen before, at least not on this particular show. Mailed our director about it. He seems really energized about our trying new things, and quite into playing his role through all of it. We are lucky to have him on-board.

Is there a word for when a baby decides that a certain person in a certain setting is a fascinating source of visual data, and so stares and stares? Mr. T. Boy had one of these attached to him tonight, from the next table over. Very amusing.

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.