East of the Sun, West of the Moon

Why do text-based games still attract players? Don’t ask me, I’ve been playing the same text-based game more-on-than-off for over 12 years now. Most of that time was as a creator or administrator and not a player, admittedly, but I would point out that this is largely due to my odd tendency to enjoy programming.

I think you can read the blog entries freely, but I could be wrong. At least my RSS reader can pick up the feed, so I guess that’s a reasonable indication that it works. Anyway, I’m currently spending some time at the invite-only beta of 360.yahoo.com and what blogs entries I write are on the blog I have on that setup. Let me know if you’d like to take a peek around as well, invitations are virtually unlimited, as long as you keep the number of pending invites below 100 (apparently, I haven’t exactly tested that limit, nor do I plan to).

In the mail today an advertisement for Sonic’s new Ranchero Salad, but food wasn’t the first thing I thought about when I saw that.

Back in December I quoted an article about how modern technology is overloading people with email, IM and other things.

Today I saw another article about the same or something very similar:

All of that data flying at you by e-mail, instant message, cell phone, voice mail and BlackBerry–it could actually be making you dumber.

Dr. Edward Hallowell, a psychiatrist who’s studied attention deficit disorder for more than a decade, has identified a related disorder he calls attention deficit trait, and he says it’s reaching epidemic proportions in the corporate world. Unlike attention deficit disorder, or ADD, people aren’t born with ADT. It’s the result, he contends, of the modern workplace, where the constant and relentless chatter coming from our computers, phones and other high-tech devices is diluting our mental powers.

Very interesting read, I recommend it to all email/IM/cellphone/etc junkies out there.

And, of course, in an ironic twist I almost forgot I had this entry sitting here, unpublished. Fixed!

Alright. The site now looks (from my perspective) 99% the same as before the upgrade, but I haven’t tested it yet with IE, just Firefox. I will likely get a Round Tuit ™ for IE later this week so if it looks horrid with that one, I suppose you could drop me a comment about it, and I might feel more encouraged to fix it.

The upgrade seems to have worked ok but for now I’m using the default classic layout, not in the mood for messing around with CSS or PHP right now. When I am in the right mood for that, first thing I want to figure out is why the admin interface has the blog title written through the rest of the page, making the top part a bit difficult to read. Fortunately all it says there is WordPress so not much is lost, but it distracts from the actual interface.

I need to read up on what the report as spam in the comment-management interface really does. Sounds promising, though. *yawn*

Goodnight, inkernet!

I’m pondering upgrading the WordPress package to the (relatively) new 1.5 version tonight, which may cause downtime and/or the blog to show up with the default layout instead of the current customised one.

Just thought I’d warn you.

Two amusing links:

• How old is that dinosaur?
• Not your average desktop background here. I’d be tempted to try creating one myself if it wasn’t for the fact that the 19″ monitor that I use is fairly heavy so I’d rather not move it just for one picture. Credit to Komma Punt Log for the link.

That’s it for today.

…Who’s there?

Apparently not me. Just got nudged that I hadn’t written anything in a few days. My apologies!

I’ve been ignoring the news a bit today, since what’s on there doesn’t make anyone any happier, I’m sure.

On the OS X front things have mostly settled. I replaced my dozen Terminal.app instances with a single tabbed iTerm instance, after getting it set up correctly. I gave up — for the moment, anyway — on CodeTek’s Virtual Desktop application. Something in it makes Firefox lose keyboard focus a few times too often and since that browser is here to stay, the other one had to go. So then I was once again back to one desktop. This is part of the reason that I tested iTerm again, and this time successfully, to reduce the clutter in my Dock.

However, a keyboard shortcut to browser through the minimized/hidden windows would be handy, so I installed Witch (WIndow swiTCH).

I also installed WindowDragon for being able to drag/resize windows anywhere I bloody well like instead of just the title bar or the lower right corner, and ClearDock to fiddle with the looks of the dock, both of which require Application Enhancer (a.k.a APE), an interesting addition to your OS X desktop.

Other updates… oh, decided to consolidate my iTunes collection and redirect it to an NFS-mounted directory. I do so like confusing iTunes! Because the tracks I had in my collection were on the same NFS-mounted filesystem, this caused it to go at a snail’s pace and I had to let it run overnight. Ugh. But at least now I can better organize my tracks inside iTunes, instead of updating the meta data and then convincing iTunes that it’s changed. I think this’ll work better in the long run.

In entirely different news, this Sunday M and A and I went for a walk, visiting M’s mom along the way and apparently it was sunny enough that in the evening I felt like I got sunburned. Hmm, spring is really here now, eh? For those who know what all these letters mean I can confirm that N isn’t home, he’s been kidnapped by his grandmother again and visiting relatives on that side of the family in California during spring-break. I bet the weather’s even better there!

I’m glad to see a new entry for Ms. Beach Bum, I was beginning to wonder if everything was alright. Turns out she’s tired, perhaps, but alive and well otherwise.

And on that semi-positive note, I’m off to listen to some more music, get kicked across the board in another game of Go or two and try to do some useful work on this computer.

Hrm.

I started using Thunderbird yesterday.. or was it the day before that? Anyway.. a bit of an uphill struggle, but I think I’m getting there now.

Today I was putting some more of my regular email environment into place. With Mutt I have it set up to use a default From: address for most email and then a few exceptions when sending email to specific addresses (mailinglists in this case). With Thunderbird you can create additional identities and specify in which folders to store copies when sending email, where to store drafts, etc. But you can’t associate these identities with specific folders or specific target addresses. That takes away quite a bit of the usefulness of those identities, for me.

Pondering a workaround, I find that you can’t have more than one account to the same server and username combination. So much for the idea of reading a certain folder (and then setting it up with a particular From: address of course) with a separate account.

I’m also still looking around for biff-like extensions that, when asked, can give me a bit more information than ‘there is a new message in some folder in some account of yours’, which is all that the Thunderbird icon in the dock will tell me, right now.

Next on the list is support for randomized signatures. Sure, I can create signature files, but those contain static text. Sure, I can install the Signature 0.2 extension but that too only allows for static text. And from all reports I gather that TagZilla is at a dead-end, and I’m not even sure that it supported this idea. I’m worried that these might be famous last words, but… surely it can’t be that difficult to call an external program that takes care of the rest, whether that’s through a (bash, tcsh, zsh) shell script, a batch file, or an Apple Script? Bah.

Hm, to recap some of the gotchas I sorted in the past 48 hours:

• By default it only checks the Inbox and you need to edit the properties of every individual folder and mark it as check for new messages. That’s a pain in the ass of course, and can be fixed by adding a line or two in your user.js file:

  // Download mail from all accounts on startup
  user_pref("mail.check_all_imap_folders_for_new", true);
  

• A mild annoyance was that it asked me every time again whether it should move on to the next folder with new messages. You can turn that off as well, but not through the preferences dialog as far as I could find:

  // This pref controls the "Advance to next unread message in [x] folder” behaviour
  // 0 - Always go to the next folder without prompting
  // 1 - Ask before going (the default behaviour)
  // 2 - Never go to the next folder with unread messages
  user_pref(”mailnews.nav_crosses_folders”, 0);
  

• Don’t try to read the (maildir) folders that you’re accessing (through IMAP) with Thunderbird with Mutt at the same time, it really confuses the hell out of Thunderbird.

Summary so far: I like it, but I miss being able to handle everything with keyboard shortcuts.