A Simple Way To Go Faster Than Light That Does Not Work
Jun. 18th, 2009
01:10 pm - Jmac.org Video Store is open!
I am pleased to announce the opening of the jmac.org video store, where you can buy DVDs of the first six episodes of The Gameshelf and Jmac's Arcade, respectively.
If you like the things I make, please consider buying a shiny discful of it! As it says on that page, your purchase helps me improve the state of game journalism and critique — and, by extension, supports quality amateur media from game-obsessed overthinkers everywhere.
May. 1st, 2009
08:46 pm - New CSS for jmac.org
I humbly request critique or comment on jmac.org's redesign. What do you think?
Allow me to say that I do feel pretty studly in my ability to transform it from this using only a new stylesheet. There are some small HTML changes between old and new, but they are incidental touch-ups that have nothing to do with the page's format. I didn't even assign any new id or class attributes.
That said, pretty much everything on the site beyond the content area of the front page feels either years out of date, or is overtly preserved personal memorabilia, frozen in time. Personal home pages, man... it's a 1.0 concept in a 2.0 world. Still not sure how best to approach that old stuff.
Mar. 24th, 2009
01:49 pm - jmac.org is back and on linode.com
jmac.org (and gameshelf.jmac.org and appleseed-sc.com) is mostly back up, and should stay that way, because I fully expect Linode to do me right where Tektonic has failed. Please let me know if anything seems amiss; gonna keep the old server running for a little while (at a different name) just in case.
Mar. 22nd, 2009
02:11 pm - ATTN Gameshelf writers (and readers)
Web services on jmac.org are hosed. I have a plan for fixing it, which I will start immediately and then continue as time permits; I'm in the midst of some time-sensitive Appleseed work that is of greater priority. I will post again with further status updates, as they come along. Things should be permanently better before next weekend.
Part of my plan involves migrating hosts once again, this time moving from tektonic.net to linode.com. Stating here that I am very impressed with Linode's service, which Planbeast now uses, and disappointed with Tektonic's. The latter was OK when I started using it last year, but either it's gone downhill fast or I was just lucky for a while. I have lately found its service unreliable, its online diagnostic tools faulty, and its customer service quite lacking. Bummer.
Jul. 17th, 2008
11:10 am - Small doopy changes
I've been getting a lot of calls from tech recruiters. One caught me yesterday morning while I was still sipping coffee, and before I'd gotten started with anything important, and so I chatted with him for a few minutes. I learned that he found me by just Googling a few key terms, which led him to my resume on jmac.org. When I told him I wasn't available for work he joke-groaned with disappointment because I looked so perfect for the job. This is all a nice ego boost, but at the same time I don't need the extra interruptions, so I've just updated my resume with a mind to deflect them.
Was of two minds about splitting my most recent consulting period into two entries, with the formation of Appleseed as the split-point, but decided to go with a single entry and making it clear in the summary that I sell my expertise through the company now.
While I was in there I updated the jmac.org about page, which still had a lot of pre-millenial cruft on it. The opening paragraph used to suggest that my entire online presence was on jmac.org, when in fact it's been spread across a wide cloud of domains, just like with everyone else, for years now. I only use the domain for miscellany that doesn't fit anywhere else, now. So it says that now. Also admitted that I'm now using a commercial hosting service, after eight years of the server equivalent of couch-surfing.
Feb. 20th, 2008
08:44 pm - Found Lost (hurr hurr)
After a hard day's work (for serious), watching Lost via abc.com. They upgraded their video player in such a way that the ads are bigger, which is nice, except that it doesn't work on my G5 any more and plays with lotsa sound hiccups on my laptop, enough to drive me kinda bonkers. I'd totally pay $2/pop to iTMS to download and watch pristine Quicktime versions, but since that's no longer an option, it's thepiratebay.org for me!
It's a race; I may end up watching all the current eps online anyway just from impatience, but we'll see.
I wasn't looking forward to season 4, but ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small}
ruthling gave it the thumbs-up in her LJ recently and that sold me, since our feelings on the show have historically run about the same. (It's got tons of cool stuff, and tons of really annoying stuff. Arrrgh, so much annoying stuff. But... but the cool stuff!)
Understood that jmac.org/blog isn't as unread as I thought. Very good.
I'm going to resume my hunting for cross-posting solutions later. Someone has to have solved this problem correctly, by now...
Feb. 16th, 2008
08:23 pm - And in case you haven't noticed
I'm kinda giving up on jmac.org/blog. I've already stated why I failed to leave LiveJournal, and there's no good crossposting tools that I can find. Meanwhile, the jmac.org blog has 0 subscribers. So LJ kind of wins.
You know what doesn't win? xJournal. It used to be a pretty good LJ client for Mac, but it's been getting crappier. Since I "upgraded" a month or three ago (probably because the old one didn't work on Leopard) my tags have only shown up about half the time, and I have no idea why. In case you were wondering about that, too.
(In fact, the reason I haven't found any good crossposting tools yet is because they do exist but none of them support LJ tags properly. I don't know if this is because LJ's tags are nonstandard and hard to cope with, or if the toolmakers are just lazy.)
Anyway, meh. I think the jmac blog might morph into my company's blog, once my company has a website.
Dec. 8th, 2007
03:11 pm - Das vadanya, LiveJournal (sort of)
I have decided to stop using LiveJournal as my primary blog experiment with using a blog other an LJ as my primary online journal. While I will retain my LJ account, and shall continue to use it for reading my friends' journals and making my own locked posts, I do not plan on regularly making public posts here beyond this point.
Please visit http://jmac.org/blog/ for all your jmac-bloggy needs. LJ users may add ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/syndicated.gif){kind=small}
jmac_org as a friend, and it'll be like old times.
My reasons are various and largely predictable, if you've been following along. They come down to a desire to exert more control over the presentation of my writing. I've had a vague hankering to do this for years, actually, but several coincidental factors have convinced me that now's the right time to shove off.
Naturally, I reserve the right to take it all back later. But, let's see what happens.
Edit: Allow me to reclassify this an an experiment. Let me putter through the rest of December in this mode, and make a final decision with the new year.
Dec. 6th, 2007
05:32 pm - Oh crap: I am a dumbass.
I have figured out why a lot of expected email's been completely unfindable, not even in my spam folder. It's because it's been falling into jmac.org's spam folder, which is different from my mail gmail account's spamtrap, now that I've started to let Gmail handle all jmac.org's mail directly. Only the survivors of the jmac.org spam filter were moving along to my gmail inbox. Failures were just invisible. Arrgh.
So now I look like an ass to at least one client, and maybe to a few friends as well. If you were expecting a reply from me about something and it's been missing, please let me know. I'm attempting to configure things better now.
Nov. 12th, 2007
11:34 am - Knees and Crotches
I've been posting the YouTubey Gameshelf excerpts to BGG and getting lots of hits as a result. Yay. I have also discovered that comments are broken on the new site. Boo. Firebug will help me root it out.
Here's an oldie from 2005. The quippy gameplay between mrmorse and taskboy3000 makes still makes it worth watching, even though the clip's production values are so rough by modern Gameshelf standards. Unscripted er um uh monologues, over-casual wardrobe, and inappropriate furniture leading to lots of frame-centering on knees and crotches.
Oct. 2nd, 2007
12:01 am - Werk
Today was wacky. A kerfuffle resulted from volity.com's highly intolerant mailserver refusing an important mail from a client several days ago, due to the fact that the mail was sent from a hotel with a reputation for spam. The client didn't see the bounce message that the server instantly shot back at them, so they didn't know that I never read the mail. Come Monday morning, frolics abounded. By Monday evening, everything's settled, insert folk juju-dispersal here.
Then had a good Volity meeting. There's only a few steps left before the alpha, which is now slightly late if you want to be a bastard and hold me literally to the dates I called months ago, but it's gonna be close-enough-dammit. Cross your fingers.
During the bits of downtime today, I worked on updating my professional presence. Following a conversation I had with taskboy3000 last week, I'm switching my self-assigned title to "Software Consultant", and have been busily retouching all my resumes and linkedins and such appropriately. I also redid my contracting consulting page, expanding the portfolio section and dropping a lot of the technobabble and buzzwords, reckoning that the resume's a better place for that stuff.
Need to redesign jmac.org. I am tired of the "Big Gray 7" layout that's, what, four years old now? On pages like this, that top bar is just oppressive.
Sep. 23rd, 2007
10:49 pm - Some days
Thursday was a sick day. Clobbered and miserable. At the end of the day I greeted the returned classicaljunkie and she gave me Tylenol cold & flu pills, which (after an hour of sleep) snapped me back into sensibility like a light switch. I swear by this product now.
Friday did some contract work for the first time in a while. (This coming week I'm gonna be doing a lot of it, actually.) After that, delivered an HTML snapshot of the web client's table UI (not super-easy to do since it's a slippery DHTML app) toradiotelescope. He insisted that this demo needs to make a much better first impression than I was preparing, and then volunteered to help make it happen himself. I have no problem with this sort of criticism!
Saturday started to set up the machine that will host jmac.org. After moving over! It's mostly Gameshelf episodes, and I discover that a few seem to exist in duplicate. Well, i can do something about that, at least. Then attended an art salon featureing cthulhia's paintings, marymary's poetry and C's recorder-playin. It was delightful.
Sunday, more machine setup, and reaching out to prodigal jmac.org users via email to tell em what's up and ask if they'd like to stay. Discovery, via daerr, of Google's domain-level management apps. I am likely to point jmac.org's MX records at it to let Google handle all my domain's incoming mail. Yeah, I know.
Afternoon meeting with taskboy3000 about the Gameshelf shoot we're having on Tuesday, including a script read-through. Also, we played MULE again. Trader Joe's dinner with classicaljunkie, and then we hung out at dictator555 and Nate's place for a while, drinking their tea while I wrote some new game news segments. It will be a good show.
Sep. 22nd, 2007
12:07 pm - Attn. all jmac.org users
Out of necessity, I am once again relocating jmac.org to a new host. I've accumulated many user accounts for friends and FOAFs over the years, and would like to get an accounting of which I should take with me and which I should jettison.
If you have an account on my machine and still use it, please let me know in the next week or so, and I'll set you up on the new host. If you'd just like a zipfile of your homedir made available to you, I'll do that instead, and won't set up your account. All accounts I don't hear about will get zipped up and placed in cold storage.
Thanks,
The Mgt
The host, BTW, is with tektonic.net, which so far has lived up to its reputation with my friends as boasting an incompetent sales process but fine support once you've gotten past it. It's the first time I've actually paid for this domain, instead of having it couch-surf on friends' machines or ISPs. Something like $20/month for a Linux VPS.
Sep. 8th, 2007
12:02 pm - Ask Dr. LJ: Local photographer rec?
That last post reminded me:
For some time I've wanted to make a page on jmac.org about my freelance programming business, more than the front-page blurb and link to my resume that's there now. One element I'm missing from this is a nice photograph of myself, with a big fat alpha channel as a backdrop, letting me work it into any layout.
I am actually looking to lay down a little dough on getting a nice couple of smart-lookin studio-made portraits that I could bend to this sort of use. I have also run into multiple instances in the recent past where entities - conference applications, "professional" blogs, et cetry - have requested high-quality photos, and I've had nothing to offer (I attached a manky iSight photo to the ETech app).
Any of y'all have any recommendations of where I could make this happen locally? (This includes you yourself, possibly; I really have no idea.)
(Also held back from making the page by a basic hesitation to promote myself as a freelance programmer when my "real" job is being the president of Volity Games. But hell, if putting a lot of work into it would have a just-my-luck effect of causing Volity to suddenly get a million bucks, forcing me to abandon my freelance job? I wouldn't cry much.)
May. 16th, 2007
02:09 pm - Hivemind: hosting
Jmac.org web & email has gotta move again, and soon. daerr has been my latest kind host, but his machine is falling apart and he's planning on bailing soon. I figure that, after more than eight years of hoboing this domain around, it's finally time to move it off of FriendlyNet and into the realm of paid-for hosting.
Any recommendations for hosting solutions? I am assuming that, since I want me own MySQL tables and Mason-based websites, I am too much of a control freak for Dreamhost, but feel free to tell me otherwise. (I don't need mod_perl, so long as Mason works.)
I am leaning towards getting a virtual user-mode Linux thing somewhere. They're more expensive, but you can go crazy on them. OTOH you have to do your own sysadminning, and enh.
I politely decline in advance offers to host on your own server or your friend's server or whatnot, thank you anyway. (Unless your friend runs a legit hosting business.) This will support, among other things, my professional identity. I need to be able to yell at someone when it falls over, without feeling like I'm stretching a personal favor thin.
Apr. 5th, 2007
01:42 pm - Too bad FAHADmail never got released
Finally removed long-dead links to mint.net and shopinmaine.com from my résumé. The former times out and the latter goes to a squatter page, but at least they went to the trouble of slapping a lobstah on it.
I remember a Photoshop collage we were using to promote shopinmaine. The composition accidentally looked like a skiier was fleeing giant blueberries rolling down the slope after him. And everything had feathered edges. There were probably some lens flares thrown in there too but I can't remember.
Apr. 2nd, 2007
07:49 pm - Shingle repainted
Rejiggered jmac.org's front page. Still more plain-looking than I'd like, but it's much more representative of what I'm up to lately, and includes a bit of self-promotion for my contracting work.
Also brought my résumé up to date, and linked it from the front. I think I will nose around on jobs.perl.org next for a short-term contract.
Feb. 20th, 2007
01:16 pm - We all love you, man
In light of more frequent well-intentioned mistaken-identity emails, I updated my contact page last week with giant-type messages about who I wasn't. It still doesn't always work.
I just got an email from a person who is putting together a cancer-fundraising basketball tournament, which compelled me to actually write him back about his mistake (as well as sending props for his efforts; I mean, that's a good thing he's doing). It's made more bizarre by the fact that this person apparently read enough of my website to figure out that I was in Boston (while the young Mr. McElwain is in Rochester, NY). Eh.
I should make a new jmac.org front page, anyway. The stuff about my blog not being there anymore hasn't been news in years.
Sep. 29th, 2006
12:07 am - Head like a hole
I'm sorry, but this bit of "teh drama" (whatever that means) on James Urbaniak's LJ has me in stitches.
(Yes, I have a similar "evil twin" page on jmac.org and I just looked and it's not funny any more so I'm not bothering to link to it. The story behind it is funnier. But probably not funny enough to be worth asking me about, either, now that I think of it.)
Sep. 18th, 2006
02:43 am - Weekend
Interesting weekend, even though (especially in contrast to the previous two weekends) I didn't really get out much.
Not too long ago at some dictator555-orchestrated event, new-to-town xartofnothingx offered to loan us some of her Google Ad-wrangling expertise. So Saturday afternoon we all sat down around 1 Volity Towers' fabulous oak conference table and I pressed the button that dimmed the candelabra and lowered the 20-foot Internets screen so that we could go over it together. As predicted it was mostly a conversation between her and daerr coz it's not like Zarf or I know anything about this stuff.
After doing lots of keyword tuning, we modified the website to let Google catch Gamut downloads. If we set everything up right, we should be able to tell how many people who see our ads end up not just clicking on them but going all the way to installing our software. Looking forward to seeing what those numbers look like in another week or so.
Other than that I set up all the Jmac's Arcade stuff. And I wanted to make a second episode about Asteroids, except that my making-movies-from-what's-happening-on-t
Wrote the output part of the ledger-display component. This is what you will look at when you want to see a report on the credits you've earned with your games, and from whom, or a report on how you've been spending your credits.
Tonight I got a burst of energy for a strange reason because I almost took a random opportunity to meet a couple of new friends-of-a-friend. Due to a benign miscue I ended up not being able to go, but for some reason the fact I almost did made me go wheeeee for like two hours after. Huh?! Yeah I dunno. I guess with all of everything going on I'm feeling socially adventurous again, as socially adventurous as I am able to get, anyway. Well, good.
Then I cleaned up Whitey, the old iBook, which is to say I attacked it with fingernail and Brillo pad until its lid was (almost) clean of stickers. I have moved past being the sort of person who has a sticker-covered latoptop, I suppose. I chose, however, to leave the Jim's Big Ego vinyl sticker that cthulhia gave me a long time ago. For some reason, advertising local geekish folkrock is still within the bounds.
There also remains a little grinning bat inside, over the screen, a memoir of the time when doctor_atomic was a housemate. And there's an extremely deteriorated Tirade sticker on the bottom, probably from a Looney Labs order from early 2002 or thenabouts.
The only thing I didn't hit on today's to-do list was fixing the toys on jmac.org, which have been broken for god knows how long, probably since I switched servers last year. How embarrassing! The toys, mostly stuff that all dates pre-2002, really serves no purpose other than impressing people exploring my site for the first time, but that's a pretty good reason by itself to keep them propped up. I'll have to get to that this week.
Navigate: (Previous 20 Entries)