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

06:48 pm - Thinking of you, Ms. P.

Doing dishes and wiping away the permanent coffee stain on my kitchen counter (which will presently reappear, because my coffee-making habits are, uh, habitual) brought to mind perpetualpuddle, a sweet little poem of an LJ account, if one not used in many years.

I believe that surrealestate originally newgrouped it. Nice to see that it is still there. (See its user info for background.)

10:42 pm - Twiddle dee-dee

OK, so, I've been Twittering a lot, and I'm probably going to keep doing so. If you don't use Twitter or Facebook, you're missing a lot of the crap I'm writing every day. It's a different flavor of crap than what I write here (go look and see what I mean), but it's still crap by me, which is of theoretical interest to my friends.

So. Given my impression that some people react to this sort of thing with profound gross-out yuck, should I use a service like LoudTwitter to post my daily tweets on my LJ?

Poll #1406258 Twonk
Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 30

Hmm?

11:02 am - Facebook again

Because of a new project, I shall endeavor to spend more time haunting Facebook. Feel free to friend me there (if I know who you are).

I visited FB for the first time in a long while the other day, and was surprised at how many people I know have taken to hitting it regularly, generating new status updates crawling up my wall. I think the disconnect I feel comes from relatively few people in my local social circles relying on Facebook as a social focal point, at least compared to Livejournal.

A lot of the folks on my LJ flist now are people who got accounts expressly so they could keep up with friends' conversations as they become increasingly filled with verbal pointers to LJ posts. Through conversation with a remote friend (who recently deleted their LJ), I see that FB holds that same role in other small social communities. I imagine it's quite possible that more people use Facebook for things like event-organizing and other social announcements than LJ, now.

03:59 pm - Here Comes Everybody

Some young punks have apparently been freely harassing Davis Square residents for some time now. That thread begins with someone describing how he was assaulted and slapped around by them, apparently in broad daylight and with people all around. The many comments that follow form a story about how this same group has been making trouble in the square for a while now, apparently trying to intimidate people into giving them money or valuables through insults, threats, and even chasing, shoving or hitting them. It sounds like the police frequently get involved (as they did during the OP's altercation) but so far they haven't been able to proactively do much about their presence.

Their anarchic behavior reminds me of how the PCs get through life in the Grand Theft Auto games. If nothing more interesting is going on, you can just wander around thumping people for the lulz, and if your star rating gets too high and a cop nabs you, you suffer a minor inconvenience for a minute before getting back into the action. (One comment seems to confirm that the kids were back to messing with people about 30 minutes after the OP's incident.) Meanwhile, everyone else in the game just sort of mills around. This makes me sad.

The online response is more heartening. Among the "hey I saw those guys too" comments are some pretty good suggestions about what to do next. (And a few eye-rolling blusters, but at least they're on the right side.) It makes me think more of the world described in Clay Shirky's recent opus, which opens with the tale of how, a couple of years ago, a spontaneous online community formed around the fact that a woman in New York had her lost cell phone found by a kid who, after being identified by their subsequent use of it, refused to give it back. Eventually the NYC cops capitulated under the insistent weight of the community and charged the kid with theft.

It would be nice to see that power turned on something that's actually a criminal threat to an entire local population. I hope that something like this is indeed ramping up. I see that the OP, initially not wanting to file a report for fear of reprisal from the hoodlums, has changed his mind and spoken with a detective after reading some 100 sympathetic and action-seeking comments. This is good.

10:24 pm - Meta McMeta

Great scott, that was the most horrible thing I've seen in davis_square in a long time. It's like coming home to discover a steaming turd in the middle of your kitchen floor. (And you don't have any pets.)

This is a compliment to the mods that the turds stand out so much, rather than being part of the background noise like-certain-communities-I-could-name, but I still feel like it shouldn't have gotten as far as it did. Wrote a mod about it.

(Started to mention TNH-style moderation tactics in my email, for I am a fan of them, but then had second thoughts. I'm not convinced that they apply in the case of every active internet community. It's an interesting question.)

12:02 am - If you're feeling great, press Option-8

• 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.

05:31 pm - Dammit livejournal

Observing that two different LJ clients had the same misbehavior regarding tags, I looked in LJ's docs to find that you can only keep 1,000, which I seem to have passed a while ago. Sheesh.

Deleting all my underused tags is a project for another day.

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 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.

10:24 am - My stupid icons are back

Thank you, "anonymous" benefactor, for the paid account!

09:25 am - Developer's Notebook addendum

This blog is now on the first page of Google hits for [fuck msie]. (It is also the number-one hit for [msie fuck]. Ha.)

05:29 pm - Look it is a number

This is my 3,000th LJ post. My sixth anniversary on LJ was yesterday, actually.

11:28 am - davis_square mutterings

davis_square is normally a great community but there are two patterns that make me sad. One is more interesting (and confusing) than the other.

Q: Something about post formatting policy.
A: If you can't write a Greasemonkey script to format other peoples' posts yourself, like me and all my friends can, go back to AOL, luser. Now if you'll excuse me I shall don my totally badass black trenchcoat and away to the Games Workshop store because I hear they just got a new shipment of Space Orks in. Waugh!
A2: LOL USE LUNIX
Commentary: The Slashdork effect. This is not surprising and there's probably not much to be done about it, but it's still disheartening to see. And I just know exactly when it will appear but I still must read the comments anyway.

Q: Something about local coffee houses.
A: Oh god don't go to the Diesel. Every time I go in there I get spat on by the staff and the clientele bludgeon me with their fashionable laptop accessories. I think it's because I'm so manly. I'm just not sure.
A2: Oh hell yes! Sometimes the Diesel workers call my mom up at home and harass her with their tattoos. It's awful!
Commentary: This, I just do not understand. Seriously, what? I'm just an ordinary slobby guy and I've been going there for years and have never picked up on any attitude. I'm kind of numb but I'm not that numb.

01:38 pm - Anonymous readers

Been seeing an increase in anonymous comments on my LJ lately. I know I have some small amount of google juice goin' on here but really I don't know who beyond my flist reads this thing.

The only anon poster I had for awhile was 'batman4050', a friendly acquaintance from Gameshelf-related circles. But people have been leaving topical but anonymous comments on old threads, and then someone anonymously questioned my getting emotional at a cartoon, so I'm starting to wonder who-all some of you are - if I actually do have random non-LJ readers and not just people who fly in on Google searches. Feel free to comment. (Also feel free to pick up a free LJ account or use OpenID or something; I'm far more likely to respond to your comments that way.)

01:32 pm - GIP

Image found on this page while I was writing this comment about the pop-up porn case.

03:29 pm - Bierce and Stross

After aspartaimee started repeatedly complaining about my Herr Doktor Rotwang userpic, a Rotwang-hating movement geared up within my flist. I've retired him as my default icon; you get to look at ol' Ambrose until I can think of something better.

In other news, it's been two weeks since I was last at my desk at ITA, and in the interim someone swapped headsets of my two phones. (I don't know why I have two phones).

I read and enjoyed the Charlie Stross novella Missile Gap this morning. You can read it in its entirety online here, as well as purchasey information if you're into that sort of thing. The story summary is basically "What if Charlie Stross tried to write a Cold War political thriller?" It's quite depressing but really the tone's set in the first few paragraphs.

I was sad during my lunchbreak in failing to find the original of one of my turn-of-the-century comics (though interested to find a lot of other stuff; maybe I'll scan em and post a retrospective sometime). I had promised this particular one to a friend as a present, and my not being sure where it is gnaws at me; it's some of my best work in an artistic area I haven't practiced in many years. I'm sure it's buried somewhere. More incentive to clean my damn room, perhaps.

02:58 pm - New Interbutt Channel

I didn't know until I reread the Wii article on Wikipedia (it was FA yesterday), but the full version of the Internet Channel is available from the Wii Shop thingy. It's a free download until June, iirc.

Yes, I got the Wii email from Nintendo about it and hit its attached "Update" button, but apparently that was a system update and not a browser update, even though the email was all about the new browser. whatevah

Random observation: LJ seems to increase the default font size if you're using the Wii browser. Cool.

11:33 am - Neat LJ RSS feetch

You can syndicate LJ posts with a specific tag attached by adding "tag=tagname" to the RSS feed URL's query part.

I just set The Gameshelf's blip-blog (cough) feed URL to http://prog.livejournal.com/rss?tag=the+gameshelf, and it works great; you can read all my gameshelf-tagged posts (and only those posts) on the show's blip page. Cool. This saves me from spinning off an entirely new LJ just for the show.

Of course you also end up reading whatever today I ate a ham sandwich stuff that I mash into the same blog posts, but that's fine.

12:14 pm - ROTWANG GIP

I swear to god I just happened to find this image on my hard drive a minute ago. It's Rotwang, the batshit insane cyberneticist from Fritz Lang's "Metropolis", and a template for the mad-scientist visual stereotype that would develop over the 20th century. It's pronounced ROHT-VAHNG but believe me he's heard it all.

I am fixing problems with exploding filehandles. It causes me to find things like this.

01:25 pm - Also that Pie place closed.

I shouted at my TV last night because one of aspartaimee's userpics, the source of which I'd never had cause to investigate, suddenly and distinctly flashed by while I was watching one of the Arrested Developments that I torrented last December.

That's hilarious. I always love it when that happens.

The show is good too. Watching it marathon-style is a little tiring because all the episodes more or less kick off in the same way: Michael confronts his mother or siblings about their spending money foolishly, or his dad in prison tells him about yet another chunk of the family's secret fortunes stashed away in some ludicrous fashion. But they then each spin off and then re-collide in wonderful ways, and the characters are great. It's the most fun I've had watching a comedy TV show since I was into Seinfeld.

Oh: I forgot about The Tick, the live-action one. But that didn't feel like a TV show since I saw them all over the space of two evenings at jhango's house with friends. Hella fun, though.

03:13 pm - Local Gamers filter administrivia

I made a post last night to my "local gamers" filter and it has been pointed out to me that it was missing a few names. I just added a couple of people.

If you'd like to be on it and you don't appear to be, gimme a yell. I use it mostly to organize semi-spontaneous game stuff and post to it infrequently.