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Looking For Quacks In The Pavement

Category: Geekery

  • The King Of Perfect Timing

    I’ve always had a few knacks, among them a knack for being proven wrong almost immediately after making a definitive statement. This time the knack which has bitten me in the backside is that which gives me the utmost in perfectly ironic timing. If I do something, there’s a good chance that if I’d simply waited a day or two I’d have known not to do that something.

    On Sunday I purchased the license code for the City of Heroes/City of Villains “Good Versus Evil” edition for the kids’ account so they could get some extra character slots per server and go into supergroup bases and such like that. So, guess what yesterday’s press release from NCSoft had to say?

    Today we announced the acquisition of City of Heroes from Cryptic Studiosâ„¢ and the formation of our new Northern California studio which we are informally calling NCsoft® NorCal […]. Nearly the entire City of Heroes team from Cryptic Studios has joined the NCsoft team and together we have formed the core of our new studio.

    Okay, so far so good. What’s the catch?

    All players with City of Heroes retail accounts will now have access to City of Villains, and all City of Villains retail accounts will now have access to City of Heroes. Players that didn’t previously have access to “the other side” will find that they do now.

    Oh. Well… I suppose that’s a good thing… for people who didn’t plunk $30 down for said “access to City of Villains” a mere 48 hours beforehand! Dagnabbit.

    (It bears mentioning, footnote-style, that the “GvE” edition provides a few in-game perks that probably won’t be given away with this “access to” bonus from NCSoft. Still, I could’ve bought the code for said perks alone and spent twenty dollars less. Such is my life, eh? And the kids get the benefit now instead of having to wait ’til NCSoft blesses everyone. So. There’s that, at least.)

  • Gravatar Support Added

    For what it’s worth, the comments portion of this journal now supports Gravatar images. Now that they’re owned by the WordPress folks, I figure performance shouldn’t be too much of an issue going forward.

    What can I say? It’s an excuse to use “buddy icons” in my journal. I’m a sucker for that sort of thing.

  • Annoying New Comment Spam Trick

    Well, this is amusing. And by “amusing” I mean “annoying and frustrating,” of course.

    A while back I posted an entry containing a music selection. Several comments were made at the time, and then life moved on. This is all normal so far. This morning, however, I saw two new comment notifications in my mailbox for that entry… and one of them looked really familiar.

    It should have, since it was Kyla’s comment exactly, repeated by someone claiming to be “GoDaddy” using GoDaddy’s support email address. The next comment from them was a few characters of gibberish… which got approved because the previous comment was approved, probably because it looked identical (from the spam filter’s perspective) to an existing comment.

    So, yes, I deleted them both and marked the gibberish comment as spam. I just hope this isn’t the new trend. I have enjoyed a couple years’ worth of peace and quiet on the spam-fighting front and don’t want to go back to the bad old days of playing whack-a-mole.

    Hell of a way to start my Friday, let me tell ya.

  • Tag, I’m it!

    This journal is now upgraded to WordPress version 2.3, for good or for ill. This upgrade required a few behind-the-scenes changes so I took advantage of this opportunity to do a little “out with the old, in with the new” action.

    The Old: I wasn’t using the Timeline at all, and only rarely did I update my Status page. The plugins which made those pages work aren’t fully compatible with 2.3 so I ditched them. Since I was already on a housekeeping binge, I made the Technorati widget go away (you could count the referrals I received from them on the fingers of one hand) and removed some of the old themes & plugins that I was never going to use again anyway.

    The New: Tagging. I don’t think I’m going to go through my back catalog of nearly-1800 posts to add tags, but I can add new tags as I go and as I find the need to touch up an older posting.

    The Unchanged: I was going to spring a new theme on you, but I couldn’t find one that didn’t annoy me in one important aspect or another. I think in the long run it’ll have turned out wise to just plug new code revisions into this theme just as I’ve done with the WordPress 2.0, 2.1 and 2.2 upgrades. This upgrade was infinitely less annoying than the last one, at least.

    The Linkage: If you’re going to retrofit an existing theme, you should absolutely pick up the Advanced Tag Entry plugin and the Configurable Tag Cloud widget plugin. With Advanced Tag Entry, you actually get to manage the tags you’re using on each of the posts. The default WordPress 2.3 installation provides no meaningful control over existing tags whatsoever, and ATE remedies that handily. The Configurable Tag Cloud, meanwhile, gives you the sidebar widget we should have been given with the stock WordPress install in the first place. Get it, use it, love it.

    Well, this took a bit longer than I originally expected. I guess I’ll have to work on my long-overdue image manipulation projects later this week, eh? (There’s a gallery to fill with pictures from the coast trip, there are banner images to craft for both of the forums…)

  • A Duck and His Pond

    This would seem to be the year during which I resurrect departed forum communities. First I created AEIOU to give former ABM denizens a new home. Now, in the spirit of Pool, I present Pond.

    One of them is populated by anime geeks. The other is just run by an anime geek. I apply the same standards of behavior to both, however: Comport yourself respectfully, communicate in complete words and sentences. That’s all I really ask…

  • Cleaning House, The Second Weekending

    Okay, so I blew off doing the cleanup I’d planned yesterday. Today, however, I believe I’ve made up for that lack. I dragooned Kyla into making a trip out to that new Ikea store (with a follow-up stop at Best Buy) and we came home with a few nice-and-cheap storage solutions that I spent the next few hours putting to good use.

    There’s a new hanging-shelf piece in my closet, consisting of some Velcro and a collapsible set of fabric shelves. Into those shelves went the various cold-weather pieces I had piled up hither and yon, along with a couple pairs of jeans that used to be wadded up on the closet floor. To make room for the shelving, I weeded out some of the clothing and bedding I’d thrown into the closet over the years. Yes, I actually threw stuff away. Amazing!

    I’m also in the middle of migrating my burned-CDs collection from those clunky, hard-to-sort binders into dual-disc sleeves which I’m filing into my new paperboard CD drawers. At $13 per set of two drawers with enclosure, it was too good a solution to pass up. As a side benefit, I’m culling lots of anime that I downloaded entirely for the kids’ sake. That will all go into one of the binders and sent to them for safe-keeping. I’m also burning some DVD-ROM discs to finish out a few series that I managed to botch up the organization of the first time around, or that I simply never got around to tidying up. That aspect of the cleanup project, of course, directly benefits the available disk space on my main computer and the network storage drive. Everybody wins!

    To round out the shopping trip I picked up a small, cheap external mouse for the laptop (touchpads annoy me, and a full-sized desktop mouse is a nuisance for mobile use) and a couple of cheap 2GB USB memory sticks. I don’t like the idea of feeding batteries into a wireless device, so my new mouse sports a retractable USB cord instead.

    I’m not done yet, of course. I have some laundry to do, more CDs to file and DVDs to burn, and I need to tidy up the explosion of fabric outside of my closet. My sense of accomplishment, however, is quite high. Hooray for organization and cleaning!

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