So far, response to yesterday’s meme has been… light.

Dawn asked,

1. “If given the opportunity to move anywhere, where would it be and why and who would you take with you?” — It’s crazy, but I don’t think I would ever want to leave Portland. It would take a phenomenal opportunity elsewhere to make me move, and even then it’d be an agonizing decision. Now, within Portland? I’d find a nice big house, possibly west of downtown but maybe someplace Laurelhurst-ish, and there’d be room for me and thee and a couple of guest rooms where friends or the rugrats or visitors could crash, and a big theater-basement (hey, I like Tom’s setup!), and all that good stuff. Yeah.
2. “If you could spend a day with one anime character, which one would it be?” — You are a cruel woman. Only one? Damn. Well, I’m going to weasel out of this with a coin-flip. It would be either the genius scientist (and goddess) Washuu or the late, great Maes Hughes, soldier, spy and proud papa extraordinaire. Now, if you’d asked what character I would want to spend a night with… well, let’s just not go there. Heh.
3. “Sunrise or sunset?” — Sunset. I’m not awake early enough to appreciate sunrises properly. Even if I’m up early enough, I’m still not awake enough. Besides, the ocean’s to the west of us, and sunsets over the ocean are the best sunsets.

Now, the roomie answered half of the meme but left out the questions. So I’m going to answer the sorts of questions that he might, as he put it, “blurt down the stairwell.”

1. No thanks, I already ate.
2. Sure, I’ll come take a look in just a sec’.
3. Go ahead, I bought enough so everybody could have some.

(Heh. I’m so damned clever.)

UPDATE: Mari chimed in, bless her Imperially Cute heart.

1. “Do you want to learn how to drive? Really WANT to learn, not just cause it’s the thing to do or anything like that.” — Not particularly, no. Never in my life have I had the thought, “Gee, I really want to be driving a car.” I’ve had the thought, “Gee, I probably should learn to drive at some point; it would certainly be useful at times.”
2. “What is my best or most attractive physical feature or personality attribute?” — Way to make this about you, cute stuff. (I tease because I love! Really!) Okay, seriously? Your most attractive personality attribute is your playful energy. Or energetic playfulness. Whatever you want to name it. Your “best” attribute is, I think, your willingness to call it like you see it coupled with your genuine concern for everyone involved in a situation. I’ve tried to learn from that, and I think I have some distance to go yet…
3. “What color underwear are you wearing right now?” — They’re a kind of dark blue/gray. (I don’t have any plain white underwear. Whoops, did I just cross over into TMI territory? Terribly sorry.)

So c’mon, what’s your excuse? Go on and give it a try; you know you want to.

Having grown somewhat discontent with the venerable XMMS, I cast about last week during quieter moments for a replacement media player to use on my Linux workstation. What I found was a media library system called “amaroK,” and so far I’m very happy with it.

And yes, that’s the inaugural image for a new section of the gallery. I realized today that I lacked a place for screenshots and other digitally-generated imagery. Hooray for progress, eh?

Anyway, if you run KDE and want a damned nifty media player that automatically updates its media library, gives you one-click lookups of album covers, and throws a pretty nifty playlist manager into the bargain, you could do worse than to give amaroK a try.

As I write this, the firmware and OS on my Treo 600 cellphone is in the process of updating. Yes, that’s right, I’m upgrading my phone.

It’s not necessarily that I have to do it. It’s that the new version is there, and I want it.

In case you didn’t know, I’m one helluva geek. Sad, isn’t it?

I noticed this morning that the CPU in my main Linux workstation wasn’t being used. This may seem like an odd statement if you don’t know that I’ve been in the habit of running the SETI@Home client on whatever Linux machines I can since May of ‘99. Running the command-line client with the “niceness” turned up from a cron job is part-and-parcel of my setting up a new workstation.

So I looked at the SETI@Home website to see if anything had changed. Boy, has it ever.

A few minutes ago I activated my transferred account and converted over to the new BOINC client code, and I’m once again happily churning out SETI results packets. Of course, now I have to make this update to all of the other machines I have that run the old client code…

Back in November I upgraded the server that this site, among several others, is hosted upon. This involved going to new versions of several webserver software products, including PHP. The new version of PHP required me to make a change to the comment script that I, among several others, use.

I just discovered the reason that my comment script, among several others’, hasn’t been storing the email addresses of commenters. (I’m not talking about displaying the addresses. I don’t want that, and I’ve disabled that accordingly.) This means that if I wanted to reply to a comment directly, well, it wasn’t gonna happen.

What, then, was the culprit? I didn’t capitalize a letter ‘m’ during a variable declaration. That’s it. Had I typed ‘M’ instead of ‘m’, I’d have saved myself nearly six months of losing those email addresses in my site’s, among several others’, comment files.

I have, of course, fixed this on my site, among several others.

Let me tell you what kind of moron I’m feeling like right now: top-notch, baby.

UPDATE: Yeah, commenting’s been broken all afternoon. I’ve been tweaking the hell out of the script, and finally managed to accomplish very rudimentary email-address validation. Now, if you don’t enter an email address, your comment doesn’t get posted. It’s that simple. As always, though, your address isn’t displayed anywhere. I insist on it mainly so that I can reply to comments personally and privately if I so choose. We apologize for the inconvenience…