What has become (by far) my main character, a katana-wielding hero by the (somewhat odd) name of Woods Cutter, has reached Security Level 20. You know what that means, don’t you? It’s new costume and cape time!

Look at him, all mean and cool, standing there with his nifty cape and new getup. And here’s what he looks like from the back when he’s jumping all over town:

Pretty cool stuff, huh? For comparison, I offer this shot of his original costume… unfortunately it’s only from the back, and he’s got Stealth on, but you get the gist of it:

That last shot was taken while I was witnessing a serious bit of Hellion-herding, by the way. See if you can spot the other hero in that picture!

Hey, at least I’m getting enjoyment out of my $15 per month…

I figured it out once the fact that the “last updated” indicator for my site on Lil’s blogroll read “October 22nd” had percolated in my brain overnight. Ah! That was the day I changed the configuration on the server to switch from ‘/journal.php’ to ‘/journal’. (The old journal.php-based URLs still work, though, to preserve compatibility with those outside sites that link to specific entries here.) Apparently, ever since that switch, my pings to Blogrolling.com have been all for naught.

The same’s been true for Wendi’s site, which I also changed that same day. The same has not been true for Lil’s site, since it was coded “the new way” from Day One. Dawn and Mari have been running Movable Type all along, so they haven’t had to deal with this at all.

Go figure, eh? Now, of course, I need to figure out how to remedy the situation without breaking the new change…

Found at The Register, this little gem:

It’s a sad state of affairs when we need warnings like #2, there, isn’t it?

Add these ingredients:

1 Matrox G450 dual-head video card, removed from one of the Enco studio computers months ago…
1 spare 19” monitor taking up a sizeable portion of my desk space…
1 slightly hosed Linux install, requiring a fresh reinstallation…
2 hours of over-the-wire Debian Sarge install time…
1 hour of Googling and configuration tweaking…

To get:

1 freshly rebuilt Linux box with a desktop display that spans two screens. Good for impressing co-workers, even if they don’t really understand what’s so cool about it other than being able to drag windows from one screen to the other…

Dear KDE,

I’ve been using you as my desktop environment on every one of my Linux machines for several years now, and generally speaking I’m quite pleased with the experience. This is, admittedly, largely due to the fact that I don’t push you very hard. I’m an easy guy to work for. All I ask is that you show me some icons, menus and give me easily workable window dressing with which to manipulate my software. Oh, and I’m quite fond of having a good, well-integrated terminal program. These are things you’ve all done quite well.

Sure, I haven’t always been a fan. I used to be all about the Enlightenment. Then that went kind of haywire, what with themes going crazy every few days and the whole death-of-EFM thing. I turned to the two big alternatives, then, not because I think the lightweight window managers aren’t up to the job, but because I’ve always been a big fan of the pretty. KDE 1.x was my salvation, for a while. Then came the 2.x series. What a mess that was, eh? I ended up in GNOME-land for a while, and was in fact quite vehemently against KDE, vowing never to touch it again. But of course the 3.x release came highly recommended from several people whose opinions I respect, including a couple who also had been burned. I gave it a try, and never looked back.

So I hope you don’t mind if I vent just a bit of frustration, here, because there are still a few things that desperately need fixing.

I understand that all software can be quirky, and highly-complex open-source software even more so. But is it too much to ask for you not to blow up in my face every time I make the mistake of actually wanting to tinker with the look and feel of my desktop? I’m not in there poking around at arcane configuration files, mind you. I’m just checking and unchecking options you freely provide me, right there in your own “Control Center.” Why should enabling a sound option mean that my desktop wallpaper and icons go away? Can you explain that one to me, please? And while I’m on the subject of sound, what’s up with that? Why is it that the only way I can reliably enjoy music on this computer is to disable the aRts sound system? That makes a whole lot of no sense, if you know what I mean. And here’s an idea. How about not breaking completely when I try to use the much-vaunted integrated network browsing features? I’d like to actually see that work “as advertised,” thank you very much.

All the cute bouncing-icon wait-cursor eyecandy in the world can’t hold me if the actual practical functionality doesn’t work. All I ask is that you please consider that in the future, and pretty please do something about making sure that changing an icon preference doesn’t mean having to restart my desktop environment. Not to make idle threats, but you do know that Enlightenment DR-17 is approaching a usable state, right?

Yours, etc,
Me.

I couldn’t resist not posting yesterday or most of today so I could enjoy the fact that the “posting frequency” indicator (down the left-side column a ways) read zeros for Week, Month and Year.

Yes, that’s the kind of geek I am. If I was the truly dedicated sort of geek, and by “dedicated” I mean “not lazy,” I’d have ensured that that the Month and Year indicators read 100%. But… I’m too lazy for that.

Hey, I couldn’t do this last year. The old version of the website code didn’t have the posting frequency indicator…