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Looking For Quacks In The Pavement

  • 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.)

  • NaDoWhaMo

    It’s been a while, hasn’t it?

    Excuses I have. I’ve been sick for a week and a half, missing two days of work during that time. My job has become more tiring and tedious. My personal life is in a state of flux. I’m broke, in spite of landing a substantial bonus from work last week. (That’s that last of those I’ll be seeing any time soon, too.) The mornings and evenings are darker, in the “sun rises later and sets earlier” sense if not the metaphorical sense, so I’m engaging in my annual battle against the onset of seasonal depression.

    I considered joining one of the “national something-or-other month” activities such as NaBloPoMo. (During a particularly manic phase a few days ago I decided that I was going to do BloPoMo with a theme, such as “30 days of musical artists” or “30 days, 30 anime” or some-such.) I even considered WriMo, which I have insisted for years that I’d never do again. I realized, however, that I’d end up even more depressed if I started something like that and then failed to complete it. Given my track record with unfinished projects lately it seemed the better part of valor to forgo that particular form of punishment.

    So, this month I’m just going to sit back and participate in my own little event: National Do Whatever Month. You may get a couple of the music mixes I came up with. You may get a rambling about animation from that planned theme. You may get two weeks with no posting whatsoever… yeah, that would be new around here, wouldn’t it? At any rate, I have several unfinished posts that need fleshing out and tidying up, so it’s not like I don’t have anything to say. (Of special note is the upcoming photographic journey through the building of the Very Expensive Media Center Computer.)

    If nothing else, I can at least take some comfort in the fact that October is over. Hooray.

  • 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.

  • Aquarium Trip, September 2007

    Kyla and I took a long weekend back in September, planned well in advance for the specific purpose of taking Alex and Erica out to the coast for a tour of the Oregon Coast Aquarium in Newport. (Who did they have to kill to nab “aquarium.org”, anyway?). The kids and I had been there before, during the years between Keiko’s departure and the completion of the underwater passage exhibit, which we were keen to see.

    Crazy aside: We ended up renting a Chevy Malibu sedan from Enterprise; the previous renter brought it back because it was too old. If that car was manufactured before 2004 I’d be stunned, people. “Too old?” As Kyla said, “Let me show you my beat up old Ford Escort, lady.”

    At any rate, after a few hours’ travel spent kibbutzing and listening to Daft Punk and other odd road-music selections, we arrived and proceeded to wander the length and breadth of the place, looking at fishies and crustaceans, snapping photographs, and amusing ourselves with silly banter.

    Photographs, I said!

    Some of the pictures make for good journal fodder, so we’ll highlight them…
    (more…)

  • 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…)

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