decafbad recaffeinated

This blog is something new for me: After around seven years of using Eastgate Tinderbox for private notes, I finally sat down and spent time with its HTML export templates. After a bit of amateur design effort and some trial and error, I've thrown together something to publish online.

This isn't entirely new, however. I've borrowed a crapload from Tumblr by building lots of templates for memes and media objects. And, I've tried to model authoring habits after what I do with the OPML Editor by centering the thing around a page-a-day and a minimum of mental cost in getting things out of my head.

Let's see how far I go with it.

I can drop in items especially styled for quotes, chat transcripts, images, audio files, and the occasional long-winded essay. Eventually I hope to find a streamlined way to use each of them.

I wonder how much I'll actually do with this thing?

One of the next things I'd like to do with this blog is hook in some importing from my own feeds. That is, give it an inbox from my myriad other accounts like Delicious, Twitter, Flickr, etc. Then, I can copy and tweak content items from each of those and turn them into items posted here.

I'm wondering whether something manually massaged would work out better than just a simple automated feed blender. Given that I'm working off and on with FeedMagick, I'll probably do that too eventually and stick that on the front page of decafbad.com.

I'm starting pretty much from scratch here, trying to build things up carefully a piece at a time. It's very sparse right now: just the bare minimum needed to get some stuff out on the web with just a tiny bit of flavor.

I'm wondering what sort of additional navigation I might add in, and whether I can get away with a sidebar or a few contextual widgets that won't completely drive the page into a bloated mess. I may tap Haloscan or Disqus for some comments. I might pull in a MyBlogLog thingy. Or maybe none of the above. Hmm.

It doesn't have a web-accessible admin interface that can be exploited or somehow left unsecured. That's a plus.

I basically already had the code ready from my OPML blog, so I just adapted things a bit to integrate Haloscan comments into this thing. I'm tempted to see if the new and shiny Disqus service could fit in here, but that's another day's project.

I'm trying to keep "asides" to between one sentence and maybe two paragraphs - whereas "essays" become a teaser paragraph linked to a full page devoted to the text. Seems arbitrary, and maybe "essay" is the wrong term — I mean, I don't really write proper Five-Paragraph Essays around here so much.

Had a 2 hour dentist appointment today. That sucked. My dentist is cool, though: He stuck a DVD player in my lap and put a myvu on my face to distract from the business at hand.

Another day at the Tag Mines. Things are looking up, though.

Since they make a Mac OS X client now, thanks to Cider, I tried a little EVE Online last night. I figured that since I like space ships more than trolls, maybe I'll like EVE more than WoW.

I'm not convinced yet: My first experience felt like an overwhelming flood of spreadsheets and statistics, as well as a relentless march of loading screens and wait times during routine play. The graphics were not bad, reminding me of the last time I played Freespace. But, in contrast, EVE definitely does not feel like an action game — whereas WoW does.

One interesting thing about EVE Online, though, is that the universe isn't sharded into realms like WoW. Hosting issues aside, EVE benefits from the vastness of (mostly empty) space in which to distribute the players. Since the environment in WoW is a detailed terrestrial landscape, it's a little hard to create a scalable space to make room for everyone.

But the realms system seems to be one of the biggest failings of WoW — the most crippling to its social nature, since it makes it so hard to play with your friends if you happen to have picked the wrong shard to start on. Sure, you can move your character, but it costs money and has some PvP / PvE restrictions — and who wants to keep moving if you have multiple clusters of friends across multiple realms?

Just 87 or so bookmarks away from 10k on Delicious. I'm hoping to time my 10k-day with the release of Delicious 2. Let's see how that works out — hopefully it means I need to start hustling!

I just got an initial rough version of some dirty JavaScript hackery to inject YouTube players for video entries from URLs I drag into my new fancy Tinderblog. Hopefully it's not too annoying, though I'll probably go overboard today with the new toy.

I'm expecting to add a few other video cases when I find them interesting to include.

For what it's worth, I hope to turn the front page of decafbad.com into a lifestream using an OPML reading list and FeedMagick2, in the not too distant future. Why not use Yahoo! Pipes? Because that'd be too easy, and besides: I need an itch to scratch to work more on FeedMagick2.

Wow, tomorrow is Thanksgiving already - holidays always sneak up on me.

One thing I like about the new Finder in Leopard is that I can right-click and eject a volume from the Path Bar.

Another thing that I like is that the previous aside was quite fast to compose - thanks to the Grab utility on OS X, ImageWell, and Tinderbox. Take a quick timed screenshot, crop it, copy it to clipboard, and paste it into the entry - done.

Happy Turkey Day. Enjoy great food coma! Today will offer greater than usual randomness.

So, she started getting mysterious Netflix deliveries a few years ago. As random as that was, she accepted it and started writing reviews for them. As of October, she's up to #118. How awesome is that? (For this, I blame Toby.)

The future has arrived.

Hope you had a good Turkey day. Send me your leftover turkey - I hunger for sandwiches.

I've spent most of the weekend heads down coding to catch up at work, so I've had even less insightful stuff than usual to post over the past few days. Of course, since that amount is approximate to zero on most scales, it might not have been noticed. :)

I haven't done much of it before, so hopefully I'm not overdoing it now — but now that I've got this more flexible Tinderbox blog, I'm trying out more media objects like music and video.

Friday's little dip into digging up the source of samples from a song is the sort of thing that fascinates me, but I've never really found a way to piece together that sort of thing that seemed like worth the effort. Let me know how it seems to be working.

I just got a bit of gold-spam in EVEmail. It begins: "Friendship is like peeing your pants, everyone notices but only you can feel the warmth. So I just wanna thank all of you for being the pants and pee =)"

Touching, but gross. Suffice to say I did not buy the ISK.

I have 3 days left in my EVE Online trial. The question for me now is whether it's worth subscribing and maintaining both a WoW and an EVE habit. I'm not giving up the WoW yet, but I wonder if I might find better uses of my time than what one of my friends has called "a spreadsheet with a pretty screensaver behind it."

It seems like a very pretty screensaver, and the spreadsheet has some interesting stuff going on in it — but I'm still sort of trying to decide if it's more fun than interesting.

I've been working with Vanilla a lot lately, and I'm wondering: How hard would it be to replace my usage of Haloscan for in-context comments here with some tweakage of a self-hosted Vanilla? It would need some JSON / JS integration love, and some thread auto-creation to pair with individual entries. Also, some OpenID and / or some comment spam defense would be nice.

Seeing as I'm a serial enthusiast, I'm better at starting things up than maintaining or cleaning them up.

Take my WordPress blog, for instance: It got hacked, and I think mostly because I've neglected it and haven't kept it updated. I've turned the installation into an SVN check-out now, which should make updating so much easier — but I'm still likely to neglect it. Maybe I need a regular reminder.

Though, what I really need is to build my little projects with a self-destruct timer. They should all automatically evaporate, lock down, switch off, or otherwise render themselves inert after a certain period of inattention. That way, I don't leave all sorts of potential gotchas in my wake as I absentmindedly wander off from them.

Our TiVo is sad that the writers are striking.

Crud. I tried to include some EVE Online tracks here, but it looks like the inline audio player I'm using decided to play the MP3s at far too slow a speed.

Oh yeah: It's because the MP3s are encoded at a sample rate of 48kHz, and the audio player can only handle multiples of 11.025 kHz. Doh.

Oh yeah, yeah: Remember this command — lame -b 48 --resample 22.05 mysong.wav mysong.mp3

Is it a sign that I keep listening to the EVE Online soundtrack at work? Still on the fence about signing up in a couple of days when the trial ends. Also, looks like there's an official music download page, but all the links seem to be broken.

I'd say this new Tinderbox-built tumblelog has been a success so far. I've lived with it over two weeks now and posted 5-7 things just about every day. That's a pretty good upgrade from almost complete silence. Now the challenge is to see if I keep it up after it stops feeling like a new toy to me — that, or I find a way to keep it new and shiny for myself.

Working from home today with what I hope is some temporary form of plague. At least the cats seem pleased.

Since Mark Bernstein linked to me yesterday, I've noticed an uptick in traffic and a few people bookmarking me on delicious. I've also gotten a few comments on the design here — surprisingly, a few of the comments seem to imply that the design's not horrible yet as a designer I should be able to do better. In reality, I'm a developer who managed to cargo cult and steal a patchwork design from other sites that doesn't make my own eyes bleed. Much.

In any case, there's acres and acres of room for improvement — suggestions or offers of free help welcomed.

Since I saw a comment about this in particular on delicious: I'm trying something with the icons and shaded boxes to set apart media objects and longer length self-authored pieces from the random asides I spew. Not sure how well that's working, though. They're kinda weird and cramped together.