Frenzied Daddy

Spoiled Gamers! I bet he even uses one of those computer programs for rolling dice. I tell ya, back in my day we used faux vellum and ink and liked it! Why … harrrumph. Never mind that I do a similar thing now, without the “overhead.” I scan the map, save it on my laptop, edit and use a “mask” on it.

Thanks for the Link

Comics, I’ve always loved you. Marvel, DC, Dark Horse, the independents, anyone I’ve happened to overlook. The combination of art (drawing) and story (writing) really hits home for me. (Illustrated Classics not withstanding). I love spandex armor on female super heroes, wise cracking heroes like Spidey and uh … the Hulk. I love Cerberus the Aardvark, and yes, I’ve even been known to read Ritchie Rich (way back in the dark ages before I met X-Men).

I also love role-playing games. My current fixation (sigh) is Everquest 2, also known as Evercrack 2. Periphally, I’m aware of City of Heroes, and honestly, if I didn’t have this Evercrack monkey on my back (and wasn’t paying $12.50 / month for the honor), I’d look into it (And with City of Villains on the horizon, mmmm cheesy goodness ) . But Marvel doesn’t feel the same way (Why can’t we all just get along? ). Marvel recently sued the COH folks and were thrown out of court. And they’re still getting slapped around (see last panel of comic.

Poor Marvel. Muahahahahaha! (cue villainous laughter)

Not only is it a household cleaner and a hero of the Trojan War, but it’s also some new buzzword for a neat old web technique. Basically, using javascript, passing information between the client and the server (your browser and the webserver) on it’s own timeline.

Google Suggest (Beta) uses it; watch the results change as you type in the box.

I thought I was being slick by having one javascript function run a timer and every 60 seconds trigger another function from an included javascript page, that happened to be generated from a script on the server, which caused new items to show up without refreshing the browser. But I had stumbled upon an old technique that has been refined since it was first dreamed up. Now all I gotta do is find a place to use it.

addendum: It’s funny how kid’s brains work. I grew up in Anchorage, Alaska. Playing with maps.google.com (another ‘AJAX (Asynchronous Javascript And XML)’ site), I looked up the neighborhood where I last lived. I could figure out where my school was, and my kid-brain knew how to get there. And my high school too. But I had no idea which direction other things were; Merrill field was a lot closer than I remember it, Earthquake park was surprisingly close. Those were places that I only went on special occasions; we’d drive past Merrill field going downtown, or we’d drive past Earthquake park (I think ) going to the airport. Not only were they in a different direction in my brain’s atlas, but also they were a lot farther away. I wonder how I can help my daughters see the world as the way an adult sees it, or even if I should.

… I did it

Now, on WishEase.com, you can import your Amazon wishlist directly into the site. <preen> I did it with the Amazon Web Services, which actually have been upgraded since I started that project. There’s a bunch of neat things you can do with those Amazon services, including item searches and other things. They’ve also got the Alexa Web services too- so I can incorporate Alexa information into other applications, using the same development stuff. For instance, I could put up a list of referrers (people linking to my site) and then show their ‘Alexa Web Popularity’ (which is akin to Google Pagerank) .

First, czar of dumbasses, don’t ask me for a bid on your homework. Second, don’t limit the bid to a measly $7.00. Cheating isn’t cheap.

Librarians are among the most amazing knowledge detectives you will ever encounter. You wouldn’t know it to look at them, but these people are truly hunters– hunters of data. Equal in tracking skill to any tribal leader in any jungle, librarians can ferret out just about any info- quarry imaginable. Picture them half-naked, with lithe bodies and painted faces, spearing pages out of books left and right. That’s what they’d look like if they weren’t wearing their wimp camouflage.

Mischief Marketing, P.45.

My friend Chris is a librarian-in-training. Nice loincloth, pal.

Discuss amongst yourselves.

Have any of you seen a plugin for the mozilla email reader Thunderbird that would allow me to forward email messages to arbitrary programs ( like a filter but to a program, not a folder) ?

I wanna design a site that looks like this.

Local boy Brad Fitzpatrick (he’s from Beaverton) has sold out. W00T him and his bank account.

A long time ago, in a galaxy far far away, Brad wrote a little bit of software to enable himself and his friends to share schedules and life events. Now, the userbase is up to about a hundred thousand, generally characterized as whiny angst-filled teen writers. Well, except for Gwenidh. Hiya Gwenidh.

The company that bought Live Journal is Six Apart; they make Movable Type and TypePad. That’s an interesting conjunction; LiveJournal and Movable Type. Of course, I’d be happiest if they moved all the LJ users to WordPress, but … hey, we can’t all be elite hedonists.

It’ll be interesting to see how this pans out for the whiny angst ridden folks. I see that they’re getting TrackBacks — I hope they get a more friendly non-LJ user commenting system. And I repeat my statement that I’d be happy to lower my consulting fee for anyone who wants to buy a domain and set up WordPress, and move from their LJ installation to WP. Keep in mind that WP uses PHP and MySQL, so your hosting provider (I love Domain Maniac, and their middle hosting tier is what you’d need) provides those as well.