underactive.net

Pics from my summer trips to New York and Colorado are up.

Hi there! So I guess I’m going to an annual update on this site, since it’s been over a year since I last posted. Going from almost daily updates, then on to weekly, monthly, quarterly, and now this. 

I’m here partly to dust the cobwebs off this site, but also to check out what’s new with Wordpress. I was previously running 2.3.1 and going to 2.7 took a little more than the usual brainless steps of going to an upgrade URL and clicking a button. 

Why do I need to know what’s new with WP? Without giving away too much info I’ll be tinkering around with it to see if I can make a new custom plugin that we need at my work. Cool Times.

I still have the gallery to set up and recover, but wondering if I want to go that route. I was never too happy with g2’s speed, and its integration with WP left a lot to be desired. Looks like they’re working on g3 which will address the problems I’ve had. Until then, I’m thinking about getting on smugmug or flickr pro. I’d be on one of those now if it weren’t for the fact that 1) I already pay for my own webspace and like having my own files on my own server, 2) I’m also on Apple’s Mobile Me which has a photo service of their own, but it’s slow and shitty, doesn’t work in all browsers, and don’t offer any cool syncing or uploading services that link my iPhone to my iPhoto collection. So I don’t really want to pay for another web-service when I don’t really have to.

It’s not like my opinion about this is going to make a difference, so I’m not going to bother making this some comprehensive Leopard review and instead just go with an itemized list. But to sum up, I’m diggin it a lot and it was worth standing in line on launch day with a bunch of other cult members and watching the confused onlookers drive by (Them: What are you in line for? Us: a new operating system! Them: ….) My only complaints are largely cosmetic, but those are things that are relatively easy to fix (or hack around).
Good: 

• Faster startups and shutdowns
• No more beach ball of death if Finder can’t connect to a remote server
• I’m finding myself using the CoverFlow and Quick View Finder much more than I thought I would
• Unified window decorations (no more mish-mash of brushed metal, pinstripey windows)
• Time Machine already saved my ass (more details later)
• Mail.app is noticeably faster and more snappy
• Spaces (finally! virtual desktops)

This baby has the most contagious laugh ever
Read more…

Got some new toys over the weekend. I hung out with Tracy for her birthday, and decided to make a stop at the Apple store at UTC so she could check out some laptops. I had my eye on the new keyboard that was just released along with the new iMacs and after trying it out in-store, I got one for myself which I’ll probably use at work. I’m finding my typing to me much more accurate and it’s a bit quieter too, without sacrificing any tactile feedback. Also saw my old friend and co-worker, Rich, who was on PlanetSide with me during my stint at SOE. So that was a cool surprise. After that, we went to Best Buy so Tracy could check out some XM radios. As luck would have it, they put up a sign near the Wii section that said they were in stock. This was a little freaky since just a few minutes before I was saying that that’s the only thing I’d want to buy, knowing that they’re never in stock. Well F me in the A… So I asked an associate if they really had them and he said that they just got a random shipment of 20. It took all of 5 seconds for me to decide if I wanted to get one, and a few minutes later, I walked out with a Wii, and Tracy with her XM radio. Nerds!

Spent Monday playing Wii sports and also picked up some cheapie games — FarCry: Vengeance and Resident Evil 4. I decided to start with FarCry since I played the PC version so I felt I could just jump right in and play it. The controls took some getting used to but I think I have the gestures down. The dumbest thing I did (so far) was I accidentally threw a grenade right in my face when I reached up with my left hand to scratch an itch on my neck. This just happens to be the same gesture you use to throw something, haha. Despite this, I think most of the controls make sense, with the exception of the Zoom toggle. I don’t know who thought it would be a good idea to make that a punching type motion because you lose your sights every time you do it. So if I’m sniping, I end up zooming, lose my aim, and then end up panning around trying to find my target again. Gameplay is similar to the PC version, although they place less emphasis on the “stealth” type combat, but I’ve been employing that anyway since it seems more natural than the run-and-gun style. Other than the crappy FMVs, it’s keeping me entertained.

As I finished categorizing the old blogs I had imported, I remembered that I still had some entries from my brief blog residence on LJ. So I signed on, exported those, and imported them back here. So that takes care of all my entries from 2004. I know I’ve made a handful in 2005 (I’ll see if I have it backed up on one of my dozen backup DVDs) and I know I only entered in 2 for all of 2006. So I think 99% of all the posts I’ve ever made are on here now.

Bored to tears right now so I’m going through the old blog entries I had imported last week and started tagging them. Along the way I found some gems:

Feb 2001: First mention of the “All Your Base” meme. This was like 60 internet-years ago.

Dec 2001: I bought gas for 89 cents/gallon!!. lolwut? no wai.

Jan 2002: The beginnings of me being seduced by Apple’s offerings and begging for a OS X release for x86 architectures. If only the 2002 version of myself could see what I’m currently working on, hahaha.

Mar 2002: First mention of the Domokun / Kittens meme. The link to the image is broken, but I know you’ve seen it. If you haven’t by now, you lose at the Internets.

Nov 2002: First day working at SOE. *sigh* I can’t believe that was 5 years ago. The pay was shit, but goddammit I miss everyone there and just living in SD. My current job has me making over 3 times as much, but I was happier back then, for sure. Sometimes I think I should have stayed there.

May 2003: First mention of the Star Wars kid. Still cracks me up.

Maybe I’ve been doing QA for too long, but when I was browsing through the fixed bugs list for WP 2.2.2, I lol’d when I saw the Priority name for one of the bugs:

I just modified our Bugzilla db here at work to the same — “Critical” is too boring.

I really have no idea why I didn’t do this sooner, but I just imported a shit-load of my old blogs (back when it was running b2 — the predecessor to Wordpress). There was no b2-wp import tool, but there was an rss2.0-wp tool, so I crafted up a perl script to parse through my old b2 sql dump and convert it to rss2.0. Worked flawlessly and imported 300+ entries.

You’ll notice a big gap where nothing was written from 2004-2006. There were a few posts where I refreshed the site with a new look or something and made a terse statement to that effect, but really I guess I was just not in the mood to update. Also, the whole “blogosphere” scene exploded (I can’t believe I used that damn word!), everyone was doing it, and I didn’t feel I had much to contribute.

I still don’t feel I have much to contribute (haha), but now I feel it’s good to document some of my bullshit stories and rants just for posterity. When I get older and when my brain turns into oatmeal, I still might be able to remember this stuff.

Also to those who read my pre-2007 entries: apologies in advance for not using caps. That’s how I rolled back then, yo.

I was going through some old junk today and found this business card:

Ordering music online via modem and telnet? How old-school is that? I had ordered from them back in 1992 — purchased a few Pearl Jam import CDs. Ah the good old days of being a slacker college student. This takes me back to when I’d go to the computer lab, log into one of the VAX machines, caught up on my “Garden of Stone” digest (a Pearl Jam majordomo mailing list), read through some alt.music. USENET groups, and browsed through cdconnection’s catalog. I just thought it was one of the coolest things ever. While everyone else was fighting over the PCs and Macs to use Word or whatever, I could pretty much find an open VAX machine and just explore a “live” network. Little did I know I was just getting an early taste of what the internet was going to bring to the masses. Can we go back to those days? I miss it.