An apology from the management

I need to apologize for a post that appeared here earlier today. I’ve since deleted it, although you could probably find traces of it somewhere if you look hard enough.

I committed a few logistical errors this morning, while I was distracted and getting ready for a real-world commitment. I can’t speak for how other people build their blogs, but I occasionally keep notes and drafts without publishing them, add points from time to time and redraw them before clicking the “publish” button.

This time I tried to splice together the fragments of two other posts, staple it into one, and iron it all out. They were two unrelated ideas and didn’t really mesh together, but at the time I thought it made sense. Ultimately I sent it out into the world without reviewing it properly, and didn’t check this site for a few hours.

And the comments, of course, were akin to “What are you thinking?” And reading through it again, I couldn’t help wondering what I had been thinking too. It wasn’t so much that I had somehow suggested a Thinkpad was a netbook but that I didn’t see that the points I was making weren’t really congruent.

In the end it was a ridiculous piece of work that I’m rather embarrassed I let slide. It’s gone now, and I promise not to make patchwork posts out of leftovers ever again. And thanks to the two people who left comments, warning me that what I had typed was, for the most part, utter rubbish.

We now return you to your regularly scheduled Internet.

Happy birthday

Well, it’s August again, and that means this lowly blog has turned 2 years old.

I am flattered to have been visited by more than 700,000 people in that time, spammers included of course. I repeat myself, but this blog was never meant to be more than notes for future reference. So to have that many visitors in a short, two-year span is a real honor.

If you’re curious, here’s the first post, as timid as it may be. From there it was all downhill.

Cheers, all!

Some outside obligations

My daily schedule has changed a bit in the past few weeks, and as a result I have a little trouble updating this site on the days when I work. Without going into too much detail, I lost an hour or two on either end of my day to other work commitments, which means I head for the job a bit earlier and get back a little later.

The long and short of this is that there might not be as much to tell on the first few days of the week, but I hope I can counterbalance that by keeping more notes on the days when I don’t work, or when my schedule is the same. Otherwise, sorry for the lack of uniformity.

Oh no, not another one

Sigh. Now WordPress.com uses a lightbox effect for image management too, as it did for widgets and in a few other places.

Look, I agree the lightbox is cool. Or at least it was cool, a couple of years ago. Now it’s just another something that I have to wait to load, then navigate through at a reduced rate of speed, then wait while it unloads so I can go back to what I was doing.

Listen to your mother

Yes, the old theme is gone. When your mother doesn’t care much for your blog theme, it’s time to go back to the old one. So … sorry for the three-month interlude. We now return you to your originally scheduled theme.

If you see it, snap it for me

By the way, my page hit counter is a day or two short of half a million. If you happen to be that lucky customer who sees 500,000, do me a favor and take a screenshot. Runner-up prizes for 499,999 and 500,001.

So long, Gary

I hope you don’t mind if I stray off topic for a little bit. I was saddened to see that Gary Gygax passed away today, at the age of 69.

Gary’s impact on culture — worldwide — can’t be denied. With Dave Arneson, a good portion of what we all now know as role-playing games, computer games, and even the fantasy genres of literature and movies began over a table of paper, pencils and funny dice, almost 35 years ago.

I had the pleasure of speaking to Gary via e-mail a couple of times over the past few years. I would never go so far as to claim to be his friend, but every time I asked a question, he replied politely and never seemed inconvenienced. For someone who grew up hoarding every book and module he wrote (and I still own legitimate electronic versions of all his TSR work), it was a great pleasure.

With that I shall say goodbye. No cheap puns about saving throws here. In the end we are all just people, and Gary was a kind and friendly one, even to a complete stranger asking a question in an e-mail. We should all follow that simple example.

Cheers Gary, and so long.

How do you like them apples?

If you were having click issues with the new layout, I think I may have a viable workaround — a Gimped image header cloned to look like the correct style! So that’s no longer a text font up there, it’s generic Dejavu Serif 36-point flattened onto a 730×180 box of the same color. No text to mess up this time. There’s more than one way to skin a dead cat.

Let me know if that’s working for Konqueror/Epiphany users. As far as the double scrollbar … I’m at a loss. Sorry.

A new look

The first and easiest thing on my list of goals is a new and streamlined look for this blog — something not so heavy and difficult to load, but at the same time attractive and clean.

I’ve had the same boxed blue look (K2-lite, if you liked it) since August 2006, when I started. A couple of times I changed it for a few hours, but didn’t like anything but the blue, and so I kept it. It’s grown a bit old these days, and it’s a new year, so I changed it. The new one is also a bit less vertical.

Some other changes were due. I trimmed off a lot of the extraneous links as well as the flash side box, mostly because it was causing slow load times for me. It didn’t do well to have a blog intended for older computers … that wasn’t courteous to older computers.

I’ve kept the two snapshots from a desktop and a game, mostly because those are very small pictures and easy to load. I’ve thought about using “more” tags to make the page load a little faster, but I’ve never liked those. I suppose it might be a good idea for some of the longer posts.

That’s about it. Goal No. 1, check.

All blog content is now GFDL

I’ve been thinking hard and long about this, and I’ve decided that there’s very little innovative or exceptionally earth-shattering material here, and so I’m changing the license on blog content to the GFDL. I’ve posted the terms of the license on the About page.

I was previously using a Creative Commons license that basically asked you to credit me if you were using narrative from the site. I don’t think it’s really such a big deal now, and I’d be flattered if there was something here that was useful to someone else.

But I’m over that whole narcissism thing that made me want credit for the stuff I’d written. None of it is that stellar. I’ll be grateful if you reuse it and mention you got it from me, but otherwise, it’s not that important.

I’ve changed the licensing tags on the About page and in the sidebar, and I’ve updated the Feisty guide as well, to show the new license. If you spot the old Creative Commons thing anywhere else, let me know.