I find marketing speak very difficult to listen to. I would guess that most people feel similarly, but if so, why does it persist? Even without dealing with the more egregious examples—such as press releases and “on-message” politicians—it simply gets to me.
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I survey the board calmly, without needing to. I know what resides there. I know the available possibilities. I draw a card, and add its potential to what I hold already.
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In the 2005 sfmagic Player of the Year race, I stayed in contention until the second-last week, and then only dropped out of contention because I had to miss the final draft. In this year’s race, I have very little hope of even making it into the top five.
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What separates the two? The question has some hidden depths—especially after reading Play Money last weekend, which details the world of trading virtual assets in MMORPGs. Also, I spent my weekend happily fascinated by JavaScript challenges that a lot of people would have difficulty distinguishing from the “normal work” of a web developer.
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As discussed in yesterday’s post about multiple AJAX requests, I wrote an enhanced version of my bookmarklet for improving the magictraders.com price lists.
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In working on an enhancement to my card price list sorting bookmarklet, I ran into a problem: if you want to collate data from a number of sources asynchronously, combine the data, then do something with all of it, how do you do that in JavaScript?
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What good does it do? I ask myself this question over and over, because I have a terrible regret habit, constantly mulling over past mistakes in my mind and wishing I could undo them.
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Closer, closer to this millennium…
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I spent some time today creating a bookmarklet (copy the contents of this page into Firefox or another Gecko-based browser) and greasemonkey script for enhancing the magictraders.com pricelists. This kind of thing exemplifies what I love about HTML, and why I distrust less open technologies.
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My current main server has acted in that capacity since 2001. Earlier this year I decided to upgrade, and got my new server, reflection. I haven’t actually moved all of my services over to it. Or any of them, in fact. Since everything would run faster, I should really do it…
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I’ve had trouble figuring this out. I love playing MTG. And when I first encountered MTGO I worried that I might spend too much money and time on it. Yet I haven’t logged on in more than a year.
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Before they got me, I programmed. Software development. I did fine. But I got bored, ennui creeping into my life, my work, my own projects, everything. Everything suffered under a fog of lethargy and angst. I thought I knew what I wanted to do, but I couldn’t seem to do it. So I went looking for more exciting positions.
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I’ve known about Apache Rewrite functionality for quite a while, but have only recently started to think about how much better it can make web applications.
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For the past few Saturdays, I’ve joined Seth on his cycle to Hawk Hill, located in the Marin Headlands.
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Here’s a cellphone video of a UCLA student getting electrically shocked by police after refusing to show ID in a library—shocked apparently to coerce him to leave after they had already subdued him.
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I’ve had a chance to drive a few of these recently, and I consider it a good thing that they exist.
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I seem to find it difficult to remain calm when losing at games. Not always, more casual games rarely disturb me. But games I feel competitive about, well, there I have trouble. I become emotionally involved, and when things go against me, I turn surly.
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For a while I’ve toyed with the idea of building an application to track my browsing. Something along the lines of del.icio.us, but with files saved to my server.
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Century Rain doesn’t take place in the same universe as the other Alastair Reynolds books I’ve read (Redemption Ark, Revelation Space, Chasm City). This universe posits an Earth abandoned by humans after a nanotechnological disaster.
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A scenario I’ve held in my mind for most of my life involves questions of principle, practicality, and transgression. Or, to put it another way, questions about the extent to which your society (which, for these purposes, includes the state) punishes you for stepping outside its bounds.
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Usability perfection, or even excellence, does not come easily. For example, a few years ago I created a sheet to guide Swiss pairings for 8 people over 3 rounds for the sfmagic group. I’ve tinkered with it a lot over time, and still find ways to improve it.
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I just started reading Gus Russo’s The Outfit, a history of the powerful Chicago crime syndicate from the 1920s to the 1960s. Its prologue deals with Prohibition, which effectively presented a massive cash infusion to criminal elements.
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Slightly late, but getting closer… soon I might reach books I read this millennium.
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