The Obligatory RSN

It feels like it's been weeks since I've done the blog thing, and I'm kind of ashamed to admit that I missed it. Unfortunately, the spare time that I burn here has been stolen by variously deadlines at work, the moving/unmoving process and the Inexorable Hand of Fate. The work thing has been the most frustratingly soul-crushing, overall. The two-week advantage I acquired by burning through the holidays working 60 hours a week evaporated quickly in the face of additional feature requests and early deadlines. This is the first night I've come home in a while that didn't have a set agenda, usually consisting of a single item: "redesign code furiously to fix problems uncovered in testing during the day." What did I achieve in the last month of activity? Well, I added a bunch of features, cleaned up both the code and the design significantly, and finally (and most importantly) demonstrated that the problem was definitively in my boss' code. The moving process is now complete, and The Mansion is history. I'm sad to see it go, and a bit overwhelmed by the prospect that all the problems with this place are now my problems, but January is a good month for new things and that place was killing us slowly anyway. Of course, we still have the vast and unconquerable unmoving process to complete. The Brat puts a ton of pressure on herself to put everything in the house into its Designated Away Zone immediately, but I'm pretty happy to just have the network up and running. I can even play my iTunes upstairs and downstairs at the same time. Walking up the stairs and hearing to the music shift between the stereo downstairs and my computer upstairs feels so ridiculously good that I think I may have discovered an Eighth Deadly Sin. Meanwhile, the Inexorable Hand of Fate (not to be confused with Manos, which had multiple Hands of Fate) has been mucking with my life again, pushing me closer to some people and further from others and just generally making it hard to take the impending permanence of the house and impending disaster of the job too seriously. I figure that if I can't even predict whose floor on which I'll be passing out or what might inspire me to write multi-line haiku emails, there's not much sense in worrying about the future. I'm reasonably sure that I won't understand it once it gets here. Tomorrow is the day that I have officially designated as New Years Day 2007. I wrote off the month of January, but I have big plans for this year and I'm looking forward to finding the time to execute them. It's All Coming Together, and in addition to the normal life-plans I've got a few things lined up for the blogs in the next month that I've been anxiously anticipating. I've scheduled a beginning-of-the-year clean-up and review of my bookmarks and linkblogs, so expect a major link-dump of cool stuff sometime in the next few days. If this goes well I'm going to make it a monthly blog event, so any feedback will be appreciated. I also plan to blog a house-tour once The Brat is vaguely satisfied with her work, for those of you unwilling or unable to come see the new space. Topher suggested that we should write a Safe Free Pr0n Download Tutorial, which seems like a good idea given the frequency with which our friends seem to pick up spam-ware. I've got a few iTunes smart playlist tricks up my sleeve that I've been dying to write about. And don't forget the impending 8,742-part Rebuilding Firefox series that I've been promising... I know everyone is looking forward to that. Extra-blogging activities that will probably get mentioned here in the New New Year include excitement like buying a new car and the inevitable discussions of which music festivals to attend over the summer. I hope to have a weekly(-ish) podcast up and running by mid-March, and sometime around then we'll start finishing the basement as well. I've also promised myself that more live poker is in the cards for me this year, and if that works out as well as internet poker has I'll have plenty to say about it as well. So, that's the obligatory Real Soon Now list. There's also a half-dozen requests I've had for various posts - software development and testing using VMWare, syncing bookmarks with del.icio.us, Google Reader posts in both basic and advanced flavors, etc - which I hope to get to RSN as well. Plus I've got a few new Coolest Things Ever currently in review. And I'm taking suggestions, so if you've got any geek questions or your looking for a step-by-step on something that I actually know how to do, let me know and I'll add it to the list.

Tagline Abusers Anonmyous

[Ed. Note: I should point out that the following is mostly tongue-in-cheek, but not so tongue-in-cheek that I don't fear it may get taken more seriously than intended. I don't want to have to invent another program for sardonic blogging.] Hi, my name is OWenJ, and I am a Tagline Abuser.* It's time for Step Five, which I've been dreading, but it has to be done. To quote the Tagline Abusers Anonymous Twelve Steps:

Step 5: We have blogged about the nature of our transgressions, so that our contacts could read it and Google could index it.

So here I am, admitting that I have a problem and I am powerless to stop changing. I've had my BlackBerry Pearl for almost six months now, and it has become as indispensible as my 7100** had been before it. Any time I'm bored for a minute or two, I can see who is online to chat, check my Milk list and Reader items, read messages... I guess I could even talk to people, if I wasn't so much more comfortable with text these days. Anyway, it wasn't very long before I was whipping it out every time I had a free moment. Stop lights, smoke breaks at work, trips to the bathroom, waiting for the Subway guy to finish my sandwich... every free moment. Of course, these moments aren't often long enough to do any serious web-surfing or say much more than hello to someone on GTalk. Ultimately, it became clear that the best I could do was type a line of text most of the time. And increasingly frequently, that line of text was my GTalk tagline. At first I struggled for something clever to say each time. It was surprising (given my exceedingly clever nature ;-) how often I failed. Sometimes I'd lose those precious spare moments to thinking (which is so 20th century), sometimes I'd put up a (mis)quote from something, sometimes often most of the time I'd put up something completely nonsensical. Unfortunately, it seems that not everyone quite understands the mental shift a toy like the BlackBerry brings upon one. Or perhaps it's because many IM programs refer to this as a "status message" rather than "tagline" or "subtitle," which is certainly what it had become in my mind. Apparently it's supposed to embody some sort of mental, physical, emotional or spiritual metric that can be used to give information in addition to the default 'Normal' and 'Busy' messages. Who knew? I thought it was a way to convince people to talk to me. For that, it worked. Just not always the way I wanted it to. Fe0₂ asked me if I was okay when I quoted "I'm the new Cancer" from a PANIC! At The Disco song (Coolest Song Title Ever: "There's a Good Reason These Tables Are Numbered Honey, You Just Haven't Thought of It Yet"). Joule was concerned when I quoted something with the word contagious in it. And then there was the issue the logging. See, I didn't realize that these changes were showing up in peoples' open conversation windows. I mean, I knew it, but I always closed the windows when I was done... didn't everybody? Turns out, the answer is no. The Brat read through about eight gazillion of these changes when she left a window open for three days. She thought it was funny (she's a little weird sometimes), but in most cases it conveyed unintended meaning. A few people thought I was providing commentary on conversations already in progress, and someone seemed to think I was providing commentary on his relationship issues. And who knows what Google magic would cause the dueling text from my desktop and BlackBerry connections to argue over which one was most recent or sometimes give me two or three messages on the display. I'm done with all that now, however. I've entered a program... well, okay, I made up a program but whatever. They've supplied my Tagline Methadone and I blogged about using Twitter a week or so ago. It has served as a good replacement for my addiction, and I have pledged to do all my stream-of-consciousness blogging on my Twitter page from now on. While it won't help me quit, I'm confident that with the help of the Tagline Abusers Anonymous Twelve Steps I can be completely clean in another 24 days or so. Maybe less if I give myself some time off for good behavior. [Update: I'm over half-way through the program!

Step 7: We have humbly asked Google to remove our Status Message.

You can see my Humble Request in the GTalk Group on Google Groups.] *Note that I am not a Tagline-oholic, as I do not drink Tagline-ohol. (c)199-something Random **Not nearly as sexy as the Pearl, but a cool toy nonetheless. According to BBHub, Amazon will currently give you $75 (eventually) to take the upgraded model of this (BlackBerry 7105) of their hands. Jump on this if you've been thinking about upgrading but don't have the scratch.

How Many Blogs Must I Stack Up

To wash you out of my mind, out of my consciousness? How many posts must I write up To bring you back the check fat off of my slenderness?^*

You may have noticed the name change. Then again, maybe not. I'm not even sure that anyone cares. However, Cheating At Solitaire was/is the name of my long-neglected poker blog. I've been playing a bit more recently, and while I'm not sure that I'm likely to try writing about it again any time soon, I just can't stand to steal the URL from it. Anyway, the URL here has not changed. For better or worse, or at least for the time being, my online identity is designated by the now nearly-nonsensical string owenj23. The feed URL is also unchanged, although it is unlikely to stay that way long, as it seems somewhat ridiculous to leave CheatingAtSolitaire in the URL. I'm in the process of making some other changes that may not be immediately apparent. I've tagged several posts iotower, primarily the geek stuff about BlackBerry and Firefox. I've moved all these posts to a new blog, which I've named The I/O Tower because it's geeky, and I think that will allow me to find some pretty cool graphics with a little effort. Why am I moving them at all? Well, as with most things I do, it's a little bit of OCD and a lot of vanity. I was checking my Google Analytics stats the other day and discovered that seven (7) people found my Firefox post the other day via Google, as I'm somehow third on the query results for 'fast firefox'. As if this whole blog thing hasn't already gone to my head, I started to think that I might get readers or something. Of course, from the readers' POV, this blog kind of sucks. At least for me, the blogs I really like stay on topic, or at least on a tightly-bound range of topics. Not that I'm looking to be the next ScoBoingCrunch or anything, but it just seems natural to separate my tech fetish from the (depressingly mundane) updates about my life. For that matter, I expect most of my friends are really just curious about the new house or whether I've bought a car yet. This way they won't have to be exposed to Re-installing Firefox: The Multi-part Epic.^** For the record, this is not the first time I've done this. I once had a post tagged NSFW (temporarily restored) before I decided that it would be better to segregate the sex, drugs and rock'n'roll to Every Seven Seconds. And I have big plans for MediaDada once I decide whether I'm playing with Vox or actually using it. I'm sure I've got a LiveJournal around here somewhere. And of course I've got several Google Reader linkblogs of various flavors... So what is that? Four... five? Six if you count the post or three I've put on MySpace, although the most recent one announces that I'm about 10 days from blowing up that account. Wow, when you put an integer on it like that, it seems like maybe I'm a little... sick? Unbalanced, perhaps. I'm starting to have second thoughts about that zombie blog I wanted to create... ^* With apologies to Soul Coughing. ^** Seriously.

Good vs. Evil

Your results: You are Spider-Man Spider-Man 75% Batman 70% Hulk 65% Robin 60% Superman 60% Catwoman 60% Wonder Woman 55% Supergirl 55% The Flash 55% Green Lantern 50% Iron Man 45% You are intelligent, witty, a bit geeky and have great power and responsibility. Take The Superhero Personality Quiz

Your results: You are Dr. Doom Dr. Doom 69% Lex Luthor 67% Mr. Freeze 65% The Joker 62% Green Goblin 60% Magneto 59% Riddler 58% Apocalypse 57% Venom 57% Catwoman 56% Dark Phoenix 49% Juggernaut 48% Kingpin 43% Mystique 36% Two-Face 36% Poison Ivy 30% Blessed with smarts and power but burdened by vanity. Take The "Which Super Villain am I?" Quiz

So many statistically significant facts to ponder. Would I have been more Luthor than Doom if only I did not have a Hideously Scarred Eyebrow? Would I be more Green Lantern than Wonder Woman if I had answered differently about wearing a bra? And why am I 4% more Catwoman-as-hero than Catwoman-as-villain? Ah, the mysteries of modern psychology...

Some Goals For 2007

I was about to post my traditional quote here, but I realized that Alienne has already done it more fully than I wanted to type in her Live Journal. Go read A Long December and just pretend that's my post, as I can echo every word of those sentiments exactly. It's December 26, 2006 as I write this, but this should be the first post of 2007 when I publish. Assuming I manage to wake up in 2007 at all. Nothing interesting here, but I wanted to post some goals so that I'd have something to talk about next year at this time. So here they are, in no particular order:

• 50 stomach crunches per day by June
• Find way to sync Google Calendar events and Remember The Milk tasks to Blackberry
• More creativity - blog, podcast, photograph, just make something more often than I have been. Stop letting my brain atrophy just because I'm writing code for a living again.
• More live poker - twice a month? maybe even once a week? - including my first live tournament not played at a kitchen table.
• Find mental equilibrium.
• More new music. More new books. Buy some comic books that I've downloaded and appreciate. Buy more mini-mates.
• Get my passport. Find a reason to use it. Or at least go to Vegas.

Okay, that's a pretty scattered list. I'll probably think of some more over the next few days and may even add some updates. As it stands, the year has started out pretty bad, which is a good omen in my warped little mind. We'll see how it goes, but I'm hoping that things can only get better from here.