Domain Names

So I randomly noticed yesterday that andrewfarmer.name was open, and heck, it's only $10/year. So now this blog is hosted under that. If I someday outgrow the blog, or want to host a real live website again, I'll have it for that too. It'll also be handy for hosting things like my resume, which I have thus far had to host on Lorebroker.

One thing that annoys me is how the domain forwarding works with Blogspot. They tell me to make a CNAME record to ghs.google.com, but don't give me an IP to use for the A record (which requires an IP, not another name). I did a ping of ghs.google.com and was using that IP for a bit, but a later ping give me a different IP, meaning that is some load balancing cluster. I don't want to hard code some IP in my DNS records that belongs to a server that could go up and down depending on demand. For now I had to use the decidedly unsatisfying solution of putting a meta refresh on the free hosting that came with the domain.

If they really wanted to make this feature shine, they'd give us an IP to point our A records at, and let us use multiple CNAMEs, instead of just one. That way I could set up wildcards and such.

Anyway, after getting this blog set up, I decided on a whim to add a Lorebroker development blog at blog.lorebroker.com. Not entirely needed at the moment, since I have no one to blog to, but hopefully useful someday for announcing features and just generally conversing with harry.

And Death to Facebook

Read an excellent article today that rather well articulates the feeling I have been getting lately about Facebook. Sadly, now that I think about it, I think Shana made this same argument some time ago, when she was 'cleaning up' her online presence. To save you reading the whole article, here is the snippet that really illustrates the point (with a +5 Burning Man reference!):

Here's one of Boyd's examples, a true story: a young woman, an elementary school teacher, joins Friendster after some of her Burning Man buddies send her an invite. All is well until her students sign up and notice that all the friends in her profile are sunburnt, drug-addled techno-pagans whose own profiles are adorned with digital photos of their painted genitals flapping over the Playa. The teacher inveigles her friends to clean up their profiles, and all is well again until her boss, the school principal, signs up to the service and demands to be added to her friends list. The fact that she doesn't like her boss doesn't really matter: in the social world of Friendster and its progeny, it's perfectly valid to demand to be "friended" in an explicit fashion that most of us left behind in the fourth grade. Now that her boss is on her friends list, our teacher-friend's buddies naturally assume that she is one of the tribe and begin to send her lascivious Friendster-grams, inviting her to all sorts of dirty funtimes.

I think it just comes down to the fact that we don't diagram and distribute a list of our friends in real life for this very reason. There are some people you don't bring home to mom, and there are some activities that you don't talk about with your boss. Facebook and it's ilk do exactly that if your mom, boss, and drunk friends all happen to be your Facebook friends too. It's not like I am ashamed of anyone, and I think most people are pretty realistic in not judging you by such things, but the problem arises when someone uses Facebook to look up information about you for something important, as some colleges and employers have been doing before accepting students and hiring. Why have a bad image out there?

Now the question is, do I have the guts to pull the trigger on my account? It does have it's useful features, like keeping in touch with my professors in Spain, and looking up phone numbers and email addresses. None of my friends are remotely questionable as far as I know, and I have already cleaned up my profile quite a bit. How much value does Facebook really provide?

If only we could get rid of those damn applications. If I get one more notification I'm going to go berserk.

Death to Turkey

Just for the record, "three thanksgiving dinners" is both a blessing and a curse. Yay to excellent food and people... boo to two days of turkey and stomach aches.

Absolutely no card sorting happened this weekend. I did however log about 18 hours on the magic site, which is tentatively online (in a very very alpha state) at Lorebroker.com. You can't really do much yet, but just getting it up in any form involved a lot of setup and deployment overhead, which doesn't really reflect in the site itself, but required a lot of time. Thankfully all that effort will make future deployments that much faster and more automated.

I learned quite a bit about Capistrano recipe writing, which is pretty neat. I had to rearrange my subversion repo to optimize that some, and got my cap setup all organized. Also took me about four hours to figure out how to automate the building and proper deployment of the bcrypt-ruby library, but it works like a charm now. Encrypted passwords for the win.

I have quite the to-do list just from talking to harry about it this morning. Makes me wish I was at home so I could work on it. Don't really want to risk mixing it in with my day job though.

I really do get more done when I am tag teaming something with someone else than I do on my own. It's just so much easier to get started when I have someone to which I am responsible in some way. Maybe that is the fundamental flaw in a day job in cubicle-land... it's too easy to be ignored and left to one's own devices. That, and my personal gain from a job well done is basically limited to keeping my job. It's not even the potential money gain that drives the personal projects to be interesting. It's creating something useful and cool.

More Conquests

In an effort to continue my recent habit of spending money, last night I won some more ebay auctions. This brings my current winnings to include four of each of these:

• Broodstar
• Cloudstone Curio
• Dark Depths
• Dread
• Engineered Plague
• Exhume
• Grave Pact
• Magus of the Jar
• Shaman en-Kor
• Tinker
• Vulturous Zombie

On a side note, I love how ebay makes me feel like a winner each time I win an auction. It's like I won some contest or something. I mean, I guess I have, since it is an auction, but they make it sound so cheesy. I guess that is how you get people to overbid. If they get lost in the idea of "beating the other bidders" then they lose sight of what they really came to do, which was to get something they need at a decent price. I'm happy to say that I have easily saved over 50% so far from what I would have paid in a traditional online card store.

I also managed to get my Black and Blue Creatures sorted last night. It is really surprising to me how many duplicates I have of some commons. For instance, I must have about 35 Orzhov Euthanists. Yet another reason to get the magic site going, just to get those up for sale. It feels good to have half my creatures sorted though. I have a few hours between work and dinner with Bob and Jessie that I hope to spend on the other half. Then on to the last box... Instants!

I hate clever titles

I almost put some stupid pseudo-witty title on this entry, and then remembered that I downgrade people in my mental intelligence hierarchy (oh yes, I maintain one of those) for that kind of crap.

Quoting yourself seriously, using 'lol' to end a sentence, and claiming your life is hard! no one understands me! will also get you downgraded. Thankfully, by avoiding MySpace, I can generally avoid these symptoms of Eternal September. (As if you were smart/unique enough to be incomprehensible!)

Yeah, today I'm feeling cynical.

I got a lot of mental clutter cleaned up last night. Laundry and other chores got done, bills got paid, groceries got bought, etc. I also got some more magic cards bought on ebay. I will now have real Tinkers with which to cheatily whip out Memnarch!

I also started maintaining a To-do list on my Google home page. Tonight's chores involve sorting Magic cards (which I mostly avoided this weekend), and a couple more ebay auctions.

Oh man, lunch soon!

Well over 300 cards on the way to me now. For once I'll get something good in the mail. Man I can't wait for this long weekend to come. I will partake in so much nerdiness! Lisp/Erlang/Ruby ftw...

Xmas List

You know, it was nice being a kid for the sole reason that I always had things to put on my Christmas List. Now it feels like a struggle to think of anything I want (that can easily be purchased by family or friends). I mean, sure, there are things I want (financial freedom, my own business, a Ph.D.) ... but those things are hard to pick up at the local Wal-Mart or Best Buy.

Really what I would like to ask for is just money. The problem is that no one wants to give money, and I feel bad asking for it. Money just seems so un-magical; nothing like opening a shiny box on Christmas morning. Money would be more efficient though, since I could pool all my gift money to buy something big that I would actually use (or at least something big).

It would be nice to have this and this, but that is seriously $1000 worth of electronics. I don't have enough family and friends to even approach that in gift money, and I really should focus on saving up rather than buying more stuff. Sure, it would be useful for the programming to have two monitors, but is it really $1000 useful?

Toys aside, money would be really handy towards helping hit my goal of saving up six months' expenses by the end of the year, which I think I'm going to miss by a couple hundred dollars. I'd probably get way more satisfaction out of hitting that milestone on time than I would opening presents. Does that make me old and thrifty?

Maybe if I framed it as a charity donation. Donate money instead of material goods to the Get-Drew-Out-Of-A-Cube Fund. Any fundraiser needs a good countdown to a goal. Currently I'm $10,345.89 short of my goal. Wanna contribute?

An Offer

This week I have been struck with an overwhelming urge to accomplish a lot of things.

The Magic cards are all sorted by type and color, and the Sorceries are even alphabetical now. I just need to alphabetize the other four boxes and I will finally be done sorting cards. This is easier said than done however, as one of those boxes is my Creatures, which represent over half my cards. I'd really like to get it done before the weekend, but there is only so much sorting I can take.

The sudden rush to sort is mostly to blame on a recent spate of deck building, which has resulted in seven decks that I can't find/don't have cards for. I need to get sorting done to determine which cards I am missing, so I can order them as soon as humanly possible. I want to put the decks together now, and waiting for cards to ship is going to be an amusingly nerdy form of torture.

I'd also like to finish reading the Ender Series (Xenocide and Children of the Mind) before the first two books get stale in my mind. Unfortunately with everything else going on, I am finding it hard to get a good block of free time for reading. My time situation will probably only get worse as we tumble into the holiday season. Maybe I should just unilaterally declare a certain day of the week to be The-Drew-Walks-Alone Day, where I can pursue my nerdy activities without the distraction of social/work engagement. I am already pretty isolated on weeknights though, so sacrificing a weekend day to that would probably result in mass friend mutiny.

Even disregarding birthdays and holidays, my free time is about to get cut even shorter, as Tyler called with an interesting offer yesterday. I am very excited about it. I have no idea what the protocol is on talking about these things, so I'll defer for now, but I am definitely looking forward to meeting with him and Scott on Sunday.

Next week is a short one due to Turkey Day, which is always kind of nice. While Thursday will be completely packed with events, I'm not one to shop so Friday will be a real day off. Surely I can get those books read then.

Then there are the various computer related projects I'd like to accomplish. The magic site got put on hold when I started sorting and reading so much about two weeks ago. Then there is Erlang and Lisp, both on my list of things I really want to learn, have books with which to learn, but are low enough on the todo list that I haven't learned yet.

You know, I was getting way more done when I slept biphasically for a couple weeks there. Maybe I should just go back to that. I really need to find a decent countdown alarm to make that work better, rather than the wake-up-at-this-time alarm I (and most people) have. The key is to sleep for a single sleep cycle, not to wake up at any given time. Too bad real life didn't work like that.

NetJ

So I am about to finish day 3 of the new job... and all I can say is that it rocks. I get to wear normal (jeans, tshirt, hoodie) clothes, I have dual 19 inch LCDs hooked to a dual Xeon 3Ghz box with a rather unnecessary raid 0 array running Ubuntu, and my coworkers rock. Add to that my proximity to home, hour long lunch break, and something totally different to work on, and I'm in heaven.

Still in a cubicle... but at least it has six foot walls instead of the normal five foot ones. Also way less foot traffic, as I'm officially located on Dark Alley (yes, the cubicle rows have street names).

I think the big thing is that everyone here is just generally glad to work here and happy to be here. I also find myself looking forward to the day's tasks, rather than dreading work. I'm sure some of this is honeymoon period... but hopefully it will continue through the whole six months. I figure at least there is no way I can get bored in six months anyway.

The project itself is updating this old dos app to run as a web app in a browser. The app itself is pretty basic, but there is a lot of data to bring into hibernate and provide CRUD for. As far as I can tell, there seems to be a lot of DRY-Violation so far, so I have hopes of making a decent impact on that front. This project is budgeted for like a man-year or more, and if there is really as much opportunity for automation as I think, we might be able to cut that in half.

Anyway, I have been re-engaged by the Ender series at home. Last night I was up until 4 reading Speaker for the Dead. I have read Ender's Game about a dozen times now, but I only read the other three once or twice each, as I never was a big fan of them. Now that I'm not 12 though, I am really getting into Speaker. I can't believe I didn't like it before. It has been gripping, as evidenced by missing my bedtime by about 6 hours last night.

Goal for tonight is to finish Speaker and get to bed early. Bonus points if I have time to sort my Instants. Magic Glee!