March 2007 Archives
I am some kind of tired tonight. This week was hard on all of us. We finally found a house we quite liked last friday, and have spent the rest of this week doing all the things you have to do before you take the crazy step of putting in an offer: another viewing at the open house, home inspection, setting up all the paperwork for the offer, lots of discussions and talking, then the offer itself, which was last night. Now, we didn’t get the place, which wasn’t very surprising to me as i kind of thought that it would go for crazy money, but it is still a tiring experience.
Unfortunately there is no rest for those that want to buy a house and then sell their current one! Doing some drywalling/patching this weekend, which will be … interesting. The only other drywalling i’ve done is with full-sized bits, and this is patching a cut out hole from a lathe-and-plaster wall. I’ll give you all the low-down later.
You gotta love BoardGameGeek.com - i knew that that was the place to let folks know about the games and stuff. You can check here to see what is going on with the games. Thanks for the interest!
Since we are moving, we are trying to reduce the amount of stuff we have. And lucky you, i’ve got stuff you want! Unbelievably, i’m finally winnowing down my game collection. After 22 years, i’m getting rid of games. I’ve got 3 pictures for you to check out: first, second, third. The “bit ticket items” are the minature games - Dark Future, Silent Death (lots of add-ons for this one), Space Marine. Oh ya, the 2 with no title’s on the side are “King Author” and “Business Strategy”.
Also a bunch of assorted graphic novels. See here. There are also loose comics - A large run of Usagi and other stuff which i haven’t picked out. Just think - free pictures for your kids? Good crafts material? Cut-n-paste? Whatever, just take them away!
So, if you are interested, please let me know. You can come by just about anytime to pick the stuff up!
Please help us out, and take some of our stuff!
Well, first of all, if you haven’t heard yet, Ciara, Conor and I are expecting a new baby boy to be joining our family August 14th or there abouts. And because there is never enough going on in our lives, we are also looking to move homes before then.
Yep. Crazy.
After trying out the two afore mentioned del.icio.us clones - Sabrosus and Scuttle, i’ve settled on using Scuttle. Sabrosus is good, and possibly a more finished product, but it is expressly a single user tool. Its developers are also not native english speakers, which makes some of the documentation (wiki, blog, etc) hard to understand. Scuttle is multi-user from the get-go, which is somewhat important to me, and the documentation is english.
And so, this is an invitation to you, my dear readers, that if you were a del user (or not!), and left because of the Yahoo buy-out (or not!), please feel free to sign up to my scuttle install. Heck, you can sign up for any reason! Rest assured i will not do anything evil with the info. And i’m backing up the DB nightly, so there is some data safety - thank you NSLU2!
If you do sign up, please let me know!
Ah the internet. So much stuff, lots that you don’t need to keep in mind, but some, some of it you want to be able to come back to at some point. Thus the bookmark. Now, as great as straight-forward tree hierarchical bookmarks structures are (ie. firefox’s and IE’s bookmark/favourites), they are actually pretty poor at being able to categorize the diverse range of stuff i want to track on the web. (I won’t go into replication between work and home - foxmarks has solved this issue)
Then came del.icio.us. The birth1 of the folksonomy. The ability to ‘tag’ each link you wanted to store with whatever kind of meta-data you’d like, to be able to create a rich set of descriptive tags, was huge.
Eventually, all good things come to an end, and del.icio.us was bought out (by Yahoo!). I took the opportunity to clear out all my bookmarks, and stopped using the service. I’ve been getting along without for some time now. However i now feel like i’ve hit the wall. With del it was easy to quickly add and tag just about any link i found interesting. Using the hierarchical bookmarking tools, i have to think about where i want to put the link, rather then just bookmark it. Or, worse, what i’ve been doing is to just drop interesting links into a single folder, making a big undifferentiated pile links.
I’m now reconsidering the reasons i left del in the first place. I was happy enough with the thought of my links being used in aggregate by the original owners for whatever purposes they might have, but once bought by Yahoo i was more concerned with the data-mining possibilities available to them. I’m afraid that the risk reward ratio might have swung back towards the ease and functionality that del offers, regardless of what Yahoo might do with that data.
Rather then having to give up my (somewhat questionable) morals and/or ethics, i could start my own del work-a-like. Sabro.us and Scuttle are two open source tools that i could install on my server so that i can retain control of my own data. I’m thinking that that is the answer i am looking for.
#1 Ok, maybe not really the birth, but certainly one of the biggest popularizers of it.
Lego have just released a new Ultimate Collector’s model: The Millennium Falcon. Yar, 5000 plus bricks. However, trying to convince Ciara that it is worth the $680 is going to be, well, impossible. Heck, i can’t even justify it to myself, but i still want one!
So, we were only needed till early afternoon on Thursday. None of us got called to even be considered for a jury. While it was nice that we didn’t have to stay any longer, it was too bad that i missed out on an opportunity to be on a jury.
Anyway, its all over, i was back to work on Friday. I’m now exempt for 3 years.
