Friday, 13th July, 2007

On Second Thoughts

Been having a bit of a mental retcon about a few things recently. Nothing major, just a slight questioning of decisions that I've made in the past, and the intentional specifics behind them.

Erin vs SuperERIN

I am a sentimental fool with a tendancy to over-anthropomorphisise inanimate objects. Hence I have a special little relationship with my server, Erin.

It's a nice little set-up — she's down there on the floor, right next to my chair, and I get a warm and cuddly feeling knowing that this blog is kinda-like an 'extension' of my house, ie. when you're looking at these pages, you're actually having some kind of 'presence' in my RL existence.

But Erin — as we all know — has a tendancy to go offline at all-too-frequesnt intervals. The most recent of which being the past couple of days, during which time I was sat frustrated in Leeds, worrying incessantly about whether I'd paid the phone bill or not.

(Yes, I know. Again. Just don't OK? I have paid it now, and besides, it was just the router crashing again)

To some extents, it doesn't matter. "Ho hum, my blog is down. People all over the world won't be able to find out what I had for breakfast this morning". But there's an increasingly large list of things that rely on Erin being online — the most recent addition being http://currantly.org

(Which I am still enormously proud of BTW, yet wondering if the background should be dark)

There are often calls, in these circumstances, for me to get a proper server — yet I always resist them, not wanting to yield complete control over to some anonymous Linux box that I haven't even ever touched. But the imminent possible port-opening of my XServe (with its bastardly fast connection speed) has me wondering if I could make the transition away from my Heath Robinson ADSL-powered Setup™, and into a multi-gigabit (and always on) blog-type thing.

Dunno

I won't be doing anything before October (because I want to reach the landmark of five years of self-hosting)¹, but the minute port 80 (and others) gets open I'll be shoving all the non-tranniefesto stuff on it.

Whether I move my blog though — well, let's just say I'm thinking about it.

Social Network Purging

I do, truth be told, sign up for far too many online things Some of those things I end up using for very specific purposes, and some of them turn into a lot of fun and useful connections.

Some of them though, irritate me.

There are one or two that I signed up to thinking (rather selfishly) "Cool, I'll get a shit-load of traffic out of this", yet the tiny trickle of inbound clicks never even comes close to the tidal-wave of one-liners and cock-pics.

Some online communities suit me, I think. In some of them, I have a real sense of 'belonging' — but others jar me a little. They don't feel 'right', and I wonder what it is that I'm potentially saying about myself by being a part of them. Some of them even make me feel a little 'uncomfortable'.

The obvious no-brainer here is to dump my profiles on them, purge the hell out of my social network and try to limit myself to things that I get a positive experience out of. Yet it's hard, perhaps, to fling something with hundreds of followers and tens of thousands of views into /dev/null.

I guess the question is, of course, whether there were enough useful views within those tens of thousands to warrant keeping a presence.

I'm siding, myself, on the "nope" side of the answer.

¹ I know, I've already proclaimed this blog to be five years old back in February. I was keeping an online diary for a few months before I turned it into a database-driven thing you see, and it was a long time after that that someone used the word "blog" to describe it.

Canadian iPod user struck by lightning

"reportedly [...] enjoying 'religious music' at the time of the incident" — I don't mean to be cruel, but standing under a tree during a thunderstorm, iPod or no iPod, isn't exactly a good idea is it? [el Reg]

What A Stunningly Shitty Kinda Day

photo

Horrible here today. I thought we'd broken through this rubbish weather the past couple of days — it was sunglasses-weather in Leeds.

But today, back in Lancaster, there's an incessant vertical stream of water that is dulling my mood, and stopping me from plucking up the energy to go to the shops and buy the Corn Flakes that I'm really craving for some reason

QuickTime 7.2

"Support for full screen viewing in QuickTime Player" — correct me if I'm wrong, but that was previously only available in QuickTime Pro was it not?

All Online Data Lost After Internet Crash

"Nigeria was the first country to report a full economic crash" — [The Onion] (via http://twitter.com/swords)

Dangle

photo

I dug an old glider out of my inventory for a bit of flight practice, but managed to catch the tail of it on a build.

Which was embarassing :

Persistent Headache

I have, for a couple of weeks now, had this strange dull ache in my forehead. Not — I hasten to point out — the typical morning headache that is common to someone who seems to be drinking two bottles of wine a night (although someone who is determined to get that down to one, and a mug of Horlicks), rather an odd painful sensation that's brought about when rubbing my brow in a particular way.

I'm not (as an aside) a great fan of my brow. It's rather 'neanderthal' in appearance — a stunning protuberance that's a right bloody giveaway when I'm trying to 'pass', especially from certain angles.

Someone once told me that I could "fix that with reconstructive surgery" — to which I spat wine in their face and laughed

But yeah, an odd pain in my forehead...

I was rubbing it, pensively (as is my idiom) in the car on the way home from Sainsburys this evening (with two bags of FOOD! next to me), and I noticed it again.

"Odd", I thought. "You now, it almost feels as if someone has punched me repeatedly in the face".

 

Oh. Right. Ah.