Request for Gossip

Not sure the best place to post this, so I’ll just blog it and hope he sees it.

Gossip:
I was wondering if you could add a couple of bootleg RSS feeds for me. Specifically the City of Heroes News Archive and Server Status pages. (Maybe the Recent Updates too – but I don’t think that one will get used as much.)

Perhaps also a “feed request” form/link on the bootleg RSS site / blog. (Assuming, of course, that you want to start taking requests.)

Thanks, man 🙂

Gmail Funnyness

Is Funnyness a word?

I just sent an email to my mother from my gmail account. In it I used the phrase:
“I’m beta-testing a webmail service from google.”

You know how gmail displays text ads based on the content of the mail message you’re reading? Check out these:

[Quote]
Sponsored Links:

Web Mail for Power Users
E-mail, Calendar, Notepad, & more Secure POP3, IMAP, and SMTP service
www.mailsnare.net

WebMail solution
complete webmail platform. 65 Milions users. For Operators.
www.xandmail.com

Free Email Account
15 MB Space- no popups/spam shield News, calendar, stocks, weather
mail.egine.com
[Quote]

They just advertised competative products to their service, based (I can only assume) on my mentioning that I was testing gmail. It just struck me as amusing.

Father’s day stuff

Jenny and I went to Redding for father’s day.

Short list of the things we did:

  • Stayed up for 35 hours
  • Went swimming.
  • Taught my aunt how to manage the files from her digital camera and burn them to cds (that can be played in their new dvd player)
  • Introduced my 8 yr old cousin to Spaced Penguin!
  • Got Duckling to kick for his Aunt (who lives in chicago)
  • Shared stories about my father with aunts, uncles, cousins, mom and stepdad, sister, and grandfather
  • Scattered (most of) my father’s ashes along (and into) the Sacramento River
  • Announced Duckling’s name our family.
  • Watched a CDF tanker helicopter scoop water from the river and dump it on a fire burning very close to my grandfather’s home (which was directly in the fire’s path)
  • Had car trouble and got lost on the way back from the shop. (Before heading out of town)

I think it was a good trip, overall. Happy moments, and sad ones too. I think it’s time for “go to bed”

Uhm, Gossip?

Looks like Firefox 0.9 is doing funny things to g-blog.net page layouts. I’ve seen it with the default as well as the house of blues themes. The sidebar keeps getting expanded to 100% of the window width. I think the culprit might be the dropdown menus. However somethign’s different about the control panel and entry writing pages, as they appear to display fine.

I’d post screenshots, but I don’t have any decent image manipulating software on this machine. (Have you ever tried to resize an image in paint?)

shudders

You Know You’ve been playing too much City of Heroes when…

You Know You’ve been playing too much City of Heroes when you have the following conversation with your wife in the middle of the night:

[Quote]
Hooloovoo: (shaking Wife awake) Go turn off the shower.

Wife: (groggy) Huh? The shower’s not on.

H: No, the shower outside.

W: (confused) What?

H: We have to turn the shower off so they’ll give us a new mission.

W: (realizing H is actually sound asleep) What kind of mission?

H: I don’t know, but it’s important that we turn the shower off first.

W: Okay. (rolls over and tries to go back to sleep.)
[Quote]

I have no recollection of the previous alleged conversation. Jenny told me about it this morning. I have been known to sleep-talk, but this is much more lucid and cohearant than my normal mumbling. Maybe I should skip CoH tonight and work on my website or something instead.

GRAH!

I know there’s a scheduled maintenance window and all, but how about a little warning with a server shut-down countdown, or even a courtesey “The server will be shutting down in XX minutes.” system message to give folks a chance to get to a place they feel safe being logged out?

is not looking forward to logging back into his main CoH character tonight.

My tanker is likely going to be taking a very quick trip to the medical center, since I just got forceibly (that can’t be spelled right…) removed from the server in a place he has no business being on his own.

MMMM, Experience Debt… yummy…

Movies ‘n’ Games

The company I work for is going to see HPatPoA. Chutta is wearing a “Muggle” shirt I found at Hot Topic. He was pestering me about playing CoH a while back, and I was bugging him about joining in on our CosPlay. Finally agreed that if I started Playing CoH, he would wear the “Muggle” shirt.

Since he wasn’t able to go with us Sunday night, I dropped it off with his GF at home this afternoon. She’s going to make sure he wears it to work today.

A Childhood memory

Zhaneel’s Post reminded me that I had written something several months ago which I had intended to post. Actually, I did post it — as a Private Entry because I wasn’t entirely happy with how it had come out. I just went back and cleaned it up a bit, and now I’m posting it as a public entry…

When I was in first grade, I made friends with a girl named Tasha. Tasha had been blind since birth, and occasionally needed the help of a sighted guide to navigate around the school.

There were of course some interesing “perks”. We got to leave class a couple of minutes early – one of the things I did, was help Tasha get from the main classroom to the “special-ed” room at lunch and after school. I sometimes spent lunches in the “special-ed” room which included, among other things, a soccer ball that beeped, other sound-based toys, and braile typewriters. Braile facinated me, and I even began to learn who to read and write braile.

I once asked my mom why Tasha wore sunglasses if her eyes didn’t work.
“She’s probably sensitive about her eyes,” was the reply. When she noticed my look of confusion, she continued: “You’ll understand when you’re older.”

My mom was absolutely right. At the time, what I took her statment to mean was that Tasha’s eyes were sensitive; as in even though she couldn’t see, light could cause her discomfort. I imagined a situation similar to looking at a very bright light (like the sun) and having it hurt my eyes, only this was the effect caused by normal light levels for Tasha. (What I actually remember my mom saying was: “She’s probably sensitive around her eyes.”)

As much as the “You’ll understand when you’re older…” line irked me when I was a kid, sometimes it’s true.

I was curious about Tasha’s blindess, but didn’t see it as a reason to tease her (as many other kids did), or take pity on her (as many adults did). It was just a part of what made her unique. I think the fact that I treated her – for the most part – as just another kid was why she opened up to me, and began opening up more to the world. She began participating more in her regualr class such.

Her teachers noticed the change. I didn’t know it at the time, just as I didn’t notice the change in Tasha’s behavior that the school did, but there were plans to track us together — we would have been placed in the same classes through elementary school, and probably junior high and high school as well.

Near the middle of second grade, the my school district had a strike. My mother, being a teacher in another district – supported the strikers, and kept me home from school. 2 or 3 weeks in, she talked to the principal of her school, and I was allowed to join a second grade class in there, so I wouldn’t fall too behind. The strike was over week or two later, and I returned to my original school.

The following year, my sister and I transferred to the district in which our mom worked, and I lost touch with everyone I knew at my previous shcool; including Tasha.

From time to time, I think about her. I wonder how she is, what’s she’s doing now, if the school ever found someone else to track her with – that sort of thing.

Check it out…

The first step in my eventual site redesign is to get a feature that I gave up on to finally work. That feature is the syndication of this blog. Basically I want a copy of my recent G-Blog entries to show up on a blog page on hoolooboo.net.

Using the XML feed, and trick I just found in an XML.com article, I’ve got it working. I just have a couple of layout quirks (caused by

tags) which will probably be solved when I get around to building new css files for the site.

Will be interesting to see that page linked to itself from this entry 🙂

fixing typos

Edited on Jun 6th 2004, 11:53 by Hooloovoo