It’s been a while since I posted a fitness update, so I thought I better fess up: I’ve been terrible about going to the gym. My summer routine of three-to-four days a week at the gym has slid to a dismal one-to-two days at the gym (and its usually 1 day rather than 2). This … Read more
It’s been a quiet fall around Nuketown. I didn’t realize just how quiet until this morning, when I was surfing around the archives and saw just how many days I didn’t post in September, October, and November. Granted, November was lost to writing the novel, but the earlier months weren’t all that much better. The … Read more
It’s done. After a month of writing 1,667 words almost every day (with a few days hitting 3,000 to 4,000 to make up for traveling, family engagements, and the occasional bout of exhaustion), I completed my novel. It’s 53,379 words, which is slightly over the 50,000-word goal set by the National Novel Writing Month organizers. … Read more
Atlas Games President John Nephew’s been elected to city council in Maplewood, Minnesota. According to Gaming Report, his opposition tried to play the “games are evil” card, but clearly it didn’t work. I’m not saying I want to run for city council in Easton, I’m just saying I find it interesting that a gamer was … Read more
Today’s Word Count: 499 (11/30) Yesterday’s Word Count: 4,753 (11/29) Running Total: 53,379 Goal: 50,000
I’ve been fighting the good fight against RSS bugs in Moodle 1.8.2. The problem isn’t actually with Moodle, but with Snoopy, the PHP class that emulates as a web browser and which Magpie RSS library uses to fetch the feeds.
It seems that the current version of Snoopy has some issues with redirected URLs. It has trouble following 302 Page Moved messages and has an annoying habit of putting the port number into redirected URLs. While it’s not technically wrong to do this, not every web server thinks that the urls foo.com and foo.com:80 are the same (strange but true).
Case in point: The Wall Street Journal. The following feeds involve redirects (apparently served through FeedBurner, so I’m betting any feed using FeedBurner would have the same issue):
http://online.wsj.com/xml/rss/3_7011.xml
http://online.wsj.com/xml/rss/3_7014.xml
After a few days of working with Open Office’s word processor, it was time to turn to the spreadsheet. I don’t work with spreadsheets much at home, but I do have a few specialized uses for them. One of those is a campaign manager for my Mutants & Masterminds campaign – I use it to … Read more
One of the reasons I bought my MacBook Pro was to get back to digitizing some home video and experimenting with video podcasts for Nuketown. Unfortunately, Apple’s iMovie ’08 video editing app isn’t cooperating. Every time I hook up my Canon ZR70 up to the MacBook Pro and try to import audio via iMovie ’08 … Read more
My first few days on NeoOffice haven’t turned up any major problems, but I have encountered a couple of foibles. Most of these are personal preferences, but I think most heavy Word users while find them to be similarly annoying Bullets: Word had me spoiled; simply typing an asterisk before a sentence and hitting return … Read more
Firing up NeoOffice and using it to write a few quick documents, the first thing I noticed was how slick and Aquafied it was — it feels like a Mac OS X native application, which is a major advantage over Open-Office-under-X11 approach that I took earlier. I also quickly began to assemble a list of … Read more