Woke up early today and did something I had wanted to do in a while. I shut down a lot of the minor websites I have and that I never use. Now I am still left with way too many websites that I never update, but that I think I should update… I’ll probably consolidate them somehow. Anyway in the unlikely case anybody is actually missing a site, just let me know.
August is World Building Month … not my idea, but I am participating! You’ll find my work on my world building blog.
I just returned to Flock and decided to test it. Well, it’s a very… feature-rich browser. It’s supposed to be a “social networking” type browser, which integrates support for a whole lot of things. Well, it’s certainly interesting. And this posting serves no other purpose than to test the blog api in Flock.
I have released “v1.0″ of this theme. I’m calling it [wpnj01](http://geek.pandemonium.de/wordpress/wordpress-themes/wpnj/). Yes, very unimaginative, but what are you gonna do. There’s probably a million bugs in it, so let me know if you find one.
I couldn’t believe my eyes: I have found a bunch of old screenshots on an ancient CD. First of all there were five additional screen shots from Project Deadland, an attempt to build an isometric tile engine in the style of UFO/XCOM.
But it gets even better: In 1995, two years before I wrote the Deadland engine, I was attempting my hand at an U6 style tile engine. That project was lost a long time ago, due to combined hard disk and floppy-disk failures. There was even a whole design doc for this one, complete with a worked out story and all. It was a really big setback to my game programming ambitions when I lost all of that. Still, it’s cool to have at least some screen shots – I had thought that none survived.
Attentive readers (Hi, Pedro) will probably notice that some of the tiles look a lot like the one in U6, and indeed that did serve as the basis for many of them. But already you can see in these screens that I was working on replacing them (the walls, for example).
I bought a new webcam recently. I find that I always unplug it from its USB port when I do not use it. – Does this make me paranoid, or just sensible? Likewise I always turn the microphone of my headset off with the (physical) switch in the headset.
A month ago I [ordered a test-book](/2007/05/12/book-publishing/) from Lulu.com. Took them about two weeks to produce and deliver the thing – but to be fair there were several holidays in between. I am pretty happy with the result. The production quality is quite okay. Not perfect, but it’s still impressive. It’s basically a normal soft-cover book. The two problems I noticed were a very fine black line in the upper left corner of the cover; and the pages are not exactly symmetrical. That is, I have a line under the page header. If you look at a page so that the printing on the back side of the page shines through, you will notice that the two lines are not at the exact same height.
Still, I consider these minor problems – The whole technology of “print on demand” fascinates me to no end. With it, it is completely possible for anybody to create books. I know there are critics who lament that this just results in a lot of unprofessional, low-quality writing being published (and I will include myself in the group of unprofessional and bad writers; I just do it “for fun” for myself). But is that really an issue? It removes another barrier of entry for those who seek to distribute their writing. It’s sort of like blogs: There’s a lot of nonsense and garbage out there, but there are also many gems. The audience will be the judge of what is worthwhile to read and what is not: It’s the democratization of the printing press.
As for me – I’m now in the process of proof-reading my old stuff, and then I will order a revised copy from Lulu: I made some changes to layout and so on because I was not entirely happy with what I chose the first time around. Lesson of the day: Just because it looks well on the screen does not mean it is necessarily perfect when transferred unto dead trees.
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When I reboot my PC with all this stuff attached, Windows crashes on startup. I am not actually sure why this happens. I am assuming I may be draining too much juice out of the USB bus. But do I look like a hardware guy?
Yes, that is my actual setup. But I must admit that not all devices are active all the time. The only reason for that is that my digital camera (the Sony DSC T-9) is usually in my coat pocket, my iPod goes to the office with me, and I don’t actually have space for the scanner on my desk. Even without the camera and the scanner, Windows doesn’t appreciate my devices much.
Well, I am back home. If you wish to listen to me “on air” (on wire, really, this being the Internet, but I guess you could always hook yourself up via WLAN if that bothers you), I was a guest on the [Corey and Joel Radio Show Episode #111](http://www.coreyandjoelradio.com/archives/2007/03/corey_and_joel_105.html) and also on [The Funhouse with Upchuck the Clown](http://wfuckoffradio.com/archives/upchuck_the_clown_20070315.mp3) – the later in disguise, however.
Just a warning, these shows are definitely “R” rated, and the [Corey and Joel Radio Show](http://www.coreyandjoelradio.com/) definitely contains very un-PC jokes. It’s a cultural thing with these wacky Americans.
I guess my iPod is nearing death. Seriously this time; after I had revived it last time by reformatting it, this trick didn’t work. I still get weird errors hinting at disk problems, and the device is only recognized by the PC on maybe one out of four attempts. It lasted one and a half years so far, which I find way too little for such an expensive device.
Now I will have to think about I will do next. For now, the iPod still works. And I am doing an intensive disk check as I write this. But what next? What will I do if – when – the iPod dies? Buy a new one?
I really don’t know yet.
_Update, the next morning_
The type of the file system is FAT32.
Volume NILS JEPPE' created 10/25/2006 9:33 PM
Volume Serial Number is 4BDD-E7E8
Windows is verifying files and folders...
File and folder verification is complete.
Windows has checked the file system and found no problems.
58,450,664 KB total disk space.
1,948 KB in 88 hidden files.
2,192 KB in 545 folders.
46,767,916 KB in 10,291 files.
11,678,604 KB are available.
4,096 bytes in each allocation unit.
14,612,666 total allocation units on disk.
2,919,651 allocation units available on disk.
Well, no disk errors. I have no idea what the little guy’s problem is.