Ptocheia.net » Blogging

Distraction is the name of the game, kids

admin — Sun, 20 Nov 2011 23:00:58 +0000

Nanowrimo is in full swing, and I totally hit 35,000 today. It’s so much easier to write (for me, at least) choose your own adventure books than regular books. No more deciding which direction to take, I can just go in every direction! The story’s pretty meandering so far – I like trying to tie in details from each path with other paths, so that characters can still get pretty fleshed out. And, so, a decision you make will influence decisions other characters make as well. But, I’m afraid that’s for later. I’m kinda short on endings so far – my main character (named “Mary Sue”, haha) has been killed once, hospitalized once, and had a few romantic encounters, but that’s about it. When I first started this endeavor, I had all sorts of lofty ideas about doing literary tie-ins with non-main characters (mostly because Snow Crash is the Best Book Ever and so I wanna gonna slip in Hiro and YT somewhere, and then branch off in other fun ways) but so much for loftiness. I started off with characters that reminded me of pop culture references (an Anthony Michael Hall a la John Hughes kid, along with a Rickie from My So Called Life character). But then everything sort of started devolving when I started naming new love interests after Colorado Rapids team members. And somehow added in Jersey Shore people as well. Hah! It’ll get cleaned up later, I’m just trying to pump out the content. Writing is rather like making pottery. The first draft is really just piling a giant lump of clay on the wheel, the real work is in the editing.

Am headed to LA for Turkey week, that should be fun. I will be paying a big chunk of Stupid tax to the local Apple store during that time, where my Mac shall sit for that duration having it’s keyboard repaired. Though it means NaNoing on my teeny netbook, I’m looking forward to not having a laptop for awhile, as it will make it near impossible to do work for my job. Considering I haven’t had a sick day where I didn’t have to still work, and I was crouched in the corner at the HP theme park in FL last spring, supposedly on vacation, doing work, it’ll be nice to have absolutely no way to do work. I am struggling with some serious burnout issues, and am really hoping that this break (along with my upcoming week in Richmond) will help.

Speaking of that week in Richmond, I’m not going to insanely plan it like I have other trips. This is because I want to be lazy, and it’s not like I have a car to use (not really looking to rent a car for the week, and the trips mostly to see my parents, who I haven’t seen since last September, anyhow).

Not too much else going on. Now that I’m writing more, I find that I’m reading more. Which is a good thing. Am kinda cracked out on sleep, which sucks. I look at this laptop and my phone too close to bed, which messes me up. So I’m trying to shut them off earlier, and read before bed. But now I’m waking up an hour before I need to, and then dozing off again 10 minutes before my alarm. I just want a decent night of sleep, but that’s been proving challenging. It’s even more frustrating when my body doesn’t cooperate on the weekends as well, as I super depend on weekends to try catching up. Oh well.

I need more time. I want to learn Ruby, and then rails. Possibly Python as well. Every day I am reminded of how many things I don’t know, and it drives me maaaaaaad. I mean, I guess it’s good, if I knew everything what would be the point of getting up. I just feel like unless I’m actively learning new things and producing new things, I fall behind, which is super stressful.

I need to go skiing or snowboarding. I got pants to do so, and have yet to experience either. If needed, I’ll look for a Meetup group that’s doing the beginner’s version of one or the other, with hopefully a carpool involved. I’ve been rear-ended once up in those mountains, and my little car is mountain-shy still!

On a final note, I ate all of the chocolates and now have none. Dang!

Feed me, Seymour!

admin — Tue, 24 Aug 2010 21:17:08 +0000

So I use LJ to read blog feeds. And I had a new one to add. However, you can only create new feeds if you have a paid account. Which I no longer have, as I just don’t use LJ nearly as much as I used to. As it is, the majority of my LJ posts are grabbed from my WordPress blog. I should probably start using another feed reader, one I can actually add new blogs too. I know there’s still plenty of people that post on LJ, and I wonder how tedious it would be for me to add all of these people’s journals as feeds to a feed reader. Thing is, then I miss reading the friends-only posts. I wish there was a way I could just add my friends feed to a feed reader, and magically have me logged in. Or I can just check both LJ as well as a feed reader, it’s not that big of a deal, I’m just all about being super efficient.

Efficiency! I’m so proud, I have finally achieved a state where I can go infinitely without showering. Nevermind, that sounds gross, let me reword it better. See, for the longest time, I would feel gross and awful if I didn’t shower every single morning. This is a pain, though. It means less sleep on days I need to get up early. I also don’t get that dirty every single day, and I really hate that if I wake up too late for a shower, I’d just feel awful the rest of the morning. It was psychological, and needed breaking. It was a big pain at first, but I have acclimated myself now to being able to get up and throw on clothes and leave without bathing, and to not feel like I’m super gross for doing so. It usually makes more sense to shower at night anyhow, since I can wash off after I’ve done something super sweaty/dirty, rather then waiting for the next morning to do so.

I’m applying to be a part of a sleep study. I would disappear for 2 weeks into a lab, and get paid around $2,500. It’s not like I’m doing any other work right now! Looks like there’s a lot of testing to see if one qualifies though.

Pretty sure I’m headed to another Drupal meeting tonight. I’m growing bitter with Drupal, though. I mean, I know I’m asking a lot of it in what I try to do sometimes, but it’s just not very well organized. I just use WordPress for blogging, so it’s not like I’m stretching it’s limits very much, but it’s so nice how easy it is to upgrade things. Just a button click, and it’s taken care of. Magical! No such simplicity in Drupal. It’s all “download this, then dump this thing here.” And this is why Drupal shall never have the market share that WordPress has. There is a way of simple module upgrades, but it’s command-line interface. Which is fine for most developers, but this sort of thing helps guarantee that Drupal will make little headway into the non-developer world.

Boy could I use some pizza right about now!

Fatal error: Cannot redeclare pclziputilpathreduction

admin — Wed, 04 Mar 2009 05:04:43 +0000

So I decided to do what all the cool kids are doing these days, and upgrade to WordPress 2.7.1. Thing is, when I tried, I got as far as getting the upgrade zip, then I get this nasty little bastard on my screen:

Fatal error: Cannot redeclare pclziputilpathreduction

After poking around on google a bit, I found the solution. Seems that the WordPress Automatic Upgrade plugin was causing the actual attempt at an automatic upgrade to die. Maybe the new WordPress upgrade was making faces at the plugin, so said plugin decided to make life more difficult for all of us involved. In any case, all you have to do is disable WordPress Automatic Upgrade, and WordPress 2.7.1 upgrades quite happily. Which also means that now the whole automatic upgrade dealio is packaged with WordPress, rather then being a separate plugin. Works for me!