This may not be news to those of you who read therithere and/or saw its latest comic, but I've updated (and moved) the ClaWrite page. Permalink, for those of you who want to update your bookmarks, is now the simple and memorable http://draconity.com/clawrite.*
It still looks like crap, but it's now at least got a tutorial page up -- including full punctuation guidelines, which have been in existence but missing in action for the entire decade that the info has been online. (Happy anniversary, ClaWrite! Most people would say tin is traditional, but I got you punctuation!)
For as little attention as I've given ClaWrite -- an alternate alphabet based on a 3x3 grid of strokes easily made with, say, a dragon's claws -- it sure seems to have captured people's imaginations. Back in my college days, the URL was apparently dropped into a column in the gaming magazine InQuest, which is about the closest I've come to 15 minutes of fame. And I've heard from people over the years who have used it in one capacity or another -- including, as the comic linked above points out, writing in diaries. I really ought to give the site a facelift and commission a proper font out of it.
Which reminds me -- I don't have an informed opinion on the many alternatives-to-copyright that exist out there (copylefting, creative commons, GPL, etc). What would be the simplest way for me to preemptively tell people that $THINGY is available free of charge for non-commercial use and/or modification; as long as the original source (me) is credited and any modifications retain the same license? And hypothetically, should $THINGY gain enough popularity that people want to use it (or one of its derivations) in a for-profit scenario -- what protections would said license still offer?
-- * Yes, draconity.com is me. This has the happy side effect that the Draconity FAQ is located at the wonderfully memorable draconity.com/faq. I feel guilty sometimes about not putting the domain to better use, but at least there's that.
I need some strange info Do any of my readers work at Google, or know anyone who does, or know anyone who knows someone that does?
I need to know the IP block of their *outgoing* mail servers (specifically for Google Groups, but those mail servers probably cover their other services as well). We're running greylisting here at our ISP, and it's working fantastically -- but the delays it's causing to Google Groups e-mail notifications are giving one of our customers problems, so I want to preemptively whitelist their mail server IPs.
There's absolutely nothing relevant on their support pages (as might be expected). I can't get through to a live person at their corporate phone number. I just need a starting place.
(Comments to this post are screened in case you have a private phone number to give me. I'll update here if I can get things fixed.)
-- ETA: Possibly solved; see comments. (Fix time: 1/2 hour. I love the Internet.) Confirmation or further refinement would still be appreciated.
can't sleep, server will eat me Thirteen-hour day for me (and 16 for roaminrob; we had a server go down at work, had to install a replacement from scratch once fsck failed (fortunately we have good backups), and then ... discovered the backdoor(s). I've been most of the last six hours manually combing the /home directory tree with find because off-the-shelf rootkit detectors typically ignore it, and we had at least half a dozen scattered, hidden directories with root executables, images-with-embedded-files, and other fun things.
Anyway. Be that as it may, a quick request for my musically inclined readers: Anyone have a copy of just the last half of (the non-acoustic) "Layla"? I mean the extended instrumental jam with the piano and the guitar.
No good deed goes unreworded* Imagine my disappointment when I came home and the top search results all pointed to waitstaff.
...
... No. That's an intriguing punchline, but kicking off with it and then telling the story backward is going to be unsatisfying. So let's start over, from the top:
I stopped at a gas station tonight on my way home and bought $6.66 worth of regular unleaded (just enough to get me to the cheap gas station on my way to pick up kadyg tomorrow). My windshield looked a little grimy. So I wandered forward to where the squeegees were stored, about two feet away from an elderly woman pumping gas into her old Volkswagen van.
"Can I get your windows for you?" I asked, and smiled. "Just the front, and rear," she said.
I walked around to her rear window and wiped. It took her a few seconds to process this; then she walked over. "Do you ... work here?"
"Nope, just passing through."
She was silent for several moments. Thanked me, finished pumping her gas, and then caught up to me as I was wiping down my own windshield's grime.
"So to what do I owe this little random act of kindness?" she asked.
I considered. An honest answer would have included the measure of self-consciousness at approaching her to get the squeegee; she had looked up, uncertain, at the stranger's approach, and I had wanted to transform the encounter into one a little more positive.**
"That's a pretty good phrase for it," I answered.
We chatted some. Exchanged introductions, though not names. Talked about our cars, digressed into a little history. She asked where I worked, and I fumbled through an explanation. Then:
Seemingly out of nowhere -- "Are you a server?"
Am i a server?
I had absolutely no context for this line.
"I, um," I fumbled, "ah, that's one way to put it ... I like helping people ..."
"Me, too," she said. Then confided: "I think being a server is the best way to end up where you should be in life." Or something of the sort; my brain was still trying to process the idea. Server. Like at an Internet company? ... Hosting web pages for destiny? ... Or, maybe, this has got to be some sort of Christian metaphor. The way that conversation took a screaming left turn it must be something religious. I'll have to look it up when I get home.
I shrugged at her. "Well, it's already gotten me this far."
We parted ways; I drove off with my $6.66 worth of gasoline, and ...
Imagine my disappointment when I came home and the top search results all pointed to waitstaff.
I'm not certain I'm convinced. It did come up in the context of work, but some of the other things she was saying around it made it seem far deeper than a mere job description.
So has anyone here heard of the term "server" in a religious context (presumably conservative Christian; she lived in Penn Valley and so odds are good that way)? Are there people who use that as a self-description besides the Workers Formerly Known As Waitstaff?
-- * Pun intentional.
** It occurs to me, hours later, that another subconscious influence on my impromptu good deed was probably my viewing yesterday of this video via bradhickshere. It's actually pretty cool. Go watch.
The Official Semi-Whenever Baxil Reader Poll I can't really think of much to say to preface this, except that I'm curious. I could easily do a spot check of my friends list and pigeonhole names accordingly, but what that doesn't get me is the demographic of my readers. (Or at least those with LJ accounts, which are needed to vote in polls.)
Poll #963562Baxilian demographics
Open to: All, results viewable to: All
I haven't been writing much lately, so I feel like a "my life thus far" post might not be amiss. I'll try to prioritize one targeted at the largest demographic(s) unless a vocal minority speaks up in comments.
Current Location:~/computer_desk Current Mood: curious Current Music: Chemicall Brothers, "Alive Alone" Tags:requests
distributed research request: pretty bird One of these seems to have taken residence in the tree outside our house:
It's probably an escaped pet, and someone's probably looking for it. My understanding is that the best place to report those is city Animal Control, and I'll call them when they open up at 11 am. (kadyg says she heard the bird at 1 am last night, so it seems to have settled in.)
My question is -- what sort of bird specifically is this? (There are several more pictures at this link.) I haven't seen too many parrots/macaws/etc up close.
-- Edited to add: Consensus is a blue-and-yellow (aka gold-and-blue) macaw. Thank you! And animal control has been called -- the guy thanked me and got a laugh out of my "I don't think it's native" deadpan. He fired back "Not yet, anyway."
Distributed research request Now that I'm no longer working in an office ruled by PCs, I've migrated largely from Winamp to iTunes. And I'm discovering that in older versions of Winamp, the ID3 Comments field -- in which I stored all my song rating data, for portability -- wasn't properly handled.
In a nutshell, I have comment data in a few thousand songs that I need to be able to mass-retrieve and mass-move. Winamp wrote its ID3 v2.2 comment data to the *last* comment field (the standard supports an arbitrary number of comments, each labeled with a name); those comments need to be copied/overwritten to a *blank* (unnamed) comment field so that my other mp3 players can see them.
So I need an id3 tagger -- on windows or Mac; preferably Mac but either should work -- that supports batch processing of multiple comment fields and the ability to move arbitrary (or multiple) id3 comments into a blank comment. Or, if I may repeat myself, a program specifically designed to clean up after Winamp's mistakes.
I can't find either. Any recommendations?
(n.b. most of the mp3s in question also have id3 v1.1 tags and I potentially could pull the data from there. But I would need a program that supports batch copy of *just* the comment tag from v1 to v2. If I batch copy the entire v1 tag to v2, I lose long song/album/artist names.)
Much dragon wuv Looks like I'm a bit slow on the draw for Trogday. TROOOOOOOOGDAY! TROOOOOOOGDAY! Birthdaynating the countryside, birthdaynating the peasants ...
Of course, it's possible you don't have enough dragons in your life to appreciate. So I decided to offer you my assistance in locating one. A broad and rigorous selection process was undertaken, at the end of which your humble author was surprised to find that he was the chosen candidate. So surprised, in fact, that he lapsed into third person for two sentences before clearing his throat and moving on to the point.
If you want to help a dragon out today, I can't imagine anything I'd appreciate more than a few pictures for the TTU Wiki.* One of my goals for the place is to start accumulating spot art to give important pages a little visual zest. For example, wouldn't the page on The First Sighting be more vivid if there was a picture of the video footage to go along with the story excerpts? Or the Los Angeles Riots?
In return for my request of creativity, I've been adding story pages and world background to the wiki; CategoryStories now has summaries and pointers for some 15 short stories that few people have read since 2003, the era timeline sketches out history and WikiNews summarizes the work in progress.
The place is taking shape, slowly but surely.
-- * To be specific, simple ones. Line art (or even a finished-looking sketch) is quite sufficient, and what I embed on the page would be 200-300 pixels wide (though it could link to a higher-resolution version). All art would be fully and gratefully credited.
Two weeks without mail and I'm desperate Alright, I need some big geek juju. I know I have many Unix wizards and friends-of-wizards on my friends list. Please give me a hand.
Tlands' host stopped being able to send outgoing e-mail about two weeks ago. We're running exim (4.54 #1) with xinetd (Version 2.3.14 libwrap loadavg) on Linux (Linux 2.6.15-27-server #1 i686 GNU/Linux). Incoming mail is smooth as silk, but any time I try to send a message beyond localhost (even directly using exim -v), it gives me an error: ==any.address@any.domain.com R=lookuphost T=remote_smtp defer (-1): TCP port "smtp" is not defined for remote_smtp transport
“Hello, this is Redtail again, and the other thing that I wanted to talk about is that I have a couple of needs, artistic and otherwise, out here on the trail that I can't really do on my own, and I would like to propose a deal: That if you can do any of the following things for me, I would be more than happy to send you a nice lovely little trail souvenir from out here -- either from the trail, or one of my town stops.
The first is that I would like a Livejournal icon -- and you all know, I'm sure, the badger song ("Badger, badger, badger ...") I would like to have a little animated icon made that says, "Blister, blister, blister, blister, ... MOLE-skin, MOLE-skin ... TAAAAPE, it's duc-TAAAAAAPE!" I just think that would be a kick for some of my posts, especially concerning the inevitable foot problems I've got out here.
Number two, is that I would like any of you wonderful furry artists out there to draw a picture of a red-tail hawk gryphon. I haven't really gotten any more specific in my mind than that, but I just think it would be neat to have a new sort of self-mascot for this trip. I'm getting into the Redtail thing; might as well make the most of it. So anyone who can come up with a character sketch for me and give it to me to use, I would be more than happy to send a trip souvenir over in return.
For both of those, if you want to just post it to the journal -- possibly as a reply to this post -- send me your mailing address by e-mail at baxildragon (at) gmail. com, and I will take care of that as soon as I'm able.
The third thing worth a trail souvenir is actually a lot easier. If anyone just wanrs to send me a postcard, to give me a little morale boost and something to read out on the trail. Rather than send it out here to me directly, the easiest thing would be to send it to my home, where kadyg is being my resupply and logistics person. She can include those in whatever box is going to my next destination, since I get regular packages of food and little items and whatever.
Send it to: Redtail c/o Tad Ramspott, 1451-B E Main Street, Grass Valley CA 95945. If you can get me a postcard, I will be quite happy to send one back from out on the trail somewhere.
Number four -- and this is a more ambitious task -- I've been taking a lot of photos that have been basically panoramas. Right now, they''re just individual pictures that need to be stitched together in much the same way as the one that I took on my snow camping clinic. Which I had to do by hand. But I understand that there is commercially available software -- for a PC, which I do not have -- and I believe it was fairly cheap, in the two-digits range rather than the three-digits. So if one of you wants to research that, and if you want to get that software for your PC, if you are willing to commit to stitch together all my panorama photos with it, I will reimburse you for the software as well as go ahead and send you a very nice trail souvenir, one of the nicer ones that I can find. I will warn you, though, that this is probably going to be a fairly extensive amount of work over the entire course of the trip.
Anyway, I will probably add to this list later as I think of more things, but right now those are things that I would really like to have, and if you can help me out with them, I would be more than happy -- as I said -- to send souvenirs.”
Friends List Power: Activate! Some of you may see this twice. But.
Due to high snow around Mt. Whitney, Bax will be hopping off the trail for a few days at the end of May. Rather than sit stewing in his tent, he would like to come to BayCon. He'll be in the area of Big Bear City.
This is where you guys come in.
If you - or someone you know - will be in or near that area, please let firestrike or me know. (He's coordinating the ride search on the BayCon staff list.) I don't have time to go all the way down there and back to San Jose - much as I would love to.
So if your karma needs a buff and you can do it, please speak up. I would really love to see my husband for a few days.
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