Coffee and Code

I received my first issue of Make magazine this week(thanks for the subscription, Claudia!). Pretty cool stuff - It seems to cover do-it-yourself tech projects running the gamut from building your own electrical circuits to home automation. I haven't had time to read the magazine in depth, but it's a good hefty size and looks promising!

I've pretty much got a working prototype of what my new weblogger will be!!! I made the decision today to go ahead with the final project, which will be forthcoming very soon (Now that I've got all of the architectural quandries sorted out....).

Whew! I will be glad do be done with that and moving on to something else. I think it's ironic that I've spent all of this time writing a weblogger for this site when, in actuality, I'm not that in to blogging, per se. It's a convenient way of updating the website content but I'm not that into online culture and I'm not a very compelling blogger, he he. Anyway, I'm prattling on, so I'll say good day!

Now: Coding, drinking coffee.

Later: SOCOM 3, Tekken 5, gyro sandwich.

Kurt Vonnegut passed away on April 11th, 2007. He was one of my all-time favorite authors.

I've read a few of his books; my favorite is 'Hocus Pocus'. Vonnegut's writing tended to piss 'the establishment' off - as a matter of fact, his work has been banned by public schools all over the place. (I consider this to be a good thing.) He was an iconoclast to the end, and I'm going to miss his writing.

One of my favorite Vonnegut moments was during his appear ance on the Daily Show (Comedy Central) - this was just a few months ago. During the interview, the conversion drifted toward global warming and climate change. Vonnegut said something akin to:

'Human beings are essentially a virus. It's only a matter of time until Mother Nature's immune system kicks in.' [ paraphrase ]

Which, I think, is an interesting way to look at our current situation. As Vonnegut himself might say, so it goes.

So it goes... goodbye, Mr. Vonnegut. Thanks for all the books.

All is quiet in my temporary autonomous zone tonight; I thought I'd give a shout for Robert Anton Wilson, who died recently. I've read some of his work, and I gotta say that I dig what I read. I'll miss his amusing website updates as well.

I'm not sure if the page exists anymore, but there used to be this biography page on his website that would randomly switch words and phrases out with bizarre grammatic equivalents... That and there was a cool SWF on the site that switches RAW's head out with first a monkey and then (a buddha? can't remember) and a yin-yang symbol.

In other news: still working on the weblogger! I'm looking forward to being able to allow people to leave comments again.

Because of the relative popularity of my Flash-based I-Ching @ SanctumVoid, I've decided to spend some quality time between now and 2007 re-tooling the Oracle. (And popular in this case means that I've noticed some hits on the page that WEREN'T search-bots!)

I-Ching @ SanctumVoid started as a javascript project 2-3 years ago... I then converted the app to Flash. (I personally think the Flash version is, like, waaaay cooler.) Now, it's once again time to re-vamp the Oracle. Here's my half-assed plan:

1. Move the I-Ching nuts 'n bolts logic out of the Flash frontend and into a set of web services. This will accomplish a couple of things: It will prevent me from having to stare at too much ActionScript inside the buggy, crappy ActionScript editor, and it will allow me to create front-ends for the Oracle in different formats, for example, webpage and blog plug-ins.

2. Conversion of the hexagram descriptions to Pinyin transliteration (e.g. Ch'ien becomes Qian).

3. User membership features will allow people to have profiles in which past readings could be saved.

4. A new, flashier Flash user interface.

These are a few of my ideas. If you have any requests for functionality on the new Oracle, drop me a line!

In the meantime, for this Sunday: doing laundry, reading Hardcore Zen, call Andy to gloat about my new 18-inch Iron Maiden: Somewhere in Time Action Figure.