Teyrnon

Hello to anyone reading this, it's been over a year since my last entry here and I decided it was time to make an update. This might the only update I make this year if I continue the trends of the past few years. I'm still working on my website. I have a change log on the site that I try to update every time I make changes. I've moved away from large and complicated web apps for this incarnation of the site. Instead, it'll be mostly static HTML pages with a few bits of javascript and the occasional PHP page that I've written myself. My intention at the moment is for there to be no code on the site that I don't understand fully what it's doing.

I haven't figured out a good way to facilitate a way for site visitors to send feedback. Once upon a time way back in the early days of the world wide web, I would have stuck a mailto link on the main page and left it at that but that isn't viable these days. The email address would just get scooped up by scrapers and the mailbox would be choked with spam in a very short time. For the longest time, I had a feedback form page that used a CGI script that Dreamhost provided,  to send an email to me without actually revealing the address to the world at large. Sadly, that script is no more. I've tried to write one in PHP but I've yet to figure out how to do write it in such a way that doesn't leave an opening for an exploit. I'm wary of anything that allows a user to open end text to the website. I need to study the language more and figure out a good solution. For now I've placed a link ro my Twitter on the change log page as a means of contacting me.

In other news I continue to be plagued by health issues and I'm still writing with the occasional short story or novella published under my pseudonym from the LD days.  If you don't know what that is don't worry about it. I'm not telling! :)

I intended to be posting more this year but here is the second of March and this is my first post here since December. There really isn't that much going on of late. At least very little that'd make for interesting reading.

The biggest news of the month is probably that a section of the ceiling in my garage fell making a huge mess of broken glass from the large fluorescent bulbs, brownish dusty insulation, broken sheetrock, and sundry detritus that the previous occupants stuffed in the attic. The fluorescent light wasn't secured to a beam as it should have been, it was just attached to the sheetrock of the ceiling. It's not the first example of shoddy and ill thought work I've discovered in this house. I doubt it'll be the last, sadly.

In other news the Raspberry Pi I fiddled with off and on throughout 2015 has found a more long term use. It's now running a wiki I'm using for notes and whatnot. Would like to get add a RS-232 port to it so I can attach an X10 firecracker so I can set up cron jobs to turn lights on and off.

The headaches that plagued me throughout 2014 and 2015 are still with me and making me quite irritable from time to time. There isn't much to be done about it at this point. Curiously coffee with a teaspoon of ground cayenne pepper per cup has a really potent ameliorating effect. So far it's the most effective remedy for these headaches that I've found.

I've returned to working on a little writing project I've been dabbling with off and on for too many years now. I'm going to be in need of test readers for it before too much longer, I hope.

That's all for now.

The end of 2010 is fast approaching. There hasn't been a whole lot to say. I've been and still am working on a few projects that are eating up a lot of time. I had a sinus infection or something during the middle of the month. It was extremely unpleasant and slowed me down entirely too much. I don't think I got anything at all accomplished the week it hit me.

I got my Holiday cards out. They were mailed a little later than usual. I didn't get them out the door until about the 20th. I went with a card that was not insignificantly more costly than what I've used in past years. (They cost me double what I usually end up paying.) It was a really nice card. Managed to find a card design I really liked this year.

For Christmas I got a nice cover for my Kindle DX. I like it better than the sleeve I've been using since I got the DX. I'd recommend using a cover instead of sleeve quite emphatically. The difference it makes is something I did not imagine when I bought the sleeve back in 2009.

I installed Linux on my old Compaq laptop. After Windows XP went to service pack 3 the old thing had gotten extremely sluggish and seemed to be getting worse with every update Microsoft released. The fact that it only has 256MB of RAM likely didn't help at all. Anyrate, it's been running quite well since I installed Linux.

Last night found me looking over some old files. Stuff I wrote back in the 80s and early 90s. Trying to deal with the old formats was and is an interesting exercise. I really need to go through it all and convert it to a new format. Open Document Format is probably the best choice for that. Anyrate...

It was kind of weird finding lots of stuff I don't remember writing. That material seems to be more voluminous than the stories and what not I do remember from that time in my life. [sigh]

It's that time of year again. The air feels strangely damp and the temperatures from the beginning of the week vary from very warm to kind of chilly. One is never sure whether to flip the switch between the air conditioner and heater settings or to just suffer it out for the conditions to change. Though for me, I favor to air conditioner for getting some of the humidity out of the air.

The batteries for the UPS still haven't arrived. The power glitches weren't as bad this week as they were the previous week where some days the electricity seemed to go out for a few seconds every hour. I still don't trust running a computer without battery backup. I've lost more data to power outages and glitches this year than I have since 1994 or so when I got my first UPS. Fortunately I have my Compaq notebook for writing.

In my last post I asked for some reading recommendations and all I got were recommendations for Briggs and Hamilton books and maybe a sidewise recommendation for the Dresden Files books by Jim Butcher. Might be time I finally read some of those. Never have. Might be fun and lately I've been wanting to get into some stuff in the contemporary and urban fantasy vein. At the recommendation of an old acquaintance I recently read A Kiss of Shadows and while interesting I'm not sure I'd want to read the later books.

This week I've done a lot of stuff on the private wiki. I've been using it to gather my notes and thoughts for that game setting I've been building for the last decade and more with auld_hippie. As of last night I'm up to 120 articles. Not counting category pages, images, and the talk and user subpages I've been using for notes on the notes, so the speak.

Well, that's enough for now. Be well, folks.

Not a great deal to talk about. My current projects are coming along. I'm in better spirits this year than I was last year at this time. Not sure why, only thing really different from last year is that I have much more to keep me busy this year.

In other news I'm about to sit down and finish getting the holiday cards ready to mail. Looks like I'll be sending out fourteen cards. There were fewer leftovers this year since the card I bought came in 18 to a box rather than 30. The same as last year. I hope I'm not sending them out too early. The folks I consulted suggested the end of the first week of December as the ideal time to drop them in the mail. I think last year I waited until the second or third week and I seem to recall at least one person telling me the card arrived after the 26th.