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January 03, 2005
Nobody Move or the Blog Gets It.
OK, the blog is safe for the moment, but your comments go into a comment queue. I will try to sort out what's gone wrong with the blog at the weekend (possibly by reverting to a default style to straighten it all out). In any case, I'm fairly convinced you're all getting this by RSS, so I'm thinking of stopping the side blogs in favour of more stuff in the main one.
Meanwhile, Six Apart may be (Update: is) using venture capital to buy LiveJournal. This would make a lot of sense; LJ has a massive user base, has great stone soup programming, is based on open source, is deeply spam-proof, and is making money without pissing people off. It also has butt-ugly, hard-to-configure UI. Movable Type and TypePad are beautiful, MT is spammed to oblivion, the paying user base is small. I do worry for the purity of my LJ permanent account, surely the best value ever at $100 (which is worth, at current exchange rates, approx 58p).
The combination of MT 3.14 and MT-Blacklist is very slick and easy to use, though I'd rather not have comment spam to worry about at all. I am still a little bit disgruntled by MT saying brightly that MT 3.14 is free for personal use; so it is, but if you're a couple, then unless you want to maintain your blogs on entirely separate MT installations, thereby doubling the work, you have to pay. It is, of course, well worth $70 (approx £1.24 at current exchange rates).
Overheard on the Internet: on one of the DDR forums, I saw this --- 'I've been playing Dance Dance Revolution for a little while now, and I'm really enjoying it. But I find that after I've played a couple of dances, my throat gets dry and I have to take on water. Is this normal?' Someone had replied with a reasonably straight face, 'Yes. This is called 'exercise' and it's good for you.'
In the Latte Free Zone, I'm drinking black tea at work, and we bought a new Bodum Electric Santos coffee maker to replace the Starbucks Utopia (same machine, different branding) that broke. Believe what they say about durability of this machine; it has a two year warranty and we've stapled the receipt to the warranty certificate and put it somewhere easily findable.
Meanwhile, we've been admiring the lava lamp, playing Frustration (that game with the popping die) with the family, going around the house with a flip chart identifying tasks that need doing, as recommended by David Allen, taking down the Christmas deccies, finishing up the Christmas food (burp), and getting to grips with the new Weight Watchers rules. Strangely, there is still no setting that allows you to eat almost until you burst, nor yet one that accounts for arriving home from work and discovering a left-over Christmas packet of Florentines with the words Eat Me stencilled in invisible ink on the side.
Oh, yes, and deciding that disembowellment with a melon baller isn't good enough for them.
Posted by Alison Scott at January 3, 2005 02:14 PM