Below are the 20 most recent journal entries recorded in Magus' LiveJournal:

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Monday, July 13th, 2009
3:51 pm	Pinewoods I'm off to Pinewoods Scottish Country Dance Camp! I won't have internet access until I get back. I'll have the phone, but reception will probably be poor; it can be used in an emergency, or call the camp. This entry was originally posted at http://marcmagus.dreamwidth.org/109503.html. Please comment there using OpenID. Current Mood: excited (Comment on this)
9:59 am	Dreamwidth customizable comment footer Dreamwidth has finally rolled out an option to customize the footer which appears when you crosspost with comments disabled. Testing out my customization to demonstrate it does what I want it to. The word "comment" should function as a direct link to post a comment for those who want it. Feedback would be highly welcome. [Edit: fixing link in footer] [Edit 2: copying code for small font size from original.] This entry was originally posted at http://marcmagus.dreamwidth.org/109228.html. Please comment there using OpenID. Current Mood: anticip--
Sunday, July 12th, 2009
10:40 pm	Loss I had to vanish on short notice to the wilds of suburban New York for the weekend. A family friend died last weekend, and his memorial was yesterday. Our families are very close; his parents are very good friends of my parents, and my relationship to him was akin to how most people seem to describe their relationships with cousins who live within a reasonable drive: we saw each other semi-regularly [4-6 times a year?] for family-type events but didn't have much of a direct relationship outside of that. Now he's dead, and I'm . . . well, I'm kind of sad. Except it seems like most of the sadness is a reflection of my mother's grief and of his family's grief, rather than anything direct. This seems to be fairly typical of my reaction to death, or to loss, or things like that; I don't seem to have much of a strong emotional reaction to these things. It's kind of odd; sometimes I wonder if there's something wrong with me. I mean, up through about 16, all sorts of things made me cry, but somewhere in the 16-18 range something shifted and now almost nothing, no matter how strong an emotional reaction you'd expect, does. Except certain kinds of frustration, and certain kinds of immense beauty. Also, I realized yesterday that this is the first time anybody I know personally of my own generation has died. That's . . . weird. It's not supposed to happen, certainly not yet. Of course I know it does, sometimes, but . . . yeah. Dunno; maybe I'm still processing. Anyway, if I vanished unexpectedly on anybody this weekend, or if I get kind of distant in the next few days, that's probably why. Current Mood: numb Current Music: Blues Spoken Here (3 Comments |Comment on this)
Friday, July 10th, 2009
1:21 pm	New Default Icon I have a new default icon. I'm pleased, because I've been kind of disappointed with the old one as it's not particularly iconic of me in any way, and turned out to be based on somebody's misspelling, so it wasn't even clever. This one contains an image of me, doing things I do and talk about a lot. Thanks to marchek for the original photo, and to shield_toad111 for pointing me to it and helping me go through options. (4 Comments |Comment on this)
11:32 am	Don't Quit Your Day Job Have successfully replaced my copy of The Don't Quit Your Day Job Players' "Blues Spoken Here" thanks to the magic of Amazon Marketplace. I'd apparently misplaced the CD before I got around to ripping it, so I've been entirely without it and missing it for a few years now. I've missed this. "Disc-O-Rama" included a 10% off coupon for in-store purchases. They're apparently in Manhattan. If anybody wants the coupon, let me know and I'll get it to you. I'm not going to use it. Current Mood: pleased (5 Comments |Comment on this)
Thursday, July 9th, 2009
12:16 am	Every Single Time Every time I see a news story like Firefighter faces jail for killing dogs, I lose a tiny bit more of my faith in the general decency of humanity. Not, as one might suppose, because of the revelation about yet another person out there doing something horrible to an animal: I already know there are such people. No, it's because every single time there's the same response. Quoting the article, "We had people say they should do to him what he's done to the dogs." Every time. That article a couple of years ago that was making the rounds about the people dragging stray dogs behind boats to catch sharks [which turned out to be something like a decade out of date and only semi-accurate]? Something like 20% of the comments, those exact words. Do people really think an appropriate punishment for shooting your pet dogs for no good reason is to be strung up and shot yourself? For dragging dogs behind a boat to be eaten by sharks to . . . be keelhauled and left to be eaten by sharks? I thought we were mostly beyond the idea of an eye for an eye as appropriate punishment, as it serves only a bloodthirsty need for revenge and doesn't act as an effective deterrent nor support a program of rehabilitation. But hurt an animal or a child, and they come crawling out of the woodwork howling for your bloody, visceral, painful torture and death. Every single time. I weep for humanity. Current Mood: disappointed (5 Comments |Comment on this)
Friday, July 3rd, 2009
10:49 pm	Knives I own a pretty decent set of Henckel's International knives (high end of one brother imprint). Not having yet had an opportunity to borrow really high end knives from anybody, I suspect they're the best knives I've ever used, and they're certainly the best I've ever owned or had regular access to. So I try to take good care of them. I hone them occasionally, I don't sharpen them with a home sharpener, I make sure to only cut on wood or cutting-board plastic, and a knife is either clean, dry, and in the block, or is currently in use. Because the knives are good and pretty expensive, and I don't want to have to worry about how other people might be handling them, I have a standing request with my housemates that nobody use my knives, and I keep them in their own block in a somewhat remote part of the kitchen to make that less burdensome to other people (there are house knives, kept on a convenient magnet near the stove, with a wall-mounted manual sharpener nearby). I just went into the kitchen to discover my chef's knife sitting in the sink with a cutting board [a nice wood cutting board of mine, and that's a separate but related rant, actually] and a prep bowl filled with whatever was in there and water. I'm not pissed yet, because I don't really get pissed these days, but . . . seriously? You [allow your friends to] use my knife after I've explicitly asked you not to, and you [allow your friends to] leave it lying around dirty and wet? Do you simply completely lack any respect for others' property? It's bad enough that it was left sitting in the sink, but should I be worrying that when I'm not around somebody is sharpening them, putting them through the dishwasher, or even cutting on glass? I mean, seriously, a complete stranger is using my good tools when I'm not looking; I don't actually know what they're doing to them. [Edit: Of course, it could always be a simple miscommunication where somebody didn't get the memo, and I could be overreacting.] Current Mood: annoyed (2 Comments |Comment on this)
1:59 am	Icehouse Last weekend I decided I'd like to play Icehouse more often than once a year at Origins. Ideally, I'd like to get a local group together to play regularly (say for about an hour about once a month?). It might be kind of neat to do so outdoors in summer if the weather's nice, but that's not required. Would people be interested in a regular but not too frequent meet-up for this? Could possibly turn it into part of a slightly longer pyramid-games themed event. [Also, quick brag, eked out the last finalist medallion in the IIT this year. I'd been really hoping (but not expecting) to get one of those.] Current Mood: excited (9 Comments |Comment on this)
Monday, June 29th, 2009
4:30 pm	LJ New Comments working with Opera and with DreamWidth! Thanks to a comment and link from pw201, the script maintainer, on my last post about the script, I've gotten the LJ New Comments GreaseMonkey script working correctly in Opera, and, further, working correctly in Opera with DreamWidth as well! First, for full functionality in Opera using LiveJournal: Replace your GreaseMonkey Library Emulation script with mair_aw's modified version available here. Modify the New Comments script as described in my prior entry on the topic. If you want to get DreamWidth working as well, you'll have to do a bit of extra work. Mair gave me the clue, that you need to get the GM emulation to set the correct domain in its cookies so the data can be retrieved again. Here are patches to both scripts to enable this. (I really need to get someplace to stick this sort of thing.) For DreamWidth: Patch Mair's patched aagmfunctions.js with my patch (below) to provide API for setting a cookie domain. Patch LJ New Comments 1.3 with my patch (below) to use the domain API. Turn on the hidden '&nc=xx' feature at DreamWidth by visiting http://www.dreamwidth.org/settings/?tag=comment. Comments/suggestions welcome. ( Patches ) Current Mood: accomplished (Comment on this)
Wednesday, June 17th, 2009
5:39 pm	Dreamwidth Invite Codes II Dreamwidth has just given me another two (2) invite codes. Same deal again, first two people who respond to this post over at Dreamwidth who I can identify as real people I know get the codes. I'll edit the post with the number of remaining codes so people don't waste time asking for what I don't have. [Although if somebody needs a code when I don't have any, I'd be happy to put in a request.] I have zero (0) codes remaining. [Those went quick.] This entry was originally posted at http://marcmagus.dreamwidth.org/107088.html. Please comment there using OpenID.
Wednesday, June 10th, 2009
12:20 pm	Sharing the Wealth Amazon has a $10 off $59 on Gillette, Old Spice, and Zest products until the end of the month (for Father's Day, meh). This results in some darn good prices on razor cartridges, though their website organization leaves something to be desired right now (hunting down exactly which items are eligible for the discount is a bit tedious. More details where I originally found out about it at Slickdeals. Also, I've just put in an order for 6 8-packs of Mach 3 Turbos. If anybody wants any, I'd be happy to reduce my longterm investment and share them for, say, $10/8 (or $5/4, as the 8-packs are usually two 4 ct. things sealed together in one blister). [Disclosure: I paid $57.50 for the 48 razors, so I would get a small profit from the transaction. Very small; that's not my goal.] For some reason they also gave me free Standard Shipping. Not sure why, but I'm not complaining. (Comment on this)
Thursday, June 4th, 2009
11:41 pm	Pocketmod I've gotten a pocketmod compiler banged into good enough working shape to start using it routinely, and gotten remind banging out nice monthly calendars that I can read in pocketmod format if I squint at them, so I feel ready to start using them for real. Which means I need to figure out exactly what I want on 8 little pages that I carry around in my pocket everywhere. I'm thinking c. 3 months worth of upcoming calendar, a lined page for notes, and . . .? Any suggestions from anybody who's used these or anything remotely like them? What little bits of information are useful to always have on you, or what format of pages are good to be able to jot notes down on? How many months of calendar are really likely to be regularly useful to have on you? What should go on the outside pages which are probably most subject to wear? Depending on what's in there, how often should I print off a new one? Current Mood: organized (3 Comments |Comment on this)
Wednesday, June 3rd, 2009
1:34 am	Quite Interesting I think I'm becoming disenchanted with QI. For those who don't know, it's a comedic "quiz show" hosted by Stephen Fry where the question are about obscure or commonly misunderstood facts, and the panelists get points for giving either correct or interesting answers, but lose points for giving answers which are both wrong and predictable. What I'm coming to realize is that this isn't actually a show for people who like to know obscure and interesting things. It's really a show for people who like to know things other people don't know. And bonus points if you can show someone up who thinks they know such an obscure thing, but it's actually completely untrue. The most recent episode I watched notwithstanding, I still enjoy putting it on and kind of half listening to it, it does occasionally get quite funny (generally when they stop talking about interesting things and start getting into sexual humor, really), and once or twice an episode they do sneak in something that's genuinely interesting. But I'm beginning to think it's neither as great nor as interesting as I used to believe. Current Mood: disenchanted (12 Comments |Comment on this)
Sunday, May 31st, 2009
1:13 am	Allergies II Hey, if anybody out there with more medical knowledge than I wants to do me a huge favor: There was one allergy medication that worked for me that I alluded to last post. It was called hismanal. It was pulled off the market because they found a connection with increased risk of heart disease. If someone wanted to check out hismanal and the current set of offerings and see if there's anything which works in a similar fashion and is thus more likely to be effective for me, I'd really appreciate it. Current Mood: dead (3 Comments |Comment on this)
12:08 am	Allergies My allergies are back in force; probably to stay this time as I'm not expecting the weather to crash back to the 50s again anytime soon. They've been driving me crazy. I realized in conversations today that I haven't tried the most recent crops of available medications. While I suspect the timeline for me to be able to get a prescription this year is prohibitive, I realized that cetrizine hydrochloride [brand name Zyrtec] is now available over-the-counter, and I haven't tried it yet. Swung by CVS and got the 90 day supply container in the store brand ($30). Just took the first one. I figure I'll at least give it a couple weeks and see if it helps. If it seems to be doing nothing at that point (or in the unlikely event that I have an adverse effect), I can always try to sell off the remainder to somebody at a mutually beneficial price. It would be so amazing if this stuff actually works. I think it's been about 15 years since I had an allergy medication that actually helped. (I'm, thus, also really skeptical about it.) Current Mood: histamine (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Friday, May 29th, 2009
11:49 pm	remind+wyrd I've spent some time this evening checking out the combination of remind and wyrd (a front-end to remind). This may possibly be the calendar tool I've been looking for: Calendars stored in a human-readable (or at least programmer-readable) text format. Use of include functionality means calendaring can be modular. remind is a command-line tool, and wyrd is designed for keyboard-and-terminal. Designed to work with pipelines at either end of the process to take advantage of other tools in the finest Unix tradition. Ships with functionality to make a printable calendar via rem -p | rem2ps Integrated support for denoting the time-of-day an event occurs and its duration. Very powerful and expressive language for describing when an event occurs; they're really not kidding with this one. Regular exceptions to a regularly scheduled event due to holidays are easy to specify. Irregular exceptions because the guy who organizes the event decided to hold it a different night this week are a little hairier, but still quite doable. Can be configured to colorize output in manually specified or semi-automated ways fairly easily, and to only do so where it's appropriate. I've been using Google's Calendar for the last while, but I wasn't really happy with it. It was an improvement over the other things I'd been playing with, I guess, but it has some major flaws: Web Applications are laggy! There shouldn't be a detectable pause when I move to the next week/month/year/whatever for a simple calendar application. Keyboard support exists, but is pretty basic. It's not all that easy to quickly enter a new event without using the mouse. I have to give Google my potentially sensitive data. I can't see my calendar without an Internet connection, unless I install a bunch of extra stuff. The new setup doesn't allow sharing, which . . . I don't use all that much anyway. There's an iCal importer (which kinda sucks), though, so I should be able to use it to see other people's calendars in iCal [including at Google], and, well, if I really want to share my calendar, the biggest obstacle is that there are things remind can express that iCal can't. Definitely on the "to check out" list is getting that print calendar generating process hooked into a pocketmod generating process. Should be fairly straightforward. Would be easier with metric paper; Letter doesn't divide as cleanly into eighths as A4. Also need to pick an approach for synchronizing with haversack, for additional calendar-without-Internet capability. Current Mood: hopeful (Comment on this)
Friday, May 22nd, 2009
7:49 am	Balticon On my way to Balticon! If you're coming, you should definitely come to the Steampunk Ball tonight. Dress up if you get a chance. I can probably be found in the Con Suite/ex-diner playing AYaW? most nights. Current Mood: excited (Comment on this)
Tuesday, May 19th, 2009
11:11 pm	Whisky Recommendations? I'd like to pick up two more bottles of whisky so I have some variety to choose from when I want a drink [of whisky]. I currently have half a bottle of Balvenie Doublewood [12] and whatever's left of my current bottle of Tullamore Dew. I recently finished a bottle of Oban [14]. I know I have a number of friends who are whisky drinkers, and who are better than I at keeping track of the labels of what they like. I'd really appreciate recommendations. I'm primarily looking for single-malt scotch. Price is definitely an issue, as I'm still not working. I've been finding myself frequently craving something with a smoky flavor, so recommendations in that direction would be especially welcome. I think a good plan would be to get one bottle now (probably something smoky), and postpone other purchases until after Pinewoods presumably offers an opportunity to taste a bunch of stuff. And to take notes when I taste things. Also, if anybody's going to be in Ireland anytime soon, I would greatly appreciate a bottle of Tullamore Dew purchased from a liquor store on Irish soil. Side-by-side comparison has demonstrated a marked difference. (Sadly, we didn't have the foresight to go with full double-blind, but still...) This is a standing request any time I have less than 1L on hand; I'd be happy to repay the favor in a mutually agreeable manner. Any suggestions? Current Mood: pained (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Monday, May 18th, 2009
5:32 pm	Vim syntax for JLJ I've just uploaded my Vim syntax file for JLJ to vim.org. This will colorize all the header stuff up top, and also include the syntax file of your choice to appropriately colorize the body of your entry while you're working on it. You can get it at jlj.vim. Current Mood: accomplished (Comment on this)
3:02 pm	UTF/dw Testing, Fix Test I Following the suggestion in response to my support request, I've made a quick patch to JLJ and am posting this test post to see if it works correctly. A correct fix would probably require taking a look at the API documentation for the &ver= field and taking a look at JLJ; I suspect that said setting should only be set if the current locale is a Unicode locale, rather than always turning it on as I currently am, but I'd want to know how it's defined to be sure. Anyway, here's the test text again, using the full toolchain with patched jlj; hopefully for the last time. The problem was presumably due to an extended character in either the name "Métro Bis" or the dessert "Crème Brulèe", possibly the name "Métro Bis" being present in the post title. If it works, I'll be crossposting to LJ to confirm correct encoding there. Edit: Confirmed, I can edit this entry and crosspost it. Current Mood: hopeful (Comment on this)