Magus

Color

2008-04-30T04:39:28Z

I know there are some people out there with graphic design experience, and some people out there who spend a lot of time looking at text in a terminal window, and even some who are both. I'm looking for a little advice.

See, there's this problem with the default settings for most terminal emulators: the colors suck. I use a black background because I find it more comfortable to look at. There seem to be studies going in both directions on the dark/light background question, so I'd just as soon skip it. Most of the colors are pretty easy to read, but both blue and bright blue on black are a strain.

So I think I want to change the palette for the ANSI colors on the terminal. I've done some research (hoping to find a website which had a bunch of palettes and screen shots of them, honestly, but with no luck) and learned a bit about it, but haven't found anything really satisfactory. I think I'm going to have to roll my own.

From my research, I've come up with a few guidelines for what it should look like which seem reasonable to me. I'd value input on what I'm thinking, as well as color suggestions.

The ANSI colors are black, red, green, yellow, blue, magenta, cyan, and grey, plus a corresponding bright version of each (bright black is dark grey, bright grey is white).
Ideally, the colors should remain as true to the spec as possible, and should certainly be recognizable as those colors.
The colors must have sufficient contrast from black to be easily readable when text is <color>/black.
The colors should be readily distinguished from one another, as they're often used to convey information.
As often as feasible, the colors should have sufficient contrast with one another to provide readable text. At the very least, bright secondaries should be visible against their dark primary complements.
I am given to understand that similar perceived brightness reduces fatigue, so ideally the set of dark colors (black excluded) should be about the same perceived brightness, and the set of bright colors (dark grey excluded) should be about the same perceived brightness. I am currently looking at the W3C accessibility standard of perceived brightness, but am open to alternatives. I'm really not sure I trust the numbers I'm getting out of this. (Blue is really dark, but is it that really dark?
Perhaps as a result of blue being so very dark, many colors are impressively readable against it as a background, which is kind of useful. It would be nifty to be able to preserve that, though I'd accept if that's not possible.

It recently occurred to me to fiddle with my monitor brightness/contrast/whatever settings. On my work monitor, dialing contrast to max seems to make the blues more visible, but I don't know what those settings really do. Is this a good approach, or is it going to be counterproductive?

Something really needs to be done. 0x0000ff:0x000000 is only readable if I work really hard at it, and blue doesn't go any brighter without becoming less blue.

In case you missed the memo...

2008-04-08T17:19:08Z

I figure there might be someone out there who hasn't heard and wants to know. Almost two weeks ago, I came down with a nasty case of what I'm assuming based on symptoms was influenza. I spent something like Friday - Monday in bed, during which time I barely had enough energy to watch Farscape Season 1. Standing up made me dizzy, but I was able to force down a bunch of apple juice and some number of cans of chicken soup which shield_toad111 was kind enough to pick up for me at the store.

This meant I missed a whole bunch of dance stuff, including the waltz night Friday, the 1880s Bustle Ball Saturday, rehearsal Sunday, and SCD Monday. Starting around Tuesday, I felt better enough that I could actually deal with, say, sitting at the computer for an hour or two at a stretch without feeling faint. That was also when I first found the energy to do exciting things like walking to Davis Square to pay somebody else to make food for me.

About a week later, I'm at around the same point. I get up, and quickly lose confidence that I can safely drive to the office. I can only sit upright for short periods of time, and getting anything meaningful accomplished is difficult. What the hell? I don't really feel particularly ill anymore, I just feel useless.

So if you haven't seen/heard from me recently, and wondered why, that's why. This is well beyond "getting" old. I'd like my energy back so I can enjoy the nice weather before the allergies kick in, thank you.

Terminfo vs. TERMCAP

2008-03-20T16:54:08Z

Over the last year or so, I've spent quite a number of hours fighting with the terminfo system to get certain tools I use on assorted systems I log in to to be able to send information to the status line (usually the title bar in xterm and most other terminal emulators). This has been a struggle primarily because certain RedHat derivatives ship with a terminfo database containing a broken information file for screen (lacking definitions for tsl and fsl). I finally learned that you can augment the terminfo database with local settings in your homedir (this they got right). At this point I feel I've learned quite a bit about terminfo and its predecessor, TERMCAP, and I have a simple question:

Why the hell did we go from TERMCAP to terminfo?

terminfo stores a static database of all the capabilities of every terminal which might ever be encountered. If you use a new terminal (that is, one with an unknown name), the database must be augmented with its capabilities. Why the inflexibility? Now that I'm trying out a relatively obscure terminal emulator (rxvt-unicode), and typically run it under screen, I pretty much have to create ~/.terminfo/r/rxvt-unicode and ~/.terminfo/s/screen.rxvt-unicode on every system I connect to. And if I connect to a system which doesn't give me a homedir for some reason, I'm pretty much screwed (or have to remember to lie about what TERM I'm using before I connect).

Compare with TERMCAP. The terminal informs the login shell of its capabilities through an environment variable. This means that if it's configured with different capabilities than the stock (say I've enabled/disabled colors differently from the expectation), it can inform the system. And if it's a brand-new terminal, the system doesn't have to have heard of it. I wouldn't have to go to drop files on every system I connect to letting them know about my terminal.

Yeah, there are severe problems with the TERMCAP approach (environment variables are often limited in length), but when they reinvented the wheel to overcome the limitations, what the hell were they thinking in taking away the most useful feature, the ability for the terminal to inform anything which cares about its capabilities, rather than the system having to know about every possible terminal?

Seriously, does anybody have any insight on this?

HOWTO customize XKB without modifying system files

2008-03-14T03:56:02Z

I have finally succeeded in my quest, to get XKB to easily set up the keyboard in an arbitrary fashion, not limited to the options presented in the rules database, using the system database for everything I'm not explicitly overriding, without needing to edit any system files or have any special privileges!

This should allow me to map CapsLock to Super (or Esc, or something else, I'm still playing) on any computer I have an account on.

Make an xkb symbols file with the new symbols you want. Pattern after the stuff in /usr/share/X11/xkb/symbols/. Mine is called capslock and looks like this (there's actually more in there, but it's not relevant):
```
// use the capslock key as a(nother) Super key
partial modifier_keys 
xkb_symbols "super" {
    key   {  symbols[Group1]= [ Super_L ] };
};
```
Put it in a directory called symbols, and put that somewhere useful. I recommend $HOME/.xkb/symbols


    Make a keymap .xkb file and put it somewhere useful (probably in $HOME/.xkb/keymap/my_keyboard.xkb or something.  It should look something like:
xkb_keymap {
        xkb_keycodes  { include "xfree86+aliases(qwerty)"       };
        xkb_types     { include "complete"      };
        xkb_compat    { include "complete"      };
        xkb_symbols   { include "pc+us(altgr-intl)+level3(ralt_alt)+level3(menu_switch)+capslock(super)"        };
        xkb_geometry  { include "pc(pc105)"     };
};

    Notice the +capslock(super) part; that's what's calling the new symbols.  You can generate a file for the stock options you like by calling setxkbmap -print [options].
    Add the following to a file which will be consistently called when X starts under your username.  Mine is in .xprofile, which is also sourced from .xinitrc.
# Set up the keyboard the way we like it
xkbcomp -I$HOME/.xkb $HOME/.xkb/keymap/my_keyboard.xkb $DISPLAY

More fun with bad UI design: Verizon software for the Motorola RAZR M3

2008-03-12T13:39:20Z

Yes, I have a RAZR. Yes, I have one of those stupid MP3-playing ones. The former is because it's portable and gets good battery life. The latter is because it was the only one I could get free with my plan. That's not what this is about.

See, Verizon replaces the Motorola stock UI software with its own garbage while it's doing whatever software patching is required to make the phone work with its networks. Among other things, they make sure that the new official software can't transfer media files directly to a computer (that's right, the phone used to be capable of downloading ringtones from your computer, but Verizon disabled that feature to make a quick buck. Jerks.). The whole thing is pretty awful.

I've found a new depth of terrible, though. The Alarm Clock feature. Apparently when you store a repeating alarm (daily or M-F; nice feature), it stores the time of day of the alarm with respect to UTC or something. I'm not sure what it's doing. What I know is that my 8:30am alarm mysteriously changed to a 9:30am alarm when we started DST this weekend. (I'll spare you the rant about DST today.) Not only does it go off at 9:30, but the clock displays it at 9:30. What percentage of users do you think want their repeating alarm to hold constant with respect to the sun when we switch to DST, vs. what percentage to hold constant with respect to the wall clock?

Sorry I overslept on Monday. I made the mistake of trusting Verizon with my alarm, and they screwed it up.

Hey, LiveJournal!

2008-03-11T20:31:47Z

Not that anybody in a position to do anything about it is likely to be listening, but it would be really cool if I could reply to comment notification emails and have LJ do the right thing.

That is, when I get an email from LJ that someone has replied to my <post|comment>, I want to be able to reply using my email client and have my reply appear in the appropriate comment thread, threaded correctly. It wouldn't be hard, and it would be really helpful not to have to open a web page just so I can read what I've already read and then enter my reply into a textarea (or use "It's All Text...") instead of using the editor my mail client is already configured to use.

Twitter

2008-03-11T19:55:52Z

Following the my current trend of looking at something seriously if it comes recommended from multiple unconnected people, I've just signed up for a Twitter account. You can track what I have to say at http://twitter.com/marcmagus (or subscribe to my RSS feed there) if you're not a member.

I'm not sure what I'm going to use this for, if anything, but I think it might be subject to those random thoughts which catch my fancy and which I want to share with friends, but which aren't substantive enough to feel like they justify an LJ post. I may also use it to explicitly state publicly that I'm adding something to my Hiveminder tasklist, if I want people to know or want to be bugged about it or something. We'll see.

Note that my text messaging plan still charges me 10¢ per message either direction, and that trying to enter anything on a phone keypad seems to be really bad for my hands, so I probably won't be using the SMS integration much, if at all. Which is too bad, as that could be kind of neat.

Today in Media

2008-02-28T00:22:31Z

Was listening to "On Point" on my way in to work today. A caller mentioned that she found the experience of receiving her first tattoo orgasmic. Listening to Tom Ashbrook magnificently maintain his poise and ask her questions to keep the program moving without breaking was inspirational.

I turned Wheel of Fortune on tonight out of a fit of boredom. Didn't Vanna White used to actually do something? Also, is it just me, or have they both added a lot more gimmicks to the show, and snuck in a lot more advertising within the show?

Vimperator

2008-02-21T20:46:03Z

Vimperator is one of the coolest things I've seen in a long time, and that's saying quite a bit. It's a Firefox extension which uses vim-like controls for controlling the browser. It looks like I can do most tasks without having to take my hands off the keyboard, once I learn how it works. And, in proper fashion, it supports custom keymappings so you can put commands where you want them.

Now if I can only figure out how to get vim (or something with controls like it) within a text box in Firefox so I don't have to edit outside and paste...

Calendar Program Suggestions?

2008-02-18T20:10:45Z

I think I'm in search of a new calendaring application. gcal, while great, doesn't seem to support the features I really want (or needs a front-end I haven't yet discovered to do so). Here's my feature wishlist:

Lets me store my data on my own computer. A tool which requires that I give some vendor all my data will lose points. A tool which does so and also doesn't allow me an easy way to replicate that data locally so I still have access to it in the event of connectivity issues (or the provider disappearing) will lose even more points.
Is easily usable from the command-line within a terminal window for basic functionality. This includes both displaying the calendar in reasonable views and adding events to the calendar. For the latter, editing a file is acceptable as long as it's easy.
Makes it easy to interrogate the calendar for things like "what do I have going on today/this week/this month/the second weekend in April/etc.?" and "When is that Passover thing happening again, anyway?"
Does all the work of including holidays I might care about.
Makes it easy to dump all of my data into it, but doesn't clutter its UI so much that I can't tell what's going on after I've done so. Should be able to easily visually distinguish the importance of the most important thing going on during a given time-period (day/hour/whatever).
That means the UI needs to be able to know what my definitions of importance are.
Should have support for existing open standards for calendaring, because this might be useful down the road (say for sending events to other people).
In an ideal world, has a web-enabled front-end with access controls (or just one which is read-only). This should allow me to easily (ideally without any intervention at all) share my schedule with my friends. My schedule is busy enough with interesting stuff that for some reason it seems to me that there are people who'd be interested in seeing what I'm doing just to know about stuff that's going on. (This UI should also, at a minimum, be able to filter on some sense of importance so people aren't confronted with boring minutiae.)
Again, it must be sufficiently usable that I will actually use it. Usable is here defined as requiring a minimum of effort for tasks I want to perform while allowing me to perform any task I reasonably want to. In particular, I have to bother to enter every event into it as I become aware of the event, and I have to bother to check the calendar regularly.
A bonus feature might be allowing others to enter (provisional) events for me. This could work with the open standard support mentioned above.

Any suggestions? Just as Hiveminder has been great for helping me dump tasks I want to do someday somewhere central and not have to worry about forgetting about them indefinitely (and is also handy for things I need to do more immediately), I'd like something which helps me keep track of what I've promised to/hope to do when so I'm aware of potential conflicts sooner.

(Incidentally, hm fails the not requiring me to give someone else my data test. This is something I forgive them for partly because they apologize for it. If I find something which gives all the functionality I use without that requirement, I might switch to it.)

Window Manager FReq: focus_follows_eyes

2008-02-18T18:24:15Z

I have a feature request for any window manager designers out there: focus_follows_eyes

I currently use Ion as my window manager on my home computer. It's great. You hardly ever need to use the mouse, and it seems to generally just Do The Right Thing. Except that sometimes it's so good at doing what I want it to that I forget which window has keyboard focus and start typing into the wrong one, because I've moved my attention from Firefox over to an IM conversation I'm having but haven't actually told it to move focus.

Clearly, what I need is for focus to move by default to whatever window I'm paying attention to. An interesting paradigm for that would be a monitor-mounted camera tracking my eye movements and keeping focus in whatever window I'm looking at. (Better, use the sloppy focus model so if I'm copying text from a printout or having a conversation with somebody focus will stay where I last looked.) You'd need to bind Scroll Lock or something to lock focus on a window for when you're manually copying text from one window to another or something like that. But wouldn't it be cool?

What I learned today

2008-02-15T01:09:26Z

What I learned today:

I've been stretching wrong all these years. Specifically, stretching with counter-pressure (such as by grasping your fingers and pulling back to stretch the wrist), which it may be helpful in averting athletic injury, can actually exacerbate swelling of the tendons.
While cold is good for reducing swelling, ice can cause/exacerbate nerve damage. (In this case, I was right to avoid ice, but wrong to avoid cold.) Heat may reduce joint stiffness, but increases swelling.
My elbows are much higher than I think they are. What feels like my arms are level is something like a 15 degree angle. This means I should be keeping my keyboard at a height which makes me feel like it's practically at my chin. (It really isn't.)
My shoulder blades are at times significantly out of whack. This is probably directly contributing to the problems I've been having, whether or not it's a root cause.
The way I sleep probably exacerbates this, too. The way I sleep, as we already discovered, is almost certainly exacerbating the ulnar issues.
I should be getting regular massage to help me heal from my RSI. Even though the chances of my getting either my Worker's Compensation coverage or my regular health care coverage to cover any portion of the cost are close to nil. I knew this one, but it was, shall we say, emphasized.

All in all, a really positive meeting with the OT. She didn't waste time on stuff I already knew, and had a lot of things to say which seemed very on-point.

ETA: Not from today, but this made me think of it. uridium, the arm numbness/paralysis thing is probably ulnar nerve related. (That was you, right?)

Healing

2008-02-12T05:21:35Z

I'm about to have two very dear friends of mine in the hospital at the same time for serious conditions. If you're the sort to do the whole sending healing energy thing, please do so.

Lazy?

2008-02-10T04:39:00Z

I just repaired my underwear in order to avoid having to do laundry. That is all.

Ouch

2008-02-08T18:23:52Z

ibuprofen_taken += 1200 mg.

That's 600mg last night when I got home from work early, and another 600 I'm taking right now. I think it's been a couple months since I've been in enough pain I felt I needed something to help with it.

This is mostly for documentation. I'm doing something somewhere between working from home and taking a sick day today, depending on whether there's anything which needs doing badly enough that it's worth typing for. Otherwise, I'm going to try to keep keyboard use to a minimum.

There may be a bunch of TV in my future; very few of the activities I enjoy fail to require use of my hands.

On the plus side, appointment finally made for Thursday with someone who should be able to provide practical advice on methods and tools to avoid hurting myself further.

Mini-Rant: Executables with filename extensions

2008-01-31T21:38:49Z

I just want to mention, for the record, that I hate filename extensions on anything with the executable bit set. Yes, I'm looking at you, authors of Perl and Python scripts.

When I'm at the command-line and want to run a command (say, "todo"), I want to type "todo" and have it work. I don't want to have to type "todo.pl", nor do I want to have to type "todo<TAB>" to get my shell to do it for me. I shouldn't have to know, or care, or even be reminded of what scripting language the script I'm invoking was written in. Isn't the entire point of the "she-bang" magic line available in all modern shells that you can run a script without having to know what kind of script it is?

Can anybody give me a single good reason we keep tacking all this ugly garbage onto the end of our scripts? It's not like editors can't use that same first line to figure out what kind of script it is and turn on appropriate syntax features. (I'm sorry, it's 2008. If your editor can't handle that, what's wrong with your editor?)

So why is my world filled with "todo.pl" and "moap.py" and "generate.sh" (in all probability requiring bash, no less)? Will you all just cut it out? I'm sick of having to symlink and alias around your annoying naming conventions.

On the bleeding edge

2008-01-18T05:48:11Z

The moral of the story: just because there is a new version of VLC does not mean "upgrading" to it is desirable. It used to be that to get a version of VLC which did anything useful, you had to use unstable, as nothing sufficiently cutting-edge was marked stable.

Now, a perfectly working version is stable, and unstable is so bleeding edge that it's broken; upgraded to 0.9.0_alpha20080110 as part of my usual automatic upgrading last week. They seem to have tweaked the UI in ways I'm not sure I like, but, worse, it doesn't seem to be able to play matroska files anymore. Gah. Hopefully downgrading will help, as I can't think of much else to try. I'm pretty sure it's that, and not some black magic involving having improved my video drivers.

On the Good News front, Arisia tomorrow!

marcmagus @ 2007-12-24T20:24:00

2007-12-25T01:25:20Z

Sign that I'm not a stereotypical bachelor: It occurred to me to make a vegetable to go with my dinner.

Sign that I am a stereotypical bachelor: . . . as I plated it.

Hiveminder

2007-12-22T22:30:22Z

Recently I've been doing a lot with working on the tools I use to do the things I do, particularly with regard to the computer. It's mostly in the hope that improved efficiency will lead to decreased typing, but also just because it makes me feel good to have my tools help me rather than having to fight with them.

So, last month, while I was in nethack mode, I watched the ttyrec of Eidolos's first ascension of the devnull tournament. Neat stuff. I noticed that he had some nifty UI features not available in the stock nethack, most notably a lot of colorized output to make important things pop out. Sometime last week, I finally tracked down his tool, Interhack. It's incredibly cool, sitting as a layer between the player and the game and allowing a lot of customization of the UI, and it's in Perl, which means it should be pretty straightforward to hack in new features.

In order to get Interhack working, I ended up doing a world remerge on my system. That's always exciting. Maybe vlc's interface issues will have sorted themselves out. (Last upgrade lost me some UI features, and I haven't gotten around to tracking down what I did yet. Who knows, maybe they'll magically be back. Yeah, right.)

None of that is what I wanted to talk about, though. See, while playing with Interhack a little, I noticed Eidolos had provided a plugin to send an IM to Hiveminder directly from Nethack. Something about it caught my eye; perhaps the idea of sending an IM to give yourself a TODO. The source comments say that when he isn't playing nethack or writing tools for it, Eidolos works on Hiveminder. Intrigued, I went to check it out.

Now, I only joined last night, so I've been playing with Hiveminder for less than a day, but it's certainly caught my eye. I think there's some fundamental way in which the folks developing this thing think like I do. I have a tendency to jot down things I need to remember all over the place: on a handy sheet of paper, a Post-It(TM) note, on my whiteboard, in an appropriately named text file in my home directory, in a todo.txt in my home directory, tagged :TODO: or :FIXME: in the source of whatever I'm coding on, in an email to myself, in an IM to myself, mentioned to whomever I'm currently talking (IM, usually, phone, occasionally), or just leave a browser window open to something associated. It gets them down and out of my obsession so I can go back to whatever I'm supposed to be doing, but I don't necessarily ever see them again. And it wasn't any better when I carried a PDA, as anybody who was in an NSO PTB meeting where I brought out the PDA, the laptop, the notebook, and the random scraps of paper well knows.

There are a couple of basic places things have broken down in the past. One, which was the death of the PDA, was UI for entering notes. That damn stylus was just too slow; it was faster to write a note to my self, let alone to type it in on a real computer. The other is actually looking at the tasks. Obviously with them spread all across creation and only appearing when I go to look for them, stuff gets lost.

So why am I feeling positive about Hiveminder? The somewhat cornily-named braindump feature, and the wide variety of communication gateways they provide. This combination means I may actually use it consistently for entering tasks, enough that I get used to it. Then it's just a matter of whether I actually use it to look for tasks. I'm hoping their email reminders might help with that, or that it just might be so useful I keep it open a lot (for entering things) and get reminded.

Braindump. So simple, and it seemed so uninteresting when I first saw it. And yet, it's so good. The idea is simple: you just jot down a quick note about a task you have, optionally adding some tags, details (priority, due date, etc), and further description using a fairly intuitive and simple syntax. Hiveminder's parser turns it into a (or more than one, if you jotted down more than one) task in their todo list for you. It's as easy as 'cat'ing it to the end of a todo.txt, but you get all the power of a database in the back-end once you've done it.

I mentioned gateways. In fact, remember that I first got interested when I found out there was an IM gateway. There is. In some ways, it might actually be more powerful than the main ("Web 2.0") front-end. And all you do is send commands over an IM connection to their bot (AIM or Jabber). I always have some sort of IM open, as many of you know. So I can keep a window open on the bot, and tell it a new task...you guessed it, in the braindump format. It can also show me tasks, search them, modify, or even show a random task. I'm starting to feel like a salesperson here...I really do think it's that cool.

In addition to IM, you can submit tasks via email (nifty), and you can export some/all of your task list to a text file (and edit it and send it back with changes/additions). This last is cool because they provide a todo.pl which will fetch these text files and send them back (as well as doing much of the other stuff you might want to do, now from your bash prompt).

So the bottom line is that there are tons of ways I can now jot notes down and have them all end up in the same place. It's all as easy as spewing it out of my mind into the computer and having it there for later.

The astute might have noticed this entry is also tagged with vim. It's my editor of choice, and I spend a lot of time there. Recently, I've been playing a bit with syntax files. That text file Hiveminder exports has syntax. It's simple, but it's there. Wouldn't syntax highlighting for it be nifty, so it's easy to catch typing errors and the important stuff stands out from the annoying (but necessary) background stuff? Yep, I did it. I've uploaded my hiveminder.vim syntax file over at http://www.vim.org if anybody wants to play with it. I think it's pretty cool.

I also wrote a bash_completion script for that todo.pl I mentioned earlier. I haven't posted it anywhere yet, but it's neat, too, and I'd be happy to send it to anybody who asks. I'll gush about how cool bash_completion is some other time, if I haven't already.

And, just for fun, while I was already playing around with stuff, I did a vim syntax for jlj (the client I use to post to LJ) entry files. It could use a little work still, like adding lj-specific tags, but it gets things done. I haven't posted it to vim.org yet, but I may. Have I mentioned how much I hate typing entries into a browser window/love being able to use vim for it? Yeah.

Oh, yeah. vim has spellcheck now. Nifty stuff. During all this syntax stuff I discovered that and enabled it. My syntaxes only check for spelling where it's appropriate.

YAFAP: magus-Kni-Hum-Mal-Law (genoless, polyselfless, artiwishless)

2007-11-09T03:44:36Z

(Crossposted to rec.games.roguelike.nethack)


Magus the Seignieur      St:18/** Dx:23 Co:18 In:23 Wi:23 Ch:18
Lawful
Astral Plane $:0 HP:302(307) Pw:137(281) AC:-49 Xp:27/70077908 T:76211
You offer the Amulet of Yendor to Lugh...--More--
An invisible choir sings, and you are bathed in radiance...--More--
The voice of Lugh booms out: "Congratulations, mortal!"--More--
"In return for thy service, I grant thee the gift of Immortality!"--More--
You ascend to the status of Demigod...--More--
Do you want your possessions identified? [ynq] (n)

After the better part of a decade of playing off and on, I've finally done it. I went mounted almost the whole way, except for the final 10 steps or so . . . I'll get to that.

I forget now what took out my warhorse. Much sadness; I stashed the saddle somewhere and wandered around for a good while looking for a new mount. I think I picked up another horse for a little while, but I was running out of apples/carrots, and I remember one starved to death under me.

On foot for a while longer, then came up with a scroll of taming right around when I found the portal to Fort Ludios. I love riding silver dragons. I know at some point I cleared out the fort and gave all the money to the priest in Minetown. I'm pretty sure I was on the dragon when I did the quest. Then it ate a doppleganger, and a barrow wight just doesn't make a good mount.

Fortunately, by now I knew taming. I had the idea to try out mountain centaurs, and had seen one wandering around. There's definitely something nice about a mount who'll wear armor and wield weapons (and wear an amulet of reflection), and they're plenty fast (unlike the dragon). I'd take them earlier if I could in the future. Unfortunately, their lack of flight is a bit of a handicap.

My first big break came when I got to Medusa's Island. I saw a robe sitting around on a little island outside (nice), and thought I'd run and grab it before going back to do a bit of cleanup higher in the dungeon and try to come up with a better means of levitation than potions. So I drank my blessed potion of levitation, and a djinn popped out and offered me a wish. Handy. Silver dragon scale-mail means I don't have to keep wearing this amulet of reflection, and can start casting spells effectively.

I exhausted the charges in a wand of polymorph trying to get some better rings and spellbooks (ultimately largely successful, and kind of fun), then headed downward.

In the Castle, I wished for a blessed figurine of a ki-rin. *That* is a sweet mount. It gets bonus points for healing itself. I rode it for the rest of the game, until a mess of enemies on the Astral Plane brought it down as I was dashing for what turned out to be Lugh's altar (second one I looked at).

Not much else particularly interesting, except I suppose the little brag that this was the first time I saw the Wizard of Yendor. I was ready.

I'm sad I let the ki-rin drop on my way to the end, though. I'd even wished for a stethescope to keep an eye on it.


Amulets
J - an uncursed amulet of life saving (being worn)
Weapons
a - the blessed rustproof +6 Excalibur (weapon in hand)
b - a blessed rustproof +7 lance (alternate weapon; not wielded)
Armor
g - a blessed fireproof +5 pair of gauntlets of dexterity (being
worn)
r - a blessed fireproof +4 robe named fireproof (being worn)
B - a cursed fireproof +4 small shield named fireproof (being worn)
C - a blessed +5 Hawaiian shirt (being worn)
E - a blessed +5 helm of brilliance (being worn)
M - an uncursed +4 silver dragon scale mail (being worn)
W - an uncursed fireproof +5 pair of speed boots (being worn)
[...and assorted other stuff...]
Final Attributes:
You were the Hand of Elbereth.
You were piously aligned.
You were fire resistant.
You were cold resistant.
You were sleep resistant.
You were disintegration-resistant.
You were shock resistant.
You were poison resistant.
You were level-drain resistant.
You were magic-protected.
You saw invisible.
You were telepathic.
You had automatic searching.
You were invisible to others.
You were stealthy.
You could jump.
You had slower digestion.
You were protected.
You were very fast.
You had reflection.
You had free action.
Your life would have been saved.
You were extremely lucky.
You had extra luck.
Good luck did not time out for you.
You survived.
Vanquished creatures:
Asmodeus
Baalzebub
Orcus
Yeenoghu
Juiblex
The Wizard of Yendor (4 times)
Pestilence
Famine (twice)
5 arch-liches
a high priest
Medusa
Croesus
8 krakens
[...]
2786 creatures vanquished.
Voluntary challenges:
You never genocided any monsters.
You never changed form.
You used 5 wishes.
You did not wish for any artifacts.
Fare thee well magus the Demigod...
You went to your reward with 3621192 points,
Excalibur (worth 4000 zorkmids and 10000 points)
The Book of the Dead (worth 10000 zorkmids and 25000 points)
The Bell of Opening (worth 5000 zorkmids and 12500 points)
The Magic Mirror of Merlin (worth 1500 zorkmids and 3750 points)
The Candelabrum of Invocation (worth 5000 zorkmids and 12500 points)
    11 emeralds (worth 27500 zorkmids),
    10 rubies (worth 35000 zorkmids),
    5 diamonds (worth 20000 zorkmids),
    3 sapphires (worth 9000 zorkmids),
    3 black opals (worth 7500 zorkmids),
    2 dilithium crystals (worth 9000 zorkmids),
    3 amulets of life saving (worth 450 zorkmids),
    1 amulet of magical breathing (worth 150 zorkmids),
and 316 pieces of gold, after 76211 moves.
You were level 27 with a maximum of 307 hit points when you ascended.

Waistcoat Update

2007-10-19T08:36:57Z

The waistcoat is assembled to the point that there are only 3 pieces left to attach to one another: the collar, the lining, and the outside. Thought it was about time I took a break for lunch.

This is pretty damn cool. I don't think i've ever done clothing from a pattern before.

Regency

2007-10-18T07:39:23Z

Elegant Arts Society Regency Assembly is this Saturday night, games on Sunday. So I'm in a bit of a frantic preparation mode.

I think, thanks to a combination of a comment dropped at Newport this summer and a bit of experimenting in front of the mirror, that I may have figured out a bit more about how cravats are supposed to work. Now I just need to come up with a nice, long, broad strip of very white fabric (linen would be ideal, but I should be able to starch cotton into submission) ASAP.

Construction on the waistcoat progresses slowly. By which I mean I'm going to have to do almost all of the work tomorrow. It should be an adventure. Probably the buttons won't get done, but I have hope I'll still be able to get the basic shape in place. Then start shopping around in the next month to get started on the next one, I think, if it goes well. I'm not sure how this got procrastinated so long, but I hope not to repeat that particular mistake in the coming year.

Unrelated, last weekend I finally dragged myself out to get weights and running shoes. Combined with getting a note from the doctor that I shouldn't go back to work, so I'm trying to think of my full-time job as repairing my health (in general, but particularly with respect to my hands), it's been a good kick toward improvement. I hope I can keep it up, but so far this week I've run at least a bit every day and done between half and all of my strengthening exercises each day. So far, so good; let's see if I can make it a pattern which really sinks in.

1856 today?

2007-09-25T19:57:58Z

I just uploaded an image to BoardGameGeek of a map I made last week. I was playing around with 1856 and Google Maps and noticed that there's a lot of railroad track identified on Google Maps. So I decided to see if I could make a game map which corresponds to the modern track. I think I did a pretty good job.

House?

2007-09-20T03:49:17Z

One of my housemates just got an offer she can't refuse, so she's moving out at the end of the month. Anybody out there looking for a place to live in the Boston area, or know somebody who is? We'd prefer not to pick up a stranger on Craigslist.

Edit: We found someone this weekend.

PSA

2007-09-05T04:33:27Z

J.P. Licks has "El Diablo" in again.

I love this flavor. Chocolate with cinnamon and cayenne. Today I had the incredibly bright idea of having some with a banana. (I didn't want a whole banana split, just half a banana as a topping. This caused a bit of confusion.) It was quite tasty.