Ceejbot

I dunno. I decided to post all the Crossfit fitness stuff over thataway, in my midlife crisis blog. I just can't manage to juggle two separate LJ logins. As you know, I'm not very technical.

Yesterday I did the Crossfit Fran in 5:26, two minutes faster than my previous time (and more than 6 minutes faster than my first time). Modifications made: 35-lb thrusters instead of 65lb, inclined body-weight rows on a bar instead of pull-ups. The limiting factor on this run was cardio.

Someday I'll do a real pull-up. I can dream.

Two Crossfit-based workouts so far this week, ( behind the cut because this is mostly for my own record... )

Safari 4 looks awesome, but I have just discovered that I can't use it until I have a working adblocker for it. The web is intolerable when it's unfiltered.

ETA: ClickToFlash is 80% of the way there. This is a WebKit plugin that works fine with Safari 4.

I've spent more time than I care to admit this weekend doing the World of Warcraft Valentine's Day achievements. They call it "Love is in the Air", just like they call Christmas "Winter Veil", but we all know what they mean.

Mostly the WOW achievement system has been a triumph. It's given players a mixture of easy things and hard things to do that have little rewards. Some of them require pure luck, some persistence, some thoroughness. Some of them happen automatically as you do what you'd normally do in the same, and some require you to be a completist. They're fun. They make old content valuable again. They're one of the high points of the 3.0 version of the game.

Except the holiday achievements. ( Explanation behind the cut... )

I'm contemplating moving my personal projects from a subversion repository to one of the modern distributed control systems. This isn't because of any discontent with subversion, but more to make myself experiment with new tools. Choosing one, however, seems tricky. There's a lot of the usual holy war nonsense.

What are your personal experiences? Mercurial? Bazaar? Git? Something I've never heard of?

I don't personally care much about graphical interfaces to the tool, since the command line is fine for me. I do care about excellent handling of renames, good branching, and a nice web browser for repository history.

Fingers "ghost" over a part of somebody's body.
For an encore, they "card" through someone's hair.
Then they "map" whatever body parts haven't previously been ghosted or carded.
To conclude, they "scissor" somewhere unmentionable.

These verbs need a few weeks of vacation in Aruba. Maybe months.

Today I did a wussy version of the Karen Cross-fit exercise. I didn't do 150 of them, only 60. And I used an 8-pound ball. And I didn't do them for time. Which was good. Because the wussy version slaughtered me.

My trainer has cranked up the intensity. I spent the hour today convinced I was going to die.

So I'm sold on the Roomba already, though I'm still trying to figure out which one to get. (I wish for Steve Jobsian product simplicity everywhere sometimes.) What about the sudsy Scooba, though? Have any of you ever used one? The net seems more mixed on the Scooba than on the Roomba.

Also, please do tell me about the pet trauma. I'm looking forward to extreme cat angst.

Two posts in one day!

ETA: I bought the Roomba 580. We'll see how well I do clearing junk off the floors first.

From The Psychology of Computer Programming, by Gerald M. Weinberg, 1971:

And speaking of garbage, one of the most easily identifiable personality needs in programming is a modicum of neatness. We are not speaking here of personal grooming, though in one case a programmer actually smelled so bad that nobody could sit next to him long enough to look at his listings. What we mean is a slight compulsion to keep one's papers in order, without which the computer's paper-generating capacity inexorably leads to grief. One computing center selects its programmer trainees by giving a test and choosing the candidate who turns in the neatest paper, not the one with the highest score.

Discuss.

My first comment: I think I need to read that book.

This guy will be the next Doctor. I had to restrain myself from typing "this kid". That's how middle-aged I'm becoming.

When one's spouse is in the living room while one is in the bedroom: IMing instead of shouting across the house. Okay or hopelessly geeky? How about carrying on an extended conversation via IM while you're both in the same house? Now imagine picking up a cellphone to continue on.

Okay, we never did the last one. I'm allergic to cellphones.

Apparently tomorrow the BBC will announce the name of the actor who'll be playing the eleventh incarnation of Doctor Who. David Tennant is stepping down after several years of turning squealing fangirls into devotees of the the longest-running geeky SF show ever. Many of them are upset Tennant is leaving and saying their Who fandom is over.

I've decided to be a fan of the Second Doctor and simmer in resentment about Jon Pertwee. Oh, the agony!

The one constant of the show is the TARDIS, and the one thing you know for sure is that someday the current Doctor will regenerate into somebody else. They'll get over it.

I'm hoping for Tony Head as the Doctor. I will not get him. I'm okay with that. I just had to say I was hoping for it, as part of my fannish obligation to have an opinion. The speculation is that Paterson Joseph will get the role. I don't know his work. He'll probably be fine. I'm more thrilled that Steven Moffat is taking over as executive producer. He's a good writer.

Useless fact: I didn't watch Doctor Who growing up. Eccleston (aka Nine) was my first Doctor, and it's only recently I've been watching the classic serials. Weird. You'd have thought my geek childhood would have included Who. But no. Did you watch it as a kid? Do you watch it now?

Two days was all it took to get used to Consolas for editing code. Yay. I'm less sure about it for my non-programming uses for BBEdit, but I'm sure I'll mellow out.

BBEdit's new default font is Consolas. I'm giving it a shot, because I am a brave neophile, but I gotta say, it's freaking me out. I've just spent 16 years looking at either MPW or Monaco 9. We all know that "familiarity is legibility", but I have taken it to extremes.

I like the emphasis punctuation gets in Consolas. It was the advantage MPW had over Monaco.

Aaron Swartz on the Sidekick. What's interesting to me is the assumption of all commenters that it's dead, or if not, will be very soon.

But once again: the obsession with hardware at the expense of moving the software anywhere at all, particularly the web browser, was deadly. Note also that all mentions of the hardware are negative. Everybody complains about build quality, even of the Sharp-made generations. Hrm! Dunno what that means. I do know that I showed my sister an M2 (um, I think that shipped as the Sidekick 3) and her reaction was that it just wasn't cool enough to tempt her. We never had good ID.

The one guy who wrote software for it liked the toolkit. The hiptop app framework is one of things Danger did right, as is the great performance the clever, clever 1.0 team squeezed out of feeble hardware. My husband's iPhone doesn't do anything in the background, because it "can't", and any of a million Apple fanboys will tell you why this is the "right" design. Well, nonsense. Demonstrated as nonsense in 2002, when I was getting all my instant messaging and email traffic flowing in while I browsed the web. And demonstrated as nonsense every day while my little Twitter app fetches my tweets in the background.

But the hiptop 2008 == hiptop 2002, and you just can't do that.

Though from another perspective it's a success story. The people who chose not to move the software at all now have oodles of money from the acquisition. Those decisions look good from the vantage point of retirement. Who's to tell them they did it wrong?

I was driving up 101 last night and I spotted the Microsoft billboard near their collection of buildings on Shoreline. It's a vivid ad, showing a boxer reaching across several computer screens. I thought, wow, that subtext is right on.

Windows: it's like a punch in the face.

And hmm, probably not what they really want to be saying to their potential customers. But they have a long history of not understanding their own secondary signals. For instance, the imitative "hello from Seattle" on the Zune, a failure to understand what "designed in California" on the iPod signals.

Three more great slogans suggested by Microsoft advertising:

Windows 95, the Rolling Stones, Start Me Up.
Windows: it makes a grown man cry.

Random Microsoft ads earlier this decade, David Bowie, "Heroes".
Windows: the choice of cowards.

Their latest campaign, I'm a PC.
I'm a cheap collection of generic computer components that might run one of several operating systems.

Got any small breakable objects? Or large ones, for that matter?
Don't let me touch them. I'm guaranteed to break them.

Whether it's failing to open a box of crackers properly and spilling them all over the floor for a doggie bonanza, dropping glasses in the sink, or crushing Christmas presents, I'm a wrecking crew today.

The training course in Mirror's Edge has defeated me. I can't get through it. I feel like such a failure as a gamer.

My Paladin wants the Shop Smart. Shop Pet... Smart. achievement. To that end, he is collecting companion aka non-combat pets. He has 36 as of this morning. Yesterday, I had an engineering alt make a Tranquil Mechanical Yeti. And this morning Blizzard mailed everybody a baby bear to commemorate the game's fourth anniversary. Bing, 36.

However, 36 pets isn't enough. I need 50 for the achievement. ( What I have to do to get them... )