Well, okay, at least this Facebook feature isn't annoying. My blog is now aggregated in Facebook via their Notes thing, which I think is being published so that my friends on Facebook (all two of them) can keep up to date on my very exciting and busy life.

Just in case they'd forgotten where my website is, or they're too lazy to click a bookmark/aggregate my feed themselves.

Comments on the Notes are disabled; if you want to comment, follow the link to the real blog. Oh, and I have no idea why it has a duplicate entry of everything so far.

I took a walk down the path today (since it was nearly 70°F!) and decided to take my camera with me. Nothing terribly exciting, but I did get a couple good scenery pictures. So here they are.

Wait, no, that's not right.

Anyway, Golashes is selling stuff. I've already snagged a game and might get a couple more before I'm done. So if you want something on that list, drop him a line. I don't think he's updating the list, though, so you'll definitely have to ask.

In other news, I'm converting the Forgotten Realms game I'm running on IRC to True20, in an attempt to streamline some things, give more freedom to character creation, and perhaps most importantly, to give myself some experience in actually running True20 before I force it upon the gaming group. It's been a bit of a rocky conversion, just due to everyone's unfamiliarity with the system, but things are mostly done and we might get around to playing next week.

And in closing, Fett's Vette is the best nerdcore hip hop ever.

From Endor to Hoth
Ripley to Spock
I'll find what you want
But there's gonna be a cost

See, my name is Boba Fett
I know my shit is tight
Start not actin' right
You're frozen in carbonite

Jorenby recognizes the track, hopefully, as the one Fiet found one fateful day in the SDL and played for us -- many times, I'm certain -- to reactions equal parts amusement and slightly quizzical glances. But nevertheless, the song's shown up again, in all its awesomeness.

My backpack's got jets
Well I'm Boba the Fett
Well I bounty hunt for Jabba Hutt
To finance my 'Vette...

As I post I'm laying in bed, listening to The Ray Hamilton Orchestra's A New Recording of Theme Songs from James Bond which, anecdotally, is one of the rarest CDs ever because the intertubes seem to know nothing about it.

Anyway, as the arrangement "Nobody Does It Better" plays I'm immediately reminded of junior year of high school -- The Accursed '99, as I remember it -- winter, specifically -- where this was the de facto listening choice for my old Discman when going to Port basketball pep band performances. The warmth of the practice rooms, sitting on the floor listening to music while Andy, Aaron, and Kate sat around and cracked wise -- presumably, my memory is not that solid -- before venturing out for a half of pep banding and returning after halftime, to then call it an eve and go home in the cold, this album is that memory. Just hearing "From Russia With Love" brings me back, although it is odd recollection; I feel angles -- everything is above me from the floor -- and orange mixed with florescent, and the music itself is a nearly-tactile representation of those friends, at that moment, with all those strange 1999 thoughts flowing through my head anew.

Music does this to me often; Bush's Sixteen Stone is, since around The Accursed '99, the anthem of my pre-Port Washington life, although it occasionally comes attached with similar memories from Port, and Project Majestic Mix: A Tribute to Nobuo Uematsu is decidedly one very specifc cold winter during the MSOE years where I played it incessantly. The fact that it was my first real dedicated exposure to video game remixing has kept it a favorite for me all these years.

Countless other examples exist: Ayumi Hamasaki's early library (a couple CDs of which are on accidentally-long-term borrow from Terry [congratulations on the marriage stuff, by the by, if you ever read this]) is invariably tied to the middle of my MSOE years, Guns N' Roses' Appetite For Destruction is pure high school sophomore/junior year angst and Weird Al's Bad Hair Day pure high school sophomore/junior year jolly, Xenogears Light is the album of first moving out and living on my own... so much music, so many textured memories. Going deaf would be hell.

If Andy finishes the Night Gallery before the new year, I'll shave my head. Or at least get a haircut.

I got an Amazon.com Associates Program thing in order to try to make a couple bucks off the website. I didn't want to do Google ads because they're too layout-invasive and annoying (in my opinion anyway), but I figured that since I've been mentioning a lot of stuff you can find on Amazon, I might as well give it a whirl.

So without any further boring preamble, my book of the month-or-so is World War Z by Max Brooks, a surprisingly compelling serious fiction about the living dead rising across the globe in the near future and how it shaped history. The details of the war, and its hysteria, are told in an interview format, with narrator speaking with various individuals of all sorts who influenced and were influenced by The Zombie War.

Despite the premise, the book is very not-hokey, and there are a number of subtle and not-so-subtle jabs at the current U.S. administration and American culture scattered between the assorted interviews. I've been pleasantly surprised by the book.

--

So there you have it. The image links directly to Amazon, and if you do buy the book directly from clicking the link, I get some really small cut of the sale. But really, I'll be pleased with just a couple bucks here and there. I'm not even looking to offset hosting costs. You are of course under no obligation (implied or otherwise) to click the links or buy anything.

That's all for today, tootles.

Yep.

A bunch of behind-the-scenes changes, but a couple things worth mentioning. For starters, pretty much all the old incorporeal.org/... URLs that pointed to stuff in Drupal now redirect to a separate subdomain, drupal.incorporeal.org. Old links and bookmarks should all behave properly. I've become increasingly frustrated with Drupal over time, and this is another step in isolating those problems. With all the old URLs are updated, and hopefully eventually search engines will update their indexes. Of course, this still doesn't help the problem that far too much of my old site (on Dan's host) is getting hit... but there's not much that can be done about that.

All the rage with the site now is subdomains. In fact, there's very little accessible by a (www.)incorporeal.org URL. There is of course blog.incorporeal.org, which houses my blogs and those of others (just Golashes, at the moment, but I don't mind more). civ4.incorporeal.org is gone, made instead a subdirectory of downloads.incorporeal.org, where all sorts of random things generally not viewable in a browser go. A neglected-but-soon-useful wiki lives at wiki.incorporeal.org, too.

And the latest addition is gallery.incorporeal.org, a replacement for all the images stored in Drupal. They're still there, and there's not much in the gallery, but in time, everything will be in place.

So with those updates done, I should mention that if people are interested, they should register at the blog, wiki, or gallery and submit stuff. And if they want an @incorporeal.org address, they should drop me an email, because I've got plenty to hand out.

It might have been a rocky ride for anyone checking the site in the past hour or two, but things are finally back to normal. b2evolution has gotten a huge (major version!) upgrade. You may need to set your skin preferences again if they seem wrong, but otherwise, things should be as normal.

Also, people accessing the old Drupal section of the site will notice that everything has been moved to http://drupal.incorporeal.org. All that content should still work too.

Build your own Tom Servo, Gypsy, and other Satellite of Love stuff.

It feels so nice to have Amarok running on my MacBook, along with a couple other critical KDE apps such as Konqueror, KWrite, and the KOffice suite. All thanks to Fink, which works like a charm. Hooray!

In unrelatedness, the default view for http://blog.incorporeal.org is now my main blog, and not the aggregation. If you don't like it, make a bookmark to what you want to see by default.

Dan's mentioning the blog reminded me that I should tell everyone that there is a new style installed, one that looks nice. It's called "nautica2l-bss" (the -bss because I've made a couple personalization mods), and you can try it out by clicking on the link for it in the sidebars. Be sure to keep your history, however, as for the moment it doesn't link to the other themes. That way, if you don't like it, you can go back to the old style and re-click the link for your preferred style.

I plan on adding links to the other themes from nautica2l-bss eventually, as well as making a couple fairly minor cosmetic changes.

I bought a new wrist cover for my Macbook and the pad (which feels really nice) is made from "PVC leather". What is that? Are there PVC cows? Are those manufactured too? Do Greenpeace and PETA team up for a huge gripefest over the selling of PVC leather?

Oh. And the battery in my car died yesterday and I had to spend time today running around calling AAA and getting a new one and everything. Fun times.

Dr. Victor R. Basili of the University of Maryland was in town yesterday for the Fall 2006 Distinguished Lecture to give two talks, "The Role of Empirical Study in Software Engineering" and "Defining a Software Measurement Program: Matching Software Measurements to Business Goals". Being the not-very-business-minded fellow that I am, I found the first much more engrossing, but both were interesting and Dr. Basili was a very enthusiastic lecturer.

The summary of the first lecture is that software engineering, like any other field of engineering, has some sort of relationship between the process (what we do) and the product (what we get), and that it's vital we discover patterns and trends in that relationship in order to improve our process, which is something the community at large has been very lax in doing, ultimately to the detriment of the outlook on software in general. The method described involved collecting useful process metrics, beyond the merely technical ones commonly collected, such as lines of code, and creating an experience factory which is designed to aggregate this data and allow for analysis. The analysis then feeds back into the process. Real results after years of use were then shown to provide very impressive productivity and process quality benefits, and the lecture moved on to more detailed concepts and framework expansions of the knowledge base. I enjoyed this lecture heavily, especially since it echoed a proposal of mine for the MSOE Software Development Lab which, as far as I know, regrettably never got off the ground.

The second lecture involved tying these concepts into the business world, defining a process with which to define meaningful business goals less vague than "increase customer satisfaction" and then tie those goals to software development measurement and processes. The CMMI came up, which I've always been a fan of (I guess, it's an odd thing to have fandom for), but a heavy portion of the lecture was for manager types, which is not me. Yet, as I said, still an interesting lecture.

So it was a good day, all in all. I met with Dr. Basili after the first lecture to chat for a bit and ask a question or two. The University of Maryland is on "the list" of universities to apply to as well, so it was a nice opportunity to at least do the old meet and greet with a very influential member of their faculty.

(Hey, at least this post wasn't about music again. :)