dot dot romkey

While I’m on the subject of World of Warcraft, I want to take a moment to mention the software I use to keep the add-ons I use up to date.

One of the most wonderful things about World of Warcraft is the extensible user interface. The UI is written in LUA and users can install add-ons which add new functionality to it or change existing functionality. Some people screens are entirely different from the stock World of Warcraft UI. I don’t change mine that much, but I do use quite a few convenience add-ons.

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"World of Warcraft: Wrath of the Lich King Expansion Pack"

Blizzard has announced that the new expansion pack, Wrath of the Lich King, will be released on November 13th, 2008.

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I was imagining that my next post here would be about the new iPods Apple announced this week, or some software-related thing.

I hadn’t imagined I’d be writing a reminiscence of David Foster Wallace, who apparently hanged himself on September 12th.

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Apple loves Tuesdays. Tuesday is when new music and DVDs come out, so Tuesday is when music and movies show up in the iTunes Store. Apple also has a tendency to release new products on Tuesdays. And they often have “special events” on Tuesdays as well.

Tuesday September 9th 2008 (today as I finish this; I meant to get this out sooner) is a special Apple event called “Let’s Rock” - although they haven’t specified, it’s clearly related to the iPod/music side of their business. And it follows a pattern they’ve established over the last few years of announcing new iPods in the fall. This gets them out in time for the Christmas season.

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Right now I have links to a few social sites that I use on the sidebar. These sites include Twitter, delicious.com, Google Reader (selected articles that I thought were interesting enough to share), and last.fm (music I’ve been listening to recently). At some point I’ll get UVFood and Flickr in there, too.

I like the idea of presenting my activity on these sites in the sidebar. It gives you an idea of what I’m up to, and helps make this blog a hub for my activity. At first I used various Wordpress plugins that were tailored to the particular sites. There were two problems with doing that. First, their formatting was all over the place. They used different heading tags, made assumptions about formatting, embedded their own formatting. They looked like a mess when taken together. The second problem was that they all loaded their info in real time, which meant it could take minutes to load a dot-dot-romkey page. No good at all.

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And, in the spirit of this new blog, I present to you: Toilet Bat.

And remember to always look before you sit! Or else you may be in for a nasty surprise!

At times I lament the fact that I don’t write quick hacks the way I did years ago. Of course, my brain and mind aren’t the same as they were twenty (or more) years ago, and that contributes to the problem. And the environment that I work in has changed and become much more complex… where two decades ago a piece of software most likely ran from the command-line, now it may need to live in a networked environment and work with a web server and talk to other pieces of software in order to do anything remotely interesting. Which is fascinating but means that software is a lot more complicated than it used to be.

But the biggest problem for me has clearly been that there’s just too much going on - too many things pulling on my attention. I have too many other concerns. That’s natural as you age from twenty to forty, I think. Your perspectives widen, your involvement in the world (hopefully) deepens. You develop deeper relationships, possibly you gain family.

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