• On Life and Love

    Weekly linkage

    Down to six hundred sixteen unread Google Reader items! Here are some of the coolest of the nearly 200 I’ve read in the last couple of weeks (as well as random surfing, of course): How to Lower Your Heating Bills This Winter – I definitely need to try out lowering our thermostat. We keep it on 72 F in the winter, which we could probably stand to lower by 5-7 degrees if I bundled up more. 9 New High-Quality Free Fonts | Freebies – I really like the Spatha and My Fair Cody fonts on this list. I'm (back-burner) working on a design for charsheet.net, and the styles of those…

  • On Life and Love

    Ghost Characters Sheets: Simple JavaScript is Magick

    I’ve written before about writing a character sheet manager for Geist characters, but there have been some upheavals within the Camarilla (now the Midnight Dance, a non-profit separate from White Wolf) that have the project on hold. For one, their developers may be doing it themselves, and they’re competent. For another, even if they don’t, they may be exposing a handy API that I can tie into. Lastly, I’m busy finishing a novel at the moment. That said, Greg offers Midnight Dance/Camarilla prestige (like, um, club brownie points; with enough of them, you can get more XP for your characters) if we submit ghost non-player characters to him. It’s not…

  • Uncategorized

    Phenom II X4 945 and Lian Li PC-A05NB Cooling Problems

    So back when I got my new computer recently, I picked up a Phenom II X4 945 chip (quad core, hence the “X4”) and a Lian Li PC-A05NB case. The case is a mini-tower that can fit ATX or microATX (my board is a micro). I’ve left in the stock fans and heatsink. The case is weird, because the air flow is the opposite of most conventional cases (back to front): (Image from Lian Li.) The stock fans don’t move much air, and when you toss in power cables and a power supply, it’s (apparently) time for trouble. My idle temperatures are around 44 C, and 50-60% load (running Minecraft…

  • On Life and Love

    Weekly linkage

    This week’s internet cruising: Ottawa school board to ask students if they are gay – The Globe and Mail – This is a little weird. Ottawa is going to ask parents of elementary students and middle/high school students themselves about their sexual orientation. Toronto evidently did this already, and "students weren't bothered by it". How to Protest the TSA and Ruin Thanksgiving in One Easy Step — The Good Men Project Magazine – "Oh, and November 24 is the day before Thanksgiving—one of the busiest travel days of the year. That means anyone who chooses to dodge those full-body radiation sarcophagi of X-rated mayhem will gum up the security line…

  • On Life and Love

    One Song, One Move

    One of the things I love about belly dance is how easy it is to practice. It’s chock-full of named moves that I can drill over and over again until I get ’em right. Because I have a deep love of listening to music on repeat, I’ve got a certain way I like to practice: one song, one move. This would probably drive some people nuts. I warm up doing a variety of moves for one or two run-throughs of a song, just doing a few repetitions of every move I know. …This might be where I sneak in some of the combo ideas I come up with on my…