Real Life – Page 8 – The Kind Healer

Software impressions – Pidgin & Win-7

I think the best statement regarding Windows-7 so far has been from my roommate Craig, who I challenged to get Oblivion working stable there (something that already is a challenge in XP). His response the next morning is telling:

“Oblivion ROCKS! on Windows-7!”

Apparently he installed it, did no tweaks at all, added pretty much all his mods (about 40 IIRC) and had absolutely no stuttering issues in the spots where he had it under XP. The fact that it recognized pretty much every piece of hardware he had (good news as I have most of the same), is a good sign that I’ll finally be paying for a Windows successor.

The software I’m test-driving right now is Pidgin, which got quite a bit of discussion on CC in the past few days – enough so to take a quick peek at it. After little fuss, I have runnable connectors for YIM, IRC, and CC which appear happy. Wikipedia has mentioned that it will accept Skype, but can’t appear to find the connector for it; I’d be useless anyway since that’s probably being used in the future for voice chats (something that Pidgin can’t – yet – do). The more amusing possibility is a connector to battle.net’s chat system, which is curious but not needed yet.

Anyway, I still can’t connect any of these through work, so the only reason I’d want this kind of universal access is to prevent many different IM apps lying around in my system memory. I’d actually stay logged in then (though likely invis).

/salute
–TSK

Pics Test

Just some old pics from my regular walking route (and testing some new stuff on the site).

Hoboken-070308

Within the gallery are a few pics that may interest SL Sailing folks; In particular some signs with info about the original New York Yacht Club (home of the Americas Cup). The building next to the actual sign appears setup to hold canoes, but has been empty since it was built.

–TSK

Oddness with WP 2.7 & Admin

Upgraded my sites to WordPress 2.7 today. Things have mostly been happy, but there’s some kinda problem with cforms (in particular after I needed to upgrade that separately). So, that’s down yet again. *sigh* I’ll check on it later.

More interestingly, after fiddling with the cforms admin panels for awhile (which I hate due to its slow response), I gave up and went back to my site page, and back to Admin/Dashboard. Which I suddenly could not load (all pages – including the main page – said unreachable by FF). Removing cforms altogether, followed by a login through IE, has fixed the problem for now.

Oh well. I guess its time to look at comment systems again. This time something dead simple on the admin side.

/salute
–TSK

Yep, I’m Still Alive…

… And can ya guess what I’ve been playing lately? ;-)

Actually, it really was Portal until a short while ago. I made the mistake of downloading the demo of Bejeweled Twist (which, a few days later, I unlocked for the full version). I now have versions of the regular HL games that work with my current monitor resolution; And with steam’s version of the Blue Shift hi-def pack enabled, even third-party mods look nicer. It’s made me wonder why I didn’t get involved with Steam sooner.

Much like Uru, actually….

I’ve heard the news of course – Seemed like every other MystBlogs post talked about it for the weekend. And I first got word of it myself last Sat, through an announcement sent through the Steam community group ‘Uru Rocks.’ Still letting the news sit with me, and seeing what followup news comes from Cyan. I may post a response via an article to GoMe, or contribute to someone else’s ‘reaction request.’ Dunno yet, but whatever I eventually say it will be mirrored here.

The more interesting news is that I’ve begun to poke about with the Mysterium Committee, to see if I can help in any capacity. More on that once I get acclimated to the idea of helping others in larger scales again (something I stopped doing when I initially got disillusioned with Second Life – mid-2006 I think).

Work, of course, has been ‘interesting’ (Financial Sector, remember?). I’m half-tempted to tear down my earlier ‘relax’ post, since that looks rather lame now, but I still have my job – which, unnervingly, means something right now. 2009 is on-track to be even more interesting (which I’ll have to stop discussing now, as we once again hit my personal ‘ethics’ line which I refuse to cross).

*sigh* Ah well, I suppose we’ll just have to see what the future brings us all, eh? Lets hope its for the better…

/salute
–TSK

More Fun /w Comment Spam

Ran into a new rash of comment spam that came in last week, didn’t notice it since they were mostly on old posts.

I used to have a plugin active that automatically closed comments for older posts; I had disabled that since Defensio’s been doing so well.

Dumb, eh? Anyway, I’ve turned it back on and this post is being made to update the database.

I’ll get around to something akin to a *real* update later. ;-)

/salute
–TSK