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Below are the 20 most recent journal entries recorded in
Run away to DreamWidth. Come with me.'s LiveJournal:
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| Friday, June 1st, 2012 | | 4:33 pm |
Stereo worxxx.
Coupla weeks ago I met up at last with Sandra Ordonez, who had the joy of being the Wikimedia PR person in the last period before it finally got its shit together as a professional and functional organisation. I told her the stuff in the Nonprofit Kit for Dummies post above and she got that post-charity stress disorder look in her eyes. I also met the Bacon Queen.
We are off on holiday tomorrow! To deepest darkest Wiltshire for Freda to see her grandparents, who are over from Australia. Don't expect me around till next Monday (unless the Internet works there). Older teen left her Nintendo DS behind, so it's Freda's now — ![[personal profile]](http://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png) arkady just got a pile of games for it suitable to occupy a five-year-old on holiday. She's playing the cat one now.
Java 6 EOL December 2012. There's no OpenJDK 7 for 10.04 and no good PPA ... so it's either make our own deb of proprietary JDK 7 the way we do proprietary JDK 6, drop in debs from Debian or a later Ubuntu, or compile from source (hah!). So, what are you doing for Java 7 on Ubuntu 10.04? (Useful discussion on my G+.)
(The small joys of fish as a server name theme: getting to call the new webdev box "mudkip".)
Dear Google+: if I'm one of the few people who actually bothers going to plus.google.com to look at you, please stop with most of the frickin' time putting me into a screen to please please please spam everyone I know, most of whom just created an account for the sake of YouTube. It's annoying and just looks desperate.
This entry was originally posted at DreamWidth and has  comments. You can comment there using your LiveJournal name via OpenID. | | Tuesday, May 22nd, 2012 | | 9:50 pm |
Popcorn.
We survived Freda's fifth birthday party. Three hours of ten five-year-olds, with both teenagers and a few parents on hand. Only a couple of meltdowns, and the terrible mistakes of (a) putting the parting gift goodie bags in plain view (b) including a whistle in each bag. The parent of every child present will hate us forever. The cake was a tyrannosaur, the birthday cards were dinosaurs, Freda got a pile of dinosaur picture books and one present was a tub of a hundred small plastic dinosaurs. Freda has also declared she wants to become a "dinosaur scientist" and we are teaching her to say "palaeontologist." This is entirely Paul's fault.
I have new glasses! I look forty-five going on fifty with them on, as I in fact am. And did before, really. (I'm adopted, and I still turned into my father.) I'm wearing them everywhere and delighting in being able to see stuff. Presbyopia is kicking in and I really should have got bifocals this time — I'm already holding my phone at arm's length. Also, my left knee is playing up. I promise I will be a very cranky old man.
We have yet another dishwasher! Turns out Hotpoint make shit so worthless it failed within the six-month warranty period. (Gosh, etc.) Fortunately, the British Heart Foundation store were not only willing to replace or refund it with no fuss whatsoever, the delivery for the replacement (a Zanussi, so it might last to month seven) was free. I am most impressed and can heartily recommend the BHF electrical stores.
This entry was originally posted at DreamWidth and has  comments. You can comment there using your LiveJournal name via OpenID. | | Monday, May 14th, 2012 | | 8:33 pm |
What do people think about computers?
I was reminded today of a short Perl course I did a few years ago. (And remember nothing of, of course.) It was Perl for web developers, and there was space for a couple of sysadmins.
Web developers work with programming languages. They cut and paste JavaScript and fiddle with it to get stuff working nicely on a screen. And, y'know, JavaScript is a pretty capable language if you care about that sort of thing.
One webdev achieved enlightenment. Her eyes lit up as she grasped the nature of Turing completeness, and the power of just giving a machine a set of precise worked-out instructions. "But you could write a program to do ... anything!" Yes. Yes, you could.
This person had shuffled around JavaScript for a living. She did not understand until that moment that computers would do whatever stuff you told them. That this was what she had been doing all this time.
With computers basically taking over civilisation, this leads me to wonder: what the hell do normal people think computers actually do, and how the hell do they think they do it? Normal people, I want you weighing in on this.
This entry was originally posted at DreamWidth and has  comments. You can comment there using your LiveJournal name via OpenID. | | Tuesday, May 8th, 2012 | | 10:11 pm |
Your hands flash back.
April 28th was our ninth anniversary, so arkady and I went to see The Pirates! In An Adventure With Scientists. It was pretty good, the American money only adding slight suck. We recommend it. Afterwards we went to the Red Lion E11 where I first used an NFC card to actually buy stuff with, and found it most disconcerting to have my money vanish without a PIN.
Freda is five in a couple of weeks. We need to proof the house, and the cats, against an onslaught of five-year-olds.
This entry was originally posted at DreamWidth and has  comments. You can comment there using your LiveJournal name via OpenID. | | Friday, May 4th, 2012 | | 12:56 pm |
Why you should keep your NFC debit card in a tinfoil wrapper.
"GREAT NEWS!" said my bank. "WE'RE SENDING YOU A NEW NFC CASH CARD! BUY STUFF WITH JUST A SWIPE, NO PIN! YOU LUCKY THING!"
As a computer professional, I was not entirely thrilled. Not much can be nicked from an Oyster card (which has long been known skimmable), but a bank card is rather a different matter.
And guess what, it's been done: Channel 4 report, researcher's piece with more details. They can get everything off the card except the three-digit security code on the back, and there's enough online retailers (e.g., Amazon) that don't require that. (And though I've yet to see reports, it strikes me as really obvious to skim a card and get an NFC-enabled phone to pretend to be that card. Ker-ching.) The card owner's name is definitely on Barclaybank cards, others may or may not include it.
You can buy expensive anti-skimming wallets (with a wire mesh that forms a Faraday cage — or you can just give your cash cards a fetching tinfoil hat.
Double layer of tinfoil, folded, about the size of the card. Note wifi symbol on card.
Put your Oyster, which you probably want still skimmable, at the other end of the card wallet from the tinfoil cash card, so that reflections from the tinfoil don't mess up its signal.
The above has worked well for me in practice for the past few weeks — I just keep an eye on which side I swipe on the Oyster reader. The tinfoil absolutely blocks the Oyster, so I'm pretty confident it blocks the cash card.
Edit: American Express Blue cards are also reported to give full customer details, unencrypted. If you have an NFC-capable Android phone, test your card with Electronic Pickpocket. (The crooks already have this app and better ones.) Then call your bank and scream blue murder if usable amounts of personal details are skimmable.
This entry was originally posted at DreamWidth and has  comments. You can comment there using your LiveJournal name via OpenID. | | Tuesday, May 1st, 2012 | | 1:20 pm |
On William S. Burroughs' claim to have caused the Church of Scientology to have moved offices.
(A minor annoyance prompted by reading the otherwise-excellent El Hombre Invisible by Barry Miles.)
William S. Burroughs did not cause the London office of the Church of Scientology to move by using tape recorders outside it.
He made the claim in "Playback from Eden to Watergate":
"I have frequently observed that this simple operation making recordings and taking pictures of some location you wish to discommode or destroy, then playing recordings back and taking more pictures-will result in accidents, fires, removals, especially the last. The target moves. We carried out this operation with the Scientology Centre at 37 Fitzroy Street. Some months later they moved to 68 Tottenham Court Road, where a similar operation was recently carried out."
Using tape recorders to move a Church of Scientology is an obviously ludicrous claim in general, but in particular to anyone who knows anything about how the Church of Scientology operates in practice:
- Scientology offices move for their own reasons (expansion or contraction). The 68 Tottenham Court Road office is still there, forty years later.
- The thing that breaks even suspension of disbelief: If the Scientologists had even noticed Burroughs acting towards them, they'd have attempted to deal with him in the manners prescribed by Church policy (approaching him to question him, very visibly photographing him in turn, etc.), as they do any other demonstrator against them; and this would have become part of the mythology of Burroughs and Scientology. Instead, Scientology appears to have largely ignored Burroughs' criticisms since he left, their only visible response being a reply to one review in Rolling Stone (their letter was reprinted in Burroughs' Naked Scientology). (This lack of reaction is itself unusual, suggesting that Burroughs failed to come to Hubbard's personal attention as the latter was just starting the Sea Org.)
Burroughs appears to have believed he achieved this, and does not appear to have been joking. (Because, frankly, his brain was full of squirrels and confetti.) But his claim is repeated uncritically by fans, biographers and even the Daily Telegraph.
People like literary effect, spurious narratives and the wishful promise of easily-accessible power so much that they are inclined to completely jettison the application of critical thinking to such claims. The tendency to hagiography in the presence of a cool story is unfortunate. In El Hombre Invisible, anything in a cut-ups novel that presages a real-world event is taken as literary prescience: the author goes through actual word salad (though extremely well-tossed word salad that deserves its literary reputation) for any fragment that could retrospectively be considered a prediction. Compare the claimed retrospective predictions of a fortune teller: how vague were the original predictions, what other claimlike statements were made? People who wouldn't be fooled for a moment by a fortune teller saying "of course, I predicted that" seem to lose all judgement.
The biography is thus tainted: I wonder at the source of every other historical assertion. Burroughs claimed a photographic memory, down to remembering emotions, and his biographers (Miles and Morgan both) appear to have therefore taken his interpretations of reality at face value. Morgan's bio is unashamedly a transcription of Burroughs' memories and interpretations of events, so is an autobiography at one remove; but Miles' isn't, and more could have been expected of him.
This entry was originally posted at DreamWidth and has  comments. You can comment there using your LiveJournal name via OpenID. | | Wednesday, April 25th, 2012 | | 10:36 pm |
Hymn from a village.
We have a new stray cat! The younger teen adopted an elderly stray, couldn't look after her and has dumped blessed us with her. Her name is Frances, she has cataracts and she's a mean little thing who's thorougly intimidated the idiot youngster that's twice her size. The vet bills have already been horrifying.
arkady has decided to use the hell out of the Wacom tablet and paint thirty pictures in thirty days. See the Tumblr. All are available as prints from the DeviantArt page. BUY A SODDIN' PICTURE. COMMISSIONS ACCEPTED!
Arkady's homebrewed mead is also coming along very nicely. The agave nectar mead in particular is a remarkable success. Cheap and effective. You just need patience.
Listening to too much indushtral. The main difference between Hazell Dean and Front 242 is how much shouting the singer does. The trouble with Absurd Minds is that their entire ambition is to be early '90s Front 242, and they're not that good at it.
This entry was originally posted at DreamWidth and has  comments. You can comment there using your LiveJournal name via OpenID. | | Tuesday, April 10th, 2012 | | 10:31 pm |
Giving the muse an office job.
Finally got it rendered and zipped. This (zip, 37MB) is the result of an experiment, based on "I write only when inspiration strikes. Fortunately it strikes every morning at nine o'clock sharp" (W. Somerset Maugham).
The aim: write a song on each of thirty days in a row. Doesn't have to be good, can be any old crap. You just have to do something that constitutes a finished piece. If you do two in a day, that's great! You still need to do one the next day.
Failures: I didn't manage one a day for thirty days, but twenty-two over thirty-five days. Many are nothing like a finished piece, just the barest sketch. Reasons include being too busy to reliably clear an uninterrupted hour each day on headphones to work on stuff, a bout of illness and just saying "fuck it" a bit often.
Successes: this "do something every day" method seems to get my brain pointed in the right direction, and when I said "OK, need today's tune" something would bubble up out of my brain. Frequently something awful, but that's not a criterion, and some of it is not a bad starting point at all. I also have a map of my personal clichés to work on.
I'd say it demonstrated the value of the method. It seems the sort of thing I'd do again, but if I think "would I actually do it this year, for instance?" I'm not so sure. Even though I'm basically not doing anything else in particular. You should try it too, and report back.
Bits you can help with: some of these I think I nicked. In particular the last one, "Please Don't Make Me Wait" (n.b.: working titles were made up on the spot) — I've listened to ten or so songs of that title, but I still strongly suspect it's ripped off. Edit: It's "Don't Get In My Way" by Linx from C81. Bah!
This entry was originally posted at DreamWidth and has  comments. You can comment there using your LiveJournal name via OpenID. | | Sunday, April 1st, 2012 | | 1:25 pm |
The waters above.
Just finishing two weeks' holiday. I had a to-do list this long, so of course I spent the first week sick in bed and the second cleaning for a house inspection.
The thing I actually got done was polishing up two RationalWiki articles for cover status: Freeman on the land and 101 evidences for a young age of the Earth and the universe. The latter is a point-by-point refutation of a comprehensively stupid creationist advocacy piece. I am told by recovered ex-creationists that it would in fact have helped them understand why creationism doesn't work, so we could actually make the world a better place with that second one.
(Wackiest creation science theory of the week: that the Kuiper belt is "the waters above" of Genesis 1:6-8.)
Freda has discovered Tom & Jerry cartoons and thinks they're hilarious. Now to find ones that aren't jawdroppingly racist ...
A Brief History Of Time is immeasurably enhanced by reading it while listening to MC Hawking.
This entry was originally posted at DreamWidth and has  comments. You can comment there using your LiveJournal name via OpenID. | | Thursday, March 15th, 2012 | | 10:13 pm |
It's the little things.
Things you don't want to discover on migration day: that a pile of particularly important DNS entries have somehow acquired a TTL of 509171 seconds. What the arsing fuck.
If you're running WordPress with a cache in front (we use Varnish), put your site's name in the actual server's hosts file pointing to itself. Else idiot extensions talking to themselves will send requests out to the cache and back again. Our new network setup led to this not working, meaning /wp-admin timed out.
(Mystery meat networking. Rule 1 is "there's always another cache", so rule 2 is "there's always another firewall.")
If your site serves a ton of JavaScript, serve it via a cache. Else clients hold onto the connection while they're digesting the JavaScript and hammer the shit out of Apache. We took our load from 750 connections to 20.
If you're using /etc/cron.d, the name of a crontab file can't have a dot in it. WHY?
(I don't mean the technical reasons. I mean how the hell that can be justified.)
Linux does threading differently to Solaris, every socket uses a file handle and Java uses lots of sockets internally. This means a ulimit -n of 256 on Solaris becomes 8192 on Linux.
Tomorrow is my last day at work for two weeks. My goodness I need a rest. My boss needs one more — I have strongly suggested he takes a break in April before he explodes.
This entry was originally posted at DreamWidth and has  comments. You can comment there using your LiveJournal name via OpenID. | | Tuesday, March 6th, 2012 | | 10:44 pm |
Eusa kills.
The big server migration is Saturday. Today I am reminding myself that the BOFH stories are just stories and certainly not role models. Ha! Ha! Baseball bat, please.
(Boss: "The DNS stuff is driving me batty, but I'm not sure who needs taking into a small room and battering." Me: "Your past self." Boss: "Yeah, he was a right twat.")
Freda has been getting her idiot cat to jump through a hula hoop. You can tell it's an idiot because it actually did.
This entry was originally posted at DreamWidth and has  comments. You can comment there using your LiveJournal name via OpenID. | | Monday, February 27th, 2012 | | 10:42 pm |
This toing and froing like a confused moth.
The older teen moved out with her boyfriend on Friday. Another one successfully raised and cast to the four winds. We have cutlery again! Bowls! Plates!
My birthday cake, with 45 candles. The candles and chocolate were melting under the heat. Birthday drinks were lovely, thank you, even if I had a throat infection and found a pint and a half to be too much. Red Lion E11 doesn't do food on Mondays. I was so looking forward to that steak! Next time.
arkady has started homebrewing mead. And writing a blog about it. Our kitchen is an alchemist's lab. Bloop. Bloop. Bloop.
I have discovered the best Icehouse album ever recorded: The Berlin Tapes. I most strongly commend to you "Disappointed?" His "Love Like Blood" wins as well. How the hell did I not hear of this when it came out?
Two, approaching three, months' deep communion with ant's stunted, twisted little soul has been paying off spectacularly. I can do a fresh application setup in thirty seconds. The bit that manages crontabs caught my boss's eye, to the point of him suggesting we manage all our crontabs with something along these lines (we haven't been consistently keeping them in source control). There's got to be a deepity along the lines of "an ad hoc, informally-specified, bug-ridden, slow implementation of half of Puppet" in there.
Seeking lyrics for "Knife Slits Water" by A Certain Ratio. The obvious search only turns up two things that are not that. Any ideas on leads?
This entry was originally posted at DreamWidth and has  comments. You can comment there using your LiveJournal name via OpenID. | | Sunday, February 26th, 2012 | | 4:11 pm |
You can't prove it's impossible!
A common sophistry which really annoys me is the one that conflates an utterly negligible probability with a non-negligible one. The argument goes:
- There is technically no such thing as certainty.
- Therefore, [argument I don't like] is not absolutely certain.
- Therefore, the uncertainty in [argument I don't like] is non-negligible.
Step 3 is the tricky one. Humans are, in general, really bad at feeling the difference between epsilon uncertainty and sufficient uncertainty to be worth taking notice of — they can't tell a nonzero chance from one that's worth paying attention to ever. (This is why people buy lottery tickets.)
It’s a terrible, terrible argument, and an unfortunately common one. It needs to be bludgeoned to death every time it’s brought up.
This entry was originally posted at DreamWidth and has  comments. You can comment there using your LiveJournal name via OpenID. | | Sunday, February 19th, 2012 | | 2:33 pm |
Never give up. Party, party.
Birthday drinks tomorrow (Red Lion E11, 6pm on), though I could have done without a throat infection for my birthday. I plan to show nevertheless if physically able to.
I'll be getting as much rest as I can tomorrow, when Freda is back at school. I am considering campaigning for the abolition of half-term and am looking into boarding schools on Mars. Wednesday's dad job: extracting a small plastic seahorse the 4yo posted in the zip drive of an ancient Pentium 4.
This entry was originally posted at DreamWidth and has  comments. You can comment there using your LiveJournal name via OpenID. | | Wednesday, February 15th, 2012 | | 1:56 pm |
| | Tuesday, February 14th, 2012 | | 5:05 pm |
Zombies! Zombies!
The p-zombie theory holds that being able to conceive of something makes it possible; and because p-zombies are possible, therefore dualism or something very like it. That is: proponents hold that because they can imagine p-zombies, therefore such a thing is possible.
(I'm not going to explain it further than linking to Wikipedia. But trust me when I say there are people who actually take the idea seriously.)
The tricky bit appears to be "conceive of" in a sense that implies possibility. Consider these statements:
- I can conceive of 2+2=4 being true (in conventional everyday Peano arithmetic as we commonly know it).
- I can conceive of 2+2=5 being true (in conventional Peano arithmetic).
- I can conceive of P being equal to NP.
- I can conceive of P not being equal to NP.
- I can conceive of p-zombies, therefore dualism.
- If I can conceive of p-zombies then dualism, which is a confused idea, therefore p-zombies is a confused idea by reductio ad absurdum.
With the second, I am claiming to "conceive of" something trivially false. I arguably haven't conceived of anything actually possible; I've just shuffled some words together.
With the third and fourth, I'm claiming to have conceived of something no-one knows (though many suspect 3 is false and 4 is true). To what extent have I actually thought it through? At some point I will hit a contradiction with one of them, though no-one has yet. Both are "conceivable" in some sense; certainly that the speaker has formed a sentence in their head that they can try out for its logical implications. But one of those statements is as wrong as 2+2=5 nevertheless. Thus, conceiving of something in this sense does not imply it can possibly be true.
When someone claims that p-zombies are a conceivable thing at all, and that they have conceived of them (first part of statement five), this doesn't actually say anything about the world or what is even possible; it just says they've formed a sentence in their head they think they can try out for its logical implications. Which is fine, but the world doesn't care what philosophers think they think.
Statement six is my own view. P-zombies is like creationism for smart people. The main argument for dualism remains its advocates really really wanting it to be true.
And now, a movie.
This entry was originally posted at DreamWidth and has  comments. You can comment there using your LiveJournal name via OpenID. | | Saturday, February 11th, 2012 | | 10:54 pm |
King of Kalifornia.
Last Saturday afternoon, arkady and I went down the pub together without a small child in tow to drink copiously with eithin and kindjourneys. (The steak at the Red Lion is bloody brilliant. Recommended.) It snowed. I mean, SNOW!!!ed. Sunday morning Freda and I went into the back yard to play with snow properly. The very first thing she did was throw a snowball at me. At the age of 45, I made my first snowman! Or snow cat, anyway. Freda admired it, then squashed it. Of course.
Freda's grandparents are visiting in June and we want her to be at least safe in water, so she's going for swimming lessons every Friday evening (the only slot we could get) ... after PE at school in the afternoon. The lessons are going great, and it appears also to be a fabulously effective method of actually wearing her out to sleep.
Chalga is possibly the worst pop genre ever, and that's a subject I have considerable expertise in. "What's the difference between chalga videos and porn? Porn has better music."
Attempting to do useful things at work with Ant continues. (Every domain-specific language that the fool designer lets become Turing-complete eventually evolves into brainfuck.) We have until the end of this month for everything to be not merely done, but tested and reliable. In a related incident, I learned that having two completely different files called test.config.properties and test-config.properties (per different unrelated naming standards) is a bad idea.
I have taught Freda how to play Bejeweled. I will never see my phone again.
This entry was originally posted at DreamWidth and has  comments. You can comment there using your LiveJournal name via OpenID. | | Friday, February 10th, 2012 | | 11:53 pm |
Dancing makes me seasick.
arkady's novel is progressing nicely. It turns out that "I write only when inspiration strikes. Fortunately it strikes every morning at nine o'clock sharp" (W. Somerset Maugham) is a good way to get a lot of first draft turned out.
Inspired by this, I've been attempting to write something vaguely song-shaped every day for a month. Doesn't have to even be any good at all, it just has to be an actual thing. I've missed a few days, but am attempting to keep at it. When I have thirty days down I'll probably put all thirty days up as an mp3. It'll be awful and pointless with a few good bits.
I've also submitted two pieces for the Homestuck album competition: "Salmon" and "Kingdom." I doubt they'll get anywhere, but it provoked me to get them into some sort of finished form. Both remain quite imperfect, but I'm quite pleased with them.
This entry was originally posted at DreamWidth and has  comments. You can comment there using your LiveJournal name via OpenID. | | Monday, February 6th, 2012 | | 8:37 pm |
Current reading.
I've just finished Actually (the last collection of essays and reviews) by Christopher Hitchens. A doorstop, a lot of which is still available on the original magazines' sites. Patchy — quite a lot was clearly dashed off in half an hour after a boozy night out, and he was brilliant but skated by on brilliance rather too often — but ultimately worth ploughing through. I would recommend the curious start on better Hitchens (god is not Great, Hitch-22, Letters To A Young Contrarian in that order) where he wasn't phoning it in.
The nice thing about books of reviews is pointers. So right now I'm on Black Lamb and Grey Falcon by Rebecca West, the 2007 Penguin edition with a lengthy intro by Hitchens. The book is a doorstop-sized travelogue of Yugoslavia in the 1930s, a subject I have little interest in; I'm bothering only because a literature fan like Hitchens raved about it. And so far it's page-turningly good.
I've also just finished the audiobook version of god is not Great, read by the author. A book so clearly written to be read out loud. If you liked the book, I most strongly recommend the audiobook.
I've been wondering about the value of fictional evidence. Particularly reading a pile of Hitchens book reviews, wherein he strongly advocates good fiction for its power to explore and teach you how humans work. Off the top of my head I can think of more accurate commmunication media, but stories are natural to humans so I would be unsurprised to find them testing out as a much more powerful vector than, e.g., popularisations of psychological research. I'm not entirely convinced by the Hitchens line but was surprised to see him pushing it so vehemently.
This entry was originally posted at DreamWidth and has  comments. You can comment there using your LiveJournal name via OpenID. | | Saturday, January 28th, 2012 | | 11:48 am |
Astral projectionist threat.
"If you delete the web-pages we asked, it's gonna be fine or else my friend, an astral projectionist is going to bring you to justice" — actual threat received by RationalWiki.
Huge success at work automating every aspect of deployment with mod_brainfuck Ant (with ant-contrib). Building a full-sized working replica Titanic from toothpicks, complete with iceberg. Bletcherous spaghetti hidden behind innocuous-looking macrodef or target calls. Lots to go, but we might even get all our stuff shifted to the new hosting in time. If your hammer is Turing-complete, one day you will have to use it as a screwdriver, spanner, soda siphon and nail.
(This is the largest substantial piece of actually useful coding I've ever done. I'm getting the thing where you wake up with the solution to yesterday's problem and have to LOG IN RIGHT NOW to get it down.)
Yesterday's problem is generating an arbitrary number of htusers files. With one, it's easy, the data goes like this and the code will follow obviously:
apache.htusers.file = appname-htusers
apache.htusers.list = user:letmein,admin:irl33t,bob@example.com:keepmeout
However, one app just has to have two htusers files. And if two, then later three or four. So my question is: how to human-obviously represent the data for an arbitrary number of htusers files as name-value pairs in a .properties file? For now I've special-cased that app, but I'll need something better later.
![[personal profile]](http://s.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png) arkady is writing a novel (with ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif?v=92.2) cavalorn, eithin and me sniping from the sides), so is using the "inspiration shall strike every morning at 9:30am" method, and cranking through it nicely. And is successfully writing on an Android phone in a Google Doc when out and about. I've decided if I want to make music then I need to make music, and have determined that I shall write a complete something every day for a month. Even if it's entirely terrible, it just has to be a done and completed thing. This is in fact causing new stuff to pop into my head. I recommend the method. (I'm not linking any of it sans polish, because it's literally just sketches in LMMS. I might later.) If you can actually play, just get a guitar, a microphone and a copy of Audacity to record into, and PRODUCE.
Does anyone just happen to have the rule sheet for the In The Night Garden Rainbow Adventure Game? We just got it for 50p complete except the rules ... boardgamegeek doesn't seem to have heard of it.
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