Blogs
Two big things happened today.
The first, is that my wife Tammy flew off with little Rose to visit her family in North Carolina. She's got a lot of family members down there, and they're all going to spoil that kid good and rotten. On the other hand, I get to go bachelor for a bit. My two big plans are to see 'The Dark Knight Returns' and attend BrethrenCon.
The second is that I turned in notice at Examiner.com, and I've accepted a new position at SpireMedia. I'm looking forward to the new job - I once consulted at Spire, and we liked each other so much that we've been trying to get together for another job since then. This is going to be a lot of fun.
Oh, and my D&D game got cancelled due to a few people not showing up, which sucks a little, but I think I'll live.
Rock a Bye Baby, Safe in my arms.
Shut your wee eyes, and trust in sleep's charms.
When you awake, then Mommy will see,
just what a good baby, Rosie can be!
A different set of words that are a bit less creepy to sing to your child. Naturally, you'll want to change the name in the last line.
Here's a useful module that I keep forgetting the name of, so I wanted to note it down: Stage File Proxy. It's not something you use for a live site, it's something you use while developing.
The basic idea is this: you're working on a site that's since gone live, making changes for the client. It's easy enough to get a copy of the database, but the files can be a pain to keep replacing, interlacing test files with live images. Stage File Proxy fixes this by snooping in on imagecache and, when a file is missing, then it grabs it off of the live site, copies it to the local directory, and then you've got the file locally and all your imagecache files get generated for you!
There's a version for six and for seven, and there's no ui for it yet, although there is a patch for it. Then again, once you've got the simple settings done, you don't need to worry about them again!
Although I don't play them as often as I might, I'm still deeply interested in boardgames. The surprising announcement that Fantasy Flight Games was releasing a new edition of the Netrunner collectable card game as one of their limited card games, where each package of cards has exactly the same contents was just the beginning. They're re-theming the game to their Android world, and titling it as , and dribbled information out to old and new fans of the game slowly in a lead-up to GenCon, where they were astounded to sell out of the game within ten minutes of the exhibitor hall opening. Things got rather heated on the boardgamegeek forums about that situation, but honestly, if you'ld offered me 2:1 odds on betting if Netrunner would sell out a decade after it had originally appeared, I'd have taken the 'no' bet and considered it certain money.
Get Real by Donald E. Westlake
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
Boy, having a kid changes how you do stuff.
Way back a year ago, before I had had to stop freelancing to get insurance, I was a fairly early user of http://www.kickstarter.com/, enjoying searching the site and finding things to put money down on. This was way before the explosion of board game kickstarters, and so when the kickstarter for Rolling Freight showed up I was all in on a copy. For one, my wife runs the train gaming at GenghisCon and is a major train gamer, and I thought she'd probably find having a copy of this useful. For another, I had a lot of disposable income when I was freelancing. I figured it would have been a great Christmas present for Tammy last year, but production of the game dragged on, and amusingly enough I got the package only a few days shy of the first anniversary of when the kickstarter finished.
The Empress of Mars by Kage Baker
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
This here is a great book. I'd picked it up on a whim, used, without knowing much about it other than it says it's one of Kage Baker's "The Company" series.
Amusingly, it's not obviously part of that series, and if you're worried about picking this book up and not knowing what's going on, don't worry - there's no obvious metaplot here, and although it's apparently part of the future history of her series, there's no reference to any other part of it.
It's not easy to go out with a Baby. This is obvious to the parents out there, who are cheerfully laughing at my naiveté - I can only point out to them that they were in my shoes, once.
But it is hard. For one, there's preparation - you've got to pack the baby into the carseat, make sure you've got enough diapers in the bag and bring that along, and probably a blanket or two, this time of year. You then have to wrestle it all into the car, and take off. Upon arriving at any destination you need to unpack the baby, possibly also the stroller, and set off. Going anywhere costs extra energy just getting in and out of the car, and as you're out and about with the baby she gets tired and cranky. You don't really stop anywhere on a whim, you tend to plan everything you do. I'm sure this will ease up as Rose gets older, but it's hard.
Here's a quick snippet I just found out today: The jquery cookie plugin is presented as part of Drupal 7. This is really cool and useful, but I must note that it's not automatically included on every page load, so you'll want to include it if you want to use it, and as well it doesn't seem to actually be documented anywhere on drupal.org.
Happily, the original documentation for the plugin is at https://github.com/carhartl/jquery-cookie/blob/master/README.rdoc, and is pretty good, although I suggest reading it through at least twice, as at first I missed that you can read, as well as set, cookies with this. Basically the parameters are the cookie name, the cookie value, and then an options object which says the expiration, the path, the domain, and such. Note that the expiration can _either_ be a date, or a number of days.
Hopefully this will help other folks out with using the jquery cookie plugin with Drupal 7.
John Scalzi is doing a bunch of posts this month about things he's thankful for, and I thought I might follow suit.
I'm thankful for - my family.
