I've been, over the years, a very sporadic blogger. I remember that the original reason I started the blog was to have a less intrusive way of sharing cool links and thoughts with my friends, potential friends, deadly, comic book enemies and passersby. I wrote my first blog scripts, used a simple script I came across for an improved version later and finally moved to MovableType and stayed here awhile. The act of blogging though doesn't seem nearly streamlined enough for me yet. I'd like for it to be more like making notes in the margins of my life. Something unobtrusive and reflexive that doesn't take time out from my day. I've looked at some of the Firefox plugins and such, but with more and more of my life happening away from the web I'm finding Twitter much more appropriate for quick announcements and notes. I've added my Twitter feed to the left, and may make some more changes here to make this into more of an automatically updated composite view of what I'm doing in SecondLife, around the web and in the world, using Twitter, some SL widgets and something like Doppler/FireEagle. Stay tuned for Web 2.0 mashup monstrosities.
I apologize if you've posted a comment and it's taken awhile to show up. I have to wade through mounds of comment spam to get to the few actual comments. Recently, some of the spam is slipping through and approving itself somehow as well, so I'm going to have to change the site around a bit to counter.
With that said, I had great response both here and in email for the Necrotic Tissue story. I appeciate hearing from the folks who enjoyed it. I'm thinking of trying my hand at a horror novel after Morning Star is out the door. I'll definitely be doing more short shorts and flash fiction.
I get so many people coming to this blog from search queries like "How to Read Minds" or "Scary Mind Reading" that I decided to help you folks out by putting the new link you see at the top of the page. It's an ebook on stage magic and mental magic (mentalism) that should answer any questions you have. I certainly hope you were looking for a way to honestly entertain people, right? You do realize it's a trick? Well, it's a trick unless you're talking about new advances in brain imaging. As always, magic is just a way of predicting next week's tech news.
If it seems like I've been ignoring comments, I apologize. I just noticed this evening that I've been missing comments. For some reason, I'm not getting the notification emails to tell me when someone posts a comment. I'll look into that, but in the meantime I've gone in and approved all of the comments that had stacked up. Tomorrow sometime I'll try to go in and respond.
Eric James Stone's Blog
I just want to point out that I have shamelessly imitated the blockquote stye from Eric's blog.
So now my blockquotes look like this.
It think it's much more readable than just indenting the block. Thanks Eric, hope you don't mind.
I've disabled trackbacks, finally, after holding out as long as I could. It's a shame really, I think they would still be workable if MT they had the same sort of approval for them that we have for comments. I tried MT_Moderate, but while it did mark new trackbacks as pending, it still displayed them from in the blog, which didn't do me much good. Until I have time to troubleshoot the plugin, I've just turned trackbacks off completely.
I just picked up a new treo 650 (my second attempt at a palm phone). I also grabbed a Motorola bluetooth headset which seems to work most of the time. So far things seem to work with the exception of custom ringtones for incoming calls. It's frustrating but trivial. Be warned, I had a terrible time getting it setup with Sprint spending two days on hold with tech support. I should be able to post a bit more often now though. Now if I could just plug a chording keyboard into this puppy.
As you may have noticed, I haven't been blogging very much lately. I'm working on a book deadline (non-fiction) and have been pretty much head-down for the last few days.
More when I come up for air.
As you can probably tell I've been messing around with parts of the site. I've been removing the remaining tables (except for those in Moveable Type) and switching everything over to style sheets. I'm not doing it for any particular reason except that I can't stand duplication. I may add some "skins" to the whole site later, just to see if I can resolve some of the oddities that will cause. I also want to add a better book list, but I'll need to write my own MT plugin to do it since I can't use the MTAmazon plugin on a HE.net box. (missing XML::Parser and I don't have permisions to install it). If any of you MT types have a work around, let me know.