We got hit with a blizzard warning for the weekend and last night things were not looking pretty out the windows. Then about 6:30 PM, the power went out. Fortunately, our house has a fireplace so we were able to stay warm until the power came back on around 1:00 AM this morning. We trooped up to bed, got a few hours rest and then went outside to shovel the sidewalks. *blech* Days like today make me hate having a corner lot (twice the sidewalks to shovel). The sidewalks had 4 layers on them: snow, slush, ice and water. It made shovelling the walk even more hellish than usual. Fortunately we have kind neighbors who lent us their snowblower which got rid of the snow and some of the slush. But that left us with plenty of ice and water. A few hours of backbreaking labor later, we had the sidewalks as clean we were going to get them and came back inside. Gack. You have to love living here; otherwise you go insane. I have the pleasant advantage of not loving it, but keeping my sanity locked in a box so I never lose it. :p
Category: Life
Sometimes, I feel the need to talk about me (imagine that).
Sunday night both Ariesna and I were feeling a little run down. Monday we both woke up sick. Not sure what her symptoms were, but I had a sinus pressure so bad I was dizzy. I slept through almost all of Monday, but around dinner time got up enough energy to head downstairs. And that night we had an unexpected visitor.
I was watching some videos on my computer when all of a sudden Ariesna was shouting. I looked over and saw something flying around. Turned out a bat had somehow worked it’s way into the house but then was scared and flying around freaking out Ariesna. We locked our cat in the bathroom. Closed as many interior doors as we could and opened the door to our porch. Then after much cursing and effort we were able to drive the bat out onto the porch. All the time we’re doing this, our cat is wailing and crying most pitifully from the bathroom. Though as soon as we let him out, all was well. *shrug* Go figure.
Then Tuesday we’re both still feeling under the weather. I work from home liberally dosed with cold & sinus meds and feeling a bit tired, but closer to being back in the land of the living. Later that night, I mute the TV during some commercials to talk to Ariesna and we hear some rather pitiful wailing from our porch. I look out through the windows to investigate and find one of our neighbors’ cat (was wearing a collar) is sitting out there. Since it was a warm night, I just left him alone but I felt kind of bad about it. I did check the neighborhood email list but there wasn’t any reports of a missing cat. Plus several of the people in the area feel it’s ok to let their pets run free1 so I figured it would just go home soon afterwords. I did keep looking out and after a couple of hours it eventually left but I still feel kind of bad about leaving it out in the cold2. Mind you, I’m not going to let a strange cat into my house with our current cat. But I suppose I could have let it into the screened portion of our porch.
Today I made it into the office, still slightly down but significantly improved. Ariesna stayed home sick again. Then she went to the doctor and found out she’s got pneumonia. *wheee* She gets to stay home the rest of the week as she can’t risk transmitting that bit of plague to the kids at her preschool. It also blows our plans for Friday and the weekend. Ain’t life grand? *sigh*3
1 No, I do not share that opinion. It’s dangerous for the pet (could be katnapped, run over, hurt, lost, etc..).
2 The weather recently warmed up, so it wasn’t all that cold but still…
3 Yes, this post is mostly a pity party for us. :p
In my gaming group1, we finished up the current storyline in a previous session. This week we were discussing what we might want to do next as our current GM needs a break. One thing that always comes up during this sort of discussion is a game run back in everybody else’s college days based on GURPS Castle Falkenstein. As usual when this was mentioned, the GM who ran this (and still a player in our group) begged off as being too busy2. However this time the discussion refreshed a vague memory of a gaming system/supplement that I’d bought once upon a time.
Given that I tend to horde collect books, I went searching through my gaming library trying to find that old system/supplement. I had one major problem with my search… I could not recall what the game was called. So I just searched through all the gaming materials I had (and knew where they were). Unfortunately, my search was unsuccessful. Once I gave up the initial search, I decided to go online and see if I could figure out any more information on it.
Again I ran into difficulty in searching as I only vaguely recalled when I bought it (the 90’s), what it was about (faeries in England when gaslight was common, say Victorian England) and that I was pretty sure it was published by TSR. I was thinking the title was something like Faerie by Gaslight (or maybe by Foglight) but I couldn’t be sure. Lastly, I recalled that it wasn’t a D&D setting but based on another system TSR put out.
After about half an hour of searching I uncovered the name of that other system, Amazing Engine. A few seconds later and I knew the game setting was called For Faerie, Queen and Country. The worst part of revisiting these old memories? As soon as I found a picture of the book for the game setting I realized I’d bought it, read it (cover to cover more than once) and never, ever once played the damn thing. And now I cannot even find my old copy, even though it’s highly likely in the house somewhere. *sigh* So faithful reader, are there any old RPGs that once captured your imagination but which you never got a chance to play?
1 Yes, I am geek. If you’re only just now realizing this; then this is either the first time you’ve read my blog or you’re seriously delusional.
2 This is not a complaint. You are too busy.
It’s certainly been a couple of bad days for Flickr and Yahoo!. First on 30 January 2007, Flickr made a couple of very unpopular announcements. Here’s the full-text of those announcements.
30th January, 2007
A pair of items for your attention:
1. In our ongoing efforts to Make Flickr Better®, we’re introducing two additional limits: the new maximum number of contacts is 3,000 contacts (good luck with that), and each photo on Flickr can have a maximum of 75 tags.
We love your freedom, but, in this particular case, limiting these things will actually improve the system performance, making pages load faster across the site for everyone and cut out some unwelcome spammy behaviors. Both of these new limits apply equally to free and pro account members.
If you have questions or comments about these changes, we’ve opened a topic in Flickr Help.
2. On March 15th, 2007 we’ll be discontinuing the old email-based Flickr sign in system. From that point on, everyone will have to use a Yahoo! ID to sign in to Flickr.
We’re making this change now to simplify the sign in process in advance of several large projects launching this year, but some Flickr features and tools already require Yahoo! IDs for sign in — like the mobile site at m.flickr.com or the new Yahoo! Go program for mobiles, available at http://go.yahoo.com.
If you still sign in using the email-based Flickr system (here), you can make the switch at any time in the next few months, from today till the 15th. (After that day, you’ll be required to merge before you continue using your account.) To switch, start at this page: http://flickr.com/account/associate/
Complete details and answers to most common questions are available here: http://flickr.com/help/signin/
If you have questions or comments about signing in with a Yahoo! ID, speak up!
Then Yahoo! decided to start using pictures posted to Flickr for their new Wii portal. As near as I can tell no announcement was made about this; they just started doing it.
To many these things seem petty an unimportant but it’s caused quite the uproar in the Flickr community and said uproar is bleeding over onto other sites (e.g. Digg). Are these things really worth all the anger spilling out? It’s all a matter of perspective. The new limitations on contacts and tags aren’t anything I forsee as causing me problems. I don’t have anywhere near that many contacts and cannot imagine having them. As for 75 tags, that seems like it would take an obsessive amount of work to get that many tags on a photo.
Since that’s more of a none issue let’s move on to one causing a much bigger stink, the forced merger of people’s Flickr & Yahoo accounts. For those unfamiliar, Flickr used to be a separate company. Back in those days one could sign up with Flickr using nothing more than an email address1. Signing up with Yahoo! requires considerably more detailed personal information. This by itself is enough to cause some people to be very nervous about merging their accounts. There have also been reports about people having problems merging their accounts and concerns about how Flickr/Yahoo! will handle some people having multiple Flickr accounts. Especially since Yahoo! has a habit of deleting accounts they think are inactive if you don’t log in frequentally enough. It’s a lot to take in and many of the “Old Skool”2 Flickr users aren’t happy about it. While I do have a Yahoo! account, I’ve yet to merge my Flickr account with it. I liked having them separate, but very soon I won’t have any choice. While I sympathize with the Old Skoolers, I’ll be combing my accounts before the deadline and find the excitement over this issue to be more than a bit overblown.
The last issue is probably the most interesting as from a quick reading of Flickr’s TOS and an immediately small knowledge of copyright law; this seems like a sticky widget of a situation. According to Flickr’s TOS, any images pulled from Flickr must link directly back to that photo on Flickr. What Yahoo! did with their Wii Portal is to take thumbnails and initially link to a secondary page before linking back to the original photo on Flickr. Plus, Yahoo! was originally just grabbing any photo on Flickr tagged with Wii. This included photos marked as © All Rights Reversed and photos marked with Creative Commons licenses forbidding commercial use. This angered even more of the Flickr community and Yahoo! did eventually change their Wii portal to only grab photos with appropriate licenses.
Personally, I any one of these issues would be enough to stir up a hornet’s nest of trouble within the Flickr community. But having all of them happen so close on top of one another was enough to really get some people’s blood boiling. Will I be abandoning Flickr over all this? No, I like the community too much and I still plan on integrating this gallery on this site more into Flickr. However I will be keeping a much closer eye on where Yahoo! takes Flickr as we move on into the new year.
1 For the free accounts anyway.
2 This is what some of the Flickr users who signed up in the pre-Yahoo! days call themselves. For the record, I also signed up (for a free account) in those days and I don’t consider myself an Old Skool user.