Archive for January, 2004
Could It Be True?
Have dabs.com honestly shipped our laptops? Certainly the order seems to finally be completed, although it did require emailing them almost every 20 minutes today.
Still waiting for the confirmation of shipping email, desperate to see whether they were nice enough to upgrade my shipping to Saturday delivery as per my request.
But then, since they’ve been a bunch of useless fuckwits so far, I’m not holding my breath.
UPDATE: Received the shipping notification, finally. Well, it’s on it’s way. Looks like we’re talking Monday rather than tomorrow though. Bah.
High Class or White Trash?
My first proper meal in over 24 hours and it’s lobster and chips at 20 to midnight. Pass the brown sauce.
Weird
I am weird. Apparently. Just because I thought the drinking of blood was questionable as a sexual activity.
Donations
I’m currently on a donation drive to try and get enough to pay the server bill for the next year. Which, thanks to the still tanking value of the US Dollar, is $3300. So far, $520.18 has been raised, so we’re a sixth of the way there. Thanks to all of those that have donated so far. If we reach the target then I’ll not start charging for Chatbear for the next 12 months and you can’t say fairer than that.
If you haven’t already donated, go ahead and visit the donations page and find out how you can. There’s a star waiting for you.
Redesign
With a couple of other people now using Blogbear, I decided I wanted my blog to stand out a bit and no longer use one of the default templates (ok, the only current default template). I’m pretty happy with it, so we’ll see how long it lasts.
I cheated a bit with Blogbear and put the TiVo listing back on the right hand side, I guess that might be something I can let anybody do, add the external URL of their TiVo box so a script can grab it the way it grabs mine. One thing I do plan on letting anyone do is the DVD list on the left, which comes from whatfilm.com. Of course, since I’m the only current What Film user, that’s a bit unfair to everyone else now too.
Domains
Ok, here’s a list of all the domains I have. I think this is complete.
allapple.com, bearkey.com, bearkeyalerts.com, bearkeydollars.com, bearscript.com, blogbear.com, chatbear.com, chatbear.net, chatbear.org, chatbear.co.uk, chatbearextreme.com, chatbearlive.com, chatbearstore.com, diamondleague.com, doomplayer.com, filebear.com, gamecube365.com, gamesplayer.com, imagebear.com, ircbear.com
listbear.com, marketbear.com, planetgroovy.com, quakerally.com, square8.com, squareeight.com, thelinkseffect.com, theonewith.com, todaysmeal.com, webdog.org, whatalbum.com, whatfilm.com, whatfilm.net
Now what?
Sites
Sometime this week I need to go through all the domains I’ve got and try and remember what I was thinking at the time. I’m sure I’ve had plenty of good ideas over the last few years that I’ve forgotten about.
Marketbear was certainly interesting at one point. Gamesplayer still is, but requires a lot of work to clean up the data I have. The One With would be really cool, but requires a lot of time to watch and document all the Friends episodes. So many ideas, so little time, so little enthusiasm for most of them.
Cocoa
It took years of trying, but sometime on Sunday I actually had a moment of clarity and actually understood something about Objective-C/Cocoa programming on Mac OS X. I don’t know what it was, something just clicked. I wouldn’t go so far as to say I understood everything, but certainly I understood enough that I could at least start coding.
And that’s what I did. Not only that, but I’ve written something useful too. Bearkey Alerts.
It’s not released yet of course, nowhere near finished. But it does download the alerts and display them in a nice table, just like the history option of the Windows version.
It’s nice to have a new challenge for a change, especially since Perl is now so damn unexciting. However, I think I’ll put it down for a couple of days and concentrate on doing some Blogbear instead. It would be nice to at least launch something new.
iMac
The screen on my iMac has died. It’s still booting up (I can SSH in), but nothing comes up on the screen (well it lights up slightly, but that’s all).
Damn Damn Damn Damn.
Friends And Foes
For some reason the last few days of 2003 saw more activity on Chatbear since v2 launched six months previous, with the addition of a new Friends and Foes section to the profile pages. Single out your favourite users and humiliate those you hate. And then, best of all, see if you rank among the friendliest Bearkey users by clicking the Relationships link at the top.
I started off well, jumping to #1 within the first few hours, before quickly slipping down to #8, where I have remained. I mean honestly, I give all these people a reason for getting up in the morning, whether it’s to post inane drivel on the boards or idle on the IRC server and this is how they repay me?
Frankly I’ve considered rigging the vote. But I don’t know how I’d also get away with adding 8,000 posts to my Chatbear count to push me to the top of that chart too.
Be Witty At My Expense
I finally got around to creating a comment system for Blogbear to hook into, so if you fancy adding a slice of your own thoughts to my ramblings, be sure to hit the link below.
Extra points for those who manage to point out my mistakes.
2004
So apparently, according to the calendar on my computer, it’s now 2004. I’m a little disappointed. We’re now 4 years into the new millenium (three, depending on whether or not you listen to those people who say 2001 was the real beginning), and we still don’t have flying cars. Or robots doing our housework. Or people living on the moon. Frankly, I feel a little cheated.
