Recently in Blog Category

It's November, which means it is time for National Novel Writing Month. I've not had much success with NaNoWriMo before, but hoping to improve on my one completion out of three attempts record. I also managed to delete my stylesheet (long story) for this blog. Hoping I've restored it to a reasonable approximation at least. And yes, I did have a backup of the stylesheet, the problem was the the underlying style it was based on changed with the minor version upgrade to Movable Type. Thanks for that, Six Apart.

I'm going to upgrade to Movable Type 4 on Saturday. The image galleries should still be available but the blog will be down for a hopefully short time starting around 9 am Eastern.

Born to Be a Dancer from the album "Employment" by Kaiser Chiefs

I’m a long time Sims addict. It started innocently enough with the original Sims and all of its expansions and it has gotten worse with the Sims2. Well at least I can admit my problem, right? Anyway, the Sims2 is very open ended, at least on the PC, and so normally I’ll play a lot for a month or so after a new expansion and then after I’ve played through all the new content put it on the back burner for a while. Over the holidays I discovered two new things that have renewed my addiction to this game:

• Challenges – Basically a set of goals to try and complete. Something along the lines of creating a family that spans ten generations for example.
• Storytelling – This has been a part of the Sims2 from the beginning and I kept meaning to try it and I’ve just now gotten around to it. The game has a built-in screencapping ability and photo organizer so you can create a scrapbook of your Sims2 family.

The players who enjoy the challenges also encourage the writing/sharing of the stories behind them and in keeping with the spirit of posting more to my web site, I’ve created a new area for the Sims2 stuff (this way those that don’t play or don’t care to view it can skip it) and called it  From the Neighborhood (which probably makes more sense to Sims players). The photoalbums are hosted from picasa (at least for now) because it was convenient for adding the captions etc. If you click on the embedded image, it will take you to my album on picasa, where you can view them as a slideshow (the way I’d go) or however you like.

For those that are on livejournal and can set custom mood themes, I’ve created a picard-crusher mood theme. Sample images can be found here. I think only those that have  a paid LJ account can create a custom mood theme. In order to change the mood theme you will need to download (do a save as on the download link) the images and then either upload them to a site that lets you remote load images, like photobucket, or upload them to your LJ scrapbook. Then you will need to create a new theme using the Custom Mood Editor (basically paste the url of the image to the appropriate mood entry).

Now playing: Bonnie Raitt - Back Around

I’ve upgraded the backend software of this site to Movable Type 3.3. Please let me know if you experience any weirdness (hopefully the comments still work!). I’ve also uploaded a few more 100x100 icons. Those that are on livejournal have seen these, but I wanted to gather all my icons in one location. I should be adding wallpapers soon.

I’ve got a few more boring backend/admin details to cross off my To Do List, but then hopefully I will get back on track with more regular updates. I’ve been toying around in my head with an idea for a new Picard/Crusher music vid so stay tuned.

Now playing: Tom Petty - Big Weekend