Well. Here it is. After a lot of hard work, this is the new home to my blog. This is a bit of an experiment in that I've separated things out into separate sites now. The idea behind this is that I wanted to be able to specialize in a few things. Before, all my photos and all my writings were a part of the blog. And, while that was nice, I wanted to make web sites that were better suited to those media.

So, that's why we now have two extra sites in addition to the blog: Felix.Fotos and {art of language}.

Now, I had thought about keeping the blog strictly a blog, but the simple fact is that I need a place to keep all my randomness as well. So, there are many things here on the blog that simply did not merit their own websites. For example, the 'code' link. So, while things are pretty specialized on the other sites, the blog will continue to be a bit eclectic...just like my interests.

However, I've come up with a better organizing method for my blog entries which will make it a bit easier to read the types of things you want to read. Each blog entry will have categories and tags associated with it. There is the potential of many, many tags, but the categories are more generalized, and so there are fewer of them. I'm organizing things into the general categories of "Journal", "Theology", "Open Source", "Photography", "Gaming", "Webmaster", and "Misc". After looking through all my old posts, most of what I write fits into one of these categories one way or another, and "Misc" is a catch-all category. The tags then will serve as more specific descriptions of the posts content. We'll see how it works. The fun thing about this is that you can now click on the categories and tags at the bottom of the post, and you will get a list of all the other blog entries that fall under that category or tag. So, if you really like reading about my friend Ed, you can click on the "Ed" tag, and find all the posts about him.

Finally, I wanted my standard photo gallery to stick around in addition to the new photoblog at Felix.Fotos. So, you can check out all the old pictures (and potential new ones) in the Photo Gallery (linked to in the main menu, above), just as before. But if you enjoy those pictures, be sure and check out the new photoblog as well. (* I should also note that I did a revamp of the photo gallery, which meant I had to start over in uploading the pictures. I'm working through them chronologically this time, so the Japan pictures aren't up yet...but I'll have everything up in a couple of weeks. There are some new albums up now, though, so check them out!)

Well, I guess that's it. Let me know in these first few weeks if you have any difficulties with the new sites so that I can get all the kinks out. One thing I'm aware of is that the new theme for the blog takes up quite a bit more space. From my records, most people are viewing the site on larger monitors, so this shouldn't be a problem, but let me know if it is!

Thanks! Read more »

Thank goodness, Ed has posted again on his blog. I was starting to get worried. Go check out his new post, leave a comment of support, and breathe a sigh of relief!

Yesterday Nat Friedman (really famous in the Open Source world) posted a friendly challenge on his blog to fellow programmers.

The challenge was this: Twitter limits it's posts ("tweets") to 140 characters. So, the challenge is to come up with the best one-line program (or shell script) that falls under twitter's 140 character limit.

Here is Nat's first-try example script:

s="-<";while true;do echo -ne "$s\r";s=`sed 's/->$/-<-/;s/^/;s/--/->/;'<<<$s`;sleep 0.1;done

I've done a little shell scripting here and there, but this just looks like jibberish to me. Yet, if I paste it into my Linux terminal, it's a nifty little program that creates a fun little animation.

And that's pretty good. But you would be amazed at what some of the programmers who stepped up to Nat's challenge were able to come up with!

You can read the contest results here, on Nat's blog. Read more »

Here's another great Improv Everywhere mission. This one is just really fun. They decided to give some little-league baseball players the game of their lives:

I finished Zelda: Twilight Princess today. It was a good cathartic release. The ending boss battle with Gannon is phenomenal. Altogether, though, I have to say that I preferred Wind Waker. It had a bit more fun and joy. But I wouldn't want to take anything away from Twilight Princess. The graphics were stunning, especially for the Gamecube. There were moments when I just wanted to look around the world for the perfect place to watch the sunrise. It's the most "world-like" Zelda yet.

I think part of the reason I preferred Wind Waker in the end is because my start with Zelda did not begin in the normal progression (Zelda-Zelda II: Adventure of Link-Legend of Zelda: Link to the Past). I feel that Twilight Princess sits in this progression very well. If you put LOT: Ocarina of Time after Link to the Past, you have an almost perfect series in which the art all seems to draw from each other, but systematically improve as the game system improves.

But I did not begin playing Zelda in this progression. Read more »