For a few weeks now, since I went without posing music with every post, I’ve been letting this little idea rattle around in my brain, about changing up the format of the blog. As mentioned previously, I’m trying to adjust the format such that I post more. I like posting, I like the blog!

Once I actually get my but in the chair, and my fingers hammering out the post, I feel pretty good. Not that we’re going to take the blogosphere by storm, as we once did, but I neglect this thing far too much, and I have a fair amount of time for side projects here in REU land, so I’m going to give this a shot.

There are four general areas in which I feel qualified to offer an opinion:

• My Life, School Expereinces

• Nerdy Things (Esp. Firefox, Evangellion, Gundam, LEGO, you know how I roll)
• Music Reviews, Recommendations (Top 10 of the Year, Indv. Album Reviews)
• Political Musings

The plan would be that every week includes two posts, in one of the above categories, using the first as a general catch-all in the event that I just want to share something with you.

I think this could work. Hashing out the best case scenario, the music section keeps the radio show fresh, the political one keeps me reading the news, the ‘personal’ one gives me an out in a busy week, and the nerdy one is my guilty pleasure that nobody will want to read.

Eventually, I’d like to boost it up to three, but I struggle enough with one, and so I feel that two’s a decent place to start. If I can keep it up during the summer, start entrenching the habit, then just maybe it’ll hold once I get back to school. And if not, that’s OK. At least we’d have a good summer.

Speaking of a good summer, I have been reading a ton! I got started on some books that Allison loaned me, and just went crazy. It’s been a long time since I haven’t had regular assigned reading, and get to use all that time to just read whatever I’d like has been fantastic; the list is as follows:

Catch-22 [Heller] (Carryover from Spring Semester)
Mountains Beyond Mountains [Kidder]
Pride and Prejudice [Austen]
The Man Who Invented the Twentieth Century [Lomas]
Slaughterhouse Five [Vonnegut]
Fahrenheit 451 [Bradbury]
Breakfast of Champions [Vonnegut]
Cat’s Cradle [Vonnegut]
The Last Question [Asimov]
The Road [McCarthy]
Neuromancer [Gibson]
Lolita [Nabokov]

I used to think I was a slow reader, and I still do, sortof. Can’t help but feel like I got back in the saddle though. I haven’t read this much this quickly since I was young and had entire summers to blow, and it’s been awesome! I admit, I stole the last 3 from Time’s All Time Best 100 Novels, and I’m a little scared to read Lolita, but it was that or some tragic thing about the Civil War… saddly, the pedophile novel seemed the lesser evil. We’ll see, I’ll keep you posted.

I was proud by how many books on that list I’d read at one point or another, pleased that several of them were not from school, satisfied with my education that many of them were, and surprised by how many I hadn’t heard of at all. Hrrrrm.

Desperately trying to keep the blog alive.
It comes in fits and starts, you know?

Today’s song is a Mountain Goats song that I wish I had found a year ago. The past year has been hell of turbulent, and it’s a pretty solid anthem to getting through a rough spot. Kinda despondent without being mopey, if that makes any sense.

I’ve been doing a lot of pretty serious thinking about the ol’ blog, and I’ve been trying to figure out why I don’t post more often. Bygone are the novel-length entries of days of old. That hurdle is gone. But why now? Honestly, my favorite part is the biggest hangup. Uploading the song is a pain in the ass, and some days I just want to say something that doesn’t have to do with a song.

And you know what, it’s my blog. I’ll do what I want. We try things here, and they work for a while, and then they get dull or boring or whatever. I also honestly think it’s just because I’ve gotten a lot busier in the past couple of years. I used to be a self-prescribed “internet person,” sitting for hours at the computer just digesting Wikipedia, or reading conspiracy theories or watching bootleg anime or whatever.

I basically do that never, anymore. I realized this last semester when I would go entire days without touching the computer, an unspeakable and entirely unlikely occurrence when I was in high school. So that’s something kindof unavoidable. I’m committed to the blog, no question, but it’s just hard to stay current with it when there’s no reason to do it except “because.” It’s pretty easy for it to be the first thing on the chopping block when it’s something you do only for yourself.

As always, every entry promises to be THE ENTRY, the one that gets me back on track. So maybe we’re here? Certainly in the coming weeks, I’ll have plenty to write about. I’m headed off to Boston in just under a week to do physics research at Boston College. You’ll be able to follow that in all its gory detail at the Truman State REU Blog, under the category “Boston College” or just look for my name.

That’s where all the sciency stuff will be for sure; I haven’t decided whether to simulcast the social entries, or just have that be entirely separate. The completist in me hates to have any of my work strewn across multiple blogs, but that’s already something I’m going to have to forgo, with not only the REU Blog, but our Game Development Blog as well, which I suppose also merits a mention.

Around the end of Fall Semester, Joey brought to Ian’s and my attention the existence of a program called RPG Maker. It’s a piece of software that is an engine for a pretty simplistic (think: Super Nintendo) role playing game. You work within that construct and can make up the characters, their sprites (which is a pain in the ass for me, given my lack of prowess with art stuff), their weapons, the enemies they fight, the towns they visit, the things they say, and so on. I’ve been working with this since the end of… WELL I DON’T KNOW BECAUSE I NEVER DATE THE ENTRIES IN MY GAME-DEVELOPMENT NOTEBOOK. Arg.

So that’s coming along. I mention it today of all days becuase I’m coming up on having a demo ready for quasi-public consumption, which I’m getting pretty pumped about. I don’t know why I’m so invested in this silly game; given the means which I’m utilizing to make it, it’ll never be that good of a game; forever doomed to the heaps and heaps of these crappy little games that get produced with RPG Maker (no offense, RPGM people), I don’t think it’ll be that special. The better ones even have a totally custom graphics set, distinct from the default one provided, and I’ll never be at that level.

I’m not complaining, just musing. If even the full realization of my goal will garner little recognition, why bother? I suppose because this is something I’ve always wanted to do. If seven or eight people also happen to enjoy it, that’s fine. For me, the real emphasis, as is with anything I’ve written, is not about imagery, but plot. My focus is on the evolution of events, and how the characters react to those developments, and what emotions are the resultant. To tell that story, the default stuff works just fine for me. Thus, I’m trying to make a good game in terms of story and the depth of a world.

It’s exciting becuase I feel like I’m doing that.

This next thing is random, but awesome:
I have figured out that if you have two Firefox windows open, but not full-sized, and you put them roughly next to each other, you can drag a tab from one window to the other, which was something I did on a wing and prayer, and it worked, causing me to pen the following:

Man, so new semester, new classes. I was talking with some people, and I think the general consensus was that by the second half of your third year in college, the sheen of “new classes” has kinda worn off. This time around, the lineup is as follows:

Physics:
Advanced Lab (3)
Thermodynamics and Statistical Mechanics (3)
Junior Seminar (1)

Political Science:
Public Policy (3)
International Relations (3)
Comparative Politics (3)

All of which are challenging in their own… special ways. When you factor in Senate, SPS, ODK, applying for internships, the radio show, technology committee, and general house-duties, man. I’ve never had a busier first-week-of-school, EVER.

There was also the additional tragedy that struck my room the other day…

Today we morn the passing of one Steve T. Bonsai-Tree. Steve passed from this world sometime between January 8th and January 17th at his current home at 804 E. Line Street in Kirksville, Missouri. Steve was a simple tree. He never needed much more than a little sun and water. He first came to live with me as a result of Christmas, 2003. He lived a relatively peaceful life, though occasionally marred by leaf-purging-illness, he always fought back to good health with a zest for life. In 2006, he made the journey with me to Kirksville for the first time. It is a path we would trace many times together. These trips were always hard on Steve, but he knew it had to be done, and Steve T. Bonsai-Tree is a Tree who does his duty. This past trip, a lethal combination of the cold as well as dry air of his hardest Kirksville winter to date finally caused his circulatory system to shut down, preventing water-delivery to his leaves. Steve leaves behind in his immediate family Frog and Snake, who took up residence with Steve in his pot sometime in 2004. His remaining extended family consists of the last living member of the Bamboo Triplets, as well as Chaki, C. Cactus. Flowers, grief-cards, and other related items can be sent to Steve’s home at 804 E. Line Street. Steve’s will called for a Viking Funeral, to be held at a date to be determined in coming weeks. -Tom Hogan, Caretaker Jan. 17, 2009

So yeah. At the time it was just kind of a thing, but after writing that little clip above, I got really sad. Steve and me have seen some times together. I never did any fancy bonsai trimming for him, which maybe now I should have… but he never really grew that much. He was just a tree; I was just a dude who watered him… but we had a bond, and he will be missed.

Will I get another tree? Someday… but I really am going to miss Steve.
In a very Lion-King-esque, circle of life kindof thing, there was a second development yesterday. A stray cat was living under our porch for the past day or so, and we didn’t know what to do with him. He was obviously a kitten, and really hungry (Ian claims he saw him eat a rock!). About an hour and a single house-vote later, we have a cat.

We went out and bought pet stuff, discussed potential monetary commitments that having a cat might entail, and decided that we would help the little guy and adopt him! At least… we think it’s a him. Below are pictures.

Jesus Christ.
Now I’m a guys that posts cat pictures to his blog.

…I guess everyone saw it coming but me:

His name is Cal. More on him later, I suppose. I’m still bracing for the moment when I recall, in quick succession due to an onslaught of problems arising, all the reasons we had NOT gotten a cat up until this point. But he’s a good little dude, so we’ll see!

So this post has kinda been sitting in the wings since like… a month ago.
More than, actually.

Basically this is a quick shakedown of items that have been upgraded over the weeks/months since this summer, when I embarked on the mission of upgrading the blog a little bit. Thus I present, with little-to-no-fanfare, becuase it’s not really new to me: Schrödinger’s Blog Version 2.5.

• New Buttons (Or Lack Thereof)
  This idea got scrapped pretty early on when I remembered that… oh yeah! I suck at graphic design stuff, and will never get any better at it. Party. Also, I asked Ethan his opinion, and he said he liked it the way it was. So it’s too my advantage to not spend a lot of time on something that will suck anyways? Awesome.

• Pages (‘Contact’, ‘About’, etc.)
  Right now these are done in the old-timey style; that is, they’re just HTML documents sitting on my webserver. When I want to edit them, I pull open the ol’ notepad, tweak the code, save, and upload. This was getting a little annoying, especially around the new year when I need to rollover the faux-copyright date at the bottom. Editing the same 8 pages like that can get sortof tedious. I had other reasons too, though they now escape me.

  Anyways. This has all been migrated and integrated into the blogging software, so it’s all a little more cohesive.

• YouTube Compendium
  I’ve been promising this for a long, long time. It’s finally reached fruition! You can find it under the Rooftop section for videos, or just go straight there. It’s a collection of all my favorite YouTube videos in a convenient, easy-to-use interface.

  aside:

  Speaking of YouTube, I have developed this weird, weird thing for YouTube chicks with guitars. That whole female singer-songwriter-personal-hygine-only-slightly-improved-over-Bob-Dylan kindof thing really does it for me. Why? Can’t exactly say.

  An Example – Purely a Crush

  Another – Actually Enjoy the Music, But Also Have a Thing For the Girl

• M30 Prod. Videos On the ‘Tube
  While I was noodling in YouTubeVille, I also posted a few of the shorter-length M30 Productions Videos onto my account. The rest are still available where they’ve always been.

• Radio Site
  I also managed to get a new blog-within-a-blog set up for my radio program. Finally settled on an official name for it too: [defcon5]. Check it out! There you can find archives, track listings, as well as news about upcoming shows! Plus, if you’re an iTunes person, you can download the podcasts straight to your iPod/Phone/Thing and listen at your convenience (IE: long car rides).

• New Banners
  The old ones were… like, more than a year old. They were getting a tad bit stale. I realize now how silly they are, because half of them nobody understands, so they just look a little pretentious. Whatever. I like ‘em, and last time I checked, I’m the only one who pays the bills for this outfit, so.

• Up-To-Date About Page
  Also tucked in a little summary about this version update there, so we stay current with our history!

So that’s version 2.5! It’s taken FOREVER to get it off the ground fully, and even now there’s a lot of things that got left behind, but I did do some work on the site this summer, and I thought I’d let everyone know about that.

So I’m not really huge on the internet, or internet-related tests and whatnot, but this made me pretty happy, as I am a huge fan of the ol’ Achewood.

Your result for The Achewood Character Personality Test…

Roast Beef

Take The Achewood Character Personality Test at HelloQuizzy

As mentioned on the previous entry, I’m hard at work getting the 2.5 version of Schrodinger’s Blog put together. A lot of cool features coming up, and also just some book-keeping/housework type of things too. It’s still a ways off though.

However, part of the process I did feel like sharing with everyone. I mentioned a while back getting prepared for a visual overhaul of the site. I even went so far as to prepare some material for that:

The plan for the overhaul was to simulate the look of a nuclear launch console. I based my design roughly off of this picture. However, the barrier I keep running into is my Adobe PS skills are only what they are. I’m no whizz at the thing, and I don’t really have any training/talent in artsy things.

You can see different manifestations I played with; the leftmost button is “pushed”, and lit up red. The second one I tried for a more realistic backlight, with a textured surface and a washed out yellow light color. The second two have a different orientation of the text, and are “unlit” or “unpushed” buttons. So. That was the first idea.

I showed this to Ethan though, and his comment was that he liked what I had now. And so I thought to myself, ‘I should just polish up the current design.’ What better to make something look fancy than adding brushed aluminum.

You can see my stab and making an aluminum textured surface on which to place the buttons. The leftmost is “pushed” with a red ring around the edge. This and the aluminum were attempts to make the style similar to a real elevator, which the design is patterned off of. In the end though, I dunno. I really like what I have now, and to change it just for the sake of seems silly.

Brak Blog had one major visual overhaul in its day, but that was when we went from Blogger to LandingClouds, and so it was out of necessity. This would just be “’cause,” and I’m not confident it would be a change for the better. (Though I do like the aluminum!)

So ultimately, I scrapped the idea to do any major graphics work, but I thought I’d share some of the failed drafts with you guys.

Not a whole lot else to mention, besides my thoughts on Thunderbird as an RSS reader. Long story short? It’s not bad. It’s way better than my current method, which was to use Firefox’s Live Bookmarks utility:

This is pretty useful to follow like, maybe one or two blogs or webcomics. The problem, at least for me, was that I started to want to keep track of too much stuff. That bar is only as wide as the browser, and then things trail off into side menus, and it’s not nearly as convenient.

Running it through Thunderbird isn’t bad though. Postings to an RSS feed are basically handled like an e-mail. Everyone does it differently, so a lot of times they look a little rough before you get to the content you need, but it works more or less like basic e-mail:

The one thing that helps is an add-on called ThunderBrowse. This allows the message pane (where the little dog is in the above picture) to function like an internet browser. So when your feeds come into the program, they look like little e-mails with links in them; ThunderBrowse allows you to click that link, and visit the page inside the e-mail client itself! Which is pretty cool.

I know maybe that sounds a little complicated, but the alternative is visiting the sites you see in the panel at left constantly, multiple times a day to see if they’ve updated, which had started to become a problem for me. Now, I just open up my e-mail, and it tells me exactly how many times each site has updated. However, if using Thunderbird seems to daunting (and I’ll be frank, the add-on is a little difficult to install), try Google Reader. Ethan uses that to sift through hundreds of updates daily, and he really likes it. Plus, it’s web-based so you can always read it, and it’s pretty simple to set up.

Regardless of which you pick, there’s a whole world of RSS out there. If you haven’t really made an effort to put some of it to use, I really recommend it. It makes your internet time a lot more efficient, even if that just means getting to your weekly webcomics that much quicker. If anyone’s got questions, I’d be happy to field them. I’m a huge RSS fan, and would love to get other people into it too. (In fact, one such planned update to the site is an index of everything that I get RSSed to my Thunderbird, as a sortof “next gen” version of the old concept of a “Recommended Links” page!)