Blog–ruptcy!

Oh yeah, this thing. Here's the ridiculous thing. I've been meaning to write a whole mess of posts. And in fact it had reached a logjam of stuff. I was paralyzed on writing any given post because I knew there were so many to write. So then I decided I was going to declare "blog bankruptcy" and just write one post touching briefly on all of the topics. The thing is that I decided that in early December and I've had a task sitting in Omnifocus about it for over two months. In that time frame even more shit has transpired that needed to be in the post. In short, it wasn't going to happen. So here we are. Here's what I'm going to do. I'm going to dump a list of interesting things, no more than a couple of sentences on each. Once it's all here maybe it will free me up to write more on particular topics. Feel free to jab me if any of these catch your eye and you want to hear more.

1. We got a new TV! We replaced the old set with a projector and an 84" retractable screen. It's pretty sweet!
2. While doing all of the projector install and wiring I put my foot through the hall ceiling, so we had a big hole for several weeks. This was less sweet.
3. Back in October Schrödinger got really sick and we had to take her to the Cat Hospital. Turns out she's having renal (kidney) failure and was super-dehydrated. They had to keep her there on an IV for five days, one of which we couldn't visit her at all. That super-sucked and now I have to administer fluids subcutaneously to her daily. (Translation: I have to stick a needle under her skin and give 100 mL of lactated ringer's fluid.) She's doing fine now and she's got a special diet that helps her along.
4. Not to be outdone Heisenberg had some sort of hypoglycemic shock in January. I came in and found him passed out on the floor with his face in his food plate. He couldn't stand and when I checked his blood sugar it was drastically low. He only had to stand overnight in the hospital but we're still adjusting his insulin trying to find the right balance. He seems OK for now, so we'll see what happens.
5. Since my last post talked about iTunes Music Match I should probably mention that I turned it on since then on my iPhone and it works well. I find that I can't stream music from the internet down to my phone and then wirelessly to the Airport Express but that's a pretty edge case. It is pretty cool to be able to search my entire music library from my phone. Macworld has a useful article describing how to upgrade crappier audio files after using Music Match. It worked for me and upgraded 4,788 tracks so that's awesome. I did notice one example later where my "explicit" CD rip had been replaced with a "clean" radio edit so keep an eye out for that.
6. I got Skyrim for Christmas. Probably my vote for best game of 2011. So good!
7. I also got Super Mario 3D Land for the 3DS. It's a lot of fun, but the last few worlds get ridiculously difficult. At one point I was up to well over 100 lives but I'm on the last 2-3 worlds now and I've gotten down to a bit over 25.
8. Playing the 3DS again really drives home the odd conflict in Nintendo's hardware these days. I like the 3DS and the 3D effect does make some sections of Super Mario easier, but I've also died many times because I move my head or arm and lose the sweet spot mid-action sequence. It's weird that over with the Wii they've made this big push towards getting non-games, this "blue ocean" strategy and then their handheld is so weirdly finicky as to require serious training in how to use it.

So there you go! Hopefully this will clear the decks and I'll resume posting. I have some pictures of the projector install and ceiling repair that I intend to post at the very least.

Possible Blip

Just a quick heads–up: I need to switch the Registrar for hiddenjester and that will require some DNS foolishness. It's possible this site will disappear for some users for a tiny bit. No worries. We will return :-)

Err … Yeehaw?

So it turns out I was able to twiddle my DNS in such a way that my email was mostly but not completely down. I was getting just enough email so I didn't notice. If you've been getting bounce messages I apologize and you should try resending.

Also, it wasn't clear but I don't think you need an "account" on this blog in order to post a comment. I removed the superfluous "login" link since that only applied to me. Hopefully this is a little clearer to everyone

The Move, Finalized

OK, it looks like everything is done. One final note, if you read this site via RSS and you got some sort of note in your RSS feed directing you here could you either comment here or send me an email? It looks like some of my hacking around with RSS feeds worked such that the old feed URL gives you a message with the new URL, but it's difficult to be certain. Thanks!

The Move

OK folks. I’ve pulled the trigger on some changes, and they should propagate out in about two hours or so. If things go well than many folks will just redirect to the new site. If things go poorly … well here’s a few good things to know.

The blog should be accessible at http://www.hiddenjester.com/blog If it isn’t it will definitely be at http://hiddenjester.squarespace.com/blog. If you want a RSS feed you can get one there.

The existing blog URL at http://www.hiddenjester.com/~tsanders should work, but I can’t test that until the DNS records propagate.

Hopefully this will all go fairly smoothly.