Ramblings of a Martian

From the article "Helpful Hints for Dealing with Martian", in the March 2005 issue of Alien Invasion Quarterly:

If, say at a party or something, I have something you want - some bit of kitsch or whatever - which is obviously of little value to me, and I tell you to make me an offer.. seriously, just make an offer. If it really is of no value to me, odds are the offer alone will be an adequate price. I just want to see what kind of offer you'll make. Mind you, you should be serious and sincere in your offer, 'cause I might accept it. But, despite intentions to the contrary, I tend to be at least somewhat reasonable in what I expect someone to give for something I don't care about. In the worst case, I'll tell you your offer is boring and make you come up with something better.

No, really, you should be reading tithon_greader and tithon_twitter. cyborgfolly and tithon_tumblr are basically dead, you can ignore them. But the first two are good. No, really.

See, I share out 'interesting' items from google reader. That's tithon_greader. If I put it there, it's because I think you should read it. Either it's cool or it's interesting or it's horrifying or it's .. something. I don't just spew shit out there, k? I'm subscribed to 145 feeds in google reader, I get over 500 new posts per day, and I tend to read it in fits and starts (that may be the first time I've used that phrase in my entire life), and share out maybe a dozen for every thousand I read. So, it's really the wheat, got it?

And then, if you want a complete picture of what's going on in the Martiverse, you need to read tithon_twitter. I go long periods without posting to it, just like I do LJ sometimes. But I've been using it a lot more recently. I've got Twitterific running on all three of my daily machines (Arcturus, Sedna, and Dobropan) and have been posting random little snippets. I find it occasionally interesting to try to fit what I'm trying to say into 140 characters. I usually don't like to spread across two posts, so I'll go back and rephrase. I refuse to use l33t or most abbreviations. But anyway. I've been talking about how my project at work is going, and how my project at home is going, and about my progress getting google reader to make my eyeballs explode from their sockets. Probably not /interesting/, per se, but like I said: if you want a complete picture, you gotta watch the whole show.

(I've considered one of those collect-twitter-posts-and-post-the-digest-to-blog tools, but.. eh.)

caladri's little tool revealed a depressing count of outbound-only friendings, and I cleaned out a bunch that have been around for a while. People who never read me or dropped me a while ago, and whom I didn't feel I needed to be reading anymore. Kept the new ones, and a few others. La.

A force-reload command might be nice. ;;)

A couple quickies:
1) In rushing out the door this morning, I forgot my cell phone. So if you need to get ahold of me, call my work number.
2) A sudden priority shift and a VERY short deadline shall have us rather busy for the next week and a half. Any plans 'cept Boston are now soft.

http://crashspace.epiglyph.com is finally ready for beta.

It doesn't send any notification emails yet, but it will attempt to auto-assign 'beds' every 10 minutes or so. If you're feeling bored, please sign up (use an invitotron URL if you have one, so it can link to your invitotron data), and create some requests. You can create multiple requests that overlap, if you like, tho even better is if multiple people create multiple overlapping requests.

You should be able to edit your user data (name, email, password, zipcode), but not see everybody's. You should only see your requests, and not other people. You shouldn't be able to see your priority ranking (it assigns a pseudorandom 'priority' value, based on zipcode and rand(), in order to resolve conflicts in overlapping schedules). You /should/ be able to see the 'bed' your requests have been assigned to within ten minutes of making the request (actually, after the next %10 minute). When a bed has been assigned, you should be able to see the comfort and capacity ratings for that bed. If you change the number of persons in a request, you may - depending on the changes - see the bed change (for example, the guest rooms officially hold 2 people each, the living room floor holds 10, and the couch holds 1). I don't want to deal with the datastructures involved in spreading a request across multiple beds, so - for example - a large party won't get spread across the three 'beds' in the sunroom (lovesac, harem pit pillows, floor), it'll just get assigned to the largest party capable of holding it. If the party is too big for any beds, it won't get a bed assigned (or, rather, it'll get the 0-bed, 'none').

OH! And don't log out unless you change your password. Since there are no emails being sent yet, it won't send you your password. If you log out, you won't be able to log back in.

Mail me if you find any bugs or have any suggestions or comments.

I'm considering switching to LJ as my primary blog. I'e maintained my separate system since I started journalling again, and I like it a lot, but there are features LJ has that it's just not practical to try to implement on my system... Properly attributed comments, and mailed comments, for example. I /could/ do it on my system, but it doesn't make a lot of sense from a time-investment point of view. I don't know.

I also don't know what I'm doing tomorrow after work, or friday during the day. I'd thought of going to the grind for a while Thursday, but maybe not. Suggestions? Anybody want to do brunch/lunch/dinner/something friday or have better ideas for thursday?


Edit: Enabled comments here on LJ.

http://www.martian.cx/Words/Life/Ramblings/comments.cgi?entry=387

I think maybe I /will/ use this, specifically and only to post those stupid little tests everybody's passing around. I don't want to do that with my real journal, and don't want to create a new page to do it, so I figure here's a good place. Opinions? Send me tests, if you think it's a good idea.