waider

This is absolute gold.

I caught a cold-like thing two weeks back, and it kept me off the running and gym in order that I not drown in mucus and/or freeze to death. I've been back at the gym this week, but still on reduced weights; no running as it's FRICKIN' FREEZING outside. By which I mean the temperature is in single digit celsius values; you people who consider this balmy can shut right up already.

Wow. My favourite publicans' representative group has declared a freeze on the price of drink for the next year, effective immediately. I'm sure there's a fast one being pulled here somewhere, because I am naturually cynical and suspicious of these clowns, but hey, nice move.

Dave Egger's "Once Upon A School" comes to Dublin: Fighting Words opens in January 2009, as best I can tell from the somewhat meagre website. This project was mentioned on Egger's site some time ago, but there were no updates forthcoming; now it looks like they're finally ready to roll.

...but this LOLCAT is definitely one I want an actual motivational poster of: Success: It can lead to fail.

So Values of N is shutting down (which, I suspect, means that that's a volatile link). I had played around with Stikkit and thought it was interesting; I was more interested in I Want Sandy (a digital personal assistant, lest the name makes you think it's some sort of questionable content!) but was frankly disappointed with the fact that the Stikkit API never made it to I Want Sandy despite the fact that they were both based on the same technology and there was a long-running user request thread to implement such a feature. Ignoring all arguments for and against the viability of giving away your core product for free, I think one of the key things in making a product successful is allowing other people to add value - whether that's through an API, or through a SDK, or some sort of developer program is not relevant; the fact of the matter is that one company can't come up with all the possible ways in which their product will be used, and even if they could, they have limited resources and have to concentrate on the applications of that product that are expected to provide the greatest return on investment. Anyway, if you had accounts on either of these sites, now would be a good time to go and fetch your data and/or nuke your account. I'd been meaning to shut mine down anyway as the lack of API had pretty much turned me off most of the possible interactions I'd otherwise have had with the site, so for the last year or more it's been emailing me the same to-do list and I've just been deleting it and ignoring it.

update: I've just finished reading the followup comments on the linked post. They're laughable, to say the least. People apparently feel that because they put their data into a free service, that free service is obliged to stay running ad infinitum. And various people are standing on soapboxes declaring the death of Web 2.0/Cloud Computing/Buzzword Buzzword Buzzword. Dollars to dimes these people have free accounts on last.fm, twitter, myspace, livejournal, facebook, flickr, etc. and while soapboxing against Values Of N will not even consider these other places storing their precious bodily fluids data. It's very simple: whatever else you do with your data, keep a local copy. If you're blindly putting data you value into the hands of others with no scope for force majeure recovery, you really don't value that data very much.

We won. Woo. What a terrible game; even the refereeing was rubbish.

Dammit, looks like my server just fell over (again). This means email to me will remain undelivered for a few hours. Just, you know, in case you're expecting a reply or anything.

update: huh, it's back. I guess it just rebooted rather than freezing. Please be assured that the root cause of this is being addressed as fast as I can do a live repartition a 350GB USB-connected drive (which isn't very fast, and isn't helped by the box rebooting in the middle of the process)

while true;
do mpg123 absurd.mp3;
done

Yes, that's the Fluke track I mentioned earlier this week. Listened to it for about an hour straight in the office today. And it's STILL going around in my head.

Short run tonight: 2.5k, 10:33. Trying out a new route with a big feckin' hill in it. I have to be careful with this, because when I started running, my route included a long downhill slope which ultimately screwed up my achilles tendon and left me unable to run for about a month. The route I tried tonight has about 1k uphill, 1k shallow-gradient downhill, and the remainder more-or-less flat; two laps of that should be good enough to whack my lungs around a bit. Bonus: less major road crossings.