Hello, world.

When I was a kid, I had an Atari 400. I spent hours sitting in front of that thing, copying programs from magazines and running the games I’d made from them. When I wasn’t writing my own (even though I was copying things from Atari Age or whatever, I was slowly learning how BASIC worked and felt like they were “my” programs), I played the hell out of Star Raiders and Pac-Man, and States & Capitals (which was loaded from a cassette, because that’s how we did things back then).

After the Atari 400, I got a Texas Instruments TI-99/4a. I loved that computer so much, and it was in that machine’s TI-BASIC environment that I truly grokked BASIC programming. I wrote text adventures, a rudimentary database to store news events I made up for a UFO research project that I also made up, and when I wasn’t doing that, I played the hell out of the weird and wonderful video games that machine offered.

Around 1984, I got my first Macintosh, and the first thing I bought for it was whatever BASIC ran on the 128K OG Macintosh back then. I was so excited to get into that language, and start doing things that took advantage of the GUI and this thing called a mouse, but 12 year-old me just couldn’t wrap his head around the language. I don’t know if it actually, objectively sucked, but in my memory, it really sucked. Nothing made sense, nothing followed the conventions I had grown used to, and just getting programs to respond to the mouse was beyond me.

So it was, in 1984, that I gave up trying to open BASIC to write computer programs, and instead opened MacWrite, where I began to write stories. I also played the everlivinghell out of every Mindscape game I could get my hands on.

Fast forward to a a few weeks ago. I was looking through my Humble Bundle library, and noticed that I had a book in there that teaches Python. I flipped through it, and the curiosity that I had as a kid bubbled up to the surface of my mind. I went back to the beginning of the book, and began reading. I downloaded Python for my Mac, and I started copying down the examples, starting to figure my way around the most basic aspects of the language. I’m a few chapters into it, now, and bits of it are beginning to stick. I’m having a lot of fun breaking things and then putting them back together, and just remembering the joy of turning a set of instructions into something useful and fun, like I did when I was a kid.

I have no idea if I’ll see this through to the end, and I have no idea what I’d actually use the skills (if I can even master them) for, but I really need a hobby that isn’t also part of my job, and this seems as good as anything.

Who knows? Maybe I can finally finish that dungeon adventure I started when I was 10.

unblock the block

I may have blocked you on Twitter by accident. Rather than unblock all the stupidsphere and #GarboGuts idiots who I meant to block, if you check my Twitter page, and see that you’re blocked, leave a comment here with your Twitter name, or email me with your Twitter name, I’ll fix it.

No, that’s not me on Instagram

Someone is impersonating me (or at least trying to mislead people into thinking he/she/it is me) on Instagram. This person is using my Twitter avatar, my bio, and generally causing a lot of confusion.

I tried to report the profile to Instagram, and Instagram told me that to complete the report, I would have to send a scan of my government-issued identification.

Fuck. That.

So: I can’t get the account taken down, but that’s not me on Instagram. Tell your friends. Or don’t. I’m not the boss of you.

regarding instagram’s new TOS

So Instagram is now going to use photos taken by its users in advertising, and they may or may not disclose to viewers when the advertising is happening.

I have no idea how this will actually work, and I’m once again glad that I don’t use Instagram … but I know a lot of people who do, and many of those people are celebrities to some degree.

Here’s what I’m wondering: if Kaley Cuoco uses Instagram to share a photo of her and Melissa Rauch doing something silly, does that mean that Instagram can take that photo and use it to advertise for something silly without compensating them for what becomes a use of their likeness for commercial purposes? I can see that being a pretty serious shitstorm if it happens. I’m not a big enough celebrity for it to personally affect me, but I know a lot of people who are. If someone Instagrams a photo of Seth Green walking through an Urban Outfitters, does that mean Urban Outfitters can take that image and use it to create an implied endorsement by Seth? What if the picture is taken by a complete stranger? Who gets final say in how the image is used? The subject, the photographer, or Instagram?

This sort of dovetails with similar concern I have about the automatic opt-in nature of much of our digital life: if I’m in someone’s address book, and they use an app that grants the developer full, unfettered access to their address book, I’ve now had my information given without my consultation or consent to a developer who I know nothing about, and I never even knew it was happening.

Just as we have a “do not track” option for our webbrowsing habits, we’re going to need to have something similar for other aspects of our increasingly-digital lives: from contact information to our location to moving and still images of ourselves. Because it’s no longer enough for me to be careful with my opt-ins and online sharing; now I have to ensure that every single person around me is careful and respectful of my privacy wishes, as well.

This title has no H3 tags!

In response to several requests, I spent quite a bit of time yesterday reworking the CSS for my site, so I could get rid of the ugly H3 tags that used to contain my entry titles. I did this primarily as a courtesy to the people who synidcate this site . . . it’s really spiffy that anyone thinks this site is worth synidcating. 🙂
I’m pretty happy with the way things look now, and I have a much better understanding of how stylesheets work. It’s pretty cool. I ran my index.php through a validator, and got 32 errors out of 540-something lines . . . not too bad. Same for the stylesheet.
Flush with the success, I felt lucky and upgraded MT to 2.63. Yeah! I didn’t break anything.
Earlier, I was goofing off when I should have been working, and I took this Star Trek personality test, at the suggestion of a WWDN reader. You can get my results by clicking “More . . . ”

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