A new home

Hello!  Shrieking's been running on Wordpress for a long time now, and it's been good, but to be honest, I don't look after it enough, and I know that Wordpress can be a security risk if you don't keep it up to date, so I think the time has come for me to move to something hosted and easier to manage.  Enter Posterous, a lovely little site that seems to do everything I want a blogging platform to do.  Hopefully it'll all work out.

 

I think I will miss my old design, but it doesn't really work on today's monitor sizes (a sign of how long I've been blogging!) and it was looking rather dated.  This one is easier to read, I think.  Hope you like it.

Time

I've played World of Warcraft, the life-sucking wonderful massively multiplayer game, for almost 4 years now. I've racked up about 150 days of played time (which is extremely low for that amount of time, as it happens, but huge for the average human being) and I've had an awful lot of fun and made an awful lot of friends. It's a fantastic game, and I love it, but it's very time consuming. My guild requires me to play for at least 2 evenings a week, and as someone who has about 4 evenings free before social events happen, that's a huge chunk of my time. I was never very good at keeping my attendance up while I was at uni, but my guild are lovely and merciful and let me play with them all the same. They even let me come back after I left for a year to travel. Bless 'em! The sad fact is, though, that I have become increasingly busy as this last year has gone on, and as Summer hits it seems that my free time is hard to plan out, so I just can't commit to playing for the same 2 days a week. Therefore, I've dropped out of raiding for now. It's very, very strange to be free of a repeating appointment that I've had for 3 years. The people that I played with are very close friends now: it's hard to avoid getting close to someone you talk to for at least 10 hours a week. I met lots of them in real life and I even attended the wedding of a guy I met through WoW a while back, so I'm sure you can imagine that it's very odd to leave, but it's also very nice. The feeling that I'm not booked up is wonderful. Christ only knows what I'm going to do with the free time.

Upgrades

I did a load of upgrading stuff. I hope I didn't break anything - let me know if stuff is busted up. If any tech people are interested, Shrieking now runs on an Nginx + FastCGI + Passenger setup. It was a pain to get it all working, kudos to the Passenger people for making that bit of it super easy though.

Running

I went for a run today! This is worthy of an exclamation mark because I am outrageously unfit. I'm sort of trying to change that, I think. I'm not too sure what my motives are. What's post-worthy about this is the funky little iPhone app that I used to track my little run. It's called TrailGuru. You run with the app running on your phone, and when you're done you upload it to the website and it plots your route and does all this clever stuff with it. Here is the breakdown. Now, the stats aren't impressive in any way, so don't look too hard at what the numbers actually are, but instead, try to be impressed that you can see them. The Co-Op is 200m higher up than my house. That's information that I didn't know. I'm not too sure that I needed to know, but I think it's fantastic that I can find out. I don't know if I'll manage to keep on running but I did enjoy it and I am a bit fat, so I'll try. If I do any running that's worth shouting about I might even post the routes up here again.

Graphs!

A while back I started thinking about providing a way to sparkgraph stuff through Twitter, and although Simon totally beat me to it, I got there in the end, so in my sidebar I can now graph anything I want. The backbone of the thing is a Twitterfeed that you won't want to follow and it uses the Ruby on Rails implementation of Sparklines, which is pretty cool, although I'm running it on mod_rails which is uber-slow. If you're freakish about graphs, you might want to have a look at Daytum. It's just in beta but it looks quite exciting. (Thanks to Vicky for the link!)

Live

It's always exciting when software gets finished and milestones get hit, so I'm very excited to tell you all that the site I work on (as in, for money, not the junk I make in my spare time) is now in beta and is ready for your visitation. Head over to BillMonitor and check it out, if you like. Also, I now blog for money occasionally, which is very exciting. You can read me on the BillMonitor blog.