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.

Achiever: a Done List

I like the idea of making a list of stuff you've done rather than stuff you have to do, but no website I've tried out does a good job of just letting me list things I've done. There are a million list sites out there and the internet doesn't really need another one, but for the sake of practice and portfolio, here's my take on the 'To-Done' list: Achiever. It has no features yet really, but if you want something done to it, let me know. If it's a good feature, chances are I'll make it.

Wow

(Regarding NaNoWriMo, in case you've lost the plot) 1,667 words a day is actually quite a lot. I'm currently at 10,023 words, and I'm running 3,000 behind. Hoping I can make that up over next week. I'm really enjoying it actually - this is the longest bit of fiction I've ever written, and I've never even attempted to explore a character this far, outside of roleplaying games, so it's been very educational. The story I'm writing is really, really bad, but if you're interested, it's available online here. Please, no constructive or nonconstructive criticism: I know, it's bad. There are a million things I would change about it. It's just about getting the words out. Can't blog. Too busy writing.

NaNoWriMo

NaNoWriMo approaches and I have, perhaps foolishly, decided to join in. I've never written anything of length before so I'm quite sure that I'll fail, but I'll give it a shot. I'm going to write a trashy cyberpunk story about a badass guy and his efforts to generally be awesome. It's going to be terrible but I'm really looking forward to writing it. Of course, this means that November is approaching. That, and the conkers that litter the floor on my way to work, remind me that Winter is coming once more to ruin my fun and leave me wishing I could hibernate for 3 months. My employer tells me that hibernation is not an option, so I'm going to try my best to motivate myself through the season. NaNo is the start, but I'm hoping that I can follow it up with some other projects to keep me enthusiastic. I always come through Winter wondering what I did with my time, and I don't want that to happen again. Summer was good this year. Not as much sitting in fields as past years, but there was plenty of fun to be had all the same. My one gripe is a tricky one to pin down: it is that although I have my usual Summer anthems from the year, I didn't get out clubbing at all, so I never had the chance to share them with others. That's kind of a shame, and I guess it's the way things go as you grow up.

Maintenance

Shrieking was long overdue for a bit of maintenance, and it's finally got it. My old hosts refused to upgrade my server to MySQL 4 or PHP 5, which I think is a fairly basic duty of a webhost (For the non-techheads, you can do this in about 20 keystrokes - it's not hard) so I've moved on to the rather excellent SliceHost, who just give you a virtual linux box to play with so you can update the software yourself. About time I found myself something like this. I'm now up to Worpdress 2.6.1, and it's very nice. Well done you guys at Wordpress. Along with Shrieking's update has come a wave of new ideas, creativity, and motivation. I've recently been edging in on the Rails community and it's made me remember what I love about computers. Slowly, all the stuff that I always thought would be cool but never managed to express is becoming a reality in the computing world and finally I've got the means, time, and expertise to get stuck into it. I've got a few projects on my mind and I'm looking forward to getting on with them now that Shrieking's admin is all done and dusted. Everyone, programmer or not, needs to read Why's Poignant Guide to Ruby. This is how books should be written. This is how people should think about programming. My job's been pretty hectic lately but last week we released the alpha, which is very good news indeed, and explains why I'm sat in a coffee shop in London at 5:30pm on a Friday instead of crying into my aluminum keyboard in the office. I'm really enjoying the job: it's nice to have something to do with my days. I find it helps me to focus my free time. My house is also lovely. it feels like a real person's house, and I'm living with some awesome people who are doing a fantastic job of acclimatising me to life back in England. I suppose I should probably also mention that my girlfriend is briliant. She'd tell me off if I didn't. Overall, life's pretty awesome. I promise I'll get back to writing stuff that's not just about me now that I have ubiquitous net access again.

Projects

One thing I've always had difficulty with is finishing the personal projects that I start.  I'm pretty sure that everyone suffers the same sort of thing to some degree, so I thought I'd ask my readers - what do you do to make you finish your own projects?  What drives you on?  Do you have a workspace full of unfinished ideas like I do?  If you had to write a list of things you'd really "finished" in your life, how long would it be? On the personal front, my life is going swimmingly, thank you very much.  Work is cool (Check the company y'all) and I have a house on the horizon, all being well.