Do not adjust your browser, we control the horizontal and we control the vertical

Hey all. This is just a quick note to say sometime in the week or so I'm going to change my website over to Squarespace 6 (it's currently still running on 5.) That should in theory be seamless but I know theory and I know my friend Murphy and his law. So if you see something weird going on please go ahead and drop me a line. Hopefully at worst there will be a day or so of whatever DNS disruption we need and then maybe some fiddling about as I settle in. (I'm not 100% sold on the theme I'm using, for example.)

Anyway, should be a fairly minor issue and then things should work a little better.

Another year, another Registrar

I'm switching domain registrars again. In all honesty the fact that you can read this probably means it works, but I guess maybe part of it could work but not other parts. At any rate, if you see anything odd drop me a line. There's a contact box at the right, down at the bottom of the sidebar.

For the curious/technically inclined I switched to Hover. I was reasonably happy with EasyDNS but there were a few things that bugged me, in order from most to least aggravating:

  1. No privacy options. I don't think I've ever been contacted via my WHOIS info but there's no real reason to have that hanging around out there. EasyDNS has help pages that seem to say this isn't possible but that's just patently false. Yes, a contact must be listed. But it doesn't need to be me and there are plenty of registrars in the sea that will do this. It's free at Hover and in fact is defaulted to on.

  2. Couldn't set the @ A record for hiddenjester.com. I pretty much want everything for hiddenjester to dump into Squarespace except for mail, which goes to Fastmail.fm. Without the @ A record if you did a dig on hiddenjester.com you got back nothing. Hover will let me send that to Squarespace. This is one of those "does anybody really care" things, and the A record for hiddenjester.com covers 99% of the cases but still … it was weird that the option was not available.

  3. EasyDNS got a little spammy about renewals. I received seven total emails from them about renewing, going all the way back to late July. That wasn't really a huge deal but it was slightly annoying. And it's poorly timed right? They start annoying me right when I can jump ship and go somewhere else?

  4. The EasyDNS dashboard/configuration/whatever-you-want-to-call-it page is confusing to me. Some things are off my account, some things are managed in the domain, then when you get into the domain there are several little subpages, etc. It worked but in comparison when I log into Hover I get a screen listing my domains, click one, and there's a "Domain Details" name for setting the name servers and the WHOIS stuff, then there's a DNS tab that has all of the DNS records listed for easy tweaking. (There are other tabs, but ones I can safely ignore. The Easy DNS separation between "account" and "domain" was less clean to me.)

The thing is at the end of the day I don't need complicated DNS stuff, and I don't need fancy options. I don't want a lot of handholding, I just want to drop in, set the things that need to be set and then not worry about it until I need to renew. At that point I'd like one email about it, maybe a month or so out. If I don't mess with it, ideally it would just roll over and charge me another year. I liked EasyDNS overall, and they certainly were head and shoulders above a Network Solutions or a (shudder) GoDaddy, but it seemed like there were both more knobs than I wanted, and a few knobs I did really want that were missing. Luckily switching registrars is much easier than it was in the Dark Ages …

Bring me your comments, yearning to be free!

In the comments thread over on the X-Com post Tony mentioned that there was an annoying CAPTCHA that you had to pass in order to post a comment. I don't see that because I have an account on the site so I'm not considered an anonymous commenter. I can't find a setting to turn off the CAPTCHA but I can have up to 250 accounts on my current plan. I can make accounts that let you login and post comments without hassling about who you are. Tony beta–tested this and it seems to work well. However, what I can't provide on my current plan is a form where you sign up for an account. So. We don't' see a ton of traffic on this blog and I suspect I can keep up with requests for accounts. If you'd like to post a comment drop me a line and I'll get you squared away. If you don't have an email address for me there's a form in the sidebar on the right that you can use to contact me.

I should note that I'm not doing anything to remove the old "anonymous" comment system, so if you're posting a one-off comment and would prefer to use that go ahead. It just turns out that if you're likely to make multiple comments over time that it's a bit friendlier to get an account here and avoid the rigamarole. It's a new option, not a replacement of the old system.

Blog–ruptcy!

Oh yeah, this thing. Here's the ridiculous thing. I've been meaning to write a whole mess of posts. And in fact it had reached a logjam of stuff. I was paralyzed on writing any given post because I knew there were so many to write. So then I decided I was going to declare "blog bankruptcy" and just write one post touching briefly on all of the topics. The thing is that I decided that in early December and I've had a task sitting in Omnifocus about it for over two months. In that time frame even more shit has transpired that needed to be in the post. In short, it wasn't going to happen. So here we are. Here's what I'm going to do. I'm going to dump a list of interesting things, no more than a couple of sentences on each. Once it's all here maybe it will free me up to write more on particular topics. Feel free to jab me if any of these catch your eye and you want to hear more.
  1. We got a new TV! We replaced the old set with a projector and an 84" retractable screen. It's pretty sweet!
  2. While doing all of the projector install and wiring I put my foot through the hall ceiling, so we had a big hole for several weeks. This was less sweet.
  3. Back in October Schrödinger got really sick and we had to take her to the Cat Hospital. Turns out she's having renal (kidney) failure and was super-dehydrated. They had to keep her there on an IV for five days, one of which we couldn't visit her at all. That super-sucked and now I have to administer fluids subcutaneously to her daily. (Translation: I have to stick a needle under her skin and give 100 mL of lactated ringer's fluid.) She's doing fine now and she's got a special diet that helps her along.
  4. Not to be outdone Heisenberg had some sort of hypoglycemic shock in January. I came in and found him passed out on the floor with his face in his food plate. He couldn't stand and when I checked his blood sugar it was drastically low. He only had to stand overnight in the hospital but we're still adjusting his insulin trying to find the right balance. He seems OK for now, so we'll see what happens.
  5. Since my last post talked about iTunes Music Match I should probably mention that I turned it on since then on my iPhone and it works well. I find that I can't stream music from the internet down to my phone and then wirelessly to the Airport Express but that's a pretty edge case. It is pretty cool to be able to search my entire music library from my phone. Macworld has a useful article describing how to upgrade crappier audio files after using Music Match. It worked for me and upgraded 4,788 tracks so that's awesome. I did notice one example later where my "explicit" CD rip had been replaced with a "clean" radio edit so keep an eye out for that.
  6. I got Skyrim for Christmas. Probably my vote for best game of 2011. So good!
  7. I also got Super Mario 3D Land for the 3DS. It's a lot of fun, but the last few worlds get ridiculously difficult. At one point I was up to well over 100 lives but I'm on the last 2-3 worlds now and I've gotten down to a bit over 25.
  8. Playing the 3DS again really drives home the odd conflict in Nintendo's hardware these days. I like the 3DS and the 3D effect does make some sections of Super Mario easier, but I've also died many times because I move my head or arm and lose the sweet spot mid-action sequence. It's weird that over with the Wii they've made this big push towards getting non-games, this "blue ocean" strategy and then their handheld is so weirdly finicky as to require serious training in how to use it.
So there you go! Hopefully this will clear the decks and I'll resume posting. I have some pictures of the projector install and ceiling repair that I intend to post at the very least.