For my birthday, my mom said she was going to buy me a bottle of bourbon that I’d had on my wish list for some time. She asked me what it was, and I told her, but she lost the thing she wrote it on. I said, “Don’t worry about it. It’s hard to find anyway. I’d like a gift certificate to Tanczos just as much.”

I want a system in which my players can keep logs of the adventures. I want them to be in a clear sequence so you can click “next” and “previous” without having to set the links up yourself. I want it to be possible to have multiple summaries. One unbiased log, a per-player (or per-character) log, and maybe others.

A while ago, someone directed me to Obsidian Portal. It’s a website where you can collaboratively develop an RPG campaign. A camapign has a wiki, PC and NPC tracking, an adventure (b)log, an item tracker, a map archive, and forums. There might be some other stuff, too.

Lately, I have a lot going on. I think I need to recalibrate my “very busy” alert, because I feel like it’s been going off for months, now. Still, things are okay. Here’s a bit of a dump on some things I’m working on or should be working on.

On the recommendation of a friend, I tried out the Charles HTTP proxy for debugging… web stuff. It’s nagware, and the nagging is really annoying. Despite that, it was obvious within the first two hours that I was going to buy it. It made it very, very simple to diagnose a number of problems that Firebug and Safari could not sort out. (They both seem to clear their logs fairly aggressively during redirection, for one thing.)

I mean, they’re not one-liners. They’re full programs. They just do something really really simple.

…not really. I still really like using GitHub, and (obviously) they do much more than I could churn out in a weekend, let alone an hour. Also, I used Perl.

First off, my slides. Whenever I give a presentation, someone will ask me whether the slides will go online. Sometimes they do, and sometimes they don’t. This year, I gave three presentations: one on Git, one on some new email libraries, and one on Rx. The email slides will probably go online soon. I’m not sure the other two will.

I’m trying to keep up to date with what’s going on in the Dungeons & Dragons world. I think the fourth edition rules are nice and easy to use. On those occasions where I encounter a rule I don’t know well, I can guess and when I look into the rules later, it usually ends up being easy to remember for next time. I’m looking forward to seeing the new rules for psionics. I like the stuff they’re doing with hybrid classes to introduce something more like old style multiclassing.

Let me start off by reassuring you: I’m not going to go on and on about how everyone needs to stop using Email::Send forever. I will stop once nobody is using it anymore.