I may be in sporadic contact over the next couple/few days. Death may have come for my hard drive, and I don't think I can win his game.

First my glasses, now this. Ugh.

Cut to spare the sensibilities of those who don't care for such things. :)

( Tristan's birth story )

I love screen. I love vim. One problem I have is that I can't seem to remember which screen session is editing which file. I decided to spend some time and get this fixed, once and for all.

My screen now has a persistent line showing the window setup. Obviously it won't be perfect for the number of windows I run at home, but it's working nicely at work.

The screen line is the last line in my terminal and looks like:

[ hostname ][ 0 mysql 1- tcsh (2*tcsh) ][11:09]

(I'm not spending time showing all the colors here. You could adjust them if you like.)

If you want to use this, put this line in your .screenrc:

hardstatus alwayslastline '%{= kG}[ %{G}%H %{G}]%{g}[%= %{=kw}%?%-Lw%?%{r}(%{W}%n*%f%t%?(%u)%?%{r})%{w}%?%+Lw%?%?%= %{g}]%{G}[%{W}%c%{G}]'

Now, for the vim setup. I've always noticed that my screen titles are useless. They all say 'tcsh' unless I have pre-titled them (like the mysql above). What if vim could change the title for me? As it turns out, it can.

I open a new window and a new file, test.txt. Now my bottom of my terminal shows:
"test.txt" [New File] 0,0-1 All
[ hostname ][ 0 mysql 1 tcsh 2- tcsh (3*vim:test.txt) ][11:14]

Closing the vim session resets the title back to tcsh as well.

If you want this, add the following to your .vimrc:

let &titlestring = "vim:" . expand("%:t")
let &titleold = "tcsh"
if &term == "screen"
set t_ts=^[k
set t_fs=^[\
endif
if &term == "screen" || &term == "xterm"
set title
endif

(Those are escapes ( ^[ ) in the set. Control-v + escape in vim ^^)

If you like this, let me know. Thanks.

So, if any of you that play TF2 still haven't done the Halloween achievements and want to farm them, let me know.

4 out of 5 are fairly quick, it's just the last one that takes a while.

old.ocrtf2.com:27015 is running 24/7 Harvest Event (the map needed for 3 of the 5 achievements) until it ends or the server is shut off.

Tristan day 12 stats:
7lb 7oz (25-50%)
20.75" long
36.2cm head circumference

He got his repeat PKU test which is like some kind of baby torture :( and we refused the hepatitis B shot because, you know, shockingly my 12-day-old newborn doesn't having any unsafe sex or other risk factors for hep B. :P

These are my quick impressions of the game, admittedly a little influenced by a quick glance at the reviews.

First of all, all the good things from every BioWare game are here in full force.  Not that much expansion necessary.  Pretty graphics, awesome story (so far), great characters and production values.

From a basic standpoint the various game systems are good.  I can't say great because I definitely have found some stuff that irks me.  First, it'd be nice to have a little more guidance in finding things, as in points of interest or quest destinations.  The map is a letdown in that sense.  Moreover, the journal systems of other games (even Mass Effect) are less convoluted in structure and make these sorts of things more straightforward.

Second is something I expect is going to pop up as an annoyance across the board.  Party members not under direct control are controlled by a series of conditionals.  In situation x, do y.  This is the same as the FFXII gambit system except you don't need to unlock behaviors, only slots.  However they require way too much tweaking to get right, and honestly it's hard to see that your characters are doing anything you want them to.  You end up having to do a lot of stop and go micro management.  The opposite to this is FFXII where you could mostly let your party members act independently without excessive worry.

Last, this makes it way too hard to play a mage.  Since you can't expect your characters to control enemies in any sort of organized fashion it becomes really hard to use your spells to full effect.  Why is this?  Friendly fire.  I'm sorry, but the friendly fire is excessive and unnecessary.  It should either not be there or a toggle should be available in every difficulty.  I can't use my CC if my party is in the thick of it, because they all get caught- same for AoE.

To be honest I think this can all be addressed.  I'll wait and see what BioWare does from this point on.  Some better tactics presets, a little work on party AI alone would go a long way towards making things more fun.

Anyway, that's all a bit harsh.  I played the damn game for 5 hours straight without noticing.  I know it's a sad thing to say about games these days, but publishers rush developers (even on delayed games) and so I still think this is a great game, and figure a lot of what's wrong will be fixed.  I do in fact recommend this game- of course I'd say PC is best.

Well, it's been cutting out for a long time now, but it really started to die the night before Halloween, and it was almost totally dead by Halloween night. I can get net at school, but I can't really do any site work from here. I'm trying to get it sorted out tonight or tomorrow.

It isn't 100% dead, so I might still be able to get on a little, but if this morning is any indication, it can't even hold a connection long enough for me to check my mail.

Ok, I missed, he's actually just over a week old. Time flies when you're sleep deprived. Tristan's an awesome baby most of the time, except when it's the middle of the night and he won't sleep. Day/night confusion sucks.

I'm doing about 1000% better postpartum then with Vivian. I had a lot of anxiety with her that turned into postpartum depression pretty quickly. This time my midwife put me on Zoloft right away with a second, shorter-acting anti-anxiety med because I wasn't sleeping. As in, I was laying in bed all night staring at the ceiling. Not so good, that.

We had hired a postpartum doula, Carol Lynn. She was here for 4 days and was seriously awesome. My mom also came for 3 nights when I started the 2nd anti-anxiety med because it made me drowsy and you can't hold a baby all night while drugged. And since Tristan mostly won't sleep without being held, that was kinda a problem.

Actually it's still kinda a problem. Last night I got him to sleep on his own exactly one time, for 2 hours. He also slept two hours in arms before I took my meds, then spent most of of the rest of the night fussing and crying and nursing.

So, Team Fortress 2 had an unannounced update yesterday. Included in this update is a seasonal map (koth_harvest_event), seasonal achievements (only valid on koth_harvest_event), and seasonal items (new hats).

Why do I call these seasonal? They only work around Halloween each year. That's right, you now have hats that can only be worn for a few days each year clogging up space in your inventory.

Also included in this update is the normal koth_harvest_final map, a slightly better optimized version of the koth_harvest that we already had on our servers.

Speaking of which, all 3 servers now have koth_harvest_event in their mapcycle... twice on each server.

Here's a family portrait of the Mann family:
( Family Portrait )
From left to right:
Barnabas Hale (maybe?), Blutarch Mann, Zepheniah Mann, Elizabeth, Redmond Mann, unknown person.

Elizabeth looks suspiciously like The Announcer portrait that someone made before...

( The Announcer image )

Taking a cue from cal_renfro, I thought I'd try BrainHex out.

( Legend of the Seeker-Mastermind )

Seemed about right.

...comes out on Friday PDT for the PC. Those suckers people who buy the Wii versions will probably have to wait another month, seeing as how the last episode took a month to get to the Wii.

Oh, and why is the PDT there? Because one of the previous episodes (#2) came out in the last evening PDT, so it was actually Saturday in time zones east of it.

BTW: last episode had the return of Murray, the demonic skull... this time we get... Stan, Stan, STAN!

P.S. If you liked the Secret of Monkey Island Flash Film., make sure to watch the various "I Wonder What Happens?" clips on the Tales page for laughs... they're by the same people as the SoMI flash film, but they basically guess what's going to happen in each game based on the trailers and image galleries available for each game before its release.

So, by Valve's crazy moon logic, pre-loading the Left 4 Dead 2 demo actually only pre-loaded 36% of the demo, requiring you to download an additional 64% before you can play the game.

Prehaps someone needs to explain to them what "preloading" means.

I am displeased. Not only was the demo due out yesterday (see the updates to the Valve Time page on their developer wiki), but because I was at work and class for a combined total of 11 hours today (12 counting transit time), the demo's not going to finish downloading before I go to bed.