Sources
Favorite authors
Patricia Briggs, Orson Scott Card, C.J. Cherryh, Neil Gaiman, Ursula K. Le Guin, Diana Wynne Jones, Robin McKinley, Terry Pratchett, Brandon Sanderson, Jonathan Stroud, J.R.R. Tolkien, Megan Whalen Turner
Favorite movies & TV
Arrested Development, Beauty and the Beast, The Bourne Identity, Corpse Bride, Dead Like Me, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Galaxy Quest, The Gods Must Be Crazy, The Incredibles, Iron Man, Firefly, Futurama, Kung Fu Hustle, The Lord of the Rings, My Fair Lady, The Princess Bride, Pushing Daisies, Shrek, Stranger Than Fiction, Zoolander
Hi, I'm Ian Beck. I like to make things, such as websites, fiction, and delicious pancakes.
DecemberDec 2 Wednesday Wed 09
Learning to love the one-off ExpressionEngine plugins for things like pre-parsing custom XML and displaying via EE template language.
Good thing I've got an old copy of the EE documentation squirreled away locally for use with Coda's books feature.
Oh, good grief ExpressionEngine. Could you not have waited until people don't need to access your docs before you took your site down?
Man, this XML developer is killing me. Gives me a feed with tons of duplicate info, then uses a weird timestamp that strtotime can't handle.
Arg, I've written code for this problem before but I can't remember for which project. Looks like I have to write it again, which is lame.
DecemberDec 1 Tuesday Tue 09
Man, absolute deluge of spammy Twitter followers today. Wish there were an easier way to block them than going one by one.
Adium must have been hanging out with the Adobe apps recently. "Adium unexpectedly quit" dialog right after I hit command-Q.
Wish more of the people I know on Facebook used Twitter instead. Their day-to-day thoughts/adventures interest me. Facebook does not.
Interesting; Twitter appears to be highlighting tweets with the word "AIDS" in them in red today on their website. Gotta say, that's classy.
Apparently some of my coworkers don't understand the amount of my time they waste by leaving questions unanswered in Campfire. Annoying.
The web is about tradeoffs between feasibility and budget that I carefully explain to clients. Why then do they keep expecting miracles?
Of all my various clients' webhosts, PowWeb has got to be the most incompetent of the lot.
Socialite feels a lot more polished than EventBox, but the user interactions still drive me up the wall. Why doesn't tab shift focus again?
NovemberNov 30 Monday Mon 09
Unless you're related by blood, are someone I'd hang out with on a weekend, or your site is completely broken, DON'T CALL ME AFTER 6:00.
Both computer and XBox games hurt my eyes after a while, but at least the XBox means I'm sitting in a different chair.
The main problem I've had completing Avernum games recently is that I find it much harder to complete computer games compared to XBox ones.
Avernum 6 is out! I don't think I finished either 4 or 5 (thanks to my attention span, or lack thereof), but I might have to buy it anyway.
In the EE forums: "Query strings passed to the homepage are misinterpreted as the first URL segment." "That's a feature request." Uh, what?
I guarantee the second bullet point for Structure's "what's new in 2.0" list took them maybe 10 minutes. Because that's the code I wrote.
Awesome. Structure 2.0 uses some code I created for Structure 1 and shared with the devs without crediting me at all. Thanks, guys.
NovemberNov 29 Sunday Sun 09