Tech Rants

I just signed up for Twitter as sircorby.

Theoretically, this will automatically be posted to my livejournal, if not delaflamme.org.

I'll use this for major events of the day at the war, like "arrived without trauma or drama," "really stupid hot," "raining tomcats and hoehandles," "broke my femur in the bridge battle," "garlic chicken bread bowl for lunch," "Atlantia kicked everyone's ass," "left site for beer and the 1:15 Dark Knight in Butler," and so on.

Hell, that could almost be my whole war right there. Hopefully not the femur stuff.

Oh, and PACKING IS DONE!!!!!!!

Not my normal SCA stuff, but this is really important. Please contact your senator about the FISA bill they will vote on soon. If Congress passes this bill (the "FISA bill"), it will become legal for intelligence agencies to bulk-wiretap American citizens without a warrant, using data-mining to listen in on millions of Internet and phone connections Please tell them this:

I'm a constituent and I urge you to oppose telecom immunity and the FISA Amendments Act. As a constituent, I am very troubled that during this patriotic holiday season, the Senate appears ready to toss civil liberties and the rule of law out the window, and so I urge you oppose telecom immunity with every vote that you have when the FISA bill comes to the Senate floor on Tuesday, July 8th: Vote "YES" on the Dodd-Feingold amendment, which would strip telecom immunity from the bill entirely. Vote "YES" on the Bingaman amendment, which would delay implementation of telecom immunity until after Congress has received the Inspectors General report on the president’s warrantless surveillance program. Vote “NO” on the cloture motion to end debate on the FAA, And finally, vote "NO" on the FISA Amendments Act, an unconstitutional and dangerous bill that would radically expand the president's spying powers and immunize the companies that helped him break the law.

Phoning them is best. If you aren't comfortable doing that, google them. Most every senator has a "contact me" form where you can make comments. More details here.

What Every American Needs to Know (and Do) About FISA Before Tuesday, July 8th from Tim Ferriss on Vimeo.

Anyone needing to email Thjora for the next 2-3 days is due for a delay. Our DSL modem died spontaneously last night and the new one will not arrive until Tuesday or Wednesday at the earliest.

By the same token, my internet communication will be limited to at work or via my dumbass blackberry.

If it wasn't born, does it have to be 18 to authorize?

Waiting around for a week for an answer that took one click to implement, but now the site is back up.

Let me know if you see anything strange--or at least anything strange that isn't supposed to be strange.

Coming soon: Brash Black Tie Billionaire Bash pics, more fun stuff.

See, I can make anything medieval. Though it isn't Norman.

Okay friends, I've now completed a bunch of upgrades to functionality and appearance for this site. Now we're running the newest fanciest version of Drupal 5.1, with some new layout and new graphics. Tell me if you see any problems or liked things better before.

For all you people who use LiveJournal, this site now has Livejournal Crossposting enabled. In fact, I've set this so things you post here will show up in your LJ (or DeadJournal if you set it up that way) by default.

To make this happen, first you have to have an account here. Then you have to edit your account settings here once. Click on "My account" on the left, then click on the edit button. Fill in your LJ/DeadJ info.

From then on when you go to the create content link you'll see some LJ options. If you don't want to cross post whatever you're writing here, you'll need to deselect that option.

If you prefer it to work the other way--to have to choose to cross post, let me know.

And last, do you think more people would read this stuff if I set up a real LJ of my own instead of just that syndicated feed? I would never reply to comments on that journal. This will always be the primary place I blog.

This came up once before last April, but Theodora just brought it up again.

LiveJournalers can read this site as part of their friends list. Theo writes:

Hey, I figured out how to make the feed from your blog appear on livejournal

http://syndicated.livejournal.com/delaflamme/profile

(Theo listed a different URL--this is the older, more subscribed one.)

So now people can use this feed to add your to their regularly read LJ 'friends' list.  Also, people can leave comments to the "user" created by this syndicated feed - I couldn't figure out how to turn that off since you'd probably never see the comments.  (I posted a comment to today's armored rose post on the LJ user http://syndicated.livejournal.com/corbydelaflamme/3740.html?view=668#t668 as a test - I'm too dumb about XML/RSS to understand if this would get posted back to delaflamme.org but I think not.)

Thjora broke the antenna on her cell phone last week. (Hey, I've broken mine 3 or 4 times.)

So I lent her my phone for her trip to Alan and Genvieve's.

This morning, I found one of my replacement antennas, so I attached it to her phone. So now I have Thjora's phone and she has mine, until Sunday. So keep that in mind if you need to reach either of us.

I had been holding off on getting new phones because I wanted to see what the iPhone would be like. Now I think that the combination of cost (very high) and Cingular (terrible customer service and signal at our house) may send me to some other phone soon. But man, that iPhone is sweet.

Our current 3 year old  phones have held up pretty well, aside from the terrible terrible fragile antennas on the v60i. I have a v60x now and that antenna is durable.

They're not very sexy though.

Update: We both have our respective phones back and working now.

Hey friends with web sites,

Do me (and every clueless newbie hunting for SCA info on Google) a favor.

Put a couple of links to this site on your site. In your "links" area, if you have one, link to the main page.

Find some article or blog post here and link directly to that in some post of yours. There are almost 600 entries of one kind or another from which to choose.

It pisses me off that that kooky "Trick of the Eye" manual is on the front Google page  for "SCA combat" and this site isn't.

Thanks. Here's some example code, if you need it:

<a href="http://delaflamme.org/site">House de la Flamme is one of the few SCA Combat Blogs, and a resource for all kinds of SCA info.</a>

And to those of you who have already linked once to me, much gratitude.