Whimsical.nu

Welcome to a Whimsical Blog~

Hi, I'm Angela, a girl with a blog on five different psyches:
girl, geek, reader, writer, gamer
Choose your poison ♥

Bowling (right into the gutter)!

I haven’t gone bowling in a long time. I don’t do very well at it, my coordination is bad and my throwing weak! To illustrate:

0 - 0 - 0

What, it’s not golf scoring? :D I did so poorly in the first game that on the third round in the second game (shown above), they put up the gutter guard rails for me. Yes, my dear friends, I managed to sink the damn 9kg bowling ball into the gutter with the guard rails up. How’s that for skill! :D I saw the local kids in the lane next to us laugh along with our mad capering and cheering at my amazing talent. ;)

Well, the ball managed to ricochet along the lane and hit something after that ;)

By the end of our three and a half games, I thankfully was able to get a spare without my ball meeting any of the guard rails! Only once, but it feels like an accomplishment already! I had cut my nails short for this (apparently not short enough–my thumb’s nail still has some tearing) and I’m thankful it wasn’t all for naught.

Maybe I should try some more!

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A geek’s realization

Laptop workI was out for coffee with a couple colleagues a couple week ago, when a thought came into my head and only when I said it out loud, did I fully realize how true it was for me and how sad I was at finding out how I’ve changed:

A few years ago–especially my last year in college and a year or two after I graduated–I enjoyed developing for the sake of developing. I didn’t care who would see it and use it, or what it would bring me: I only cared that I enjoyed making these things, and that they were useful to me in some way. That gave birth to the small hobby scripts in my archive, to the multitude of sites I used to own.

Now, I feel this pressing need that what I make/develop needs to either be profitable at some point, or game changing. It needs to matter to a lot of people. It needs to be significant to people.

And then I never get enough steam to carry me through more than a couple weeks to get it out. Since I am creating for the sake of some imagined external return (in various forms), even if I do love the idea (i.e., one of these ideas have been in my “plans” since more than five years back) it’s never been enough to keep me going on to completion.

(Some say this is why a “co-founder” is important, because you get to have the support you need to keep you going and fueled, but that’s for a different time.)

A friend suggested, well, why not redo those things you did, but this time in HTML5 and CSS3 and use AJAX and all that? But that’s exactly the thing: I don’t feel like redoing them anymore, aside from the occasional spurt of ambition. I have the expertise, but I don’t feel like redoing them for nothing, “just for the hell of it”. However, once I give my little project a goal, I get embroiled in doing it “the right way”, and I end up in that sad little hole that is called over-engineering. Which I dislike, and end up abandoning.

It is a disheartening realization. I have this need to be purposeful (likely a symptom of growing older?) in what I do, but I soon lack the joy in creating as I used to do. There is no drive to make something without a “purpose”, but there is no love in making something tailored for one.

But, a light at the end of the tunnel! As I’ve mentioned before, most of my hacking had been brought about by my learning something new. I don’t think it has to be anything really significant sometimes–I’ve had fun hacking together a few dirty WordPress plugins for my own use, for example. Baby steps, but steps all the same.

It’s never too late. :)

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Trusting the Giants

Locked doorI came across Jason Calacanis’ What I Learned from Zuckerberg’s Mistakes article recently–actually, a long sort of recently–and I’ve been thinking a lot about it. I’ve been trying to figure out how Facebook “fits” in my “onlineering”, and the article comes at a good time.

I’ve been online for a long time. I made my first website in 1998, and while I know there are lots more who have been in this industry for much longer, from high school is a long enough time for me. You might say that I had the best of both worlds–I experienced early adolescence without the Internet, but my late coming-of-age was influenced by it. I don’t trust the Internet, but at the same time I’m not fearful of it.

I realize though, that that’s pretty subjective.

For example–I wish I liked Facebook more than I do. A good number of my friends seem to swear by it, who are active on it, and seem to have vibrant Facebook-lives. I don’t, and I don’t think I can ever have one: I just don’t like Facebook.

The sheer power they have is amazing. The features, the experience, it’s all quite well done. The article above outlines their methodologies and practices. The movie The Social Network gives a glimpse at its beginnings.

But I don’t like them. I don’t trust them. It’s a mix of my perceptions of its founder (charismatic people can easily transform the people around them), the sheer scale of the service, and the past (and present) blunders they’ve had in handling user privacy. I dislike the fact that so many web accounts nowadays require you to sign up using your Facebook account (I’d usually just skip the websites in question).

But then, I do trust Yahoo!. A part of it is likely because I work in Yahoo! and I know first-hand the measures taken to protect users and their privacy. To be sure, sometimes I think, ugh, do we really need to go through all of these hoops? but I don’t worry that my data is being leaked on to other networks and websites and applications with Yahoo!. I don’t begrudge their mobility and flexibility–and it certainly sounds like an exciting place to work at, as a developer–but I’m very wary of them, as a consumer. (Sadly the people who are wary are in the minority.)

All that said, I find the juggle between fast-and-reckless and slow-but-safe interesting. There’s a fine line somewhere there; and as consumers it’s really just knowing how much you can handle in the features deficit and/or information slippage, and learning to live with that (or not at all).

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Closet clean out

One thing that I finally got around to doing during the Chinese New Year holidays is to do a bit of closet organization. I tend to “live” in my Threadless t-shirts and jeans, and I’ve always had that itch to have the best organization possible. That doesn’t mean to say I’m never a slob, because sometimes…uh, yeah. BUT! The long break made me bored, and that meant I finally went to tackle my closet.

Before anything else, though, can I say that I am extremely jealous of people who have walk-in closets? That is one of my house goals someday–to have a walk-in closet of my own. To have so much space to organize things in! Shelves! Racks! Drawers! Hooks! Oh my. Can you not see the possibilities?!

Ahem.

As it is, I have two full-length wardrobes, and a chest–specifically this Ikea Engan wardrobe and the accompanying chest of drawers. I love them too, the full-length wardrobe has a mirrored door and I’ve angled it just right so that I can use them in tandem to see a bit of what I look like from behind.

So I dumped out my clothes (well, not all at the same time, but almost) and started sorting them out. A good number of them are going away (recycle, or possibly send back home in case my sisters want them), a number is in storage (i.e., “I love these too much to part with them so I will wear them again when I can fit in them”), and two items need to get mended first. The whole ordeal (yes, it is an ordeal) took most of the day, but I’m really glad I went through all my clothes, because I discovered:

  1. I have a lot of relatively casual dresses I really love, which I should really start wearing. Most of them were bought last year but never worn!
  2. I have a good number of tops (although half or more than half are t-shirts), but bottoms should get expanded in variety; and sorting through my clothes, I know just what I should be getting, instead of just haphazardly buying things.

I’ve never really had the chance to organize the closet since the move, as one really needs a bit of thinking to organize one’s closet, i.e., which side to put the pants on, and the coats? Top drawer for the intimates, or bottom? Where do the socks go? And all those life-and-death questions.

My closet

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Ready, set, pull!

I have my two mains (don’t laugh) to 85 now, and decently geared: Tala has been raiding, and Eilonwyn good enough for heroics and maybe a Baradin Hold. Tala is discipline healer main spec, and shadow off-spec; while Eilonwyn is arcane and frost.

Earlier this week, I realized exactly what kind of play style suits me. Planning suits me. Pre-strategizing fights and what I do in them suits me. That’s now evident in the specs and type of play I like: I prefer PVE to PVP because I like being able to plan what to do and when, discipline healing is basically “pre-healing” by mitigating and absorbing damage, and arcane play style relies a lot on how well you plan and sync up your burn phases.

Say what?

This realization came about due to two things:

First, I ended up raiding at 5fps, because we had no healer cover for that night, and I did not realize that the Mumble overlays were wreaking havoc on my FPS (I realized after the raid. GG). I have never been more thankful of my mitigation that night: blind shielding+hasted Prayer of Healing can just about make it, although it won’t get one very far (overshooting mouse turns and running past stack points will get you killed, folks).

Second, I bit the bullet and changed Eilonwyn’s secondary spec to fire, because the number of frost instants just isn’t ideal for my latency. Initially, I thought that maybe since I was doing alright with my shadow priest spec, I can go fire now with its DOTs and all and work that out–right? WRONG.

It’s not like shadow priest dots, where you refresh them just before they run out, and cast other stuff on cooldown. I was even better with the mage frost spell priority, with its multiple instants; the problem I was having with fire is, how to align the goddamn DOTs for Combustion, y0. I set up my auras and everything, and I know I just need a bit more muscle memory to get it all down pat, but when you finally get the insta-Pyroblast and have the dot up there, Ignite or Living Bomb or freaking both might be down to, what, 2 seconds before they run out, but you need to hit combustion now now now!!. *dies*

Arcane is great for me. Arcane rewards the prepared: knowing when the best time to burn is, shifting your rotation according to your mana levels. It sucks for mobile fights, though, totally. Can we get Firestarter for arcane, please? On the move but hit less, maybe? Kthxbye.

So what now?

I’m a big believer in enjoying the game. It’s a game, you should play the way it’s fun for you. No one should ever feel forced to raid if they don’t feel like it, just because it’s “expected” of them. In the same way, I don’t want to play a spec I get a lot of frustration from (I think I’m a bit too obsessive-compulsive to hit Combustion while all three dots are not up). Sadly, arcane is the weakest mage DPS spec at the moment, and I don’t feel comfortable asking for a raid spot when I’m going with the weakest DPS spec. I know that arcane still puts out well for certain fights…but those fights are a minority. :/

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The move to GitHub

Laptop workA couple of weeks back, I finally bit the bullet and opened a GitHub account, and moved my linkware, available scripts over there. In addition to that, I also moved my scripts to GPLv3 licensing. There were a lot of thinking and internal debating over these actions, which have “visibly” started when I posted about choosing between GPL and BSD licensing (the choice I took is obvious now, of course).

These changes are both exciting and bittersweet. I’m psyched about GitHub (peering at other people’s code in such a sexy interface is exciting! really!). I’m a little sad, as well. Putting the scripts on GPL for me symbolized a kind of letting go. It’s not throwing in the towel and giving up on these scripts of mine–I still want to work on them–but I feel that this should have been done a long time ago, if I only knew how loooong it would take me to get updates and new features out. By now, Enth codebase (or any of my other scripts’ codebase) is probably close to monolithic. It certainly looks quite dated! But putting it on GitHub means it’s easier to get changes out, faster, and less of an “event” as it is when I was hosting it.

What does this mean, though? It means if you have a hacked version of Enthusiast (for example) you’ve been wanting to release but couldn’t, you’re free to now, however and wherever you like, as long as I’m credited and it’s released under the same license. You’re now free to offer services to install and configure Enthusiast, as I’ve heard a couple of people doing. You don’t need to ask my permission to do either of the above.

It also means I’m free-er to iterate on my work without needing to bundle them into nice and shiny organized releases. It means that if there are updates, they get out there faster (hopefully!). It means less management on my part, and more coding.

Here’s to more git repos in the future! (Again, if you want to get to the scripts, they will be at github.com/angelasabas.)

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