03.31.2008

Hah!

by Casey

Got my XSPF player working again. Also, did “The Hand that Feeds” on Rock Band, despite the fact that it is REALLY HARD. Of course, it wasn’t the hardest performance that we got the best score on. It was “Dani California” by RHCP. Oh well.

03.30.2008

Hah! Now I have LJ and MySpace working on the same blog… I think. Anyway, I love mucking about in blog guts. Although I am not relishing the idea of moving to WP 2.5. It looks really pretty, but it’ll kill my LJ crossposting which is hanging on by a thread, and more than likely, will kill MySpace crossposting and several other plugins to boot. Oh well, I’ll just wait.

Been playing FF7: Crisis Core quite a bit. The Materia Fusion system is deep and requires much levelling. The DMW spinner has been criticized for being too random, but it’s based on SP and seems to trigger at VERY similar times if you redo a level after resetting. That tells me it’s less random that one might suspect. The story is awesome, especially if you know Final Fantasy 7 very well. Already have God of War: Chains of Olympus mostly finished. Just need a couple solid hours to finish up the last bit.

Also, Echochrome is friggin’ amazing. That is all you need to know. Buy it ASAP.

03.30.2008

Tinkering

by Casey

I had decided to fix a few things on my blog, maybe add the Myspace Crossposter, when I decided to change themes. Of course, it broke the whole shebang, and I ended up swapping my old theme into the default folder and then swapping back to my original. I’m not entirely sure why I always feel the need to change and make things better, but I do know that even when I don’t succeed, I learn something. That alone makes me happy right now, in the quiet cool-down after Shabbat holiness – studying and doing family time can take a lot out of me. So here in the dark, I continue to tinker with arcane coding and try to reveal my inner thoughts.

“It is the glory of God to conceal a matter, and the honor of kings to investigate.”

- Proverbs 25:2

03.26.2008
03.23.2008
03.23.2008

“What’s so unnatural about working for a big company? The root of the problem is that humans weren’t meant to work in such large groups.

Another thing you notice when you see animals in the wild is that each species thrives in groups of a certain size. A herd of impalas might have 100 adults; baboons maybe 20; lions rarely 10. Humans also seem designed to work in groups, and what I’ve read about hunter-gatherers accords with research on organizations and my own experience to suggest roughly what the ideal size is: groups of 8 work well; by 20 they’re getting hard to manage; and a group of 50 is really unwieldy.”

http://www.paulgraham.com/boss.html

This applies equally well to magicians and Kabbalists. Personal experience says that while 8 or 9 well-adjusted people can get along pretty well, our kind (heh, presumption) are rarely well-adjusted, so the number strays down to between 3-7 in real-world circumstances. Big gatherings ala Esozone and Pantheacon (much like company meetings) can mitigate this, but again there you’ll sometimes end up with one exemplar representing a group of people again. If the goal is to reduce the fractal scaling and maintain single plane of communication, options are limited. It also explains the backlash against ‘sheepish’ members of larger orders. It’s the wild ones trying to whip the tame ones into shape.

03.21.2008
03.20.2008
03.19.2008
03.18.2008

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