Over the last two months or so, I’ve been homebrewing up my own setting/world for a Dungeons and Dragons campaign. It is a huge amount of fun–and a huge amount of work. The simple job of keeping facts and timelines straight once you’ve started is a gigantic thing in and of itself.
I realized that I’ve been working on this in a semi-agile way–perhaps more kanban than scrum, but fundamentally, if I were to work on a software project the way I’m working on this D&D world, you wouldn’t be able to say I was doing it wrong. I’m aping all the names of the principles here from people who know more than me, but it’s a little bit like pin-the-tail-o-the-donkey. You’re just sticking things where they belong.
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The context
I love eggs benedict. But I hate dishes. And I don’t even know how to make hollandaise, but I learned from my Grampy that it’s gotta be real, and gotta be fresh; definitely can’t be frozen or canned. Which presents a conundrum: I can’t make eggs benedict.
Except, it turns out, with some judicious ingredient hacking, I can.
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This winter break (which is something I haven’t had in some time–it’s fantastic!) I put together my own Confluence wiki. I’m really enjoying it because I’ve now got a place to dump all of my things that’s accessible to me anywhere, searchable, and pretty safe. I’m also using it to collaborate with the players in an upcoming D&D campaign, and the insanely fine-grained control Confluence gives you over access to pages is a DM’s dream come true.
Turns out, this was a pretty good learning experience for me too. It was a project and outcome I was invested in, and that started me off on the whole thing with excitement and momentum.
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The Context
So… I’m the kinda guy who has a ton of apps running on my Mac at the same time. And I’m also the kind of guy who has a lot of Menu Bar apps. You know, the ones that have icons up in the top right instead of say, the Dock. Which, for me, is kinda perfect. I have a dashboard with the really important information at a glance.
Problem is, you put enough information up there, that glance gets a little overwhelming, and after a while you stop looking.
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iTerm and Guake are terminal replacement apps for Mac OS X and Linux (Gnome) respectively, that offer a few simple, but absolutely game-changing tweaks over ‘standard’ terminals.
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If this is a blog looking at performance in daily life, one of the biggest questions we need to tackle is the question: who the heck is the audience?
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There’s something about online communications that disrupts one of the most fundamental aspects of the way imagine and understand other people: the lack of a physical presence. Beyond anonymity, the fact that the people we meet online exist only in our heads and on the screen changes the way we understand them.
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