Phil Ringnalda has a nice post about update intervals in RSS feeds. After reading this, I’ve made the following changes in my RSS 2.0 feed:

<sy:updatePeriod>daily</sy:updatePeriod>
<sy:updateFrequency>6</sy:updateFrequency>

In English this means that my site is updated daily, but no more than six times per day, meaning an average of once every four hours. So if your aggregator checks my site, it knows this if it supports this feature. Of course, you can still force it to poll more often, but I’ve politely told it not to expect new content if you wait less than four hours between polls.

Also, I finally got Straw working. Now I have a nice aggregator in Linux as well. For Windows I’m using Feedreader.

There is a story on k5 about the problem with RSS feeds and polling intervals. Me being a mojo-whore, I wrote a comment listing a bunch of RSS aggregators for people to use.

Now this Tetris movie (12,7Mb MPEG) is just insane. I’m very much in doubt that it hasn’t been doctored to increase the speed, but it’s damn impressive playing anyway. Via Boing Boing.

I’ve studied media with focus on graphical design and layout, so this article (found via Splorp) about user interfaces for operating systems and programs was very interesting to read. I don’t agree with every point in the article, but it does have a bunch of good points.

Also in this article was a link to a book by Vernor Vinge, A Fire Upon The Deep, that I just have to read. Christmas is coming up, and I always love a good book…

It turns out there is a Yahoo group for Zombies!!!, the game I bought some days ago. It has a FAQ and a bunch of optional rules. Well, I haven’t tried the game yet, so I’ll wait some more before I start tacking on new rules. We’ll play Junta and Zombies!!! tomorrow, hopefully.

I should really have a look at Frag by Steve Jackson Games. It seems pretty similar to Zombies!!!, and has a cute disclaimer:

Update: I found an article from the author of Frag that describes how you can combine Frag and Zombies!!! for some zombie-blasting mayhem. Now I just need to buy Frag as well…

Weird news item of the day: Invisible burglar arrested in Iran.

While you’re at it you can masturbate for peace. Spread the love.

Magnus wondered if I felt like going to the Cave Club, but it’s a bit too short notice, and I’m still pretty tired from yesterday. And I’ve got some minor work to do.

Yes, I know that IE screws up the logo image. That stupid browser can’t handle the PNG format properly. Clear evidence that the market leader doesn’t necessarily have to be the best product on the market. Haven’t felt like working on the template code for a while, but it will be up sooner or later.

Need to get myself a new id card on Monday. The current one has expired.

VNV Nation played live at the University yesterday. Muchos great music. I hardly ever dance, but yesterday I danced. My hips are hurting today. I hope Magnus and Erika didn’t mind me grinding my crotch against their butts for the first three songs, but I didn’t exactly have anywhere else to put it. Quite a crowd on the dancefloor. Good thing my boots can take a bit of punishment without my toes hurting, since the girl in front of me bounced on them for the next two songs.

I think I’ll make a mixed CD with VNV songs and give to my mom for Christmas. I’m not expecting her to flip head over heels over the EBM/futurepop style of VNV Nation, but I think she’ll like some of the slower VNV songs like Airships, Solitary, Standing, Solitude, Carbon and Beloved. I’ll fill the rest of the CD with songs by Assemblage 23.

Ronan must really have liked the audience, since they played four extra numbers. First Beloved, then Standing and Joy, and finally Electronaut.

And here, your your enjoyment, are the lyrics to Carbon. It was incredibly powerful to experience it live.

A million points of light
Ascending to the sky

Monuments in darkness

Standing watch until the sun will rise

Screaming to an emptiness

How we deified ourselves

With our hands over our eyes

Claiming all of creation

What inspires in us this madness
That our existence should be defined

By a light that can’t be seen by anyone

What inspires in us this madness

That our existence should be defined

By a light that we can’t see

By a light that can’t be seen

A million points of light
Ascending to the sky

Monuments in darkness

Standing watch until the sun will rise

I can’t see this all as progress

How did we come this far?

When we see ourselves as deities

Claiming Nature for ourselves

By our actions we betray

The instincts in our race

By our blindness and stupidity

We kill everything

We kill… everything

Can someone see our self destruction?
Are we reminding ourselves

That our existance is

So delicate

That without this light we are no more

That without this light we’ve made we are no more

A million points of light
Ascending to the sky

Monuments in darkness

Standing watch until the sun will rise

We torch the earth until it bleeds

Rain ashes from the sky

Just to make a light that no one can see

We cut the earth until it bleeds

Rain ashes from the sky

Just to make a light that no one can see

Just to make a light

Just to make a light

We kill everything

By our blindness and stupidity

We kill… everything

In 1000 years what will be our legacy
a million lights that no one can see

a million points of light

Birthday party at Puh’s place tomorrow. She’ll be 23. Haven’t found a gift yet, but I’m sure she won’t mind me being a few days late with it.

game girl advance: Sex in Games: Rez Vibrator. In the quiet words of Mr. Anderson; “woah.” Choice quote:

Do all grrl-gamer articles include pictures of the authors taking off their pants and spreading their legs for the camera? Maybe I need to read this site more often.

Evil taken to the next level: the Ketchup Song as ringtone for your phone. Quoth the always eloquent Dean Allen of Textism:

It is the opinion of the author that this song — to paraphrase Glenn Gould — is twelve bars of brilliance surrounded by three and a half minutes of sticky tedium (no gimmick is left untried: from a wandering rubber-twang guitar lead on loan from ‘La Vida Loca’, to slatherings of futbol-arena organ, to a glib rhythm track so close and overproduced it might as well come in ones and zeroes). It’s the sort of instant dance hit that makes your ass move the first and second time you hear it; by the fifth you want to slice your ears off.

It’s a twisted world. On a side note, I’m currently ranked as #4 on Google if you search for “pure crap.”

The interview went well. They didn’t give me a straight answer, but said they’d do a background check on me and call me sometime next week. Sounds promising.

Went to Tradition to see if they had something interesting. Pondered whether I should buy a Scarred Lands module, or have a look at a new board/card game. I opted for the later, and bought a cute little game called “Zombies!!!”. Here’s a quote from a review:

Who doesn’t like a bag-of-zombies? That’s one of the many things you get in this Journeyman Press game by George Vasilakos (creator of “All Flesh Must Be Eaten”). “Zombies!!!” is a game for 2 to 6 players that challenges you to escape an ever growing army of undead while using your friends as human shields. Players take turns drawing cards and placing the tiles that create a doomed city as they fight their way through streets choked with zombies and try to reach the only exit a heliport on the edge of town.

To quote another review: “One of the best ’screw your neighbor’ type games I’ve played in a long time.” You’ve got to love a game that comes with a Bag O’ Zombies, containing 100 plastic zombie minis. Tradition also has an expansion adding cards and a new location, and a Deluxe Bag O’ Zombies with minis that glow in the dark. Cool shit!

I’m a sucker for card- and board games. I love them. Other games I’ll buy sooner or later include Munchkin and Chez Geek, both by Steve Jackson Games.

Well, tomorrow I’m off to a job interview at Pengar i Sverige, a company that basically counts money for other companies. Basically I’ll be counting money using machines as well as manually. I don’t know the specifics yet.

They require, and for a damn good reason, that you don’t have a criminal record (I don’t) and no financial problems (well, my economy is a bit tight, but they mean large debts and such, which I don’t have).

This will just be a short-term job during December. Then I’ll (hopefully) start studying again in January.

This is a job that will look good on a resumé as well. “Ooh, they trusted you enough to count very large amounts of money? You’re hired!”

Word of the day: cerulean.

I really like the style of the entire Earthling album by David Bowie. I’ve never been a large fan of him, but Earthling has a nice, electronic style that’s very enjoyable.

Discussing Christmas plans with Chris. I’ll spend Christmas with my family, and me and Chris are planning to have a “kitchen table gaming session” some time during the holidays. We basically put our ‘puters on the kitchen table and play games until we drop. Great fun. We haven’t done it for a long time, now that I’ve moved away from home and he’s studying elsewhere most of the time.

Natural Selection looks like a very cool mod for Half-Life. It’s not the first marines-vs-aliens mod, but it has lots of nifty features. The marines have a commander that stands at a terminal in the home base and can see everything from a top-down perspective and give orders and waypoints, and also build stuff and research new items.

The aliens, on the other hand, are more individual without a leader. Instead, they can sense enemies through walls and instantly know where the action is. They also build stuff, and evolve and gain new abilities when they build additional hives. Sounds like great fun. I’ll dust off my old Half-Life CD and give it a try some time soon.

Looks like I’ve finally managed to get somewhat proper sleeping habits — meaning I won’t go to bed later than two in the night. Hey, that’s pretty normal for me.

Since I’m easily amused, I found this image entertaining. Normal people wouldn’t understand.