It’s not the hottest summer I’ve seen, but this heat has lasted for a long time. And I can’t really have the windows fully open for a nice draft; about two weeks ago April decided to jump out from an open window. I didn’t really expect her to try to jump from the second floor… She was away all night, but apparently stayed nearby since I propped the door open in the morning and refilled her food bowl. Two seconds after the rattle of food in the bowl she was inside again.

It’s a tough life outside — there’s nobody there to refill your food and water bowls.

The biggest news right now is that I’ll be moving back to Stockholm in early September. I’m going to give another stab at studying, but the main reason is that I miss my friends and I have nothing to do down here. Studying is mostly so that I can apply for a student loan and afford the rent. Getting an education and a good chance at a job through the school doesn’t hurt, though.

For starters, I decided to quit school. Back in 1997 I suffered from a severe depression, and parts of it have tagged along until this very day. I don’t really have the energy to focus on both studies and on my personal wellbeing right now; and if I have to choose the answer is obvious.

It sucks that I had to quit when I only had the last semester left, but it’s for the better. Now I will have time to focus on myself at my own pace, without the projects in school adding their weight to my shoulders.

But I still got a fair bit of knowledge with me from school. Maybe not that much that’s actually new to me, programming-wise, but it did open my eyes for .NET and ASP.NET, which are actually great platforms. Despite being from Microsoft.

I actually got a nice idea for a programming project the other day. One of my friends is the lead programmer for xmms2, the next generation of the xmms audio player.

XMMS2 is a redesign of the XMMS music player. It features a client-server model, allowing multiple (even simultaneous!) user interfaces, both textual and graphical. All common audio formats are supported using plugins. On top of this, there is a flexible media library to organize your music. See the features page for more details.

We are a whole bunch of people who hang in the same IRC channel, and a lot of us have a lot in common in our music taste. There’s been some discussion about setting up a server with a jukebox, where we can upload some music, have it played, and have some request features to move a song to the next position in the playlist.

I’m going to write this from scratch now. There already exists one called Otto, but quite frankly it has a horrible interface and was pretty annoying to configure.

So I intend to make my own, using Ruby on Rails and a really spiffy interface featuring that latest buzzword, AJAX. I’ve even gone so far that I registered a SourceForge project for it. The grand unveiling will be in a week or so.

That may have something to do with the fact that I started playing a MMORPG. EVE Online is a major timesink. It’s not an obsession (”I can quit anytime I want!”) yet, though. But it still manages to be quite the timesink. More on EVE in a later entry.

I haven’t made any announcement about it yet, but if you’ve visited the site outside of your news aggregator of choice, you have probably noticed the domain switch.

The bomb will not start a chain reaction in the water, converting it all to gas and letting all the ships on all the oceans drop down to the bottom. It will not blow out the bottom of the sea and let all the water run down the hole. It will not destroy gravity. I am not an atomic playboy. Vice Admiral William P. Blandy, Commander of Operation Crossroads

I’ve had “I am not an atomic playboy!” as my IRC name (not nickname) for years and years. I heard the quote as a sample in song by Purple Motion and Skaven, made for the now classic demo Second Reality.

I didn’t really think much about it, but I stumbled upon the quote again the other day. And then it clicked: that would be a perfect domain name! Lo and behold, it was available as well.

I will have an easier time establishing a visual identity for the phrase “atomic playboy” than for “frozen skies.” So effective some days ago, atomicplayboy.net is the new domain around here.

Thanks to some DNS magic, any request to the old domain will be transparently redirected to the new domain. I’d appreciate it if you changed any links here to the new domain, though.