David Raynes

Every time the Olympics come around (most the summer ones) I always start to delude myself into thinking I could complete once again in the sports that took up so much of my time in high school (and that I enjoyed immensely).

Unfortunately, the only masters water polo (my preferred sport) team on entire east coast is in DC and that just isn’t going to work for me. You can’t shake a stick without hitting a masters team out in California, but it’s pretty barren out here.

So, second (but still good) choice is masters swimming; there are many clubs nearby, with hours I can actually make most days (i.e. really really early). The issue, unfortunately, is the ~$750/year in dues and fees. On one hand, shelling out that much (seems standard to do it quarterly) would certainly do more to motivate me to actually go swim than almost anything else. On the other hand, though, is the fact that, well, I can be a bit flighty and this wouldn’t be the first time I’ve tried to get back into swimming.

But, I need to start doing some form of exercise. If not for myself and my health, for my boys (who, I must say, are totally ripped for two year olds. I’ll get they could do like three hundred push-ups each). They deserve a father who can at least attempt to keep up with them. My biggest problem (as it is with most people) is motivation. While doing it for the boys will go a long way, competition will always be the number one motivator for me. Exercising with a goal. Getting healthy is just a nice side-effect.

Last night I whipped up one of the smallest plugins I’ve ever written. It is so small in fact that I was able to stuff the entire thing into the plugin configuration file, config.yaml. It adds a configuration option for mt-config.cgi that will pre-populate the path field in the asset upload page.

name: Default Upload Directory
id: DefaultUploadDirectory
version: 0.1
description: Sets the default upload directory

config_settings:
        DefaultUploadDirectory:
                default: assets

callbacks:
        MT::App::CMS::template_param.asset_upload: >>
          sub { $_[2]->{extra_path} = $_[1]->{cfg}->DefaultUploadDirectory }

Drop this into mt-dir/plugins/DefaultUploadDirectory/config.yaml and make use of the new config setting DefaultUploadDirectory in your mt-config.cgi file if the default value of assets isn’t going to work for you.

Pat’s Fantasy Hotlist: THE NAME OF THE WIND is now available in paperback:

Only the Bookscan numbers are in (it will be a while before we get a full tally), but it looks as though The Name of the Wind has surpassed the sales of both George R. R. Martin’s A Game of Thrones and Terry Goodkind’s Wizard’s First Rule.

Woah! If it beat out A Game of Thrones and Wizard’s First Rule, I am going to have to check this book out. I really enjoyed those two books, especially A Game of Thrones.

According to the Associated Press, Arthur C. Clarke has passed away.

[HT: Charles Stross]

Well, somebody else is giving away a copy of The Last Wish. Over at Pat’s Fantasy Hotlist, there are four copies of the book available. I’ve already sent in my entry!

I am really looking forward to The Last Wish finally being available in the US. I have heard nothing but good things about the series.

Thanks to Orbit Books for linking to the giveaway, and for both getting the book to the states and making it available through a fellow blogger!

Movable Type News A WordPress 2.5 Upgrade Guide:

And of course there are lots of third-party plugins for the MT dashboard, to integrate statistics and information from third-party services like your number of FeedBurner subscribers.

It’s always fun when one of my plugins gets, well, plugged by the Six Apart folks.

Charles Stross (scifi author, D&D nerd, and former perl columnist) posted Politics as she is Played with 3d6:

The recent death of Gary Gygax, who together with Dave Arneson invented Dungeons and Dragons, coincides with a most interesting period in the American Presidential primary season, as three hopeful monsters slouch towards an appointment with the polls in October or November or sometime around then. (You can tell how much attention I pay to US politics.) Anyway, in an attempt to correct my woeful ignorance of the state of play, I decided to turn to AD&D as the analysis tool du jour, and consulted my battered copy of the Monster Manual in hope of shedding some light on the crypt.

The rest of the posting includes stats for the top three candidates. Go take a look!

(HT: Scalzi)

Geek Love:

Gary Gygax died last week and the universe did not collapse. This surprises me a little bit, because he built it.

Complete with very fancy looking flowchart tracing Gygax to Google, among other things.

(Hat tip: SF Signal)

Having not been able to attend DDXP last weekend, I queried a few folks I knew that went for their impressions of the upcoming new edition of D&D. Here are the responses I got.

xkcd had a wonderful new comic posted today: