I've had several.

Simultaneously, I've had several thoughts on which way this post was going to go.  Originally I was going to go along the vein of a blog post from Zauber Paracelsus (which outlines the "nymwars" debacle to the date of that post, people embarking on "Project DeGooglefy" and alternatives to Google services).

Then I was going to do something or other about G+ and Facebook and problems with centralised social networks.

Somewhere in there I wanted to write about the DiSo project (which appears to have died), and projects such as Diaspora and Friendika, and how I'm wanting to attempt to help with everything, and where I'm going to expend most of my efforts.

Then I started wondering what all those people that aren't me want.  Build it and they will come maybe, but "they" still need to have a use for it and be able to use it.

Since I first got together with Josh, I have heard stories of the farm which has been in his family for generations (or at least, his grandparents ran it, and it's now owned and operated by his uncles and their family).  It has a name but is just referred to "The Farm".

For the last seven years, Josh has told me he will take me to "The Farm".  For various reasons, we never quite got there.

Recently, I found out that the place isn't a collective hallucination.

There is a house in those trees.  It's a bit of a dark splodge in the photo.  On the other side of the tree to the right of the white thing.

The farm is a decent size, and got some pretty scenery.  I couldn't piece a decent writeup together (and the farm visit was a couple of weeks ago now), so have a bunch of photos.

3d-bek wonders what in the hell is going on and what we're getting ourselves into :)

I'm quite pleased with how my rig is turning out.  Little niggly fine tuning things on the arms, but I (finally, because I iz slow) worked out that I should turn off the heading and pitch channels on the shoulder and use the collarbone to control those, and point the elbow with the shoulder's bank channel.

Sasquatch is awesome.  The hand is angled a bit strangley but the hair is automagically avoiding the fingers :D

Low level antialiasing, no cloth dynamics yet, still working on textures and hair.

A friend introduced the kids to the My Little Pony remake some time ago and with the starting of this blog post this song stuck in my brain (had no help whatsoever from the kids watching it a few times ;).

My Little Pony Friendship is Magic "Winter Wrap Up"

So I'm a bit late for "tomorrow spring is here", we're about halfway through the first month of spring as humans like to count it.  I think spring came a bit earlier than September.  As far as I'm concerned it's spring when the weather and the flowers say it's spring.

Speaking of flowers, our plum tree is looking rather pretty.

Flowers on the plum tree

Following on from hiding unwanted elements in comment forms, I found this tip on one of the many threads in Drupal of people trying to hide the pesky formatting guidelines and came up with:

template.php

<?php function [theme_name]_form_comment_form_alter(&$form, &$form_state, $form_id) { $form['comment_body']['#after_build'][] = 'remove_tips'; } function remove_tips(&$form) { unset($form['und'][0]['format']['guidelines']); unset($form['und'][0]['format']['help']); return $form; } ?>

That gets rid of everything but the fieldset container and for the roles that can use multiple text formats, the select box (the "Text format" label can be easily removed with $form['und'][0]['format']['format']['#title'] = ''; in the comment_form_alter).

Here was supposed to be yet another whingepost about how I'm doing everything wrong and there is now nothing that I "can" drop.  So I'm going to see if I can somehow write myself into doing "it" right.

The computer room is a f***ing mess

There is more crap than there should be on the desk.  Most of it is paper that needs to be filed or recycled, and I have just been too damn lazy to process them into the appropriate location.

It needs to be cleaned up, if just so I can find the stuff that usually lives on my desk (phone, wallet, Lightwave dongle) easier and the cables are slightly less likely to get tangled.

This time for the arm rigs.

The "blue" arm is using IK boost.  The "red" arm is in default T pose still but is using the original rig which was modified from the leg rig (which works really well so far).  The elbow directional on the arm just wasn't working.  I have ikstop on the collarbone and handles on the elbow and hand to make them that bit easier to see and grab.  Need to remove the elbowD bone from the right hand rig (it's the red bone pointing downward), reorganise the bone hierarchy and apply ikboost to that.  Then have to associate all the sliders with the hand bones seeing as I won't be needing the IK goal nulls anymore.

Last night's bizarro dream is probably going to prompt interpretations of changing points of view or something to that effect.  It was my first thought when I finally managed to peel my eyes open this morning.

I was in what appears to be my room at Crazy Dog House (big room, always same layout, sometimes differently decorated, though the bed appears built in or extremely heavy as it doesn't appear to move or change), I found some old contacts (which I have never owned never mind seen before) in crazy colours.  I got it into my head to try them on.

I just haven't been writing about it.

Last week, Tao drew a picture of Venom from Spiderman with black whiteboard marker on paper, including sounding out the name and checking with Josh after writing it out.

This week just gone has been crazy.

I hang around on LinkedIN.  With Google+ in its invite-only "field trial" stage and people writing blog posts raving about it, LI's Questions have been inundated (or maybe people just aren't reading before posting, how unusual) with "Is Google+ a Facebook killer?" style questions.

Same question all over teh interwebz by anyone who cares to write a blog post about it.

Other similar ones that pop up are "Is [this shiny new Blackberry|Android thing] an iPhone killer"?

It's kind of a stupid viewpoint to take.  Unless of course you're a marketer and you're desperately trying to make people believe that THERE CAN BE ONLY ONE and your thing is it.

No.