MaW’s Blog

I’ve been ploughing forward fairly heedless of things recently. I’ve not blogged much, I’ve not really spent much time on IRC or anything like that either. My days are split between work and not-work, and not-work is largely consisting of sleeping, eating and procrastinating. Must stop that.

Occasionally I get off my behind and do something though (and sometimes I even get on my behind in order to do something, but this doesn’t usually involve a physical change of position, unless swinging the chair around to face a different computer counts). Recently I’ve been working on getting Towel ready for a 0.3.0 release, which I think is fairly close now. Various UI improvements, bugfixes and vastly better file metadata support. I even have some extra features planned for 0.4! Hopefully no 0.3.1 will be required in the mean time. Towel’s also got an autoconf build system now, so I should be able to write an ebuild for it without too much trouble. That’s one of the things on the list for 0.3, although it can be written just after the release as it’s not really actually a part of it. I wonder if I can get anyone to try the ebuild…

In other things, I’ve also been working on version 3 of The Westlands Tower. In case anybody doesn’t know what this is, it’s a Wheel of Time-based roleplaying site, where roleplaying is in the form of collaborative fiction rather than D&D-style dice rolls, skill points etc. It’s also known as ‘free-form’ roleplaying, and basically consists of people using some kind of forum-like system to gradually expand a tale by writing segments of it from their own character’s point of view. I’m looking forward to having Westlands v3 up and running, so I can put some energy into roleplaying again. My copy of ‘A New Spring’, which is the first of three prequel novels to Wheel of Time, arrived yesterday and I’ve been reading it avidly. It certainly has more information about the White Tower that we didn’t have before, and of critical importance to a site like Westlands is the format of the test for Aes Sedai, and the raising ceremony which follows, along with some inside info on the Blue Ajah. All good stuff, although it’s weird seeing scenes written from Lan’s point of view. I don’t think he has any viewpoint scenes at all in the main series. Very much looking forward to the next two prequels, and the final two novels in the main series of course!

What else? Ah yes. I’ve started regular Tai Chi classes again, having finally found and contacted a local Yang style class who do probably the closest to the variant of the Beijing 24 form that I’m going to find outside Universe Tai Chi. Some of it feels very weird, but it definitely feels like Tai Chi as I want to do it, which the Taoist style never did. I feel all relaxed and glowing for a day or so after the classes now, although it wears off quicker depending on what work’s like. Tempting to start doing Chi Kung in the mornings.