Life's been sort of exhausting lately. My job this summer includes teaching a group of pre-freshmen the material covered in our introductory programming class, not only so they can start out in the second programming course in the fall, but also so they can be of some use in the lab beyond just information gathering. It's just a lot of work keeping up with where everyone is (some came early, some later), while figuring out what to cover (I skipped this course, and it's been a looong time since I went through such a class) and attempting to teach them the thought process behind good coding, not just the syntax, all at the same time.

In other news, I've recently discovered Achtung Baby. It's sort of funny---I was first introduced to U2 a little over three years ago, but I've only really begun to explore their music in the last four months or so. Of course, two of those years were lost for most purposes, so it makes some sense. I found The Joshua Tree back in March sometime after they released their new album, and ended up listening to just that all of April and May (March was still mostly NLOTH). I tend to get certain songs stuck in my head and not want to listen to anything else. I think I listened to nothing but "Mothers of the Disappeared" for like a week in there. This is a good sign believe it or not... my mind being productive seems to result in compulsive music listening---those two lost years were filled with silence and my thoughts were mostly filled with fear and self-doubt.

Things by-and-large are looking up. I just need to get out more now... I don't really feel like I have any local friends anymore... a fair number of Bekannte but no Freunden and definitely no Freundin.

Every time I hear some company complain about how difficult it is to package for linux since there are often multiple choices for various libraries (probably most notably GTK+ vs QT), I really have to wonder what is wrong with just compiling certain products statically and forget the dependency issues? I realize that this makes the packages larger, and there will be redundency on systems that already have those libraries installed, but seriously... it's better than the software not working at all because your software depends on some hard-to-find library (cough*amazonmp3*cough).

So, I went ahead and bought an iriver P7, even though they've just barely been released. Unfortunately, it doesn't seem to want to communicate with my laptop at all. Not under Linux. Not under Windows. I know the USB cable is connecting, it was able to charge, and both sort of recognize it as existing, but not as a mass storage device. I was however able to get an older Mac and an older XP box to communicate with it... but I don't have regular access to those.

Sigh. I was so excited about this thing. If I can't get it to work soon, I'm going to have to return it and find something else I guess.

My first area in Retromud finally went in today. It's a little village and some of the surrounding countryside, located on the island of Sco'land. The backstory is roughly based on the Ballad of Tam Lin, a Scottish Border Ballad about a young Scottish noblewoman who rescues her elven lover from being sacrificed to hell by the Fae. I played with the idea of her being unsuccessful in her quest, and the consequences as they would likely be borne out in the Retroverse (where even the evil Fae are not really aligned with the Demons of Hell). The result is an area with a fairly dark backstory, though I'm afraid some of this is obscured by libral use of Sco'ish speech on the part of the characters. For example, here's my news introduction for the area:

They say 'at Tamalin was ance a cheil,
So fair 'at th' Fairie Queen stole heem awa'.
They say 'at Auld Maggie was his bidey-in,
Lang ago afair 'er hair was grey.

Auld Maggie li'es in Selkirk,
Near th' kirk hoose thaur.
Ain waits by th' auld well,
Fur 'er elfen knecht so fair.

'er granddochter Janit li'es thaur an aw,
With 'er guidman an' 'er bairn too.
Ain hae gart a life in Selkirk,
With a hoose an' shep an' coo.

But nae aw is weel in Selkirk,
By Sco'land's forests deep.
The Fairie hae their ain vows,
That cause mortals thaur tae weep.

Overall though, I think I accomplished my goals for this area. It has an involved backstory, it rewards paying attention to details, it has multiple ways to approach it while staying somewhat coherent, and it introduces a mechanics concept completely unique (afaik) in the mud. I hope everyone has as much fun with it as I have.

I'm going to go ahead and rebuild the system on my laptop. I've been thinking a lot about it a lot the last few weeks---there's been a lot of really cool stuff going on in slackware-current, and I didn't take good notes when I set it up last November, which has kept me from doing some things, like upgrading the kernel (I have full disk encryption, and I don't remember how I set it up and I need to to tell the kernel/initrd what to do). So this week, I'll do my standard backup to DVD of stuff I want to keep, figure out what I want to carry over or recompile after reinstalling, then wipe and renew. I might also try out Windows 7 in my test partition, though getting Windows to cooperate with which partition I want it to install in is always a pain. That's far from critical anyways.