May 2, 2005: Randomness

I've had a very scattered few days, so here's a scattered Illuminator.

Shuffling Along

Finally got my iPod Shuffle (I know Apple insists on decapitalizing it, but that's stupid and I'm not playing). My Shuffle isn't playing either. It is just a bit too wide to fit in one of my USB ports while the other one is occupied. Trying to do so interferes with the connection, so the Mac complains and the iPod flashes its little "I'm hosed, start over" sequence, and it seems that the problem has now wedged iTunes so badly that Force Quit won't make it stay dead. I'm going to try rebooting, but not until I quit work for the night. So I have had this thing for 48 hours now and haven't heard any music. But at least the battery seems to be charged.

A Convention Report I Didn't Write

Usually I'm on the WRITING end of convention reports, so it was fun for me to hit the page today and find Howard Tayler's report on Penguicon. A large part of said report is devoted to the Chaos Machine setup which he supervised there. It went well. If it looks like fun . . . I'm going to have it with me at Marcon in Columbus at the end of this month. Come see!

And speaking of Howard . . . he recently had an amazingly bad experience with a webhosting company, and just because reading stories like that makes me very grumpy, the above link points to his narrative. So just in case you were looking for a webhosting service, there's one NOT to use.

GURPS Lite

You'll remember that a few months ago we asked for volunteers to translate GURPS Lite into various languages. Well, it's happening. A lot of people and teams are partway along, and a few have actually made it back here for layout. Layout in an unfamiliar language is . . . challenging. But we'll be posting at least one translation very soon, I do believe.
-- Steve Jackson

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