Better than I was, not as good as I could be

[giza]

I got some of the mental/stress issues that came up in July squared away. The bad news is that I'm single, but the good news is that my relationship status is no longer in a state of flux, which is where it had been for the past few months. I value stability, and having my situation be in said state of uncertainty for some months was starting to take its toll on me. I still have remaining unresolved issues on my plate, but they are about a different situation entirely and there is little I can do about them right now.

On the physical end of things, I got casted for my orthotic inserts last Thursday. Despite there being high tech methods for measuring feet for orthotics, my pawdiatrist explained to me that in this case, the simple methods are the best methods. The orthotics are expected to arrive in another week or two. In the meantime, I adjusted the inserts in my shoes, and started lacing them much looser, and have seen lots of improvement on the pain levels. That makes things much more bearable than before. Things for my physical health will probably continue in this holding pattern until I get my orthotics, at which point they should start to improve. Hopefully that will also take care of my knee issues and I can make a return to the gym.

Over the weekend I bought The Orange Box, and have been playing Half Life 2 in my spare time. For the first time ever, an FPS caused me to suffer from motion sickness. It turned out that the fix was to adjust the view angle from 75 degrees to 90 degrees. That fixed the problems I was having. Also, I'm on Steam as DmuthAtHome.

I also installed the Ubercart Drupal module on my development sever over the weekend and was very very impressed with what they had to offer.

I signed up for an account on InkBunny awhile back, and seeing as I like the interface there, have been visiting that site regularly: http://inkbunny.net/Giza Their feature of having account preferences that can filter out specific tags is a Big Win, because it means I can completely avoid tags which do not interest me, and therefore save time browsing the site. It integrates nicely with their search feature as well. It looks like they're past 10,000 submissions, and the site has scaled pretty well so far.

I also just signed up for Tumblr. Anyone else on there? My account there is: http://dmuth.tumblr.com/ I like what I see of the service so far, in that it's like Twitter but with more "depth" (no silly 140 character limit), and like Facebook but without being quite as "busy" interface-wise. They still need to work on their social integration, though. I can't seem to find any sort of a "friends page" on there.

I've found that I've been drinking a lot less over these last few months. For whatever reasons, my brain no longer associates alcohol consumption with "having a good time". The tolerance that I used to have? Gone. All it takes is 2 beers, and I'm starting to feel happy and buzzed. Meanwhile, my collection of scotch and rum sits lonely and neglected in my liquor cabinet.

Due to better eating habits, and keeping off the weight I lost, I'm down 1-2 shirt sizes. At the beginning of the year I wore Large and Extra Large shirts. Now I'm wearing Medium and Large. I've bought a few smaller shirts to see how the smaller sizes work out, but need to make sure that I'm not going to outgrow them when I eventually get back to the gym after recovering from my current health issues.

Comments

Inkbunny

[greenreaper.livejournal.com]

To me, the killer features of Inkbunny are:
* Integrated digital download and print sales (including delivery) plus donations
* Multi-file submissions (think entire comics, but they've also been used for sketch pages/alternate versions) and bulk upload of multiple submissions
* A usable if quirky interface (subjective; some dislike the interface, at least at first)
* Fewer limits on image dimensions and file size than other popular sites
* Fast searching and filtering on tags
* Separation of work into pools
* Email updates

These mostly benefit artists, although the higher quality images provide a trickle-down benefit to viewers. It's probably worth a few minutes of your time to try it out, though.

The tools for moderators are also excellent, which somewhat makes up for not being able to use the filtering. :-p

Re: Inkbunny

[greenreaper.livejournal.com]

I think a little friendly competition is good, but it's not necessarily an either-or thing. Several people have taken to posting their better works for sale on Inkbunny while promoting them to their FA audiences, and we're quite happy with that arrangement - as long as artists make money that way, it helps support the site.

I think FA has had development issues. It would be nice if they fixed some of the more egregious security holes (//www.flayrah.com/c/fur-affinity-helps-users-fav-watch-delete-each-others-work). But in fairness, some features are hard to do well over a million database records, especially if web and database programming is not your forté. Even when it is, not everyone can take a year out of their life to create their dream website - yet alone recreate one they already spend hours running. It's a full-time job that most of us can't afford to do full-time.