I'm just experimenting. I hate the word "blog" and am fascinated with how the net seems to nurture *everyone's* vanity.
Philocthetes's Articles
March 29, 2016 by Philocthetes
Hi, I don't know how long my hiatus was (I missed the chance to be a GalCiv3 Founder), but I'm quite sucked into that game. Doing some typing related to the beta 1.7 made me start looking around at stuff and I have to forum functionality questions: 1) If the Forum Issues board deliberately not available at forums.galciv3.com or am I just failing to read the screens properly? 2) Is there now a policy that locks threads after a period of inactivity? I hit My Posts and saw all my o...
January 16, 2012 by Philocthetes
Thanks to the Great Recession, I've escaped a direct business need to adopt Win7 and also have not earned enough disposable income to try playing with it myself. Market conditions have also seriously suppressed my interest in reading about said OS, so I'm left in some kind of fogie-newbie land and hope Stardockia can answer a basic question about generational change in the MS OS family. I've had access to some Win7 rigs in a workplace where I can still earn as a contractor. I'...
September 24, 2011 by Philocthetes
So, last Monday, along with all of you who are also customers, I received a truly annoying (pathetic?) mass email from Reed Hastings, CEO of Netflix. Mr. Hastings called it an "explanation," but I'm still waiting for an apology for this message that had the word "apology" tucked into the bottom, snugly wrapped in an overall tone of arrogance. My concern is not really about the price hikes. They vexed me because I hadn't been interested in streaming and was suddenly told it was part of...
August 2, 2010 by Philocthetes
I appreciate the value of a refit as part of getting ready for release, but the change to a black background for the forums is awful, at least for readability. The new home page looks sharper and the black is OK there because it isn't a big reading thing. But please, please, please tweak this tweak so we don't have to read white on black forum threads for the game's life cycle.
March 15, 2010 by Philocthetes
Thread looked open from My Replies list, but the main lists show the lock icon. Thread itself is definitely locked.
December 29, 2009 by Philocthetes
Right now, the latest timestamp in the Last Reply column on my My Posts page is from Dec 26, but my bug/gripe on diagonals and another post on item-dropping both have activity since then. Last Reply info looks normal to me in both general browsing and the My Replies page.
December 17, 2009 by Philocthetes
So this network still pronounces its name sci-fi even though they felt a need to change the spelling to gibberish that reads "siffy." ECW remains on their lineup, along with a stupid 'reality' series that seems to be spawning spinoffs, so maybe they really shouldn't call themselves SciFi any more, but still... How can folks who've milked the Stargate franchise to the max and gleefully ridden the success wave of Moore and Eick's Battlestar Galactica not consider it their fiduciary and aestheti...
August 12, 2009 by Philocthetes
I hardly know where to begin laughing and/or raging about this unbelievably Dilbert-Is-Real interaction between the the Lego brand management people and the Spinal Tap guys who liked a fan's Lego stop-animation video enough to include it in their recent tour. The story is so damned kinky-- not so much the fun kind of kinky as the confusing folded-protein kind of kinky. Very hard to tell where the jokes begin and end...
May 20, 2009 by Philocthetes
I wanted to hunt up the old wilderness thread for a reference link, and I knew that Geoff the Slug was mentioned in it, so I used the local search box and entered "Geoff the Slug" (quotes included). The search only returned two hits, both for NTJedi's terrain types thread. But when I ran the search from Google proper and added the site:forums.elementalgame.com delimiter, I got four hits for four different threads, including the one I wanted to find. That seems a little broken to me, but I'...
May 11, 2009 by Philocthetes
I've had my Vista box since too soon after the bits went gold and have diligently kept it updated. Why is it that I am still seeing very inconsistent (or no) reliablity when I use the 'new and improved' search function? I still have no real idea whether searches have ever been accurate on this box. I often need to search several tens or hundreds of files in a subfolder set for strings like "Feature X" and I need both filename matches and text content matches. When the set I'm working with is ...
March 28, 2009 by Philocthetes
I thought Colbert was jokingBut it appears that " SyFy " is indeed the future name of the ever-frustrating Sci Fi Channel. The funniest (scariest?) line in the TV Week article is a quote from the channel's president, Dave Howe: "We really do want to own the imagination space." Is it any wonder Dilbert is so successful? So many working CEOs really do say vacuous things like that in all seriousness. I find this branding meltdown really odd timing what with the channel seeming to finally be find...
March 1, 2009 by Philocthetes
There's a very long thread page in Elemental Ideas. When I try to view it in FireFox, the last bits of the last post are cut off and there is no reply box nor final page boilerplate (other than the (c) block, which looks to be outside the table that contains the posts & reply box). When I view the page in Opera, I see all the text of the last post, and the page bottom I'd expect to see without being signed in. Has this particular argument found some character or line limit for thread...
November 17, 2008 by Philocthetes
I've been working from home for several years now, but I've been sitting on the same cheap task chair that my mom bought me when I started my full-time undergrad studies back in 1991. The pneumatic thingy that keeps my overweight derriere in the air is starting to fail, the thing never had ergonomic features worth the name, and, most importantly, I finally have the capital to make my first serious investment in my home workspace. I've admired Aeron chairs since they came out, but mostly for t...