Iain M Banks is dying.

I am shocked.

I have tremendously enjoyed reading his novels, becoming lost in his ideas and  imaginations, becoming inspired, becoming thoughtful. I was looking forward to his next novel, simply taking it for granted as we all just take tomorrow for granted. But now there never will be another one.

I feel sorry for all the future works which are now lost, and I am grateful for what we were allowed to have. I feel sorry for the man behind these ideas who comes across as an intelligent and humorous person.  I wish him peace in his final months.

As someone else said: Glanding Grief now.

Yesterday’s xkcd called “Time” is simply a beautiful and unique piece of art. It enfolded over the course of 24 hours 48 hours and counting, and it took me literally ages to figure out what was going on. Amazing!

The final picture, and the end of a 24h piece of art Or maybe there is no final picture.

It is over now, but you can check what actually happened on the indispensable explain xkcd where there is also a preserved speeded up version.

I really love the site, and the creator Randall Munroe. He has done some of the most thought provoking and touching comics, as well as some of the funniest. And he does not pull any intellectual punches, simply assuming that you are smart enough to figure things out.

It is also fascinating, how his drawings are as simple as they can be – stickfigures! – (although he is obviously able to draw perfectly well), but this is in contrast – or maybe even as an enhancement – to the deep and intelligent content.

(I may point to some of my favourite of his comics in future posts…)

(And yes, I have bought his book!)

Update: It’s actually still ongoing! Apparently the tide is rising, and the castle is being carried away – pixel by pixel?! How great is that!!

Update 2 28/03/2013: And I got it completely wrong on every front – it was not finished at all – instead, it shifted, pixel by pixel to the left, revealing an even bigger castle, and the two characters were doing lots of other things (which I missed as I had to work). Shame, that I used a permalink, instead of copying and pasting the image, I would have been able to demonstrate better what was happening when I wrote the post. But – time waits for no one, and so this is on some level strangely appropriate…

In any case, I have no idea, if it is even done yet, and this post seems now completely inaccurate – except my original point, that xkcd is utter genius!!

Update 3 01/04/2013: I feel pretty stupid, and my post here is making less and less sense. It is still going on after more than 4 days!!! The picture now changes every hour – the characters have built a second castle, then threw rocks with a catapult at them, then went for a swim, then did more things I missed – and now the female character is building a huge pile of sand in the middle of the castle… I have no idea how and if this will end.

I am tempted to delete this post, and write a completely new one, but that seems like a cop-out. Let’s just say, that this whole thing was even more genius than I initially thought, and no one really knows what to expect… I won’t update this post here anymore – go to xkcd if you want to find out, how it ends, if it ends ever at all.

Got my first spam comment today, yeah!

The lovely and talented Michael Kors Bags (Is Bags his surname? Does a spambot even have a name?) made this valuable comment on one of my posts:

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I am so pleased to learn about the toast colours so passion these individuals! I feel musing!! Thank you, sheepkin Michael Kors Bags, for safeguard these individuals! Is certainly!

Anyway, looks like I need to activate the WordPress spambot filter in order to deal with this sudden spike in popularity.

Trying to fix my fixes led to a complete meltdown of the site, with all kinds of permissions screwed up.

Thankfully, the amazing folks at MacHighway responded promptly to my cry for help, and everything is up and running again. Wheew! – Thank you, MacHighway!! That is excellent customer service.

I shall now not even look at this site anymore in order not to break it.

Anyone else still wondering why this thing is called an “experiment”!?

So I managed to nuke my entire website today, and there was only some error code gibberish up, when you tried to access it. (I am sure this was just the day when I was just simultaneously linked from Daring Fireball and Reddit, and millions of visitors tried to come and read my hilarious witticisms, and had to leave again empty and disappointed…)

I had set up a second site (which for some reason ended up a subfolder in this site here), and then used Freeway to upload a brief “Under Construction” page. Of course, having no idea whatsoever what I was doing, I managed to upload the page to the main Thoughtexperiment.net site, and overwrite WordPress.

Thankfully, I still had a backup, but trying to use Transmit to upload it led it to just crash after crash. Transmit is supposed to be this awesome FTP-software, that every Mac-pundit seems to be hyping, so I was a bit disappointed – shouldn’t it at least say why it crashed? (I assume it was because the files on the server were somehow still in use – I mean, what do I know?) I have sent two crash reports to Panic, so we’ll see.

Anyway, copied the backup onto a different folder on the server, and then renamed the folder. Now we seem to be back in the game. Sheesh!!

Update:

Nope. Still broken. The main page is there, but clicking on any post itself just brings up a 404 error. Not good!

(Edit 21-3-2013: Removed some mildly snide remarks which were uncalled for. Let’s keep it classy!)

Okay, so I managed to figure out, how WordPress publishes images full scale, and updated every one of my image posts (as I said, thankfully not many!) by hand.

Now all of my previous posts from Posterous are okay, and I can have a look, if I can find a theme, which I like.

Incidentally – the WordPress dashboard seems amazing. Lots of options, and I have still not figured out even a quarter of it. I think I will have lots of fun with WordPress.

And don’t even get me started on the web hosting control panel… As I said, I bit off way much more than I can chew.

The experiment continues… now in earnest.

So – I may have bitten off more than I can chew here.

Today, I got myself a new web host at MacHighway. They were offering 6 months free webhosting for Freeway Express users, so I finally decided to take them up on that offer, as I needed to move from Posterous.

I also moved my Posterous web site from Posterous to WordPress. The importer did not work properly – like in, at all! -, and after going through some support FAQs, I used a beta version of the importer (by downloading it, then copy-and-pasting it into a web form on the WordPress dashboard), and managed to import it.

However, all the images are the wrong resolution. That is apparently a known problem with the import. Also, of course, the default WordPress theme kinda sucks.

So I may need either to update every image manually – I don’t have that many posts, thankfully – but I have no idea yet how – or try a different way of importing, via first importing to the WordPress.com website, and then import again from there.

All of this sounds like I know what I am doing – and honestly, I have no frickin’ idea!

Scary and exciting.

(And this post may disappear after trying another import… But the sentiment remains!)

So this is amazing!

Just as Posterous is imminently shutting down – as I so eloquently predicted -, I got myself the thoughtexperiment.net domain!

Last time I checked, thoughtexperiment.net was run by a utterly weirdo semi-squatting guitar strings company while thoughtexperiment.com is being sold for a bazillion dollahs. And today, I just completely incidently checked again, and weirdo semi-squatting guitar strings company has apparently given up the domain. I immediately grabbed it, and hopefully it will be active soon.

Unfortunately, I can only rejoice until the 30 April, when Posterous will go sublime and all of this will be flushed down the Internets. Which is a shame, because I always thought the reason I never did some proper blogging was due to not being able to have the domain name I wanted.

Anyway, I need to see if I can move this blog somewhere else – and start a new chapter in the saga of relentless firing of neurons!

(I am still not doing anything with this blog, but that may be because it’s so awkward to post with Posterous. Oh well.)

Anyway, I realised that I promised when I started out that I would talk about the font I am using for the title.

The font is called Clementine Sketch and I found it here.

It has been created by the very talented Teagan White and she made it available for free which is amazing of her!

There is a little trick to using the font – you need to start every word with a capital, and finish with a “^”-character, in order to have the beginnings and ends of the words closed.

I really like the playfulness and sketchiness of the look.

Thank you, Teagan, for creating this!