Mambo Rocks

Ok, so I'm in the process of setting up the Grinning Gecko website, and I decided to try Mambo. Wow, it's really cool. There's a lot that can be done with it with little to no effort. Now, I'm a big fan of Joel on Software, and I like what he has to say on a lot of things, but I'm sorry, Joel. I don't think I'll be buying CityDesk any time soon.

By the way, if you go to the Grinning Gecko site just now, it's going to look an awful lot like a default Mambo site with very little tweaking. Hell, it even says Mambo on it all over the place. I really need to get that figured out sometime soon.

But I also need to write an adventure or six to sell on RPGNow. This whole thing is a spare time kind of project, and I don't want to throw any more money at it than I need to.

But even before that I need to log off, take out the trash, and go to bed. I've stayed up way too late too many times this week already, and I don't need to be doing it tonight.

Steal Your Own Identity

So I was just kicking around JoS and saw a thread on identity theft and someone (Simon Lucy) commented on how ironic it is that people who steal identities usually have more fun with them than their original owners did. I just had the weird thought of "Man, that could be fun!" and then I wondered on why that is and how it works.

Identity theft is about being somebody else without consequences, but it's also about being who you'd like to be. The illegal kind of identity theft is irresponsible. It damages the original owner of the identity.

What I'm talking about here is to dare to be who you want to be. Take a chance. I'm not saying throw away your credit rating on stupid crap. I'm saying to ask yourself if you were a total stranger stealing your identity, what would you do with it to create a life you'd want to live?

Then ask yourself why you aren't doing that.

Ch-ch-changes

Last week our older Honda died, so Saturday we bought a new one. It's nice. Yeah, there's the extra cost for the "new car smell", and there are benefits to leasing rather than buying, but you know what? I'm real big on owning my stuff. That car will keep on working for 7-10 years after we're done paying for it, and maintenance on Hondas tends to be pretty low. They go for 200,000 miles and then they die The Death.

In other news, we finally got around to getting broadband. I have no clue why we took so long to do it, but it's hooked up, and the cool part is I got it to work with my wireless router with almost no problems at all. 802.11g is handy to have when you've been crawling along over dialup for years. Again, don't ask why we took so long to do this - I don't have a good answer.

Footnote

Just so you know, I'm well aware of the irony that I, in fact, did own a company, and that the only products it ever released were gaming material. I made many mistakes with that company that I won't be repeating, and it was best to dissolve it.

One of the mistakes made was that the company was made with no specific goals in mind - games, no wait pharmaceutical software, no wait software development tools, no wait games - and then when I settled on games I focused on just hardcopy role-playing games. (Even then I still bounced from games to other stuff and back.) Both the lack of focus and the overfocus were mistakes. My desire is games - only games, but many kinds of games. Board games, card games, role playing games, computer games. (I'll still tinker with writing that language, Lore, but it's a tool to achieve the end of computer games, not an end to itself. That's why I'm open sourcing it.)

There were many other mistakes I made in my company, but I won't go into them here, or at least not now.