I've been working on moving my personal code repository from Subversion to Git. My main guide for this is John Albin Wilkins' article on converting a Subversion repository to Git. In it, he outlines the steps he took to convert a Subversion repo to a bare git repository; he follows that article with another announcing a script that does all the heavy lifting for a user that has a number of SVN repos to convert.

I've been reading a number of articles recently concerning games, their reward systems, and addictive behavior. Some talk about classics like Everquest (Evercrack) or somewhat more recent games like World of Warcraft. Others discuss Facebook games like Farmville and Mafia Wars. Today, I read an article by a game developer about extrinsic vs. intrinsic rewards in a game, and how putting in quests in their game nearly ruined it.

Six more books since last update, so I'm a bit behind my projected curve. I'm getting Richard Kadrey's latest Sandman Slim tomorrow, and I've just started a book I acquired from my college roommate, but I've also got a nice list of books (and comics/graphic novels) I've culled from wandering through bookstores and pillaging my Wishlist that I hope to acquire from the library.

I love to read. I also enjoying owning books. As my shelves have filled up, however, I've come to re-learn the value of having a library nearby. Although I've been living in the Alpharetta area for a little while now, I hadn't managed to visit the local library until late February, when I took my daughter and we both acquired library cards.

As a Linux geek, I don't usually wrestle with Windows problems (but when I do, I prefer Windows 7); this week, I did a little bit of system administration and troubleshooting at work, since I could physically manage the machines in question. There's no doubt I need to improve my phone support abilities, but since I was available in person, I took advantage.

I'm in Boston(-ish), working out of my office for a week after coming up for PAX East. I didn't attend as many panels as I have in the past, but made up for it via various adventures:

Yesterday, I blacked out my site in protest of SOPA and PIPA. I figured the easiest way to do so was to create a quick custom theme just for the occasion, a minimalist theme inspired by BoingBoing's own SOPA Strike page. Further, I would switch my site to its offline mode, which meant I had to have a working maintenance page template.

Yesterday, Hackwater.com went offline in protest of the PROTECT IP Act (PIPA) and the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA). As an Internet professional, I oppose any legislation that threatens my freedom to work in my medium; SOPA and PIPA would put Hackwater.com in legal jeopardy if I were to link to a site anywhere online that had any links to copyright infringement, putting a burden on me to ensure that every site I link to is clean of any "offending" links.

Note: This post may or may not be inspired by Brandon's post about The Blogenning over at Extant Musings. Because when life gets busy, posting here falls by the wayside. Let's see if I can correct that...

This isn't necessarily big news, or even new news, but it's important to me: last June I became a Drupal module maintainer. I had previously submitted a couple of patches to one of the modules we use at work, and after some time without any comment, I decided to ask the module maintainer about it. He immediately offered me the position, since he hadn't been able to give the module the attention it wanted, and, with trepidation, I accepted.