Well, it's the first of May, and all the components of a plan I hatched right before moving (that would be a month ago) have more or less come together, so here's the skinny:

Starting today, I'll be trying to create a whole new album in a "short" span. It'll be called "A room of one's own" for reasons that will be explained in detail later. The idea is to create 10 songs in 12 weeks - that's 3 months, starting the first of May.

This idea obviously takes some inspiration from the venerable Jonathan Coulton's Thing A Week, but I am allowing myself 2 weeks of sucking hard and producing nothing, because I have found that ambitious tasks like this seldom pan out for me when they are projects for myself. For someone else, no problem. For myself, the follow through tends to peter out about a third of the way into something of this scale. This may well happen here, but we'll see.

Speaking of Jonathan Coulton, I do hope you all got outside for a bit today.

This process will be chronicled on the newly revamped TRB site, which still has broken navigation, but also has neato flash players and a slightly rebuilt header graphic, and is available here. The old version will remain at its current address until I iron out all of said navigation and flow issues.

[i said I'm sick and tired of winter]

I've considered changing this, but normally I'm not big on the "brief intro for a link plus link = entry" kind of entries, but this sent me into fits of hysterical laughter.

Escalator Sign via Fail Blog

[it creates the reason for its existence]

OMFG.

Fuck you, Mike Nelson.

[yay]

Well, I told a lot of people that I'd finally have my grand, much-blabbed-about-by-me site redesign up by the end of the year.

The year nearly got away from me, but I managed to get a fully gussied up and mostly functional version ready yesterday, thus beating the end of the year deadline by some number of hours that my bleary eyes and exhausted brain could not calculate.

Anyway, behold! http://www.patrickcentral.com

It's Art Deco styled! It has enough drop shadow to kill a team of oxen in its tracks! It has widgety things!

For those of you who saw it and liked it, the "Under Construction" curtain that I put up for the 31st is available here.

This was an important deadline for me to make not only in a "Jesus, you've been planning this for a year and a half" kind of way, but also in a cyclical, sentimental way. My first "real" site, real in this sentence meaning "hosted with an actual domain name I owned" went live on January 1, 2001. (Yeah, 01.01.01, get it. IT'S LIKE THE DIGITS WHAT COMPUTERS USE FOR CIPHERING)

Anyway, here we are 7 years later, and I'm consolidating the insane myriad of pages I have, domains I have, into one central train station type setup - a concept that has been kicking around for years now.

So, the concept has been around a while, the design has been bouncing around my head for over a year - it's not quite polished up yet, but it's nice to finally have something to poke at, and look at.

I'm quite happy with it, and though I will be tweaking it some in the near future (replacing the Feeds window with a Colophon, etc) it is already so many times better than what was up there that I just want to boggle at it for a bit.

Anyway, not that this blog is good for much else, but that's the end of my self-promotion. Check it out. It glows blue.

[do you believe in miracles?!]

I am not sure if I could possibly agree more with anything in this world than this Glenn Greenwald post at Salon.

And as Glenn notes, Atrios does a wonderful job of exemplifying the point by hyperbole.

I've taken yet another job outside the profession I sat in classrooms for 4 years to be a part of, because I simply can't bring myself to look at the state it's in.

And if you think I'm bandwagoning, I made a comic about this a good long while ago.

[the rage begins]