Spent the morning busying myself to avoid running myself up walls about something I have no way of reversing or making better. Suffice to say, I dislike people who break into cars even more now. Plus I drew an utter blank on a song request. I've not been helpful to others thus far this morning.
This did force me to get PatrickCentral.com's main index up and running, though, instead of sitting and watching Family Guy in a slothful fetus-like glob of too-coldness and self-loathing frustration. For some reason, the two levels of my home operate in different climates, despite the vents scattered throughout the house all theoretically being connected to the same HVAC system. This has resulted in a blunting of my recent productive streak, as I find myself more and more frequently caught in paroxysms of utter coldness, and the blankets sap all my willpower.
Aaaaaanyway. Here's the skinny on PatrickCentral's new role. Beyond being the root site for this here blog, it's basically going to be the Reader's Digest version of it. It will be a succinct and well-organized list of my recent creative output, as well as a link to all my various online presences. To that end, I've prepared some pre-dated entries as examples, and you can check 'em out. The template does still need a bit of tweaking, but it's functionalish.
So, if you don't feel like wading through all the self-serving shit I slather up here to find the latest TRB song, or see when the last time I updated any of the writing projects I have going was (it's been a while, but that will change), there's your handy pocket version.
This morning, I also joined the club of people who decorate their laptops with stickers. I'm not proud of this, but at least it's not one of those Euro-style oval stickers with OSX on or an M$ one with a circle and a line through it.
Speaking of, Finn, I need your mailing address yet again, because I always seem to forget if this one is the one before the last move.
Word to the wise: anyone who doesn't wish to risk serious eye injury, do not wire up 4 superbright UV LEDs in series to a 12v power source and look directly down at them. Holy jesus. I was seeing spots well into last night from that.
More updates on other topics later.
[this is one tasty bear]
Welcome, one and all, to Server 44, in a corner of an office building in Michigan.
For those of you who participated in the shortlived PatrickCentral.com experiment, thank you for putting up with my incessant nagging. It was a miserable failure in every respect but one, however - and that one is testing how good a hosting provider you can get for 4 dollars a month. Turns out, quite good.
So, I'm moving my blog here. If you're reading this, you should be seeing the fruits of a long night of transportation labor that should appear almost entirely seamless to the user, aside from some changed-around archive #'s, and the fact that I finally polished up the individual archive pages. Soon there will follow the newly redesigned PatrickCentral.com, which fits with the more my-creative-escapades-hub feel I originally purchased the domain for. The fark-like experiment may rise again, but it probably won't be on this server, or domain. The title was too egocentric for my taste anyway. I don't mind an ego trip for my own creative endeavors, and the blog here, but for something that involves other people, it's too divisive. And who knows. Diginanity tends to lend itself well to that underlying concept. In all likelihood, though, I'll pack it into the museum of failures, and eventually stop hoping to craft communities.
As far as the blog, the old address will work into the foreseeable future, because I've linked that thing all over hell. Hopefully you'll all notice a definite increase in speed - I can promise you there is an increase on my end, in terms of the server processing updates and so on. Moving the whole thing over here forced me to do a lot of long-overdue streamlining, also.
The TRB site will, for the moment, remain on diginanity.com.
There are a couple broken links at the moment, (for example, the 'writing' page, which is being redesigned) but for the most part the blog is all lights green. I still have to go through the existing entries and fix the archive #'s for when I've referenced my own blog, as well as a couple in-entry images.
As you can probably tell, I'm doing a lot of online reshuffling, so there will probably be more entries of this type - which is to say, mind-numbingly boring - but I find it helpful to document all this crap for myself later.
So, welcome to server 44. The control panel you log into to administer the astounding options this hosting company gives you actually says that.
Welcome to Server 44.
[brave new freaking world]
I'm too tired to do a proper thanksgiving weekend recap right now, suffice to say, Thursday I had Wednesday night's leftover spaghetti, drove down to Atlanta, did little, and wrote the preceeding entry.
Friday was our actual family thanksgiving, which mainly consisted of my mother cooking turkey in exchange for myself and my brothers installing two sinks and a new vanity while my dad was out of town. This may sound hollow and awful, but you just have to know our family. We have a good time of it. And we did a damn fine job on the new vanity. I also got to see my nieces and nephew, which was cool. I convinced my mother to save this picture of my niece Caroline, which I have dubbed "Whyyyy Yiii Yaughta..." I should point out that the baby is not drunk, the picture was simply taken in the midst of her falling off a cabinet. It's a stunt baby, people, no one was in any real danger here. You can't see the blue pad, etc, please don't call child services.
If you want to see a more cutesy picture of her, here's one.
That was a surprisingly tiring day, and I fell asleep, woke up, fell asleep, on and off again til mid freaking Saturday, at which point I did a laundry list of things for my mother that are boring enough I'm not even going to write about them. And I write blog entries about anything.
After that I managed to sneak some more time with the Leslie, and thanks to her will probably never be able to have a dessert again without thinking whether or not I've dug any holes under fences lately. But I mean that in a nice way.
She had a bunch of things to do, including waking up for work at 8, so after she finally managed to get rid of me, I had what was probably the best drive to Athens I've ever had. That's where I'm coming to you live, right now.
Since being home, I made a couple new bits of TRB art that I'm not gonzo about, but am mulling over.
As it turns out, that's a pretty good summary, even though I meant to keep it brief. Ah well.
I have to get up and do some things during working hours tomorrow, and this is bible-belt Sunday working hours, which is basically from 6am to noon, so I should probably close this out.
[plenty of sunshine, plenty of hay]
This one gets a little mushy.
A long time ago, a friend of mine told me a story. She was a very close friend of mine at the time, and I was one of the few guys in her life who was not actively trying to hit on her or use her for something, though in the interest of full disclosure, I did eventually sorta hit on her. Successfully. At the time, however, I was just a friend to her, and did what I could to make her life less tedious, because in addition to simply being nuts about her, I felt I owed her a debt of gratitude.
Anyway, in the course of being me and being captivated by a female, I did various funny, sweet, or silly things in an effort to impress her or distract her from my other obvious failings, and the things that were not going well in her life. She was one of those who participated in the great change of my personality, but one thing about me that’s always been there is the attention whoredom.
So, back to the story she told me. At this point in time she was dating a guy somewhat seriously, either Mischa or Jon, I think Mischa. I’m pretty sure it was him because I probably wouldn’t remember this story all that fondly if it were Jon, because he was a dick, and also because I remember Mischa having a computer, which is an integral part of this story. This story, which, though really quite short, I am somehow stretching to insane lengths. This may be because I am unintentionally distorting many of the less salient details of the story, because it's been an awfully long while.
So Mischa, while not a dick like Jon, was not mister perfect boyfriend either; I do have to give the guy credit, though, for when I later met him, he was amiable and held no bitterness. Anyway, chief among this guy’s imperfections, as I recall them, was his possessiveness. As we all know, there is of course little in this world that independent-minded, free-spirited women love more than possessive men. I am being sarcastic, but somehow while actually knowing this rationally, this guy was like this anyway.
One day my friend is utilizing this guy’s computer, at his suggestion, to reconnect with the circle of online nerds she had been largely without since she lost her own computer and net access. Being one of the few among these big honkin’ nerds to keep in touch with her via the phone and snail mail, I knew of this in advance, and had sent her a little email.
I can appear, if nothing else, charming and sweet until such time as you learn all my numerous faults. So, this particular email was a gesture indicative of me when I’m being sweet, which is to say, well-thought-out, personalized, and based on tiny nuggets of information that reveal the degree to which I listen to the most minute details of those who capture my intense interest. Plus, I think it amused her in a way that I seemed to have a unique talent for.
Anyway, everything’s going as planned, and her day is brightened, and I consider myself one tiny bit closer to repaying her for what I consider the incredible gesture of being female and not being repulsed by me.
She told me that after that, she had a special kind of smile, one that I genuinely but somewhat sorrowfully hope someone else has found a way to elicit. She described it as simply that, a special kind of quiet, ear to ear smile she couldn’t describe but seemed to come only from me. This is the kind of thing I live for. This is the kind of moment I can get through hundreds of lonely nights on. I mean in an emotional sense, you insensitive clod.
But, it got even better. Well, for me, anyway. As the story goes, Mischa comes in at this point, and sees this smile - this smile, that, at the time, I’d have given anything to be able to see, and reminiscing over the later instances of it, will never in all my life forget. He knew she was intending to talk to me, and had in fact enjoyed the relationship benefits of being the guy who got to do the menschy thing and give her the means to contact those she dearly missed. Walking in on this smile, and following the “Cockyness is the sure fire way to reduce our relationship tension” guidebook, he says to her, “Hey, that should be my smile.”
You see, many women have a special kind of way their face lights up when they see the person they love, and you can see it if you’re a careful study of female behavior. In my experience, it’s often in the area right around the eyes. I don’t think it’s strictly a female thing, however, by and large, outside of movies, guys are not particularly sensitive or emotional, and are far more likely to say “It’s about time” than “My God, I’ve missed you.” Anyway, this guy was bright enough to know most of that, and made his best stab at trying to convey that he was sensitive enough to know he was being robbed of the joy of providing something he was not very interested in providing.
And where many women would have their happy moment blighted by this, she simply stood up, and said “Yeah, well, it’s not.” She wasn’t rude, there were simply things he did not own about her.
Now, I bore no real ill will toward the guy, nor do I now, aside from him being a less than perfect match-up for my good friend, which isn’t really his fault, just who he was. But the point for me at the time was MY SMILE WAS BETTER THAN YOURS, I RULE, SOMEONE PLEASE GO OUT WITH ME. I reveled in this point because I was in no position to benefit from this action in any way other than her happiness, and in my view that gave me license to gloat to myself as much as I’d like. It also reassured me that I had something in me to offer to a companion, and with my self image being what it is, every bit of reassurance of that is worth the world. She was still firmly with the guy, though, and I still had no one, and no prospects, and so any delight I could get from his agony was blunted by that. I was simply happy to have brightened her day in a way she was apparently not getting regularly.
Since she told me that story, I’ve always cherished it, and not because of any competitiveness or anything to do with him, but simply because of this special smile, and the sort of mystery and joy the concept held for me.
I’ve been somewhat sad over the years that I’ve not really had a similar reaction. I loved the concept of that smile so much, I wished to share the kind of feeling that eliciting it could cause with others. But I think it’s like love, and you simply can’t fake it. Platonic as it was, the sincerity of it is unimitatable, the sheer emotional core of it – the kind of knock-out feeling that leaves those who mock anyone who uses three words when they could use ten speechless – simply has to happen of its own accord, and no wishing will make it so.
Today I was lucky enough to have had such an experience, and luckily not even from some dorkus who I wasn’t even dating or capable of dating. I was driving back to Atlanta, and listening to a song, and I found myself with the most peculiar smile.
Today, I got my special smile. And there was nobody to walk in and wish it was theirs. No mismatched person that I had to remind of that. I got to live out the above story today, and without all the unfortunate, ironic parts. I got to take a story that has warmed my heart for years, and have it take on a whole new meaning as I appreciated firsthand the feeling I was so happy to have caused. And now, I get to tell that to the person who caused it.
And I really can’t tell you how wonderful that is.
Though I just got through with a lengthy phone call with that person, I don’t think I managed to properly thank her. I didn’t tell her much of this story because I wanted her to read this, since I'd already written most of it. So, I guess I can use that to my advantage.
Thank you.
[we'll ride them someday]
A new TRB song is available.
the rage box - cosmic string theory
I gave up on this one partway through, because it's so unmetric it makes looping anything reliably an impossible chore, and everything I tried to add to it sounded like atonal ass as a result. So, if it sounds unfinished, that's why. It's still 2:11 long, and really is just a single string riff I liked so much I kept globbing crap onto it. I got a new pack of string samples and wanted to give them a whirl. Still, it does something for me, but it may just be the mood I was in when making it, one of wistful thankfulness. Which brings us to today's actual post.
Tonight, I'd have been thankful if it was Thanksgiving or April. It's a cooincidence, but I figure, hey, why not treat it like providence and milk a sappy but overdue entry out of it.
(As an unrelated note here, due to a phone call I recieved while writing this, I would like to note that I will now probably never forget that in Final Fantasy IX, the Pisces Stellazio is in a place called Invincible. Having not played the game, I am able to generate my own context around this, and the irony of it makes me laugh hysterically. Now back to our program.)
I have been pretty bummed for the past day or so, as the somewhat embarassingly scatterbrained last entry will attest to. Like Wil, though, I'm pretty committed to letting that LAME stamp singe my permanent record, and I'm leaving it up. That's me.
Bummed though I may be, I'm still thankful in general.
So, I take this thanksgiving day to thank the great many people who make my day to day life something I feel grateful for despite my own crippling mental neuroses. Those who still put up with me, and encourage others to do so, and those who lift me up when I get down about those who've made it clear they don't want anything to do with me. I can't really think of much I've done to deserve any of these people in my life, and can think of quite a bit that should dissaude them from being in it, and if that isn't a call for gratitude, I don't know what is.
So, to all the people out there who for some reason still call me friend, thanks be to you. I have it pretty sweet, a privileged life, and yet I'd still be miserable if it weren't for all of you. I am an awfully petty and jealous person, and the times when I acknowledge how ridiculously unrewarding it must be to wade through the crap those traits bring on are too few and far between.
Everyone have a happy and undercooked-stuffing-salmonella-free day.
Jesus.
Note to self: check email before writing long entries.
I'm going to close this out now, as I have to shift gears in my writing, and don't even want to risk crossing tones.
[and here i had this perfectly sincere entry]
I'm so tired, and yet I can't sleep. And am suddenly quite worried about my stance on tattoos.
I guess I might as well mechanically log the goings-on since the last entry, since it will at least keep my fingers busy. I cannot trust my brain at the moment.
Saturday I started and completed work on the recharge table. If you look at enough of the pictures, you'll eventually figure out what the hell that's all about. I'm pretty happy with the way it came out, but it was an exhausting day. I was also on the phone most of the day - to Leslie, to my mom - it was a nice, productive day, but a draining one, and I was already working on a pretty strong lack of sleep. Seems like every day for a week has been an exhausting one.
Sunday, I cleaned, and cleaned, and cleaned, and cleaned. Boxed up some more stuff to take to Atlanta, and made some brownies. Sunday was not a phenomenally interesting day. I do make some pretty kickass brownies, though.
Monday, the rain came hard. I packed up some stuff, drove through the monsoon to Atlanta, and listened to my mom tell me the same 5 things she told me Saturday. Then I got to see miss Leslie for the first time in fo-eva, and had quite the whirlwind of an evening. I had a hell of a string of luck in lottery tickets from the place across the street from her work, had one of the hottest goddamned chicken wings of my life (thank you Ass Reaper) and went to a bowling alley I thought I'd never seen before, but in fact had driven by many, many times. Never once through all this was I asked to put a paper bag over my head, and I feel better as a person for that. I also nearly punched a guy for something he did in high school. Then, later, took some refuge in the fact that he'd apparently become a crackhead. Then, still a bit later, I felt bad for that. At some even later point, I engaged a mad quest for an example of pornography starring one specific girl, whom I've since learned was a math and physics scholar, went to college in Siberia, and majored in Optical-Electric Systems. She's like the Dolph Lundgren of porn. It was an interesting evening, but unfortunately one I didn't sleep much after, which I think is affecting me right now.
Tuesday, or, for this entry's purposes, Today, I got to spend nearly the entire day with Leslie, and it was fantastic. Sadly, we had to part back at her work, and right around there began the head funk I'm still trying to navigate my way out of. Though I'm done with the back-and-forth head battle that raged from that parking lot to about Oconee county, feel considerably better, and have shut off most of the things my brain was trying to do to make me miserable, I still retain some guilt for bogarting almost the entirety of the first day off she's had in God knows how long. That was such a side issue to the main battle, and I suppose if that's the only thing I know is still bouncing around my stupid head, that's progress. Here's hoping a night of sleep will allow me to reflect on how truly wonderful the time was, and wipe the time since then away.
the thing is, he loves laura, and his heartrending visions are based not on his feelings about her, but his own insecurities
I suppose I will try to go into some more animated, interesting, and, well, funny detail on all these events later, but right now I just don't have it in me, aside from this:
Word to the wise to anyone attending a Lefont Theatre - if they tell you they are out of popcorn butter, do not accept this on its face. There are alternatives they aren't willing to share at first.
Maybe if I was allowed to have a zanotab, I'd remember it's teamocil.
[at least not where you'd think]
"...producing a sort of call which was said to recall an orangutan fucking an accordion. " -- Tycho Brahe, Penny Arcade[jerry holkins is a fucking genius]
Several new TRB songs are available.
the rage box - flyover: the city of industry
This is the good one. More in it in a sec.
This one sucks and I am giving up on it so I do not ruin the small portion I like by continuing to try and tweak it. Maybe someday in the future I'll pick it up again, or use part of it in another song, but that's doubtful. Its title would have been "Vigil at the Robot Church."
Now, onto the good one, the first one. I took Finn's foul mood about Peter Frampton into consideration, and thus the song is named as it is. It's not the greatest thing in the world, but it's not bad either, and in many ways is the spiritual successor to "the machines do all the work," but twice as long. So, Finn, I may not have kept any of the aspects you liked about that, but I did keep some, and I made it longer. Dance and be joyous.
It takes a little bit to get going, but I think it's a pretty cool soundtrack-type piece. It makes use of some old tricks from other songs, and some new experiments. Reason continues to amaze me with the things I dream up that actually work.
If no one can see why it was going to be called Peter Frampton Riot, well, it festered, didn't it? It will always have an element of Peter Frampton Riot in it to me, just like there's some Skold in "someone's at the door." There are all kinds of little things like that in my various songs that make me laugh because no one was around when I was making them, so they're secret jokes. Secrets you guys don't get.
Only I get them.
That's why they're jokes.
I mean, secret. That's why they're secret.
[entry kinda trailed off there]
I have good news and bad news.
The bad news is really bad, but few will care, and the good news is mediocre, and none will care.
First, the bad news. Ladies and Gentlemen, the Netmonkey is dead. I still haven't exactly figured out what the hell is wrong with it, but it's serious. Whenever any live network connection is hooked to any of its ports, that port's activity LED blinks like crazy, and as near as I can tell, it's not passing any kind of packets between the ports. This is problematic, given that a network switch, at least in a hobby sense, is used to pass packets between ports.
Pulling out all its guts and opening the internal switch up, there doesnt seem to be much wrong with the hardware. I do seem to have caused a momentary short in the power LED, as one of the wires I soldered in was longer than the other, and at some point it bent, and connected with the other.There's some charred flux, but no blown components or anything. It seems kind of odd that that would cause the mental freakout that is currently plaguing the thing, though. Since I'm trying to get things organized, and save money, I can't really afford to grab a new switch and try to reanimate the thing. Now, it is packed into a box, and will live again some day in the future. It will be the Jesus monkey.
Ashes to ashes, and all that. It's silly, but I'm actually saddened by this.
Anyway, the good news. The death of the monkey of course reduces my available network devices by one. I hadn't been using him for a bit anyway, because he had been freaking out, and his absence added a network cable running across my living room, as well as limiting my magic TV box to the 10megabit hub I had left. I've been cleaning and organizing like mad, and it seemed about time to try and deal with the fact that I had 2 network cables running across my living room, one of which reached from up in my bedroom. Nothing adds a touch of class to a home like random cables snaking across heavy-traffic areas, and down staircases.
This was necessary due to the fact that for some damned reason the wiring we ran through the attic and down the bedroom closets was not providing any kind of reliable connection. Additionally, the wiring we ran across the living room celing divider and behind the living room wall was similarly being a bitch.
I have been battling this for aeons, it seems, and only getting it to work reliably at 10megabit - which is chump speed. I wanted to use the 100mbit power I had in the hardware available, which frustrated me endlessly and eventually resulted in me using the half measure of Big Bertha for over a year.
For the uninitiated, Big Bertha is a gigantic, green, 100ft network cable. For the past year plus, it has run between the two levels of my home, filling the void that the nice, professionalish, behind-the-wall wiring left by its being horribly unreliable and intermittent.
Well, no longer.
As it turns out, the good news is that I have, for more than a few years, been incredibly stupid, and ignorant about the proper manufacture of network cables.
I've been through 800 battles with this stuff, gone to greath lengths to test line continuity across a whole house, and it turns out that while my wiring was sound in its integrity and manufacturing, the planning stage was horribly, horribly flawed.
What's sad is that all this grief was simply because the color pattern I chose to use when making network cables did not properly make use of the data-integrity-enhancement present in the twisting of pairs in Cat5 cable. I had considered this problem, but honestly it took until last night for me to find a site that made it as ass-simple as this one. Snip a couple ends, rearrange the wires, crimp new ends on and suddenly all my in-home wiring is happily slugging along at 100mbit and I am doing what must have been a hillarious looking dance to Beck's Loser on XRM radio, streaming to my downstairs computer through the in-wall wiring. I had 100 megabit, and I was no longer abusing Big Bertha.
So, that's the "good news," everyone. I have drastically reduced my need for extraneous network hardware, and completely eliminated the annoying network cables running all over hell. It's a shame I didn't realize how dumb I was a long time ago, or I could have had a nice looking living room without sacrificing geek power.
It's a small thing, but it has been such a recurring, daunting problem, I am insanely happy to have finally won. And now I don't need to resurrect the monkey in order to be able to have all the networked devices in my home be connected simultaneously. Plus, I am saved trying to fix this crap so it's functional for whoever buys this place. It's all working now, so I can point to it and say "Hey! Potential buyer! Behold, networking!" and they will go "Well isn't that the cat's pajamas!" and I'll say something like "And how!" and then we'll go into some kind of vaudeville bit or a musical number about packet routing, I haven't decided yet. Either way, the lindy hop will probably be involved.
Other events of the evening, lessee.
I cleaned. A bunch. You guys would be impressed. I threw a bunch of stuff away. Hm, what else. I went to Wal*Mart at 2am, which is always a surreal experience. At that hour the employee:patron ratio is approximately 32:1. If you tried to start a riot in Wal*Mart at 2am, they would put you down or blow you away with the dogs and the hoses in about 4 seconds. I don't have any idea where I'm going with this.
Funny how an entry called 'endings' doesn't really have
[HIC IACET SIMIVS REX QVONDAM REXQVE FVTVRVS]
"Love me, for I love you" -- and answer me,
"Love me, for I love you" -- so shall we stand
As happy equals in the flowering land
Of love, that knows not a dividing sea.--snip--
We meet so seldom, and yet we surely part
so often--highly chopped excerpts from "Monna Innominata" by Christina Rossetti, The Z Axis' 19th Century woman of the week.
Just got back from delivering a lesson, through the freezing sunrise over this town. That was a wondeful drive, and it got me all thinking. I've been up this late writing an essay on the aforementioned sonnet, and I will say, the only thing that has been difficult about this class is the last thing I was expecting - how difficult it is to write essays saying things that seem plain and orderly to me. Write a thousand words on why it's important that women be able to express their feelings of despair in an elegy directly, instead of being comfy with female grief being covered in the literary world by male speakers relaying the grief. It's such a basic equality issue that I don't have the proper mysogynistic tools to wrap my head around the opposition to the idea, and so it's hard for me to get many words past "Well, duh."
Anyway.
Christina Rossetti can express longing, that's all I got to say. And generally speaking I'm in a surprisingly good mood, but I still got some of that goin on. I had to delete a whole bunch of sappy song lyrics from this entry, so that proves it.
Anyway, I'm still a bit busy, but I've finished the week of intensity, so I have blog time again. I was going to post another song today, but I can't seem to get it near a finished state. It's definitely shaping up to be another "club record" one I end up abandoning and releasing as-is. To make up for that, and because I'm in the mood, I'm going to post a snippet of the most beautiful music I've heard in a while. I had nothing to do with the production of this aside from cutting it from the main selection, and fading in the beginning. The really beautiful part begins about 10 seconds in.
Thank you David Schwartz.
-several hours later-
So what's funny is, I was tired before, and yet I just spent like 3 hours tinkering with the aforementioned song, and ended up improving it and then making an entirely new one.
I am now therefore super exhausted, and I will unfortunately sleep through the majority of the day. This sucks, because there are people I'd like to try and talk to during the day. I'm genuinely sorry.
The new song I started this morning may be called "City of Industry" or maybe "Peter Frampton Riot." I'm going to let that get out there and fester a bit before I finish and release it.
must sleep now.
[tears of an angel, tears of a dove]
A new TRB song is available.
the rage box - a walk in the cold
This will probably be the only post all week.
I'm attending to matters I have been putting off, and that means less blog time.
It's time I got on with my life.
[tell him i am not at home]
A new TRB song is available.
the rage box - four more years
The first time I've had a political message, the first time I've ever used a vocal overdub. I'm one step closer to KMFDM. Speaking of, I suppose I should call them over-dubyas. Yuk Yuk. Worst liner note joke ever.
That's all I'm saying about it. Listen if you're curious.
I did indeed have anchovies today. Sardines, too, at the suggestion of the lovely and canned-fish-knowledgable Leslie. While I enjoyed the Anchovies a great deal individually, they did not do well as part of my meal. Ah well, it was worth a try. Sardines seem to me to simply be canned regular-ass fish. But, that's not such a bad thing, as they didn't contribute the 700% FDA sodium level that the anchovies did, and were certainly tasty.
Now that I've done that, and briefed you all, I'm going back into my self-imposed diversionary bender.
Everyone is urged to booze up and / or riot.
[i don't fit this shoe]
yeah, i'm pretty deep into a diversionary bender, but i have a chicken breast and some canned mushrooms, and i just watched the futurama episode where fry buys the thousand year old anchovies.
To my knowledge, i have never in my life had an anchovy.
That changes tomorrow.
Also i'm making some kind of fish filet on the foreman.
more sensical posts late tomorrow, when i wake up.
[life is too short given that we're all going to die soon]
.
..I woke up this morning at 3 a.m. and thought, This is either Christmas morning or the day of a close friend's funeral. I've been awake since then, and I'm still not sure which.
--Tom Tomorrow
Though it was more like going to bed at 6 and getting up at 8, I could not possibly have put this better.
Most likely, there will be updates throughout the day. I will be watching my nephew instead of viewing the results with friends, and so the chances of me blabbering to the blog are quite high. Empty House + Wireless Connection = Prolific loneliness.
[santasantasantasantasanta]
So allo there, come one, come all, to this month's close-out geeking-out bonanza. I'm Chester Butterbottom, your moderator and guide through this wonderful world of dorkiness and fanboy miscelleny.
(note to regular readers- fear not, I shall be playing the role of Chester Butterbottom. Didn't want my satirical and self depricating style to make people think I was doing another guest author piece, as it did not go over well last time.)
Starting off with the computery and sadly necessary, I've had to supplement my spam-killing system. I've raved many times about the bounty of Popfile, which sorts the spam. However, I'm now getting 60 spam mails a day, and while auto-sorting is nice, I'm still having to download the crap and wait for my email program to trash the stuff I don't want. As you may imagine, since I am not Mr. Popular or Strong Bad, this means many times I wait for email downloads to find 60 trashed messages and 0 good ones. Weak.
Enter mailfilter. When properly configured, (a simple process that took me approximately 6 hours) mailfilter connects to Popfile, (or any mail server) and nukes stuff directly off of it, based on rules you have given it. Then, when you go to get your mail, all that is left is the stuff you've chosen to allow - in my case, the stuff that my trained puppy Popfile says is hunky dory, and not penis-pill related. This works by me having Popfile change the subject line of spam emails, inserting the ultra clever "dickspam ufuels" shibboleth. Then, mailfilter cans anything with that in it. Please, don't everyone take this as an opportunity to send me an email with that in the subject. I specifically chose it as one of the least possible subject line strings I would ever get in a legit email - especially given the ufuels, which is quickly becoming one of my favorite in-jokes of all time.
NO ONE WILL DARE TO OPPOSE US, ONCE WE HAVE CAPTURED THE UFUELS!
Ok. So. Here's a crude metaphor to explain how my new spam setup works. Mail comes in, like a letter, to my various mailservers, or what we'll call the Post Office. Then, a very wise Postal Worker, who we shall call Mr. Popfile, sorts it into good and bad piles, based on my vicious, iron-fist-like guiding hand over the course of the past year. Then, my spam Butler, who we shall call Mister Mailfilter, goes into the Post Office every 15 minutes, and sets fire to the "bad" pile. He then urinates on the ashes, burns them again, and scoops them into a little pile shaped like the word "Spam." Then, he gets on his knees and begins an ancient voodoo enchantment to hex the people who sent that bad mail. The ashes then disappear in a flash of light, to the sound of hundreds of tortured souls screaming out. Then, he tips his funny butler hat to the perplexed postal worker, and goes back home.
This way, when I click "check mail" on my email client, which, what the hell, we will analogize to yet a second Butler, who goes to the Post office, scoops up the good pile, and delivers it to me, with no trace of the burning and incantations that Butler #1 went through. I seem to have a bizarre predilection toward considering computerized services butlers.
Suddenly I am able to check mail and have to download less than 10 messages. And they are ALL GOOD.
There now. I'm sure that was fascinating to you all.
But we're just getting started here at the Bonanza. Next up is the excitement of minute, almost unnoticible changes to the blog.
The alert reader (phrase on loan from Dave Barry) will have noticed the super sweet fade effect when you mouse over links. Some may consider this silly or tacky. I admit it is a fairly cheap effect, but for reasons beyond my understanding, I am FASCINATED BY IT.
Seriously, I can sit there for 10 minutes at a time just going over various links and giggling. But I can certainly see how someone would think of this as a really insignificant trifle, a digital bauble not worthy of that kind of attention. However, I will go to my grave calling anyone who says such a thing a dirty fascist, not worthy of the lethal beating I will have inflicted upon them with rusty bicycle chains.
Next up on the blog change list would be the image behind the "Stuff I do" part of the main page interface. It, uh, has a brainbomb now. That's about all there is to that one.
I've added several boxes of links to the right side of the main page interface as well, though I'm still tweaking that.
Those are the only blog changes that are up for public consumption at the moment, but after the beginning of this week, when, you know, there are some things going on on the national stage, I shall be changing some more things. I may finally be ready to redo the templates for the monthly archive pages, a blog improvement that is literally 2 years in the making.
In closing, the Bonanza will continue the fanboy raving from the last entry, about Arrested Development.
Holy. Crap. Not only is it a truly amazing show, but they didn't chintz out on the DVD set. I'd have liked for them to uncensor the episodes (though the extended pilot is uncensored) but I'm one of those who can appreciate the fact that a well placed bleep occasionally makes something even funnier than the actual curse word.
They include 99% of the music used on the set as a special feature, which is excellent given that the show's music is part of its wonderful style. There are only a couple songs not included, for example John Hiatt's Cry Love, but there are only about 3 of those, and as I did for that one, they can be picked out and downloaded purchased from a legal provider.
Beyond that, I'm simply glad Jason Bateman is back on TV. The man is amazing, and it has been too long since The Hogan Family.
It shouldn't surprise me that I love this show so much - Its executive producers include Ron Howard and Brian Grazer - 2 names that appear in the same capacity on a little show called Sports Night, which in case none of you were aware, is the Best Show Ever. I don't think I've been as happy with a DVD set since Sports Night, actually. Though, in fairness, the Sports Night DVD set had zero extras - it was more the ability to posess the finest in television in one compact box that made that one so great.
This has been Chester Butterbottom, with the geek news you couldn't care less about. From New York, we bid you adieu, and remind you: we could do this more than once a month, so be thankful.
[chester butterbottom is a funny name to me]
