http://www.patrickcentral.com/zaxis/ 15-year-old self-preoccupation at 25! en-us patrick@patrickcentral.com 2010-02-02T01:13:51-05:00 hourly 1 2000-01-01T12:00+00:00 http://www.patrickcentral.com/zaxis/archives/000308.html Seems I am dipping back to a wistful, bygone era, at least for long enough for me to mark "Lace and Fur" in the olden style, right up to and including the cryptic post on the abandoned, frozen-under-glass blog. Lucky 13 years, my friends, and that you shall remain, until we all may die. And if any of us come back as zombies, well, I think it is safe to say all bets are off. [let the water hold me down] this web page, or I won't see it.) ]]> 308@http://www.patrickcentral.com/zaxis/ 2010-02-02T01:13:51-05:00 http://www.patrickcentral.com/zaxis/archives/000307.html Two years ago, I got a wish I'd had for nearly a decade. Right here on this very blog, actually, as dusty then as it is now. Perhaps slightly less so, but once you get past a certain point, it's all the same. Anyway, I digress. At that point, I had finally ceased commemorating a certain bygone period on my blog, as it had become a sort of self-flagellation and cryptic reliving of some glory days - which ordinarily I'm all for, but even I have statutes of limitations on that sort of thing, and for once my life had nothing I could really complain about. I was happy in everyday life - not deliriously happy, not perfect in every detail, but happier than I deserved or thought realistically possible. It was one thing when my day to day life was terrible to use sentimental calendar markings to bring myself back to a fond period. Fondness of my everyday life and increasing distance from the people and events being commemorated had dulled my sense of duty and the perceived benefit of publicly wallowing in the observance of significant past events. I privately wallowed, paying tributes and reinforcing stories much like one would with a religion, and even had a steady cultmate. We kept alive a dark art, assuming others had dropped it as much as they had us. And then, for the ten year anniversary, I got something far different and more unexpected than Tin or Aluminum. I got a comment on this blog from someone I was pretty dead certain I'd never hear from again. Several days later, I had my first actual live back-and-forth contact. That happened two years ago today. Over the course of those two years, a great many life-changing things have happened, and while I can't say what the future holds, I have worked hard to return to a point where I am not as in need of my calendar markings to get through the days, nor wallow in the sad ones as much. I have worked to try and enjoy the happiness I still do not deserve, which is harder for me than it sounds. I have a paradoxical sense of debt and guilt for having gotten my wish, but I am aware enough of it to attempt to be grateful for it, and not ruin another gift out of a sense of guilt, as I always seem to do. Because I cannot live an uncomplicated life, being grateful and suppressing guilt seems to be paradoxically not working as well, as it dulls my sense of duty and observance. It feels rather like not visiting a dead relative who gave their last breath to ensure you live a free and happy life. If you're sad and grieving, they died for nothing - if you're out living, you're not showing the proper respect. Which is the appropriate point of data on this curve? I imagine myself today talking to the me of two years ago. Oh, the things I could relate. Regardless of these things, though: good, bad, harrowing, exciting, I'd been granted my wish. What it developed into is a story far too voluminous and emotional to recount here, but for the purposes of this post, it is a day worth marking twice on a calendar, to say the least. A goodbye and a hello, both laden with aftereffects that I will obsessively analyze for the remainder of my self-involved life. So here is a commemoration of that day two years ago, a day with a far-reaching, cataclysmic significance I was ignorant to at the time. I remain ignorant of the ultimate effects this day will have on the tapestry of my life (to steal from Star Trek in the most pretentious way possible,) but I really wish I could talk to a future me and find out. But as the old adage goes, I suppose you must be careful what you wish for. this web page, or I won't see it.) ]]> 307@http://www.patrickcentral.com/zaxis/ 2009-02-09T12:34:56-05:00 http://www.patrickcentral.com/zaxis/archives/000303.html 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] this web page, or I won't see it.) ]]> 303@http://www.patrickcentral.com/zaxis/ 2008-05-01T23:43:38-05:00 http://www.patrickcentral.com/zaxis/archives/000302.html 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] this web page, or I won't see it.) ]]> 302@http://www.patrickcentral.com/zaxis/ 2008-02-01T17:39:06-05:00 http://www.patrickcentral.com/zaxis/archives/000300.html OMFG. Fuck you, Mike Nelson. [yay] this web page, or I won't see it.) ]]> 300@http://www.patrickcentral.com/zaxis/ 2008-01-15T18:11:02-05:00 http://www.patrickcentral.com/zaxis/archives/000299.html 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?!] this web page, or I won't see it.) ]]> 299@http://www.patrickcentral.com/zaxis/ 2008-01-01T23:48:50-05:00 http://www.patrickcentral.com/zaxis/archives/000298.html 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] this web page, or I won't see it.) ]]> 298@http://www.patrickcentral.com/zaxis/ 2007-11-28T17:41:54-05:00 http://www.patrickcentral.com/zaxis/archives/000297.html So, much of my time since the great cross-country move has been devoted to trying to secure a new job. I had intended to do this before moving, however, my old job decided to throw me a curveball and curtailed my seemingly courteous 2-month-plus notice into about 3 weeks. I understand why, and don't begrudge them, but it sure shot my planning all to hell. So, schedules got moved up. The move happened before the job, which meant that even after all the chaos of moving, I still had the hell of searching for a job lying in front of me. I had an interview on the 15th with what would be a dream job for me - excellent company, good product philosophy, and a position I described in said interview as "like going shopping for cakes, and finding one made entirely of icing." It really is. It's UI design - what I liked most about my previous jobs, but was usually a side or afterthought, or just developed with such a deadline that I always felt it didn't get what it truly deserved. Thus, icing on a cake. This was a job that was all icing. Trust me, it makes sense. I had to create a 45 minute presentation for this interview, which is not something I have ever had to do, and it took what seemed like the bulk of 4 days to prepare. The preparation was worth it - if for no other reason than I now have some miscellaneous portfolio stuff resurrected and up for show. Since the interview, I've had a lot of people wish me well, a lot of people who know companies like it or the area tell me I'm totally in. People who are simply friends back home cheering me on, with the usual "they'd be crazy not to hire you" kind of upbeat but ultimately air-filled puffery that I know I don't react well to when I'm genuinely on the line on something. I have had a rather caustic reaction to any such confidence or even speculation that assumes too much for my taste. This is because of who I am and my life's history of having the things that I'm really invested in not pan out. I found I was not alone in this feeling when years ago I saw the following on television, in a wonderful episode of The West Wing: TOBY Put it down. Everyone in this room let me have your attention, please. The law of our land mandates that Presidential appointees be confirmed by a majority of the Senate. A majority being half plus one for a total of what, Ginger? GINGER 51. TOBY 51 yea votes is what we see on the screen before a drop of wine is swallowed! Because there's a little thing called what, Bonnie? BONNIE Tempting fate? TOBY "Tempting fate" is what it's called. (Starts collecting champagne glasses from people) In the three months this man has been on my radar screen, I have aged 48 years. This is my day of jubilee and I will not have it screwed up by what, Bonnie? BONNIE By tempting fate. This is exactly the reaction I would have given the people who were so sure I was "in" before having seen that episode. Having seen it, I didn't even have to exert any effort - I could wholesale borrow the caustic pessimism so aptly exuded by Richard Schiff. I could rail on people prematurely celebrating on my behalf - not out of actual superstition, but knowing that the memory of the celebration would be all the more bitter to me if the job didn't pan out. Fate, it seems, was not so sorely tempted. This Monday afternoon I found out I got the job, and after aging approximately 24 years in the 2 months I have been unemployed, it was finally my day of jubilee. I don't start until mid November, which means I can finally have the vacation everyone has assumed I have been on - when in reality I have been stressing myself out, biting my nails and aging approximately a season a week for a while now. For anyone who may be reading this who has gotten the crabby side of me that was collecting champagne glasses, you may now drink up. That's what I've been doing, and why it's taken me 2 days to make a post about it. [toby, how 'bout now?] this web page, or I won't see it.) ]]> 297@http://www.patrickcentral.com/zaxis/ 2007-10-31T22:55:04-05:00 http://www.patrickcentral.com/zaxis/archives/000296.html So, the last post may not seem all that informative - it was designed to simply be a test of the database, to make sure everything was functioning properly once again. I'm going to leave it up, because even if it's for stupid technical reasons, I resolved a long time ago to never take down posts and delete history, and this would open up a precedent. Aaaanyway. So about a week ago the box on which patrickcentral.com lives was rebuilt by my hosting company, in a process that did not go too well. You can read about it at this link, but it requires you to create an account on the forums, which I doubt anyone reading this will do. Long story short, they broke the hell out of Perl in the process of rebuilding stuff, and a lot of my homemade perl image compositing scripts got broken. This was fixed quickly, which was good, because I was directing a potential employer to one to see how awesome I was at creating perl image compositing scripts. What was also broken, unbeknownst to me, but now knownst to me and as such becoming knownst to you, was my blog software, which is driven by mostly perl scripts. What followed this becoming knownst to me was a harrowing series of ultimately fruitless support tickets, and ended with me upgrading the software and then manually hacking about 10 separate files - all of which will be broken again the next time Six Apart decides to push out some new version, but I'm back. And there's a new comic to prove it. This experience has gotten me once again dangerously close to jumping ship to Wordpress, because I have just never had to put up with this crap on the several Wordpress installs I've set up. Maybe its a PHP vs Perl thing, I dunno - I always liked Perl, but this shit is getting out of hand. Perl simply cannot be this fragile in a production environment, even on my shitty little corner of the internet. Also, I absolutely hate Movable Type 4's new interface, which was one of the few ways I still considered it superior to Wordpress. Then again, Lazy Patrick wants to chime in here and point out how much work would be involved in converting this blog, the comic, and their respective layouts and feeds and whatnot into a Wordpress system. In fact, in my mind, he does so, and then brandishes a gun. I balk momentarily, and then he hides it and shows me a bag of Doritos and an ice cold Pepsi. I cautiously reach for the Doritos. He smiles, and puts the gun away again. At least for a while. [shhon of a bhhhhiiitch] this web page, or I won't see it.) ]]> 296@http://www.patrickcentral.com/zaxis/ 2007-10-20T01:58:38-05:00 http://www.patrickcentral.com/zaxis/archives/000293.html jesus christ what an ordeal *update* comments are broken, but that is the least of my worries. *update* comments are no longer broken, but remain butt-ugly. On the bright side, they've been re-captcha'd, which is a cool idea. this web page, or I won't see it.) ]]> 293@http://www.patrickcentral.com/zaxis/ 2007-10-18T16:05:09-05:00 http://www.patrickcentral.com/zaxis/archives/000292.html So, I made fun of Halo 3 over at the comic. Sorry for the duplication, for those of you who subscribe to the All-Patrick UltraFeed. For those of you who do not, why not!? It's more Me than you could possibly ever want, all mashed up and extruded into tasty and delicious sausage form. It's my digital life, served up to you trough-style. Surely this convenience entices you. Anyway, I needed to vent something creative out of the flood. I'm not sure if I feel any better than I did before I started, but it's damn nice to be able to go from concept to delivered comic in less than 3 hours. It's been a bit of a day, you see. Anyway, goodnight out there in internet land. [lying in bed just like daryl dragon did] this web page, or I won't see it.) ]]> 292@http://www.patrickcentral.com/zaxis/ 2007-09-27T01:54:59-05:00 http://www.patrickcentral.com/zaxis/archives/000290.html This is what appears in your bill when you move across the country. UPDATE: It has been brought to my attention that I look like an idiot for not checking my roaming plan before moving. I should have noted - none of this roaming actually cost me anything, as I have free country-wide roaming. Each of these rows has a charge of 0.00. I didn't get screwed by the phone company, I just found this a fascinating way to document my journey. I can easily see how it would seem like I'm crying because I got dinged for a lot of roaming fees, though, so I'm amending this. Not the case, I just liked how it did an unconventional job of drawing the little dotted red line marking my trip across the country. In other, vertigo-inducingly-unrelated news, I registered the domain laserbaytwo.com, for almost no apparent reason. Also, it appears I just now remembered I have a blog. Hi! Won't you come over for tea? [Is this your homework, Larry?] this web page, or I won't see it.) ]]> 290@http://www.patrickcentral.com/zaxis/ life in general 2007-09-20T18:40:53-05:00 http://www.patrickcentral.com/zaxis/archives/000289.html The following is going to be hard to make heads or tails of if you haven't read a certain book. And even then, it could be hard. Tough. "Take that, gravity." This is something I've said privately to myself at the precise moment of takeoff - the very second the rear landing gears lift off the ground, every single time I have flown anywhere, ever. Except once. It's a fascinating feeling to me, not just in a sensory way, but in an intellectual way - I mean, with all the force I can muster, I can make myself jump maybe 3 and a half, 4 feet in the air, for half a second. Despite appearances, I weigh considerably less than a commercial aircraft full of hundreds of people, their luggage, and a galley full of pretzels to placate them. The force necessary to completely escape the pull of gravity while hauling that much, and then remain buoyant all the way to Poughkeepsie, or whereever, somewhat blows my mind. The fact that we as humans have devised and built machines that do it so routinely makes me want to absolutely celebrate and jeer at nature, as evidenced by the above quote. I like it when we win. I've never cared much for the oft-quoted end of Reagan's Challenger speech, which is in and of itself quoting liberally from a poem called High Flight by John Gillespie McGee (which, to get all tangental and me about it, apparently rips the line I dislike so much from a poem published several years earlier. But I'm getting ahead of myself.) I have such conflicting feelings about this poem, because the first line, "Oh! I have slipped the surly bonds of earth" - I could have a passionate European romance with this line, for reasons you now understand. It would be better if "of earth" were "of gravity," for general applicability, but overall I still absolutely love it. A mixture of poetry and anthropomorphizing elemental concepts of physics in a triumphant and defiant celebration of human ingenuity and exploration. I'm totally there. The second quoted line, though - "and touched the face of God" - ruins it for me. Setting aside the larger question of whether God exists and is in fact using the earth's thermosphere to put on his contacts, visiting space is not touching his face. This doesn't even make the slightest bit of sense to me, and the rest of this paragraph is a rant to that effect. God would have to be, like, shaving with the Blue Ridge Mountains as a razor for that image to make any sort of quasi-literal sense to me, and in a figurative sense, I have absolutely no context for what it indicates spiritually to have touched the face of God. It could just as easily be "I have peeled the scab of God" and presuming it is not a literal meaning, I have absolutely no idea what this is supposed to imply. I'd go so far as to call it sophistry, which is a word I have been grateful to know for nearly 10 years now, as it succinctly expresses something I have hated for 10 years before that. Sure, it sounds profound and spiritual, but even within that spiritual framework it doesn't even make any sense, at least to me. Wow, I kinda got all over there, and wayyyyy off the point of this post. Without even having touched the face of God. Anyway, that one line, when it hits me, poisons a great mixture of lyricism and expression with something baseless and nonsensical, and that, I find, is an absolute tragedy, as there is some great stuff in the poem, and one line causes me to resist it all. This resistance also comes despite the fact that Reagan chose bookend excerpts, which I do frequently with all manner of source material on this very blog. I find it's a good way to basically say "The content of this post is similar to that of the content between the quoted points in something else." At this point it may be helpful to imagine I am winking at you. That first line, though, it's a killer. As I said, I've celebrated that same sort of neener-neener mentality every time I have ever taken off in a plane, except one. That one time, I was entirely too preoccupied with opening a card I'd been given only moments before, and had been instructed to open upon takeoff, presumably in order to do so in sync with She who Gave it to Me, who for the purpose of this post I believe I shall call Jane. The contents of the card I shall leave out for personal reasons, and to satisfy my internal quota for crypticism, but suffice to say I cling to it very dearly during the stressful time I now find myself in. It's not quite a Luxor token, as these things go, but it's the only thing to ever make me miss a chance to strut and caw in the face of all reason and physics, as the seemingly impossible and definitely improbable routinely took place all around me. This should say something. Now, I look down the barrel of the hardest part of my life to date - packing it all up, turning my back on it, and going somewhere new. Taking a chance on adventure and love. The thing is, I am not particularly scared. I have let go of outcome. I have a token to get me through this hard part, and it in itself is a reminder that I've already won, because I've got someone who doesn't care how this goes, and will invent some sort of ridiculous dance with me anyway. This is what I found this past weekend. None of the fine details matter, because I've already won. Over the past couple months I've found myself emotionally up and down, slugged repeatedly, on the brink of losing it several times, and I kept coming back. This weekend, though, I saw the arms go up. Touchdown. This weekend, I sneered derisively at probability and physics. Take that, gravity. [also, jane] this web page, or I won't see it.) ]]> 289@http://www.patrickcentral.com/zaxis/ 2007-07-29T21:56:51-05:00 http://www.patrickcentral.com/zaxis/archives/000288.html This is the kind of thing that gets me all hot and bothered. Yeah, it's a documentary about a typeface. Not a font, a typeface. This predates fonts. It's 50 years old. Sure, that's younger than Times New Roman, or Palatino or most any of the big names from Monotype and Linotype, which were type foundry industry giants I like to pretend were involved in a bloody and operatic battle of wills similar to that of Edison and Tesla. However, in that shorter span of time, Helvetica has taken on a hell of huge percentage of what you could laughably call the "market share" of ANYTHING PRINTED IN ANY ROMANCE LANGUAGE AND ALSO FUCKING CYRILLIC. Plus, I just like it. Serifs, as far as I am concerned, can largely go to hell. Yeah, I'm a huge fucking nerd. You want a piece of me? [Lanston vs Mergenthaler TO THE DEATH] this web page, or I won't see it.) ]]> 288@http://www.patrickcentral.com/zaxis/ geeking out 2007-07-16T22:05:41-05:00 http://www.patrickcentral.com/zaxis/archives/000287.html I don't know why I keep posting topical things when there's so much going on in real life, but here I am anyway. This blog runs on the back of Movable Type, which is the first blogging software I ever came across, and which I have continued to support and use even through their licensing fiasco and the increasing ease of use and functionality of their primary competitor, Wordpress. I had done a manual edit-resave-archive process on my website framework for years, and so software that actually did all the drudgery for you was a complete revelation to me. This was before blogging was something they talked about on the nightly news - I saw it merely as an automation of what I'd been doing anyway, though I could definitely see how it had the potential to unlock mass publishing for everyone who could manage basic double clicking. Movable Type's been through its trials and tribulations, as I pointed out - they were woefully behind on comment management at a time when comment spam spiked, and at this same moment unveiled a wildly unpopular licensing scheme to try and make some money off their work. I narrowly escaped being affected by this licensing scheme through a cunning combination of laziness in updating and taking advantage of the fact that they brokered a compromise with the Pitchfork crowd and delivered a free 3-blog-one-author version. This solved my needs - though I was upset at the limitations, it did what I expressly needed and I had become accustomed to it. Others, however, were outraged. That moment raised the notoriety of Wordpress considerably, and with some of the hosted solutions gaining steam and benefiting from a collected userbase (Livejournal, then basically all social network sites that let you write, though I hate calling those 'blogs,' especially Myspace,) MT had been playing catchup for some time. They still are, really, even with TypePad and Vox and the updates they've made to their software. Every new blog I've helped friends bring to life has been Wordpress. I have stayed with MT this far because for my own purposes I'm used to it, and I personally find WP's template editor maddening. I'm currently typing this into version 3.34, which finally got some good comment management, but still was ripe for spam to overrun it. I'm using the Scode plugin to provide captchas to counteract that, and an autosave plugin to satiate my now-hair-trigger rage at webapps that don't autosave my work. Six Apart, you can thank Google for my newfound intolerance. Anyway, with these two plugins, I finally have little to bitch about with MT. I don't have to screen out the spam, the Captcha does a wonderful job of that, and MT's default junk comment system allows me to delete them en masse very efficiently. I haven't lost any writing in some time thanks to the autosave plugin. I find it annoying that I need to rely on the third party developer community to get to what I consider "adequate," but as I'm not paying them anything, I suppose it's not my place to get too cranky. So, being that I finally have an attractive and functional system I can't bitch about, I had to log in to a Six Apart News post of: "MT4: Time To Give It A Try." I'd read that they were going back open-source and generally free a while back, and had resisted the urge to check it out, because...well, it finally worked right, and they would probably change stuff. I've gone ahead and set up a test doodle blog, though, as I cannot resist authoritative headlines like "Time To Give It A Try." So far, I'm not a huge fan. They've rolled in some important features, like autosave on posts, and the ability to easily create static pages, which have been standard issue in Wordpress for some time. Their new template editor is absolutely fantastic, allows drop-down inserts of the cumbersome-to-remember special tags, and color codes the template code for easy readability. But the administration UI is sluggish, harsh on the eyes, and though it claims to be customizable, I'm not immediately seeing how. My issue with Wordpress is that the admin UI never did it for me, and unfortunately it seems they have run in that direction in MT4. Slow, blocky DHTML menus seem to be what is on the offer in MT4, and it's a shame, because MT3's admin UI was for the most part a thing of beauty. Narrow, perhaps, given the average monitor these days, but quite good. This new thing is like a demo for a new browser standard, and while I assume they will polish the chrome before release, it makes testing it very annoying for me. Anyway, testing 4 beta 5 has made me yearn for the elegance of my somewhat-modified 3.34, and so I came running back to it, and that caused me to begin writing. This is hardly a review, and I may even have some facts wrong about when they introduced certain features - I have always been very behind the times on my MT installation, because they tend to monkey with shit a lot and blog writing is very ritualistic for me. Screws me up if the candles are all gradient-ified now and the gold trimmed gown has the pockets on the left side now. Anyway, as I play with it further, a more detailed examination of MT4 will be forthcoming, as will the decision about whether to migrate to it. [elephants hate eggshells] this web page, or I won't see it.) ]]> 287@http://www.patrickcentral.com/zaxis/ 2007-07-10T10:54:37-05:00