Year: 2002

Today is my brother Dan’s birthday. (Yes, they’re all crammed in together.) He doesn’t even know this blog exists, but I’m happy for him anyway, so there it is. Also, happy belated birthday to this blog, which is now 1 year old.

Here are some of the fine words my email client’s spell checking mechanism suggested when I spelled anniversary with one n instead of two: animosities, anises, animadvert (huh?), and nailers. Notice: anniversaries was not among the suggestions. (Don’t ask why I was spell checking with my email client, let it suffice to say my IM client came up with the correct spelling.)

This article in the city pages that quotes things overheard in a sex clinic is perhaps one of the funniest things I’ve ever read. The topic came up several times this weekend, most notably at a Holloween party on Sat, where I was Mr. Clean.

I laid on the couch this afternoon watching Brotherhood of the Wolf and wanting to be a director or cinamatographer. I love those slow motion action shots, particularly in the first fight scene, there were these shots of raindrops hitting the puddles that were just extraordinary.

There is a new movie theater opening up downtown today, and for a week they’re showing second run movies for $1 a show. Yet another reason I’d rather be working downtown. I guess they’re going to have abnormally cheap matine shows even after they begin showing the good stuff, and my friend Jason is bragging that he’ll be able to walk through the skyways and make the 5:00 show after work.

I would love to say I got her all kinds of boyfriendly gifts, but the truth is I got her this totally utilitarian cheepo gift that probably isn’t even worth mentioning. I had debated getting her various other more “expressive” things, but they would all have required I break the no-credit-card rule that I have been following for the last 3 or 4 months now.

I think she’ll understand… maybe.

BTW, she is the only person (I’m aware of) who reads this thing regularly, yet has never posted a comment. She still sometimes likes to pretend she doesn’t read it, but I know better. Isn’t that cute?

I have again discovered a p2p file sharing client I like, this time in winMX. Amazingly, this little bugger contains no ads or popups, and doesn’t install fifty demo programs on your computer when you install it. It also supports simultaneous downloading from multiple locations to maximize your bandwidth (although I have yet to beat the 250k download speeds I was getting last night over http!). Unfortunately, it’s only for windows.

I had recently tried to use eDonkey, but something needs to be configured differently in my router, I think. I need to open some ports or something. (winMX informed me of this, whereas eDonkey just kept timing out on server after server.)

I had a blog back in 1998 (but of course I didn’t call it that, and I hand-coded all my entries). I called it lit tech (or living poem, apparently). I’d forgotten all about it till yesterday when I was cleaning out my web directories.

This amazing halo of the cat’s eye nebula was posted on my birthday at APOD (astronomy picture of the day). I’d never seen APOD before, but it’s going in my bookmarks now! (Thanks go to Michael for the link!)

This weekend I paid the bills. But there were a couple of unexpected ones. Well, to be fair, I was expecting the medical bill. Basically, sick as a dog, at the clinic, I didn’t have my insurance card. The lady said not to worry about it, they’d just bill me. I thought about it some, “Don’t they usually call the insurance company at this point?”, but just decided not to fuss, and got on with it.

OK, so now I have this bill, I know I’m not suppose to pay it, what do I do? Well, long story short, I called the clinic, and gave them my insurance #, and that was it! Easy as pie, after being on hold for 20 min.

2nd bill, from my homeowner’s insurance company. Wait a minute, I paid for a year of that up front… ten minutes on the phone with my insurance agent, and it’s all taken care of.

I had been dreading these phone calls, you know, where you KNOW you’re in the right, but you just expect to have to fight for it the whole way through? But no problem!

So I’ve been spending probably more time at work than I’d like to admit playing with the W3’s (x)html validator. I got all excited when I found out the default movable type templates validate, and started converting my old static pages to css layout (most are still using font tags), and writing them to validate at the same time.

Then I randomly ran into this accessibility tutorial that just kicks ass, and I’ve been trying to integrate that information too. Probably the most interesting part of that tutorial is how it says who benefits from each tip, and one of the “people” who can benefit is google. I had no idea, but yes, many accessibility tips will also increase your site’s rapport with google.

I want my pages to look good in text browsers like lynx (which can check with this handy Lynx Viewer–although I’m not sure why anyone would use lynx when w3m is so much better. ;) and many of the changes for text browsers are pretty much the same ones that need to be made for accessibility, so that’s nice. Fortunately, back when I handcoded most of those old pages, as clueless as I was, I still tried to keep things as simple as possible. So the work is mostly doing things like closing paragraph tags (I still thought of paragraph tags as just adding space between text) and un-nesting various formatting tags (like center and blockquote).

It’s fun, actually, to revisit these pages, revamp them a little. I like the new stylesheet I’m using, I might make this one a little more like the one I’m using there.

Oh yeah, I almost forgot, Songs Ohia is at first ave tonight. I might have to skip unicycling again. I haven’t decided.

I must immediately and humbly apologize for all current and impending puns in the titles of my blog posts. I like puns, but they’re somehow ingrained because they were (and still are) my father’s main form of humor.

At this very moment, I am listening to the new Amon Tobin album. In part, in preparation for the concert this saturday at first ave. I just picked up the album last night. I think it came out yesterday, but coincidentally that’s also when I first heard about it. Anyway, I rushed out to Cheepo and picked up a copy. I was a bit disappointed that they didn’t have a copy of Ben Neill’s latest work, which is supposedly comprised of songs he composed for auto commercials.

The other reason I’m listening to this great CD is to get the song that appears in this wonderful flash unstuck. (The link is to rathergood.com, and may take a bit to download, depending.)

Final news tidbit: It’s snowing outside. First time of the year, as far as I know. Fuckin’ beautiful.