There are just a rediculous number of versions of alice in wonderland out there, and it was revealed last night at family dinner that my sister has never seen any of them. The disney animated one seems to be the most common, it was made back in 1951. But when I thought about it, the one that I remember seeing first was the one with Sammy Davis Jr. as the caterpillar. That one was made for TV in 1985, and as far as I can tell was never released on DVD!!! I’m semi-tempted to rent the SIX versions that netflix has on stock to watch and compare, but I’m affraid none of them would live up to the one I’m remembering…
organic responsibilities
I went for a run today. OK, yesterday now. I ran halfway to Jasmine Deli for lunch, and walked slowly back, still breathing hard fifteen minutes later, eating my mock duck sandwich.
It’s only five or six blocks to Jasmine Deli. I’m so out of shape it’s sad. My muscles in my shins hurt like hell. I feel pathetic.
I’ve decided I’m going to try and run more often. Maybe even once a day, or every other day. I’d like to say I’ll start working out too, but I tried that a year or so ago and didn’t keep it up.
The flesh is weak… I feel like my mind is weaker still.
“Oh what force on earth could be weaker than the feeble strength of one?”
sci-fi sideswipe
I’ve suddenly gotten all excited about books again. I’m on some kind of weird book/game/movie oscillation pattern. This may or may not have been sparked by my finishing the last graphic novel in the sandman series late last week. I put it down, sighed one of those soul-shattering life-altering sighs, and went straight into book-hunting mode looking for the next thing that would fill that aching, gaping void in my consciousness where and unfinished novel need reside.
Then, of course, I skipped over all the novels sitting on my shelf, waiting to be read.
Instead I decided I really want the new Iain M. Banks novel, The Algebraist. But it’s only been released in the UK, so I was going to order it from amazon.co.uk. But then I thought maybe someone locally would have already done the importing for me, and I could buy it from them faster and maybe even cheaper. But if any of them had copies, all the local stores have since sold out. (It was released several months ago, but I just didn’t know it until recently.)
Of course I discovered it isn’t around locally after I jumped the gun and ordered Richard K. Morgan’s new (UK released only) book Woken Furies, which is a sequel to Altered Carbon and Broken Angels, both of which I enjoyed immensely.
Now I have far too many books lined up to start reading, and my amazon order hasn’t even shipped yet.
Tattle Tale
Bonfire Madigan (a band containing at least one former member of Tattle Tale,) has a CD out that I hadn’t before seen. It’s a retrospective kind of thing, called i bleed: a decade of song.
It contains the song Glass Vase, Cello Case.
I had heretofore been giving away that mp3 because I’d assumed the song was only available on Tattle Tale’s out-of-print album Sew True. Now that the song is back in print (and making the artists money), I can’t in good conscience give away the song anymore.
Philosophically, I think the artists should probably offer that particular song (one that is incredibly sought after because of its inclusion in the movie But I’m a Cheerleader) for download. This would obviously increase their fanbase, and I have little doubt that many listeners would then want to purchase more music by the artist. (Of course, the artist doesn’t technically exist anymore, so maybe that was part of the decision to release a new CD with the song on it instead.)
Anyway, you can order the CD from their website. I plan on doing so myself as soon as I get a spare minute.
Mondo recap
Mondo came and went last weekend, and it was great. Not quite as great, however, as the last madfest. Of course, Madfest is in madison, and much harder to drive to. I have plans to go to another juggling convention in two weeks, the one down in illinois.
I don’t know how I suddenly got “back into” juggling, or even if I ever was “out” of it, but this time of year just happens to be a busy one for juggling conventions, at least in the midwest. (Which seems odd, you’d think we’d want to have them in the summer or something.)
Anyway, I’ve been picking up a few new skills, and my five clubs has improved immensely. I’m also getting pretty close to level five on the unicycle.
One reason mondo may not have felt quite as fun as mad fest was the fact that I was probably coming down with something the whole weekend. This week my body has been drained of all energy, and I’ve mostly just sat around like a lump of fat. Most days it’s all I can do to force myself to eat sometime in the afternoon before laura gets home from work. As a result though, I have been plowing through the sandman comic series, which I borrowed from Delobius’s wife.
Now because I’ve been sick all week, my sleep schedule is all f’d up. For instance, I slept till 1pm today. If I do feel well enough to go into work tomorrow, (I felt a little better today, like maybe the worst of it is behind me) …you can bet I’ll be in late. At least I’ve got forgiving coworkers (who are probably reading this right now wondering if I’m full of shit).
I’m going to upload some new pictures to the TCUC gallery before I got to bed, I think.
(And this is a particularly lame entry, I think… Where are all the big ideas? I watched “No Maps for These Planes” this afternoon, a documentary on William Gibson. It was quite interesting. The part that probably struck me the hardest was how he had at one time been inspired to take all the psychedelic drugs he could get his hands on. I guess I’d never thought of him as all that “out there” or surreal, but his better stuff definitely is, which is probably why I like it so much. That and the sandman comics have definitely put me in a strange sort of introspective mood.)
movablejournal?
How come nobody told me Six Apart bought LiveJournal!?
Also, my earlier enthusiasm for writing a movable type plugin for closing comments has now abated.
upside down pentagram comment spam
This is it, the six-hundred and sixty-sixth live livingtech blog entry. I’m about ready to sprout horns ala Legend or something.
I’ve been extremely reluctant to spend the tedious hours it would require to change all my old entries to comment status closed (or none) when I feel that the same task would take one (or maybe two) lines of SQL, and five minutes to perform on the command line. Unfortunately, I’m using the magical Berkley DB for livingtech’s movable type install, and there is no such thing as SQL in a Berkley DB. If only movable type provided an interface for this type of task… (Suddenly I have a plugin idea, and surely my time would be better spent hacking MT rather than watching the entry page reload literally six-hundred times or so.)
Needless to say, comment spam sucks. I get a few hundred every couple of days probably, which seems disproportionately high considering the fact that my blog cannot be that highly ranked on google. It’s not like anybody reads this thing. That combined with the plethora of actual spam I get in my inbox, I’m seriously considering switching primary domains. I mean, what is livingtech to me? It’s just a name. I could easily make up another one just as cool and interesting. Hell, I own blogistry.com, and am doing jack shit with that right now. So what do people think? Time to leave livingtech and find new digs for this blog?
next is satan’s entry
That last entry’s poem was written back in November of 2002. I don’t really remember writing it at all. I only vaguely remember feeling dissatisfied with something about the prose, which explains why I just saved it as a draft and never looked at it again. The only reason I re-discovered it just now was that I noticed I had exactly 666 blog posts in livingtech. (So technically this is the 667th.) But I realized that there were no doubt one or two entries I’d saved as drafts and never actually published. Monitor this, was one of three, so that meant there were 663 live entries. It became the 664th, this is 665, and next up it’s a tribute to satan time… if I feel like it.
Anyway, the poem/entry was originally titled cosmic incapacitation, I actually cleaned it up quite a bit before changing the post status to “Publish”.
Monitor this,
god comes bundled with spyware,
and just like every other self-proclaimed “freeware”,
is no more open source
than Microsoft’s latest OS.
(Never mind the guiltware, nagware
adware and/or crippleware
climbing over the pews
clutching at the spines of
Earth’s first virus.)
That old tome is precompiled
to hide its true architecture.
They want you to run it without inspection
close to your firmware: “Click here
to always trust software from…”
We’re all just spinning
what our motherboards were spinning.
Garbage in, garbage out.
I don’t believe it’s in our bios
to just blindly run
every little command-line commandment
because ‘It’s from the source itself!’
We were meant to edit our own code,
tweak all those jumper settings and
replace a chip or two when they’re cracked.
We just have to take that first step,
open up, and show everyone what we’re made of.
links and psychotic tendencies
Here’s an intriguing idea conceived by one of my more or less intriguing friends over at Book this Blog (.com). I wonder what it would feel like to have a bound copy of livingtech in my hands. It’s so contrary to the whole blog concept that I really want to do it for some reason. Lets print the web!
I’ve been posting over at Tech Evangelists, which is a sort of communication experiment for the company I work for. Many of us believe in blogs the way I refuse to believe in deities, and so we’re trying to put our mouths where our money comes from… on the web. I can’t say much about it, cause I still haven’t read the bio I was supposed to add to the sidebar earlier today, (somehow that got lost in the list of things I had on the proverbial “plate”,) but so far it’s just been a free-for-all.
My friend KR has finally started posting regularly on the blog I set up for her back in October. It’s fun to see someone new pick up the blogging bug. I hope she keeps at it.
In not so pleasant news, Laura and I have been fighting like an old married couple the last few nights, and I feel like I’m totally raining on her parade. I don’t know why, but every time we get into these miniscule squabbles I feel angrier and angrier when they’re not resolved right away. The dentist told me I’ve been grinding my teeth in my sleep and said that I might need to wear some kind of mouth guard if I notice myself doing it during the day. (Apparently people who grind their teeth during the day almost always do so involuntarily at night.) So today I tried to pay close attention to whether I was grinding, and didn’t really notice myself grinding, but did notice myself biting the skin in my mouth, and my nails, and around my nails… constantly. So I guess what I’m saying is that I’m probably wound up so tight that one of these days I’ll find myself holding an Uzi I don’t remember purchasing, looking down on the bloodied corpses of all the people I know and love.
…maybe then I can stop chewing my nails.