Author: grid

well, things are not really progressing very fast with pyblosxom. It’s like instead of installing movable type once I’m installing it over and over again. I’m going to disable comments for this post because it’s confusing having the form there when it doesn’t do anything, I think.

This week has been busy for me. Monday night I biked to juggling and back, Tuesday I don’t know what the hell I did, and Wednesday I went to see the newly released original Godzilla at the Oak Street Cinema. Godzilla was really good, there were parts that were still funny, but you really didn’t want to laugh, because the movie was seemingly much more serious in tone than the americanized release.

Thursday was the last day for this documentary on Scrabble that I found out about at the Oak Street called Word Wars. My mom loves scrabble, so I told her we had to go, and it didn’t disappoint either of us. The world of competitive scrabble is just as weird and inbred as any other very obsessive-compulsive hobby… juggling, chess, sci-fi fandom, all share simmilar traits when it comes to the their upper eschelons, I think.

After Word Wars, I had this strange compulsion to see Trekies. It’s been on my list (albiet not very high) for quite some time now. We also (not surprisingly) wanted to play some scrabble, so we stopped by the video store, picked up Treckies, and got Laura to join us for some 3-player scrabble. It is definitely harder to play when there is a TV on in the room though, and I always feel bad for some reason if I don’t give a game my full attention.

Tonight I had about fifty things I was suppose to do, or could have done, and instead, Laura and I sat around at home waiting for her sisters to get into town. This seems noble, but we knew they were going to arrive after midnight, so we could have made it no problem to either or both of the birthday parties that were scheduled for tonight. Or maybe done the parade that started at six-thirty. But we both needed time to unwind after work, and it was easier just not to leave the house.

I did watch Shaolin Temple, (Jet Lee’s first movie), and it was a pretty decent action-packed kung-fu movie. Lots of one-hit deaths though, and then when it came down to real battles (at the end of the movie) there were times where it felt like a some of the blows should have been killers, but weren’t. It was silly, but fun, anyway.

Laura’s sisters arrived around 1 am, (having driven from Kansas) and we showed them the house, and played a game of Phase 10. Now I need to sleep… this weekend promises to be as packed as my week has been.

Anyway, that’s the week in summary… a small slice of it anyway.

ok, for the time being, comments are disabled. I’ll hopefully have them back online sometime this evening. (When I’m not at work.) With any luck, maybe you won’t even notice!

[update 6-20: ok, things are still not fixed (only almost a week later… :P) I’ve installed pyblosxom and played around a bit with it, but it’s nowhere near to prime time yet. Sorry.]

Another brief link-post this morning via my web-trowling co-workers.

Read the surprisingly well written found poetry of Donald Rumsfeld. (I particularly like the first three.)

Truly inspiring.

A coworker linked me to this brilliant essay by Kurt Vonnegut today. It’s about politics and war and the meaning of life, among other things. Read it.

Here’s the big-ass story of my weekend and how I proposed to Laura. The important part is just that I proposed to her on Monday, May 31st, and that she said yes. We still have an open relationship, and no, we haven’t yet set a date. If you don’t really care about all the nitty-gritty details of our trip to Orlando, don’t bother reading the narrative below.
Continue reading “the weekend I got engaged”

Updates have been sporadic as of late, I know, but the next four days they’re going to be even worse (ok, non-existent) as I’m going to be in sunny Orlando Florida, soaking up the sun and enjoying various theme parks. I’m not sure how much theme park Laura and I can stand, so we haven’t purchased any tickets yet. You save some amount of money by buying tickets online, but it doesn’t seem that significant an amount when you compare it to the price of the trip as a whole. Right now the big decision is whether to do Universal Islands of Adventure for more than one day… or rather, whether we want to make the journey from Downtown Disney (where our hotel is at) to Universal more than one day, because for like an additional $40 (each) we get both Universal studios and USIOA for something like 5 days.

It’s a little late to solicit feedback on this issue, so please don’t tell me how I should definitely see XXX as Murphy will make sure that is the one thing I just happened to miss while I was there.

I’m sure I will have at least one exciting story to tell when I get back.

Kitin wrote about the phenomenon where the realization that something would make a great blog entry uses up all of your enthusiasm for writing that particular entry. (I’m paraphrasing, of course.)

Anyway, I feel this way all the time. I have a great idea for a blog entry, or worse yet, a topic that I plan to blog about, and the more I think about said topic the less enthusiasm I have for blogging. In fact, I could probably write a list of the topics that are somehow “ruined” for me in this way:

    * The meta-juggling entry I have had on the backburner for eons–where I plan to talk about why I do it, how I got started, and why you should too.
    * The entry I am planning to write about my desire to switch from Movable Type because I don’t like the capitalist direction that six apart has taken their website and licensing scheme.

OK, for starters I can only think of these two, but I’m sure there have been lots more over the years. You can probably add to the list just about every political observation post I plan to make and then don’t. (These happen on a weekly or bi-weekly basis.)

So go read Kitin’s blog… her entries make me horny. (yum!)

Switching topics now, I had my faith in humanity restored today by an attractive woman named Mariah.

I had just gotten off the bus going eastbound toward St. Paul, and was waiting at the stoplight to get to my next bus when it started to rain… hard. I was holding the book I’m currently reading (The Well of Lost Plots, by Jasper Fforde), and my bookmark had been my $40 stored-value bus pass. Just then it started to rain. It started to rain HARD.

I ran as soon as the light changed, and–I remember this part distinctly–two guys in a red sports car laughed obnoxiously at me as I raced for the bus shelter while trying to keep my book out of the rain. When I got to the shelter, my bookmark was gone. I put the book away in my backpack and went out to look for it, but I couldn’t find it. I called the bus company on my cell phone to see if they could contact the other bus for me, but I guess they’ll only do it if it’s an emergency (which apparently my $40 card is not).

I got on the next bus, sob story on my lips, and the driver was pretty skeptical. She didn’t give a rat’s ass that I lost my transfer (they put the transfer on your card when you use it).

So then from the back of the bus, this gorgeous girl runs up and offers to pay for me. Her first card is one of those ones with your photo on it, that is obviously not suppose to work for someone other than yourself, but when the bus driver doesn’t stand for it, she gets out a stored value card and uses that to pay for me.

Naturally, I follow her and thank her profusely. (Probably making an idiot out of myself.) And after we’ve exchanged a few sentences, she just up and GIVES me the stored-value card she used. Apparently she has a job now where they pay for her bus card, and so she had this stored-value card from before, and didn’t need it anymore. It probably had more money on it than my old one did. Amazing.

So we talked for a few minutes, and then suddenly my stop appeared around a corner. I’d never actually taken that particular combination of bus routes, so I didn’t realize until it was too late that I didn’t even have time to get the girl’s number. It was probably just as well, I didn’t want to sound like a schmuck after she was so nice and all. But I could have at least offered to buy her a drink or something, and would have for sure if there’d been more time. Some part of me hopes that I’ll see her again. Maybe on the same bus next week!

I have counted Rudy Rucker as one of my favorite authors since I read his novel White Light back about six years ago. I had read Master of Space and Time before that, but it hadn’t really struck me like White Light did.

Today I finished his latest masterpiece Frek and the Elixer, and I feel I have to write this entry to recommend it to all my friendly viewers out there.

It’s too bad I can’t branecast this blog, then you all would be able to esp my enjoyment right from my skull while I’m reading it. Of course, that’d be over, and you’d just be esping my memory of my enjoyment as I write this entry.

In a little bit you’d be able to esp my dreams.

So, there are a couple of different and very interesting blogging options out there. I’m not very happy with the state of the new movable type license, so I’m beginning to explore some of those other options with more gusto than I may have previously exhibited.

One of my main chriteria is that this thing be portable. And to me, that means no external database. I mean, of course the data is outside of the application, but I’d prefer not to work in mysql at all. Enter Blosxom, where every blog entry is a separate file on the filesystem. Strange and exciting. Also vaguely reminiscent of a php project I did a while back where I created an entire website from a few text or html files in a “data” directory. I thought it was cool at the time anyway, and I’m still using it for my mindblurbs (over on the navigation there).

So tonight I installed Blosxom in about twenty seconds, but getting it to do what I want is going to be a much more difficult and challenging task.

What I would really like is to install a Blosxom plugin, put my MT export file in the Blosxom directory, and have it just work. Is that so much to ask? ;)

Unfortunately, I see no Blosxom plugins that perform that magical task. I may just have to try my hand at writing one, even though I have this abject fear of Perl. Not sure why, but Perl all looks like machine code to me. It’s not really “scan friendly” in my opinion. It does do some pretty neat stuff though, I’ll admit that.