Category: Uncategorized

This morning on my way to work I heard one of those “station identifying” ads on Radio K. It was this kid talking about how he didn’t have anything to do that weekend, and he was going to sit around and post to his blog all day. Of course Radio K had some alternative thing for him to do or something, but I thought to myself: That’s a perfectly fine thing to do all weekend!

warning: far-too domestic description of house pet eminent!

Laura may very well start a photo journal for Thor, our first cat. This was him on his first night, hiding behind the washer and dryer. This morning when I woke up I startled him in my closet. (I was actually looking for him.) He jumped out and scampered downstairs like lightening.

Thor already has pet pet-names. I can’t decide between Jupiter or Thursday (both of which have some entomological relation to Thor), but Nate doesn’t like either of them, so I think Thor will be his official title.

He’s a small kitty, at least part mancoon, and very adorable. Maybe tonight he’ll let me pet him…

Yeah, ok, so now my comments form has some style. I don’t know why I’m telling you this, except that I havne’t been posting much lately.

I was up late last night working on my Instamatic Web project. I’m not entirely sure it’s ready for prime time, but it’s not like that many people read this thing anyway. (I guess this is more like cable access.)

Anyway, the sudden burst of energy necessary to finish the thing was inspired totally and completely by the discovery that Dean Allen over at Textism.com had done all of the hard stuff for me already by creating Textile, a text to xhtml converter in php.

I was tempted to mess around with Textile some, and re-create some of my beloved text formatting rules (having tabs indicate headers was the big one, my favorite anyway), but the way I ended up using it, I can just plug in a new version of Textile if Mr. Allen ever updates it.

Anyway, the main purpose of Instamatic Web was to make it so easy that you wouldn’t have to know anything at all about web development to use it. But as I was writing my text to xhtml conversion functions, I realized that they’d still have to learn some kind of basic rules if they wanted any text formatting at all… and this was SO easy to plug in that I’m definitely willing to accept Textile’s rules over my own, at least for now.

It’s worth noting that until last night, I hadn’t really understood why anyone would care to write their own text formatting plugin for Movable Type. I mean, if you’re using IE, most of what you want is already there with that stupid ActiveX crap.

Now what I really want to find is something exactly like Textile, but for rtf to xhtml… then you really won’t have to know anything to get text formatting.

ok, so a couple of relatively long reads have muddled up my brain today. The first and lighter topic is a post over at six different ways about why people blog. This is of course one of my favorite topics, the metablogging question, and this rant was great. (a little long, but full of links citations, which were really excellent and to the point.)

There are several things about this blog are conscious decisions, despite, (maybe to some people) appearing as omissions. The most obvious one of which is my lack of side-links. Almost everybody has them, and yes, occasionally I will click on someone’s. I’m not sure why I don’t have them except to say that hey, this is my blog. Yes, there are blogs I love and would like to promote, but I keep those another link deeper, in the “blogs I read” link at the right. In some ways, I suppose keeping a list of bookmarks is not that different from the sidelinks that most people have, but I guess I had the bookmarks before I had the blog, so maybe it’s laziness. I did at one point consider including the bookmarks (and especially the blogs I read part) as part of this page, but it was going to involve some stupid javascript since I wasn’t about to start using SSI or PHP to include stuff here.

Another voluntary omission is the trackback feature and the whole ball of wax in that can of worms. Paul Hammond pointed out in his post on this topic that “Something about trackbacks, pingbacks, referer lists and the like makes me uneasy. But I don’t know what.” This struck an immediate chord with me. I don’t know what it is either, but maybe I’ll do some thinking this weekend and try to come up with it. There’s got to be some weird social or psychological quirk that keeps me from wanting these. (Strangely, this uneasiness does not extend to user comments, as it appears to for Paul, even though he didn’t mention them.)

Ok, enough about that, the second link that gave my head a whirl is this piece by John Barlow about the possible war with Iraq. As you may or may not know, John Barlow is one of those EFF people, and someone who (at least from afar) I have admired. The piece is long, but very interesting, and it made me take a step back in the way I’ve looked at US motivations for the conflict, (if not, actually, the uselessness of the possible conflict itself). That last part is to say that yes, I disagree with the possible war, and I would even go as so far as to say that the shaking of our mighty military fists is just plain wrong, yet now at least I can say I’ve heard one plausible justification for the whole fiasco that doesn’t make Bush and Cheney out to be complete blithering idiots. (Yes, there is quite a bit of evidence pointing to calculation behind Bush’s various idiocies, but until today I had mostly written it off as coincidence and circumstance.)

On a related subject, something I will merely link to and say no more.

So Laura subscribes to Bust magazine. (On more than one occasion, I’ve picked it up, and there’s some interesting stuff in there! Not just lesbian stuff either!) Today she got a new issue, and there’s a review in there of a new book published by Stuart David, (frontman/basist for the band Looper). Looper is one of my favorite bands, so she told me about it.

I did a little searching and found an excerpt. I will be picking up the book shortly, (it’s on hold at ruminator) but then I also decided to see if looper has a website. That was how I found out that they also have a new album!!! Well, it’s not even that new, it came out in May of last year, called the snare. I feel horrible that I didn’t know about this before now!

I’m also tempted by looper’s backpack-type-things available from their site, but since I made quite a few purchases this weekend (after paying bills, of course), I should probably hold off on that one. I called in sick on friday and monday (hence my lack of updates, for some reason this thing is a lot more fun when it’s on company time — ooh that’s incriminating!) and played one of those purchases (Dark Cloud 2) all day yesterday. So far, it’s pretty much a lot like the first one, addicting and fun… I don’t yet know how I’ll find time to read.

I just went for a walk with Alex down to the bridge out behind the building. Barely anybody has walked on it since it’s snowed, and today the snow is ripe for snowballs and snowmen. I made a snowman, (that Alex tried to put a penis on! hehe… snowpenis kinda sounds a bit like subloopiness… coincidence?) and then we amused ourselves for quite a while by throwing snowballs at the frozen creek. Finally, after rolling a snowman-sized ball of snow and hurling it as far as possible, I managed to puncture the ice. We did so another time before I rolled our last snowball, (Which was probably 3 feet high!) up to the edge of the bridge’s railing. Actually, I had to get Alex’s help even to push it that far. We grunted and strained to get it over the railing, but it was well worth it, falling straight into the middle of the river, creating a hole exactly as large as the snowball. The water was black and murky underneath it, and splashed brown sludge everywhere. Fortunately, we were above the splash threshold.

I kept thinking as we walked back to the building. I actually affected something today. I accomplished something. My life has meaning.

Well, here it is… I spent the last hour reading the movable type support forums trying to figure out why MT was giving me a servelet error after I upgraded carefully to 2.61. I meticulously went through each directory, making sure everything was actually there, and found nothing. I don’t have access to my webserver’s error logs (or I seem to have forgotten where they are, I’m not sure on that one) so I was pretty much at wit’s end when I finally just re-uploaded all the .cgi files in the main directory. Low and behold, it works. (so far.) Kinda frustrating, seeing as how I uploaded them in exactly the same way both times.

I guess the internet works in mysterious ways. Either that, or my beloved copy of WinSCP2 isn’t as wonderful as I give it credit for being.

There are some nasty comments on the support forums about this new version, so I’m crossing my fingers…

I want to publicly appologize to Laura for snapping at her in the middle of this fiasco. She’s got a headache, and I should really go tell her I’m sorry.

(After that, if this post works OK, maybe I’ll tackle re-creating the whole blog, so I can take advantage of some of the new features.) *rubs hands together*

Are we defined, (as hypothesized in Hornby’s High Fidelity) not by what we’re like, but by what we like?

This weekend I bought Dynasty Warriors 3: Extreme Legends. It’s more of the same. If you liked Dynasty Warriors 2, you were pleasantly surprised that DW3 was exactly the same game, but with more of everything, (and a much better UI). DW3XL doesn’t even pretend it’s a sequel. It’s just an upgrade. But one that’s worth the $30 price, if you ask me. There are 7 new musou (or story) modes (for the “unaligned” characters that you could previously only play in “Free” mode.), and tons of new items to collect, including a new 5th weapon for every character. I’m excited for DW4, (which comes out in a month or two), but this is enough to keep me slaughtering hordes of enemy soldiers for at least a few weeks straight.

Now, how does this game define me? Last night I dreamed I was at a science fiction convention, (perfect setting for this, actually), and presumably slaughtering hordes of people… I only remember the last part, when I sat down by the pool, just after dispatching someone with my smaller sword (I had two). I was wiping it off, and cleaning it before putting it back in my sheath, so I could go swimming, (I was wearing trunks underneath my ninja/samurai garb) when Laura said I had to drag the body at least a certain distance away from the pool… I did so, grudgingly.

Second purchase last weekend (first chronologically) was a book that Jason recommended to me on the basis of a few preview chapters he’d read online. I read the chapters too, and decided it was definitely something I was going to have to read. I know he bought the book for his trip (he’s been out of town for a week–and we have his kitties!) and so I was going to wait for him to finish it before I read it. But somehow I found myself at barnes and noble on Sat. night, with a giftcard for $20. So Max Berry’s Jennifer Government ended up costing me less than $2. I finished it Monday morning, around 2AM. It was damn good, and well worth reading.

I found myself, upon later reflection, a little puzzled at the end of the novel. For a very satirical (and generally negative) portrayal of capitalism, the novel ended on a note that in many ways could be considered a pro-capitalism way. I don’t want to say too much. I’d love to have this discussion with anyone who has also finished the book. As a purveyor of Adbusters and most things anti-corporation, I find myself (despite having thoroughly enjoyed the book) left with a rather bitter aftertaste.