Category: Uncategorized

Just got back from Rurik’s Halloween party. He always throws a good one. Laura and I spent most of the afternoon running from one store to the next looking at costumes and trying to find something we wouldn’t mind being. Eventually, we got her a vinyl witches hat and a target witch dress (it came with black wings that she didn’t wear, and was called something else, but yeah,) and I got to be her black cat. It was a good costume, in spite of costing very little and being kind of unoriginal.

I wrote no poetry yesterday. I tried to write something just now, so at least I made an attempt, but it’s so late that my eyes are closing on me all the time, and my heart just isn’t into it.

I’ll try to write some later today after I’ve gotten a good sleep, in between bouts of GTA: San Andreas. I haven’t actually played it yet, and it’s sitting on the coffee table calling my name. Bed is calling louder though, and I absolutely must obey…

How’s this for a list of things to include in your novel: a list of “Human Universals”, link via Kottke, who says “All known human cultures share these attributes.”

Tonight I met a bunch of nanowrimoers, most of whom I’ll never remember their names. But I also met Sharyn, who I seem to have an inordinate amount of things in common with, and Katherine who I have met before and find oddly intriguing… (Also, she calls me “Mozilla Man” because the first time I met her I was wearing a Mozilla T-shirt, which is obviously appealing in an entirely too geeky sort of way.)

I had a very productive shower today, where I figured out the motivation for one of my main plot points in the novel that I haven’t even really thought much about, but which I will be writing next month. Man, lets hope I can avoid sentences like that last one come monday!

Things I’m thinking about at around 5am.

• The Worlds of Warcraft beta is almost over. They’re going to be down for a few days, and everyone has to download a new client. When the servers come back up they’ll be officially starting the “stress test”, which probably just means open beta. Anybody can sign up. Usually these things don’t last too long, so I’ll bet the game actually gets released in the next couple of weeks at most. I wanted to be sick of this game before it was released… but there’s just so much to do! I will refrain from buying it in november, however, as I’ll be doing nanowrimo.
• I really want to go see the documentary film Blogumentary next friday at the oak street. It’s part of a local documentary film festival called Get Real. Some of the other films sound quite interesting too.
• I can’t believe I’ve blogged every day this month so far. That is definitely a personal record of some kind. Even last november I missed eight days or so. (of course, I was probably too busy blogging to post then.) I’m sure I won’t be keeping this kind of pace up during Nano next month, but I do hope to update fairly regularly.
• Speaking of nanowrimo, tonight is the twin cities kickoff meeting/party. The first really is starting to creep up on me, and I still have only a vague idea for my novel. I thought that by this time I’d have thought of (and no doubt rejected) several other ideas, but no, I just haven’t given it enough thought really at all. I may end up going with my first idea because I have no others. (Which is what I really didn’t want to do this year, because it’s pretty much what I did last year. This year I wanted to have some small plot outline at the very least.) Wish me luck, and if you’re doing it, maybe I’ll see you tonight!
• I’m sleepy.

I didn’t really write nothin’ today. Had too many emails to go over from this weekend… did lots of stuff with Laura yesterday (sunday) for her birthday. OK, so I wrote some mindblubs. Also, I’m not feeling so woofy. Lots of spam comments today. Feels like I got dog breath and some enlargated esopho-glandiaries.

Today is Laura’s birthday. She is my loving companion and best friend. You should give her a special birthday hug the next time you see her.

A little interesting OS X factoid… I wondered a few minutes ago if there was a log on my laptop of when it had been put to sleep and woken back up again. I did a google search and looked through the first two pages of results without any luck. Then I looked in my library folder, and low and behold, the very first file I tried had that information in it. This is the kind of thing it would seem I would inevitably search for again and never be able to find, so I’m posting it here. The file was /Library/Logs/Console/(username)/console.log Neat, huh?

I tried to write some more php poetry today, and it was BAD. So instead I’ll post these movable type plugin ideas I had, in case someone either a) is ambitious enough to write one, or b) happens to know of one already that does basically what I want.

MTShowAtLeast, a very simple plugin that changes the functionality of lastn entries to mean “show at least” the last n entries rather than just showing that number all the time. So basically, this shows the greater number, either the number in lastn, or the set number of days in your blog preferences.

MTCSSPicker would be quite a bit more complicated, and read in your default style sheet, giving you some color pickers for each entry in the style sheet with a color attribute already in existence. Or maybe it’d give you the option for every style defined. For styles with multiple hex values already, it’d give you multiple pickers, as in the case of style sheet entries with background colors and the like. I’ve always thought this would be a great idea just in general, a CSS GUI.

I just finished posting the complete contents of my latest chapbook, Photocopies and Staples, to my page of old poetry chapbooks. This thing isn’t new or anything, I put it together last year, but it’s new to this website! I also think it contains some of the best poetry I’ve ever written, so if you haven’t seen it already, check it out. Also, let me know if you want a printed copy. I’ve got a few dozen of them lying around uselessly in a box upstairs.

While I was at it, I added a link to my chapbooks page from here, and brought that into the wonderful world of CSS. But while I took a step forward with stylesheets, I also took a step backwards, because I formatted the page with a huge table. My coding moto for livingtech has always been use the least amount of markup possible to reach the objective. I thought I achieved that pretty well with Photocopies and Staples until I realized that IE doesn’t support the white-space: pre attribute. So I had to add an actual pre tag to the code. It looks fine now though.

Nothing like taking a metaphor and running with it. I guess I feel like every really good metaphor deserves a poem written about it. Maybe that’s back-asswards, but I like those one-meat-a-phor poems. There’s technical jargon for them, I know, but I can’t be bothered to search for it right now, what with the words coming hither-thither and all. It’s raining outside you know, really getting water into everything.

Probably nobody’s noticed, but I write a lot of these poems after midnight, then backdate the entries to look like I wrote them the day before, usually right at 11:59. This happens when I’m about to go to bed and realize I haven’t yet written a poem for the day.

Yes, I realize they haven’t all been about technology as I’d promised. Especially the last couple. But it’s almost like I’ve been thinking about technology so much that when it comes time to write, I want to escape it rather than exalt in its glorious majesty. This last week I have found myself more and more thinking about code when I’m not working. Maybe it’s the eight-hour days, but suddenly I am a programmer in my non-working hours too. I have a project whose deadline is ostensibly the end of this month (but the client has been taking their sweet time approving things, so I’m sure we can push back on that date), anyway, I’m getting a little worried that I haven’t started the programming yet. So I woke up this morning and was defining the database tables for it in my head. This is Friday. My day off. My day for me. What am I doing?

The night before last, I looked over at Laura after a silence, I forget which of us asked what the other was thinking about, but we’d both been thinking about work. How does this happen? I used to be so good at separating work from home. I have so many favored forms of escapism in my arsenal. I’m going to go find some…

I wrote some poetic crap today, but nothing worth posting. Usually when I sit down to write, I can mold something I think is worth reading from all the crap that spills forth in the meantime, but not today.

I feel like I owe about fifty people emails. But I woke up today at about seven to carpool with Laura to work today, and my brain is mush. I’m sleeping in tomorrow, no doubt about it. I may also work from home, as my throat has been kinda scratchy, and I don’t yet know if it’s the lack of sleep or what.

Tonight a bunch of us all saw Team America: World Police, and I swear it was just about the funniest thing I’ve seen, maybe ever. I’m not even a huge fan of south park. I like the show, but don’t generally seek it out. But this was extremely funny. My sides hurt from laughing by the end of it. Obviously it’s “their” type of humor, “irreverent” puts it mildly. I don’t know what else I can say about it other than… I highly recommend you go see it when it comes out on Friday.

I started reviewing some movies on netflix today. I wanted to create a “list” of the best science fiction parody movies, and realized that I couldn’t do that without writing a couple of reviews first. Not only that, but my reviews have to be approved before they show up on the site.