livingtech

Thor is creeping up the bed toward my face. He likes to sneak up and rub his wet nose on your chin. It’s kissing, I suppose. But he’s really sneaky about it. He knows we don’t like it, but he does it anyway.

I like cats better than dogs because they don’t lick everything. They don’t slobber on everything, or rub their wet noses on everything. But Thor does. He’s a dog-cat, and when he gets excited he’ll knead his claws into whatever they’re on top of at the time.

He purrs like a pigeon.

I push him over onto his side to stop his slow plodding toward my face, and he just purrs louder.

Ah yes, it’s time for another exciting entry about everyone’s favorite blogging topic–web stats and referrer logs!

I’ll be your host for this wild romp through search-result wonderland, as we coast down a magical molehill of wacky and unusual traffic that’s driven right here by absolutely crazy catch phrases! That’s right; phrases like “wordsex” (12.22% of all search strings!), “mancoon” (2.93%), “trivial questions”, “snow plow pictures”, “thoughts”, “meghan ryan”, and ultimately, “crack cocane”!

I wrote an entry back in the day about how I misspelled cocaine and was generating traffic from it. Well, today I got another comment to that entry, someone who wants to know how to freebase! Since my entry had NOTHING AT ALL to do with cocaine other than including the word itself, I can only assume that this lovely fellow didn’t even read it!

So those interesting referrer logs that everyone loves to post… WORTHLESS!

BTW, I still come up first for a search on the phrase “sexsweat”, but it’s not even listed in the top 20 on my logs. C’mon people, lets search for more of that lovely perfumed liquid in the future, alright?

All… right.

I’m blogging from bed right now, wearing only the lint from my flannel bedsheets.

This morning I woke in one of those slow dramatic thinking modes. Every lazy twist and turn my brain-tunnels took was some exaggerated incredible idea. After awhile, I stopped daydreaming (I’m sure the thought process was very close to dreaming while awake) and focused on one thought in particular: I’m never going to be one of the crazy-prolific writers. The writers you read about because they wrote over a hundred books during their lifetimes. Asimov and Silverberg come to mind in the science fiction realm, but it seems like about one author a week in the writer’s almanac talks about another one. Someone who was driven to write–possessed by their passion for it. I am a slow writer, and as a result should really focus on quality, not the crappy quantity nanowrimo stuff (although that was good because it forced me to write something). Anyways, I haven’t been writing. One of the biggest reasons for taking the new job was so I’d have some time to write on the weekdays. But so far it’s just been party every night. Board games and video games, inviting people over at every opportunity. It doesn’t help any that laura doesn’t work, so when I get home she’s starving for attention almost as badly as the cats do when everyone has been out all day. I don’t mind that, but sometimes I’m exactly the opposite, and I want to hibernate for a while when I get home.

Anyway, point is, write more, game less. (yeah, write.)

Peet is pretty much nearly my favorite writer. I spent twenty minutes looking at hard drive enclosures and MMC cards on ebay before I decided I’d better get on with it and update this shithole. A few minutes on Peet’s blog for inspiration, and I was back at it, wanting to do something with my life… Or anyways, update this fucker.

I played Crystal Chronicles tonight with Delobi.us, D, and G, and man… I admit I was sucked in, but I’m kinda glad I didn’t plunk down my fifty. I’d maybe buy it for $30 used or something.

Before that, I stopped at the fetus and signed over a lung and two kidneys for the four aforementioned desired CDs. I was in the store for an hour, and (as my co-worker put it) it was payday today… (well, yesterday now). I’d picked up six or seven CDs that weren’t the ones on my list and for various reasons put them all back again. By the time I was ready to check out, I riffed through the ones still in my hands, and low and behold, it was exactly the four CDs I’d come into the store with the intention of purchasing. I’m honestly not sure how that worked.

So yeah, latest craze, ripping my CD collection to mp3. I’m not sure how big this puppy’s gonna get, but I’m aiming for ALL the CDs, so I imagine it’ll be upwards of 50gigs.

There is this weird phenomenon I want to write about involving coding and reading poetry (and how the two don’t seem all that compatible), but after writing these last few paragraphs, I’m not feeling particularly articulate. Maybe I’ve said enough on the subject already. I’m awash with nothingness and less-than-sweet nothings.

“Let the day take you.”

So the evolution of last month’s obsession with board and card games has found me up to my neck in marked-down games from the Wizards of the Coast closing sale, (among various other sources). My latest two favorites are Carcassonne, and Settlers of Catan.

Wizards had a nice edition of Carcassonne with all the expansion packs included that several in our group of friends have now picked up. We played tonight with all of the expansion rules for the first time. (I take that back, we didn’t play with the big “double sized” guys, I’m not sure why exactly, but we used them to score instead.) It was fun, but I think the game definitely moves faster if you don’t play with all the expansions.

Dr Bombay picked up Carcassonne Hunters & Gatherers last night, and we played that–both to see how it differed from the original, and because he’d heard it was better. It was better, but only in some ways. The scoring at the end of the game was definitely less complicated, and we liked having the “bonus” tiles. Anyway, I’m not sure why Settlers of Catan is so fun. There is a definite strategy element involved (quite different and distinct from Carcassonne), but it seems fairly random to me as to who ends up winning in the end.

Tonight, after juggling, Laura, Sarah, Matt and I played a round of Settlers, and then one of Carcassonne. Sarah had to go sleep, so then Matt and I played some Go on a 9×9.

I won twice with my usual 4-stone handicap, so we went down to 3 and he schooled me. Then he told me why I was losing, and it basically all boiled down to the fact that I play too aggressively in general. With a game that small, you really only have to play the most brain-dead defense to win with a 3 stone handicap. I pretty much felt like an idiot, but I really thought about it afterwards, and even now it rankles a bit.

Makes me wonder if I have the same tendency in Chess or other games. Many of our friends make fun of me for being too aggressive. Laura likes to get everyone to team up against me no matter what game we’re playing. Of course, she’d say it’s just because I like winning a little too much, but I’ve always sorta taken it as a compliment. I’m the one people have to “watch out for” to keep from winning. It means I’m good, or at least, that’s what I like to think.

Sarah mentioned that she’d played a game of Carcassonne with K this last weekend where he got a little too upset about much the same thing happening–people conspired against him, and he lost. I think I know the feeling well, and it really sucks if you loose by a lot. But if you’re still in the running, and you know everyone else was out to get you, I always feel like that’s a sort of accomplishment in and of itself.

I better stop this line of reasoning before I start to sound too conceited. Just don’t ask me who wins every time we play Tetris.

I get emails about twice a month begging for Tattle Tale’s song Glass Vase Cello Case. (I come up 4th in a google search for that song, don’t ask me why.) It is attest to my idiosyncrasies that I sometimes reply right away, and sometimes not. This morning I had two of them in my inbox, quite polite ones at that.

I started to feel guilty sending out the mp3, despite the fact that it is near impossible to get a hold of a physical copy of the Tattle Tale, Sew True CD itself. I looked briefly (in vain) for Jen Wood’s email address to ask her permission. In my searches, I discovered that she is part of one of my newest favorite bands, The Postal Service.

A few nights ago, I burned my sister a cd full of songs that would possibly make good unicycling “routine” music. She chose the first track from Give Up. I will be hearing quite-possibly too much of that great track in the coming months.

I discovered the Postal Service when I was obsessed with lists of people’s 2003 favorites. It felt like everybody had them on their lists. So I downloaded the CD, and it’s now on my list to buy when I have money again. Here’s the list:

Crystal Method: Legion of Boom
Postal Service: Give Up
Stereolab: Margerine Eclipse
Trans AM: Liberation

Today, reading pete’s new blog, I found his link to Dom’s moblog. It was a moment very much like another moment not that long ago, when I realized that a close friend of mine from high school’s husband was in the band Volante. A band I even mentioned here, back when I picked up their remix CD at cheepo. Anyway, I think theyÂ’re married now. We very much lost touch for many years.

Dom and Pete are friends from high school too, so it’s all one big startling blur of really. Past acquaintances blown up into new blogs, or band members, or band members wives, or whatever. A giant smorgasbord of reality’s small-world syndrome packed tightly into brain-memory bubbles.

There are no doubt some readers out there who will be secretly pleased to hear that not all aspects of my new job are perfect.

Toilet paper, oft the receptacle of my ire where I used to work, is much better here. While still in a giant impersonal and un-scored roll, it is soft and serves its function well.

Unfortunately, there is only one stall in the bathroom, and the door to said stall is totally and completely, incalculably wack. Not only does the door not really line up with the jam, failing to perform its function in a respectable fashion, but I think I may have hurt my wrist trying to twist the stupid inch-diameter knob that extends the bolt-type-thingy. The twisting action is maddeningly sticky, (although the knob itself is not) and only seems to actually even work at all about half of the time. I feel like I’ve spent literally minutes trying to close and fasten that door. Minutes that feel–when the porceline object of your desire is so near at hand–like hours.