I think my paid membership at LiveJournal may have lapsed, taking away some of the RSS features I was using to stay in touch with my old small friends community. I'd still like to port my LJ entries over to X-POLLEN or into some yet undetermined system like textpattern of ftrain. Need to simplify.
markpasc set up a RSS channel at http://livejournal.com/users/xpollen/ that will mirror all my posts to my new blog. Now I just need to add the RSS feed for my friends page (if it exists) to my Radio Userland aggregator and I will continue to have the same circle of friends in my new technological wrapper.
The software shouldn't matter so much. It shouldn't be so political. Migrating should be easy. Data wants to be free (to move).
I'm afraid LiveJournal friends, that I'll be vacating this little corner bodega sometime soon, having relocated the locus of my personal blogging to a MovableType-powered blog called X-POLLEN.
I will try to do a number of things:
In other xian blog news, I have moved Radio Free Blogistan from http://blogs.salon.com/0001111/ to http://radiofreeblogistan.com/ .
Lots of fun stuff going on in my little microcontent universe. Nanocontent?
White liberal guilt has never been so deliciously skewered.
(via MZ)
this new two-tiered password scheme of netsol's, surely it is designed primarily to once again entangle passive Internet domain holders into staying with verisign out of inertia or, short of that, stuck like flypaper to the new authentication scheme until the inevitable renewal deadline passes.
what is the easiest way to get all of my netsol domains transferred en masse to my preferred (or any other) domain-name registration provider?
"Where is my not-bag not-going?"
review tapers addendum for dead letters magazine
finish installing pmachine
install and test rss monkey
set up godetia and wildflowertrips domains for b
set up virtuser mail forwarding for antiweb.net
send book promised to friend
make household budget
plan/prepare for moving site root to radiofreeblogistan.com
*set up rss monkey*
learn opml
final notes on j-school panel
jump menu for sidelists
http://www.onfocus.com/snap/cats/
http://www.onfocus.com/bookwatch/index-media.asp
http://www.onfocus.com/bookwatch/
rush to judgement mediajunkie.com/rush
don't know if suexec or cgiwrap available <==figure out!
Please Notify in my event log. Does that mean rss feed received? How notify?
possible to do e-mail list, just send summaries?
Also, how about "Mail this entry..."
w.bloggar
kung-log for MT
make blog books page, link from masthead
make colophon
. typography
. software, radio, dreamweaver, fireworks, textedit, palm desktop, eudora, ie, mozilla, opera, omniweb, netscape
. hardware: mac, speakers, camera, handspring visor, pen and paper
xmltree
PEP is my codename for my dream application, the Personal Expression Platform
start blog directory process
include blog reviews
blog books
required reading
by tool
blogger
radio
movabletype
livejournal
other
respond to blog-related e-mail
try out manila
consider bbCMS for ezone/thedeadbeat/mediajunkie/memewatch
Type design, bold vs italics vs quot marks, not having a style sheet or set design, semantic <strong>? it's more like <span class="thoughts"> and defining that to look italic? accessibility and standards sometimes feel like an infinite regress
traction
people have died of exposure
http://www.chron.com/content/chronicle/nation/crawford/index.html
http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=28609
http://mcns10.med.nyu.edu/intro/brain.tumor.primer.html
turing test for spam arrest
q: how to use short listings in rss feed instead of entire post?
abude brazil ins story meme
first impression of the band:
a little more detail:
the moon was going down
the greek without the people
...and some raw notes
scribbled during the show:
if there's interest i'll actually transcribe the scribbles...
...and mightily he smote them. the rumored covers (Zevon's "Accidentally Like a Martyr," "Brown Sugar," Neil Young's "Old Man"), the reinterps of classics (just like a woMan, i ain't ME babe), the recent material rousing the audience (Summer Days with its Charlie Christian, Django, old-timey feel with Charlie Sexton and Larry Campbell trading eights in their long maroon zoot suits looking reet pleet), the Berkeley crowd cheering that line "Even the president of the United States must sometimes stand naked" in "It's Alright Ma, I'm Only Bleeding," the everlasting resonance of the lonesome death of Hattie Carroll. Now is the time for your tears. Business they drink my wine... Money doesn't talk, it swears.
Scans of notes and sketches to follow.
From Court News and Monster Weirdo come this report by DeVon Nolt of a lawsuit against Pixar and Disney on the part of Stanley "Mouse" Miller:
The lead characters of the movie Monsters, Inc. were illegally copied from characters drawn by cartoonist Stanley Miller in the early 1960's, according to a lawsuit filed in U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California against Disney Enterprises, Inc. and Pixar Animation Studios, Inc., the producers of the movie. ... Disney and Pixar allegedly came into contact with Miller's work in 1997, when they reviewed a treatment for an animated movie Miller had proposed.
Saw New Orleans piano genius Henry Butler last night with Amy DeNaio at the tiny 21 Grand performance space in Oakland (the show was produced by Earthwise, and Butler's appearance is part of a Basin Street Records "invasion" of the bay area also featuring Kermit Ruffins and Jon Cleary at other venues).
Wow!
Butler is so amazing. He draws on blues, jazz, country, classical, and just plain atonal weirdness. He has a muscular pounding style heavy on the syncopation, and an incredibly deep voice. One song was just a long serious of tuneful moans—a good fit for DeNaio who does a lot of vocalese in her work as well (she played an accordion borrowed from the next-door shop and later a sax with an effects pedal she played with her hand for her vocals).
Mixed in with his own material, Butler reinterpreted Georgia on My Mind and, most thrillingly, the Entertainer.
What a night. Turned my bad mood from the daytime entirely around, as tired as I was.
Tonight it's Bob Dylan at the Greek.
(Say, I've noticed that since I upgraded iTunes, iJournal is no longer able to detect the track currently playing....)
The Buffalo Beast names the 50 most loathsome people in America, 2002. Pretty over-the-top (fairly vulgar too), but funny and much of it is hard to argue with.
A sampling:
13. SEAN HANNITY
Misdeeds: Without question one of the most smarmy, vile, hypocritical talking heads on television. Has the uncanny ability to vilify and generalize those who disagree with him, and then state that he's not a partisan person. Exploits his devout Catholicism and patriotism to the point that it makes you think he's selling something—like his book, whose cover features his giant head in front of one of the glossiest, waviest American flags ever. Much of his wrath can probably be traced to his displeasure that Reagan still can't remember his name although he's met him many times.
Aggravating Factor: Since 9/11, pretends to be genuinely convinced that anyone who disagrees with the Bush administration does not want America to be safe.
Aesthetic: Repressed kid from Long Island who got to college, was scared of sex, discovered other repressed white kids in conservative student group, joined them, devoted rest of life to blasting people who didn't.
12. EMINEM
Misdeeds: Expecting people to care about his shitty childhood because he is white. Dissing his mama. Lifting weights after he got famous. Is the official voice of white teenage suburban boys. Has already worn out his shock value to the extent that his next album will have to include slurs against parapalegics and land-mine victims just to raise eyebrows.
Aggravating Factor: For someone who sells millions of records partly due to making fun of other people, has no sense of humor about himself.
Aesthetic: Trailer-trash cracker with just a hint of Down's Syndrome.
Could they possibly cram any more ads into The Onion?
I blame Ev.
After two three days of blazing heat peaking in the midafternoon, it started to cool off yesterday and this morning the sky is totally socked in cloudy from the window of my breakfast nook. It's a relief. The ultrahot weather has its charms, especially in the evening when its just balmy outside, but I can get a lot more work done in this cooling fog.
Please don't kill the messenger!
Mahatma Gandhi, as you know, walked barefoot most of the time, which produced an impressive set of calluses on his feet. He also ate very little, which made him rather frail and with his odd diet, he suffered from bad breath.
This made him ....what? (Oh, man, this is so bad, it's good.)
A super calloused fragile mystic hexed by halitosis.
from Art of the Mix (via MZ):
Do you remember a band called Blind Melon? Can you still rattle off the words to "Shoop" by Salt-n-Pepa? Visit this site to test your knowledge of pop and rock lyrics from the 1990s. Hint: look out for appearances from a few hip-hop and country crossover artists. From Ace of Base to Alice in Chains, they're all here, along with a few acts you'd probably rather forget. Step back in time. It's harder than you think!
After spending sixteen frustrating minutes on the phone and on the web a few Sundays back, failing to get Elvis Costello tickets. I asked a friend to deal with getting us all tickets to Beck with Flaming Lips at the Paramount Theatre in Oakland. No such luck. He got in after a few minutes and everything was already sold out. It smells rigged to me.
He got an offer from Craigslist, good tickets for $100/ea. (they were between $40 and $50 with added "convenience"). I just don't feel rich enough for that.
Please Lord, slashdot me... but not yet!
I have a temporary need (two, three months) for a PC for a project I'm working on. (There are five Macs in my house and one PC but it's in the basement and runs Windows 98, ugh.) It's an old Pentium Pro, so I don't even know if I should install XP on it (probably not!). I had to buy XP and put it on a borrowed Dell to capture the PC-related screenshots in my Dreamweaver book.
Now once again I need a PC for testing stuff, so I'm stringing a very long ethernet cable down through the laundry chute to the basement, where I have a second hub (amidst the detritus from my old office in downtown Oakland) I can plug into it and put the PC and Mac down there online (I use a Linksys router to share the DSL connection and an Airport base station to put B and my laptops online).
If it all works and the old PC can handle the testing load, I'm cool. If not, I may be looking to borrow someone's spare laptop for a few months.
If there's one thing the Internet's good for, it's finding your old friend and compadres.
Just posted this to RFB but realized it belongs more over here (or maybe in "artsflow" - it's kind of hard to decide sometimes): WebCollage
Three new items (two serious announcements and one forwarded piece of satire) up at Uncle John's Blog. (Archive of today's latest post at Other Ones to Play Oakland 12/5 and 12/6.)
Kitty Bukkake watches a porn flick while listening to NPR and writes a wickedly accurate, down-to-earth blog entry entitles A Bukkake Home Companion
(Contains frank descriptions of pornography, bodily fluids, and Garrison Keiller.)
I overheard myself just now saying "shift-printscreen! shift-printscreen" when actually looking for the Grab application on this Mac. (Shift-printscreen is PC jargon.)
Last night while watching Frasier typing up copy for his "Wine Corner" segment on the restaurant reviewer's show ona strangely small chunky looking off-white laptop, as he leapt from the table to respond to noises from his dad's bedroom, I blurted out "Save your work!"
Re-reading How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Panopticon by Cory Doctorow, I am struck again by how on-the-ball and fun-to-read he is.
Added Google search to RFB over the weekend and email subscription today (with instructions how to do all dat). Could add same to bodega but don't know if it makes as much sense for a personal journal, especially one likely to move to Radio or MovableType or Rupal in the near future.
Short notice, and Bay Area-specific, but I still thought this worth passing along, from Scott Rosenberg:
Readers in the Bay Area are invited to Cody's Books in Berkeley, where on Thursday evening (Oct. 3) a panel of Salon editors and contributors — inclding David Talbot, Joan Walsh, Jennifer Sweeney and Chris Colin — will talk about "Afterwords," our anthology of coverage of 9/11 and its aftermath. More info here. It's free.
I'll send a copy of my Dreamweaver book (or something else if that's not needed) to the first person who can identify the source of the subject of this entry.
Porn is Hacking
What makes pornography (let's stick to visual porn for the sake of discussion) work the way it does? That is, how do images of bodies, body parts, or sex arts stimulate sexual arousal in a way that's useful for masturbation?
I would suggest that porn deliberates manipulates (pun intended) inherited, evolved, largely genetic but clearly somewhat socialized as well, impulses or tendencies in the mind. In other words, the porn images hack into your brain and fool it into thinking that procreation is imminent. Shwing.
If you look at that curve (is it a breast, the undercupping of buttock?) you are fiddling with your brain chemistry. The photographer or cinematographer and publisher of the porn are the hackers, in collaboration with the consumer.
This is not unusual. Most of contemporary human existence relies on these forms of interventions into animal drives, these layers of feedback loops and intentionality that feel like being conscious (I think). Drugs are the more obvious example (think aspirin as much as cannabis).
I once read Andrew Weil suggesting that the same power of visualizing that enables people to arouse themselves (with fantasies, the imagination, without props) can be applied to health: curing illness, transcending allergies, etc. I can foresee a time when our palette of brain-twiddling levers make today's interventions look like rocks tied with twine.
B sent me this link to Riparian Rabbit Release for the bunny pix but these guys just aren't as cute as Hoppy was.
When is the sequel to the Matrix coming out? I seem to recall them filming it in Oakland last year. The original was on TV tonight. It was fun seeing it again, though not quite as impressive on our little screen. The Matrix also seems like it was the killer app for DVD.
One question, the guy who played Cypher (who betrays the heroes), is he the same guy who plays Ralph Cifaretti on the Sopranos? Same nose and voice, but bald instead of lanky blond hair. Hard to be sure.
The always-hinky MichaelZ sends along this link to the Scrotum Gift Shop down under.
I've started working on a still-under-wraps project this week and for the next month or three I will be a lot busier. I expect therefore to have less time for blogging, here, at RFB, and elsewhere. I imagine I'll still post nearly daily at least somewhere, but not necessarily here (I'm working on a tool that will aggregrate anything I post into a one-stop-shopping page, but it's not there yet), but I make no promises, as work comes first.
There's always procrastination, and on any given day if I get my quota of work done, I may be eager to post to a blog. In the course of my workday as well if I encounter interesting stuff I'll probably stow it for blogging later, although that goes against much of what makes me like the weblog form so much: the immediacy, the capture, the end to stockpiling.
Today Radio, the tool I use to keep Radio Free Blogistan up-to-date is malfunctioning on me, refusing to past the last couple-seven entries. Oddly, you can see them by going to today's archive page but not on the home page.
Saw the Giants paste the Padres last night with an old friend who happened to be visiting from San Diego. My first time in the new stadium. Pretty cool. It would be even better for a day game, I'm sure.
One odd thing is the rule against going back into your seat while a batter is up. There is a little petty tyrant at the top of the steps with a little sign who holds you up (but, of course, lets the vendors pass) till the batter gets on base or gets put out, even if there's a conference on the mound and the (way too loud) PA is playing the theme from Three's Company.
The architecture is half the fun. Very open-air, with a promenade overlooking China Basin (I think, or is it McCovey Cove?), and thematic activities for the kiddies. The food was so-so but more varied than in the old days. Apparently there's an exclusive club level with even more elite food.
I'd go again but, like I said, next time during the day to avoid the falling damps.
B writes:
"The biologists told me that many of these dead fish are very bright and healthy looking, except for the part about them being dead."
I was wondering about this while racing through the Sopranos' season three on VHS (no cable), the shot of the twin towers in Tony's rearview mirror during the popular opening-credits sequence. I assumed they'd take it out or replace it, and Nick Denton has the scoop.
It's bad enough the guy dressed up the dogs he molested in bras and panties, but did he have to kill them too?
Well, that little thing I blogged over the weekend about being motivated by orgasms, praise, and money (not necessarily in that order) got picked up by Dave Winer on a slow news day and drove a bunch more traffic my way. I fixed some typos but only after the first few hundred had already read what was a fairly frank and unguarded (if also somewhat silly) post.
I still haven't fixed the typos here at Bodega, though. This is one problem of my sprawling unsolved content-management apparati. I sort of envy Scot Hacker his recent move from LJ to MT, though he does miss some things about LJ. Consolidation will come but for now there's no time.
But back on the subject of motivation, I dug out a Richard Brautigan poem that was tugging on a neuron:
Hey! This is What It's All Aboutfor Jeff Sheppard
No publication
No money
No star
No fuck
A friend came over to the house a few days ago and read one of my poems. He came back today and asked me to read the same poem over again. After he finished reading it, he said, "It makes me want to write poetry."
This line cracked me up in today's Tom Tomorrow.
These are the incentives that truly motivate me. Is there something I told you I'd do several weeks ago that remains still undone? Did I promise you a considered reply to some thoughtful communique of months ago? Was there a list of interested reviewers I promised to provide you weeks ago that I finally did provide you but only after the publicity person went on vacation so that the reviewers are still waiting for their books even now a few weeks later?
Well maybe, just maybe, someone else jumped the line? How did some last-minute task that just came up today or this minute or even yesterday get done before that thing I told you I'd do for you? It's possible that the person attached to whatever other obligation has been cheating on the line offered me one of those incentives that really get me moving: orgasms, praise, or money. The praise has to be real, actual praise, the other two seem to work even if they only hold out the hope of a potential payoff down the road.
What have publishers got that you don't have? What do pornographers have that you haven't got? What's the one thing you can offer to motivate me even if you're broke or disinclined to give me pleasure: support, kudos, kind words, feedback, keep up the good work, nice try, better luck next time, we still love you anyway, etc.
Went to Diesel Books in Oakland last night to hear Lynda Barry talk before a book signing. She is amazing! I've always loved her comics (comeeks?) but I didn't realize what an amazing writing teacher she is! She was funny, honest, and incredibly inspirational.
She sings when she's nervous. She's really good and unaffected. Sang a little bit of "Groovin' on a Sunday Afternoon" to illustrate a point: She always heard one line as "You and me and Leslie... grooving etc." and talked about how that evoked an image of three people groooving or whatever. Years later in her car she realized the line is actually "You and me endlessly," which she said is a much inferior line, as it evokes almost no image at all.
She pointed out how an editor would prefer the endlessly line as it makes more "sense" and "because you haven't introduced this Leslie character properly." She also made a good point about the naysaying editorial voice that chokes off the flow too close to the spigot. She said, "You know when you're writing and a voice in your head says, 'This is stupid, I'm an idiot. Why am I doing this? I should quit, etc.'? If you were writing in a bar and some guy came in and said, 'Why are you doing that? That's stupid. You're an idiot.' etc., you'd immediately know that person was an ass, so why when the voice is in your head do you suddenly tread it like an authority?"
She reminded us that we are all storytellers and writers by birthright. She says the human race spent as much time developing storytelling as music and dance, as long as it took to develop opposable thumbs, she said. It's only "the man" (one of her favorite expressions) who tells us to leave creativity to the professionals. She compared being creative to child's play and how it's one of the ways that we solve problems and understand things.
She talked about the power of memory. To write her latest book, 100 Demons she says she made a big stack of nouns on 3 x 5 cards and would just grab a card and promise herself she'd write a comic panel page about whatever each word evoked. She wrote it all with a brush because she says her computer makes it too easy to delete things.
She used the example of cars. Think about a specific car from your life. Now imagine where it is. Where are you? In the car? Outside it? Can you describe the car? Who else is around? What time of day is it? What time of year? What's happening? Stories come to mind easily when brought up attached to details. She gave "couch" as another example.
She said her writing students, even when they are turned on to the power of memory and our innate storytelling ability, they still ask what they should write about or what they should do next. She said that this is in one sense a good question but in another sense it's a really bad question that really doesn't help you do anything. (I think it comes from fear.)
Her analogy was: suppose I gave the power to be invisible, and fly, and travel through time. Would you say, "I really can't think of anything to do with these powers"?
She said her brother used to wish he had a time machine that said Future, Past, and Meanwhile....
She pointed out that writing really is time travel. At the very least, I hope someone in the future reads something I wrote and understands what it was like for me to be alive in this time.
She said a lot more that was really inspiring. I wish I could study with her as a teacher because I think she'd be hugely encouraging, but she lives in Evanston, Ill. You can buy signed artwork from her for just $25, though.
7. You want to milk that Disney relationship and introduce a new revenue stream? When Spy Kids 2 and Lilo & Stitch get released into the home-video market, enter into a revenue-sharing deal with Mickey Mouse and rent the videos and DVDs with drive-through convenience. You can sell them, sure, but that would be a price-point turn-off. You're better off charging $3.99 for a four-day rental. Instead of time-consuming credit card collateral, just match the rentals to driver's license numbers, and let the honor system take it from there. Why a driver's license? Well, you need one to be in a drive-through in the first place, right? Just one release at a time eases the inventory workload, and since a return has to be made, a repeat visit will likely be accompanied by a new food order.
A got my notebook back. Left it on Geo's roof. Perfect balmy weather, like today, after dusk with few stars but a spectacular view of the Williamsburg bridge. I was warned that the sound system could bring the cops. I imagined dj'ing the whole lower-east side. "Alphabet city say ho-o." "Williamsburg bridge put your hands in the air." It wasn't as lame live.
Good party, but I left my notebook and a good pen. Geo told A "someone left his life up here." Lots of title-only reminders of ideas for short stories in there, diagrams of content-management databases, sketches and setlists, but A got it back for me.
At one point we were the few people dancing, A, me, and K, an opera singer from Germany, recently divorced and living on a couch, looking for a place to stay and talking about wanting to be pregnant (if that's flirting, A finds it heavy-handed and off-putting, but he is magnetic and has to deal with what a lot of cute girls have to deal with, an imbalance of attention that's too easy to win).
We are dancing and as I relax and do whatever I do without thinking, kind of restrained early evening dancing, cocktail party chatter on the furniture around the edges and by the buffet table and barbecue. K says to A: "Your brother is a good dancer." I hear this and turn, say "Now I can't do it," and pout, hang my arms at my side, parody of childhood embarassment masking adult reenactment. I don't get fully back into the swing again all night.
Got the notification yesterday that my Mirror Project submissions were accepted. I think they look even better with the gray background at the site, a subtle framing.
They're still not as good as the toasters, eyeshades, and other found reflections, but for what they are, they're OK.
The first has a kind of Kilroy was Here feel. In the second my eyes go to the rolled cuff, forearm, and hand. The spots on the mirror surface and the Leonardo hands grab my eye in the third one although it was the cropped-off expanse of stucco wall that I liked best when I grabbed it. A zoomed out version would have shown more but the details would have been tiny. It's a tradeoff. In the first two I wanted the inset images to be at least slightly visible.
I did all the editing in Fireworks. The blurb for the last one gave out a variation on the URL for the alternate images, so I had to put in a symbolic link to the real root and gave the index of the gallery of alternates a base href so that the relative links would still work even if you come in via the variant address.
I've always admired online collaborations like the mirror project and I've respected it enough to not just waddle into my bathroom and snap some pictures and send them in.
Last week in New York I found myself in a beautiful room festooned with mirrors and I snapped a bunch of shots, some better than other. I picked three out of about five finalists, and then experimented with different crops to comply wit the 300 pix max single-dimension limit.
Then I chose my favorite crops after side-by-side comparisons (some tough choices, largely dictated again by the format) and submitted them. Don't know how much of a lag to expect.
In the meantime, I posted the finalists in a quick and dirty gallery. I may add the best rejects as well if I get a moment.
Here's a taste:
I'll be on TechTV tonight at 7 pm, on the show "The Screen Savers."
I wrote about this just now at RFB.
Disturbing referrers: A lot of Google searches for TSS's Megan Morrone nude are showing up in my logs.
Scot's popular (especially among BeOS and Mac aficianadoes and other groupies and hanger's on to his stylistic majesty, like myself - note to self: start scot hacker fan club) foobar blog has moved (comments and all!) to a movable type hosted blog at http://birdhouse.org/blog/.
Looks good. I mean to ask him where that template is found. MT seems to come only with the blues stripe across the top design out of the box, as it were.
It's amazing how seamless the transition is. His August posts cross back into LJ territory without a hitch. It's clear that the essence of a blog is not in the software.
I have to update my blogroll now. I will also look and see if he left a note at LiveJournal. Will his community there feel betrayed? Will he tell them how to add his RSS feed to their LJ "Friends" view (which is really a kind of LJ-tuned aggregator)? Inquiring minds want to know.
At the beginning of this year when I wanted to resurrect a personal blog and start thinking in public about my PEP (Personal Expression Platform) project, I noticed that Scot had started listing a blog with livejournal in its URL in his sig. I hadn't heard of LJ and asked him about it and saw something preferable to Blogger, a kind of path of least resistance (with one built-in friend), so I started this bodega blog here.
In the meantime I started using Radio for the new blog and I've been learning about MT all along. We've also now got a bunch of old antiweb folks using LiveJournal as their gateway blog, so I may not hurry to follow Scot this time. Then again, consolidation on a single platform would simplify my life utterly right now.
Lately I've been trying to make the seemingly disparate things I care about and work on all relate to each other, overlapping and reinforcing, with an eye toward fusing into some new thing that is the thing I do.
This is a like a year's long chess game, often involving difficult decisions, which means letting go of desirable alternatives. As with anything, fortunately, "use makes master" - you get better by doing. Doing my last book filled a gap in my schedule and enabled me to brush up on exactly the kind of software (Dreamweaver) I was looking for to manage and organize my web projects.
Similarly, learning more about Apache, perl, PHP, awstats, etc., this summer I've begun to get more familiarity with running my own server and not just relying on friend/sysadmin to do things for me like a black box.
(On the other hand, trying to add virtual hosts to httpd.conf I somehow made an invalid file that apache refuses to restart with *and* lost my backup of the old, working configuration - which freezes my ability to go live with radiofreeblogistan.com, etc.)
Likewise, the new blog I've been doing since July has served several functions:
* A new organizational take on my daily writing, with an obsession on the blog phenomenon.
* A way to promote my latest book but more importantly stay involved in the dreamweaver/macromedia world by publishing news and info about dreamweaver and build a community of return readers around the book, its website, future editions, and other news from me.
* An attempt to systematically cover blog related developments and memeflourescences, and potentially build a flow of coverage that might itself feed into a book project or other future paying writing jobs.
Three birds for the price of one stone.
Speaking of which, the cat is locked in the house now, as B saw a deformed bird on our back walk. I didn't see it when I went out back just now and I'm relieved. How sad nature makes me sometimes.
Yesterday afternoon I realized I had zero energy. The weeklong trip to New York, with its consequent jetlag, late nights, early mornings, family dynamics, and memories of last year's attack, had managed to drain me to empty husk.
A little after noon I realized I was passing out so I got into bed and slept until 3:30 when the phone rang. After that call I slept almost another hour. Still felt groggy and dour in the evening and went to see Road to Perdition at the Parkway Bowl. The movie, gory as it was, provided some fine escapism and beautiful old-Master-looking cinematography to appreciate, but when the dream wore off I was just as down as before.
This morning after eight more hours of sleep, I am beginning to feel myself again. A little stressed about the numerous things competing for my time and attention, but no more than usual.
I am reminded that my friend J, a magazine editor, told me that one of his employees, a young man (in his 20s) went to see Perdition a month or so ago and reported back that "the salad-dressing guy was really good."
There might come a time when things between us get just
a little bit too weird.
We'll move to different cities for a temporary vacation
but it's just as you feared
My Human Gets Me Blues
...if it's this nice in newyork tomorrow then the beach is going to be great. my sibs and i are (all four of us) are going to jones beach. we may even rent one of those orange and red umbrellas you drive in to the sand as in all the old black & white photos of us on my parents' wall...
Staying at a friend's place near west 11th and west 4th.
The weather is here. Wish you were beautiful.
I think I saw this Jelly Bath site at Rebecca's Pocket. I especially enjoyed reading the Frequently Asked Questions.
I'm working through the logjam at my web server, having just set up the DNS for some new domains: antiweb.net, x-pollen.com, radiofreeblogistan.com, and a few others. Still need to restart the server to get the new virtual hosts working, set up cgi access where needed. A few need new usernames, permissions, or email forwarding set up.
It's like the summer is ending and my attempt to do nothing for a while has succumbed to first finishing the book and now promoting it (on TV again next week), working on my new blog-about-blogging, and the attempt to get another book deal or some other kind of project to work on (or, as a last resort, a new job).
At least I'm enjoying the ride. About x-pollen: I want it to be the central aggregation hub for anything I publish online. Nice clean design, multiple feeds, easy to read, easy to filter or search. Slowly I'm geting this PEP vision in place.
I remember now that they also played When I Win the Lottery and Flowers from Key Lime Pie.
The tension between Lowery and Siegal was light and they made light of it, though David wore a cowboy hat that obscured the nonbearded half of his face, and winced when he (rarely, but noticeably) flubbed lyrics.
Siegal was very enthusiastic. I realized I hadn't seen him since he had long hair and used to play with Eugene Chadbourne. I think they played the electric rake long before Fishman broke out the vacuum cleaner.
Shocking to think Reagan was president when I last saw them! Sweethearts really hit home now that we have some mutant Bushreaganoid president.
Everyone knows I think
now if we could only entice levi into greater blogistan...
I'm tired of having to generate a new editing window every time I want to link to someone, write something, or edit something. I just made RadioExpress! pop up its editing window in a new window because I want to link to several URI's in one entry and otherwise RE! takes over the window I was just in. But I'd rather just have one import sitting somewhere on my desktop when I need it, and then if necessary I could add the metadata I want.
So this time I'm actually writing this post in my LiveJournal client for OS X (iJournal).
[Digression: I'm getting a lot of flow right now from Scot Hacker's article at O'ReillyNet about choosing blogging software for UCBerkeleyJ-School's IP Weblog class. Since Dave linked to Scot this morning and suggested he look at Manila, that flow has more than doubled. It was Scot who first turned me on to LiveJournal. Scot heard about LiveJournal because there was a BeOS client developed for it and Scot wrote the BeOS Bible (I am oversimplifying, but hey! this is a digression). LiveJournal is open source and there seems to be a lot of voluntary effort going at least into developing client's for multiple platforms. I know the Blogger API is being used as a lingua franca right now, but it doesn't support entry titles, which I use 99.99% of the time. I can't use w.bloggar because I'm based on a Mac, and it uses the Blogger API anyway, right? MovableType and Radio (/Manila/Frontier) also both have vigorous communities contributing a lot of volunteer efforts to extend their basic feature sets. OK, end of digression.]
So the Radio Multi-Author Weblog tool is going to pick up this message (including, I've noticed, the Tune and Mood choices if I've used them, but not the picture I've assigned to the entry, which is just as well) and add it to the x-pollen category.
Then, I'll go in to edit and check the box to include this entry on the home page. By now, if you're reading this from Radio Free Blogistan, I'll have already done that.
If I wanted to use the iJournal client just for RFB and not for bodega or artsflow (my livejournal blogs — I also belong to a community weblog at LiveJournal called celticmyths). I could delete the message or make it private after Radio's RSS feed aggregator picks it up. Or I could set up a new livejournal in obscurity and use it just as a way-station for posts from this client.
One curious thing, when I was adding the links above (it's too distracting to fuss with HTML or even gui widgets when trying to form prose), at one point I repeatedly pasted in the link to Scot's article instead of to Dave's permalink, dyslexically grabbing the intro link instead of the octothorpe
x
One last total non sequitur (more in the spirit of bodega): Did anyone get the setlist for Camper Van Beethoven Saturday at the Great American Music Hall or Sunday at Slim's? I'd like to write a little review of Saturday's show but it would be nice to have a setlist to check my memory.
Some memorable highlights off the top of me head, no particular order: Eye of Fatima (Parts 1 and 2), Sweethearts, Sad Lover's Waltz, Tusk (the Fleetwood Mac song), Interstellar Overdrive, I Was So Wasted, We're a Bad Trip, Tania, All Her Favorite Fruit, She Divines Water, History of Utah (my unfinished—okay, unstarted—novel about the late '80s in San Francisco is called History of Utah), Take the Skinheads Bowling, Pictures of Matchstick Men, Waka, Turquoise Jewelry, hey, it's all coming back, almost, Good Guys and Bad Guys, One of These Days. That's not all, but my brain is now dry.
Wished they'd played: Life is Grand, Seven Languages.
postscript: Ironically, I forgot to close a link tag and now have to edit the post on two servers.
Check out this one showing the WTC site.
Gnosis, a Salon blog that currently has a John Lee Hooker quotation as its description, notes that the Spanish translation of the artist's name is suprisingly literal:
Puta De las Heces De Juan ... means "prostitute (hooker) of the shelters (lees) of John."
My nose is freezing. Just a week or so ago it was too hot to do anything. Now I feel like Bob Cratchitt hunched over here at my desk.
B gets back from her writing retreat at the shore in Oregon tonight. I am trying to clean the house and make things presentable, after a week of slovenly bachelorhood, mostly devoted to working on my Salon blog and related projects.
In other blog news, I renamed the column I've been doing at Mediajunkie from Junk Mail (which is clever but does not communicate out of context) to Bite Media, which is at least more descriptive of the mission of the column and of the site in general. Some other news to announce about that site soon.
Played hooky this afternoon after working all weekend. Saw XXX. I thought it was great, funny and clever. Definite Bond elements, without the gross-out humor of the Austin Powers franchise.
The meshing of the extreme sports attitude—camped up by Hollywood to the nth degree—with the technothriller context (complete with a gothic supervillain) works beautifully.
Vin Diesel (not the greatest line-reader in the world) even manages to pull off a few Bond-like quips. The script is suprisingly well written. More well written than it probably needed to be.
I watched a horror movie on tape last night, Session 9. It was ehhh. In that case, the actors were much better than the script, which often sounded so wooden I could picture the hot tub they were writing it in.
Will you make it to the end of Tales of the Plush Cthulhu? Over 11,000 curious readers have fallen by the wayside.