Category: Digital Neighbors

November 30, 2003 /

I really hate remedy medicine. I actually don’t like taking drugs at all, though I make mild use of caffeine and will choke down / vaporize / intravene something if, you know, I’ll die otherwise. But decongestants, antihystamines, painkillers, soporifics… bleagh. I don’t like to think about treating symptoms instead of causes. I can live with symptoms! Fix the root problem!

Nevertheless, living with an iron-willed roommate who happens to be a med student will eventually weaken you on the placebo-effect front. I’ve been taking Robitussin for about 24 hours now, which is why I was functional enough to sit in a VERY COLD ticket booth and run sound for PI Sketch with only one slip-up. It was a good show. The crowd liked it. I touched Yale inappropriately and got to meet Allilea, who differs from most other celebrities in that she’s taller in real life.

Tomorrow I crash hard, and try to get ready for my last homework and last exam on Tuesday. Then Thursday, then finals, and then the semester will be over. This is very weird. Who the hell gets out for finals on December 4th? U of L, that’s who.

Yea, I go to bed to rest my fevered brow, and to cough until the Robitussin kicks in. It’s not like this is unusual, I get sick about once every winter, but I start to worry about my brain health when I notice that I’m subtracting 230 from 1830 and coming up with 1400.

November 11, 2003 /

The Emperor-Priest of Goulash basically trumps the real site with his own three grouphugs. (Did you know grouphug.us doesn’t even HAVE A Google PageRank? Not that I mentioned this.) They’re beautiful.

CONFIDENTIAL TO CODY POWELL: Thanks for giving me something to regurgipost, Your Worship, otherwise I’d have to confess that I had the most boring day in the world. I ate Easy Mac for lunch, that’s how boring it was. And then I watched TV.

Condense, condense, condense

November 5, 2003 /

Via Sumana:

“It’s like a law of nature, a law of aerodynamics, that anything that’s written or anything that’s created wants to be mediocre. The natural state of all writing is mediocrity. It’s all tending toward mediocrity in the same way that all atoms are sort of dissipating out toward the expanse of the universe. Everything wants to be mediocre, so what it takes to make anything more than mediocre is such a f***ing act of will.”

—Ira Glass

October 21, 2003 /

I’m glad I have a reason to talk about NewsBruiser again, because I’m on the front page! No, actually I want to talk about NewsBruiser because Leonard’s had version 2.0 (“Master Planarian”) out for weeks and I need to install it. Except I don’t want to install it, because a) NewsBruiser installations have traditionally been nightmarish for me (this is due to my hosts and my own incompetence, not NewsBruiser), and b) it has comments. NewsBruiser with comments! It’ll be anarchy!

Sumana and I had a conversation this morning about said comments, and about Leonard’s implementation of Bayesian heuristics in NewsBruiser. We agree that it’s capable of preventing comment spam, but I argued that it can’t entirely prevent tar pit syndrome, because it can’t filter out stupid. Sumana argued that it can. And then we jousted. No, actually we exchanged spam jokes.

(Yes, I know you can just turn off comments, I’m just whining. And yes, I do have a forum and am thus technically already sinking into a tar pit. However, you’ll note that the definition of the tar pit theory clearly states that “as long as no one actually uses the discussion forum, you are safe.” The only people who actually post there came from AZWP anyway, so I’m totally slopy.)

I do need to install 2.0, actually, so I can do trackbacks. I really don’t understand trackbacks, but they sound like they have something to do with RSS feeds or referrer logs, so I must consume them! Speaking of RSS feeds, I’m turning into an RSS evangelist like all the RSS early adopters, and I should be shot. And speaking of referrer logs, Cody Powell responded just as I planned to my goulash bait, and proceeded to write an entry about Cracked vs. MAD, which is a topic I was thinking about just this morning, during my pseudobreakfast. CODY POWELL CAN SEE INTO MY BRAIN.

Today I am terse.

October 3, 2003 /

Could’ve saved a line if he’d written it in C++.

Update 1636 hrs: Or five lines, in PHP.

Update 10.5.03 1745 hrs: And Leonard points out that unless he puts a newline character in at the end there, it won’t look right at all.

Yeah, this didn’t actually turn out all that terse.

Warning: I’m gonna talk about a lot of stupid blog stuff now

October 3, 2003 /

My RSS aggregator is now officially aggregating 39 blogs. Granted, a lot of those are dormant, but that’s still not bad for something that started as an experiment while I was bored at work.

Things I want to change about it:

  • This is a third-party aggregator, so I have to wait for it to update itself, which it does only once an hour. For petesakes, that’s a possible 59 minutes of tardiness on late-breaking bruisable news! I should either write my own or find software I can install on my own site, but I’m lazy.
  • Thirty-nine? Come on! Somebody start a new blog, I want to round it off. No, not a blogspot, they don’t let you have a feed unless you pay money.
  • (Or, if your name is Kristofer Straub, you could get on the stick already and install some journal software with feeds and also real permalinks.)

I know thirty-nine isn’t actually a particularly large field for an aggregator, but it works nicely for me. It was pretty boring when I started out, but now there’s a good chance that any hour I hit it will yield at least one new post.

September 15, 2003 /

There’s a bit of rough going, as you might have noticed, as I try to install my journal software on the new server. It’ll be back, honest idjit. Meanwhile, things I’ve been meaning to talk about:

  • Sumana has not only been published in Salon, she’s also turned 22 (Sumana is younger than me. I can’t stand it) and written what is possibly the definitive blog entry on spam.
  • Lisa is back at school, next to Flora, having fun without me and taking my single favorite picture of a door ever.
  • My roommate Maria is taking about eighteen exams today, over there in dag blasted medical school. Wish her luck! I’m not really worried about her, since (as I recently discovered) she has a photographic memory. Never try to win an argument with someone who has a photographic memory. Or rather, try as you will, but get ready to lose a lot.
  • The new work-school-rest-school-work schedule is working out very well–it’s a lot of effort, but I’m never as tired as I was this summer, partly because the breakup in my week keeps me refreshed and life interesting. I’m also doing a lot at work. Putting up dummy pages for my journal, for instance. No, I’m not doing anything actually work-related.

That’s most of it. With any luck, the journal will be back this week, but I wouldn’t wager any real estate on it. Meanwhile, if I have any updates of lesser importance, I’ll post in the (again) spanking new forums. Take care. Wear a jacket.

This actually took place about 24 hours ago.

August 30, 2003 /

2212 hrs and Emma Hayes has tricked me into showing up at a party at her house, filled with cool hip extremely professional twentysomethings I don’t know. Emma Hayes herself is predictably not here, so I’ve vaguely procured a 7-Up from her roommate Dawn. I am lucky to have met Dawn once in a parking lot, and to have her mercifully remember me.

Here I am sitting on the front porch of a freshly warmed house, trying to look writerly with my pocket Moleskine. Perhaps, I think, this will politely make it less obvious that I have no idea what I’m doing.

Adventure!

Sumana is not actually the big sister I never had, and would probably be a little weirded out if I claimed she was, but she DID display a frighteningly big sisterish sixth sense in calling about half an hour after I wrote that down. This was wonderful; it gave me a good excuse to laugh for twenty minutes, recharged my ability to talk to humans, and gave evidence that I have a life outside of showing up at parties filled with people I don’t know.

Emma finally did show up at what, 2320 hrs? And it was great to see her, and I got to know some of the people at the party. By the time I hitched home (around 0300) I had actually had a good time. None of this outweighs the first panicky hour I spent retreating into introversion, though, really. There’s a reason for the fact that, in college, I only went to parties in my own apartment.