I’m writing little bits of journaling here, but otherwise my writing has pretty much gone down the drain. which makes me feel low and dull. I gotta get some more energy & zip somehow. or use this freaking medium to get me back into the flow of writing. after all, I do spend most of my evenings sitting in front of the computer.
a brief note on proprietary formats
I really wanted to publish my little poetry book of a couple of years back: A Fool’s Tale in both PDF and XHTML formats (using a Creative Commons license), but when I found the disk on which I’d stored my files, I discovered that I only have it in Pagemaker 6 format…from back in the days when I had regular access to Pagemaker, I suppose. now I don’t…damn. rather than dealing with OCR or retyping, I imagine I’ll be finding a computer (either on campus or at Kinko’s) with Pagemaker. and at least one of the formats it gets converted into will be something plaintext, that’s for sure!
the two towers
Wednesday, after C. turned in his last paper for the quarter, we went up to Seattle to spend the evening with Kat. started out with lots of Grand Theft Auto III (a freakishly addictive game, that) and DOA (3?), then graduated to the exended edition of Fellowship. totally worthwhile, that. we all expressed the opinion that they should’ve just released the extended version to start with, and given the damn thing an intermission! (at 4 hours, it definitely needs an intermission.) more character & narrative building stuff, which was good.
then we got up, had a little breakfast, and took off for the show. got there at 9:30 for the 11:30 show (more about that later)…bounced between the “getting in the door” line and the “picking up the tickets” line.
when I’d gotten up to the will-call window, this woman showed up and said that she had a group of 100, and they wanted to go get in the concessions line early, and at first I thought “no way” but the manager started letting her “group” through…and people were rushing the door by the time I got back to where C. was standing in the getting in the door line. so we just busted in as soon as we could. I’m a little less mad about it today, but not much. so annoying…we could’ve gotten much better seats, although the ones we ended up with weren’t too bad.
and the movie? excellent. I’m now waiting for the extended edition. 🙂 nick-picky geek-fans may have things to fuss about – we three noted about a half-dozen discrepencies – but it was such an intense, enjoyable movie that it just doesn’t matter. (of course, I sort of agree with Kat’s assessment that it wasn’t quite depressing enough.)
the music was much better than the last movie. C. said he thought they’d learned something from scoring the extended edition. whatever it was, I found myself both enjoying and anticipating the various musical themes.
amazingly, Gollum/Smeagol was sympathetic…I felt sorry for the pathetic little thing.
(so, Dorothea, a happy dance is definitely in order.)
my first tree…
I don’t usually mention work…
but I will say that Dorothea covers the topic of socializing at work quite nicely, and by implication part of why I’m happy to be heading up to visit Kat and watch the extended version of Fellowship of the Ring in preparation for going to see Two Towers on Thursday…instead of going to the office holiday party. (something about the white elephant gift exchange thing just weirds me out. but you didn’t see me say that.)
minimally related to anything
– How to be a philosopher: “Set out not to solve any problems. Do this in spades.”
– Practical Internet Code – good javascript stuff…if dead-ugly design.
– Anhedonia (a poem)
– keep Firefly on the air! – have not written about this before, but Firefly rocks! (I like it better than Buffy, definitely.) write UPN & beg them to keep it alive.
– An inclusive internet – gov’t sites and accessibility – should really go on the workblog.
– contest to design the new Amaya splash page…Amaya is the strangest browser I have ever used…for a W3C project, it has insanely lousy CSS support.
– Baldur talks about the authorial voice and the weblog. he’s an insanely smart guy. 🙂
– How to get an “A” from…
some new (to me) blogs:
– Elizabeth Lane Lawley
– this public address (links to me!)
– wireless librarian
an old friend in meatspace
I was home sick on Wednesday, and when I got back to the office on Thursday, there was a message from Tom: he was going to be in town Thurs & Fri, and he’s moving (back) to England. I did finally get a hold of him, and we went to Johnny’s Greek Cafe for lunch on Friday.
another person in my life who it’s always good to talk to & hang out with. Tom’s the one who pretty much got me started on this whole web thing, back in the United Way days, when we were cube neighbors, and pretty much the only person I have any contact with anymore from back then. and he’s not a reader of the weblog (stopped reading when my site went awol last winter), so there was lots to talk about.
he finally has his own site, humantail.com, which to my dismay doesn’t work quite right in Mozilla, but has some pretty good music, and a picture of the top of his head. (my first comment, when he came up to my office: “you grew hair!”)
oh, and he’s selling a bunch of stuff, so if you’re in Portland, go check it out! don’t take the rug, though – I want it. 😉
my ankles f’ing hurt
I’m beginning to think that my ankle thing is affected by the weather, because this fall they’ve been relatively quiescent, but today, and the last couple of days, with all the rain…. ugh. tonight I can barely wobble around the house.
it doesn’t help that we’ve been spending most of the evening trying to rearrange & figure out what to do for the holidays.
mass more links
tons o’ stuff
Wi-Fi:
– Glen F. article on wifi security: David notices the class division inherent in the map (which I guess just proves C’s argument that you can understand anything better with a map.)
– also in the NYT: The Wi-Fi Boom
– Personal Telco Van
– the book of seg: drool.
– Piracy is progressive taxation. “being well-enough known to be pirated would be a crowning achievement” hmmm. something to that, I think. speaking of which: O’Reilly Open Books Project.
– Library Lookup: again with the drool.
I have stuff to say about the Weblogs in Meatspace thing, but not yet.