Year: 2003

now I’m having fun with, oh, you know, the blogs and stuff. must close browser. must go back to writing. (I think this is why I’m more productive with ye olde pen & paper.)

made a phone call I’ve been meaning to make for a while, and ended up having a rather nice conversation.

and of course, I’ve been writing, which is something I find myself procrastinating on a lot for some reason.

oh, and procrastinating about budgets? don’t do it! (for the love of god!)

I’m trying for “NaNoWriMo”:http://www.nanowrimo.org/ — not doing something new, but trying to churn out as many words for part 2 as I can manage. so far it’s been a good experience…didn’t write anything until day before yesterday, but in those 3 days I’ve gotten somewhere over 4300 words.

I’m writing mostly longhand, on the van as usual, so I’m just estimating using a number I worked out a few weeks ago: 108 words per page.

it’s a damn good experience, really. writing through bouts of not wanting to writing and then getting to that spot where I could write for hours and hours on end.

not putting anything online at this point, tho I might eventually. I’m sure it’s all just incredibly slushy writing, but I find I don’t give a damn.

I have never, since I’ve been here, seen it snow this early. this morning I woke up to a thin glazing of snow on the lawn, car, neighbor’s roofs, etc. went for a bit of a walk to take pictures, but my battery died and it was starting to rain, so I came back home and went back to bed.

rain turned to snow for a bit, then back to either nothing or drizzle (can’t tell from here); still a little snow on the ground. curious as to how long it’ll stick, or whether it’ll snow again.

I’ve heard a half a dozen people I know say this is going to be a “hard” winter, cold, lots of snow. my fingers are crossed. 😉

update: “cheeseball story from KOMO news”:http://www.komotv.com/stories/28064.htm (initially went to KING5, but their site requires registration. WTF?

I actually dressed up for Halloween this year…as something other than a vampire, even!

those who know me IRL will already know that I own a very special set of vampire fangs. when I was in college, I had a friend (?! the notorious “evil” Grey…if you know the Jill Sobule song Good Person Inside, you know Grey) who learned how to make fangs out of dental cement — Raul traded him two sets of teeth for a dremel tool, which he needed to do the shaping. I still have mine, which I wore perhaps a little bit more than was truly necessary when I was in college. now: instant Halloween costume! (I love them because they look really real…)

but today I just happened to wake up in the mood to go all gypsy. I even found a little crystal ball in a box of odds & ends and set it up on my desk at work. 🙂

the funny thing, at least to me, is I realized that this outfit, or something rather like it, would’ve been a normal outfit for me in high school…that’s including the rather-too-much jewelry and scarf.

XSLT should be considered harmful. to my brain, anyway. stupid crap. all I want to do is break a character-delimited element into separate elements. I could do that in 15 seconds in PHP, and god help me, I probably will. I’m just tired of spending hours and hours trying to figure out how to do some ridiculous stand-on-your-head-and-touch-your-left-knee-with-your-spleen kinds of maneuvers that XSLT seems to require.

okay. now I feel better. time to go make some dinner.

no more to say than that. just feeling a little overwhelmed at this moment.

I picked up a copy of SimCity 4 a couple of weeks ago, and have been having much fun…more fun than I’ve had with a video game in a long time. like losing hours of time kind of fun.

and yesterday C. finally discovered the addictive power of SimCity. whoa. potential urban planner and avid D&D world-builder, meet obsessively detailed but ultimately uncontrollable world. 😉

bq. *In wartime nearly everyone becomes an accomplice.* The huge dislocations, the millions who lose homes and property, are often compensated with the property of those that were forced out. Those who had their homes taken away from them in Srebrenica by the Bosnian Serbs were later given the homes of Serbs who fled the suburbs of Sarajevo. The moral destructiveness of ethnic cleansing, like the psychic wounds of war, thus reverberates throughout a society. Families who are stripped of all they own and then handed by the state apartments that were seized from others are complicitous, whether they like it or not, in the crimes of war.

bq. These dislocations, a large and usually deliberate part of modern warfare, destroy communal structures and weaken ties to those beyond the immediate ethnic group. They create, as Hannah Arendt pointed out, a population of stateless individuals, refugees within their own countries, who to survive must share in the loot of war. The policies of communist Russia revolved around such internal displacement. Political or moral dissent is silenced, since nearly all are forced to become accomplices. It is hard to condemn ethnic cleansing when you live in someone else’s home. (p. 106, emphases mine)

I’m reading War is a force that gives us meaning. that section resonated for me, and reminded me of a theme I need to return to in my novel. I’ve been focused on Aila’s romantic entanglements; I want to go back to this particular philosophical point…the question of culpability. she’s always been an outsider, in my mind, but she’s benefited from the forces she detests nonetheless, even from the weird unbelonging space that she inhabits: a “stateless individual.”

and Marcus…I think, whatever the deal is with his career, and what Viola does, and how Aila reacts to it, that his own innate feeling of being an accomplice in Aila’s fate, and Radla’s fate, and Reboa’s fate is what sends him into his final spiral. it’s not like he’s a kid, either.

(total aside…I find that I’m getting more depth out of this story as I get older. of course, one of these days I’m going to have to finish it, and move on to something new.)

which brings me back, in the context of the book, to what one actually does about it. Marcus…well, Marcus doesn’t do too great; I have some ideas about what Aila does, but nothing too clear. and that brings me to what I actually do about it in real life. sigh.

not that anybody except “Kat”:http://frantikgirl.blogspot.com has any freaking idea what the hell I’m talking about.

I’ve been working with our print publications person to get a better process for the class bulletin. based on my own bootstrapping over the last couple of years, we’ve finally got something that sorta works…. we get a word document which has the correct styles already applied, then I convert to html, then xhtml, then a really ugly xml. then I make a nice xml file that can be imported into InDesign, or transformed into a complete Web site (don’t look at the current one; I’ll be working on something better on Monday). it all sounds much uglier than it turns out to be in practice.

here’s the weird part. I’m on Windows, she’s on Mac. when she imports, she gets an extra line in between every line of text (generally, it’s one line per element in the xml). that’s with line breaks in the xml; when I tried generating the xml with no line breaks at all, the whole thing smushes together, with only the first style applied.

what’s up with that? is it related to this problem? is there anything I can do about it? (short of either of us switching platforms…not an option in either direction.)