#meta

I've decided to configure things so that the WP site can be my Fediverse presence, at least for the moment.

I can certainly subscribe to other users, this is to see if I can spit things out into the void.

Under just the tiniest bit of duress, I've moved this blog to a new host. OK, maybe not duress, but it was something I might otherwise not have done because, as you might notice (or probably not because I don't know that anyone at all reads it), posting has been pretty light for years a while.

However, while I was taking stock of all the things that are broken (to a first approximation, every post before ~ 2013 is going to be poorly formatted, but otherwise things seem OK), I stumbled across a post that referenced the fact that this blog was started on February 10, 2003.

Since today is February 10, 2025 (already an altogether shittier year than 2003) it seemed worth it to take note.

Who knows, in this new era of digital serfdom, maybe I'll start posting here regularly, just to stick it to our wannabe-overlords.

Ignoring a post made to verify that some unintentional breakage was fixed, this blog has been silent for more than 18 months. It wasn't overly active even before that, though.

I've decided that, one way or another, 2019 is going to be it---either I will manage at least one post a week, or else I'm just going to walk away.

I'm not sure which outcome I'm hoping for.

I might have something more to say, but for the moment, I'm just running a test.

I didn't expect to drop off the face of the planet for nearly two months.

But I decided to go off and learn lisp "in my spare time"---which took a while. And then I decided that the best way to do that was to write a minor mode for blogging to complement org-mode. And then I decided that to give myself incentive, I wouldn't do any blogging until I had it working.

It took a little longer than I had hoped---in part because I think I was overly ambitious; I was going to learn a new language well enough to write an extension in it, and make it as functionally-pure as I could, and make sure that it's well tested....etc., etc. I wasn't just going to hack something out.

So it took a while. And there are still rough edges that I will continue to file off. But if you can see this post, you know it's working.

So this is the two-days-late Weekly Wrap-Up #3. I spent the last two days doing my first real batch of elisp hacking of any significance, so I don't feel too bad about missing the normal rhythm of things.

My big winner for this week is C-M-@ (mark-sexp), which made several moments in elisp hacking bearable---there's inevitably a moment in any lisp code where the right parens start to pile up, and good luck with trying to figure out what to mark by hand.

I'm still not habituated to using TRAMP for editing files using sudo or ssh, which is unfortunate since I do that a lot. And the mark ring stuff still eludes me.

I think this week I'm going to take on registers and rectangles, and perhaps start building up a cheat-sheet I can use to keep the things I've discovered a little more present.

I recently made the decision to start doing my blogging using org2blog. I've been using WordPress to host a couple of blogs (Radios Appear and Gurave, as well as my friend Chet's blog Miscellaneous Heathen) for the last couple of years, but I've always done my writing in Emacs (using Textile for formatting), and then simply cut-and-pasted what I wrote into WordPress's text entry box: of course a more integrated solution based entirely in Emacs sounded attractive.

And, indeed, I like the results. In addition to the original two blogs, I'm using this workflow to write my articles about exploring Emacs (Do You Even Lisp?) as well as this blog (I gave some serious thought to Brent Yorgey's Blog Literately package, appropriately written in Haskell, but first, the Debian Haskell situation is in a lot of flux right now and I didn't want to have to work that hard to package it and second, a little consistency of tooling is always welcome).

Being the sort of compulsive neat-freak that I am, though, I decided that it wasn't enough to just create new articles using org2blog---what I really wanted was to export all the existing articles in my long-term blogs into my org2blog setup.

I was originally going to do this using Perl---it's been my go-to language for the last 17 years, I can whip up what I want in it faster than in anything else, and I've been doing it long enough to write code that is readable after the fact. Besides, I already have a script for doing some WordPress interaction, so it would be a great starting point.

And then I decided that I was going to do it in Haskell (which I have come to realize was probably an even better choice than I initially expected---I'll talk about that later).

So, the task is to download all the articles in my existing sites, reformat them into org-mode files with appropiate metadata for org2blog, store them locally in a hierarchy that mirrors the one on the server.

I think it's going to be easier than I expected.

I first started programming in 1980 on a Heathkit H-8 in Basic (Benton Harbor) when I was 10, and in the intervening 30-odd years I've programmed more-or-less competently in Basic, Modula-2, C, Turbo Pascal, Clipper, C++, Rexx, Bourne Shell, Perl, PHP and Javascript.

I've also been exposed to many other languages---Forth, COBOL, Fortran, Java, C#, Ruby, Python, and so forth. By exposed I mean I can read and perhaps divine the intent of simple, straightforward code, but wouldn't easily understand complex code or write anything of any significance.

And of course I've probably forgotten most of that stuff anyway---I have no memory of even the barest syntax of Modula-2, say---not that I suppose it matters much: if you look at that list there's not a whole lot to strongly distinguish one language from another.

Sure, some are strongly typed and some are weakly typed and some are compiled and others aren't, but in the end they're all imperative languages (sometimes with functional features baked in), and the ones that I'm really familiar with all fall into the general ALGOL family of languages.

Which is why Haskell has been so interesting to study and attempt to use---which is what I've been doing for the last year or so. And I still feel like I'm taking baby steps.

Like a parent dutifully taking home videos of those baby steps, I've decided to do a little log of my work with Haskell, both to remind me of what I've accomplished and perhaps entertain others.

This week saw me get very behind on writing these posts---I had a lot of other commitments, and I didn't work hard enough to make the time.

I did find myeslf using C-o in the minibuffer a few times, and I did use M-<num> a couple of times when using numeric prefixes, but I didn't make any great progress in efficiency.

One thing I did do, that I'm not quite ready to talk about here, is work a lot on my Org-mode setup. Though there are things about Org-mode that I do not love---the biggest of which is that it's free-form-ness often leaves me feeling like good structure is impossible to find---it's an astonishingly useful tool once you begin to adapt to it. I've been doing more of that of late---my use of org2blog for this blog is part of this---and I hope to do even more, perhaps even getting into writing some elisp.

But for the moment, I'm just trying to get the easiest way to do things under my fingers as quickly as possible.

I think next week, the Weekly Wrap-up will include a table of all the keystrokes I talked about, so I can more easily remind myself of what I am intending to use as things go along.

As I've mentioned before, the first systems on which I used Emacs had keyboard support that was spotty-to-nonexistent for anything but the most common keystrokes.

Consequently, I learned to use ESC for a lot of stuff where you'd use Meta. For most of those things I've retrained myself, but until I was actually reading the GNU Emacs Manual, I didn't know that you didn't have to hit ESC to do a numerical argument.

So where I've often done ESC 5, say, to do a numeric argument to a function, I've now learned that I can simply do M-5, which is more like a single keystroke.

I do expect it'll take a bit to train myself out of my existing habit, but I'm hopeful.

This blog is supposed to be about what I'm learning and how the process of refining my use of Emacs is going, so each week I'll be looking at what I wrote about in the past week (or perhaps earlier) and assessing how much I've been able to change my habits or otherwise make use of my new knowledge.

So this first week has gone pretty well---using M-g M-g (goto-line) instead of M-x goto-line has come up a couple of times and I've remembered the new way of doing things, and similarly C-/ (undo) for undo. The change back to the prior handling of line-move-visual hasn't come up as much as I expected---I have a much wider terminal these days, so it's less of an issue---but I'm nonetheless glad to have made the change back.

The one thing I've not internalized, and that I'm not sure I'm likely to internalize, is using C-LEFT (left-word) and C-RIGHT (right-word) for by-word cursor motion. The benefits versus M-b (backward-word) and M-f (forward-word) just don't seem to be there---it turns out that for me, keeping my hands on home row outweighs the awkwardness of doing it all with one hand.

I've actually done a lot of other stuff this week, too---I've started using org2blog for all of my blogging (and will write about it shortly), reorganized my init process, started using ido-ubiquitous, and a few other things. But, for this week, this is the end.

I was first exposed to the Emacs command set some time in 1990, while I was a sophomore in college; I owned an Atari ST, and stumbled across a port of Conroy's uEmacs for TOS. It was a good little editor---capable and easy to use. In fact, as I was learning C at the time, I spent some time converting the source to ANSI C as an exercise.

I have used and even become pretty facile with a couple of other editors---I spent a lot of my last couple of years of college using Turbo Pascal, whose embedded editor used a command set derived from WordStar, and in my first job out of college I spent a lot of time writing Clipper code using Brief---but I've always had Emacs hovering in the background.

Then in 1994 I lucked into a job as a system administrator for a Unix system and even started using Linux as my primary desktop OS. The logical editor for me to start using was GNU Emacs, and I've never really looked back.

I use GNU Emacs a lot, every day---I read my email using Gnus, I track my to-do list and log my work time using Org-mode, I edit all my code and writing in Emacs---but in many ways, I feel like I'm still a raw beginner.

When I watch something like Magnar Sveen's Emacs Rocks videos, I am constantly amazed at the fluidity with which he does things that would take me much longer because I'm not familiar with a lot of capabilities that he's using. And the little snippets of elisp that he uses to simplify things in his What the .emacs.d!? posts blow me away with their ratio of bang for the buck.

In light of all this, I made a conscious decision to start actually studying GNU Emacs in 2013---and then I decided to chronicle my study, in the hopes that it might help others discover new things in GNU Emacs. When I remembered the Do you even Lift? meme, well, naming things is always the hardest but most important part.

So, the plan is for a post a day. The subjects will probably start out utterly mundane and basic---"Hey, did you know there's a keystroke for that?" sort of stuff---but I hope that, over time, they may come to be more complex and sophisticated---less a chronicle of my own personal journey and more a contribution to the store of knowledge about ways to use Emacs most effectively.

I finally found something to make me want to wail and gnash my teeth.

Having exported the content from Movable Type, I spent some time working on a script to clean up that content--I had made some errors when I move to Movable Type that meant my articles were often not in the format I wanted them to be, so I took the time to correct that, getting everything moved back to its original Textile source, and even converting some things that had started life as hand-written HTML to Textile.

And then I did the import and everything seemed to go well...except.

The WordPress importer seems to have pulled out all "extra" line-feeds, meaning that my posts end up formatted with a lot of line-break tags rather than proper paragraphs.

In the short term, I'll live with it. In the longer term, I'm probably going to be exporting and then importing this blog into a multi-blog setup, so I can probably do some text-hacking to resolve the issue then.

What worries me is what this means for possibly moving over Chet's blog. Re-doing his posts that are in Markdown is not in the cards--there's just too many--and the WordPress export/import format is a wordy mess for trying to generate yourself.

Grrr.

If you're inclined to love the software, you're going to want to take the time to dump a bunch of content in it to see how wonderfully it performs, and end up staying up late.

If you're inclined to hate the software, you're going to want to take the time to dump a bunch of content in it to find that one thing that it does so horribly wrong you will have to remove it, and end up staying up late.

Or at least, I am. Oy, this hurts.

I am now 90 days from being 40 years old.

I think these decade birthdays always loom especially large because I'm a decade baby.

Over the last week I've been considering what I'm going dedicate myself to for the next 90 days, so that perhaps by the time I actually hit 40, they will feel more like habits and rituals and be easy to maintain.

One that I've actually already started on is blogging every day. It doesn't have to be significant or insightful or, I suppose, even coherent. Perhaps it will just be a picture of the latte I have in the afternoon, or whatever coding problem I solved (or didn't ;) that day.

It's more about the consistency of writing every day, because I also want to start keeping a (private) journal. For the last 40 years, I've mostly been able to operate off memory alone. But I know that's not going to last forever, and I've probably already forgotten a lot of stuff I would like to have written down (though, of course, I can't be sure). So writing daily, both for public and private edification.

A related desire is that I want to be more diligent in keeping track of what I get done. I have a lot of days where at the end, I feel like I haven't gotten a lot done. Objectively, this isn't true, but I don't record it anywhere. In short, there's no evidence, it's totally ephemeral. So I want to be more diligent about knowing how I filled my days.

I need to reassert the habits of self-care. Eating well is an important part of that--I could stand to lose a little girth right at the moment--but even more importantly, I want to return to a daily meditation practice, a daily yoga practice, and other daily maintenance. I've gotten away from all of those in the last six months, and I'm very aware of it. 90 days is long enough to help me get over the hump in making these back into habits.

I want to get out of my music listening rut. It seems like I have a lot of music that has gotten short shrift--played a couple of times, and then dropped for more familiar things. Each day I want to find the time to listen to a whole album I don't know well from beginning to end.

Perhaps other things will present themselves. Anyway, it's going to be a fun time.

Well, my experiment with Inbox Zero is going swimmingly (even if I am only five days in).

I was spurred by comments to look at ways to try and use the same strategies for paper--which, I have to say, is an even more oppressive burden than email. We have a big filing cabinet full of stuff that's organized in rather idiosyncratic ways, and Anne's and my idiosyncracies don't always match up exactly to boot.

The specific suggestions that were made don't necessarily apply--most solutions presume Windows. Still, it got me thinking.

Now it just so happens that the gigantic multi-function device Anne purchased (because she's on research leave this semester, and expected to do a lot of printing, which meant our little ink-jet MFD wasn't going to cut it, but I wasn't going to have two devices taking up space in my office, so we specc'ed a high-speed color laser printer with fax and scanner. Total cost? <$800. Really) not only has an auto-feed scanner, but it will dump the scans to a network share in PDF format.

I spent some time last Friday setting up samba and doing some occasional cursing (some of the configuration you have to do is not well documented--some of the terms they used do not mean the same thing to everyone) but I got it working.

And this morning, I was able to take a couple of nice-to-retain but not vitally important things, shove them in the feeder, scan 'em the shred 'em.

It was very satisfying. Thanks, Dave, for suggesting it.

I've started experimenting with Inbox Zero as a way to handle the email I get.

The idea is simple enough--when you get an email, you deal with it in whatever way it needs to be dealt with--read and reply, delete, otherwise act upon it--and you get it out of your inbox.

Oh, and all those emails currently in your inbox? Well, you can do what I did--browse through them and guess that they were all archiveable--or you can do the "DMZ" folder that they talk about above, or whatever.

But the idea is to get you out of a position where you feel so behind that it's harder to act.

I'm only about 36 hours into it, but I'm finding it easy to maintain so far, and it's very freeing. In fact, I want to put this in place with paper mail, too--tuff comes in, it gets read and archived, trashed or acted upon.

I do believe bike geeks can be even more withering towards the novice bicyclist than computer geeks are towards the novice computer user.

Just sayin'.

Thanks for the heads-up, Chet.

At least, the links for articles on the site. There are still a bunch of image links that I probably need to go back and fix up.

So far I'm kinda liking Movable Type, though I still need to figure out how to setup fastcgi support for it--you don't notice it when you're just browsing the site (since it's published to static HTML) but using regular-old CGI for the interface can be a leetle bit poky.

I am hoping someone could explain to me what the real difference is between "categories", "tags", and "keywords". Seems kinda redundant.

Oh, and the damned rich text editor causes epiphany to go into search mode whenever I type an apostrophe. Oh, well.

I'm feeling lazy, so I probably won't move all of my deathly-important archives over until this weekend at the earliest. Just so you know.

After years of running my own blogging software, I think I am finally done with that whole business. Too much work, too few features, etc., etc. I've installed the Movable Type Open Source package in Debian, and whatever its flaws, it's going to be more featureful and useful than the various packages I've used over the years.

So, Chet, how about you?

I guess I didn't do a last-year assessment last year. I was probably scared to.

I dunno, how do you assess, "Was this the best year ever?"

I mean some things are unambiguously good, like beginning to teach yoga: six months in an I'm still enjoying it, perhaps even becoming skillful at it. And the yoga kula continues to grow and become more cohesive, which is a great source of joy and support.

Other things are more ambiguous, like my Dad getting laid off, and the big AnteSpam upgrade six weeks ago: it's good to have him working full-time on Ironic Design stuff, and it's good to have the big transition done since we needed it to move forward, but damn, neither were smooth, graceful transitions at all.

And then there's the stuff that is mostly just hard, and in the early stages so it's hard to find the rewarding parts, like therapy to help me deal with 36 years of crap being swept under the rug.

That said, things seem brighter than they have in a while. I'm mostly happy, fairly together, healthy, loved and supported, and I feel like I can mostly sustain that.

Anyway, enough maudlin shit. If you haven't seen it, you should definitely head over to Chet's place to see the picture of me in all my late-80's hirsute glory.

The only comment I'll make is that I've never styled my hair--it has always done whatever it was inclined to do--so this was only a choice insofar as doing nothing is a choice. Now I keep it short so that its choices are mightily constrained.

Well, I'm sure not going to blog about Saddam Hussein, and I've already blogged about the Vietnamese restaurant we went to yesterday, and while an amusing experience, the hispanic supermarket we went to yesterday:http://www.comparesupermarkets.com/ wasn't that earth-shattering (having been to one of the Fiestas in Houston, it's pretty small potatoes, really).

And I'm otherwise occupied with making tortilla using this Cook's Illustrated recipe (warning, it's behind a membership firewall, but you can find a copy someone's put on the web here.

Maybe tomorrow I'll come up with a bunch of New Years Resolutions that I won't keep. Once I wake up.

was moblogging capabilities. Typepad even provides a Treo app to facilitate it. This is the obligatory test.

I have decided to get out of not only the blog-software-writing habit (a bad tendency anyway, and one I never really had the spare time to give proper attention), but out of the blog-software-hosting gig.

I've got all the old posts imported (ah, beloved perl, an hour to hack together something to convert 500-odd posts), and I'll be redirecting the URL to typepad shortly.

I finally post the first item here in, what, three months, and the next day things come down the pike that virtually guarantee I won't have a lot of time for the next however-long.

All I will say that if that old saw about "When a door closes, a window opens." is true, I'm the guy whose efforts to open the window just went from vigorous to mildly frantic.

Given my repeated and persistent absences from posting, it should come as little surprise that I also haven't bothered to look at my web stats either. Given that this whole edifice is about my narcissistic need to make my snappy patter available to the web, how could it not hurt to find out that my never-exactly-legion fans had abandoned me?

Anyway, just because I haven't looked at them doesn't mean that the stats haven't been collected, and after a week of blogging a couple of stories a day, I figured, "What the hell?"

Well, the numbers are the numbers--ultimately, I don't believe that I've had 62 distinct visitors in the last 8 days, etc., etc. Most of it is probably just bot traffic, etc. But the thing that always makes this worthwhile are the searches. Sadly Live Sex Chet is nowhere to be found, but we do get:

1. do the heathen go to heaven?

and

1. two queries about

coordinates from Feasting On Asphalt, which makes me think there's an audience for someone to scribble down the coordinates and post them on a blog. Perhaps that will be me.

Not about stuff like work and coding and so forth, but about trying to keep up with so much stuff.

I purged about a dozen blogs from my reader yesterday, mostly political ones, some of which I had been pulling for nigh on two years. I find myself deleting Daily Show episodes from the TiVO unviewed. I am still reading The New Yorker from cover to cover, but it can be a bit of a slog.

I know, intellectually, that the world isn't going to shit any more than it has been on most other days in the last two centuries, but hearing relentless bad news is getting a little old.

I mean, I don't think anyone expected them to be gone for two months. But just for the moment, Fafblog is back.

bq.. "I always used to figure God would show up at the end a the world an beam me up to Raptureland in his magical funk-powered mothership," says me. "But that was before he got eaten by Supergod."

"Serves him right!" says Giblets. "If God wanted to go to heaven he should've accepted Metajesus as his personal lord and savior."

An interesting article on coming back to things you've fallen away from.

Although it's couched in terms of a graduate student and things like theses and dissertations, it all rings true for me and my experience in being AWOL from a side-project (I was AWOL from Debian far too often) or even from blogging or just keeping up with email. I think it's influenced in part by my mildly hermetic lifestyle--it's all too easy to draw in and ignore things--but it's also a learned habit.

And someone comes on the line and tries to tell me I owe someone $2K+. I asked what it was about, they said, "A card with citibank that was in default." I told them they had the wrong guy, never had a card with them. The guy said, "I have a social, last four digits XXXX". Nope, not me. Sorry. :)

I must admit I had to get the guy to read the number off twice because the first time my head was so full of voices shouting "Identity Theft" I couldn't concentrate on what he was saying.

...insofar as I can only stomach about five seconds worth of cultural criticism at a time these days--since that's about how long it takes me to look at Anne, shrug my shoulders and say something about how the cultures on the skids or vice versa.

I don't have the energy, and besides, what the fuck to do I have to be outraged about? I do stupid shit, you do stupid shit, "they" do stupid shit, this is the human condition. Laugh a little, or a lot, but calm down. You will be happier if you accept that stupid shit will be perpetrated for as long as the race is viable.

Mind you, some of the stupid shit I see makes me wonder how long that may be...

However, having decided for another reason to link to it, I must say that I participated in almost none of eXile's 90 90's shams. I don't mean that as a value judgement (see above), just as an observation. My purity test score is low, my music collection is full of oddball items, and I don't go to the movies. I guess I'm realizing, I ignored huge swaths of my peers experiences, period.

Oh, what was the reason I was going to link to it? The site is built using Mason.

Yeah, I'm a geek.

It's not that I care so much about the people who are trying to push products through telemarketing--I am on the do-not-call list and all--but it seems to me the people who are actually on the other end of the phone deserve some compassion.

After all, I can't imagine that it's anything other than a job that combines mediocre pay and soul-crushing work. I suppose that in some cases it may be a specific choice someone makes because it leaves them free to do other things, but in most I expect it's what they do because it's all that's available.

So when I get solicited, I usually say, as politely but firmly as possible, "Thank you, I'm not interested."

Well, today some guy calls from Earthlink, and I do my normal, "Thank you, I'm not interested." and the dolt tries to tell me why I am wrong not to be interested.

And I snapped.

Not in a shouting-obscenities-and-banging-the-phone-on-the-table way--which I've been known to do, but usually in a more Spider Jerusalem state of mind, that is, with a smile on my face and giggling--but in a harangue-on-a-theme, "You should not presume to know enough about me to tell me that I'm interested in your product." way.

After it was over and I went down to feed the cats I started to wonder where our little version of capitalism went totally off the rails. Why is it that companies I do business with, often over long periods of time sometimes seem intent on making me regret having a relationship with? That just seems stupid.

That, if you really want (or, alternatively, if your wife just feels like amusing herself), you can get Orange County Chopper Boxer shorts:

Well, 34 started off pretty horribly, really--the last half of October was a blur of work and yoga, with maybe some sleeping in there, leading into disaster on November 2, for which I had a sleep-deprived ringside seat. I basically came home and hibernated for two months, without even the comfort of some good yoga classes--while I had been gone, our yoga teacher started teaching at a new studio with whose proprietor we had some problems, and I ended up putting the ten pounds I had lost in DC back on. On the upside, Chet and Erin got engaged that month knew about it, say, four hours before Erin did.

January saw Anne and I go on a short trip to San Francisco. We found an Anusara yoga teacher, and I started working on a big rewrite of AnteSpam, to incorporate two years worth of experience with what we were dealing with (still not done, I'm afraid, but soon, soon). I started getting back into doing some small jobs for i.e. Marketing. I ordered a new laptop which wasn't to arrive for six months.

February came, Hunter S. Thompson went, and I spent a few days writing my own blogging software.

March saw the replacement of almost all of i.e.'s machines--which wasn't exactly how we'd planned things--and I had about as much dental surgery as I think you can have while still having all of your own teeth at the end of it. Ajax started to show up as a topic on geek blogs.

April brought with it a surge of productivity on the AnteSpam rewrite, and a corresponding lack of blogging--I've never been as consistent as I'd like, and never as prolific as Chet.

The blog drought dragged on through May. We celebrated Anne's birthday. I read some books, I watched some movies, and generally tried to be ignorant of the outside world.

June had the first of my younger cousins getting married. Anne and I had an actual vacation in Panama City, FL. Debian got a release out the door. I made some further progress on the new AnteSpam back-end, but still hadn't begun to touch the front-end.

In July, I started playing with Catalyst, with an eye to using it on a project for Bad Boy Records. Although that project has subsequently stalled, I realized that it was the perfect medium for building the front-end for AnteSpam, so I started work on that. That's taken up a bunch of my time since then--it's taken a while, but I've been learning the toolkit, and arriving at ways to do things that I'm comfortable with (everything's been rewritten at least three or four times), and I'm really approaching the endgame now.

August was more work on AnteSpam, and pizza every week thanks to the astonishingly good tomatoes available at the Carrboro Farmer's Market. Who needs more?

September was kind of tough. First Katrina, then the news about my cousin, and then Ford, our acromegalic cat, had a small medical crisis that meant I had to miss Chet's Bachelor Excursion--though, honestly, my liver thanks me. I totally rebuilt i.e.'s email infrastructure as part of a project to add some features. I made further progress on AnteSpam.

October has been "wedding month", and here we are, all caught up.

Funny enough, what this summary has made me realize is that I really ought to keep a journal. A lot more stuff happened than this, but, you know what they say: if you don't write it down, it didn't happen.

Is it a beginning,
a continuing,
or the end?

> (Adrian Belew, Face To Face)

I promise a painful reconstruction of Chet's wedding.

It is painful, of course, because of all the alcohol that was liberally applied during various stages in the process. Self-inflicted pain being the best sort, of course.

Other than that, it was great. As I said, more tomorrow.

I'm posting this to a LiveJournal account. I'm giving serious thought to making tendentious.org a "virtual" domain--that is, run services on other machines, rather than taking responsibility for keeping them up on my own.

Part of this will revolve around whether I can find services I like enough, of course--which is part of why I'm posting this on LiveJournal. The other part, of course, is whether I'm too much of a control freak for that.

Update: I've moved everything off LiveJournal. I like the little bloggy thing I wrote too much to abandon it.

Almost six weeks with nary a post. Nothing at all for July.

I'd love to have some excuse--that I was busy with work or something--but the changes to my schedule that did, in fact, happen are not actually the cause. I just haven't had much to say.

Yeah, I'm back. I don't want to think about how long it's been since I've posted. I swear, baby, this time I'll post every day, just come back.

No, I'm not going to go full Ike on you. Not right now, at least. Instead, I will leave you with an amusing quote from Jon Carroll:

In my youth (and still, today, in Las Vegas), all the rules were available in advance. The nature of the problem was known. The solution to the problem depended on many variables, but the variables were also known. Many unexpected things can happen in poker, but none of them is that a Merkon Death Ray will turn all the cards into lizards. It is never true in poker that your only hope of survival is to steal the belt of the man sitting next to you.

Yeah, the person who found my site by searching for holly hunter unattractive. Dude, you're just wrong. Wrong I tell you!

On the other hand, one on one sex chet video software is just funny.

One last selection: elephants anatomy porn.

whimper.

OK, so the single best reason to analyze ones weblog access logs is not to find out how many people are hitting your site or any shit like that--although I have to admit to a certain bafflement at how many hits I get, even if you carve out bloglines.com's constant polling.

No, the best reason to analyse ones access logs is to see the absolutely hilarious searches that people follow to your site. I've mentioned "milla jovovich naked" before--I don't think the person using that got what they wanted, since it was a result of me bashing Resident Evil. Anne and I spent a few minutes a week or so ago lauging about some.

You must see where this is going...

I can't say how amused I was to find the all-time-best-search today: Live Sex Chet.

Chet, of course, demanded that I make it the headline, which I've agreed to do for a day or two.

I have to say, there's an awful lot of other amusing ones, and some that I just don't understand how they got to me:

• gas treatment dupont (no frigging idea)

• kernels that stick in your teeth (err, linux + new Nine Inch Nails album?)

• free porn that you can watch for free (no idea)

• a boy bow down to his parents (the old title, bet this wasn't what they expected)

• all sorts of warts (no idea, don't want to think about it)

• dogs fuck women novels (whoa, where'd that come from!)

• naked librians (yeah!)

• wachowski brothers and sex change (v for vendetta and...uh...)

• how to tell someone you hate them (I'm kinda amused, but baffled)

• get out of this shitty marriage (this kinda makes me sad)

• how to give a lap dance (u2 + who knows)

Chet's recollection of me screwing around with people who kept calling my number in error. It has a vague sense of familiarity, but, honestly, it might have been Patrick--simply taking reservations seemed a little subtle for me, I was much more the "beat the phone against the wall" sort of person at that point.

I'm much better now. Unless you're a telephone solicitor. Or a wrong number calling me too early in the morning.

So, um, I took a week off, more or less, from any real, sensible, useful work to write my own blogging package.

This choice, believe it or not, was not undertaken lightly. Well, that's not entirely true--the need to resolve the issues I'd been having bit me in the ass one day, and I just couldn't concentrate on anything else until it was done. But I'd been thinking about moving for a while, because there were issues with the software I had been using, but the software, Blosxom, is basically dead.

Well, perhaps that's overstating the case. It still has a community of users, and many of them are quite happy--heck, I was mostly happy--but it has no leader to keep development moving forward, and the prior leader, Rael Dornfest, released the last alpha version of the "big new update" nearly a year ago with a restrictive license that forbids anyone from picking it up and continuing development.

And the idea of hacking on the prior version, of which I've done a little, was not attractive.

So I decided to take those aspects of Blosxom that I really liked--mostly using the filesystem as your database--and build my own. And I have, and it's not really ready to be released just yet (there's still a ton of rough edges), but I can talk about the design a little bit.

The single biggest thing I like about Blosxom is that it uses the filesystem as its database of articles, which are all just text files--you type them up, give them silly names, dump them in directories, and it picks through it all to find stuff. This works great for me, with my devotion to Emacs, and it allows me to easily and reliably do all my editing locally, and then push my changes up to the real server using rsync or sitecopy or what-have-you.

Where my too begins to differ is that Blosxom considers the first line of your file the title, and the rest is the body. For various reasons, I got in the habit of separating those with a line, and I decided to exploit that. So my tool considers anything up to the first blank line to be a "header", while the rest of the file is the body.

Now, at the moment, I actually prefix this header text with the string "title: ", and then split the whole thing up on the colons, much like one would a mail header. This allows you to define arbitrary properties for a message. You can put:

This is a title
Foo: Fee
author: Jiminy

Etc., etc. The body part of the message gets run through Textile, which is a very nice, very smart formatter that takes a lot of the scutwork out of the sort of text I'm writing. It gives me back xhtml.

From all this, I can produce a chunk of XML to represent the article, including those arbitrary properties from the header. This all gets glommed together with some header information for the whole feed into a big XML document that represents the semantic content I want to produce.

Then, depending on what sort of output you requested (this is the "flavor" in Blosxom parlance), that XML is cranked through a stylesheet that will produce well-formed XHTML, or RSS (of any type), or Atom, or conceivably other things.

Even though this is all written in perl, it's pretty damn fast--all the XML tomfoolery is done using the XML::LibXML and XML::LibXSLT libraries, which are wrappers around libxml2 and libxslt1.1, which are lightning-fast C libraries for doing this stuff.

I also think it's ridiculously flexible, for the usual reasons: it divorces content from presentation (mostly), so it's easy to support multiple formats with a fair shot at producing optimal results in them.

I also have ideas for "plugins"--the fundamental thing to realize is that we can dump as much stuff as we want into our "source document", and then use XSLT stylesheets to tailor things for presentation. So that list of days with number of posts can be put in some arbitrary place and the XSLT (probably plus some CSS) can move it to be a sidebar.

Overall, I think it's going to end up being a nice system--perhaps not perfect, but close. But for the moment I need to go to bed.

The question is kind of tongue-in-cheek but the fact is I'm starting to think that for me the answer is "mild depression".

Now I'm really not trying to cause anyone concern--this is not "I'm going to go jump off a bridge now" material. I don't feel unhappy or anything--which even now makes me wonder if I'm wrong--instead, I'm just totally and utterly apathetic. I have no energy, no desire to do anything active at all--I'd happily sleep, eat and watch television, maybe read and play World of Warcraft.

In fact, at first I just thought it was that I was tired--three months in DC did take a lot out of me; it was stressful for a whole host of reasons, and it didn't exactly end on a high note. But I've had plenty of time to get past the physiological effects, and yet here I find myself, feeling like Inertia Man--if I can get moving, I can sometimes find some energy and keep it going, but most of the time, I lose steam quickly. And it happens pretty much every year.

Oh, well, as reliably as it comes, it goes, too. In a couple of weeks I'll wake up bursting with energy, wondering why I was so egregiously slack for the last month--it's just weird to realize all this.

...that postings have dried up, insofar as he hectored me into buying Worlds of Warcraft, which is interfering with me getting any, you know, work done.

I haven't spent this much time with a video game since '95 or '96, when Quake came out.

Find it at http://www.diepunyhumans.com

This should be important to anyone who's read Transmetropolitan (bet that one came out OK, Nova), and, well, everyone should read Transmetropolitan.

Oh, and that link where he says don't look--seriously, don't look. Nothing good can come of it. Nothing. I need to go spend about three hours in the shower now.

via William Gibson

Never, ever, ever go three months without playing guitar.

While--should I get back to any sort of substantive posting before November 2, which is unclear at this point--I may link to things other people have to say, or discuss the way my involvement in all this has changed me, I don't think I can continue to talk about my feelings, because it's obvious that when I do so I am unable to rise above fairly corrosive incivility.

So I'm going to stop. I'm unlikely to convince anyone, no matter how well I document the compulsive mendacity, or the failed programs or the disastrous policies, if I can't even begin to make the case at anything less than a primal scream.

More yoga is probably the answer. Or more gin and tequila. It's probably situation-dependent.

Taken by putting together the words that appear most often in searches that arrive at this blog:

bow the down poodle one before you serve blonde concrete