February 1, 2001

Note to self: Give up playing pool; never lift a cue again. Because you'll never again be as *on* as you were last night. There's something to be said for quitting while you're ahead, going out in a blaze of glory, burning out instead of fading away, etc etc. [10:39 am in girl meets web]

but the thing is this: I'm only elitist in the abstract sense. I'm better than them (of course, of course) but sure that you are much more fascinating and accomplished and intelligent and comfortable in your own skin than I am. So I don't talk to you unless you make me, and if you make eye contact, I will assume it was someone else you were looking for, that your gaze met mine only on its way to somewhere else. [6:06 pm in girl meets web]

February 2, 2001

Nick brought this to my attention: proof that "organic supermarkets can be bastards, too." Or, in other words: the Man comes in many guises. I didn't imagine that thinking globally and acting locally could involve wiping out the indie competition. [2:11 pm in found links]

Martin Amis: "unfilmable author notorious for unwatchable films." Yowch. [3:34 pm in found links/dead trees]

Gothic/industrial clubs in Washington, D.C. Featuring a drippy blood animated gif and a logo featuring the Capitol building, the Washington monument, and the Lincoln memorial on the prerequisite black background with the prerequisite scratchy red text. And I thought the Florida Goth site (at floridagoth.com, but I can't seem to resolve it now---is it dead, I wonder? like more than usual?) was funny. [8:57 pm in found links]

Save changes to No Recipient, No Subject?: the only people who would care enough to be able to help are the ones I would wish not to burden with the asking. a tidy little self-fulfilling prophecy of isolation. [11:37 pm in girl meets web]

February 3, 2001

they're baaack: "Hello, I call Gianni, I was making of the tests with the webcam that I must install in my discotheque that I will open between two settiamne in coast smeralda, Olbia (portocervo, Sardinia island)quando are entarto in your situated one, sin that you were in offline. Six pretty one, and this the sAi, but From YOUR EYES, to traspare ALSO much SADNESS. tI I SEND a RIVER BASIN. If it goes to you rispondimi, I have 35 years, alive to olbia and between some week, I will send online mine discoclub. Soon! Gianni from Sardinia island Italy. He tries to answer in Italian." [1:04 pm in girl meets web]

February 4, 2001

Friday was Patrick's birthday. Saturday, he was surprised. Pleasantly. I hope :) [4:55 pm in found links]

More adventures in chocolate beverages: tonight I accidentally ended up with a half-pint of chocolate *soy* milk; its fate was remarkably similar to that of last week's Yoo-Hoo. Unrelated: am I a bad person if I was so disgusted with how long it took the woman in line before me at Fresh Fields to get through the checkout (two carts of groceries on a busy Sunday night) that I didn't say anything when her broccoli rang up at sixty-eight dollars? ("Wow, two hundred and thirty dollars, what did I buy?" she asked no one in particular, signing the credit slip with nary a glance at the itemized receipt.) ... yeah, I figured I probably was. [7:44 pm in girl meets web]

February 5, 2001

Time does fly when you're having fun. If it keeps up like this, you know, I'm just going to wake up one day and find myself all-of-a-sudden forty years old with sensible shoes, a Cuisinart, and a 401(k)---but still giggling like a schoolgirl, with the same stupid grin on my face---one can only hope. [6:21 pm in girl meets web]

flowery because I'm thinking of spring---dark, because it's not, yet: I have a new design. I think it is very pretty. I hope it is pretty for you too---as opposed to scrambled, broken, downright scary. Unless you're using an old browser, in which case, I have no mercy. But if ugly things happen, and you think they are my fault, not yours, do email me and scold to your heart's content. [8:35 pm in girl meets web]

February 6, 2001

I love it when the Internet makes possible answers to questions whose reply, in darker days, could only have been "How the hell am I supposed to know?" Today's question comes from Scott: "Where's a good place to get a cell phone and plan?" My answer: wirelessadvisor.com. Once again, the built-in URL catcher in my brain (mIRC-style, but more usable) makes me look smarter than I really am. Win-win! [5:26 pm in found links]

February 7, 2001

I finally took TheSpark's Gender Test. It seems it's eighty percent certain that I'm a man... and I have backspaced over every single witty retort I can think of; insert your own here. My favorite question is number 26: "Which word is grosser? a. moist, b. used" Anyone who's ever seen The Impostors KNOWS that the answer is, most definitely, "moist". [12:06 pm in found links]

I haven't thought of this in forever: The Tree That Owns Itself. I do miss Athens still. [1:59 pm in found links]

I know, I know. But still... sapphires come in all colors of the rainbow, except red, and even then it's the same stone, just with a different name: ruby. so there! (link swiped from MetaFil---oh, wait, that was me who posted it, never mind.) [5:55 pm in found links]

February 8, 2001

Oh, those wacky wacky hipper-than-thou-indie kids with their reedy and bitter cries of "sellout". Britney's fat endorsement deal with Pepsi is said to be all about the benjamins. She gave lots of lip service to her love of Pepsi upon the announcement of the sponsorship, but documents from her recent tour show she demanded her dressing rooms be stocked with "(6) cans coke". However, there's an easy explanation for all of this: in the South, any drink that's sugary, fizzy, and can be enjoyed even more with the addition of a handful of salted peanuts (just like Elvis used to drink it, and by the way, maybe Roanoke's just not far *enough* South, but *lots* of people eat the peanuts too) is a "Coke", even if it's a Pepsi. Given that Ms. Spears is from a tiny town in Louisiana, some confusion is understandable. [1:58 pm in found links]

Panda Cam at the National Zoo. [2:20 pm in found links]

February 9, 2001

even more still more yet more me! Realized recently that the webcam gallery was seriously out-of-date... I hadn't put anything new up since last May. I have rectified the situation, however, and there are now sixteen new cam shots for your viewing pleasure. My favorite: what geeks do on Christmas Eve. [1:46 pm in girl meets web]

February 12, 2001

sxswb.com is back, but I'm not going to go look, because if I did I'd end up convincing myself that it's not too late to decide to go to South by Southwest after all---that the walk-up conference rate and what's sure to be a complete dearth of hotel rooms are, really, no problem, man---that no matter what lastminutetravel.com says, surely my iron will and cunning ingenuity would be enough to come up with a non-insanely-expensive plane ticket... [11:35 am in found links]

Wow. Apparently Altavista thinks that, if I search on +CSS +font +size +relative +"xx-small", it's my coy little way of saying "Please offer me above-the-fold links to Giant Erections, Group Sex/Orgies, Hot Teens, Lesbian Girlfriends, and Oral Delights". In fact, maybe this is a desperate but ingenious new business plan of some kind? "No matter what the people ask for, what the people really want is sex." [12:11 pm in found links]

... or maybe I *should* try to magic a trip to Austin, given that the ApacheCon people just posted the registration fees for this year's conference. Egads! A girl could fly to Austin, stay in a medium-swank downtown hotel, attend SXSW, and even eat for just what it'd cost to get in the door at ApacheCon. [1:29 pm in found links]

<Sapphireblue> valentine's day stinx0rs. it is performance anxiety waiting to happen. <sjc> then buy him nothing. and just tell him you love him. Or, better yet, MAKE HIM DO SOMETHING FOR YOU. <Sapphireblue> yes, that's the ticket. "I love you, sweetkins. Do you love me? Oh, you do? Well, prove it, buster. Put your money where your mouth is. Pronto---I'm *waiting*!" [5:01 pm in girl meets web]

Change the Climate is a non-profit organization out to end the "war on marijuana", citing, for example, the DEA's classification of pot as a Schedule 1 drug right up there with heroin, which makes no sense at all other than as pure propaganda. The group's ads were rejected by Boston's public transit system, triggering a lawsuit, and accepted for the Metro system here in DC only after the threat of a similar suit. The ads have been up for a month and a half here and have attracted a fair amount of controversy. Predictably, there's the point of view that says that they're all just a bunch of dirty damn hippies anyway, but the Change the Climate website links to a whole bunch of other organizations who would disagree. [8:10 pm in political]

February 13, 2001

A good day and here's why: he found the note I planted for him, and I think it made him smile---lasagne for lunch---I helped a friend fight the forces of evil---doing smart things today at work---I found the Metro card I thought I had lost with twelve dollars on it---it is sunny outside---excellent email last night from a favored correspondent, and I am impatient to find time to respond so I can get another---on track for a week of many billable hours---the guy at Earthlink who couldn't help me get my DSL fixed last night offered to order me the ice cream I'd wanted from Kozmo---payday is soon soon soon and I will buy more furniture or perhaps tires---there should be a UPS package waiting for me at my apartment when I get home tonight---I managed to get out of paying my car insurance for the month with two efficient phone calls---no devils in my details; all is right with the world as it exists in this exact moment. [12:43 pm in girl meets web]

You know, when I hover my lil mouse cursor over a link on my screen that says "Visit My Home Page", I am most likely interested in looking at the status bar to see *where your home page is*. Therefore, using JavaScript to populate the status bar with "My Home Page!" does not help me. Stop the madness! Yes, I mean you! sheesh. [3:02 pm in girl meets web]

I wrote a letter that hurt twice---once for the pain of writing it, again for what I imagine will be the pain of its receipt. After thinking about it for weeks, after phrasing it carefully and then reviewing it closely, I very nearly sent it on its way to its ultimate destination some several hundred miles away, but at the last second paused: in three minutes it will be the fourteenth of February, and no one should have to receive a letter like the one I have written on Valentine's Day. [11:57 pm in girl meets web]

February 14, 2001

... just ran my taxes for the year, and what they say is that I'm not going to ApacheCon, or SXSW, or pretty much anywhere, for, um, quite a while, it would appear. E-fucking-gads. National retail sales tax, anyone? [1:06 am in girl meets web]

Old news, but good news: obsessive-compulsive chronicler of footnotes Nicholson Baker took a wild hair last year and bought untold thousands of old U.S. newspapers dating back to the year after the Civil War from a library in England that had decided they were trash. He formed a non-profit organization for their preservation, and I'm so glad he did---only one page of photos of one of the bound volumes of antique papers he saved, from the Chicago Tribune of July 1911, seems to prove beyond the shadow of a doubt that electronic storage is serviceable and efficient, but paper retains a sort of magnificence that a universe of zeroes and ones could never hope to match. ...however, I've never been quite sure what to think about his notorious vendetta against digital-minded librarians (hello, New Yorker, your spiffy new website sucks---a link to "Discards" in your 4/4/94 issue, please?---oh well, it's reprinted in Baker's 1997 collection The Size of Thoughts, which is worth its price even if you skip its last, monstrous, dreadful essay on lumber---yes, lumber). Even if I've missed the pro-card-catalog evangelistic fervor somewhat, I just have a feeling that Baker's forthcoming book will attempt once more to sway me: its title is Double Fold: Libraries and the Assault on Paper. [3:36 pm in dead trees]

Oh yes. Nearly forgot. Six years ago today, I dialed into the internet, or a reasonable facsimile thereof (it was actually AOL), for the very first time. A 14.4 modem because the seeming gibberish I was hearing about competing "high-speed" specifications scared me: V.32terbo? V.FAST? V.FC? V.34 in the end a *decade* in the making? what?? It changed my life. It's still changing my life. [4:33 pm in girl meets web]

xcutsel is my new best friend. (obviously, I need more friends.) [5:47 pm in tech/biz]

February 15, 2001

a song I hadn't heard in years came back to haunt me this week: "there are many things that I / would like to say to you / but I don't know how / cause maybe / you're gonna be the one that saves me" [3:12 pm in girl meets web]

.. though, it seems prudent to mention, I don't feel much as if I need saving anymore. the song still makes me wistful though. force of habit i suppose. [3:29 pm in girl meets web]

For later perusal: Maybe I won't have to write myself some ugly PHP to prevent people from stealing bandwidth from my site after all---it may need some tweaking to support multiple valid referers, for certain sites I don't mind swiping a little of my bandwidth, but this script may be just the ticket. (yes, I know it's super-easy to configure Apache to do this very thing, except the server I'm on has too old a version of Apache to let me do it through .htaccess, and I surely don't have access to httpd.conf ... doh.) [5:11 pm in tech/biz]

Good news for Kansas schoolkids---Charles Darwin's back in town. [7:29 pm in found links]

February 16, 2001

not gonna let it scare me, not gonna let it scare me, I'm not. everything is going to be ... just fine. [12:56 pm in girl meets web]

Want hottt xxx kitty pr0n? PETA is happy to oblige. (Imagine the fur that would fly if a couple of humans re-enacted this one!) [1:48 pm in found links]

February 19, 2001

Area girlfriend has finally seen Apocalypse Now. Yay me! Must remind area English major to continue the deconstruction of the movie he began just prior to falling asleep for the night, though. [1:26 pm in girl meets web]

February 20, 2001

How to make beef stroganoff with fresh onions, garlic, and mushrooms for two dollars and ninety-one cents: it helps a lot to find steak that a sleeping meat-department employee accidentally priced at four cents a pound. [12:35 pm in girl meets web]

Mike has some thoughts on Dale Earnhardt's death that fairly well sum up why the news saddened me in spite of my not being a racing fan. It is really a family sort of thing, you know: when I was a teenager, I helped paint the stock car belonging to my favorite aunt and uncle, and spent quite a few Saturday nights hanging out with them at the 441 Speedway in Dublin, Georgia. Doug and Brenda always lost, and last place was not infrequent, but they loved doing it, and all their friends and family were always welcome in the pits on race nights. That's the way I remember those long, loud, late Saturday nights: you'd sit and talk shit with the rest of the crew---loosely defined as anyone who wanted to be there---through the other classes' laps, waiting for it to be your team's turn. You'd slap the sides of the car, still undergoing adjustments to compensate for last week's spinouts and sideswipes, and you'd say "This will be the week!" and everyone would agree, every week, like they meant it, and most likely they did. Maybe you'd grill some hamburgers or hot dogs, but definitely you'd get some hot boiled peanuts from the snack stand. The cooler would be full of Cokes for the kids and beers for the adults and you'd pray to god you wouldn't have to use the racetrack's bathrooms. And you might not be much into racing, but you'd have a good time, because everyone else was. It's been a lot of years since I went to or even watched a race, but there were a good number of Earnhardt fans among the people who counted themselves as part of the Mudd Puppy Racing team, I remember, and I know that the extended family mourning Dale's death is a very large one indeed. [2:01 pm in girl meets web]

I remain, if not immune, untouched, but stand witness to any epidemic for long enough, and you begin to wonder why-not-me. [4:25 pm in tech/biz]

bah. it always sort of puts a damper on the fun when you're telnetted in and doing your thing and suddenly you're *not* doing your thing but instead looking at a scary broadcast message---"going down NOW for an emergency upgrade". double-damper when your site's down for nearly two hours immediately thereafter. [7:01 pm in girl meets web]

February 21, 2001

Okay, it's just a joke. And maybe I even got a grin out of it. But---"the once thought based blog"? My webcam was bringing me declarations of undying love (or, well, messages like "17/M/Kalamazoo, how r u?", anyway) from around the planet before your "blog" was so much as a twinkle in your eye. And we walked uphill barefoot in the snow both ways, too... Uppity youngins these days don't know their place. The good old days just ain't like they used to be. [9:39 am in found links]

So the firm I work for doesn't do creative. (Which, incidentally, means that a half-serious vow I made last July regarding my career development---"by December 31, 2000, I will have chopped-and-tabled my very last Photoshop comp"---actually came true, and the thing that got me into the web to begin with is now the last thing I feel any desire to do. Full circle, or at least far enough around that I can't see my origin point any longer.) It's all about the software, or in my case specifically, all about the interface I guess. What this means is that there isn't a copy of Photoshop installed on every workstation in the building. And this is paining me today---I find myself called upon to do some rare graphics work, and I'm stuck with Paint Shop Pro. Oy, it's hell. I keep telling myself that as I get more used to PSP, it'll get better, that it's just six years of Photoshop habits that make the going tough. But it's *not* getting better, and I'm about to retract my benefit of the doubt altogether. Just one more stealth-silent crash in the middle of an operation, and I'm going to throw a world-class tantrum. [12:51 pm in girl meets web]

To elaborate a bit on this: I've been working for nearly a month through John Updike's last collection of essays and criticism, and it distressed me in an odd way this week to come across a footnote to one of the reviews, apologizing for the youthful arrogance of the piece (from 1960 I think?), but pointedly not apologizing for its unabridged inclusion, because after all, the book "may be his last" collection of such miscellanea. Obviously he's an older man, won't live forever, and even if he did, would tire of writing sooner or later, one imagines. But it is saddening to think of Updike's dying, because that means the end of all the lovely gifts he's given to a world of devoted readers. It won't be the same mourning as, say, his wife would do, but it will be mourning just the same---the "relationship" between Mr. Updike and myself is entirely one-way, to the point where he does not and will not know that I exist, but that hasn't stopped him from enriching me, and that hasn't stopped me from gotten mighty comfortable with having him in my life. In that one-sided, hero-worship, mildly-obsessed, isn't-it-about-damn-time- for-another-new-book kind of way. Such is the oddity of celebrity culture: guys who write die every day, but not one has died yet who's affected my life as much as Updike has. And that is why I'll mourn when he goes---as will many others---and, no doubt, why I'll end up having to defend my sadness against small, crusty people whose brains (hearts?) aren't big enough to realize that love is a strangely adaptable and persistent phenomena, taking many more and subtler forms than the sorts found amongst families, or between lovers. [2:16 pm in girl meets web]

Conducted quite a bit of research today on color psychology, and was having a tough time coming up with exactly what I wanted in among all the explanations of additive vs. subtractive colors, cones and rods, etc. But xblog's list of color resources pointed me in the right direction, or rather in a few of them. The best finds included Understanding Color and How It Affects Your World, the Basic Color & Design SBFAQ, Results of the Roper/Pantone Consumer Color Preference Study and Many Moods of Color from Pantone, Color Matters, Marketing Products with Color, and Color Psychology. Also, not strictly what I was after, but obscurely interesting anyway: a key to colors as used on signage by the U.S. DOT Federal Highway Administration. I've seen those neon green school-crossing signs; if my having a searing headache makes America's schoolchildren safer, so be it... I guess. [5:55 pm in found links]

February 22, 2001

On Monday I picked up my car from having a full set of brand new Michelin tires put on. Today, it's snowing like hell. I am, against all better judgment, terribly tempted to take Alfredo out for a spin in the pretty white stuff. If the weather wasn't enough reason for you DC metro residents to stay off the roads today, now there is one more---namely, the fact that no matter what state a person gets her drivers' license in (it was South Carolina, in my case), she's thereafter entitled to drive anywhere else in the country. [2:59 pm in girl meets web]

I thought I was doing okay with this whole northern-living thing; I've been here three months now and haven't died of cold yet. But then I made the mistake of sliding Delerium's Semantic Spaces into the CD player. My earphones are currently delivering a sweetly painful, incredibly intense dose of (dare I say) nostalgia straight to my winter-withered brain. It feels a lot like eighty degrees, eighty miles an hour, slanting sun glinting off the ocean, a giant styrofoam cup of sweet tea with all its ice melted in the center console, my feet and sandals and jeans cuffs and floorboards crusted with half-dried sand. It feels like a long weekend and nothing to lose. [7:10 pm in girl meets web]

February 23, 2001

Zeldman's is a site I forget to go to. It's on that list of often-enjoyable reads which still, for some reason, never pop into my mind when I think (as I often do) 'where would i like to surf today?' Sites in this category (which also includes Suck [especially Filler (oh I love Polly Esther)]) often end up consuming half-days at a time as I rediscover them all over again every month or two. So it's really only dumb luck that I found Zeldman's latest "My Glamourous Life", and I'm awfully glad I did, because it afforded me the opportunity to snicker knowingly at the cool kids, which, for us mousy geeklets clustered together at the rejects' table on the far end of the cafeteria, is a divine pleasure indeed. [12:48 pm in found links]

At the cube across from where I sit, a co-worker is trying to show S. and myself how Half-Life works. We are taking turns listening to the sound effects on his headphones. S. likes the snarks better than any of the guns. "What do the bugs do to you when they get you?" she wants to know. A. walks up and sees us goofing off. "What's that?" she asks. We explain. "Oh, is that what you guys play on Friday nights?" she asks. Our demo leader says "Yes! Will you join us?" A. says, "Oh, I don't know, I haven't played any games in since Pac-Man." I say, "I used to be really good at Galaga." S. says, "I had an Easy-Bake Oven." A. says "Me too...!" The programmers on the other side of the room snicker at us. I go back to my cube. [2:11 pm in girl meets web]

Someone at work today sent around a site that lists cool 404s, and there is one that that features a Java-applet Centipede game. This makes me happier than I can say. (Thanks Chris!) [3:23 pm in found links]

A hero's retreat. A story that sounds familiar, except for its very end. [6:10 pm in found links]

February 24, 2001

How sad is it that it made my day to be called a "more clueful former Kinkoid" on a thread at Fucked Company's message boards? I need a hobby, but oh well. As another poster wrote, "years of therapy can't keep ex-kinkoids from spending huge amounts of time dissecting the company's past and current problems." So true... so true. [3:51 pm in girl meets web]

February 25, 2001

heh heh. Rogers, that self-link is more than forgiven, by this observer at least: the Bush Clock is absolutely wonderful. Only way it could be better is if the "days" value were a lot smaller. [3:56 pm in found links]

February 26, 2001

Before, I hadn't set up the Macquarium because I didn't have a hacksaw blade or a drill. Now I know a boy with a basement workshop and a growing fondness for chisels and power sanders, so that's not an issue, but I don't have a place to put an aquarium in my apartment, whose dimensions are akin to that of a generously-sized shoebox. Every square inch of counter, shelf, or table space is occupied. I'll have to fix that, though. I was at Petco yesterday buying the He-Man sized box of scoopable litter for my pair of regrettably-not-toilet-trained felines, and all the pretty fishies were mighty tempting. Bettas and angelfish and gourami, oh my. Maybe one of those side-suckers too, those are neat. Some tiny snails... yeah. [1:09 pm in girl meets web]

ROEvBUSH.com keeps an eye on "the Bush administration's assault on reproductive rights issues". Brought to you by Planned Parenthood. I've donated some money and included a snarky message to the President; have you? [2:54 pm in political]

Thinking about a projectlet of sorts, and as usual when I come up with a new idea, it's completely beyond my capabilities. So I turn to you, Constant Reader: how to make PHP play nicely with ImageMagick? Or, is there an alternative mechanism through which one could take a whole bunch of images and string them together into a GIF animation programmatically? (Which puts gd out of the running... damn Unisys all to hell and back.) And I mean seriously programmatic---we're talking set up a cron job and take a month-long cigarette break. There's some user-contributed notes in the PHP manual about using ImageMagick, but I'm open to either more comprehensive docs (okay, tutorials) or to other suggestions. [9:48 pm in girl meets web]

February 27, 2001

The fact that I clicked through to the Conan O'Brien topic in Pamie's "Crushes" forum has absolutely nothing to do with any swooning crush on my part on Mr. O'Brien. 'Cause I don't have one. No I don't. Stop looking at me like that... Anyway, this is so funny, and so perfect, I had to share: "oh how i love conan. i'd climb that man." Exactly! ... I mean, you know, if you like that sort of thing. [2:10 pm in found links]

Gah. I didn't know that last month's announcement by Amazon that it would lay off 15% of its workforce included the closing of a thousand-employee distribution center just south of Atlanta. Apparently, no one's told the state Democratic Party, either. [4:31 pm in tech/biz]

March 1, 2001

I get the best spam.... read full entry [11:22 am in journal abstracts]

I will always think of Ralph Steadman as the only guy who could possibly have done illustrative justice to Hunter S. Thompson's paranoid and drug-addled Vegas adventures, but he's done lots of other stuff too. Herewith, the website to prove it. Don't miss the family page---"Her name is Microsoft and she is my black sheep. She doesn't like gates much because they stop her from getting at my Broccoli. She downloads every hour and keeps the orchard well fertilized." [11:45 am in found links]

Dinner last night with a group from the office at West 24. One of my companions said, "At James Carville's restaurant? Of course there will be sweet tea." But when I asked the waiter, he said, "No, our tea is unsweetened. You've got to remember, Carville is only one of four principals. The rest of them are from New York." sigh sigh. Hope springs eternal, though: someone else at the table suggested I visit the Florida Avenue Grill, promising that my efforts would be richly rewarded with excellent sweet tea. [1:04 pm in girl meets web]

and then it occurred to me: "i've got no game." [4:55 pm in girl meets web]

Julian has a new site. At least I think it's new---I haven't seen it before and it's dated today---but for all I know it's a CGI date script that's there to fool me into thinking I happened to stop by on the day he redesigned. In any case, it's quite well-done, I think, and looking at his archive of old sites makes me realize how much time has gone by... Julian, do you watch your referer logs, or are you over all that these days? I miss you. [6:24 pm in found links]

March 2, 2001

the thing is, once the legend's been constructed around you, you can't just say "it's over". not even when you have every right in the world to do so. you can't say "it's over"---you can only say "i won't play anymore"---and when you take your ball and go home, the game will find a way to keep going without you. Only now you're not around to defend yourself against the playground catcalls. [2:38 pm in girl meets web]

I found out a few days ago that David Gray is touring, and coming to D.C.'s Constitution Hall in May. Hopped over to Ticketmaster's site to find that the "best available" seats came with a warning: "view may be limited or obstructed". Meaning "fixin' to sell out". So I paid a visit to the website of Front Row USA and sent off an email request inquiring about non-crappy tickets for the show. Got an autoresponder saying they'd get back in touch right away and then---surprise---they never did. Had to call them on the phone (gasp!) to be told they didn't have anything. How hard can it be to send out a form email that says "Sorry, we can't help you"? So yeah, three days later, Ticketmaster seems to indicate that even the blind seats are only available in singles, and I'm seeing ticket prices of up to five hundred twenty-five dollars each elsewhere on the net... gack. However! The nice people at ASC Ticket Co.were able to hook me up with not-too-pricey second-row seats, even if they are way the hell off to the right. Moral(s) of the story: good deals can only be had by shopping around---sooner is better---making just one inquiry is asking to be screwed---and if you are smart, you'll avoid Front Row USA like the plague if there's an event you really want to go to. Side note: ASC has a pair of one-in-front-of-the-other orchestra seats they tried to unload on me for 30 bucks each, which is cheaper than you could get 'em from Ticketbastard... wonder how much they'd want for either of those seats sold by itself? I was tempted for a moment, but you know, it's nice to sit next to your date when you've got one. [4:25 pm in girl meets web]

Recurring thought of the week: my life would be complete if I could be---just once---standing in the middle of a great big dance floor as Moby's "Machete" comes over the sound system. So long as I was wearing a pair of really solid shoes... and no one got in my way. [7:44 pm in girl meets web]

March 3, 2001

The spoils of this weekend's shopping spree include a fast ethernet router and a toe-length boufy silver skirt with matching sash. I am either well-rounded or suffering a personality schism. [6:33 pm in girl meets web]

March 5, 2001

What I Learned On Saturday Night: upon being presented with half a dozen bra-clad ladies and being asked to scream for their favorite, a room packed with five hundred lesbians will roar for the big boobies with every bit as much enthusiasm as a teeming, hairy crowd of straight guys would. Except they'll smell better doing it. [11:08 am in girl meets web]

From Pultizer Prize-winning editorial cartoonist Mike Luckovich of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, a very sweet tribute to Dale Earnhardt. [11:33 am in found links]

Spotted today a copy of the last print issue of George. Snagged it because I always liked the magazine quite a bit, and was saddened (though not surprised) to hear of its demise. When I took it to the store's counter, the clerk pointed at the big photo of John F. Kennedy Jr. on its cover and asked, "Did you like him?" "Well, I liked the magazine," I said. She replied: "I liked him. He visited my country, South Korea. That was my first time knowing he was John F Kennedy's son. I watched him on the TV. I thought he was so handsome." I smiled and said, "Yes, he is." And then corrected myself: "...was." I left feeling glad to know that there are people who remember JFK Jr. for his life, and not his death. [3:19 pm in girl meets web]

March 6, 2001

How To Be "Well-Read" In No Time Flat, Assuming You Have No Job, No Life, Endless Patience, And A Buttload Of No-Doz. I'll just stick to the Modern Library's Best 100 Novels (in English, 20th century), thankyouverymuch. [12:04 pm in found links/dead trees]

Doing my morning surf of MetaFilter, I came across this thread, which is centered around a story found in the online version of the Marietta (Ga.) Daily Journal. And suddenly I felt really, *really* old: my first real job was with the MDJ; it involved exacto knives and Veloxes and pica sticks and proportional scales and pans of hot glue, and a lightning-fast 286 machine that was my first experience with Microsoft Windows... When did they get a website? Yeah, I'm feelin' old. Positively antique. D'oh. [1:52 pm in found links]

... i got roped into this how again? oh yeah, i asked for it. heh. think 31337 thoughts. [6:23 pm in girl meets web]

March 7, 2001

Got an email this morning from a person who first complimented me left and right on the coolness of my website, and then took me to task for the slowness of its loading. She will be upset with me for the latest addition here at sapphireblue.com, namely those pictures over there at the right, but I hope everyone else will enjoy them. Ever since the launch of this design, all the dead space created by the no-longer-stretchy new layout was grating on my nerves. Plus: I like to take pictures, and I like to show them off. So combine those things with a fierce philosophical stand regarding my right to make my own website as bloated and as Fat Elvis as I want, and what you've got is... more stuff on the front page! Sorry, Kim, but all your bandwidth are belong to me. [3:03 pm in girl meets web]

"Consult your physician before using Deer Antler Velvet™." I can't see why; there is no cure for chronic gullibility. [5:50 pm in found links]

A fishing expedition at #blogirc---"so what i *must* know, is who just happens to have a site launch of some kind planned for next week"---got a bite on the first cast. It's *all* about knowing where the good holes are. *No*, I'm not going to tell you---more fish for me that way :) [10:37 pm in girl meets web]

March 8, 2001

Neale looked deep into my eyes, and said huskily, "Sapphire - I can upload you in a matter of minutes... or hours... depending on your desired throughput." And I knew I had to have him.... read full entry [12:15 am in journal abstracts]

What do you do when you can't make it to SXSW? Send your monkey, of course. (my own monkey had a prior engagement, unfortunately.) [12:35 am in found links]

March 9, 2001

So I got my new router all set up and functional, even after the debacle with the lights on the Mac's port not working, causing me to troubleshoot at great length a problem that didn't actually exist. However, I'm left in the dark by the discovery that a post from yesterday evening didn't go through---can find a way to blame that on the router somehow, or am I going to have to go troubleshoot mystery bugs in my home-rolled CMS too? [12:32 pm in girl meets web]

It all comes back to me now: Thanksgiving breakfast of beef jerky, Boston peanuts, and half-flat fountain Pepsi, at Crazy Ed's Travel Stop of Hardeeville, South Carolina. You have to wonder how Nancy Drew ever got anything accomplished before the time of such glorious investigative aids as InterstateWizard.com. [2:46 pm in found links]

March 11, 2001

meta-meta-history! start here and try not to get too lost in the infinite loop of self-referentiality. blast from the past number 361 in a series of... well, god only knows. [8:45 pm in found links]

A polite request for the nice folks at Kozmo: how about a way to add a tip for the delivery guy to my total purchase price? If I had cash, I could go buy some milk at the shady little store on the corner myself. (I will save the rant about their being out of whole and my having to settle for skim for some other time.) [11:11 pm in girl meets web]

March 12, 2001

ctrl-c, ctrl-v: It all leaves me at a bit of a loss. But also a little bit ... lonely? Because I can't help but wonder how long---when, if---it will be before I'm home enough here to have established these sorts of connections. The kind you didn't know were there and couldn't see coming. The kind that only come from being in one place for a good many years. [12:09 am in girl meets web]

It's two L's instead of one, I don't run the pro-choice ring, my birthday isn't until September, and they slightly messed up my link, but the nice reporter condensed some of my rambling into a readable quote, and that's what's really important. [1:34 am in found links]

Having recently explored the joys of geek fetishism at this site, I can't resist linking to this Salon story detailing the lusty potential of my other favorite form of intellectual autoeroticism: reading. "All he would have to whisper is 'Let me read this to you,' and I would shudder and be his." mmhmm. rowr... mmhmm. [4:43 pm in found links]

D'oh! php.net has redesigned, and in doing so, lost those neato DHTML popup menus and search boxes and things they used to have. A moment of silence, for the passing of one of the only known examples of DHTML That Doesn't Suck And Actually Makes The Site It's On More Usable. (ymmv, of course.) [5:29 pm in found links]

php.weblogs.com. promising. [6:10 pm in found links]

PHP4 RPMs. (Yes, I'm on a kick; yes, I'm using my website to note the good stuff I find. I can do that!) [6:15 pm in found links]

"How do I install Mysql + Apache + Mod_ssl + PHP4 ?" [6:17 pm in found links]

March 13, 2001

Okay. Snickering Enya references are doable---I've snickered at her myself. Being scared by the 25 Years page is okay too; it's supposed to be scary (and so, for that matter, was Insomnia). But do not---do not!---dis my man Updike. "Literary has-been"? There's a can of whoopass with the names of the boys who scribble those snarky Blog You reviews all over it, and that can contains one hundred percent pure John Updike, no additives, no preservatives. [9:37 am in found links]

I said "synecdoche" today, and he was awful impressed with me. But I can't help but wonder: if I had said it with just a smidge more confidence, might I have gotten a "good girl" for my efforts? Dare to dream. Next time maybe. [4:42 pm in girl meets web]

still more esoteric tech references: home page of FOP, "the world's first print formatter driven by XSL formatting objects", and the Formatting Objects chapter of the XSL Candidate Recommendation. [5:53 pm in found links]

March 14, 2001

Happiness is stepping onto a six-car Metro train, bleary-eyed from oversleeping and frustrated at having run to catch the previous train except missing it anyway, and finding your favorite person in all the world sitting in the seat nearest the doors. [12:31 pm in girl meets web]

XSL Formatting Objects. Chapter 15 of The XML Bible by Elliotte Rusty Harold. [5:57 pm in found links]

March 15, 2001

The funnest part of going out drinking with your co-workers is leaving early so you're in tip-top shape for watching them all straggle in looking rumpled and haggard the next morning. [10:20 am in girl meets web]

Is it just me, or does Strom Thurmond, in the photo accompanying this New York Times article about his declining health, look an awful lot like Gary Oldman's Mason Verger? Just wondering. (Photo swiped from The Dark Side of Gary Oldman.) [11:53 am in found links]

It is completely the story of my life, to be unable to get in touch with some man, and to become completely neurotic over it, and then to finally make contact with said elusive man only to be told that everything is just fine. Well, sometimes it is and sometimes it isn't---but always, persistence pays off. [3:26 pm in girl meets web]

Satellite radio might just be the kick in the ass that radio needs for the 21st century. Maybe. (do I credit the Fametracker forums, where I found this link, or Don, who pointed out XM Radio's headquarters in northeastern DC the other day? some of both, maybe.) [5:48 pm in found links]

March 16, 2001

"Split-Up(TM), the first and only software to help you deal with divorce." I laughed, I cried, I joined a convent. [2:44 pm in found links]

I wish I had found this site sooner. Called "The MARTA Chronicles", I gather it was once upon a time a compendium of wacky real-life stories from the MARTA system---that would be Metro Atlanta Rapid Transit Authority for you tourists. But the author of this site says "I don't ride Marta much anymore, therefore I've nothing much to say" ... oh, my kingdom for an "archives" link. Such a good site idea; there's no better setting than mass transit for kooky stories of random encounters with urban humanity. Of course, when I try to sort through my memory for kooky MARTA tales of my own, all I can remember is the sweaty, airless desperation those trains during the '96 Olympics. A dubious honor, to be able to truthfully say that you've been subject to full-body gropes from the citizens of more nations than you could possibly count. [3:49 pm in found links]

me? abuse the net send command? never. [5:59 pm in girl meets web]

Rest in peace, Madalyn Murray O'Hair. [6:39 pm in found links]

I love Google as much as the next guy, but I still have used AltaVista a lot too. Why? Because it doesn't ignore the quotes you put around phrases to indicate that you want all of those words, in that order, in your search results. Or at least it didn't. But now it's all Googlified, and does. I really do hate that. Am I missing something? [10:18 pm in girl meets web]

March 17, 2001

That "homosexual agenda" chestnut surely does get tiresome. Vermont's conservative House of Representatives passes a bill that would outlaw gay marriage. Fortunately, the state Senate is Democrat-controlled, so the bill is likely to die there. [1:51 pm in found links]

Not only did I swipe this link from Memepool, but it's got the feel of something that everyone I know has either already seen or will have already seen inside the day. Still, it tickled my funny bone: Income Tax Return for Recently Laid-Off Dotcom Employees with No Job Prospects. [2:53 pm in found links]

March 19, 2001

Tomas writes to offer tips on bending Google to my will: "to search for exact phrases in google, put periods between the words. if it ignores a common word in the phrase, put a plus in front of it. annoying to type all the extra characters, but it works. example, "as much as the next guy" in old altavistian translates to +as.much.+as.the.next.guy in googlese. Or at least that's the only way I've found to do it." I'm pleased to report that Google returns 2,270 results on a search for pain.+in.my.ass. [9:51 am in girl meets web]

March 20, 2001

On the Metro train this morning, as I stood clinging to a rail, pissy that the train had been delayed enough that I watched three go by in the opposite direction before mine showed up packed to the gills, I heard someone talking about Atlanta behind me. So I turned around---the better to snoop with, my dear. It turned out they were discussing Atlanta's famous car-centricity, and looking over glossy, full-color fliers headed "Put the purple line on the fast track!" The fliers included a map of one proposal for a Purple Line expansion to the DC Metrorail system, going from the Red Line at Grosvenor to the Orange Line at New Carrollton, intersecting with the Green Line at its northern end and with the eastern portion of the Red Line at or near Silver Spring. I almost asked them if I could have a flier for myself, but chickened out (it would have meant talking to strangers, after all). Even so, I've been thinking about this all day: I know that they've been discussing the Purple Line forever, and that that is only one suggestion among many for improvements of local traffic and transit, but I wonder if there's any hope for any plan of such grand scope. In Atlanta, NIMBYism ran rampant where the MARTA was concerned; several suburban counties including several professional centers of the metro region didn't want MARTA because they were afraid it would bring "undesirables" in from downtown (no mention was made of the high concentration of undesirables in Cobb or Gwinnett themselves). And in reponse to a drive to put MARTA rail between transit-hungry southern DeKalb County and Emory University further north to Lindbergh Station, the people of southern DeKalb ate it up, but the militant homeowners of the North Druid Hills and Emory areas came out against it in droves, busting out yard signs and neighborhood meetings and protests and websites and closed-mindedness. And, predictably, the South DeKalb proposal went nowhere. These same people who didn't want to have to look at MARTA while while drinking mint juleps from their verandahs are the same ones who talk about how miserable getting around Atlanta is. How hard is it to make the connection? It seems obvious, but the sad truth is this: everyone loves mass transit unless it's too close to where they live. And it's that attitude that keeps us all locked in our cars, crawling down the freeway in second gear, breathing smog and cursing the slowpokes in front of us, blaming everyone and anyone else for the traffic misery when we ought to be blaming ourselves. [4:34 pm in girl meets web]

Paul writes to share his urban traffic woes (it seems suburb-to-suburb mass transit is just as non-existent in Chicago as in Atlanta and DC) and to point out a related link that's making the rounds this week: an arresting visual representation of the difference between the space taken up by forty people in cars, and forty people on a bus, and forty people on foot. [5:39 pm in found links]

It's true, you know: Brian really does have a tendency to find himself surrounded by hot babes. Piles of them, in fact. It must be really tough to be him. [10:39 pm in girl meets web]

March 21, 2001

As we began the walk back to my car, he paused in front of a little antique shop across the street from the market, and said, "Would you mind...?" I grinned (either to myself or out loud, depending on how well I managed to hide it) and told him I'd noticed the store on the way in and had assumed we'd end up stopping there. So we went in.... read full entry [12:25 am in journal abstracts]

There's nothing more random than sitting at your cube trying to go through bug reports and being distracted by an animated conversation on the other side of the room among the Java guys about the joys of clipping coupons from the Sunday paper. "I never clip a coupon for something I wouldn't buy anyway, though. If I do that, the coupon people win." [12:57 pm in girl meets web]

hmmm. type "heart turned dark" into AltaVista, and look what's the very first result. Metablogging minions of Satan---I knew it!! [5:43 pm in found links]

Somebody remind me how much I love the bugfixing phase of a project. ...no, you're going to have to be more convincing than that. [6:44 pm in girl meets web]

March 22, 2001

quit with the secret crush silliness. just. quit. don't you know you're a pawn of the Man? have some dignity! [3:52 pm in girl meets web]

I am awed at the devotion and dedication of people who can muster up a flamewar on the topic of John Irving. [4:48 pm in found links/dead trees]

March 23, 2001

This Never Happened in Jacksonville, Part 483 in a Series: you're walking across the street to buy some chocolate-covered peanuts and you notice an unusual profusion of cops hanging out shooting the shit with one another. By the time you make it out of the store with snackie in hand, the cops have moved into gridlock formation, parking their cars perpendicular to the flow of traffic along the intersections of New York Ave, and they're standing around blowing whistles at cars who dare twitch in defiance of their authority. When not tweeting, the cops are paying strict attention to the seeming nothing in the northeastern distance. So everyone on the street stops and looks in that direction too. One man breaks out a mini camcorder and films the stopped cars, the dead street. A helicopter does a lazy loop against the grey sky. After fifteen minutes of tweeting, gawking-at-nothing, and increasingly irate laying-on-of-horns, a buzzing roaring cacophony slowly swells. Necks crane, and then the presidential motorcade cruises by. Sixteen or so motorcycle police. Half a dozen police cruisers. Another half dozen black Ford SUVs and panel vans. A couple of ambulances for good measure. Two or three long black Cadillac limousines with little gold-fringed flags---the official seal, the stars-and-stripes---whipping in the breeze. The gathered crowd watches silently. No one waves (although at least one observer briefly considers a Heil Hitler salute). The man with the camcorder does a slow pivot, following the motorcade with his electronic eye. As soon as the procession is finally past, vanished in the direction of the White House two blocks west, the police cruisers and motorcyles are moved out of the streets, traffic begins to move again, and the pedestrians disperse. And the interruptive gap in the day is closed with no fanfare; within minutes all is back to normal. ...it makes you wonder if this is what happened along this street every single time Bill Clinton developed one of his famed Big Mac attacks. [1:50 pm in girl meets web]

A timely groaner serves as the headline for today's New York Post: "MAD DOW DISEASE", blares the cover. Aie. [2:54 pm in found links]

Taxation without represenation revisited. I go back and forth on the question of whether Congressional votes or no federal income tax sounds more appealing. On one hand, giving DC a couple of Senators and a Representative is more or less guaranteed to mean three new Democratic votes in Congress---but on the other hand, no federal income tax is no federal income tax. And it's interesting to ponder the socioeconomic impact of making one little city immune to the IRS's greed---would people move into the District in droves? Would property values skyrocket? Would local taxes do the same? Would lower-income residents of the District be displaced or otherwise suffer from the change? All very interesting, but unlikely to ever be more than academic questions... no chance in hell of any of this coming to pass. [3:53 pm in found links]

March 26, 2001

I suffered a fit of small-scale wanderlust on Saturday and so we went to Old Town Alexandria. Found ourselves at the Torpedo Factory, a big waterfront hive of artists' studios and galleries. I marveled at the near-photographic luminosity of Diane Tesler's paintings, and was pleasantly disturbed by the Gorey-esque darkness of Rosemary Feit Covey's wood engravings. I was also, unexpectedly, beset with a fierce resurgence of my own artistic yearnings---I used to have some talent for drawing, you see. Was quite the fishbowl artistic prodigy all through grade school, but beating out Trung Nguyen to win the art award given at my eighth-grade graduation ceremony was both the high point and the end of my artistic schooling; I haven't even tried to draw anything since summer of 98. I miss having a talent, something creative from which to take a bit of joy. (oh, this? no, it doesn't count. it feels too much like work.) And so I'm thinking verrrry seriously about signing up for a weekend class at The Art League, some of whose classes are held at the Torpedo Factory. It wouldn't be me against a classroom full of slacker kids there just to fulfill an elective requirement any longer, and therefore my days of being the best in the bunch by default are long past, but maybe I could be not-too-bad. And anyway, it'd be fun. Maybe maybe maybe... should decide soon, though; the spring quarter begins next week. [3:22 pm in girl meets web]

March 28, 2001

so I was checking out the list of sites that use Slashcode and came across webcrush.com except it doesn't seem to be resolving (granitecanyon... hmph). In a fit of curiosity to discover what the site was, I first googled for a cache (no luck) and then on the term webcrush. There were only 43 hits, but two seemed to be declarations of crushage for Bryan and Maura---I had to laugh. Not because they are not crushable, as that is clearly not the case, but just because it's funny. Anyway, hey guy, you, webcrush.com guy, you don't wanna sell that domain do you? Whatever you were doing with it, it isn't as cool as what I would do with it. [1:16 pm in found links]

RCS, RCS, RCS! i am so in the wrong business, to be as acronym-stupid as I am. [2:19 pm in tech/biz/found links]

Mac OS X means that I can have MySQL on my Mac. Mostly I've let the OS X fever sort of wash over me, but this spin on it gets my attention. The possibilities! Wonder if having all that Unix under the hood means I could avoid having to buy DAVE for the Mac to play nice with my PC? I bet it does... so much to tinker with, so little time. [2:40 pm in tech/biz]

Maryland poised to be the 11th state to outlaw discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation. This on the heels of last week's approval of anti-racial profiling legislation in the state. I am just tickled... pink, of course. [4:29 pm in political]

March 29, 2001

When I was much younger, I used to count the days between cries; the numbers never grew very large. Sometimes I would arrive at grade school the morning after a hard night at home with eyes puffy, soft and swollen, and sometimes I would be asked by other children if I were part Asian.... I arrived at the office this morning wearing my first set of Chinese-eyes in a long time. By the time I left half an hour later, my tote bag bulging with not only the remains of the Kleenex I'd bought on the way in but also my slinky, my earphones, my color-wheel mousepad, the puffy eyes were worse. Now I am counting again, incrementing, this time, in fractions-of-hours. [7:13 pm in girl meets web]

March 31, 2001

Thank you to all who wrote with words of consolation and support... I've been feeling like I need all I can get. On the brighter side, I think I'm down to only two emotional meltdowns a day now. Go me! [1:33 pm in girl meets web]

If you live in or near Washington, D.C., and if you want your MP3s, you might be interested in attending a million geek march in support of Napster on Tuesday morning. There's also a forum being held at the Ronald Reagan building on Monday night (not at Catholic University, which apparently got cold feet after having been announced as the original location for the forum), where Sean Fanning and Chuck D will rouse the rabble in anticipation of the next day's march to the Capitol. I'll be there, digital camera in hand---it's not often you get a chance to witness a clash between Capitol Hill politicos and anarcho-geeks hellbent on unfettered access to free music. [1:47 pm in tech/biz/political]

Angela writes to say that one needs a G4 to run OSX, and so I can forget about that---not about to drop that kind of money for a secondary machine. (insert embittered comment about "even if I had a steady paycheck" here.) Of potential interest to those of you who are equipped with the latest and greatest Apple hardware: Herb wrote to say "To share files with a windows box, you can use SAMBA on OSX. Apple changed the file structure of BSD quite a bit, it takes a bit of getting used to. I found these two sites quite good for workaround info... http://www.stepwise.com/, http://www.osxzone.com/." [1:57 pm in tech/biz]

Ah ha! Alan writes: "Not that I doubt Angela, but acording to this a G3 (even a beige g3!) should be fine. Wait... I guess that means I DO doubt Angela..." [4:32 pm in tech/biz]