Throb

Noony

Fire!

Elaine and I have been poking around the amazingly silly National Symbols Program web site after finding out that there's a new controversy around Woodsy Owl's new post-diet persona.

Look what she found:

September

Funny how change happens. Life is a stack of mostly anti-climactic revolutions: Things that start out as a good way to spend a moment turn into lifestyles, and most of these eventually get squeezed out just as easily as they came in. It's the end of summer and change is in the air. You wake up one morning, super refreshed, take a deep breath and find yourself pulling out that song you almost finished writing, the painting that needs some love, the phone number of an old friend. What I'm not sure about is whether this is a learned behavior or some natural response to circadian cycles. Does one too many depressing winters teach you to do a hard reset every fall? Or are we hard-coded this way?

I'm playing again.

Throbbing

My back is torturing with me, randomly twisting me from the inside. Some days I can't stand up straight. Other times live electrical wires fire down my leg while I try to sleep. My stance has become crooked and stooped. One of my legs is too short. One side doesn't stretch enough. I have a ridge in my spine. I've been possessed by a demon, but I'll be conjuring a serious exorcism very soon. It is time. I will rain the vengance of hell upon this bastard mofo and return triumphant. By whatever means necessary. Bad day becoming good.

I will stop being such a self-pitying, self-obsessed, non-blogging nerf-herder when that happens. You have my word. I'm really in a damn good mood, and it's time that the system got the message.

Dangerous Lurkers!

We will kick their asses by luring them into our friends' cul-de-sacs!

We will surround them with our slingshots and force them to take a stand while we pummel them with mean observations about their poor breeding and short penises! We will go YouTubing down a river of the blood of their precious hamsters and curse them for the pain in our stomachs from laughing at their twisted doom!

We will make friends with their mothers to learn their nasty childhood secrets for humorous additions to our blogs! Their girlfriends will cry out while we make sex with them (the girlfriends)! HaHA!

Overheard

My brother and I spent an hour or so yesterday at an outside cafe (ok, bar) listening to (ok, participating in) a fairly loud argument about who was cooler: Robert Conrad (star of The Wild Wild West) or William Shatner (star of Star Trek), and who would kick the other's ass. It turns out that Robert Conrad did most of his own stunts and made up for his altitudinal limitations by rigorously studying pugilism, while Shatner is just the world's coolest has-been. Verdict: Conrad, sort of.

My Dream Livingroom

Currently my entire entertainment system is based around a five year old G4 and an amp/tuner that I found on a dumpster. For the most part everything works great. I don't have a TV, but I have far fewer boxes, remotes and other garbage that most people have to deal with. I have one remote that manages to do everything I need with about 10 buttons. Pumping digital music through an old tube amp gives it a warm sound I like. Rhapsody + a cd player + iTunes + a bunch of couple of fat internal harddrives I scavanged a few years back totally does the trick.

That said, I'm due for an upgrade, here's the plan:

• Replace aging Mac with a new Mac mini. I'm going to wait until one comes out built on an Intel DualCore chip, like the screaming iMac and MacBook Pro that came out yesterday. I'm hoping Apple has the foresight to include a remote (very likely), otherwise I'll stick with my third party USB/IR solution.

• Get an enormous external harddrive. There's a kind that perfectly sits under the Mac mini and provides additional firewire and USB ports to boot.

• Shell out for a 30" Apple Cinema Display or similar wide format flatscreen monitor. This is long overdue.

• External digital TV box. This may not be necessary, I think that we're only a year or two away from a passable TV on the web solution, but I might not be able to wait. Also will mean I'll have to get some kind of lame expensive cable package that includes a bunch of mindnumbing channels I will hate. Then I'll have to figure out some kind of software DVR solution, don't really know what's out there right now. It's pretty critical that this thing can do FM as well, I'm a morning/weekend NPR addict and going to a website just isn't as satisfying as pressing a big shiny metal button.

• Good looking/sounding replacement for amp. This might just mean building a box for some of the guts of my current system. I think my current tuner/amplifier sounds fine, but the (pink) lights behind the tuner window are starting to go dark and the veneered finish is, well, finished. I really don't want one of those black rectangles that everybody has, maybe I can find something from the 70's.

• Some kind of angled swivel table for my Wacom tablet. I need to be able to swing this out when I want to draw, and tuck it away when I don't. What would be really cool is if somebody would come out with a wireless flatscreen monitor/drawing tablet with a blistering response time.

• All of the above in my Lear jet. And coke! Model/actress/librarians! A gay fashion advisor/masseuse/personal assistant! World peace! Non-corrupt government! Model/actress/librarians!

Frank Folupa

In a page about William James Sidis from a link in a recent post I found a little mystery about him: he used a pseudonym occasionally: Frank Folupa, and some people think it must have had some meaning to him. Here are the best of the anagrams I could find:

A FAR FOLK PUN
A PLANK OF FUR
A LARK OFF PUN
KLAN OAR PUFF

Clearly I figured that one out. This genius guy is overrated.

Perhaps of interest, I also discovered tonight that my first and last names can be rearranged to spell "UK REAR THROBS"... which is funny because of this: throb.co.uk.

I cain't quit you, blog.

ARMAGEDDON

GEORGE W BUSH AND HIS CRONIES HAVE BROUGHT THIS DESTRUCTION AND HORROR ON THE EARTH AND ITS PEOPLE BY IGNORING THE GUIDANCE SIGNALS OUR BETELGEUSEAN ANGEL OVERLORDS HAVE BEEN BEAMING INTO OUR HEADS VIA QUANTUM PARTICLES AND SATELLITE-BASED RADIO SIGNALS. I HAVE BEEN INSTRUCTED TO INFORM YOU THAT, BY ADVOCATING RECKLESS AND SHORTSIGHTED ENVIRONMENTAL AND SOCIAL POLICIES, OUR COMMANDER IN CHIEF HAS CAUSED A HERETOFORE UNIMAGINED LEVEL OF DISTURBANCE IN THE UTOPIAN AGENDA OUR BENEFICENT GUARDIANS HAVE DESIGNED AND HAVE BEEN MANAGING FOR US SINCE THEIR FIRST EARTH VISIT IN 3027 BCE. MORE HURRICANES AND EARTHQUAKES AND TSUNAMIS WILL WRECK UNPRECIDENTED HAVOC ON US IF WE DO NOT TUNE IN AND HEED THE MESSAGES FROM OUR FATHER SPECIES! YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED!!

*rolls eyes*

I used to imagine rolling my eyes back into my head and looking at my brain, a clockwork. I see the pipeworks, the in-tubes from the spine, the ears, the eyes. I see pumping processes, processing. There is a keyhole, through which I can see a mirror, an image of me looking at me seeing, upside down. I see microchips soldered to tiny green boards, minute gold mazes leading to buses. Grounding wires. Fans. There is a control room with oompaloompas watching lcds of rutting naked bodies, the faces of lovers and friends, interfaces, fractals. There are oozing puddles of blackness under the machines, and some of them, bubbling and spurting, grow fragile tendrils that flirt with the whirling cogs. A faint red mechanical pulsing is omnipresent. The sound of clicks, whirs and whistles. Heat. Unopened boxes.

Positive Stuff

The sun keeps coming up. Evolution and reproduction and family and tradition keep occuring. You are relatively happy. You are talented and sexyish and people like you. Enough. You have a good body compared to lots of somebody elses somewhere. You like cooler things than some people who brag about the things they like. Your horoscopes aren't helping. Neither is God. These things are probably stupid. You get along well with others. You Bring-Something-To-The-Table. You have taste, as evidenced by your stupendous relatively-new acquisition. You have less debt than the median. Your parents care about you, regardless of your stupid blog. You eat as many solids a day as you want to/can afford. Your job is more challenging than most peoples'. You aren't sure about the rules of grammar. You laugh at least once a day. You are more sane than the "You were never in the Navy!" guys. You can still do a decent enough job of making love, even after you take a break for a while after splitting up with some numbskull who couldn't recognize your potential and/or skillz. The right people want you to work for them, the wrong people don't. You are dedicated to something nobody else understands. You don't have many lice or crabs or the heebie-jeebies. Sometimes you have GOOD hair days. You can give one hell of a blow job or whatever you call the equivelent when performed on girls. You look good in good clothes. Everything is alive and connected and beautiful. You keep waking up in better shape than you were in the night before. Thank god that nasty rash/fungal infection hasn't reared its ugly head in a while. You love something or someone at least as much as yourself. Your arrogance is tempered. You read, you watch. It keeps getting better. You control your own destiny, and realize [verb] it more than most folks. World War III keeps sounding stupider and stupider. If - you are a fool, so is everyone else. If you are dying, so is everything. If you can't relate, you at least understand what I'm talking about. You are what you were meant to be. You are twitching, you respond. You are still alive. Write a song for christsake. A poem. A picture.

Really should be in bed right now

What the hell does "off the deep end" mean, anyway? Wouldn't "in the deep end" better convey mortal fear, insanity? "Off" only suggests missing the mark. Or am I missing something?

A murder of crows was circling us this evening, and left for better pastures.

Google has a mobile map service in their Labs section. Everyone should bookmark this on their phone. Save you lots of trouble.

I need to visit Eastern Oregon. What wonders might await me there? Native American history? Also more of Canada. I'm taking next week off. Bad timing, maybe.

I want to build a menu structure that extends the whole "left is more fundamental" metaphor/philosophy. The Mac OS menu structure has come a long way since its inception toward making the leftmost options those that represent the operating system stuff, followed, left to right, by menus which control the application you're using, the document you're working in and the thing you're working on in that document. I wonder if you could spring this whole thing outward, very literally like a tree, so that the energy of a person interacting in an information space could better conform to their intuitive use of the mouse. Flat dropdown menus will meet their end one day and I think I have an incrementally better model.

Vectors, baby. I finally got a chance to really explore the feature set of Photoshop CS 2 and I think the improvements Adobe has made might actually make the power of the application available to regular people. They've finally figured out how to make layers practical. They've added something to the feature-set they call Smart Objects, which are simply practical vector objects, bringing them firmly into this century, finally. I think we'll get to a point where the description of a thing, given a powerful enough client-side appllcation, will be a very small thing; whereas the thing itself could be almost limitless in complexity. Imagine combining the best of the stuff Google and Flickr have been doing with what Illustrator and Freehand and Halo have been flirting with lately and you'll know what I'm talking about.

I feel like I miss almost everyone I know. I'm parched. What kind of a Spring is that?