split|retina

I move back into my house tomorrow after a 5.5 week stint in the Hilton Garden Inn. So long and thanks for all the cookies! (Really. They were fresh baked daily around 6pm. I'd come to the hotel from work to find a varied assortment of chocolate chip, sugar, and peanut butter cookies longing for my grubby hands and eager lips. I'll miss you, my cookies.)

I received this fortune the other day. My immediate response was to call bullshit but I didn't like jumping to such an overly harsh and fatalistic position. So I considered the alternatives. The notional antithesis, "Look for misery and you will find it," is so obviously true, so blatantly and overtly part of life that it seems this once sickeningly optimistic fortune perhaps has more color and depth than I first suspected. Why would I go negative like that? In truth, I am an optimist, but perhaps that is just in truth and not in life. Heed the contrapositive for it will no forsake you!

And another splash screen is deprecated and logged to the archive. You can still see it here.

Ignore the Save Your Handlers!!! article. It works, but isn't as cool or as useful as it should be. Here is what I think is the proper method, though I don't know how I missed it the first time:

[UPDATED: Look at the article above, I was wrong. Or just behind the times.] I don't normally post programming stuff here. I didn't even have a category for it. But today I scoured the web for the answer to a simple JavaScript problem and found no satisfactory answers. So I solved it myself and I would like to share my solution with whomever might find this page. Here it is:

Throughout the centuries there have been many flooding myths, the most popular in the United States and with Judeo Christians in general is the Noah story. But the Akkadians before them drowned the world's numbers strictly for being too noisy. Here is the account that I experienced:

On 8/17 my house flooded due to a malfunctioning switch in my washing machine. I'm posting the pictures here. I'm living in a hotel for now and things are going well. Everyone is giving me plenty of support and the people working on putting everything back to normal are doing a good job. Thanks everyone.

This was just a quick jot I sent to a friend. But I thought others might like to hear it too, slightly reformatted.

This guy, Joseph Duncan, is a convicted sex offender and suspected murder, but had been keeping a blog on blogger.com. He also seems to have a private diary that is encrypted and it's being searched for. Chilling, but pretty incredible. It reminds me of In the Belly of the Beast. There are a few decent articles I was able to dig up about the details of his criminal history. If the blog is down for whatever reason just search for "Blogging the FifthNail" and there are lots of copies.

Some of the posts seem like the reality of Camus' The Stranger. He's a rare case indeed, but I think it is interesting what opportunities our society has given him to convey his emotions, to feel connected to the world. They are lonely and cold, but they're there. In time maybe these violent crimes won't happen as people become more connected through technology. Maybe now is the interim, the imperfect developmental period between extended family bands and a complete global social network that supersedes and does away with the idea of nations and ruling classes, the monopoly of force. Evolution takes millions of years, but the progress rate of the last century shows that maybe the peaceful future isn't as far away as it seems to be.

I had looked for quite some time for a liquor cabinet and wine rack that I liked but nothing pleased me for a reasonable price. So with the help of friends I set out to make my own. A total of twelve days was actually spent on this project, but it took over a year to complete.

The base unit was an unfinished prefab kit with doored cabinets top and bottom. It wasn't set up to be a liquor cabinet and I would need to fashion a wine glass rack for the top and something to hold wine bottles in the bottom.

Lorraine and I stained the wood with cheap all-in-one varnish that I picked out. Don't use that stuff. I then aged it one year to let the wood warp and discolor just to add some challenge to the project.

The wine glass rack was fairly straight forward. I simply cut, glued, and screwed some ½"x2½" birch (I think. Might be alder) and ½" square dowels (yes, dowels can be square. I looked it up) together and aligned them in the center. The wine bottle rack presented a more substantial problem. Originally I was going to make a criss-crossed rack, perhaps something like this, but that seemed to require too many cuts. Wandering around the hardware store, Josh helped me come up with the final design. We bought some of these , connecting pipe, and some pvc cement. With the purchased hardware and a couple bolts and wood screws I hacked together a sturdy wine rack.

Two coats of paint, some graphite for the sliding drawer, custom handles and I now have a liquor cabinet. Cheers!

Eric, Andy, Laura and I went camping July 8-10. I learned Puff the Magic Dragon on the guitar and we burned the metatron. We hiked four miles and it took us about one mile to do it. We pushed in corks, found the spices, set up three tents, used only one, put marshmallows in pancakes, and generally camped the f**k out of Dogwood. There are pictures of it.

When I want to meet new people my first thought is the Mall. Mall's are filled with wonderful people doing what they do in America, and where better to make a new friend than a consumer monument teaming with life? I mean, we're all consumers, right? I want someone who does what I do, who looks like me and smells like me. I hope they are wearing the same shirt I picked out this morning. Also, at the Mall, I can make observations on how I can fit in and be just like the other consumers in my area. Malls are truly wonderful social playgrounds and petri dishes of culture. School kids should spend a period at the Mall each day to learn how to be a part of American society.

So why not bring this experience to the web? Yub.com has done just that. Not only can you buy Star Wars: Attack of the Clones, you can see that Sarah from Brighton bought it too. She's single, takes long walks on the beach, and just loves to bake apple pie! Haven't you ever wished that there were friendster links floating above the heads of the other shoppers when you strolled the Mall? How easy would it be to point your Palm Pilot or celphone at them and see how you two are related *(We both love Nike!)?

Meet, Hang, Shop. But don't leave the house for christ's sake. Eye contact is the leading source of communication and intimacy. If you find yourself communing or being intimate, point your browser at WebMD immediately.

I swore to draw and I've drawn. Practice, practice. What I do is trace a picture (with tracing paper) and put the tracing aside. Then, from the original, I try to make a drawing of the original. When I feel the copy has reached a certain point I lay the tracing over it to see how accurate I was. This is helping me immensely with eyeing proportions, which is in essence the hardest thing about learning to draw initially. Later comes the fancy stuff, like expressions and technique and hair.

I found a wonderful program today called SketchBook Pro by Alias. It is mindnumbingly simple, but in a good way. It is for drawing. I didn't find myself caught up in the tricks and tools I use in Photoshop. Instead of masking something I had to let it bleed then erase. Liberating to be sure. Liberated perhaps.

My first doodle with SketchBook.

When sailing at sea the ocean can rise to meet you or it works your opposite and slaps you when you come around. The lapping little sounds keeps one awake and lulls hypnotic. But then comes the valleys, water coiling back just to move forward and strike. Size matters. The yarded hull towering barely shimmers. The frothy brine crystalizes at its peaks. On a plate glass window the dingy still lifts and bobs.

But the concern is change. Twilight hour. Magical is the time where we are half awake, half asleep, where lapping is just less than slapping. Any analogy will do. Awareness, that is key.

I've written much about change, and really everything is change. Fluctuations. Vibration. Music. Bach modulated between keys with mini resolutions, building tension and excitement for that final resolve. And our lives modulate like a Bach piece, or the sea. But Bach didn't slap as hard. Ask Hemingway. Ask any salty dog.

I don't really have anything to say here. I wrote this in hopes of inspiring myself in other concentrations. Big changes often pass us by. I didn't want to miss this one.

There are lots of important things in life. Some of them need a soundtrack while others ARE the soundtrack. If you find the local silence unbearable, or if you begin to feel that your delicate wisps of auditory cotton candy need some rougher crystaline edges, read on! From time to time I'll post what I've been listening to and give some pointers on where to find other good stuff (that I don't listen to).

First up, and maybe most importantly, Salon.com's Audiofile has daily downloads of excellent artists that are often enjoyable. Good reviews too.

What I'm listening to (supplied by the eclectic, Not-so-emo Cimino):

Burn Your Bridges + I bet you didn't think they made punk like this anymore. Along the lines of Angry Samoans, Black Flag, and the Germs. It just doesn't get any better.

Plastiq Phantom + Mellow, sometimes melodic, digital ingenuity and brilliance. Not for everyone, but it certainly won't offend your mom.

Sam Phillips + Yeah, I like women singing about sad things. Especially when they do it remarkably well and with so much style I simply swoon. Wonderful, wonderful, and most wonderful.