Another Decker

The Internet and Me

2005-12-01T04:39:31Z

I've been having a difficult time lately maintaining enthusiasm for the Internet. Just off the top of my head, the earth-shatteringly interesting things I've read lately include a lot of bullshit about new versions of the Macintosh OS - Which I couldn't care less about if I tried.

Endless debate over whether or not XHTML has failed to revolutionize the Internet, was doomed from the beginning by being backwards compatible, and what content type it should be served as - Though all that could be very interesting and enlightening, I just can't be bothered any longer.

I can't figure out what happened to the fire that used to be lit under my ass that had me sitting in front of this monitor hammering out inane (well, some of them weren't totally inane) web sites with absolutely no point whatsoever.

Case in point: contemptible.org and my own private playground in the subdirectory smack/ (will look like total shit in Internet Explorer).

I can no longer muster the interest required to do anything with these sites. Contemptible.org itself is, in my own self-assured opinion, a masterpiece in code which took me months to get working (mostly) the way I wanted, but it just looks like ass. I had a layout created for it, all set to be deployed - it was clean; it was pretty; I had really accomplished something with it - But at the 11th hour, the plug was pulled: the final word being that it just didn't fit the content of the site. Can't argue with that.

So thus contemptible.org gets its, I want to say third, incomplete redesign in a row, still having received no new content in three years. After the completion of each redesign it had been my plan to begin grooming the heap of content I have waiting to be published.

I could never work as a designer for a living.

As for my site, the design is basically there - Or at least the layout element girl I've created looks good, but I'm at a complete loss for what to do with my installation of WordPress and always feel just a little bit silly when I go to make a blog post (as I do even now). Although I'm not writing in loving detail about how many bowel movements my (nonexistant) cat has had today or bitching about some other jerk's weblog and the nasty things I heard from some asshole blogger friend of mine he said about me behind my back, I feel that by spending my time on an entry I've sunken to the level of people like them.

Now that I think about it, why am I bothering with this again? I'll just go back to daydreaming about my car and reading about fiberglass fabrication.

Book Report

2005-10-22T00:17:28Z

Today my girlfriend's son, Sonny, came to me and told me that he's been assigned to do a book report on Fahrenheit 451. While the novel is one of my favourites, and I think that the ideas and concepts Bradbury presents in his masterpiece are important enough that everyone should be exposed to them, I just know that Sonny will absolutely hate it.

You see, Sonny is not a person I would describe as being an avid reader: His favourite entertainments are playing video games, watching sports and listening to "gangsta" rap. He's a bright young man, but exercising his mind isn't something he likes to do for fun. He'll never understand how the government distracts the people from what its doing by allowing them to drug themselves into stupors, participate in and spectate upon violent sports and constantly pumping television programming that appeals to the worst part of human nature into their homes.

And most importantly, because books don't mean much to him, because he's never read something beautiful, compelling, enlightening, - something that stirred an emotional response in him the entire point of the book will be totally lost on him! Terrible, it really bothers me that there's absolutely nothing I can do to really make the book hit home for him. But maybe he'll surprise me.

What the hell?

2005-10-20T23:26:54Z

I was just beginning to get to work, I had queued a few good songs to listen to in WinAmp, gotten settled with a drink, lit a cigarette and opened Photoshop. I figured I could save myself a second or so opening the file I need to work on by choosing it from the Open | Recent Files dialog, but the files referenced by the dialog were totally unfamiliar and I decided to see what the other users had been up to.

"mona.jpg" turned out to be a picture of the Mona Lisa with make-up airbrushed on it - I don't see the merit, but whatever keeps them amused, I suppose. The oddly-named "joshlougreganus.jpg," however, ended up being something much less innocuous:

I've taken the liberty of applying a gaussian blur to the woman's anus and spread vagina. For those that don't get the signifigance of the filename, the images are: some jerk kid named Josh that my daughter knows, Lou Diamond Phillips, Greg Brady and well, apparently the focus of the last photo is the woman's anus, though another part of the woman's anatomy is much more prominent.

It seems that Anjle didn't have the opportunity to upload her collage before I deleted it. That's a shame.

Down the Memory Hole

2005-09-25T00:16:56Z

Everything's fine, and now back to infrequent posts about trivial things.

Months later... AOL

2005-09-18T07:01:31Z

Here's where I explain to my largely indifferent audience that I haven't had phone or dedicated Internet service for the last few months, but because that's a terribly boring thing to write about in and of itself, I won't.

As a matter of fact, of all the things that have happened in the time since my last post here, the only thing I can be bothered to write about is the fact that I'm on a dial-up connection - and not even a decent one, AOL.

I know, how can anyone with the least bit of computing or Internet savvy use AOL? It's very difficult. I don't like it on my computer, but I'm forced to deal with it - See, my computer is the de facto household computer. One member of the household in particular, whose wants and needs I would be unwise to accommodate, certainly in a matter as trivial as whether or not we continue to waste ~$25 monthly on AOL, has not yet been able to wean herself from Steve Case's teat.

Yes, my dear girlfriend has to play her trivia games. So I've been forced to stay my itching finger from clicking uninstall button I'm so strongly drawn to. Not only that, but the Other Users in the household regularly update the AOL software when AOL's crack team of technicians ratify a new memory-leaking, resource-intensive, clusterfuck feature because they need to a background tile on their IM windows because the people they talk to with them apparently aren't stimulating enough without such nonsense.

It's not as though I can just downgrade either, as good as I am at finding things on the Internet, I simply cannot turn up an earlier, less-flawed version of the AOL software anywhere - I'm stuck having to worry that someone will have AOL scan my computer for "problems" and then allow it to try and "fix" them. I'm terrified.

But here I am, using it. AOL complains once in a while that I've configured my firewall not to let some of it's non-critical processes access the Internet and suggests that I should sign off or restart my computer so that maybe it can make it harder for me to multitask and cause my bottleneck to shrink further by reporting to the hive mind in Dulles, VA. I don't think so.

In closing, why is it that AOL, which is aggressively targeted at people who don't know shit about computers or the internet, the same people who generally own computers that are incredibly obsolete and barely able to run even their very operating system (budget Dells with WinXP in particular) creates such astonishingly bloated software and then claims that it's not only better for their computers to have it, but faster?

My Neighbors

2005-05-20T01:26:03Z

This is good stuff. I ran a reverse IP lookup of contemptible.org's IP address and found that my site shares a server with 74 other sites. The most entertaining of the lot follow.

http://the-iranian-directory.com/ - Very obnoxious, has John Lennon's Imagine quoted on the front page along with links titled "US Charged with War Crimes" and "CIA and Saddam Memories."

http://sportsbetodds.com/ - Almost as obnoxious as the iranian directory, and very well-designed.

http://shystered.info/ - Looks like a defunct install of wordpress, interesting domain name though.

http://scversillee.com/ - Possibly the website of a fairly talented artist, though it's hard to really tell because said server is being brought to its knees by something.

http://scotchlinecountrymarket.com/ - A country market in Perth, Ontario offering 100% Angus beef.

http://www.omegaquest.com/ - Love Mates 4-Ever (follow Photos link)

I'll follow up on this later, my girlfriend wants to use the computer and as I may have mentioned the server my site and all of these are hosted on is running like shit at the moment.

This Page Is Valid XHTML 1.0 Strict!

2005-05-11T13:39:26Z

No, not this page. Definitely not this page. Quite simply, I don't care enough about web standards to pay for a livejournal account just so I can write valid mark-up. Rather that refers to my installation of phpDig - which I chose to use as the search engine at contemptible.org.

It's a damned good search engine and even spiders by itself (though I can't seem to make it spider the entire site all by itself) and on the surface it seems to render at least its form elements in xhtml. But it isn't xhtml compliant by any stretch. Even when using the option to use a custom search page, which I have to admit was fairly easy to set up after I sorted out the results array, phpDig was spitting out FONT tags, non–self-closing BR's and marked-up input fields with attribute values enclosed in single quotes - I don't know if that's technically invalid, but it was irritating.

So I hacked, and I hacked and I hacked some more, hunting things down in the PHP that drives the search engine - by the way, the code is ugly, arranged poorly and isn't even written in a consistent style (of course the guy that coded it would probably say the same about mine). I added LABELs for all the INPUT elements, wrapped those elements in FIELDSETs, played with the CSS to make it all look reasonably decent and then I noticed a rendering problem.

I then proceeded to try validating the page in question, no big deal, right? I've taken special care to make sure everything's correct. Wrong. There were a few minor issues that weren't a big deal to correct, like outputting a UL with no LI children, but the ones that really stymied me were:

Line 40, column 49: document type does not allow element "input" here; missing one of "p", "h1", "h2", "h3", "h4", "h5", "h6", "div", "pre", "address", "fieldset", "ins", "del" start-tag
 < input type="hidden" name="path" value="" />
The mentioned element is not allowed to appear in the context in which you've placed it; the other mentioned elements are the only ones that are both allowed there and can contain the element mentioned. This might mean that you need a containing element, or possibly that you've forgotten to close a previous element.

One possible cause for this message is that you have attempted to put a block-level element (such as "< p>" or "< table>") inside an inline element (such as "< a>", "< span>", or "< font>").

The damned things were wrapped in FIELDSETs! I took special care to do it! What followed were hours of looking at the code, copying, pasting, swearing and worrying my girlfriend - She gets worked up when I'm having a code frenzy.

Turns out, and listen up if you care about this sort of thing (I know, if you didn't, you'd have lost interest far before this point), that you can't wrap the FORM tag inside the block-level element that contains your INPUTs. I have never once seen this documented anywhere, and still have to fix the template for the rest of the site because it suffers from the same exact issue.

Rare Baseball Card

2005-05-11T03:28:07Z

I got this rare rookie card through one of my contacts, let's see who can identify this player, known by some as the "Brown Bomber," now more commonly known as "that girl with the miniskirt":

Sub-optimal Uptime

2005-05-07T09:53:12Z

It's been a very long time since I've seen the dreaded BSoD, but all the same, there are some very obvious and clear problems with my computer.

Lately, however, it seems like it won't run stably for more than ten hours without needing a reboot (I know, that's already better than average, but there was a time when I wouldn't have to reboot my machine for at least a week). It becomes apparent that it's reboot time when page display in Firefox goes completely to shit, thankfully, that's as impaired as the system becomes. I always have the opportunity to save what I'm doing and reboot willingly (as opposed to being rudely interrupted with an hour plus invested in coding something by the BSoD).

None of that's really too disturbing, but about half the time when I'm rebooting, my Intel P3 BIOS splash screen is riddled with flickering, horizontal white lines and windows won't boot - that disturbs me a little. Below is, of course, an exact representation.

\--------------\
 \            -------
  \___--    _____\
      \     \                 ---------                                --------------
     -----   \                                    -----------
        \    ------   \----      \----\  \--------------\  \------------\   \-----\
         \     \       \    \     \    \  \         --------------       \   \  ---------
   ---    \     \       \    --------   \  \____     _____\  \    --------\   \     \
           \ --------    \      \   \    \  ------   \        \    -------------------------------
            \     \       \       \  \    \      \   --------- \     _______\   \     \
   ---  ---------  \       \  \     \_\    \      \    \        \    \       -------------
         -----      ----\   \   \     -----------------------------   \------\    \     \------\
         \       ----    \   \    \   -------\      \    \        \      --------  \ -----      \
          \_______________\   \___| \_________\      \____\  --------__________\    \____________\
                   ------------
                           --            --------------
         ----------

I suspect that the chief reason for it's aberrant behaviour lately can be attributed to the fact that it's pretty old as computers go: I've probably had it for around five years now - but not only that, the hard disk hasn't been reformatted and the OS freshly reinstalled... ever.

So what then? Well, one thing that hasn't changed in the last several years since I put this thing together: I'm still lazy - certainly too lazy to back up all my crap, reformat the hard drive and freshly install windows. So I'm going to chew up my registry. I'm sure I've got all kinds of goodies in there from five years of spyware and legitimate programs I've installed and uninstalled.

If you don't hear from me for a while, it's because I fucked up Windows "trimming the fat" and I'm attempting to hack it back in to working order.

It's even fairly accurate

2005-05-06T21:50:04Z

I think i'd have gotten a higher rating on the punk dimension if I liked Blink 182 or The Hives.

Your Taste in Music:

Ska: Highest Influence

Punk: High Influence

90's Alternative: Medium Influence

Classic Rock: Medium Influence

Adult Alternative: Low Influence

Alternative Rock: Low Influence

Dance: Low Influence

Gangsta Rap: Low Influence

Heavy Metal: Low Influence

Old School Hip Hop: Low Influence

How's Your Taste in Music?

Observations

2005-05-03T05:10:09Z

It's 12:40. I won't be sleeping tonight, an attempt to get back on a more normal daytime schedule. Will mention tomorrow whether or not it works out.

That's all relatively inconsequential though, I'm here to record what I've just witnessed. Backstory: about 20 minutes ago, I went out to the kitchen to pour myself a glass of Coke and noticed my girlfriend's daughter, Angel, cooking.

Angel's cooking is like a middle-school science fair project designed to demonstrate that organic materials are carbon-based: Read, the results of both are invariably burnt beyond recognition and palatability.

She offered me some of the white rice she was stirring, but I had to decline, citing the fact that I have no taste for rice in general, and certainly not for plain rice. She assured me then that she would be seasoning it. I asked her what she planned to use, genuinely curious and was met with "Well, seasonings. I haven't decided yet."

If I was at all undecided up until that point, I was certainly polarized after hearing that. I told her that I wasn't interested in her "cooking by experimentation" and bid her a good night.

By itself, that was unusual, but not particularly noteworthy. Were it not for what I saw just a few minutes ago, when I went for a glass of milk, I wouldn't be here boring you now.

On the kitchen counter near the stove I saw the following: table salt; our pepper grinder; chili powder; a jar of some kind of green Goya brand condiment labeled "recaito" that my girlfriend cooks with; a bottle of Ortega taco sauce; seasoned salt and finally, in utter defiance of what may have been intentionally selected spices and seasonings to follow a mexican theme: McCormick brand montreal steak seasoning.

Figure that.

The Other User

2005-04-30T19:18:40Z

So I sit down to get in a little work on contemptible.org and open Winamp - I skip around for a minute before deciding on something to listen to and turn it up, but there's a problem: It sounds like shit.

I open up the volume control and fool with the settings, figuring something's over-amplified and giving me distortion - nope. So I play with the volume and bass settings on the speakers themselves, but it's not that either. Everything continues to sound tinny with awful hissing.

Then it dawned on me, Sonny, my girlfriend's son, was using my computer to listen to mp3's - I made the mistake of showing him where Winamp's equalizer is located a few weeks ago. So I open the EQ and sure enough, it looks like this (pardon my ASCII representation}

     ||||  ||||  ||||  |  |  |  |
     ||||  ||||  ||||  |  |  ||||
     |  |  |  |  |  |  ||||  ||||
     |  |  |  |  |  |  ||||  |  |
     |__|__|__|__|__|__|__|__|__|
     |  |  |  |  |  |  |  |  |  |
     |  |  |  |  |  |  |  |  |  |
     |  |  |  ||||  ||||  |  |  |
     |  ||||  ||||  ||||  ||||  |
     |  ||||  |  |  |  |  ||||  |

Needless to say, it was a mess, and has caused a cascade distraction* that has kept me from getting anything done yet.

*In that I not only had to re-adjust the equalizer, but then stopped and made a poor visualization of the equalizer.

Incredible

2005-04-27T07:08:48Z

No other part of the contemptible.org re-structuring has given me this much trouble. I just finished with the submitted writing page, which contains 13 individual entries, each with a value for the title of the piece, the author's name, e-mail address, website URL and website title. Additionally, I have a written paragraph of "rating" text and a number representing the rating assigned to it.

To illustrate:

'writing' => array(
         0 => array(
                  'title' => 'Reflections',
                  'author' => 'Shawn Kielian',
                  'authorEMail' => 'Netheril11@aol.com',
                  'authorUrl' => 'null',
                  'authorUrlTitle' => 'null',
                  'theWriting' => '< p>You say that we...',
                  'rating' => '2',
                  'ratingText' => '< p>Clearly Shawn...'),

Looping the entries out wasn't a big deal, starting with the first entry and going to the last, but they needed to be displayed in reverse order with an offset and a value per page. I did something similar on the poems by alpha page, but sorting them in reverse order just eluded me completely.

I also made a number of stupid mistakes in the process which I spent entirely too long correcting - the number one recurring stupid mistake being... declaring variables that need to be used in some logic AFTER the point in the script where the logic is. I think that all this coding is beginning to get to me.

I won't even get in to the double fiasco. Why does PHP round decimal numbers down when converting them to integers when I don't want it to?

Anyway, the damn thing's working now, but it's ugly as sin. I can't stand to deal with CSS right now - I know I'll subconciously find a way for it to take me two hours to set some margins and adjust spacing between elements if I get going on that.

My night's work: http://www.contemptible.org/features/submitted_writing/

P.S. I hope this episode of the X-Files doesn't turn out to be one of those episodes. A woman just gave birth to a baby with a prehensile tail, the doctor holding it takes a look at it and says: "Oh lord, not another one." :\

Heard from the other room

2005-04-26T20:32:46Z

Just a moment ago, I was cleaning the bathroom and heard from the living room where my daughters are passed out, sick, on the television, delivered by a woman with an edge to her voice: "You'll never get out of this building missy! It's sealed up as tight as your little young butt!"

I just wanted to share.

Keyboard Woes

2005-04-13T15:35:27Z

Last night I left the house for a few hours to go on a double date with my girlfriend, her brother and his wife and while I was gone strangeasanjles committed a heinous, beastly, diabolical act - she spilled water on my keyboard! Yes, that's right! Inputdevicicide! The most despicable act of the information age.

The murder weapon was a glass of water, the victim, a Logitech Elite keyboard. The victim was interred with the utmost respect in the trash can last night after being pronounced unusable.

So what now? Well, I'm using a Belkin F8E223 keyboard that we just had lying around, which, while capable, is just crappy. I wanted to use the big Fellowes (old IBM style) keyboard we also had lying around but couldn't find an adapter for the DIN plug - Which is not to mention the fact that it picked up some mildew out in the garage. I'm not sure, but I think that Microsoft's Healthy Computing Guide makes some mention of not using a mildewed keyboard but it's outside the scope of this post to verify that myself.

All that said, I still need a new keyboard. I've been wanting a backlit keyboard for a while now, but most of the ones out there are cheap and thus probably shitty ("You get what you pay for" is one of my maxims) - but I ran across a nice one after some searching: the Saitek Eclipse. Now look at that and tell me that's not one sexy keyboard. I paid more than I really care to admit for it and needless to say, I'll throttle the person that kills this one.

Go ahead, you can fawn over my hardware, it's okay.

Star Trek - 24th century sexism

2005-04-08T18:12:40Z

So here I am, watching Star Trek: The Next Generation, the episode is "The Child" first episode of the second season, where the series really began to come in to its own (season one is just like the original series, Riker being the main character and Kirk-surrogate) and become a truly great show.

The episode begins with Counselor Troi being impregnated by some unknown force, which we see in the teaser before the title sequence as a ball of light that enters the ship, from space, floats through the corridors and goes in to Councilor Troi's quarters. It then slips in to the blanket in Troi's bed, where she is sleeping and can be seen as a lump traveling up the blanket. Suddenly, Troi gasps and sits upright, clearly jarred! - cut to opening sequence.

Now this is just one more in the ongoing tradition of Star Trek episodes focusing around something sexual with Counselor Troi. She's always having sex with or flirting with someone - occasional episodes have her in some kind of psychic torment, so casting her as the damsel in distress rather than an interstellar easy lay. The character of Troi is really just a collection of stereotypes.

Anyway, the exchange in the episode that prompted me to write here was one around the Enterprise's conference room with all the senior staff in attendance. After Dr. Pulaski informs the crew that the pregnancy seems to be as normal as a pregnancy can be under the circumstances, Worf insists that Troi have an abortion, because the entity could potentially pose a threat to the ship. Data argues that terminating the pregnancy would prevent them from studying the child and Riker probes for more information as to whether or not there is any risk to Troi's health, the undercurrent of his comment that if so, an abortion should be considered.

I was very amused by all this, the creators of the series using the episode as a vehicle to discuss abortion. The message is coming.

Troi, who has been listening to all this distractedly, herself focused primarily on the beating heart of the child she is carrying interjects: "I am going to have this child no matter what!"* Everyone sits looking a little stunned for a moment before Captain Picard, until just then, silent, speaks: "Very well. There will be no further discussion on this topic."*

The episode goes on, presenting several other subtexts and eventually presents Troi as the obsessed, irrational mother - thus bringing us full-circle on her being little more than a bunch of stereotypes.

Clearly the woman's right to choose is very important in the 24th century. Just thought I'd share, because I'm always amused when shows that I like try to lead me around by the nose.

*I've paraphrased the actual dialogue because I'm not going through the hassle of looking up the script, regardless of the fact that I know it's out there to be found.

Blocked

2005-04-04T15:17:15Z

I don't seem to be able to write anymore here of late. Regardless of what I type out, I look back at it and have this itch to delete it and rephrase the thought. I'm fighting that urge hard right now, because this that I'm typing presently is already rubbish and I haven't even really gotten started.

It's as though I've lost my former knack for putting my thoughts in to words. Though I know from experience that (having the exact problem now as I write this) I have the ability to express myself almost effortlessly, I can't seem to tap in to it. It occurs to me that I'm probably just being overly critical and need to perhaps employ the time-honoured method of drafts and revisions to polish things up but it just used to flow almost unbidden.

I need to do one of two things to cure myself, I suspect. Either just make myself write until I work it out or take a step back and do something else. After years of living with myself, I've come to notice a few things: My mind has to be occupied constantly by something, and what I occupy myself with runs cyclically. Let's see if I can write this out intelligibly, For a few months I might be stuck on creating, with ideas occurring to me as if by serendipity that demand to be written or sketched out.

I may try to explore these ideas by writing a few paragraph or a few chapters of a story, sitting down and fooling with photoshop for a while or opening my text editor to code. The problem is that eventually the spark dies out and the ideas cease to really arouse my intellect and finishing the project I started is sheer drudgery. Oftentimes I even hate the partially-finished product, finding it to be clumsily composed, poorly written or just generally shitty.

Usually I just drop it and do something else, something passive, preferably. I'll pick up a book or get in to playing a video game - maybe even just start reading on the internet and just experience someone else's artistic vision for a while until that urge to create strikes me again.

The problem is that although I believe myself to be burned out on my current project, the game I'm creating, I still have this massive urge to work on it. But when I sit down with it I procrastinate (like I'm doing now) before starting, and even after I have finally gotten myself started, I can't lock myself in to the acute focus I have when I'm working well, I'll stop to look up the spelling of something and become utterly distracted for hours reading random bullshit on the internet or allow myself to become distracted by my surroundings.

In the last few weeks, most of what I've gotten accomplished have been code-based optimizations, streamlining the way the scripting crunches the hundreds of lines of text, interprets user input, returns markup to the browser and generally making the logical processes of the game better. While these are good things that I have done well, it amounts to fuck all in the bigger picture of progressing the story.

I just need to figure out what to do to satisfy my mind because it's really beginning to get to me. I can't think straight, I'm not satisfied when I go to bed at night (I'm not even having to drag myself away from what I'm occupied with when it comes time for me to go to sleep!) and I hate it.

I've gone ahead and uploaded what I have of the game, still available at http://www.contemptible.org/smack/game_mk_ii/

P.S. One of Livejournal's spellcheck recommendations for "photoshop" is "photos-hop."

Awesome Girl II

2005-04-02T16:13:43Z

I was bored enough today to sit and take countless online quizzes. Below is the best one.

Awesome Girl II
You scored 86 looks, 70 personality, 54 politics, and 76 sex drive!

You don't seem to either know about or care about politics, but you are
beautiful and a good person (so it seems), and you seem to have a high
sex drive. You're probably a great wife or girlfriend, and you know how
to make sure that the ones you love are happy. You have a wonderful
life ahead of you, make sure you live it to the fullest, and keep being
the person that you seem to be.

My test tracked 4 variables How you compared to other people your age and gender:

You scored higher than 94% on Appearance
You scored higher than 40% on Personality
You scored higher than 88% on Beliefs
You scored higher than 68% on Sexuality

Link: The What Kind of Girl are You Test written by ramonaaronperez on Ok Cupid

I don't know how I feel about having scored as having better looks than personality. Am I really that kind of girl!?

Rotten Teeth

2005-03-27T08:22:15Z

How I wish I had been conditioned at a young age to brush and floss regularly. I know some people that are as resistant to not being able to brush their teeth twice a day as they are to going a week without bathing.

Psychological conditioning is a powerful thing. We all know about Pavlov's dogs and do ourselves condition our animals to behave in ways that we prefer to their out-of-the-box behaviour. We even do this to our children.

I must admit that the self-grooming conditioning never really took. I go weeks before I shave, sometimes a day or two past the point when I really should have showered and never, ever brush my teeth regularly. It has come to my understanding that this is utterly reprehensible behaviour - but it's a little late to change now. (can't teach an old dog new tricks)

As a result, I have teeth that are rotten through-and-through. I can only chew comfortably on one side of my mouth. I can't bear to chew sugary sweets. I have to drink soda through a straw in order to direct it to the back of my mouth, past my rotten teeth. Once in a great while I spit out a small fragment of tooth that has broken loose while chewing. My rear-most molars have disintegrated down nearly to the gum-line, like broken Roman columns.

Complimenting the constant oral problems I have to deal with, I also have occasional bouts of tooth pain, which most people cite as the hardest type of pain to deal with - for me, it's bad, but I've lived through far worse. Having dealt with worse pain is little comfort, however, when once every two months or so, my abscess swells up and begins to make my head feel like it's going to crack open.

This is not your garden-variety abscess. When swollen to full mass, it occupies a quarter of the roof of my mouth and seemingly has a canal running through the very roots of my teeth that enable it to overflow in to the outside of my tooth-line. When I find myself so afflicted, I have no recourse but to push up in to the roof of my mouth with my tongue until the pocket of infection finally bursts through my gums and in to my mouth. Painful, but effective.

I write this because I just recently went through the experience, with one marked side-effect. While pressing up against the roof of my mouth, I must have generated a little too much pressure, thus irritating several other cavities and setting them to hurting. Having no panacea technique for alleviating the pain in them, I have had to resort to eating Naproxen and Excedrin tablets which have completely blown my concentration.

Unable to write (the phase of development I find myself on in the game requires me to write coherently about things that I am sick and tired of writing about), I have instead written this, when I initially set out to write about how none of my music is any good to listen to with a headache.

Game Progress

2005-03-24T15:30:05Z

I've progressed to the point of finishing the first room of the game and have gotten several other things extraneous to the advancement of the game-play finished. I have to say that it's shaping up ~~beautifully~~ (well, not beautifully, but I've already tried to remedy that (1) (2)) nicely.

I should be ready to spam the few people I have that are willing to do some testing fairly soon, from the limited correspondence I've had with them individually, they seem like a good group; including a writer that has written several of her own games using Inform, and a man and woman that have played Interactive Fiction before and have already given me very illuminating input - The man felt a bit of a disconnect with the PC when it was revealed that she is a female and his input was very analytical. Whereas the woman felt a disconnect when the PC became violent and was generally discouraged by how bleak the setting was and how futile the actions of the PC seemed. Last, but not least, my own dear girlfriend has also promised to continue to give me her view of things - She's probably the most important tester because she has absolutely no experience whatsoever with this kind of game and if I can draw her in and make the interface intuitive enough for her to use and enjoy, I've really got something.

I also have two other people interested in the project. One was very excited about the idea of deploying Interactive Fiction through the internet and asked to see my source code. He's interested in writing a PHP-based Inform interpreter, which is completely outside the scope of my project and may not even be possible. The other person I'm not certain about, his response was in a word... clipped, though he did ask to receive further e-mail about the game without any kind of prompting.

In short, I'm feeling good about the project, have some good people ready to pick it to pieces and am going to go and get some work done on it now.

The game is available for your pleasure at http://www.contemptible.org/smack/game_mk_ii/

Apache/1.3.19 running...

2005-03-22T14:40:51Z

No work today, so I'm going to get some work done here in the morning and go grocery shopping in the afternoon. I'd have been working by now, had Kazaa not screwed up Firefox. I'm convinced that there's some sort of conflict there - that or Kazaa Lite is just especially bad about leaking memory (which I already know, really).

I had to reboot a few times to get back to a clean slate and noticed that it's taking at least a minute for my computer to go through it's song and dance as it loads Windows, which is pretty bad.

In other news, someone just called here from the parent company of Howard Johnson's for my girlfriend's ex-husband. The only problem with being at home during the day is these calls from telemarketers. I told him in no uncertain terms that Jesus (hispanic pronunciation) doesn't live here and to my amusement, Dimitri, the telemarketer, switched gears deftly and told me how he doubted he'd be able to contact Jesus, so he'd offer me the promotional package.

He proceeded to tell me about discounts for hotel stays, car rentals and something else - but the "clincher" was a hundred dollar gift certificate or some such thing for going down to their office to see an hour and a half promotion. I'd already been polite enough to the man not to interrupt him in the middle of his spiel, and frankly, he was interrupting me so I told him "Thank you very much, but I'm working right now." Not to be deterred so easily, he asked me "But surely, sir, a hundred dollars is worth an hour and a half of your time?" I wasn't going to allow myself to be railroaded though, and replied "Actually, as I said, I'm in the middle of working right now, and frankly, an hour and a half of my time is worth more than a hundred dollars right now." This seemed to take him aback, "Oh wow, are you a lawyer or something?" To which I replied, "As a matter of fact, I am. I'm sorry, but I don't stay in hotels or rent cars very often, I'm sure that you have several other people to call. I don't want to keep you from your livelihood."

It was a rout, I tell you, the telemarketer was actually apologetic! "Well alright, sir, I'm sorry to bother you, but would you mind taking down my name and number in case you have any use for our services?" Because I find such tenacity admirable, I pretended to take down his name and number before wishing him a good day and more luck with his other calls.

I'm going to try the lawyer defense on my girlfriend's stepmother from Alabama who calls here every week or so to talk the ear off of whomever is stupid enough not to think up an excuse to hand the phone off to someone else next. "Oh, hello, Debbie, I'm sorry, but I'm a lawyer now and I'm on the clock!" Before she can ask how I've gone from a warehouse worker to a legal eagle, I'll give the phone to my girlfriend who will just have to think of something.

Another day

2005-03-20T08:29:02Z

Things aren't looking particularly good for accomplishing much of anything today. In a few hours of playing in Photoshop, I did manage to whip up a fairly acceptable bauble though - I'll actually demonstrate said bauble at a later time when it is working as intended.

In the interim, I have a headache and a lot of conceptual re-working to do for the game to accomplish what I want, which involves tearing up and re-laying the skeletal structure of the markup it generates. It's a nasty place to be, but the plunge will have to be taken.

In other news, I'm reading "The Zen of CSS Design" by Dave Shea and Molly E. Holzschlag. While the book is full of merit, I have to say that I'm a little nonplussed with it. Frankly, I was expecting it to be a little different. So far I have read chapters that touch briefly on colour theroy, designing within a grid and a brief treatise on typography... and really, it's just not anything I didn't already know.

Most of what I've read that's provoked me to remember to come back later has been in the notes in the margins of the book that refer to yet other expensive books or websites maintained by people with more expertise on a given subject than the authors.

I do have to admit to having drawn some inspiration from the book, however. I doubt that the desire to create my bauble would have occurred to me had I not blown $40 USD on the book. So that's something anyway.

Argy Bargy

2005-03-14T08:42:47Z

A brief post on music follows: I realize that what I'm about to write will cement the fact that I am a hopeless geek, but last night while "working" (I distracted myself looking up Oi bands on google in the middle of coding) I ended up reading Wikipedia's entry on Oi, and decided I'd check out some of the original Oi bands listed there.

So I downloaded some music and listened to a few songs, nothing really made a huge impression on me other than the stuff by Cock Sparrer - It's amazing how fresh music recorded in the late 70's seems to me. See, I was weaned on West Coast post-punk, groups like NOFX, Rancid, Operation Ivy, The Dwarves and The Vandals - Hell, I've even got a few of Green Day's early albums when they were still (primarily) punk. But this '77 Oi took me right back to where it all began for me with Johnny Rotten slurring in a cockney accent about anarchy in the UK.

Even though my girlfriend says punks don't have long hair and don't wear mustaches (written tongue-in-cheek), I can definitely get behind lyrics like these from "Tough Guys":

...He don't wear armani suits or shirts pressed nice and clean
He wears doctor martens boots and dirty Levi jeans
Your friends all think he's gross and your parents hate his guts
And once he gave you a dose but the tablets cleared it up
They all say he's no good, but he's misunderstood, and remember

Even tough guys need someone some times...

This musical breath of fresh air has stimulated me -- I've done better work in the last two nights than I have in weeks, It's been like hearing punk for the first time.

Spring Cleaning

2005-03-11T22:21:24Z

My girlfriend has gotten a wild hair up her ass about spring cleaning this weekend, which apparently is how she would like to spend the weekend - the house will reek of bleach, disinfectants and air fresheners instead of dog and children with questionable hygiene. I think that I've managed to get out of my part in the cleaning, having agreed to wash the dog.

I think that I'll be doing my own spring cleaning. This week, the kids filled up my hard drive (I had 2 gigabytes of free space the last time I cleaned a few months ago). The drive being full or close to full doesn't really bother me because I haven't done anything requiring massive amounts of free space in a while and don't plan to, but the mp3's their inexplicable musical tastes have led them to download are beginning to irritate me.

I listen to WinAmp in shuffle most of the time, and rather than fool with playlists that have to be saved every time I download something new, I just load everything that's in the shared files directory of my filesharing software (1,192 entires presently). This worked beautifully for a while, but more and more recently when I skip around to find something to listen to WinAmp randomly selects something either Sonny or Rosy have downloaded, leading at times to a solid minute of pressing the "next track" button.

If I'm actually trying to work on something it completely blows my concentration and it takes me another five minutes to remember what I was doing before messing with WinAmp. By that time I have to skip around for another minute to find something else to listen to besides "Knuck if you Buck." To understand my consternation you must take in to account the jar I feel when an Operation Ivy (good, old west coast punk) song ends and "Shake it like a Salt Shaker" by Twista (gangsta rap) starts playing; Or the equally disconcerting combination of Slick Rick (old-school rap) and emo crap like Tilly and the Wall.

I can't work like this.

New Boots (and Boot Zen)

2005-03-09T19:15:28Z

Off and on for a few months I've been wanting a new pair of boots -- I do already have two pairs: one a pair of dedicated work boots with a permanent bad smell and horribly abused leather, the others are... substandard: The leather is cheap, the soles slip and slide over wet floors (leaving me very susceptible to busting my ass) and they're broken in poorly (a steal for five bucks at the thrift store, but still not that great of a boot).

I began to do some internet research to find The Perfect Boot, I thought briefly of Docs, but was hesitant about buying a pair because frankly, they've become too trendy (I don't want poser kids coming up to me to compliment me on my boots and to tell me about how their parents are going to buy them a pair from Hot Topic ("A store where pseudo-punks/goths go buy their identity.") soon) and I already get enough stupid questions about my facial piercings (which are also becoming trendy).

My research consisted largely of looking at skinhead websites (people under the impression that all skinheads are neo-Nazis should read the skinhead FAQ) because most of them, like myself, wear boots exclusively, and because no one else really writes about their boots on the internet (except for me, apparently).

Doc Martens were taken out of the running pretty quickly, for several skins reported big problems with their quality of late. Other boot-makers noted during the course of my research included Wesco (pricey), Demonia (psuedo-bondage boots, complete with superfluous zippers, buckles and shiny baubles -- a boot brand my girlfriend's daughter would wear), American work-boot makers like Caterpillar (I'm bored with American-style 8-eyelet work boots) and the brand I finally settled on, Grinders.

Grinders is a company based in London that manufactures primarily boots which are modeled after the British military's Ranger boot, available with leather uppers ranging from 8-20 eyelets with oil/acid/slip resistant soles and steel toes. Convinced that I had found the Perfect Boot, I ordered a 14 eyelet pair.

Five days of anticipation and (borderline) obsessive checking of the FedEx tracking page for my order followed. I don't think I've been as excited about getting something save for one Christmas over a decade ago when I got a Super Nintendo. Then they finally showed up and after being initially smitten with them, I discovered a big problem.

They wouldn't shine, weren't absorbing the show grease I put on them the way leather should -- Something was very wrong with my boots. I concluded eventually that the leather was impregnated with something to make it more like a vinyl boot, so that the customers would only have to wipe it clean with a wet rag to get it looking decent, but that is completely unacceptable for me and damn it, I want shiny boots for short-wearing weather.

So I began to strip the boots with alcohol and a rag -- apparently my room smells horrible after I've been at it for a few hours and few dare to venture in when the air is thick with evaporated rubbing alcohol (my girlfriend walks in holding her nose whenever she needs something, gets it and retreats hastily, hell, even the dog walked in, make a few choking noises and walked right back out once). This solitude allows me to fully enjoy Boot Zen, it's very meditative, sitting and working on the leather for a few hours at a time. My girlfriend, on the other hand has just about had it with me and my boots, so it's a good thing I'm almost done stripping the leather.

I think I'll go and finish now, actually, so the fumes can clear out before she gets home.