20021030
Does anyone know who made this image?
I've been planning a tattoo for a long, long time. I've wanted one since before I was 12 years old. I even tried to give myself one late one night working security with a ballpoint pen, some string and a safety pin. It hurt and it lasted a month.
Over the years I've drawn up many tattoos, some of which were quite nice. Unfortunately I've lost all those images. If I find any in my backups I'll let you know. I've slowly been coming to the understanding of what I want leaving a mark on me.
Right now it's the following 'icons' or ideas:
- The lemniscate - the symbol for infinity. The idea has alway prevailed in my mind of having this on my skin.
- Binary - I like technology an awful lot. Binary data is the basis for all modern computing.
- A butterfly - While some will scoff at getting a tattoo that connects me to the woman I love ("What if you divorce?!" --- "Well, if I am concerned with divorce, then I shouldn't be getting married."), and especially something our western society judges as feminine, I would like to have this.
There may be more that will end up in my tattoo, but for now I am seeking out the artist that made the picture above. I think he/she would do an amazing job of designing something for me with my input. If know of them, please let me know. Thanks!
20021029
So I had this nice little blog entry about the violent differences between the US and Canada...it was headlined by this strip:
It was a thing of beauty, I swear to gawd.
The browser crashed, so the world has lost that potentially world-shattering brilliance. Back to mundanity.
I have no idea why people write such bad software. Now before you berate me, saying "You have no idea how complicated it is to program big software, asshead", really I do. I've written a number of complicated things. My chosen language is Perl and regexp's give me a woody. I laugh at things like:
perl -pe '$_ = " $_ "; tr/ \t/ /s; $_ = substr($_,1,-1)'
The thing is, I've seen what good programming practices can do. I've seen and participated in bug testing and quality assurance. I know that just a few days worth of serious testing can find all the serious major bugs in a piece of software and then that info can be passed onto the developers who can endeavour to make the software work correctly. A lot of good software is out there for the simple fact that they bug tested thoroughly.
Enter games...no game is done until 2-12 months after it is released to the general public. It's a known fact. If you talk to serious gamers about how you just started playing a new game, the first question out of their mouth is, "Have you downloaded the patch?".
The point I'm trying to get at is that with the software rushing like mad from the fingers of the programmers straight to the shelves and bypassing any decent testing, we are all getting screwed. The software we need to run our businesses is quite simply awful. The CEOs of the firms creating it don't know or care because the people will be forced to use it no matter what in order to keep their staff working.
I'm annoyed that my browser crashed. I'm angry that there's nothing I can do about it but switch to another buggy software product.
20021028
But that's a rare thing, because mostly the internet bores the hell out of me. So many bland people thinking they are deep by the pseudo-goth poetry they write (oh god...I have to quote this: "A collection of gothic poetry inspired by the various gothic websites I have visited". It saddens me that websites with bad gothic poetry inspire more bad gothic poetry.
The internet is eating itself, and once in a while vomits up that which it cannot digest.
I spend my days entirely concerned with the internet, either researching work problems, surfing for fun, or chatting with my distant love. I have to admit that the internet has done a lot of good things for me. But to find those good things is now a horrible chore (note the advertisement for Viagra on the front page).
It's tough to find decent stuff because there is simply so much meaningless commercial crap out there. I loved the net when it was MUDs and Mosaic. I hate it now that it's Viagra and VISA. That's about it. The CEO saw a way to make a quick buck on grabbing eyeballs whether they wanted to be grabbed or not. The spammers will continue to fill a million mailboxes just to make one sale. The scammers follow suit.
So where does it end? When people are educated enough to NEVER participate in answering spam, to not invest in businesses without business plans, to report the frauds they encounter.
Until then, I am looking forward to the destruction of the internet as it currently exists. But I still make my own site to pathetically complain about it.
Tea water is on the boil...wake up time in the Webster household. Pico (the cat) has been awake for a while of course, whining at my bedroom door for me to get my ass out of bed and feed him. So I make my way out of bed, into my ragged old green housecoat, and spot that he has pooped on the floor. Why do cat's do this?! His litterbox is fairly clean, I gave him lots of attention before bed last night, and he still does it. Maybe he's mad at me for not feeding him as early as he wants?
Today I took the day off, going to get a bunch of things done. My list:
- Courier plane tickets up to my mom - but I am not allowed to use Fedex or UPS because they don't go to small towns apparently. I have a feeling they do, but my mom says this is the way it's gonna be. Greyhound it will be.
Quick interrupt to start the tea steeping...
- Go buy a part I don't know the name of for my toilet - It's that thing that stops the water flowing out and is attached to the flush handle. Hopefully that's clean enough for the folks at Home Depot. I've never had a problem with them, they always know exactly what I need. Except when I went in looking for 1/4" sheets of copper, but I wasn't terribly surprised.
- Meet someone for lunch and to buy a guitar book off of her. I am The World's Worst Guitar Player right now and keep buying things and bookmarking song tabs in hopes that it suddenly gets better. I have a feeling I'm going to have to play some arcane form of bad jazz, since I have no internal sense of rhythm.
- I'm supposed to make a whole bunch of CDs for the wedding to give out to the people who come - Mostly nice celtic music. Maybe get a chance to compile the music today.
- Clean the house - This is a losing battle. I really wanted to have the house spotless before Jen arrives (seems kinda uncool to expect that she will clean it up after she gets here, but I know she will). I've even considered hiring someone to do it for me. *shrug*
- Relax - I get tense the day before work...every week. In fact, I am pretty much a big ball of stress at all times anyway. I just am really damned good at hiding it. Everyone thinks that I am the mellow guy in the corner when really I'm the guy who crawled into the corner hoping the world would just calm the heck down.
The tea, she has arrived. Off into the world.
20021027
Everything in my current life costs a bucketload of money. I've just bought $2200 worth of airfare, $200 worth of clothes, gas, a game miniature, $30 worth of used CDs, etc. etc. etc.
Wah. I could have cut much of that down considerably. Oh well. While I'm trying this whole 'no attachments, no desires' Zen thing at a moderate level, I'm not going to beat myself up for not doing it perfectly. It's just not worth it worrying about such things. In fact it's kinda detrimental to the principles of Zen.
Andy and I were talking about this. His words: "only with correct action in the now will the now-to-be work out in a correct manner". My words: "In a pure now, you can do things with effects in the future based on the sense of what you are doing in the now is correct". He tends to say things in shorter sentences and with less constructs. I tend to only understand things after I rephrase them verbally.
I've got stuff. Load and loads of it, in my personal opinion. In two weeks or so my stuff will be merged with Jen's stuff and we'll have more stuff than I suspect can comfortably fit in my apartment. We'll find a way, hopefully without removing stuff that would make it harder to live normal lives. Man, my silverware drawer is gonna be full for a while though.
I have a car, that I drove for over an hour today just to buy a $6.95 miniature. During the trip I saw numerous accidents, and listened as some CBC radio host debated The Kyoto Accord. Most of the talk was about how consumers could spend less and drive less and take transit that really sucks. If I had taken transit, it would have taken me nearly 3 hours and cost about the same as driving. I don't think that I honestly hurt the environment much by saving two hours. Environmentalists would likely disagree. Here, have some tofu jerky to snack on during the wait for the bus. Freaks.
I called my mom, since I am paying for her airfare to the wedding and needed her address. I didn't call my dad, even though I really should. He whines, so I have avoided talking to him for a while. Pretty lame excuse, but if I really wanted to talk to a drunk whiny guy, there are 4 cheapass bars within a 5 minute drive.
20021026
Ok, so it's a lark, but it's a fun and somewhat interesting lark.
After telling numerous stories about the weirdness I see on a regular basis, it occurred to a friend of mine that perhaps I should spread my stories around. That way at least I'd be forced to tell new ones to the people I know to avoid boring them to an early grave.
So...a story. Since I am about to be married (20 days from this writing), I will tell the story of Jen.
Jen is a sweet Alabama girl I met over the internet (No, I will not tell you how or where). I was interested in her almost immediately after she contacted me directly because she just exudes this nice innocent honesty. She's sweet without being dumb. She constantly surprises me by caring about me in very obvious ways and then turning around and intuitively understanding something quite deep. Maybe that sounds crass, but it's been rare in my life that I've met people who are both smart and nice. Usually it seems to be one or the other. The ones I have met with both qualities I have kept as close friends.
Two weeks after Jen and I started talking, I won an Alaskan Cruise for 7 days for two people. The thing with that is, I had no one to go with. I didn't want to share a small cruise cabin with any of my smelly male friends. So I asked Jen and she (after proving to her and her mother that I really did win a cruise and really wasn't a psycho) agreed to go with me. It was a wonderful week, better than I had thought possible. I fell in love with her before, during, and after the cruise and have just been more and more in love with her since.
I took a trip to Alabama, met her folks, and asked her to marry me. Of course it's a bit more complicated than that, but pretty close to the truth. Her mother is great, her stepfather is easily a favourite person of mine, her father is a bit of a dork. Not much I can do with that.
Since then we've been planning the marriage (in white gold), planning her move, planning the ridiculously stupid immigration hoops we are going to have to jump through. We marry in 20 days and I can't wait :)
Standing in a little tiny room with 40 people watching us say vows and swap rings though...that's something I could wait longer for.
Ah well, if you do it right, you only have to do it once.
LINKS and STUFF
Userfriendly.org - It's a geek comic strip. Really it's the main geek comic strip that has content based more for the geek crowd than any other. Other 'geek' comic strips have humour and content that almost anyone can get. I go there more out of habit these days than anything else, I used to work for it, and am still the head moderator for their comments system. I guess that's my intro to blogging in some way.Aspectus - This is Illiad's (of Userfriendly fame) other project, which is like Slashdot in some ways and like a personal blog in some ways, but cooler than either. Needs more content, and more visitors, but that'll come.
RED MEAT - Oh my. I imagine there is a FBI file on the artist. I never, ever want to meet him. But I will glory in his comic strip. Brilliance and intelligence wrapped up in the tattooed skin of a circus freak and tied with a bow made of blown O-rings.
Imparte.com - Rich's site. Not going to talk about it until he says I can. But go visit anyway.
