fine whine

Ah, spring! I'm behind,
as usual, but I blame
Kingdom of Loathing.

Seriously, though, I'd be closer to posting each day's entry that day if I weren't spenfing my evenings playing this free, lo-fi sort-of-MMO called the Kingdom of Loathing. It's more involved than my last RPG-ish experience (Diablo II) but entirely web-based and as such is very slow to play. It's fun, though.

Give it a shot, if you have some spare time socked away. And if you make it to level five, tell me and maybe I'll let you join my clan.

Today I thought I stumbled across a brilliant idea. While killing some time this afternoon (more on this later) I sifted through the shelf-full of gadgets in the front of our house, idly picking up Jessica's step-counter with belt clip. At that moment I thought of another belt-clipped gadget, the Ericsson LX588 cell phone I've taken to carrying at least until SBC beats CoreComm up and installs our phone service. Why not, I wondered, combine the two devices and for once actually cram a new feature into cell phones to replace a gadget that people already have on their belts?

Well aware of the lack of original ideas these days, I did a quick Google search for "cell phone pedometer" and in fact turned up this this posting on whynot.net. Oh well. It's still a good idea, I just was beaten to it by at least four months.

So as I mentioned, I was killing time. Sometime between last evening and the night whilst the temperature was dropping some twenty-odd degrees a transformer in our furnace decided to shuffle its coils off their, er, mortal coils and burn out silently, leaving us, as it did, with no heat on the coldest night in May. My feeble, half awake attempts to flip all switches and trip all breakers was to no avail, and I had to break down and call up the HomeGard folks who have our home warranty. We called out All-Knight Heating, and after two hours of banging around in the basement and garage the repairman had replaced the dead transformer, installed a fuse inline, and took down my credit card information to pay the $100 deductible that I'd forgotten about. Not only had I forgotten the deductible, but I also failed to ask the guy where in the circuit the transformer had been, namely so I could figure out why none of the four breakers involved tripped instead of the transformer being fried. You know, since I had all those otherwise-wasted hours of circuit analysis in college... as if I were going to bust out some calculus on his ass. Now that's cold.

Before I get to the real meat of things, let me say this: I don't think I've been bored for many years. What brought that on was Glenn MacDonald's "37 attempts at a morality of joy" line item number 3:

3. The world is big, we are small. Boredom is a failure of imagination. If you don't wake up curious, you didn't get enough sleep.

I just can't think of a time in the near past wherein I sat, befuddled, with absolutely nothing to do. And now that we've bought a house, I don't see any boredom getting slated into my schedule for quite some time.

So anyway, we've almost completely moved everything, save for much of my computer and stereo equipment and our telephone service. Cursed SBC.

Actually, I should not curse them so much as telephone companies in general&0151;but I will. Curse you, Ameritech, for driving me into the waiting arms of CoreComm with their more attractive offers and seemingly better service. Curse CoreComm for assigning me an abnormal dialing prefix, but curse you Ameritech again too, dammit. Curse you for your DSL service which was unavailable to me before as a non-SBC customer and still unavailable to me now because the CO's too far away. Curse you for your inflated rates and lackadaisical support. Curse you for your repetitive hold music. Curse you for not killing the fattened calf upon my return!

Sorry. I just needed to get that out of my system. This moving process has not only been unending frustration, but also a learning experience. I learned to make sure that socks, underwear and alarm clocks get packed in properly labeled boxes. I learned that any number of hand soap dispensers is useless without any hand soap, and I also learned that we won't need to buy toothpaste or toothbrushes for quite some time.

I learned that some people don't always check that the hot and cold on a faucet have any grounding in reality. I learned that some people don't look at what electrical socket they install for a dryer. I learned that if a lightbulb's not in a socket that fixture doesn't get checked. I could go on and on but really, everybody's getting tired of this. I know I am. Just not bored.

So there's this meme floating around the so-called blogosphere whereby everybody's opening up books and posting the fifth sentence of the twenty-third page. Or, as they say:

1. Grab the nearest book.
2. Open the book to page 23.
3. Find the fifth sentence.
4. Post the text of the sentence in your journal along with these instructions.

Lately I haven't been doing my bit for the community so I'll play along. Here's what I found in Fitzgerald did it by Meg Wolitzer:

You might think that such a story will just "write itself".

I happened across the idea whilst idly considering changing my publishing software (after just a year of happily using MT, I'm starting to find the need for something a little different, and apparently a bunch of other people (some with more technical reasons) are doing the same. I had a good run with MT, but it's starting to take up too much space. I'll try not to be too geeky and detail every step and motivation, but don't be surprised if as my whole moving from the apartment to a house thing becomes somehow a metaphor for the moving from MT to WordPress thing (or vice versa).

As for the book, I stumbled across it wedged between some screenwriting books at Half Price Books, wrote it down and checked it out from the library. Next week when I read it I might have more to say.

Yes, I am aware of the significance of 23. And I finally watched my Scandinavian DVD of Scorsese's Raging bull tonight too, but I don't have much to say about either. For now. Goodnight.

A while back my web browsing took on a new idiom: that of me going basically to the same seven sites or so every day, hungry for updates. I shouldn't admit it, but for a long time I was even hooked on slashdot and would reload the front page several times a day, just to see the very bleeding edge of geeky news. Those days have long since passed, but I would still find myself haunting the same few sites, a personal page here, and there and then community-derived lists of interesting links and news, and that was about it.

Then I started doing daily tours of my friends' sites, waiting for updates and occasionally chiming in on the conversations. I wasted a lot of time refreshing un-updated pages, though, and probably sent my workstation usage data through the roof. Not that I worry about that sort of thing, but whisperings and mumblings and half-hearted rumors occasionally contain a grain of truth, don't they?

So anyway, there had to be a better way. Enter Bloglines, a web service to aggregate the news from all the sites I visit based on a wonderful and cryptic technology called RSS. One that I'd used many, many years ago when Netscape first backed it and largely forgot, but now it allows me to see in one single page every update to all the sites that matter to me.

Slick, sleek and chic it may be, but I lose the ability to comment on items directly and also to see the ensuing conversations. I need only click on certain links to do so, but I'd like that functionality at my instant disposal, dammit. All of this is really an excuse to all y'all bloggers as to why I don't comment on your stuff anymore. It's not you, it's me. Really.

Try Bloglines, though. It's changed the way I look at things, in a manner of speaking. I'll be adding a "subscribe to this site with Bloglines" link eventually.

When it comes to free web services and sites, I am an utterly hopeless compulsive joiner. Behind me in my years of web use I have left a wide swath of forgotten accounts and un-revisited pages. Some I would use for months and others I would forget almost immediately after joining. At one time I collected email addresses (both for forwarding and actual mailboxes) and had so many that I needed to use a full sheet of paper to map out which went where (but never why).

So to stumble across something like the fantastic metafilter and to be told that no new users were being accepted was something of a slap in the face. To then see that it won some prominent blog community awards for being a community site made it even more so. I wanted to join and contribute, not just leech off the links and vicariously enjoy the conversations.

Well, I guess the powers that be decided to open back the floodgates and allow us peons back in, albeit at the somewhat limiting rate of twenty a day. Naturally I was poised on the page, anxiously refreshing until the very second the signup link was to go live... and I made it. I was the seventh or eighth person today and likely not the last for a long while of people to join, and hopefully contribute something to what is one of my primary sources for new and interesting stuff on the web.

There's really no reason for me to mention any of this, other than not wanting to talk about the fact that the inspectors found some preliminary evidence of termite activity in the house we're pursuing. Oh, and I didn't hate Men with brooms, I just didn't enjoy it nearly as much as I had wanted. Likewise The league of extraordinary gentlemen, which was far too slapdash and cobbled-together of a movie to be truly enjoyable, and quite frankly the CGI looked somewhat dated. So it's not good enough to be a SFX showreel nor does the movie stand on its own without the flashiness. All in all the book's much better (the graphic novel by Alan Moore), though I have to admit that the Nemomobile's a fine looking car, dual elephants on the front end and all.

On a related note, I enjoyed watching the BBC's The office's first series far more, and it didn't have any special effects at all.