Tag: blogging

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Trip report procrastination

I’ve been digging through notes and trying to type up a trip report about my last visit to Vegas in July, but it’s been a total bitch. I didn’t take many notes, and I have an outline, but it’s hard to get worked up about this and type anything that’s worthwhile. I’m tempted to just post the outline and say “you figure it out.” I think part of my total lack of enthusiasm is that I’m sick and nothing beats a hot summer night than a hot summer night with a fever. And one of my fans is crapping out, so it spins and then it stops and then it starts again, and it fucking freaks me out every time it does it and I think maybe it’s going to catch fire when I’m asleep, and/or maybe if I hit it hard enough or change its angle, it will cut the shit and start working again. Also, my kitchen light is burned out, and it’s this stupid circular fluorescent thing that you have to drive to the Westinghouse lab in New Jersey to find a replacement. And there are about 17 much more pressing things that are currently bugging the hell out of me, but I can’t really discuss them publically. When it rains, it pours.

I keep thinking of stuff I need to do to this journal to make it “better”. I haven’t touched the structure in five years, and now with all of this diaryland-livejournal-blogger garbage out there, my pages pale in comparison. The biggest pain is I want to break out the frameset and make it individial pages with the links in a table next to them, but I don’t have PHP or anything like that on my site, so I can’t do any of that. Also, it would be cool to do some other weird stuff in the sidebar, like have a poll or some static links. But without dynamic pages, it’s a huge pain in the ass. Another cool thing would be where you can leave comments, but that requires scripts. Sometime when I’m not sick, I might be able to come up with a better plan for doing this kind of shit. Of course, I don’t even know if anyone reads these pages, so maybe I shouldn’t waste my time.

Incidentally, I hate the term Blog. I also hate any notion that blogs are new, revolutionary, or otherwise creative. Why? Because back in 1992 and 1993 when I first started to mess around with the Web using the NCSA browser for X, I found that everyone’s homepage (then more commonly called a hyplan) was essentially a blog. Every page on the web was a page of links, except for the 23 or so pages with actual content. If you were a college grad student in some compsci department that let you create a hyplan, it would always be a list of links you found. I remember the main reason I started creating my now-defunct Coca-Cola page in 1994 was because I was so fucking sick and tired of nothing but pages of links. It’s like when you try to rent an apartment in New York, and every number you call in The Voice Classifieds isn’t a person who has an apartment, but is rather a realtor who knows a broker who knows a landlord that blah blah blah and THERE ARE NO APARTMENTS. That’s how I feel about blogs. One, they aren’t new. You aren’t trendy if you have one. Two, they suck because they are often just links to other blogs that are links to other blogs that are, at most, links to news articles that require registration and the URLs will be fucked up and rot in a day. And I’m not saying this journal isn’t high art. But I didn’t claim I invented journals yesterday.

Not much else. I’m going to finish this quart of orange juice and lie down with my half-broken fan.

Categories
general

First post

This is my first entry, and I’m still trying to iron out the kinks in this thing. I have an emacs function (thanks to Bill) that opens a text file with today’s date whenever I do a C-x C-j, so I can always pull up a file for today. They are text files though, and I have no idea if they will later be html-ized in any way. I’d like to, I guess, but I don’t want to be typing this stuff and adding tags and thinking about page formatting – it’s too much of a distraction. Just straight text will work for now, and I can always reformat it later.

I also don’t know how I will index these into a master html page. I guess I could write some kind of script to run through the directory and then somehow order the stuff, make links, and slap in the html. That’s a future project, I guess. For now, I’m just going to keep journaling on a daily basis so when I do create a web page, it won’t be for like 3 journal entries.

This whole project is sort of conflicting with my regular project, which is journaling on paper. I’ve kept pretty much daily journals since November of 93, and I have odd bits and pieces of journals that date back to high school. I’ll still keep a seperate paper journal, because it’s somewhat of a different project. This online journal won’t contain any of the private information that I keep in my paper journals. I’ll talk about personal stuff in here, but there’s a certain boundary I’m going to create, since this is on the internet, and anyone with a search engine, or from work, or whatever, can look at this and read it. Also, I don’t intend for this to be as in-depth as my paper journal. But I guess the boundaries and differences will define themselves further as this whole thing progresses.

I’ve been thinking of putting my paper journals online, or at least typing them in to have a backup-able format. Also, I don’t think I’ll be able to read my own handwriting in 10 or 20 years (I can barely read it now). But I don’t think I can put my journals on-line, because of the privacy issue, and it would take forever to do. I think i figured that I have about 1200 sheets of spiral notebook paper I’d have to type in. So that project will probably wait. But last night, I did type in all of my information from a smaller 1992 diary and a 1989 daily planner, just because those two things will probably get lost or destroyed at some point.

I should probably start talking about something other than the mechanics of the whole endeavor. This is a bad time for me to start an online journal, because I’m leaving for vacation on the 15th. Karena and I are flying to LA that day. Actually, we’ll be going to Orange county and staying in a hotel near Disneyland. The trip package included a car, and passes to Universal Studios and Disney. We’ll be going to Universal on the 16th, and spend the 17th-19th and maybe the morning of the 20th at Disney. We fly out on the 20th. We’ll also try to hit any other LA touristy things each night, since the park is only open till 7 on weekdays.

I’m pretty excited about leaving for a while – this is my first ‘real’ vacation. I’ve been on school trips and parental vacations, but they don’t entirely count. This is the first time I’ve booked a flight for something that didn’t involve family or work. I have taken many roadtrips, and I have been to more than half of the states in the country, but this will be a real change of pace. Also, it has been pretty shitty in Seattle – it is always raining and dark. In the last week or two, it is almost clearing up, but it will be nice to be in California.

I am also nervous about the whole trip. I always get nervous before I travel – that I’ll forget something, forget the tickets, miss a flight, or whatever. I’m also not sure how we’re getting to the airport, since both the shuttle services and the airport parking are a complete ripoff. So I need to figure all of this stuff out. At least we are leaving in the afternoon – I really hate getting ready to fly out on an 8:00 am flight, which usually means you have to get up at like 3 in the morning to shower, pack, check everything, wait for the shuttle, take the shuttle (which is always late), check in, etc.

Today is the 5 month anniversary of me and Karena being together. I think that means this is my 3rd longest relationship. I was with Tanya for 6 or 7 months (although there was a summer break apart in the middle of it), and I was with Becky for just over 11 months. It still feels weird to be in a relationship, but I guess I am pretty settled into it now. Still no complaints or anything. This weekend will be weird because we aren’t visiting each other. Since we will be on this trip all week, we decided it would be best not to visit, save some money, get all of our pre-vacation stuff done like laundry or whatever, and just wait until Monday when she is coming up here. It will be odd to have a weekend by myself again. My first thought is that I’ll be sleeping all day, eating junk food, getting a bunch of writing done, and enjoying myself like when I was single. In reality, I will probably miss her a lot and just mope around the house and do some laundry.

I just spilled chili on this yellow shirt. I should watch my eating while I’m writing…

I’ve been worried like hell about money lately – I owe the school, the dentist, and two credit cards about $500 each. Last night, I calmed down about it and sort of figured out a schedule to get it paid off. Then thismorning, the dentist calls to say he wants me to come in to get some more fillings done. Every time I think I am done there, he thinks of some other thing I should get done that will cost me another $300. Plus he wants me to get braces, will be another 10 grand and 2 or 3 years of agony. My teeth don’t hurt, they look OK, and I can eat okay. So I am just going to tell him to go fuck himself, and change dentists before my next cleaning. He is worse than the Ford dealership on this stuff (and more expensive!).

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I’m so proud of myself. My litte C program to convert directory listings to html is mostly working. It’s been almost 4 years since I worked with C on a daily basis, so it was very muddled when I started. I couldn’t remember any specifics about file i/o, and string operations were not too clear either. But it can read a file and convert it, so it is technically functional. I’ll add more to it later, but it looks like I’ll be able to work with this.

I got my Queensryche fan club stuff today – a signed photo, some stickers, and the price list for other merchandise. It was pretty quick – about 8 days turnaround time.

Life is otherwise boring, and I’m going to give in to my TV vice and watch ER.