Hunting The Muse

A friend mentioned that the

A friend mentioned that the no-crying thing in the last entry might have just been because he was in survival mode trying to save other people. That's a good point. Oh well.

Salon.com People | Oregon rescuers

Salon.com People | Oregon rescuers go after last body Joiner, the assistant fire marshal at the Tualatin Valley Fire & Rescue department, was one of five people from the department who were climbing. His 14-year-old son, Cole, was among those who fell in the crevasse, but he wasn't seriously injured.

"When I found out he was alive, it was an emotional moment," Cleve Joiner said. "I just kind of fought back the tears and carried on."

That attitude just pisses me off. Dude, your son slid into a crevasse and then you found out he survived. What are you doing fighting back tears?

Slashdot | Organizing Data Across

Slashdot | Organizing Data Across a Heterogeneous Net? - This is something I'll probably have to start figuring out. I've got the world's most disorganized home network.

I'm on. Performance is sluggish

I'm on. Performance is sluggish and I wish I hadn't hung up on them quite so quickly when I realized I was online, but I got it working. Turns out I didn't have to set my modem to be G.Lite compatible at all. DMT mode works fine. But the trick is that I had to change the vci number on wan0-0 to 35 instead of 32. And that did it. Hopefully Google will index me and someone looking for info on Verizon, ATM DSL, G.Lite, DMT, and Cisco 678 router/modems will find this entry and be helped. If that's you, leave a comment.

All right - this should

All right - this should be my last blog entry from my old apartment. I am about to attempt to do a massive dsl reconfiguration to make my network compatible with my new apartment.

Terms for search engines. I have a Cisco 678. It's in DMT mode. However, I'm about to go from Qwest to Verizon. And they have an ATM-style DSL network. They recommend a WestTel modem but I don't want to buy a new one. They say that any modem that is G.Lite compatible should work with it though. They say the Cisco 678 won't work. I don't believe them. According to this page the Cisco should be G.Lite aware with some reconfiguration. I'm about to do that reconfiguration, but when I do, I will be off the net.

I guess I'll probably just take it all over to my new place right now and do the reconfiguration there. It sounds easy enough - serial connection, "enable", and "set interface wan0 standard g.lite". Should be as simple as that, right? Right?

So, I have an ant

So, I have an ant problem. Yuck, ants. I know. A long time ago I had this chocolate mix that was stored in a big coffee can. I ended up using that coffee can to store some bulk dried goods. I guess I didn't wash it thoroughly enough because there was some powder left over. I left it out overnight, and it turned out there's an ant nest in my counters somewhere and they had a gay old time.

So the pest control guy came over today. Chatty guy, in his fifties, thick glasses.

"Let's see, what kind of ants do ya have..."

I led him into the kitchen. A few of them were crawling around.

"Ahh, there we are. Yeah, your regular odorous house ants."

And then he squashed one under his thumb, rolled it around between his fingers, and sniffed his fingers.

"Yeah, yep. Have you tried smelling them to find out their signature odor?" He asked this as if he was expecting me to try it out.

"Um, no... I didn't think of that."

Ick. ick, ick, ick. And two nights ago when I discovered the ant problem, I left a message with one property manager before my normal one called me back.

"Yeah, " she said, "when Teri told me they were coming out of the stove, the first thing I said was, 'Well, did you tell him to turn on the stove?'" She paused for my reaction. "Just cook them right up, fix yourself a meal."

"Yuck."

"You didn't want to just turn on the stove and fix yourself some ants?"

"Yuck."

I hate my property manager. I hate ants. I hate people that crush ants between their fingers and then smell their fingers. I hate the thought of cooking and eating ants. Am I really so strange? Why are these other people so strange?

Personal RSS Aggregators - It

Personal RSS Aggregators - It looks like I've been having the same sorts of thoughts as many other folks lately. I investigated half these pieces of software just the other night.

Finally, I appear to be

Finally, I appear to be making progress. I still have a good part of the kitchen left to do, but then again none of my dishes are all that great, anyway.

Upstairs is my desk and my bed and two headless computers. No big deal. Downstairs is a bunch of stuff I can clear out tonight, and the dreaded kitchen.

I have all day tomorrow and Thursday (and Friday) to finish. Thursday is when the cleaners come over. Unfortunately I have to pay someone to shampoo the carpet, too. This sucks! I'm so pissed I'm going to have to do this yet AGAIN before I finally get my house!!! Fuck!

Pete's wife is gonna give

Pete's wife is gonna give birth soon.

I used to be so

I used to be so organized five days ago. All boxes were themed, everything was flowing out of my place. But I just now packed up a box that was labeled "Candles/Telephone".

I had a dream that

I had a dream that I ate meat. Actually, I had a dream that I was making out with some girl on a sofa while here grandfather sat in an easy chair next to us watching television, but he's the guy that offered me the burger. I could totally taste it in my dream and everything - the smell filling my sinus cavities, the different areas of the tongue watering. Halfway through chewing I remembered I was vegetarian. Then I woke up. Weird.

I also have a dynamic

I also have a dynamic "Other Weblogs" list now, too - When I am reading a new blog I find and like, I have a little bookmark that I click, and then it's added to my sidebar. Coolo.

My thoughts about syndication/aggregation yesterday

My thoughts about syndication/aggregation yesterday got me wanting to look into it more. So now there is a new XML link on the left sidebar below my archives. Its url is my RSS feed. This is just a feed of my blog entries, not of news I want to pass on. I'm still thinking about that other thing.

Did okay moving today, but I still have a ways to go! I'll be organizing clothes and kitchen stuff tomorrow. And paying bills...!

I read a lot

I read a lot about blogging being the next big form of media. You know, down with big centralized corporate-controlled media, up with distributed democratically-controlled grass-roots media. This army of ants that finds out interesting facts and zings them around to each other through the backchannels, with readers just sorta ending up being informed.

The folks that weren't bloggers but were paying attention to it really noticed it on 9/11. CNN.com was down, msnbc.com was down, abcnews.com was down. Meanwhile, blogs were sending around eyewitness accounts, holding vigils on the blogs of bloggers killed in the attacks, and aggregating news that others had heard from various sites. They could do it because it was distributed with lots of redundancy. As something that both feels like it should and shouldn't be a counterpoint, there were also videos being passed around of people jumping and landing. You didn't see that on network tv. You also didn't want to. I sure didn't watch any of those videos. But it is at the least a testament to the ability to pass around NEWS that can break through the gauntlet of those who might want to control it.

But there are times when you need the editorial control. Before I found blogging, I found indymedia.org . The overall feel of the content hosted on indymedia.org was a bit too liberal for me (I'm liberal but I don't break Starbuck's windows to protest the fascist state) so it wasn't a real fit for me, but I liked that rather than them being a bunch of complainers, they were trying to set up a new network and a way to distribute their media.

But, the reason I lost interest was because it got bogged down. Despite the anarchists desire for a lack of hierarchy, their organization was essentially hierarchical. They had local indymedias, and then the biggest news would somehow get posted on the overall indymedia site. Since they wanted to be flat organizationally, and since the whole point was to bring publishing and news-spreading to the masses, they had no official editorial control and huge resistance to any concerted effort to exercise editorial control beyond this.

So what usually happened is that articles would be posted that would be full of venting, rage, and opinions spoken as fact. There was a guilt-driven motivation to not control them. It would get ridiculous - some folks would post essays that first seemed to be simply supportive of some Palestinian causes, but would then subtly switch gears until, by the end, would turn into anti-jewish holocaust revisionism. Some folks would scream to take it down, others would resist saying overused crap like "I do not agree with what they say but will defend to the death their right to say it" (an attitude that is great when it is relevant but infuriating when used as rote).

So anyway - interesting battles, lots of people learning about their emotional standards and what "picking your battles" means, but ultimately I gave up - the politics didn't speak strongly enough for me to stay and fight. I just like distributed media, I don't feel a motivating passion to attend WTO demonstrations and dare cops to beat me by pointing a videocamera at them while they are in riot gear.

So back to the point. How to distribute media in a way that separates wheat from chaff, without relinquishing editorial control to a group that might have an agenda you don't agree with?

My answer: trust metrics. They exist. What I haven't seen yet though, are distributed trust metrics. Or user-defined trust metrics. What the hell do I mean?

Well, here's the thing. I've got my favorite blogs over there on the left sidebar. Those guys have their favorites on their sidebar. We check our favorites. But you know, we'll miss something, or we won't have the patience to check our friends' friends.

And there are blog indexing sites. What links are being passed around the most? What are folks talking about? Again, that's a media flaw. The news isn't necessarily what the most people are talking about. That's Lowest Common Denominator, that's snowball, that's everyone in the US knowing everything about Condit and Levy, while my friend hanging out in Ireland for eight months (in a city with newspapers and tv) didn't hear one tiny little thing about it.

So, if each person could choose three or four news sources - distinct, flavored news sources with their own slant on current affairs, with identifiable feels of what they thought were relevant and what weren't, then these news sources could be the "seeds" of that person's trust matrix. And I wouldn't necessarily have a news *source* in my matrix, I might have news *aggregators* in them. And maybe the news that would have a higher chance of being reported to me would only be one, two, or three links away from those news aggregators.

And then I would be my own aggregation service. I'd mention the ones I liked the most, and the people that for some reason really wanted to follow what *I*, Curt Siffert, thought was important would subsribe to my aggregation service.

So, the chance of people being cut off from reality? Not very high - we're all subscribed to each other and cross-pollenated. The chance of everything getting redundant and circular? Not very high, if you have a large enough group of folks it is pretty impossible for that group to not be connected to the rest of the world's population within six or seven degrees. Any one person can report news and if it's newsworthy, it will be picked up and passed along.

Does this service already sorta exist? Yes, just from us manually going around and checking each other's blogs. Stuff we like, we link. Other people like it, they link. But it could be better. I could set up a second blog through blogger, yet still hosted on this same page, that would simply be my choices of news to pass on. It could be available through RSS, for other bloggers to subscribe to. They'd have an RSS reader, and an easy ability to republish on their RSS feed. It just needs to be tinkered with a little, and then we'll have it. Yes, it will need a centralized server, but the *news* wouldn't be centralized, only the information of what each member's trust matrix is.

I don't know if I have the passion to implement it, but I've written about it. That's a start.

So I checked out

So I checked out Radio Userland today as a blogging tool. I found it is a lot more community-centric than blogger is. Its user experience puts you right in the middle of an interface that encourages you to act similarly to tons of other bloggers, the kinds of bloggers that post a lot of links, have other bloggers reading their blogs, and read lots of articles.

Blogger doesn't specifically encourage you to do that. Maybe it does culturally, but it doesn't technically. With Blogger, I just post to my blog from anywhere I want. I blog from my mozilla sidebar, I blog from my AIM buddy list, I blog from my linux terminal window in a vi session. I can even blog from my palm pilot (to be published when I hit "sync").

To be fair, all those things are possible with Radio Userland. And to be fair, all the things that Radio Userland offers in its user experience are just as possible with Blogger. But it's more a matter of what each software puts at your fingertips by default, and what each software requires you to go out and do by yourself.

For me, my best match might just end up being Radio Userland. I like the flexibility that Blogger gives me, and most Radio Userland users wouldn't have that flexibility. However, I'm a programmer, and the backend functionality of all blogging software is extensible enough by programmers that I could do what I wanted with Radio Userland.

And I like what I saw of Userland. I like that it will pull down site headlines of all your favorite blogs. I like that it pulls in headlines of hundreds of other user sites, and I like that you can rank them and sort them by your own criteria. I like that it shows you which blogs are most popular on a daily basis, and that it can show you what other people seem to be talking (blogging) about on a day-to-day basis. I like that it feels more hooked in to a community, which makes your own blog more relevant to a community, which might give me a larger readership.

But... I'm still thinking about it. It's still canned desktop software.

And it requires a pc or mac. So it'll have to wait until I get my ibook anyway. (I'll be getting the 700mhz 12.1" screen I believe.)

Stuff I have moved:

Stuff I have moved:

• Four 3-shelf bookshelves (all different styles)
• One 2-shelf bookshelf
• Contents of said bookshelves
• Big poofy chair (like a beanbag but softer)
• Big hard-mounted wall-poster
• Drill, electric handsaw (bandsaw)
• Coatrack
• Two circular end tables (that my dad made!)
• Dresser for my bedroom (new! well, picked up on a street corner)
• electric piano keyboard and stand
• guitar/stand
• small music bench and guitar footstand
• videotapes, cds
• Two cd racks

Stuff I have left to move:

• Futon, futon stand
• Coffee table and contents
• Tv, VCR, Tv cabinet
• Stereo, tape deck, small speakers
• two floor lamps, two table lamps
• Junk on floor (remains from bookshelves)
• All my kitchen stuff
• All my bathroom stuff
• All my clothes
• Two file cabinets (three drawers total)
• Two computer desks
• Bed
• Second stereo
• Computer textbooks
• Three computers and components
• Other junk that doesn't quite go anywhere

Man, I don't think I'm half-done yet.

Everyone thinks I'm insane for not just boxing everything up first and then moving everything at once. Well, maybe. It just seems like that would have been harder, though - I mean, I have so much stuff in a place with no closet space, what are the chances I would have been able to box everything up before going insane? I needed to clear stuff out of the way. At least now I have some floor space.

Salon.com Arts & Entertainment |

Salon.com Arts & Entertainment | Willow, destroyer of worlds - This woman Stephanie helps me to believe that Buffy is the best series ever on television.

Salon.com Sex | Since You

Salon.com Sex | Since You Asked: "Whose Baby Is It?" - I wasn't the only one who was moved to write in about that guy's advice column.

I'm a freelancing machine.

I'm a freelancing machine.

Why do I love

Why do I love Tina Fey, he asks? She's adorable. She's bookwormy and hot and quirky. She's got that smile and that hair and that face and those glasses and that cute little scar. Because I can imagine being friends with someone like her if we were both in fourth grade. And there was a moment in the last SNL broadcast where she was about to talk but some audience member laughed extra loud out of turn and she stopped and gave him a huge smile and I just melted. And because sometimes her jokes bomb and when it happens it doesn't make me wince. Yay Tina!

I read Salon's advice

I read Salon's advice column today and it just got me really angry, as I saw a lot of it as evidence of attitudes that are, in my not so-humble-opinion, What Is Wrong With Society Today. So I wrote a letter to the editor:

I'm concerned about the advice Cary Tennis is giving. I realize this can be written off as just one man's moralizing conflicting with another's, but there are some important points to consider.

I tend to be honest. Honest to those I love, even when it involves things they might not want to hear. And I have friends that seem bewildered about my choices sometimes. I'll have one of these "honest confrontations" and describe it later to a third party, and their reaction will often display their belief that it was unnecessarily brutal. "Did they really need to *know* that?" or "What they don't know won't hurt them..." is what I sometimes hear.

But, these third parties are not present to feel the emotional dynamics of these "confrontations" - which are never intended brutally. For me, I see them as an opportunity to learn, to come to greater understanding, to grow. And if the person I am talking to is similarly committed and not insistent on deceiving theselves, these confrontations *do* result in deeper ties and more understanding.

Cary's philosophy at first glace seems to be a liberal affirmation of self-empowerment - to control one's own situation and reduce the messiness. However, I can easily imagine cases in which this approach, while perhaps pseudo-powerful in the short term, will eat away at people and lead to secrecy, self-deception, tightness and resentment later on.

The most obvious example is the woman who is not sure of the identity of her baby's father. When someone writes in for advice about something personal, it is a big step. This issue is clearly at the forefront of her mind. Cary tells her to keep a secret forever - not only that, but to not even find out the truth of the secret. What she doesn't know won't hurt her.

It's obviously eating away at her. She's so incapable of letting it go that she is writing to an advice columnist. And if it's a reasonably sensitive relationship, her husband *will* notice something is wrong. And if she keeps the secret forever, the dynamics of the relationship will be forever altered, with the one dark imagining that may be true, may not be, serving as a wedge in between their intimacy.

What is worse is that the child will grow up with this dynamic flitting around in the background. People are sensitive and they notice these things, if only on subconscious levels. What about a child that grows up never being entirely sure of his place, of always feeling a vague sense of unconnectedness to his environment, his powers of intimacy?

What is the correct thing to do? Well, I agree that she may be worrying about something that isn't a problem. Maybe she should find out to a medical certainty who the baby's father is, and soon. It would be torture to tell the husband, "This *may* not be your son," when she has the ability to know for certain beforehand.

But to tell her to maintain a deception against herself? These are the sorts of things that teach us to feel compromised. We can all learn to live with compromises, with lessened integrity, and over time our self-image suffers and we start to act out of a reduced belief in ourselves. But when these challenges happen, we can also learn to find ways out and increase our integrity, and *that* is what she should do.

This woman was unfaithful, not only to her husband, but to herself - she had sex that was unattached to love. This is an important issue for her to address in herself - sweeping the paternity of the child under the rug also locks the unfaithfulness away, leaving it to fester and grow. And it could get in the way of her loving her child completely, without a background gnawing of shame. She should learn about the child's father, and then while she may not have to address the child being another man's child, she should address the infidelity with her husband - with loving intent, with a spoken desire to learn more and deepen her married relationship.

I am also concerned about the advice he gave to the 29-year-old experiencing discouragement problems. Cary asked insightful questions about what has changed in his life since high school. However, the rest of the response was another example of the all-too-common pattern of encouraging someone to skip past their feelings and head straight to the doctor.

There's a point at which certain experiences are supposed to be hard, challenging, dissatisfying. There is a point at which we are supposed to feel grief, fear, anger, helplessness. These are not feelings to be protected against.

The unfortunate misunderstanding here is that we see our difficult experiences as being evidence, evidence that grief, anger, fear are the emotions that are in the way. What we forget to understand is that what makes these experience especially hard is not the root emotion, but the judgements we have against them.

If I feel angry about my social life, it is a signal there is something to overcome. But if I feel angry about my social life, and also feel distraught because I see everyone else seemingly happy and feel I should be happier with what I have, but I don't, which means I'm fucked up, which gets me anxious, which makes me feel attacked by life, which gets me manic and anguished because *obviously* being manic and anguished means I'm fucked up and I shouldn't feel that way... that's a problem.

Our 29-year-old-friend is feeling that he should feel better about his life than he does, and that's where he's stumbling. He needs to be encouraged to accept that his life isn't ideal right now, and that's okay, and it doesn't mean he fucked up, and that being 20-something is difficult, and that he is allowed to feel all right with putting less pressure on himself. Let life slow down. Be patient. He's not on a schedule. Focus on finding friends for now - people that don't necessarily fit a checklist, but just feel good. Live, don't diagnose. And let himself *feel*. Life gets easier when we don't judge against our confusion. Our confusions, our stumblings, our trials - those are the *valuable* parts of life, and they should not be locked away. That is where we live intensely, those are the parts that most deserve love.

And that's the point of this letter. I am concerned about Cary's advice because he is encouraging people to adopt behaviour that in the long run, will lead to them being more confused, that could lead them to judge against their struggles, that could possibly lead them to more pain by trading against their futures.

I said no publication because this letter is far too long. If you want to publish subsections though I would be willing to approve it.

Sincerely, Curt Siffert

mrph

mrph

Time for the weekly health

Time for the weekly health report. Slightly better last week than the week before. Outlook this week is unclear. Probably still above target, but maybe not as good as last week.

My average freelance income (yellow) is at an all-time high. Hooray! It's not above the blue line, though. I told my friend Pete that I'd start making purchases (nothing extravagant) when the yellow line reaches the blue line.

I love Tina Fey. Truly,

I love Tina Fey. Truly, Deeply.

So, I have this

So, I have this friend. She dropped me, with no explanation. She just doesn't return any of my email, doesn't return my phone calls, just stopped writing me, just dropped me. We had gone out a couple of times, had a great time, exchanged compliments, looked forward to hanging out again, and then it's like she was just wiped off the face of the earth.

There's a couple ways to handle it. There's paying no mind to it and then knowing that if/when you run into each other again, you can just be happy to see each other, "Heeey! Been a long time! How ya been?!" etc.

But instead, I actually addressed it in email, when we didn't know each other. "So, you haven't really written back. I hope you will one of these times because it seemed like you'd be a good friend." Which under certain circumstances is direct enough that it makes people uncomfortable. Maybe I didn't know her well enough to be so direct.

And since I handled it that way, it means the gauntlet has been thrown. I have been sort of dogged, have written her four or five more times over the last couple of months. Always friendly, always "Hey it would be great to hear from you". Because honestly, there wasn't a hint that there was something wrong, and it seems really weird, like I wonder if I push hard enough I'll finally realize that there's some major misunderstanding that has nothing to do with me that could be easily cleared up if she just spilled the beans. ("Oh, you mean it wasn't YOU who skinned my dog? God, I'm so sorry I assumed it was you!")

But it's also at the point where I can imagine that this thankless person who is insane enough to not listen to the signals that AN EMAIL BACK WOULD BE APPROPRIATE might also be insane enough to convince herself that I'm sort of stalker that just keeps sending her email and won't leave her alone. And I'm pissed that I was this abruptly dropped; it is beyond rude.

So I'm at the point where if I run into her randomly on the street, I don't know how I will react. Maybe I'd just look through her and be cold, or maybe I'd look right at her and tell her off. But I certainly wouldn't be "Heeeey! How ya been?! Great to see you!!" At least, not if I were feeling reasonably centered when I saw her.

It might change things if I got a mea culpa, I suppose. But I won't be writing her again.

Damn it.

Oh, and I'm just going to assume she's not like dead or in a coma or something. I'm comfortable with assuming that.

Oh, and I mentioned her briefly before, and some of you that read it wrote me and said, "Hey, you don't mean me, do you??" No, it's not you. I mean, unless it's YOU. And if so, what are YOU doing reading this?? I didn't even think you knew about this blog! And by the way, you're such a jerk!

And frankly the biggest reason I am bummed about this is because I think her married sister is really cool. Really, I never even liked her in the first place. She's a big poopy. A poopy, I say. And my bike was stolen and I'm having a bad day.

This would be an excellent time for someone to send me a present or take me out for a piece of warm apple pie.

My bike was stolen.

My bike was stolen. argh!!!

And I feel really stupid now, and more than a little bit pissed off.

First, it was a nice bike. Not a completely gourmet bike, but a good $400 mountain bike. Second, I'm in a gated apartment community where you need a gate key to get in, and then need to use the gate key again to get into the storage area. Inside the storage area I had it locked to a bike rack with a u-lock and a cable.

And I have no idea when it was stolen. I hadn't been in there for a few months, since there wasn't any reason for me to go in there in the winter. I would check on it every once in a while, but that's about it. With the weather nice, I had been thinking about riding it some more, especially at my new place. This complex has always sort of bothered me, so I figured that it would be the first thing I'd take over to my new garage.

I'm pissed off at my apartment complex because they have been talking this place up as a luxury community and it sucks. I don't think they have any guarantees in the lease about the security of their storage facilities (why would they?). But, looking at the bike rack, I see there are *three* u-locks on the 12-slot rack that don't have bikes attached to them, including the rack where my bike was. So I'm wondering if they had other bikes being stolen recently that I didn't hear about - if so then I think I have something to argue about.

And the worst thing is that I got confused about registration. When I got a bike in Colorado and New York a long time ago, they had bike registration. When I bought the bike this time, I asked about registration and they looked at me funny, so I was all confused because I didn't see how to get identifying information about the bike. So today the police tell me that there's actually a serial number ON the bike, but I never wrote it down. :(

Update: Despite the manual telling me that the vendors wouldn't have it, I called my bike shop and they actually had the serial number on file. Yay them! So at least I haven't totally dropped any balls. That's cool they keep all that info on file - they are Paul's Bicycles of Eugene.

Got a haircut today. That helped me feel a bit better about myself. I still wish I had my bike though. :(

My new lease starts today.

My new lease starts today. And you want to know what I've packed? Not a damn thing. You want to know what I've cleaned? Not a damn thing. Yay me!

Coding is weird. Sometimes

Coding is weird. Sometimes it takes brains, but sometimes it is just dreary and repetitive. Like today - I'm writing a system to accept form input and then use the input to dynamically generate a pdf file. I use a pdf template and then overlay the dynamic data into certain spots on the pdf template. So they supplied me the pdf template with blank spots. And then it was basically up to me to put them in the right place. So for three hours I just did this:

1. Picked some coordinates (in inches) out of the air (I was going to say my butt but the image was just a bit too close to biology).
2. Generated the pdf
3. Opened it in my browser's pdf plugin
4. Eyeballed the results

over and over and over again.

I finally did get it working, though, and it looks great. And I have to admit that it wasn't so bad. Sometimes I procrastinate the heavy problem-solving, so once in a while the repetitive, routine trial-and-error stuff is a nice break. Of course, getting paid for it hourly helps.

So I saw Star Wars

So I saw Star Wars today. And I was left with the same feeling as when I saw Phantom Menace - for all the bitching that people have about the surface level of these movies, there really is one really fascinating backstory that is being told! Pay attention to the stuff that they aren't pounding over your head, and it really is a cool story. Anyway, I absolutely loved it.

O'Reilly Network: Tapping the alpha

O'Reilly Network: Tapping the alpha geek noosphere with EtherPEG [May 16, 2002] - I found this pretty creepy, especially when he started talking about viewing a crowd as a living organism.

Brain is buzzing. I

Brain is buzzing. I have so much to do. Need to sleep though. Worked eight hours and got a bunch of other things taken care of, including some good veggin' out. But I have a TON to do coming up, including moving!!!

oh god. she tore off

oh god. she tore off his skin. oh yuck. willow, I used to love you...

Oh no.I have a major

Oh no.

I have a major problem next fall.

The WB's "Angel", Fox's "Firefly" (new Joss Whedon series), and ABC's "Alias" are all airing at 9pm on Sundays.

Boo.

I'm tired of this blog

I'm tired of this blog design. I like the structure but everyone and his brother is using the same stupid template. Anyone want to make a cool new design for me that fits my personality?

I'm feeling like this

I'm feeling like this freelancing thing has a better chance of working for me longterm now. Maybe I can obsess about it a bit less now (and stop blogging so much about my graphs) and start getting back to hunting the muse.

I've had crazy dreams lately. Two nights ago I was myself, driving to my old high school - actually trying to get to this community college somewhere in Fort Collins. Evidently it was the Brigadoon Community College because it certainly wasn't where it was supposed to be, and then my mom was just totally incapable of giving me directions. So I ended up by my old high school and my parents, who I met their driving their own truck, started to get all goofy and not take my questions seriously - then they just took off. POV switched to a bunch of native americans running around in corn fields and one of them tried to blow a blow-dart at my mom. Evidently it was important, as she was actually some sort of undead creature (in broad daylight). This native american's little sister wanted to try also because she was sure she was going to be the next vampire slayer. One of them scoffed at her and said, "You know there can't be more than one of those at a time!" And then they sort of shuffled their feet as they remembered that wasn't exactly true, but were still sure the little sister was being silly. Then I woke up.

Then last night I was working in a grocery store to supplement my freelance income. After spending a couple of hours bagging groceries (including one drawn-out section of the dream that was entirely devoted to separating a guy's kiwi fruits from his garlic cloves, only to put them back in the same bag anyway), I realized I hadn't punched in. I felt like an idiot. So I went upstairs to punch in, but the room was empty. And there was a woman in black vinyl/latex/spandex or whatever following me around that looked like Carrie Anne Moss in the Matrix. She didn't personally look like her, but was dressed like her. Some other woman offscreen (I was watching myself like in a movie by this point) was throwing stuff at her and then latex-lady attacked me. I tore a phone off a wall but there was nothing behind it. Then a bunch of rubble fell on her but she stood up anyway. Then I pushed her into a wall which stunned her, and I grabbed her coffee pot that she was carrying around (???), poured it into a mug - it was more like green tea - and drank it. Then I was back on the city sidewalk reading the ad in the paper that was surrounded by a green border and I realized that it was some new-fangled kind of hyperlink, that when I focused my attention on it, I fell into its reality. I guess the bagging groceries never happened. So then I saw the next green-bordered ad, focused on it, and fell into it. Then I woke up.

Ooohhhh. I just realized that this could mean that I'm *IN* that hyperlink reality right now. Will I wake up from it if I drink some green tea? Huh.

All right, time for

All right, time for my graphs. I want to get a start on next week. First, my averages. You can see my weekly expenses line dip down a bit, since I exceeded my target. My two "averages" line are obviously up. And even though I had a slow last month, my overall average is still about as high as it has ever been.

As for my overall profits, the line has climbed up a little bit. Still have a ways to go, but at least it's flattening out. When I reach the 0 line, it doesn't mean I've made all the money I need for the year, it just means I'm on target for the year up to that point.

Looks like next week should be pretty good too, maybe slightly better.

Not a bad week overall.

Not a bad week overall. I get to sleep in again tomorrow, that is if I can keep the blasted phone from ringing. I'll have more stats (and graphs) tomorrow, but I beat my expenses target for the week - I wasn't really in the land of major profits, but it was a good start for being distracted and sick. Not really used to the workload right now but I felt pretty effective.

I put in a couple of good hours for my other client today and I feel comfortable with the progress it is making now. I'll be able to get a lot more of it done tomorrow afternoon. Then I'm invested in the season finale of Alias!

My truck's windshield has a big crack and a small dent in it. Actually, it's more like a pockmark. I'm so happy I just got use the word pockmark in context. Anyway, I might do that thing with Empire Auto Glass where they pay part of my insurance deductible and give me 24 free dinners to Shari's. :)

I watched Tin Cup with Kevin Costner and Rene Russo tonight. Cute movie and it went in a couple of directions I wasn't expecting. I liked it. Kevin and Rene didn't offer to help me with my dishes, though. ba-dum shh.

I'm up super-late again,

I'm up super-late again, but luckily, I can sleep in tomorrow! And maybe finally get over this cold that has been annoying me all week. I'm not really sick - it's a pretty wimpy cold (DO NOT TAUNT ME says the germ) but it's just been slow-moving and a constant annoyance.

Graph news - I'm above the blue line for the third time so far. I won't break my record, but there might be a chance I'll break it next week. I've got a busy week next week - projects for two clients will be launching, and I'll also be interviewing for another client.

Evidently things are speeding up in Portland - agencies are getting busy again. Good news. I've been asked to do something for a rate that is smack-dab in the middle between my two current clients (one is way too low, and I consider the other one reasonable). They say that to figure your 1099 rate, you should take your W-2 rate and add 20% or so. This one's more like 50%. So I'm torn. I'll find out more next week. On the other hand, it will make me eligible for their group health insurance rates and their 401k stuff.

So, how about that pipe bomber who wanted to make a map of a smiley face? Aside from the pain and terror and injuries (yada yada yada), isn't there something intriguing about that? Just on a conceptual level. I bet any day now someone over at Salon will come up with some insightful literary essay about it all... maybe even use the king of all words that don't mean anything except to say "look at me I'm pretentious and only I know what I mean but you should feel like you're SUPPOSED to", 'post-modern' - although lately I get the feeling that using 'post-modern' is a bit passe. Maybe it's neo-post-modern now.

stayed up too late again.

stayed up too late again.

Hooray! My indicator line for

Hooray! My indicator line for this week is flat! Even sloping slightly up! That means that I've met my raw week's requirement (the one that doesn't make up for the slow weeks before). It also means that I am officially *less* behind than I was last week.

Sweet - my cyan line

Sweet - my cyan line is above my yellow line! So this means I am now pulling my weekly average up instead of down.

so tired

so tired

Crap... I bought some semi-conductor

Crap... I bought some semi-conductor holders trust (SMH) on the stock market after market close, but before Cisco reported their better-than-expected earnings. It'll probably spike way up tomorrow before my order gets filled.

I liked this quote"Those moments

I liked this quote

"Those moments where you miss the ones you love most are the moments you know they would wish to most be a part of." - Harry Knowles

Hooray, my cyan line just

Hooray, my cyan line just passed my red line! That means I'm doing better this week than I've done the last four weeks on average.

Is there anything between a

Is there anything between a public corporation and a non-profit corporation?  Like an entity that isn't penalized (through loss of share value for shareholders) for doing good like donating to charity or doing other foundation things, but also isn't limited in growth like nonprofits usually are?  (I just mean that nonprofits usually would have trouble justifying investing their money/cash for capital growth purposes.)  There's corporations that do more charity, of course, and there are nonprofits that are big, I'm just wondering if there could exist another entity or framework that would make it in a company's financial interests to benefit more than just their own internal balance sheets.

man I have a big

man I have a big todo list tomorrow.  I'm also going to bed at 3am so that's not a good start.  But I also slept until 1pm today so maybe I'm okay.  I love my logic!

Time for another update

Time for another update - first, my income's rolling averages, what I'll need to make per week from now on, and what I've earned each week:

Next, my all-important indicator. Flat is good, approaching 0 is better, crossing 0 is even better, and crossing the big line above that that you can't see yet is best.

Obviously a really slow week - second-slowest week ever (since I started). However, the next few weeks all look significantly better. Stay tuned...

So I'm making my first

So I'm making my first true "estimate" in freelancing. If I go over, I don't get paid for the extra hours I put in. If I go under, it's technically my option to claim all the hours or turn in less - if I turn in less, then my client will bill her client less, which spreads good feeling and loyalty all around. This feels like a cushy project and I feel like ideally I could get it done in 8-12 hours, but there's so much other stuff that can come up - so right now I'm thinking of bidding 24 hours. I'll sit on it overnight and maybe I'll bid 20 instead.

What's the project, you ask? It's to accept criteria from a form, decode the criteria and use it to select data from a database fitting that criteria, and then serve the resulting datasets back to the person in an automatically generated Excel document. They're also password-protected, and there's seven different kinds.

So the month is

So the month is starting to shape up. I will be really busy! In general, I like really busy, although I get worried it will be easy to drop or ignore thing that would normally be really important to me. I am keeping a lot of notes.

It's funny - for all the bizarre software and organizers we buy and use, sometimes it just doesn't do the job. Well, maybe I should just speak for myself. What I'm doing right now is just making a big list, then breaking it out by day. I completed everything I had on my list for today except for one item, plus a couple of things I had scheduled for Monday. Tomorrow I have a busy day and I hope I'll have the energy for it. I didn't really start to feel a lot better today despite eating good food and generally taking it easy. We'll see how I feel in the morning. The person I hope to be helping will be making Veggie Chili. That sure does sound good. Then tomorrow I also have to complete a project estimate for a client.

Okay, sleep time.

Things just got busy again.

Things just got busy again. That sure came out of nowhere. I have an estimate to complete by Friday, and another spec to review on Monday, so both of those projects (definitely the bigger one) are due by the end of May, which is also when I have to be moved by. And I got a $5 raise in rates. Yikes!

I'm sooo tired.  So why

I'm sooo tired.  So why don't I sleep?  I think I just love that feeling late at night, even when I'm tired, that nothing is waiting on me, and that I can access that space in my brain that has stuff pressing on it during other hours of the day.  Djam Karet, they call it - the hour that stretches.  I learned that from Harlan Ellison.  I can start to access longer-term goals again.  Sometimes when I'm about to fall asleep, I remember the stuff I really want to keep in mind - so maybe if I stay up when I would usually be about to fall asleep, I can both remember it and write it down.  I think that's why I stay awake.  To make sure I don't lose my grasp on myself.

Even though I'm getting unemployment,

Even though I'm getting unemployment, I've decided not to incorporate it into my spreadsheet. One, because it would be too complicated. Quit laughing. Two, because the point of the spreadsheet is to track how effectively freelancing works for me, not how close I get to going completely broke.

So what it will do for me is just help me pad my emergency fund and not go through it so fast. That's good.

I did learn that with my current client, that whether I work six hours or 26 hours, I'm making the exact same amount of money. That's tough to stomach. I can still do it, but the only motivations would be to stave off boredom, complete a project, and protect future unemployment benefits.

Top Anagrams for my name:Gig

Top Anagrams for my name:
Gig Riser, Coffee Strut
Coffee Triggers, I Rust
Coffee Urge: Stir Grits
Secrete Fruits For Gig
Fiercer Urges - Got Fist?
Fierce Frog, Gut Sister (sorry, tobi)
Fierce Ogre Guts First
Fierce Tiger, Soft Rugs
Fierce Tigress Got Fur
Groceries = Stiffer Gut
Gruff, Esoteric Tigers
Recruiter Offsets Gig
"Terrific Suggester Of"
Tofu Sect Fires Rigger
Fire 'Greg: Tit Focusser'
Secret Orgies Git Ruff

Guess who "A Gender-Morph Twit" is? hahahahaha A hint - it's the same person as "A Pre-Thrown Midget." And it's not the same person as "Enter A True Drama". (this entry has been updated.)

Feeling a bit better today.

Feeling a bit better today. Not really a cold, just feeling low-energy and run-down. Pasta should help.

I saw my new apartment

I saw my new apartment again today and like it even more.  Plus, even though it's Washington County, I'm still technically in Portland and not Beaverton, which makes me feel better status-wise.  

Unfortunately it might not save me as much money overall as I thought because it turns out my Cobra payments are going up over 50% to over four hundred dollars per month!!! That sucks!

So are there any nice women working at Nike out there that want a boyfriend/roommate? They have single-plus-one free-for-dependents health insurance there. Will sell my heart for health insurance...

Hooray! BloggerBot is back up!

Hooray! BloggerBot is back up!

Despite Beth's belief that having

Despite Beth's belief that having a cold plus not being able to find pants means it is probably best to stay home, I am going out to the grocery store wearing nice green khakis... and a ratty t-shirt, tube socks, and sneakers.  Please don't take pictures of me.

Evidently I can qualify for

Evidently I can qualify for a NINA home loan, where they don't need verifiable income, and where I'd only need to come up with 10% of the home value for a down payment, plus maybe another 5k closing costs.  If I chose to get a condo, it's possible, although I'd need to get some money from my retirement accounts under the 1st-time-home-buyer loophole to cover it.  But even then I'd basically be depleting my emergency fund which I'm currently living off of as I keep this freelancing thing going.  So.  I think that overall I am finding that buying a place isn't the best decision for me right now.  But I am encouraged since it means that home-buying is more possible for me as a freelancer than I originally thought it was.

I can't find my pants.

I can't find my pants.

Today is the "Day of

Today is the "Day of Silence" (details here) for Internet Radio.

boo, I have a cold.

boo, I have a cold.