Hunting The Muse

Writing helps me find my ideas. It's your choice to be subjected to it all.

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Curt Is:

Musician, Programmer, Polyglot, Rennaissance Man, Bon Vivante

(credits)

Hunting The Muse

Thursday, February 28, 2002
This contracting this is weird... it is so much in ebbs and flows that it makes me think more about rhythms of the world, if behaviours are partially ruled (or at least inspired) but things beyond ourselves. Last week it looked like I had four or five things going on. Then this week, it started to seem like all of them, except for the one I have going on right now, were all starting to wilt. Whether they were flaky, unresponsive, more uncommital, or whatever, they were all not quite as definite feeling.

So this morning I started thinking about what I'd have to do if they all dried up... but then they ALL started moving again. One called me back, another touched base, another firmed up... we'll see what comes of it. Right now I feel like I really only need to land one other in order for me to feel like I can support myself with this, although I have room for more than that. Keeping my fingers crossed...
(6:50 PM)
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Monday, February 25, 2002
man, some days you just wish you had a fast forward button for your life. I had to tell someone today that I wasn't interested in her after she had the courage to call me up and lay it all on the table, and right after that I learned that today was her birthday. That sucked. Then there are a couple of other things going on right now that are very much in progress, not with a feeling of resolution... one of them is very fun, so that's good. But the rest all put together are giving me a bit of a workout right now. Stuff in general is getting stirred up.
(7:35 PM)
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Saturday, February 23, 2002
Salon.com Arts & Entertainment | "Dragonfly" - a great quote about Kevin Costner's performance: "he plays grief as if he's perennially forgotten where he put his car keys".
(7:23 PM)
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I am reading through my last few blog entries, and boy. I must be on a really crude sexual kick lately. orange pubic hair, lingams, mouths, sexy backs.... I should start charting when my sense of humor starts to go more in that direction. I've heard rumors that guys also have a bit of a hormone cycle (other than "always on"). Never found it really worth paying attention to, though.
(1:01 AM)
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YES that was a joke. :) geez.
(12:32 AM)
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Friday, February 22, 2002
I just learned what "poontang" means. Just now. I am so out of the loop. It is the opposite of a lingam. Well actually, yoni is the opposite of lingam. poontang is the translation of yoni. And since lingam means "penis", I can only assume that poontang means "mouth".
(9:31 PM)
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Word of the day, "gruntle". Surprisingly, it doesn't mean the opposite of "disgruntled". It just means to grunt repeatedly.
(3:24 PM)
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How To Get Over A Break-Up (TheSpark.com) - the spark does it again. that video is priceless.
(1:06 PM)
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I have to admit that while Russia is one of my favorite places in the world and it breaks my heart to see such an emotional people suffer from years of being painted as a huge evil, their sour grapes bitching about the Olympics is really starting to piss me off.

I'm really surprised that they are protesting the women's figure skating results. In their defense, they say that it happened with canada, it should happen to them too, but they don't bring up any sort of reason why they think the result was unfair.

Hughes' performance was clearly better than Slutskaya's. And everyone knew going in that the top three finishers had their destinies in their own hands. If it was already accepted that the top three finishers in the short all could win gold by winning the short program, then it should be accepted that the 4th place finisher could easily finish ahead of the 2nd place finisher by skating better.

It's a mathematical argument and it is frustrating that the Russians aren't paying attention to it - they will only be embarrassed later when they calm down to find out they are being headstrong. Since Kwan was in first, she was the only one of the skaters that could have had a worse free skate program, second to Hughes, and skill ended up with a gold. This means that the other two skaters would have had to have outskated Hughes in the free skate in order to get the gold. Slutskaya was only two places ahead of Hughes after an event that only weighed half as much as the free, she skated worse than Hughes, and that was that.

So it seems to me that the only basis they'd have for protesting this is if they actually believe Slutskaya skated better than Hughes. Either that or they are all of a sudden protesting the actual scoring mechanics after they were agreed upon before the Olympics.

I do hope that cross-country thing works out, though - if it's possible for someone's hemoglobin/red-blood-cells level to be increased just from where they are in a menstrual cycle, then that's not fair.
(12:09 PM)
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Thursday, February 21, 2002
You know, I have never really paid much attention to which body parts I like on women more than other parts, but I swear, French figure skater Vanessa Gusmeroli has the sexiest back I've ever seen. When they close up on her face, she just looks like a pretty woman, but when she turns around and I see her back and shoulders, I'm all thinking marriage.
(9:38 PM)
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Wednesday, February 20, 2002
b-may - I know I have already linked to this site once on this page, but I just can't get over how much fun I am having reading this. He works security at the Olympics. You have to read it.
(6:45 PM)
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We've started posting our glob chapters (collaborative creative writing!) over at The Glob.
(6:41 PM)
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I just started really wanting one of those new imacs. The $1799 model. Not so much because of the style (I think it looks fat), but because of the specs. I had no idea I could get something with those specs for under two grand. a dvd-recordable/cd-rewriteable superdrive???? wowowowowow!
(1:48 PM)
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Monday, February 18, 2002
Some friends of mine are having a poem competition about Bjork. It started with:

i'm so bloody sick of bjork
her fans are pretentious dorks
if i get the chance
i'll kick them hard in the pants
and tear out her tongue with a fork

The response was:

when bjork sings it's transcendent
people who don't like her can go and get bent
i think they just can't concur
that they really want to sleep with her.

I had to join in:

Bjork's eyes in orgasm
Her pubic hair orange
A lie I don't tell
We screwed on my floor in 
July!

I figure any poem that figures out how to rhyme with "orange" has got to win.
(6:49 PM)
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Photostrip/Shrimps - Wow. This is odd.
(6:36 PM)
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Sunday, February 17, 2002
blogging from Pete's house right now... luckily it looks like my laptop is working again. We're trying to stay up to see the canadien's pairs-skating make-up gold medal ceremony but we're fading fast... not sure we're going to make it. :)

I actually earned computer money tonight for the first time in a while... not a lot, a low hourly rate, but fun work and a good contact.

We made Yumms tonight with more than two jars of Yumm sauce tonight. It's $4.19 a jar, I am going to have to learn how to make my own variation of it in bulk and freeze it. There's no way it will be as expensive as that.
(10:39 PM)
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I landed a new contract... it's for low money but it sounds like fun and I'll be filling up some time... my first contract! And I went to bed too late and I have to get up for choir and I'm running late and I'M REALLY TIRED.
(7:53 AM)
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Saturday, February 16, 2002
b-may - this guy is working security at the olympics and is blogging it. it's friggin hysterical. (courtesy of ev)
(7:58 PM)
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Judge's tainted vote exposes deal-making - I wish there were more articles like this one. Just tell me the facts, lay them out. Skip all the stupid positioning, sound bites, accusations, and conjecture. Good journalism here.
(3:30 PM)
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Just switched php templating systems, and I love the one I found... called "Smarty". It is awesome. For my very dynamic todolist application, the old templating system required EIGHT subtemplates and all sorts of horrible redudant variable assignations to assemble one page. This required one template, one include file, and it saved me over fifty lines out of my 250 line php script. Hooray!

Now I am free to start engineering my new enrollment system - this was "proof of concept", really. Maybe by the end of the weekend I'll be really encouraged. I'm also starting to think of a domain name for the project.

Now I have to go to bed... rehearsal at 9am for our ee cummings choir performance. woo!
(12:56 AM)
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My own website is not accessible to me due to a DOS attack launched against museworld.com's providor. Since my local ISP uses uunet, my webhost is now filtering me out from viewing MY OWN WEBSITE. However, strangely enough I can probably still post to this site via blogger if blogger.com does not use uunet. So I can post.... but I can't see!
(12:53 AM)
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Thursday, February 14, 2002
Slashdot | Kathleen Fent Read this Story - aww! This was posted on slashdot's front page by slashdot's founder. :)
(11:48 AM)
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This google search thing is so funny. It's really indexing my site. I just have to wonder, if I type "pamela anderson naked" will I start getting pounded with hits in a few days?
(3:47 AM)
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Wednesday, February 13, 2002
Someone just searched for "stupid curt" on google and came up with my page.

Was that you, Harmony?
(12:12 PM)
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Well, I confirmed that TemplatePower does pretty much everything I need it to do... it's a bit too simple, which makes the templates a bit too complicated, but that's all right. Porting my todolist application to templates definitely put it through its paces, since that little bugger has some pretty complicated dynamic behaviour in it.

I think I got sidetracked a bit though - so I need to get back to my enrollment system. I think I'm set for doing some work on that tomorrow. I've got choir tomorrow so I won't be able to do a lot of work on it, but hopefully I can have a bit of a tailormade enrollment system going by the end of tomorrow night.

Had fun with the glob today - we have started a bizarre story about time traveling in the old west. After discussing a lot about time travel paradoxes, I realized how helpful thinking about time travel is towards understanding multi-threaded programming techniques. When we started talking about how changing the past spawns a new alternate timeline, and wondering how to communicate between and account for all the timelines, it was just like how I felt reading my java thread programming book.

Now off to bed... need to get to sleep soon so I can continue to get my schedule back on track again. Knocked an hour off of my nocturnalness last night, so it's time to keep that trend going.
(1:48 AM)
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Tuesday, February 12, 2002
Here's a sentence I just wrote to The Glob, my new creative writing mailing list, totally out of context:

"That might upset the caretaker of the space-time continuum, which would be amusing, but it's just a bunch of spawning."

I can't tell you how pleased I am with that sentence.
(6:35 PM)
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I downloaded and installed some php templating code today. It's not as full-featured as the templating sytem I used for my java programming, but it seems to get the job done. The most frustrating thing about php is that there isn't really a central source to find out where the really good code is. Everything is scattered to the winds and I'm not certain I've found the php guru hangout place. I'm using TemplatePower for php templating. Most libraries I see out there for php are for php3 and are broken on php4. It's weird.

What I really want is a templating system that allows you to put php in the templates. Which sounds kind of odd since that is what php is. But while I hate having html in the same file as my more complex php code, there's still the occasional time where I want to include different subtemplates depending on the situation, or not at all.
(2:13 AM)
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Monday, February 11, 2002
Ok that is just weird. Someone just searched for "abc enterprises pizza" and came up with my webpage. I swear I just made up the company name because I didn't remember the real one. Maybe the human race is just a bunch of duplicates, with the duplicate people just one too many degrees away for us to notice.
(1:36 PM)
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I had a dream last night that my blog got slashdotted. It was horrible.
(12:50 PM)
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Sunday, February 10, 2002
Well, I just - fairly painlessly - accomplished a major database upgrade and also got the beginnings of an enrollment system working. Yay me.
(1:43 AM)
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Saturday, February 09, 2002
Reading a really funny series of comments over on slashdot about spam. My favorite idea so far is to have my public email address on my webpage be the browsing user's ip address at my domain - then when I get spam, I would know what IP address the offending spider came from.

But it made me start thinking of other creative ways of dealing with annoying marketing. One time in college, my roommate and I got one of those flyers that said "You have won something or other! Please call this number and ask for 'Pat'!" So you'd call, ask for Pat, the drone would say 'Pat is not available, but I can help you!' and then they'd try to sell you something. We had great fun with that one. First we just tried interrupting continually and insisting that the letter said we had to talk to PAT, until the person on the other end got mad. Then we'd just call and start screaming. No words, just screaming. Then we sang them a song. Then we cried. The one that was the most fun went like this:

"ABC Enterprises, are you the recipient of a prize notification?"

"Uh... yeah, hey, did someone there order a pizza?"

"Pardon?"

"We've got a pizza here... for Joshua at ABC Enterprises... he left this number. We have a question about the toppings."

"I'm sorry, I don't know a Joshua."

"Look, we're just out the door to deliver it. He said he was in the same big room there as everyone else. Could you check for me?"

"Well... I don't think..."

"Come on, it's quite a few pizzas and we can't lose this order. Just stand up and call out for Joshua."

We were able to carry that on for a while - the poor lady actually stood up and yelled out "Joshua?" a few times. We then tried to act like we were radio DJs playing a prank until we just started laughing too hard, so we hung up. After that my roommate just put the number on his modem's autodial. I don't tend to get too many of those "call our 1-800 number" sales letters anymore so I think the companies must have eventually figured out that it was a bad idea.

As far as regular telemarketers, as in the ones who call you, the best approach I've found so far is to say, "I'm sorry, I'm drunk right now." That one isn't written into their scripts so they don't know how to handle it.
(8:24 PM)
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Having fun with my little dynamic-image experiment. That's a javascript command that dynamically generates both an image and an image map. It's kind of silly because the goal was to keep folks from having to type in the html for an image map, but they'll still have to type in the html for the href to the script. Oh well - at least it enables me to dynamically adjust the interior regions of the image map.

So far I've figured out how to save calculations in the session, issue and read session cookies from the person's browser, and pass on other data through query string arguments. I have plenty of other idea that should be fun, but it looks like first I have to create a nice, solid piece of enrollment software, which sounds kind of boring. logins, passwords, session and permanent cookies, session ids in the query string versus in cookies, password storing issues like md5, how to handle when people have logged in before but need to again, etc, etc. Sounds tedious to me. I've found a couple of libraries that might give me a head start, but it still sounds tedious.

But after that, things sound fun. What I do need to find, however, is someone with some good photoshop skills that can supply me with graphic ingredients that can be assembled to make a larger, pleasing picture.

Watch this space...
(2:45 AM)
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Thursday, February 07, 2002
Yes it worked! Although I really messed up blogger.com's editing page (on my browser) for a moment by not closing my script tag properly... :)
(11:08 PM)
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Here is a test -

did it work?
(11:07 PM)
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Shift.com - The New New Economy - Wow. I'd love to be a bank.
(4:49 PM)
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Wednesday, February 06, 2002
I've been thinking a lot about laziness. What it means, etc. Laziness is such a weird concept, because when you're lazy, you're not accomplishing much, but it's with the added judgement that you should be accomplishing more. When someone tells you you are lazy, they are judging against you in a sense. And what's funny about that is if you really should be accomplishing more, being called lazy doesn't exactly make it easier. It's a guilt-ridden concept.

So, I wonder, am I being lazy? Well, what does that question imply... am I accomplishing "enough"? Whose rules or standards to I use to benchmark that? Should I be accomplishing more? I already know that "should" is a stupid word... it's more just about objectives and requirements. Do I have an objective that I am in danger of missing by not fulfilling requirements? That's what a project manager would ask. :)

Or maybe being lazy means something else. Am I not feeling able to accomplish as much as I would like? Am I unfulfilled about my life and am I taking steps to improve it?

Well, there's the rub. Maybe I'm not. And maybe someone else more mean than I am would call me lazy for not doing so. But it isn't laziness, I don't think. It's something else. At least, it wouldn't really help my purposes to look at myself as lazy. It'd just get in the way.
(3:40 PM)
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Tuesday, February 05, 2002
what is it about italian tomato sauce that reminds me of puke? of stomach acid? is it the garlic?
(4:45 PM)
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Monday, February 04, 2002
I love talking to Harmony. We just talked for fifteen minutes about what a masturbating mime would be like.
(11:34 PM)
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Saturday, February 02, 2002
Hooray! The Glob lives again! Website might launch soon. :)
(12:02 AM)
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Friday, February 01, 2002
Salon.com News | Yes, the Patriots can beat the Rams! - "...the Rams are built for speed, not power. Which is to say that the Rams are a bunch of flaming homosexuals. Well, not really. But, you know, sort of."

The only pre-super-bowl news coverage I will actually enjoy.
(8:32 PM)
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Not a bad day today. I applied for work at Intel, I found another possible freelance opportunity or two, I had a great dinner with a cool new friend (well, it's a couple months old but it's only the second time I've seen her), and did a tiny bit of hacking. Mainly just that I got vncserver working again on my other box (bizarre Xauth ssh tunneling bug), and did a bit more work on the glob's new website. I'm still considering how to open up ftp on my box without having a major security risk. Oh, and I supposedly earned some money by writing a review for Matt's site. ;-)

Not sure what to do tomorrow. I might get to go see a really cool movie, Brotherhood Of The Wolves. If I can think of another couple of freelancing opportunities, that would make me feel good. I'd feel good about the weekend then.

Supposed to be sunny tomorrow!!!
(1:06 AM)
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