Journal Archives - July, 2000

9/2007: New poetry
12/2006: TTU Wiki!
8/2006: Baxil Standard Time returns!

Around
the Site

Home
About Us
Copyright
Old Journal
News Archives
Draconity
Edinburgh
Hiking
TTU Stories
TTU Wiki
Art
Humor
Miscellaneous
Personal

---

Site Map
Ley Lines
Forum (gone)
Contact Us

July 1, 2K ... Yay! A new month. New news. That wasn't clever, but it's 3 in the morning, and I don't have to be.

I went to the Seattle Dragons' beach luau today. Jia and I arrived about three hours late, which means that the party was just getting good. The sun came out about 4 p.m., and we got in some last-minute Frisbee and enjoyed some barbecue and a song about being evil. I heartily recommend regional dragon gathers. They kick all sorts of arse.

I'm working on the Edinburgh Lectures on Mental Science -- the update is almost done; most of what's involved is just translating the images from a black background to a white background. (Can't have the site look the same EVERYWHERE, after all.) I'm too tired to upload them tonight, but they'll be up soon.

In other news, holiday pay is cool.

July 2, 2K ... Funny how I feel obligated to keep this current, even though the site isn't even officially up yet. I think I'm just trying to get myself into the habit of updating the page daily. Which is good.

Sadly, the actual updates have been a bit slow. I goofed off today, and I also need to move my computer over to the apartment tonight. Fortunately, I've got a four-day weekend; stuff will happen.

July 4, 2K (about 4 A.M.) ... Good things happened today in my life. For instance, I got a table. Tables are good. Now I have furniture in my room. Yay! I spent all day setting up the table and then setting up my computers on the table, along with peripherals and the obligatory rat's nest. Now it's 4 AM and I'm glad that I won't have to go through that again for a while.

Plus, I got to watch my roommate Misty's weasels play. They're really ferrets, but we all call them weasels. Mostly to aggravate her, I guess. ;) Anyway, the weasels -- ferrets -- were running around outside of the cage, making happy little chirpy noises, and occasionally sneezing with a weird sound like they were attacking a hand air pump. And they were poinging! Pete Abrams makes a really big deal of Kiki the Ferret going "Poing!" -- but ferrets really do do that! When they're excited, or having feisty little play fights with their comrades, they arch their back and hop sideways. It's much better seen than described. And very endearing.

Due to computer move-age, no work got done on the site today. But now that all of my computers are bax together, in my room no less, I've got a much better chance of being able to make massive update changes when I get up this morning.

Happy Independence Day.

July 5, 2K ... I'd just like to say that "Chicken Run" is a good movie.

July 6, 2K ... Still depressingly few site updates. Edinburgh is in a state of limbo which I could fix with a mere half hour free on my home computer, but I've been trying to use my time recently to catch up on e-mail instead of add content. Serves me right. Or something.

On the other paw, I'm soliciting opinions for the Draconity FAQ overhaul, which is going to be a major major project. (I just checked this morning and realized that it's going on two years since I made major changes to it. Where has my life gone?!) Fortunately, my move to Tomorrowlands is a good impetus to freshen everything; with the site redesign, I have to edit every page anyway (if only to add the sidebars and footers), so why not take the extra time and brush up the content too?

Oh, and Tomorrowlands e-mail is working. Yay! So, if you're actually reading this (I still haven't officially opened the site, but the URL has slipped out to a few places), please mail me and let me know that my diligent news updating is not for naught.

July 8, 2K ... While I'm finishing a few site updates, and before I upload them and later go off at length about what's been done, I'd like to share something with you.

"It's a haiku!" "It's a real Java method!" "It's a haiku!" "It's a real Java method!" "Calm down, you two, nothing is BOTH a haiku AND a real Java method!" (w/ apologies to SNL.)

Granted, if you insert it into your Java code and call it, it will create an infinite loop which will very slowly crash your computer, since none of the created boolean variables will ever go out of scope, and therefore will never be garbage-collected. But that fits the tone of the piece rather well, don't you think?

Javaiku

public void nothing() {
    boolean bored = true;    //  <-- (Pronounce "=" as "equals".)
    do { nothing() } while (bored);
}

July 9, 2K (late night) ... EDINBURGH IS UP!! EDINBURGH IS UP!!!

Yeah, I've got the Site Map done, too (at least, it is also up, and reflects the current status of Tomorrowlands accurately), but EDINBURGH IS UP!! And I even cleaned it up, fixed some typos, and put the chapters into HTML instead of plain text! *AND* I wrote some entirely new content -- a quick analysis of the book!

If the rest of the site updates go like this, Tomorrowlands is going to seriously rock. (It'll also be ready for its grand opening in, oh, March 2001, but let's ignore that for a moment ...)

I'd like to thank me for all my hard work. Me has been fantastic. You have been, too, because you're here to read this, thus justifying me's existence in some small way. ];=8)

Oh, and I just realized I still think it's the 7th for some reason. So all today's page update times are going to be off by two days. Oops. You won't tell anyone, right?

July 11, 2K ... One of the most heartbreaking things in existence is when you get this really, really fantastic idea which you just can't do anything with because you've already committed yourself to too much.

Sometimes the idea is just so fantastic that you have to shout "Damn the torpedoes!" and do it anyway. Such a beast is the TRC. But it's going to be a lot of work, both in terms of content creation and in terms of PERL scripting ... and I'm less than one-third done with transferring the rest of my site over to Tomorrowlands. Every page I generate, every update I make, means the rest of the site is put off that much longer. *sigh* Did I say "March 2001" as a release date? Was I being optimistic?

"But ... the TRC?" you ask. "What is the TRC?" You will find out, in due time. And I'll even give you a hint: No, the "T" doesn't stand for Tomorrowlands.

Enjoy the wait. ;-)

July 12, 2K ... It finally struck me this morning that I'm going to be leaving for the Denver Dragon Gather in a week. Ack. So much to do before then ...

I doubt that I'll be able to provide consistent Tomorrowlands updates during the time I'm gone. But I'll deal with that as the time comes. For now, I just get to stress a lot about how to spend my limited time before leaving.

If it were just Tomorrowlands, I wouldn't even flinch. But I've got a project at work to finish up; I have to finish toasting Soup2K and create the album jacket; I have to pack for the trip ... and then I have to pack the rest of my stuff, because we're MOVING!!! AAAIEE!!

It never rains but it pours, I guess ...

July 12, 2K Part II ...
<prose>
I was out walking behind the Wildtangent building today, and I had an epiphany: As much as I would enjoy the chance to live out in the wilderness as a dragon in true form, I would miss civilization if it were gone.

I'm not saying I'd miss everything about human life. I would not miss the impersonal, the desecrations of space. I could go my entire life without seeing another parking lot. I would not miss stadiums (except as examples of architecture, best admired when empty). But I would miss those things which connect human lives, with each other, with their world: I would miss dirt roads, the gentle washboarding (and that's romanticizing, I know, but they're a lot neater at walking pace) of tire tracks, the ephemeral impressions of footprints. I would miss soccer fields and city parks. I would miss hand-written postcards. I would not miss motorboats; I would miss sailboats. Ironically enough, I would miss computers. They are abstractive to a greater degree than any of the "evils" listed above, but they have enabled me to be myself in a way that no parking lot ever could, and in that abstraction they have therefore allowed me to connect deeply with life.

I also noticed that I can see Mount Rainier from where I work. A haunting image, that mountain, framed between two light poles, hanging over the empty softball field like some spiritual referee.
</prose>

July 13, 2K ... I spent an hour or two today looking up Arthurian legends on the Web. There's a specific reason I was trying to find out more about the "Fisher King," which relates in some nebulous way to some future plans I have for a story arc in Tomorrowlands. Be that as it may, it's a very odd feeling to find a page chock-full of information about the origins and connections of a single story ... in four or five different cultural backgrounds.

Centuries of writers have thrown in their own takes on the subject. Even today, the story grows, morphs -- keeping pace with the culture that spawned it, watched it grow, and then left home for college and put the baby in care of its grandmother. (Pardon my cluttered metaphors here.)

But the youngling myth of the Fisher King first set down in the days of Mallory's Le Mort D'Arthur is recognizable in today's full-grown and robust legends (like Matt Wagner's Mage: The Hero Defined). It has grown, but it has not changed -- it still captivates us, commands our attention, invites comparison and analysis, then shrugs them off and runs, laughing, to pace us into the future. Considering that we can't even agree on its past, this is a pretty spectacular feat, one worthy of the guardian of the Grail.

Meanwhile, I'm staring at a stack of papers on my desk. I have to sign up for health insurance. My choice is clear-cut: Regence Care or Regence Blue Shield? There are multiple pages comparing the benefits of the HMO-15/100 and the PPO-100/90/60/15 in nauseating and abstract detail. The numbers on the charts are enough to make me ill (I've been putting this off for two weeks) ... which, I suppose, serves their ultimate purpose.

And I turn from the computer with a small tinge of regret, pick up my pen, and wonder depressedly: Which is ultimately more real, the Fisher King or my health insurance?

July 15, 2K ... My computer broke today. I hauled it into the local Macintosh computer store (thank goodness for university districts!) and found out that its aging battery had just given out. Yep, computers have batteries; what do you think keeps the internal clock correct when you unplug it to move it to the other side of the room?

The repair cost me $25. It's the first repair of anything ever that I've had done professionally ($5 of that $25 was labor) and that I've been able to pay with cash-on-hand. That's a good feeling.

Unfortunately, I kind of wasted the afternoon getting the computer fixed. I'm back up now, but I'm doing a lot of moving and soup2K work, both of which must be done before I leave for the Denver Dragon Gather. So webpage updates may be a long while in coming. (sigh)

July 18, 2K ... I've been scrambling like mad to move into the new house, but the worst is finally behind me.

I've also been scrambling like mad to finish my current project at work, so that I can run it into QA while I'm gone, but the worst is finally behind me.

And tomorrow morning I'm leaving for the Denver Dragon Gather. See you all in two weeks.

July 31, 2K ... I'm bax from the Denver Dragon Gather! It was very fun. I am exhausted. I am still trying to catch up on my e-mail, let alone actually get productive web work done.

This is more or less a note to let y'all know that things are up and running again. I'll try to get plenty of content up in early August.

On a total side note ... I hate it when I create a puzzle, mislay the original paperwork, and then forget what the solution was supposed to be. Those damn columns on Millennium Shrine (Alfandria MUCK, in my area; 'tport mil' and then wander one room north and east; 'look letters') are going to haunt me for days now.