Just spent a few hours reconstructing the blog data, which had become corrupted when I ran out of host space a few weeks ago in the midst of all that Alaska-ness. (As an aside, that’s why all months of entries prior to Jaunary 2006 had suddenly dropped off the face of the earth.)

The sick thing is that if Greymatter loses its entry count for any reason, rather than totaling up the number of existing .cgi entry files in the archives directory and beginning in sequence from there, it just starts over again at #1 (that’s right, “one”) and counts upward, overwriting old data as you add new entries.

Luckily, I had some backups, and was able to cycle the new entries to later sequence numbers and edit the index files. Unfortunately, the formats for things like gm-counter.cgi are not documented anywhere that I can tell, so unless you feel like crawling through a shit ton of perl, you just get to give it your best shot, which I’ve done.

If this entry doesn’t overwrite #1, but instead turns up as #585, then the restoration work has been successful.

I’m tempted to say “time to replace Greymatter,” but I just love Greymatter too much, it’s so old school and so easy to hack into various different frameworks, formats, and structures using only your own elbow grease and a pile of HTML/CSS. See here or recall the old Defarge site, for example.

In case anyone remembers it.

Ever.

etc.

—

Oh yeah, and some things on the site are getting updated for 2006, too, including a new page that will sell my editorial services to the unsuspecting buying public — hopefully.

Downness is hitting me like a heavyweight boxer today. It’s proving difficult to get anything done, as I just want to sulk. Still, there are time-sensitive things that demand my attention and that have been left on the back burner too long already.

I need to have a less crowded life. Right now I would trade everything just to be free of debt, poor with a trade, living in the third world with a wife and kids.

And just like that, with no fanfare and almost by stealth or sleight-of-hand, she went from having just gone for an interview… to simply having left, indefinitely. More indefinitely than ever before. I suppose there’s a message in there somewhere.

I suppose school is the thing at this point. If that doesn’t happen, things will be very, very bleak indeed.

i just

give up

—

i’m a fool to do it all over again, yet here it is, happening all over again. how many times in my life do i have to do such things before i learn? 10? 100?

the time for ideallism — is over.

—

worst wishes to all those who aren’t standing up for me; i have no need of such “help.”

everyone else has spent a lifetime taking care of themselves. it is high time that i do the same.

—

modernity: i join you now.

*** WHAT HE SAID *** <<-- click!
A close second is Fisk (emphasis mine):

” Iran now has a clerical government again. So, to all intents and purposes, does Iraq (which was not supposed to end up with a democratically elected clerical administration, but that’s what happens when you topple dictators). In Egypt, the Muslim Brotherhood won 20 per cent of the seats in the recent parliamentary elections. Now we have Hamas in charge of “Palestine”. There’s a message here, isn’t there? That America’s policies–“regime change” in the Middle East–are not achieving their ends. These millions of voters were preferring Islam to the corrupt regimes which we imposed on them.“

Also check out this piece, which may help to explain to a lot of confused people just why Saddam’s toppling was such a stupid idea — in doing it, we removed the one stable, secular component of the entire region.

It’s tough to have anything other than local (to your immediate area, i.e. workplace, apartment, etc.) friends or indeed relationships in modernity. That’s nothing new, it’s always been that way, we just seem these days to have the expectation (thanks to cell phones, email, etc.) that long-distance is a great idea.

It isn’t. Comparing the hours-of-every-day, every-day-this-week friendships of locality with remote friendships shows just how deep the imbalance is. The odd phone call, which disrupts all activity, or the odd email, which requires that one sit down and type a response, is not up to the task.

Everyone wants to be friends regardless of distance, but they don’t want you to only call them when you’re struggling in life — this tends to make feel put upon. They also don’t want you to avoid making contact for prolonged periods — even if for a very long time you’re doing nothing but struggling and would thus have little to contribute to conversation other than details about, or perspectives that proceed from, the aforementioned struggle. And finally, they also get upset if you are contrived or not completely genuine — especially if they know you’re struggling.

These things do not go together in remote relationships that are constrained by time. When people are together physically, at home or at the workplace, the struggle becomes an artifact of the environment, not a centerpiece for communication, and personalities and preferences can continue to shine through sheer force of time spent together. Not so with communication “episodes” as necessitated by modern communication, in which dialogue must be prioritized according to the third rule above.

So if you’re having a tough stretch:

– Call and be sad and you’ll hear “You only call me when you’re sad!”
– Don’t call because you’re mostly sad and you’ll hear “You never call me!”
– Call and play happy and you’ll hear “You’re not being real with me!”

And in the end you’ll always hear (and probably think about others as well):

“Why don’t you just cheer the f*ck up? You never call me and when you do, you’re either sad or you’re preoccupied and just pretending to listen and either way you’re a rotten conversationalist. I’m tired of being friends with you.”

Add to this the complexity of trying to actually time things so that you can both take a moment for a phone call (or are in a position to place or receive one) at the same time or place, and add to it your bills, your living arrangements, you job, and everything else that’s stressing you out to worry about. Ultimately you’ll bitch about the general brokenness of the arrangement to those people who are actually sitting beside you without giving it a second thought, and they’ll listen without giving it a second thought, because you’re both there already anyway as you each grapple with your own lives, and conversation of any kind is better than silence when face-to-face.

It occurs to me that I haven’t really made any progress in my life at all for a number of years now. I have more degrees than I did before, yes, and I’ve seen more of the country and of the world, and I’ve done a few more things, but I’m not actually any closer to doing anything that I want to do, and at a time when I’ve got the smallest social network I’ve ever had. I suppose moving all over the place all the time and having no money to spend on entertainment will do that to a person.

—

My mind moves too quickly anymore; I can see an entire logical argument through from beginning to end in just a few moments, but there are too many things in the thread to articulate, and if I try to slow things down and take the cognitive branches necessary to enunciate every component of the argument, I lose the logical thread.

So instead, I wind up making simplistic statements that (one hopes) have a deeper intuitive foundation, such as: The best reason never to kill yourself is to spite all of those people who complain about those who kill themselves. I’m starting to really hate judgmental people who call everyone else whiny or who try to analyze-from-a-distance everyone else’s problems while they have so many of their own that nobody can count them.

—

It’s a tough week or two. It’s a tough month. I still have to call a few friends and tell them that actually I haven’t made it out of Salt Lake City and likely won’t until fall. It’s eleven in the morning and I’m not employed and I have bills and laundry, but all I want to do is curl up into a ball and drink.

That or overthrow the government and despotically have hundreds of thousands of people executed just for fun.

My internal censor still works, that sentence was originally much more provocative. I suppose that means that I’m still sane, or at least that I’m still onboard with the social contract — enough to not be an obvious risk yet.

Everything old is new again. Same old drag, brand new place. I am tired. Not since 2003 have I had an ongoing, long-term since of well-being, that lack of anything to serious worry about of which happiness is really composed. I miss it.

doing? what am i thinking? and what should i do about it?

i have never learned a single lesson.

—

omigod i wanna smoke

—

So I keep reaching this conclusion recently, sometimes at inopportune times: I’ve lost being alive. “Meaning what?” you ask, and you’re justified, sure. The thing is, I know what it means to be alive. i’ve been alive. I’ve tasted it. I’ve tasted it on desert rocks in Moab and at 110 miles per hour on Donner Pass and on Greyhound busses on the great plains and standing in BART stations in Berkeley and walking through O’Hare airport in Chicago.

It’s a flavor, it’s a resource, it’s like breathing or feeling. You stand outside in zero degrees and you open your mouth and swallow up the moon and it tastes like tomorrow and yesterday all rolled into one and you know you’re alive.

Only I’m not right now. I’ve lost it again. I get it back and then I lose it; it’s a pattern. I hate having lost it. I have to be alive again. I have to. I have to figure out what’s next and what’s needed and what’s what and what’s not and I have to paint everything the perfect color to ride the rainroad straight through to mortality.

Time to wake up. Wake up. WAKEUP! Motofokkon!

sucks

“But if your entire life, you family — your friends — were there, why did you leave?” she asked.

“Because I was not a rich man,” he said, looking out to sea, to some point far beyond the horizon, “and I did not want to be a rich man. And in America, that is a crime — a very serious crime.”

dear god life is strange

—

things learned today:

– students today are too lazy to even begin papers, they’d rather pay you to write them
– photos are not as compelling as one might think
– computers suck time out of the universe
– gin is my favorite spirit after all
– nearly anyone can work with children
– i can bake
– i really do want to go back to chicago

—

i can’t wait until i’m shooting again

—

what the fuck is wrong with congress?
more to the point, what the fuck is wrong with the voting public?

—

do we have to kill god all over again?! jesus!

times change
they always do
gin

Ain’t no more bubble in my squeak, yo.

Sitting here late at night by myself reading posts on hardware sites and Slashdot, it occurs to me once again that I have a lot of specialized oldschool technology knowledge that very few people on Earth still have, and that will not even exist anecdotally for very much longer.

A few people have encouraged me to write about it, and sometimes I really feel as though I ought to, but once again I can’t really figure out (at least, not yet) just how to make something interesting out of it.

Earlier today, too, I thought it might be interesting to start a business called “Old Skool Technoputers” with the slogan that “we’ll make any old mini go, any old tape, disk, or punchcard flow,” but it occurs to me that carrying around 8″ floppy drives, 200lb hard drive platter stacks, and drawers full of solder spools and static DRAM chips is not what I want to do for the rest of my life.

It’s odd to be such a relic and have few people even realize it. It’s like having lived another life before the one you’re leading…

I wish I knew how many jobs spammers have cost me. 🙁