February 2003 Archives

The site was shut down because we had found PsyBNC running, again, on the account and after several analysis we have found that all your php scripts are vunerable. We have noticed that through your scripts, people and uploading software to your account and even executing commands.

i'm quite sick, have two jobs both of which i have intense workloads at, to go to today. and i can only barely breathe.

you know? some days i hate my fucking life.

i don't know why surreally's been down, or for how long, dot net and org are fine but dot com is missing.

should have had them moved by now, but ... the task of getting everyone notified and all, well, i put it off. not anymore though.

also the new servers have protections against bots -- and bots are still a problem, i guess not everyone did the mt-sanitize, and that leaves the comment text boxes like huge holes in the server.

that may be why it's not running, it could be more bots.

cPanel has things that monitor for bots and shut them down. the old hosts, well, they don't have that, and so they cutoff my ftp access every time there's a bot. this makes NO FUCKING SENSE and is also partly the reason i don't get things moved on time, i have to argue for my passwords back. like cutting off my password is going to ... do what? whatever. most of the time, lately, i have no password access. fun stuff, eh?

i'm trying to find out what's wrong.

wonder woman wins! woohoo!

ok. and now for a silly question, based on a song i was listening to in my car today...

what was silver blue and gold? color of the sky, right. and the karma chameleon was red gold and green. makes sense.

the day behind held moments of surprising triumph, more than enough. surprising because it should have been about screwuppage and shit like that. but no. things gelled, they coalesced, they ... fell together quite by accident generally on the 17th blind bumbling try, so all that was really required was an excess of trying. this, this i possibly can do, and continue to.

dizzy and disinclined to sleep but not nearly as much hostility towards the concept as last night so flailing away at the last few excuses between me and trying. not sitting upright not trying, but lying down quiet darkness willing rather than willful.

ok, just not yet. intentions are good though, yes?

i could turn my eyes on you and you wouldn't know what hit. i could have powers. there could be differences. you could know, or begin to.

think i almost wrote something last afternoon. almost.

you just never fucking know, is all.

and you know what? the other night someone suggested i was having a nervous breakdown and i was all no no fine fine. and while i now admit i ... ahhhhh ... er ... was ... not entirely accurate, i must now asseverate that it is in fact a very calm and reasonable breakdown, and that it was an appropriate choice in these circumstances, not the only alternative, however the others were less amusing.

i'm underground with the moles, digging holes.

and in ways i take exception to the breakdown allegations, well i do now as oppsed to, you know, what i just said, and my reasoning is based on recognizing that what's been happening has in fact been an existential crisis of sorts which you can not tell me is some sort of diagnosable mental whatever. in fact if it were contagious i'd urge you to come over here, closer, share this discovery with me and besides i have some answers already, they are here on the tip of my tongue waiting to be written on skin.

in me i have whimsy where i get confused between what could have been in a different world and what i still believe might in the one i'm in now. can you feel the presence of doubt? that's new, you know. couldn't pinpoint the first time a daydream faltered on a gentle suggestion that i let this go now, it's time and for the first time here is this irrevocable barrier between me and the dream, no path around the reasons it's a dream in the first place, and ...

i am not quite ready for the letting go. and i am not even going to try to explain how i managed to free-associate out of a breakdown and into the entirely unrelated ongoing saga of my vivid imagination's recent foray into serious windmill-tilting. as far as the digression, i will tell you i let it happen, probably there is some sort of hope involved in this almost dangerous openness? it could be that i see your hand in my mind, with mine almost not quite touching and the energy easily passing through the air and if this never happens (here are the doubts) will you ever wonder what happens next?

you know the feeling strolling outside into the midsummer sun wearing exactly nothing, the way the air discovers you and teaches you the difference between being unclothed, and being naked, things your own body didn't even know? it's quite enlightening, but it is not what happens next. what happens after the first touch and until the hunger subsides isn't something i can explain, as it happens in a language of breath and taste and otherwise unspoken things except for names and please and fuck and when you think you are spent i ... have said too much already.

i'm fine. goodness, yes. doesn't matter what's actually possible, only that i cannot yet believe this isn't.

out there, three twelve in the am, 'twas clear and quite dark, i wonder now if the streetlight was out? the storm had passed and left its world gleaming in repose. me? eh.

i was in the middle of remembering santa cruz nineteen seventy nine, maybe eighty, green dodge challenger, green heineken bottles, sammy hagar singing there's a crack in the world, which i found quite profound at the time.

i am as tired as i've ever been but won't sleep till i finish ftping this thing here and change the settings and wrapping a weblog around this URL. alice cooper is singing eighteen in my head so i set jackson browne in after him, and all's, well, very fucking weird.

i'm bored with myself.

oh, right -- there was something else. mm. it was like, oh yeah, i stole this design from myself and i wasn't even done, is that fucking feckless or what?

thought so.

so. yeah, i know about the plans to do something other than obsessively mess with kazaa this weekend but you know how that sort of thing goes. in any case, this left me, as of this morning, in a mad mad hurry-rush with a week ahead of me that ... put it this way, i'll be about full time at both jobs this week. which is fine. but i had to think of my sanity right? stop laughing, i still have a little.

and i kept thinking about everyone who recommended a cd player with a car kit. now i have a portable cd player. well, two - and they both have anti-shock protection which i have found works just fine if you stand absolutely still holding the player at the right angle, they seem to be able to handle the shock of existence pretty well, but they don't like being jiggled around. so.

i went to bestbuy.com and searched and discovered that a very backwards outfit called audiophase makes these clever little cd/mp3/cdrw reading disk players with car kits for fifty bucks. well there you go. not that i could afford it but after finding out my computer won't even allow more than the memory i have, well, i had to spend that money i didn't have on something else i didn't really need. and so, i determined that i would purchase the audiophase.

i left work at 8PM in some of the wildest rain i've ever seen. it was epic. i think i went about fifty most of the way, forty down the bigass hill, and it was really rather thrilling. coming through oxnard i called chris to tell him of my intentions re: fifty bucks i didn't have, and he grumbled but not hard enough to prevent any expenditures.

so i procured the device, had the customer service dude open the package for me, and went to try it out. well. the adapter was ... bizarre. wouldn't stay in the cigarette lighters, and then the little metal dealy at the end fell off. nevermind, i can take it back some other time, i figure, i have batteries in my old cd player. well i fuss with it and fuss with it and it won't play. store's closed by now, me still trying to get the damn thing to play. well. as soon as i figured out that "off" equals "on", i was fine. music was playing! and so i turned on the car, or rather, tried. yeah. mmhmm. dead battery. however at that moment a guy was getting into a truck nearby, and he helped. by now it's ... well, by my car clock, one in the morning but anyway - by the time i get to the driveway, the batteries from my old cd player die. fine.

got several miles before the cops started doing the weaving to slow everyone down thingy, so that no one would run into the folks who forgot rain is wet and wet is slippery. i could have got off the freeway, but by this time i'm caught up in the adventure and ... curious and ... yeah, yeah, i'm ... yeah.

so i finally get home ... what, 10:30? after stopping for beer and batteries, because at this point, i need both.

for a flimsy bassackwards piece of plastic, the cd/mp3 player rocks. volume! very adequate volume (unlike the other two, which not only reacted badly to being carried around, but also had trouble actally pushing sound through wires into tiny speakers). and all the features! whatever they are! sure, the little buttons are itty bitty and not well labeled, and there's no manual, but it has this alphabetical search thingy and something about folders? yeah, the audiophase kicks serious ass, in spite of the dyslexia and the deformed extremities and all. gotta love that. the little music player that could. mp3s. on cdrws. in the car. rock!

Salutations de la part d'Amazon.ca !

Nous avons le plaisir de vous informer que nous avons expedie votre procede
aujourd'hui a l'expedition de vos articles, ce qui complete le traitement de votre commande.

(translated: woohoo, the first season of Due South is on its way to me)

Par Canada Post Int'l Surface (averages 8-16 business days).

Le service de livraison utilise ne propose malheureusement pas de suivi des
expeditions.

(an expedition! to bring me my DVDs! how cool is that?)

... this was a result of my search for music from the show, which resulted in many memories, which then resulted in some googling to see if there were DVDs (apparently there were many petitions involved), which are only sold through amazon.ca, where it is quite the hot item (as high as #9 in sales ranking i think?)

and i've been wanting to write this love letter to canada thing especially after i did a little research on the Due South soundtrack, all this great Canadian music that i never would have discovered, and there were all these other things i had in my mind to be appreciative of Canada about, but the list ... is long and daunting and escapes me at the moment.

so, when i watch the South Park movie i've recently, er, acquired, i'll be singing Blame Canada in the most respectful way possible :)

ok, no, i am. and i feel this need to confess even though i'm sure it's more than apparent to anyone who still comes here now that i post every few days and hide like a hermit the rest of the time, claiming variously that having two jobs is ... you know, like a lot of stuff to do and it has completely eaten up my life.

it has partially eaten up some of my time. the rest of it? yeah, yeah, filesharing. i'm like a cyber-crack fiend holed up in a motel room peeking out the windows, i jump when emails come in because i think it's about something i should have been doing instead of clicking "find more sources to download" and racking my brains for those long lost songs among other things i suddenly seem to feel i need more than say, sleep.

something in the dimmest recesses of my sane consciousness, a part of me was a little concerned, as two nights ago i found myself with only a couple gigs of my hard drive left. first i tried to clean house, tossing out frivolous stuff like visual studio, adobe illustrator, things like that - seemed cool at the time but i never used them, so off they went! squeaked back up to almost 5 free, but then i converted some video files to share and ... it was what i thought of next that set off these little faint tiny quiet 'might be really crazy' alarms, which of course -- who cares?

what i thought of next was that i have a linux box i hardly use anymore, which had sound problems even in its windows days, it's a motherboard thing. and with few reservations and no remorse i began to plan to kill it and harvest its organs. when i came home tonight, i did the deed. and it was good, aside from the part where i was bleeding and repeating "i hate fucking computers" over and over as i wrestled with the allegedly user-friendly guts of the Enlight case, and furthermore remembered that i forgot how exactly to do the drive letter thing and i had it all messed up with my mapped network drives and ... i did prevail, oh my yes i did. and all this following stopping at Office Depot on the way home for cds and labels and jewel case inserts (i love office depot so much. so much. oh god. oh.) i mean, i was there considering my CD multi-pack options and this friendly helpful young man came to see if i needed help and i blurted out that i had suddenly gone off the waaaaay deep end on kazaa (i referred to it as 'my little kazaa problem' and he replied, surprised, 'problem???') so i'm standing there in an aisle full of storage solutions talking filesharing and ... it was almost too much for me. i nearly swooned. which is a nice old fashioned way of saying, damn, i was wet.

so anyway while i was in the late linux box, and that damned convenient case was refusing to go back together, i got pissed and said oh yeah well i'm taking your memory. and ... well, i'd say that's about it for the linux box, sure i'll do something linuxy some other time, you know, but at this point no matter how evil, this win2k pro machine is runnin' sweet with that extra memory and i'm pondering the wide openness of the spaces on that shiny newly formatted western digital, and i'm bouncing in my chair as i type this.

as addictions go, it's my favorite so far.

i do intend to be less hermitlike and so forth, stop jumping when the mail bell dings, start catching up on reading. i do feel much calmer now, probably much like a junkie feels after scoring a fat bag of the kind shit and knowing they would be happily buzzing for as long as matters, at least for now.

so i contemplate that stack of cds, my labeling paraphernalia, and my plans for the evening. my first actual labels! bliss. actual bliss.

as i was posting this, i was of course downloading the appropriate soundtrack.

commuting makes me feel smart, because i see so many more complete morons than i used to, just cruising across town. case in point: this morning, on a stretch of 101 where the usual flow of traffic is 75-80 mph (it's ok, we're southern californians, don't try this at home), there was a paranoid little clot of cars all hovering behind ... a security guard. quite obviously a security guard. i mean please. yellow lights -- nothing with yellow lights can pull you over, k? so security dude was in the fast lane doing 65, and 50 cars were all bunched up behind him, huddled masses yearning to break free, but unable to bring themselves to pass a coplike car. so i found my way through the moronic horde, and floored it. after me, only one other brave soul dared venture into the wide open spaces in front of the security car, and we had the freeway to ourselves for miles, it was great. commuting is like the other white meat, or sliced bread, or ... yeah, commuting is basically a sandwitch. with mayonnaise.

in other news, if i don't get a cd player in my car soon i shall go mad. mad i say. mad! mad. i will. i mean it. i'll be all decked out in camo with the face paint and everything, armed literally to the teeth, belly-crawling through the lobby of the nearest clearchannel affiliate station with malice aforethought, yes i will. ok, maybe not. but i need to illustrate the point about the cd player, which may seem like a luxury, but it is anything but that.

lie to me about my shoes. tell me that they're so tacky and ugly that they're actually cutting-edge cool, ok?

picture them: low platforms, thick soled, translucent (not crystal clear, kinda cloudy, matte finish) plastic throughout, and i think they call the style of shoe where the upper is just a thick band over the arch -- mules? yes, that's what they call them.

so, chunky plastic mules. not only that they require bandaids on the baby toes. however it's this or wear black with navy. i'll go with ugly and painful before i'll do the black/navy thing.

did you know feet gain weight?

the internet. and monty python. interminable waiting for the six hundred forty megabytes of the whole holy grail to download, only to find it ... needed something. had to figure out what the something was (divx), acquire said something, and all that time and bandwidth up till then, all the anxiety not knowing if it was going to work. it does work! woo. so after all that, well, what would you expect me to do? jump up and take a shower and go to work?

and yet i feel ... sorta bad about this. so, instead of bolting out the door this minute (already so late, what does it really matter?) i decided to burn a copy (along with the appropriate divx codecs) and bring it with me.

good heavens look at the time.

'cause that's ... um. oo, words. hmm. words, words ...

ok then. so i'll be cruising around and suddenly it'll hit me, some song i had almost entirely forgotten existed. and i have to wonder about how my mind works, how could it misplace things like cathedral and to the last whale/critical mass/wind on the water? how could i have forgotten seeing CSN&Y in november of 82 in the oakland ... coliseum? yeah, must have been. was 8 months preggers with amanda jayne. wonderful concert. it was during their 'daylight again' tour, but the songs that really stood out were the two i'm linking here in the more. i must say that the live performance of cathedral was absolutely transcendent.

and for long after she was born, if my daughter got fussy, i'd sit her in her baby seat near the speakers playing my CSN albums softly, she'd settle right down, enjoying memories of her first concert.

i have a lot more music at the moment than i have ... stuff to say, really. and i just upgraded my mt and i wanted to see if maybe that thing where you have to link mp3s in the more text or else the autopingerator hacks up a hairball, is fixed? my guess would be no, but i'm trying anyway.

it is fixed - i could put the mp3s here in the main entry but i seem to prefer them in the more area.

it's joe walsh, it's classic stuff, it's ...

sooooo mellow.

also i misplaced my keyboard. and there was a ... virus. and some power outages. the internet crashed! more than once! and ... have you ever wanted to just replace your computer rather than actually face all your email?

nah, me neither.

actually i have been having a bit of trouble adjusting to life without medical insurance (i'm for some reason not eligible for COBRA - isn't that just ducky?) anyway i'm fairly high maintenance and as it turns out i don't do well with the minimal medicine for my asthma.

i'm working on it.

ok, so with the apocalypse right around the corner now, i'm figuring it can't hurt to prepare and i don't mean rush out and grab 10 rolls of duct tape and some bottled water, i mean ... mentally. spritually even. chances are there will be survivors, it's not a given but, it could happen. getting caught up in such a thing totally unawares could break you, you know. so prepare.

me? i dream about a postapocalyptic world, in depth, recurrently, and they are among my very favorite dreams, along with the ones where i can fly with my mind, and the ones i can say 'hey this is my dream let's do things differently', but i digress. in the postapocalyptic world, i'll be just fine. one of the things i do best is improvise and fake it and get by. good skill to have on hand should the world end. we're talking about a totally different set of challenges than those of the current society. there's no such thing as a lack of purpose in the life that follows surviving the collapse of civilization as we know it. nothing is pointless. no, life is very very pointy at that point. very pointy. and we get to loot the pharmacies! i mean, wait, no, never mind that.

oy. i haven't said oy in awhile, but i'm saying it now, then i'm going to bed, as soon as i finish listening to the queensryche, joe walsh, dokken, elvis costello, louden wainwright III, joe jackson, reo speedwagon, and donny iris i downloaded tonight. meadows! i'm out here in the meadow, part of an old stone wall, stand here because he says so, waiting around to fall. no, not really.

. . .
k, so like i posted this at first and then drafted it, and then let it lay there, and now i gave it a fresh new date and time and put it here under the next most recent entry, for ... reasons. here it is, fwiw.

alrighty then let's see if i have this straight -- there's a paranoid whacko dictator with The Bomb, there's a call to arms being sent to a vast number of already angry people who are absolutely everywhere, and i could go on linking shit but why? it would only upset me. i'm working from home, it's raining like hell, i have dsl and kazaa lite and limewire pro and a cd burner and ... oh you know what? the superman set has grown now to include some 41 songs, 38 of which (excluding multiple versions by the same artist) are now burned onto two cds, entitled 'songs about superman' and 'more songs about superman'. did you know sunshine superman was covered by both jewel and hüsker dü? betcha didn't. i suppose a track list is in order here, and also i have included an unrelated mp3 in the more area, which sums up my philosophy about world affairs. and now i'm getting to work.

listening to burn and shine by the posies. damn, i missed the posies. out of all the stuff i've gleaned through my adventures with P2P, that's one i had to go ahead and order, oh, so wonderful.

my mp3 collection is currently at 1.00 GB (1,074,528,256 bytes) which is two to four times what it was a few days ago, imagine my glee to run the *.mp3 search and select all and view properties and see that number? see, life is good, no matter what all those news thingys say.

which seems to be the extent of my abilities at the moment. which is fine. uh, sort of.

so i had to buy pants. the first work-related pair i bought shrunk -- lengthwise. which was not fine. even wearing them low, which they're sort of cut like that, they are too short now. ok well that is sort of fine, since they weren't the greatest pants by any means. so i needed pants. oh, how i hate shopping for pants.

'twas ok though. went to the department i have to look for pants in, you know the department i'm talking about, the big department, and for the most part i have to say damn what are the pantsmakers thinking? i mean i saw size 18s that were cut, like brittney low. they were christina low, man, they were low. and excuse me but the sheer fact of size 18 means you are not built to wear pants that don't clear the hipbone. trust me on this.

anyway i'm in the big pants department and i spy cute pants on the re-hanging-up rack, which are waaay too big, so i ask the salesgirl if there are other sizes and she looks at me and says oh, no, this is the women's sizes. bless her heart, she thought i was in the wrong department. so i patted her guide dog on the head (no not really) and explained i was in the right place, and lo and behold they did have them in my size, only thing was that they completely failed to disguise any aspect of my ass whatsoever. i mean there it was, you know, out there. so there were other cute pants, my size in theory but my god. not only painfully small (i know, i tried them on twice, just to make sure), but there was a major toe problem. you know. sigh.

and there were adorable pants that were jeans but overdyed and embroidered up the side and ... i might go back for them if i can convince myself that they are unjeansy enough for work wear. i am having some difficulty with the fact that i hate most if not all non-jeans pants. just hate them. the pants i settled on were, ok, technically denim, but in a tweedy pattern and not cut exactly like jeans, i will never admit they are jeans, not even under threat of death by slow torture.

but you know what? i've lost weight. not a lot, not so's you'd notice (well, except for the little salesgirl, bless her heart). but yeah, the jeans that used to hurt like hell now fit fresh out of the dryer. maybe even a little baggy. oddly enough, as exhilirating as this would be, i still can't get into the pants i used to wear back last january, when i went to that first bloggermeeting in santa monica and was appalled to see in pictures how big i was. i'm still bigger than that, and yet i feel ... well, i actually feel ok. perspective i guess.

i'm more boring than usual lately, but i assure you brain death was painless, and i'm ... um. woo? yeah. i have pants.

woo.

so i've been on kazaa lite for ... three days now? and one of the things i had online was of course my pinching judy collection -- for those of you who aren't familiar, my favorite band basically, local guys who broke up years ago. they were at that time better than anything on the radio, almost. tonight i get home (after 10pm, thankyouverymuch) and find a message from another kazaa user "thank you, i had lost my more like morphine cd", etc ... and since i only had a couple tracks from that online, i dug out my extremely damaged old cd, and ripped the whole cd -- amazingly, ripping mp3s off an unplayable CD seems to have the ability to overlook big honkin' scratches in the disk, guess it gets what data it can and the compression does the rest? whatever does happen, i love technology. and now i have both their cds on kazaa, hopefully my downloader will be back for the rest.

have i mentioned i love technology? i'm converting the cd to a new cd of playable cd tracks, theoretically squishing it to mp3 size and re-fluffing it to .wav size will smooth out all the unsmoothness. yes, these are highly technical terms here, i know. i wish i better understood all this, but as it is i'm happy not knowing and reaping the benefits anyway.

you know, one big foster's will give you a big ole buzz if you work 11 hour days and finish them with a monstrous bank reconciliation that's off by $9.99 exactly and that should jump right off the page at me but no. woo.

i think my cd burner is froze. sigh.

my new obsession is so fraught with peril. 'sok. gonna beddybye soon, woo.

i would blame the two people who recently mentioned kazaa lite to me, in the context of me having a new cd burner, for the fact i've launched off on another one of my obsessive episodes, but it's nobody's fault but my own. i mean, i get absolutely crazed just thinking that there are, right now, 4.6 million users online sharing 6,635,008 GB of files. we're talking petabytes here, and yeah, i had to look that up.

and me? pfft. half a gig. i am so slacking. but what i lack in quantity i make up in excessive amounts of metadata - every single one of these things has the full title/album/track number/year/genre/cover art/lyrics/notes thing alllll filled in. and music match fucking rocks, ok? "super tagging": put the right artist/title in the right boxes, click "search for tags" and it pulls up a list of possibilities, you pick one and presto - i go one further and do a quick google for the lyrics, add those, and then ... go get more songs. my mp3 collection is very obsessed over.

i need more bandwidth.

current cd in the works is in more, the titles kind of tell a little story, well, they do in my little mind. don't know how exactly resignation superman encountering kryptonite would lead to your ghost being silent all these years, but the rest almost fits. i'm working on it.

horny dwarves prevailed in the last poll, and with all the superman songs stuck in my head, i thought it would be interesting to see if the man of steel is also the justice league superhero you'd most like to be rescued by - me, i'm more of a batman kinda gal.

have you ever found yourself saying "damn, another song about superman" when you hear another song about superman? well, i have. it's quite the recurring theme you know - the superman homepage is keeping a list of songs that mention superman, it's ... it's long. there certainly aren't that many songs about, say, batman, or spiderman, or wonder woman, but superman? it's practically a genre.

i mean, consider this: i, a person with a little bandwidth and some time i should have spent doing something useful, have just amassed a collection of no fewer than 15 17 18 songs about superman, ... and i don't know why. i was poking around kazaa, and i had that casual passing thought about the superman songs again, and now i could almost fill a cd with them, and ... i don't even really like most of them. but that's not the point, is it? i mean, i can make a cd of nothing but songs about superman with no intention of doing anything but saying "i have a cd of nothing but songs about superman", and that would be perfectly normal, yes?

sigh. list follows, for the curious:

so. it's saturday afternoon, lovely sunny day, i'm here and my friend mechele is cleaning my house. ok it's not as bad as it sounds, unless it is. situation: me = inveterate slob. chris = got so frustrated with that he stopped doing *any* cleaning at all, making it all up to me. me = tried. honest, i did stuff. didn't help. place = filthy pigsty. police would look at it and say there were signs of a struggle. and there are no, and i repeat no, clean dishes.

so why am i blogging while she cleans, which involves feeling horribly guilty? well, ok first of all she's doing this in payment for the fountain and all the garden stuff we gave her. and in gratitude for me getting her a part time gig organizing and filing at the car wash. and plus she's one of those people that, when she comes over, just starts organizing things, she can't help herself. but in this case she came over with buckets of cleaning supplies, with the express purpose of cleaning my house. and i'm blogging. i suck that way.

ok, i have to go do something for maude's sake.

in a minute.

meant to post long long ago, but was so very carried away. parents sent iomega external USB CD burner. arrived today. and today, kd burned her first and then second CDs. she got a little carried away with the whole idea - the first one was just a cd of mp3s for playing in other computers, she did that first, on the one CDRW in case it had to be RW'd ... you know, who knows what can happen when you're making music go on plastic with a laser for the mostly first time.

emboldened by her success and amazed that one actually can take mp3s and turn them into actual music files that play on actual CD players, she compiled a small list of reflective, lyrical tunes, burned a CD, found all the lyrics except those belonging to local bands who never ever published a lyric list - these she transcribed, and put together a thirteen page lyric sheet to go with the CD she calls 'various mellowness'. she's going to have so much more fun when she gets enough cds to really feel adventurous, but as is the burner came with one RW and two Rs, only one R left and for pete's sake she needs those special label papers that you do the whole CD kit with. good god the fun one could have making the custom labels and cover collages and so forth.

this is more fun than she'd imagined, it's driven her straight insane and caused this third person crapola. at this hour, no less.

fuck, life rocks.

ok. now let me get this straight. today is friday, the seventh of february, in the year two thousand and three? can someone please explain to me where the time's gone?

how coud i have forgotten my meat puppets mp3s. good god.

Pigs are sheep and cats are dogs
And thoughts are made of Lincoln Logs
To tend to the mice and wood
Where black is blue and bad is good

nothing to wear. i mean, i have lots of clothes, but none of them a combination of (a) i can get into them (b) they don't hurt (c) they're not jeans and a baggy tshirt, and (d) they're not the same pair of beige pants i've worn on the last three days i've worked.

there was the skirt, but the pantyhose had gone missing. so, if you are a person i know in real life and you see me today? recommend you avert your eyes from my ankles, unless you are wearing suitable eye protection.

if nothing else, it's caused me to shave my legs.

i woke up this morning out of a very successful coding dream, just the very minute i got all the functions to work. spent a blissful minute or two basking in that place between sleep and remembering. oh, i make it sound like things are horrible, and they are not, but having this decision hanging over me feels just ... there is no happy ending, you know, no matter what i decide i'm losing something else. greedy? yeah, it's kind of like that. no, i don't want to choose, i want it all! me me mine gimme!

ahem.

also i've faced a similar decision in the past. i listed and considered and weighed, i was logical, rational, and practical, and everything about the decision i made, made perfect sense. the only small problem was that it turned out to be one of the wrongest choices imaginable. it was a career-destroyer, that's how bad it was. it was an ok, now we start from scratch again type of thing.

and now i'll quit yapping about this and get to work.

tired of the panty poll? me too. let's do a little fairy tale role-playing, shall we? it's the best i can manage at the moment, so, ... there it is.

i knew i was forgetting something. monday! explains alot. like why chris had to go pick up kurtwood at school and bring him home and shave his head: apparently there are now new super-lice that don't die when you slather them with rid two times in three days and nit-comb the heck out of the kid's poor little head. so he has a buzz cut. cool, huh? and ok, i know i don't have them, the nits are quite visible white, and my hair is quite a deep shade of red, and i would see them if they were there. they are not. does this prevent me from itching? no, no it doesn't.

yeah, it was a monday.

and i do not want this to be a complaint, it's just a stressor: after he left the office this evening, the car wash boss called me back and said, "what do bookkeepers make?". i mumbled. he asked, would i like to work full time, and what would i want for money? i know this is a good thing. but i love my other job too. and i really honestly don't know what to do. i've made pro/con lists, i've talked to chris, i've done spreadsheets of labor market surveys, i've had beers. i've distracted myself by organizing info on the hostees in preparation for the move. i've itched my head. i've decided not to decide tonight. i've package-tracked the cd burner my parents are sending me. it's cool it's one of those external ones, they don't need it anymore. it
didn't leave oregon till just a few minutes ago. i'm leaning towards the car wash. that might be a path of least resistence thing, and i don't know if that's a bad or a good thing. i'm having another beer. i'm thinking of putting up a new poll. i'm clicking post.

ok, it's growing on me. last night as i was modifying all the header graphics on the skins, i was struck by the fact that hooha is just the perfect word. because not only is it fun to say, it's pretty. it's sleek and lovely and oh so evocative.

and as i was fixing up the first graphic, i started thinking about batgrl and how glad i am that she keeps the concept of hooha alive and well, the woman is a conoisseur of hooha. so i ended up going back in and adding props to the graphics, it's only right.

'cause i'm madly happy to have hooha in my life. and in my URL.

reading the sad blog entries here and there, i see that there is a heavy sense of mourning for the deaths of the Challenger crew, much more heavy-hearted than my own reaction. i suppose i have rather a different outlook on death?

these were not senseless deaths. news of senseless death sends me into despair, for instance, in last week's la times, there was an in depth feature on the ongoing tragedy of black-on-black murders taking place on the streets of los angeles. it was difficult to make myself read the whole thing, the interviews with the parents who'd had to identify their children's bodies, who had to bury their unrealized hopes and dreams and go on living knowing there was very little hope that the killers would be caught. the sense of hopelessness i felt reading about whole communities dealing with such unthinkable loss on such a regular basis ... knowing this makes something inside me just break.

but when i heard of the space shuttle tragedy, one of my very first thoughts was that there are far worse things than dying doing something meaningful, in spite of the danger. the loss of these seven brilliant and couragous individuals is terrible, but there is nothing hopeless in this, on the contrary, it speaks to me of the very best of the human spirit. and this news did not make anything inside me want to break.

it takes an amazing person to pursue a career in which death is always a possible outome. these are people who had a vision, who pursued their life's passions with amazing sucess. they were the best of the best, they loved their work, and they knew they were making a difference in the world. how many of us spend our lives serving a greater purpose, knowing that we are making significant contributions, accepting that part of this involves putting our lives on the line? the exploration of space is the most idealistic of pursuits, it represents hope for a benevolent future based on the expansion of our reach in the universe. the men and women involved are committed to this, to the extent that they accept the grave dangers involved. they did not let the fear of death interfere with their mission.

life is consummated in death, it becomes finite and complete in that defining moment: a unit, a whole, a lifetime, for whatever that's worth when it happens. and when life is lost in the course of fulfilling its chosen purpose, that offers us the opportunity to set aside the worst of the tragedy and take solace in the knowledge that that life was not stolen in some inexplicable random twist of fate. there is peace to be found in accepting that the life taken had been willingly offered, in order to accomplish something bigger than itself.

people die in the line of duty every day. how that happens is less important than the fact it happened in the course of doing something important, something they believed was worth the risk of their lives. to me it seems that there should be an element of celebration in the sadness that follows, the celebration of a life well lived.

so since i've decided to try and work things out with the server, and so it was important to find something something special i could do, something i could not have done nearly as well on the old hosting, something that didn't cost any money, wasn't fattening, didn't require the use of sharp objects; lemony freshness would have been nice too, but you can't have everything, where would you put it? so i did that thing where you have two domains pointing at the same space and so you can navigate on either. then i told MT to write all the links hooha.us, so that even if you get here via kdblog.com, you'll navigate hooha.us.

i'll probably change it back or something, but for now, it's comforting to know i've done something utterly pointless which i don't even particularly agree with. there are certainly areas of my life which offer few alternatives, but this isn't one of them. i am master of my domain, and as such am free to make completely silly and potentially regrettable choices! yay me?