This is not a tribute, though I must admit I wish it was. It was not even a help, even though that was its original intent — it failed at that. It ended up being amazing, even though I’m pretty sure I was doing it entirely wrong the whole time.

Three days ago, my dad died. I never called him my dad to his face, though I spent most of the years we coexisted on this planet thinking of him as that. At first it was pure shit-headed stubbornness, which devolved into a tongue-tied pile of failure to overcome an old habit. He was my father, as much a father as I was ever going to get anyway, and I failed to tell him that. I would advise anyone reading this to avoid that particular failure or anything even approaching it if at all possible.

Do I even deserve to tell you about the road trip, and my selfish notion that it had some significance and maybe made up for something, whether or not that thing even mattered? It was not even an epic road trip by any sense of scale; the fact it felt epic was only due to the pathetic nature of everything else around it. It was not transcendent, but it did manage to do some transcending, I think.

Late in July 2007 he called me to tell me my mom was gone. It was expected, a blessing, relief; any loss from the perspective of those left behind was pure selfish, I assure you. In case it’s unclear, I am selfish. I am also practical, so I scheduled almost two weeks off beginning the day after the first payday in August. I spent the first day preparing and woke up the next day at four in the morning, piled the preparations and the kid into the Kia, and seventeen hours later we were there. I was a little blind and maybe crazy, but there anyway, somehow safe. We, the child and I, were supposed to be a help; help organize, help clean, help get all the things that needed doing done. The fact that those were our intentions is a testament to the last of my idealism, or more accurately what I wish was the last of it.

It was the most amazing series of days that followed; hot as hell mostly, but cocooned in the efficient basics afforded us by a late model zippy little economy car, we indulged in what most normal folks would consider a series of bad ideas. It was irresponsible and I have no excuse, but I will never ever regret even one moment of it, except the part where I kept thinking about how bad the ideas were and not how awesome it felt to follow them. Fortunately that sort of responsible thought hardly surfaced at all, I cannot tell you how thankful I am for that foolishness.

We would set out in the morning, not early, and wander to various points of interest in the Pacific Northwest: Mt. St. Helens, Multnomah Falls, Timberline Lodge … we would be headed to one place and add in another on the way back even if it was hundreds of miles not-on-the-way, the best bad ideas I’ve ever had, and probably ever will. All in all three thousand miles in ten days, feeling quite rightly that we couldn’t afford a bit of it, but affording it anyway.

There are only a very few pictures left of it, aside from these entirely fuzzy memories that I am furious with myself for not being a better curator of. The drive home was an adventure which I shared with my son in honor of the many road trips my parents gave to me, though I know I could never give as well as they did. I did what I could, and I hope it was ok.

I did not save one picture of my dad. Which pales in comparison to the fact that I never called him my dad in a way I could be sure he heard me. I can only hope he knew but I must admit that’s a pretty far-fetched thing to hope, as far as hopes go.

I loved my mom and my dad, and I hope they knew that well beyond what I showed of it.

i do not unfollow and/or unsubscribe lightly. i appreciate and enjoy having many sources of information and entertainment, and i certainly do not decide to unfollow based on a difference of opinion – i appreciate different perspectives, as long as they are logical, well-thought out, and expressed with some grace and dignity.

well, this is not that. this is just ugly, and not fancy ugly – plain. i am not unfollowing @dcagle (and unsubscribing to his newsletter) because we differ in opinions. i am unfollowing because the above is a classless example of either (a) going for the cheap shot in order to stir up controversy (traffic, views, mentions, @s), or (b) whatever other reason was behind this, who knows or cares. matters not.

i took the day to evaluate whether or not the content provided by the newsletter and tweets had enough value to me for me to overlook this thoughtlessness. these feeds did have some value, but, to borrow the words of @catawu, “I can’t support something that is mean-spirited or proudly devoid of compassion or intelligence.” ignoring the overwhelming amount of good that Ted Kennedy did in favor of hawking about a once-juicy forty year old scandal is either sleazy or just plain lazy. and ugly, either way.

does it matter that one little follower, 1 of 52,996 who linked to a few cartoons from her modest social media accounts, unfollowed? nope. hell nope! do i feel a whole lot better, cathartically clicking those “un” buttons? yes, yes i do.

I’ll be doing a lot more over at lizard.be than here, i think. Tumblr is a great blogging service and i put a lot of effort into the design so i kind of have to use it.

For months now I’ve been avidly coveting the Canon EOS Rebel T1i 15.1, oh, yes, I have desired to feel its heft cupped in my little hands, to buy it adequate glass & always treasure its awesomeness. To learn to be the photographer I wannabe behind its rotating viewfinder, yes.

And then I saw this:

The Olympus PEN E-P1. I know it’s the looks of this one that got me, I’m trying to say it’s the features & the size & the lens possibilities & the Live MOS sensors & a Micro Four-Thirds format for cryin’ out loud, but, let’s face it, love at first sight is way shallower than that.

I want to go everywhere & whip this thing out. I want people to see me whipping it out, and they will see, because the would notice, because it is so not one of those you-have-to-read-the-numbers-to-tell-which-it-is ones. No, no it is not. And oh, oh, I want.

it didn’t say anything about this anywhere i could find easily, even in the manual, so i figured i’d put this on the internet if anyone’s wondering: to upgrade the memory in a Lenovo IdeaPad Y710: you basically take the whole bottom off. 7 screws (three big ones in there deep, four little ones on the surface that wobble around a lot when you unscrew them). expect to be annoyed.

i looked everywhere for this information – the manual goes as far as to tell you that the memory is a Customer Serviceable area, but stops there and doesn’t tell you a thing about how to get to it. it even goes so far as to imply that customer serviceable areas are doors that generally lead to only one thing (hard drive, memory, etc). this is a lie! the whole damn computer is under that big panel, which looks like it’s in two parts, but is one, big part.

but once you get that 4GB of 800MHz DDR2 200-pin SODIMM memory in there, and you rescrew it and flip it over and turn it on and see that gorgeous 4GB in the system properties, it’s allllll worth it.

“perhaps taking the spam somewhere else would be advisable.”

in response to a lighthearted hopeful invitation to something i’d been working on & have a strong desire to see succeed. in retrospect yes this was spam. obviously it was, it’s spam if it’s called spam & that’s that, right?  in context, arguments could be made that i’d always been relevant &/or at least on topic in communications with this accuser, and in this case … well i flat put my foot in my mouth, or at least the variant of that you do with fingers on keys. i was wrong in that way you know wrong after you’ve done it & while it still does not feel anything like that, yet, the consequences are clear.

that felt far more awful than it should have. there are no worse words i could be called, or have used in sentences that referred to my actions. none. they not only do not exist, they *can* not exist.

my head hurts.

and even though this is the first time i’ve blogged in howevermany months, the thought of linking to this from anywhere for any reason seems like … feels like … well what if there is a spammer in me, one i can’t see out of some blind stupid faith in my own pleasant intentions?

and yeah. i am overreacting.  yes i am. yes i know.

spam? yeah. spam.

i always preface these posts about major changes with “it’s not done”. and in this case that is especially true because it is *so* not done. it was so much work to make these templates functional. they were so pretty, but so broken, on so many levels. allegedly widgetized but the whole widgetality was completely non-widgety, so i had to figure out how to widget. i did that. and so many other things. and so many more to go. and why doesn’t the_excerpt() work unless it’s in the midle of a WP_MyQuery or whatever? i didn’t like that thing. i must figure this out, if for no other reason than the random posts over <- there. sigh.

you do not even want to hear the long painful story of my migration from the now-dead-to-me movable type. suffice to say it involved copying the database, hacking directly at the MySQL, and approximately i forget how many runnings of the import cycle. i will be hunting down stray missing characters for a long time because it was like, three am and i didn’t care anymore that the text editor was replacing stuff with weird diamond shaped things with question marks in there.

so of course it’s not done. but is any website ever done? it never is.

i do not remember installing, nor granting permission, nor being asked permission to  have installed, anything called MobileMe. on further exploration, it appears that MobileMe is Apple’s successor to .Mac, and that it purports to connect my Mac and/or my PC to my iPhone. i’m fairly sure i don’t have an iPhone, but i hate to be wrong about this sort of thing, so let me check.

nope. it’s still a BlackBerry. ok, so if i don’t have much if any use for this (and even people who do have a use for it are having a really rough time of it), why do i have it? why did Apple feel that my consenting to thier software update service, that i was in effect consenting to find random shit in my control panel? i like Apple, i’ve got a couple of their computers which are quite nice, but sometimes they are just some presumptuous bastards, aren’t they?

i just moved servers, installed a fresh copy of MT, and started from my old 2004 text export. again. but this time i mean it.

<edited>
in the remote case that anyone is curious, this is what happened:

i had godaddy hosting. i installed MT 4.1 and attempted to import my
old blog text file, the last archive i managed to hang on to. it’s not
that i didn’t blog between 2004-2008, i just misplaced it. long story.
anyway. the import process was buggy as hell and left dozens if not
hundreds of entries truncated. i kept meaning to do repairs but doing
anything at all was so excruciatingly slow, that never happened. then,
yesterday, i wanted to share an old post. to do this i had to run a
search and replace and rebuild some files, a task which took so
freakishly long as to challenge my sanity.

so yesterday afternoon, i signed up with HostGator. i went to godaddy
and changed the DNS, which resolved instantly. so i started importing, and yeah it went all crashy like before, which was fine, i have the technique down: i search the text file for the last posted entry, delete
everything before, and run the import again. 6 imports and only a little angst and viola! and (whether the better hosting or the fact i specified UTF-8
this time) this time, as far as i can tell, there is no truncation (!!)

so i lost whatever entries i posted when it was at godaddy (well, not
lost, so much as don’t care about them enough to bother), but i gained
intact archives. both the gain & the loss represent a kind of best-case scenario, actually.

but all the templates, the customizations, everything, was all still in the
godaddy copy of MT that was too fucking slow and weak to run any kind
of backup or archive. so i remember it being all kinds of work but this
time? i did the whole customization thing in minutes, literally. say
what you will about your blogware of choice, i’m sure it’s very nice,
but i have known MT since Ben and Mena were just these regular people
playing with some Perl in their spare time. it’s second nature to me.
the complete re-working of the template/widget system only confused me
for about fifteen minutes, and then i fell in love just like i always
do with MT.