• Stroboscopic Ceiling

    That’d make a fine band name, anyway. They would’ve been playing at the lightswitch rave in my bedroom last night. Though a proper rave would’ve included underdressed party girls, wouldn’t it? Damn my luck.

    Let me explain. (There isn’t too much, so I don’t need to sum up.) You see, apparently the 5th of July is the night on which the neighborhood kids get to light off the cheaper fireworks. Their weapon of choice? The strobe bomb (or whatever its technical name is, which I can’t be bothered to look up right now on account of being very, very tired and a bit cranky). I gotta tell ya, it’s awfully difficult to get to sleep when my bedroom is illuminated to almost daylight brightness several times per second for ten seconds, every few minutes, for well over an hour. Occasionally they changed gears and lit off various screamingly noisy things. Hooray for variety. I think they ran out of ammunition around 11:30, then settled for just talking at full volume for a while. Neighbors, schmeighbors. Nobody needs to work the next day, right?

    And now, if you’ll excuse me, I need to see about staggering and stumbling my way through my workday.

  • I can still call her my kid sister.

    She’ll always be the “kid” of the family, because she’s five years younger than I am and each of us only has the one sibling. (My present to her is that I won’t state my age here to prevent casual readers from doing the math. See what a loving big brother I am?)

    Happy Birthday, Sis!

  • Broke and brokener

    It’s just under one week ‘til payday, and I’m flat broke. There’s precisely one penny in my bank account. I have a little bit of cash in my wallet. I’ll be making a bit of money over the weekend, which is why I’m not in a blind panic right now. Next month probably won’t go much better, as a fair chunk of my “operating” funds is already spoken for.

    I started feeling woozy and nauseated late on Wednesday. I sort of bulldozed my way through work yesterday, figuring that if I just kept going strong then whatever’s wrong with me would run its course in the background. Oh, like that would happen! So today I’ve been at home, even more sick than I was yesterday, and generally not what you’d call in the best of spirits or health.

    I want to be doing creative things, but I lack stamina and the ability to concentrate for very long today so I settled for doing some more digital housekeeping. DVDs have been burned and filed. A few superfluous directories (full of stuff that I once thought I’d use but I now realize that I’ll rarely think about ever again) are now deleted. There’s more work to do, but my progress is substantial.

    That’s something, right?

  • Is this thing still on?

    Just so you know: I’m not dead.

    I’ve been tinkering with things on my local desktop, rearranging how I run my digital life, seeing about rejuvenating certain aspects of this electronic existence I’m so very tied up in. Maybe I’m just afraid of becoming complacent, maybe I’m trying to “shake things up” to break out of the doldrums. There’s some fun in just plain puttering around for its own sake, of course.

    I haven’t forgotten about the writing. I haven’t even forgotten about the music video projects. I just need to straighten out the working environment (and a few remaining loose nuts in my psyche) before I can tackle those. I very much want to make something, though, so there probably isn’t a whole lot more of this quiet, behind-the-scenes action (hidden though it may be) remaining before things start picking up around here.

    Yes. Yes, I know. I know I’ve said many times already this year that I was finally ready to come off of hiatus. The difference is that at least during this break I’ve been actually doing things rather than just moping around feeling sorry for myself.

    Scary, huh?

  • The Earth always moves for me. And you.

    Finally, there’s a scientific method for answering the age-old question, “Did the Earth move for you?” Please note that if you’re not sexually active, or if you’re prone to exaggeration, the site may not be terribly useful to you.

    I admit that I’m stretching the definition of the word “useful” to its breaking point, mind you.

  • BlogJet: Trying Out Desktop Posting, Again

    I have installed a potentially interesting application – BlogJet. I used BlogDesk for a while but was generally underwhelmed by the formatting it generated, so I’m giving BlogJet its 30”“day evaluation period to either impress me or follow its predecessor into oblivion.

    BlogJetWindow1If nothing else, the software is prettier than anything else I’ve looked at in its category. Seriously.

    There are also some pleasant features for WordPress users, such as the ability to retrieve X-number of recent posts for editing, cross-linking, tagging and such. (Yes, I could start using Technorati tags. I don’t know if I will, though, ”˜cause if I start down that road then I’ll want to go through the entire archive and just, no. Ugh.) One can natively drop in Flickr and YouTube material, but that’s not terribly useful to me at present since I don’t patronize those services. Someday, maybe.

    Will this revolutionize the way I post to my journal? Will it at least spur me to post more often? I have no idea. I just like playing with stuff. I am, after all, a geek-dilettante.

    (Now to find out what breaks when I click the “Publish” button)

    (Uploading. Go figure. I think it has to do with some WordPress settings but I could be wrong.)

    (Yes, it was the WordPress setting. Fixing that made uploading work, though the filename the picture ended up with isn’t quite what I had in mind. Oh well. Not bad for a first attempt, only requiring two edits to make everything happy.)