BunkBlog

Remakes that absolutely must be heard to be believed:

Tom Jones & the Pretenders doing Iggy Pop’s Lust for Life
Johnny Cash doing Depeche Mode’s Personal Jesus

Hilarious stuff, folks.
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Argh! Cafepress has changed their terms of service. Although it makes no difference to anything involved in the store itself, there is one new feature that worries me – if I don’t make $25 in commission in 6 months, they can close my account. I’m a little concerned, since I’ve made $28 in commission in 12 months (the age of the stores).

Anyone have any ideas for new designs? Surprisingly, nobody has bought an Eat Me thong yet.

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Although I decried the rise of consumerism recently, I’d like to request that someone get me the Sony Clie NX60 for Christmas. If I had that, I’d be the happiest little boy in the world. They just released it today, and my old Palm III is pathetic and sad. Seriously, I’m gonna replace the Palm if I don’t get a new one for the holidays. This thing is dying. Random freezes, data loss from unavoidable hard reboots… Besides, the Clie is sweeeeet!
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current_mood: hopeful

Got the coolest catalog yesterday, although simultaneously one of the most unusual. I think a number of folks on my gift list will be getting something from this fine organization. It’s cool, it’s about giving, yada yada yada. Read about them.

I’m a big fan of direct-action charities. I don’t give to the Sierra Club because they are a bunch of paid lobbyists. I give what I can to the Nature Conservancy, though, because they do one thing – buy land. If you want to save nature, the best thing to do is buy land and stop others from messing it up. That’s what NC does. Heifer International doesn’t give people food, they give them the means to eat. The old adage about teaching a man to fish applies so well here. And, the gifts range in price from $10 to $5000. For five grand, you give a village or two an entire menagerie, but for those of us with more modest means, a flock of chickens is affordable, or a share in a goat. That just sounds silly, but it’s a good thing.

In the midst of the consumerism which most of us indulge in, we could stand to help others, right? The USA is a very affluent country, overall.
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_Tuesday_

Weblogs, blogs, online journals – all the same thing, different ways of referring to the same phenomenon. This phenomenon is not new, although you’d think it was invented in 2001 by the sounds of the media coverage of the blogging revolution, the traditional media way of describing nearly anything they don’t really understand but feel may be destabilizing their way of business. In my opinion, weblogs are part vanity site and part content management.

Like most personal websites, mine has long had a series of personal posts from me to the adoring public. My adoring public tends to be geeks, and not very many of them either. Nor do they seem to adore me too awful much, but I digress. The entire purpose of a vanity site, as personal websites were once called with derision, is to tell the world about yourself, to stake a claim to a tiny piece of the electronic zeitgeist. To that end, we old-school webgeeks painstakingly worked on webpages that looked like parts of a whole, building our own menus of links in text editors with exciting names like vi and notepad. It is a tedious way to update a site, and so many vanity sites tend to fall into disrepair. Fortunately, nothing actually decays online, so long as your host stays viable. There are a plethora of dead sites out there, with “last updated” dates in the last century.

Businesses which publish frequently-changing content online need a way to make that process simple, as well as accessible to the vast majority of their employees who are scared of that whole cyberspace information superhighway thing in the magic box. So, some clever folks came up with content management systems (CMS). The author of a document doesn’t have to know anything about HTML, CSS, tags, links, and other such exciting geek stuff. The author just writes up his story in whatever (usually proprietary but sometimes web-based) interface the CMS uses. This separation of content and format is usually based on Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), which kick serious butt in general.

So, we had serious tools for businesses, costing thousands of dollars, used by CNN and CNet and other big news sites. And, we had the personal users typing away in their text editors, hoping they didn’t miss a closing tag and hose their layout. Along came weblogging tools. The best-known tool is Blogger, and others include Movable Type, Greymatter, PHPNuke, and Livejournal. Livejournal was started in March 1999, Blogger in August 1999, and Movable Type in October 2001; I can’t find authoritative start dates for the Greymatter and PHPNuke projects. For most people, the two big players are the two oldest: Livejournal and Blogger. I’m a big LJ fan, and I’ll try to explain why.

All weblogging tools allow comments, although many users may disable that capability. Although I had a decent number of people coming to my site with my old manual system, I had no way for them to comment aside from email or a guestbook. The guestbook, like most guestbooks, has been largely stagnant for years; almost nobody emailed me from my site. So, interactivity being the hallmark of the web, weblogs allow a discussion to occur centered on any comment you put on your site.

I wanted a way to keep my website looking fresh, without the pain of editing a full page of HTML each time I had something to say. LJ has been very effective in fooling people that come to my site, making them think I actually have new content almost daily. LJ embeds into the HTML of my homepage, allowing me to use it as a CMS for my own page. But, the great thing about LJ is the community.

When you join LJ, your comments are on their servers. This is often a problem, as their servers have issues due to expansion beyond the founder’s wildest dreams. The architecture of the LJ code, some have said, is not really capable of handling the load to which it is subjected, and the servers slow down too often. These are valid complaints, in my experience, but I’m still sticking with the service. The good thing about a central repository is that every LJ user is findable in some way. It may be a tedious way of going through every user, which number is approaching a million, but it is possible to find anyone on LJ. It’s easier if they want to be found, as LJ has “interests” to search, as well as having regional searches. If you want to find everyone in your town that has a journal, you can. The immediate outgrowth of the searchability of LJ is the Friends Page. Rather than visit 10 different blogger sites, you can just go to your own Friends Page, which is in a style you specify, and view all the entries written by people (or communities) that you find interesting. No need to search with Google or wander around Blogspot, you can just hit the Random button on LJ. Or, look at the people that others find interesting. Many times I have added friends that were friends of older friends. Very goofy-sounding, I know, but the web of connections is the big draw to LJ.

When people join LJ and then leave to start a blog on their personal site, I just look at the single line of code it took me to embed my journal on my homepage, and wonder why.

Livejournal – because you like to think people care.

Every few months, I get involved in an exchange with someone online that makes me wonder if it’s possible to have a reasoned discussion with people below the age of 26. I wonder if I was as resistant to rational thought at that age, and as incapable of responding to a counterpoint with anything more intelligible than “yeah? Well you’re old!”

I know that people in their teens and early 20s have always felt they knew everything and that whatever time they grew up in was completely different from every other period of history, but I swear I was not as self-important and arrogant when I was 20.
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Citibank has got to have the most annoying automated systems on the planet. I know they are a large company, and therefore need to use automation to make their workload manageable, but come on!

In February, we moved into the house and we somehow misplaced the Citibank bill and so missed a payment. They automatically kicked in the “penalty rate” which meant our 9% card went to 24.99%. In the old days (like 1995), you could call a company, they’d say, “Well, you have a perfect payment history and a six thousand dollar balance, so we’re making all kinds of money from you. We won’t fuck you after all.” When talking to these chuckleheads, though, they said there was nothing they could do. FMITGA.

Now, after much financial legerdemain, I ended up with a balance due which is larger than the credit limit. This is, of course, partially due their arbitrarily lowering my limit by 600 dollars, but that’s not important. The statement is dated 14 October, and it is two days later. It says the due date is 7 November. I got a call today from their automated collections machine telling me to call them. I call them and ask, “Is it past due?” No. “Then I’ll pay it when it is due.” This resulted in much back-and-forth in which the idiot on the other end claimed my statement (which is all-electronic now so I can’t refer to it when I’m on the phone with moron-girl) was dated 4 October, and that my two payments in this cycle actually paid on separate bills, so I need to give them money now. I ask again, “Is it past due?” The answer is still no, so I tell her that I have nothing more to say, and she says the automated calls will continue until I pay the bill. Well, I’ll pay it when my budget says I pay it, and that is in November, when the damned thing is DUE.

I’ve since looked at my online statement, it shows two payments on this statement, both applied to this billing cycle, and the statement date is 14 fucking October.

I have only one prejudice – I hate stupid people. I hate them with a passion not infinitesimal.
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current_mood: pissed off

Just ate most of an ultimate bacon cheeseburger and all the fries from a Gag-in-a-Bag meal. Oh, me so torpid!
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Ever get something in your head that you must exorcise?

In a silly conversation in which Kristy smacked me around, I remembered the quote, “Fresno? Nobody goes to Fresno anymore!” But now I can’t find the source for the quote. It was a movie or song from the mid-80s, and I’ve found two references to people quoting it via Google, but no source document.

ARGH! Does anyone remember where that came from? Was it “Valley Girl” or what?

Update – it was from Airplane.
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I’m spending weekends up in Tucson now, in case you were wondering about email pauses.

But, I do have new pictures up. New Alex photos, some from the park up here that he enjoys running around.

Life is good, although I hate watching so many of my coworkers looking at layoff notices and scrambling to find jobs. I’ve got to get out of the government-support nonsense. No private citizen can get away with not paying his bills when they’re due, but the federal government breaks the due date for a budget every freakin’ year. Odd.
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So my December trip to Florida is now in November, and the October trip to Hawaii is now in December. Wonder what will change next?

So, anyone in the Jacksonville area have any suggestions for 14-15 November activities?
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The army has patches for every major unit, but the clipart collections that are out in the retail market only have some of them. Shoot, the 1st Cav patch in Corel Gallery is in greyscale! Like it would have taken any extra effort to slap in some yellow? Anyway, in my efforts to do many things in the army, including an awful lot of off-duty graphic design work, I’ve made a few patches and scrounged others together. So, click on a patch below to get the WMF file for it, or click here for the ZIP file containing all of them. The big image, by the way, is painted on my office door. No, I didn’t paint anything myself. I’m more a computer geek. 🙂

And, of course, there’s the Army seal, since the one that gets passed around the most has some Yen symbols in the middle of the words!

I’m currently 50cents shy of getting a second commission check from Cafepress. So, anyone who needs some smart-ass clothing or drinkware, head on over and see if you want something!
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Off to a housewarming this afternoon, with a third batch of the brownies everyone loves. I can’t believe nobody asked for the recipe for baklava or black forest cake, but 3 people asked for the recipe for these brownies.

Take boxed brownie mix, prepare as directed and add a half-cup of chopped pecans. Don’t bake yet.
For the topping, take 1 pkg (8 oz) softened cream cheese, 1 lb of powdered sugar, 2 eggs, and 1 tsp vanilla. Beat until smooth, then spread on top of brownie mix. Bake 45 minutes at 350F or until top is golden brown. Tada!

Amazing, I have absolutely no mac&cheese in my cupboards. How did that happen?
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current_mood: surprised

Is a half-bottle of eiswein really worth $60? Holy cow!
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While at the mall bookstore recently, I overheard a woman say things that just did not compute for me. She proclaimed, almost proudly, “I have not read a book since they made me in high school. I sometimes get through a magazine.” Then she went on to talk about how proud she was of her son, who was 14 but reading at an 11th grade level. Wonder where in the world he developed that skill?

I can’t imagine how empty life would be without books. I get the majority of my news online, and much of my interaction with friends from out-of-state. Yet, living in a world where my entertainment was exclusively from television or movies or the radio scares me. There’s a reason why people always claim the book is better than the movie – unless you’re a chucklehead, your imagination is much better than anything Lucasfilm can put on the screen.

Thanks mom.
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On the cover of the latest issue of Los Angeles Magazine, there is an absolutely gorgeous dessert, which is called a Triple Chocolate Marquis Cake.

Anyone have a Marquis Cake recipe? I tried Google and found nothing. I looked through my Mastercook collection, and found nothing. It looks amazing. Anyone?
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current_mood: hungry

So your ex got a mansion where you kick it on the hill,
your boy comes to see you, he’s your Hollywood thrill.
He’s a Spanish fly, that bucks like a stallion.
In the suits that you got him, he looks more Italian.
You worry bout your tan when the weather’s gettin’ clammy,
summer in the city and winters in Miami.
You get so high on the high life pills,
cruisin’ and boozin’ and rockin’ on the horse size pills.
You could even take more thrills- you could even take more spills,
pills, thrills, chills and ills man, kills.
And rockin’ on the horse size.
Butt’s gettin’ bigger, do you think he’ll notice maybe?
That’s ok, don’t worry bout it baby!
Cause everybody knows he pumps you for your money, that’s alright,
don’t worry bout it honey!
In your itsy bitsy teenie weenie riding up your butt bikini.
Keepin’ on the heels cause you’re saggin’
just a teenie bit more than the girls he pretends he doesn’t thrill.
Rubbin’ on the lotion, and rockin’ on the horse size pills.
You could even take more thrills,
you could even take more spills, pills, thrills, chills, and ills man, kills.
And rockin’ on the horse size.
Sometimes you feel like Moses, that’s when you’re toasted.
Yeah, kick it.
Yo bitch.
That’s right, yeah.
Rockin’ on the horse size…
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current_mood: amused

Happy Birthday, Liz!
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