days of naze

mega-weekend, mind blown
11:02 PM

I'm at the end of a 9 hour PC building jag. Damn, it's beautiful -- inside and out. If it would just recognize the hard drive. Going back in. Not giving up. Haiku, weekend highlights and stuff coming soon. I promise.

[12:36 a.m. Success! Amongst the tangle of internal power cords, I had mistaken a branch of wires emanating from the top fan as originating from the power supply. Silly me. Found a live branch, plugged it into the hard drive -- voila! Formatting as we speak...]

days on movable type
08:54 AM

Well, here I am on Movable Type! Many thank you's to the Illusionary One who did the entire installation in the spirit and quality of a true city and Internet neighbor. Merci beaucoup!

April 21, 2003

Testing
05:27 PM | Comments (45)

Testing, testing, testing

i haiku myself
09:22 AM

Graying teeth, hair sparse
Reclining in my chair like
William F. Buckley

April 20, 2003

feelin' fine at thirty-nine
11:15 PM

I'll be celebrating another orbit round the sun in 10 hours. (I already received birthday greetings from Aussie Wendy!) If you've got a spare 3 minutes (especially if you are a regular reader), would you e-mail me a birthday haiku? (Standard form is 5 syllables / 7 syllables / 5 syllables, although you needn't feel too constrained.) Send them to haiku at naze dot net.

Hopefully, I'll be sharing some with you soon. (If you don't want your name to be published, let me know.) The last time we did this, it was a hoot. It would make me ever so happy. In fact, I'd be all atwitter.

April 17, 2003

discover this
10:10 AM

I can, without hestitation, recommend that you *never* get a Discover card. Their policy is to relentlessly harrass you on the phone with solicitations and service calls. When you provide written instruction to close the account and refund the balance, they do neither. Until the 2nd or 3rd frustrating call. And then you get another "courtesy call". I've never, in all my life, felt so bothered by a company I have done business with.

April 16, 2003

it is time to get fierce
11:12 AM

Tim Robbins, yesterday at the National Press Club: "And the most frightening thing about the weekend was the amount of times we were thanked for speaking out against the war because that individual speaking thought it unsafe to do so in their own community, in their own life...it is time to get angry. It is time to get fierce."

"You have the right to free speech / as long as you're not dumb enough to actually try it" -the Clash

"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety." -Benjamin Franklin

Feel any safer for what you have given up? Did you get a good deal?

April 13, 2003

feelin' groovy
10:25 PM

Is it that I Iove the Internet or is it just that I'm awfully happy with the people I meet through the net? Perhaps the best answer is yes.

I've been in 80's and 90's gaming heaven ever since Nick gave me the tip on how to make MAME work on my PC. Atari's Rampart is the best arcade game ever, and while it isn't configured to use the original trac ball, a mouse works pretty damned well.

I've been seriously considering switching blog apps. The choices are upgrading to Blogger Pro (add pictures, hopefully better reliability) or the more complete solution, an app hosted on my on domain server, like Moveable Type or Gray Matter. I asked advice from the Illusionary One and she blew me away with the offer to install MT on my server and to convert my blog files. That is so cool. I haven't yet decide which route to take, but it's amazing to have this collaborative way of getting stuff done.

April 10, 2003

yeah, dat's da ticket
12:09 AM

Did I just play Klax for 3 straight hours? No, why do you ask? The smattering of applause? Those are just my peeps.

Well then...move along.

April 08, 2003

what if?
11:02 PM

"What if Fox News were around during other historical events?"

[via Wil - takes a few seconds to load]

return to the golden age
09:49 PM

You may recall my recent computer wish list. I'm happy to report that it just got shorter by one item -- my Multi-Arcade Machine Emulator (MAME) is up and running classic games of the 1980's and early 1990's. My new hero? Nick Danger. In 2 e-mails he overcame the problem that bedeviled me since my first attempt a couple of years ago. (The solution: Options, Directories, Insert, select, OK. Voila!)

Klax, Punchout, and a delightfully simple gem from 1986, Renegade. Aaaahhhhhh!

temporal disturbance
09:37 PM

If you wondered what happened to me over the last week...well, it's blogger. I'm feeling very peevish right now -- 75% at the new google-owned company and 25% at me. Blogger has a recurring problem where templates (everything surrounding these words on this front page) on their server somehow get disconnected from the user's editing mechanism. I kept posting, editing and re-posting in an attempt to overcome the defect, to no avail. The result: a posting that meant something to me (my father's birthday -- below) gets posted a week after it happened and with a date that is 2 days late.

I'm peeved with myself for not demonstrating a little more ingenuity. It wasn't until a few moments ago that it occurred to me to jiggle the template a bit. Duh. Probably would have fixed it from the get go...

April 03, 2003

anniversaire appropos
09:17 PM

Happy Birthday, Dad!

I know people who were born on major holidays like the Fourth of July and Christmas, but their coincident holiday doesn't seem to rub off on them nearly to the extent that April Fool's Day has on my father. And I mean that in a good way.

When Dad moved us to Longview, Washington in 1965 he founded a group of civic minded pranksters and satirists called the Longview Sandbaggers. At their zenith in the early 1970's, the red and white striped jacket Sandbaggers showed up at city hall meetings, openings and parades with alarming regularity, ready to poke fun at pomposity, over-seriousness, and pop culture. Not always strictly politically correct, but never mean-spirited, this group created a levity and spontaneous humor that "embiggened" the small city I grew up in.