A friend of mine from Huntspatch is coincidentally staying at a hostel two blocks from my hotel in San Francisco. It's been years and she's still as beautiful and wonderful as ever. We shared sushi and walked around this glorious, crazy city. I'm still bathed in enthusiasm after we talked about the magic of words and manifesting your will and the rejuvenation of travel. I feel as though a fog has lifted off my spirit.

I wish Julie were here. I wish she could see me now as I see myself, in full bloom. Or maybe she already does and I refuse to believe it. I wish the darkness didn't build up inside me till my broken spirit limps into her arms looking for salvation. I wish she could've seen my friend tonight. My friend has that magic that rubs off on people who endure the South but learn to leave before that magic becomes a crushing burden. I wish I hadn't seen so much of the world alone. All that beauty and passion is an untranslatable phrase locked in my head. But if Julie had been with me she'd know it the way I do. Right now she's half a world away in Taiwan having her own adventures.

I did go through two bottles of wine with a couple co-workers at dinner earlier tonight. I blame the wine for my conversation with the exotic dancer on the street corner who told me how good I looked and that it's okay to take girls to her club. But the rest of the night was all real.

I've been trying since mid-July to find someone who will replace my water-sourced heat pump. It has a freon leak in the condenser coil. It no longer cools.

I used to leave it on anyways and pretend that moving hot air around the loft made it feel cooler. This August I just switched it off entirely. Now the 100+ degree weather has come and my willpower doesn't seem strong enough to make it feel cool anymore.

I've finally found someone willing to replace it, but it will be 7-10 weeks since it must be custom built. During that time I plan to lease my loft out to the CIA for terrorist interrogations. A week of the heat and any terrorist's willpower will evaporate too.

I'm back from a trip to Huntspatch for Emily's twelfth birthday. It was one of the best times I've ever had with her. One of the things I noticed is just how much more agile her creativity is.

Emily innovated her tactics in Hive and won despite my best efforts. Her use of the spider to isolate and pin my pieces was particularly novel. In Super Paper Mario she came up with a technique for flipping enemies into a new 2d orientation that I'd never thought of.

We each brought a camera to the Tennessee Aquarium in Chattanooga. After looking over the pictures we took hers are so much better. She found much more interesting angles. She compensated better for the difficult lighting situations. Mine have a much more documentary and static feel.

I think some of it comes from the holistic school program she's been in, and the virtue of being young. Next year she starts at a Catholic school and I fear this may spark a decline since they have a different mission that is limited by what the Catholic Church allows. However, I sometimes wonder if the limits Emily has (financial resources, tools) actually stimulate the creativity.

I might do better with more limits.

I knew things were going well when a cabbie motioned me over and gave up his spot in front of city hall, and the meter had over an hour left on it. Dallas cabbies earned quite a bit of good karma with that movie.

I had prepared a bunch of notes for my hearing about a red light violation. I was looking forward to dazzling the hearing administrator with my defense.

• HB 922 had been made effective four days before my violation. It outlaws automated traffic control systems by municipalities at highways.
• I was ready to request a continuance while I sought calibration records for the red light camera to make sure it really was accurate down to 0.16 seconds.
• I was also going to get the details about traffic light height requirements in relation to road incline, I think mine may have been too low.

I had still more questions to present.

But all for naught because after about 20 minutes of waiting in the hall the hearing administrator came out and said my violation was dismissed. The disposition is "OFFICER ERROR" and I'm not liable because I was already in the intersection when it turned red.

I'm excited it was dismissed but a little let down I didn't get my Hollywood courtroom showdown.

In a little over six months Texas has gone from 77.4% of the state in some kind of drought to 29.5%. I remember driving past fires in North Texas last Summer because it was so dry. I don't think the state has been this well hydrated since I've lived here.

As I write this yet another thunderstorm is pounding Dallas. It's been maybe a decade or more since I've been around thunderstorms this strong, especially with this kind of daily regularity. I miss the stretches of no rain that spanned for months.

On the plus side Julie and I were caught out in a storm as we walked around downtown on Sunday. That was really kinda fun. One of those moments every relationship should probably have.

CIC*TRIPLE ADVANTAGE 877-4816825 may you rot in hell.

Recently I went to Experian's free credit report site to get my score. Despite my best efforts to the contrary I'm now subscribed to their $12.95/month credit monitoring service. Unsubscribing can only be done by calling an 877 number and sitting on hold apparently.

I would like to add that their credit monitoring service only exists because they do such a poor job of gathering accurate credit information. They want me to subsidize their poor credit reporting. Unbelievable.

Credit scoring is only useful for lenders. Let them pay to clean it up.

Sometimes I think about all the time I spend reading this or writing that and wonder where did all that effort go. There must be some niche thing I'm pretty freaking good at by now.

If I only I knew what it is.

Almost twelve years ago I lost a drawing Kathy made. Times have come and gone since then where I've longed to look at it again and remember what it was like the first time I saw it.

The night I saw it for the first time was one of those moments that becomes a nexus point through which all memories before and after must flow. That night shines so bright in the memoryscape that other memories near it have faded. From that moment on our friendship was unhinged and a new wilder energy flowed through everything between us.

I've been schlepping decades of computer junk (RSX-11M+ manual anyone?) from city to city, and home to home. Tonight I began the effort of taking it all apart, sorting it and getting it ready for disposal. I can't believe I lucked upon an unlabeled floppy from March 27th, 1995 that had this image the whole time.

Time for a little reflection on where I've been.

My creative interests have withered all over the place. New Songs, photos, blog posts, movies (theatrical and DVD) all dropped by about half between 2005 and 2006. I've written far less in my personal paper journal. Miles traveled went down. I've had less interesting ideas to jot down.

I think I've gone up on the number of books read, especially if you count comics. Thank you Brian K. Vaughan (Ex Machina, Y: The Last Man, Pride of Baghdad), Garth Ennis (The Boys), Grant Morrison (Doom Patrol, 52), and Terry Moore (Strangers in Paradise). I've stayed about the same on my fiction and non-fiction reading.

On the professional front I've done great. I've finished out the year with a 4.0 GPA. I've got a great job.

In the last half of the year I've been trying to get into more hobbies. Most of them revolve around building projects that interest me from Make magazine.

One of my Christmas gifts was a book on Ant Colony Optimization (ACO) algorithms. I'm hoping this gets me back on track with building a collection of BEAM bots to solve Sudoku puzzles using ACO. My other BEAM bot building projects have been an exercise in frustration. Soldering together BEAM bots without any kind of circuit board has proven to be extremely difficult for me.

I did get a cordless Dremel for Christmas which I think will be exceptionally handy for fixing up some clay sculptures I made with Emily. One got messed up in a kiln accident, and the other needs some surgery. I'm also thinking about creating a chess set with theme fruits and vegetables using Sculpey and will probably Dremel out mistakes.

Most frustrating was the lack of emotional connection to the people around me. I drifted away more this year. I'm hoping that changes in 2007 but I'm not sure how to make that happen.

Vast landscapes can have much the same anxiety-reducing effect on us as ruins, for they are the representatives of infinite space, as ruins are the representatives of infinite time. Against them, or within them, our weak, short-lived bodies must seem of no greater consequence than those of moths or spiders.

Alain de Botton, Status Anxiety

A timely reminder that my present struggles would do well to be set aside, and that perhaps a trip to a vast landscape would do much to rejuvenate me.

I'm a little drunk from the tequila shots so my typing might be slippy. Tonight we had the big live event for the Yahoo Time Capsule. As the Jemez indians performed sacred dances and music the red rock canyon walls in the Jemez Pueblo lit up with images and words from the time capsule. Four images side by side each almost filled the 175 feet high canyon walls.

It was beautiful. All these pictures of people with their families, pets, babies, sunsets, love, love lost, anger, fun and hopes from all over the world in multiple languages left me awed. I wish all the people that uploaded stuff could have seen their pictures on the canyon walls. I felt so proud of the human race.

I teared up watching it. I did an uncharacteristic thing and spontaneously hugged a co-worker in my jubilation and awe. We'd only met in person the day before. All these every day slices of life from people all over the world with the same hope and anger that I know in Dallas, TX. I hope in 2020 we still have the same unity.

I've been working on this time capsule for the last five or six weeks. Well me and another guy work on the backend. I didn't really have a good idea if it would work when people started contributing to it. I mean technically I knew, but I didn't realize I'd get choked up when people throw in something really good.

I wish it wasn't a temporary thing and that we could keep working on the interface, the backend and adding different features to make it better.

I was browsing the Texas Old English Sheepdog Rescue site. I cried like I haven't cried in a long time reading about the ones that died. I remember being a lot more emotionally open when I had my dogs to comfort me if things did not go well.

Work has been very busy. I really like the people I'm working with. I wish I had pushed my way into Yahoo earlier.

I wish my electrical components would arrive I want to get to work on my BEAM bot.

I start work at Yahoo doing web development August 21st. No other job has left me as excited by what it could be, and as unsure of what it will be.

Emily had her eleventh birthday at the end of July. While I was there she asked me if I believed we go to Heaven when we die. She said she doesn't believe in Hell and she's not sure about Heaven or God. I was quietly beaming inside. I was so proud. She was grappling with faith and reason and finding a role for those ideas in her life. I think I gave her a frustrating answer when I said what I know is that we don't know what happens next.

Someday I'll nudge her towards Ursula K. Le Guin's novel "The Left Hand of Darkness" with that great section between Faxe and Genry:

The unknown, the unforetold, the unproven, that is what life is based on. Ignorance is the ground of thought. Unproof is the ground of action. If it were proven that there were no God there would be no religion ... But also if it were proven that there is a God, there would be no religion ... Tell me, Genry, what is known? What is sure, predictable, inevitable—the one certain thing you know concerning your future, and mine?

That we shall die.

Yes. There's really only one question that can be answered, Genry, and we already know the answer ... The only thing that makes life possible is permanent, intolerable uncertainty: not knowing what comes next.

One semester of school down, some number > 4 to go.

Julie is borrowing my copies of The Invisibles. I find this incredibly cool.

I got all excited when I read that The Golden Compass is shooting for a 2007 release date.

Read about Metatron on wikipedia. That took me to an enjoyable review of Donnie Darko that posits the idea that Frank the bunny is Metatron, the face of God. The article also included the idea that some believe it was Metatron who stopped Abraham from killing his son Isaac, not God. That wrapped me back around to a blog entry about theophany and seeing the divine in popular culture.

Which has brought me back to the need to clean my place.

I'd just like to say, we had 101 degrees here today and my loft is still pleasant without turning on the a/c.

The home team took home another Pulitzer in Breaking News for photography. The Dallas Morning News has posted the photos that won [some are graphic].

I learned that Maria died from injuries in a car accident on Monday. Michael was in the accident as well but was discharged from the hospital today. Their wedding in 2003 was one of the best times of my life. Rarely have I seen two lives come together and so profoundly change each other.

She had a great smile, and she always made you feel included. Maybe that's why their relationship felt so great. I felt included in whatever life changing energy they had between each other. She was fiery and forthright. I always admired how we could disagree and still be friends.

I remember her last words to me were her singing Happy Birthday in Spanish over the phone. The way she sang the word cumpleanos has stuck in my head since then. In the weeks since I'd found it repeating in my head and it'd always give me a little smile.

I will miss you Maria. And to Michael, my good friend, whatever it takes.

50% of refunds are due to bad design.

We can America a better place if we make Design part of the public school curriculum. We teach art and we teach math and science. We don't teach anything that helps you to apply form and function in the real world.

I'm feeling much better now. Sorry about all the rubbish before. I was pretty tore up.

My wellness is just in time for Apple to open a third Dallas Apple store in NorthPark. Then next week its SXSW 2006 and 20x2!

I think if I understood linear algebra better I could solve America's healthcare problems, or at least tame the healthcare claims we process at work.

Tristram Shandy finally came out in theaters here in Dallas. It was pretty damn funny the second time too. I just can't get enough of that scene with the hot chestnut down the pants.

On the horizon for gnucasa is new paint on the walls. Sometime before, during and after that I'm hoping to have a new site put together for podcasting stories about Dallas, the Big D, home of Pegasus, the silicon prairie, 7-11, the credit card, and premiere gentlemen's clubs.

I've been hit by some kind of virus. I'm not sure how long I've got. I don't know who did it. I think they planted some kind of visual cortex activated virus in a document about Operation Northwoods using some kind of steganographic technique. Normally I use a text to speech reader to circumvent such a visual viral vector. Except this time. They must administer an anti-viral to people with clearance to read such documents while everyone else who reads it is infected.

I don' t know how long I'll be able to fight this virus. I've had to drop my "cover job" since Wednesday afternoon. I've been frantically trying to find someone that can help get this out of me. I've been in touch with an agent that claims to have an ansible and contacts at alpha centauri who may be able to help.

I'm so sore, and my head has so much pressure in it. The goal isn't to kill me, I imagine it would have done that already, I'm wondering what it is trying to do to me. I'm preparing a pilgrimage to Dublin, TX as they may have an elixir to purge this thing.

Look deeper.

Long live the dolphin underground!

I'm very much looking forward to Bar Camp Dallas. I've been playing around with ideas for a presentation.

Go read Ex Machina if you haven't. Well read the first page, if that doesn't grab you then the rest probably won't.

I had lost interest in Grant Morrison's recent work and finally jumped into Brian K. Vaughan's Y the Last Man. While I enjoy Y I've really gotten into Ex Machina. Basically the series revolves around the mayor of New York who has the power to talk to machines. There is a potent story arc that involves him stopping one of the planes on 9/11 and saving the second tower. It also has a Vaughan trademark, little tidbits of historical details sprinkled throughout. These give the series a certain heft because it anchors it in the real world.

The artwork is nice. It's done like those animated Richard Linklater movies, where he shoots live footage and animates on top of it. They do the same thing with the panels. They position people in a scene and then take a picture and use that for the illustration.

Here's a little secret about me. Ever since I was a kid I've wished I could draw.

Back in Dallas after spending a week in Huntspatch with the folks, my sister and Emily. It was also nice to see old friends. Sorry for the ones I missed. I am impressed by Emily's creativity. She will go much further than I ever did.

After I got back to Dallas I caught a midnight screening of Robocop and was surprised to see my parking garage served as the parking garage for Old Detroit's police. That movie was even funnier than I remembered.

The weather is amazing. I wish it could be sunny with highs in the 80s and lows in the 40s every day. While I was able to smell the wildfires on the way in Friday, I don't notice them at all while I'm in Dallas.

I bought a starter set and some booster packs for Dungeons and Dragons Miniatures while I was in Huntsville. A 20 sided die rolled out of the box and into my hand and I felt brand new. That was unexpected. I've got to find some folks around here who skirmish.

I miss my friends from the CSB days.

I'm back from Glenn Mitchell's public memorial. Hearing stories about him from his friends only deepened my appreciation for the tremendous energy he put into the community and into chasing and sharing great ideas.

I took off for Palo Duro Canyon during Thanksgiving. I find a profound enjoyment in the enormous space and variation of the national and state parks. It feels good to confront a physical challenge and really feel the world around me. My everday cubicle life feels fake and repetitive. I always wonder how I could make that rough and majestic world a regular part of my life.

I learned the word Hoodoo and took some pictures. Boy oh boy do I need to get into shape.

Today I picked up the keys for my new place in downtown Dallas. Very soon I should have a washer and dryer and will once again luxuriate in the domestic bliss that is a personal washer and dryer. I haven't had that privilege since July of 2003.

In other news work doesn't suck. I found a place to get Peach Nehi locally. I'm itching to get projects going once I move my stuff from Huntsville to Dallas. Julie and I will be in Huntsville at the end of the month to see Emily, empty my storage unit and see some old friends.

I go to work. I write scripts to transfer and validate healthcare claims. On Fridays I can wear jeans.

Today was a little different since I put in an offer on a loft in downtown Dallas. I find it amusing that they call the lofts and surrounding area SoCo, for South of Commerce St. I've never seen that phrase used any where else. Maybe I should use my own name for that part of town: Eliteland. Tomorrow I should know if they like it, or have a counter. This wasn't how I expected my home purchasing to go.

I passed the Zend certification exam so in some vague distant future I might use this to get a new job that cross-pollinates with my personal interests in web development. My current job does nothing to fertilize my wild animal lust for web applications.

I've made some progress on my rails app to clone Yahoo/Google groups functionality and integrate that with GNU mailman for my dallasmoviegeek mailing list. The hardest part for me has been learning the Ruby/Rails way to do things.

And most importantly The Asian Film Festival of Dallas runs this week and into next so after that's over I should get more time with happy, relaxed Julie. She's been busy getting the AFFD film festival together this year.

Yesterday my contract job said they are happy with me and want to know if I am interested in coming on full-time. It's a very grown-up, responsible person type job. It's not very sexy, and it doesn't have an audience I can play to. I write stuff to transfer and validate healthcare claims. I will never be a rockstar working at this company. After thinking about it, and what I want to do here in Dallas I decided that I would like to go full-time with them.

I also moved further in house acquisition. I'll meet with my realtor to write up a contract offer, and I'm shoring up money for some mythical closing day.

One thing that hasn't gone my way is my plan to use plone on a personal project of mine. The shared hosting environment at Dreamhost really isn't suited to the requirements of plone, and I don't want to buy new hosting until I see if there is interest. So I've decided to try the Ruby on Rails approach. I'm going to find or build a RFC2822 parser, and start building a RoR app that integrates in with the GNU mailman mailing software I use for the dallas movie geek list. I'm planning on throwing up a subversion repository with a trac website for release planning and bug tracking.

These are all things that I didn't think I'd be able to do, as recently as June, as I endeavored to recover from the personal and financial hole I had dug myself into shortly after coming back to Dallas.

I'm doing something that is unheard of for me. I've prequalified myself for a home mortgage and I'm actively searching with a real estate agent now. I'm going to need a little bit of luck to find something inside Dallas that's affordable.

It's not too long ago that the very notion of anchoring myself to some place so tightly would have sent me into hyperbolic fits. But this was the plan when I came back to Dallas and now I have a job that will let me continue that plan.

I was pleased to hear architect Doug Newby talking on a local talk show about how Dallas has some of the best neighborhoods, architecturally speaking, in the country. He was practically rhapsodic about Dallas architecture along Turtle Creek, Old East Dallas (where I live), Lakewood and Swiss Ave.

I got this in my mailbox this morning:

Let me know if you are interested in a Developer position in Downtown Dallas right in the New Development arena. This position is for someone who enjoys the Developer environment, thinks way outside the Box, and enjoys hostility.

The emphasis is mine. I wonder who finds hostility an enticement to work somewhere. I'm also amused to see the Box has become a proper noun.

Once when I worked at BroadbandNow!™© back in 2000 I had to go out and get some office supplies. It was like a school field trip because I was out of the office during office hours. Only it was better since it was unsupervised. When I was out and about I was amazed by how busy everything was. It seemed just as busy as any other time I'd ever been out. I wondered if these people had jobs. They couldn't all be on a field trip like me. It really surprised me and has stuck with me over the years.

As someone who is among the unemployed, although frequently busy with contract jobs, I have had time to witness the phenemenon with great regularity recently. Are these people employed and just have liberal use of field trips? Some of them probably have spouses that make enough for one to stay at home. Some of them work non-9-6 hours. Still it can't be that half of Dallas doesn't work between 9 and 6. I think I've figured it out.

The ones without wealthy spouses, and non-9-6 jobs have all found the magic money tree and they refresh their savings accounts as needed. Really, it's the only answer for all the people I see hanging out at Panera all day with their laptops, shopping for clothes, sitting in the aisles reading books at Half-Price. I must devote my life to finding the magic money tree, and once I find it I'll share the secret.

After a couple interviews, and an untold number of conversations with recruiters I've come to a new conclusion. I need to take over the skills assessment and I need to be far more prepared about the character/work ethic questions.

I can short-circuit the skills questions from less prepared/skilled interviewers by presenting samples of my work and explaining how it works. Although for the most part I've found that skills have not been the stumbling block.

The harder questions for me have been "What kind of company do you want to work for?", "Why did you leave your last company?" For the latter I didn't want to go, they just left me with no alternative. For the former, I don't know. I tend to view companies as antagonistic towards their employees. They have the ability to fire me at any time, and are only going to keep me around as long as they need me. I don't really have a problem with that as it seems the most efficient way of doing things. So when I look at a new job I look at it solely from the standpoint of what I am going to get out of it. I want to develop my skills and portfolio, and I want financial remuneration. I've already assessed that your company can do that or I wouldn't be interviewing, so I tend to feel the question is redundant.

However, in the great dance that is the interview I have a feeling this is not what a company wants to hear. I don't even know that it's the right way to look at the situation. That's what makes those questions so hard to answer.

Re-reading what I wrote I'm stunned by how cold and selfish it is.

At 31 I didn't really expect to be unemployed and wanting to find regular work. I thought at this point I would have it all figured out. I would have transcended the need to take care of mundane bills and be free to focus on more interesting things. Instead I find myself fighting others for jobs just to be mediocre.

I've discovered that I spent way too much time educating myself. Nobody cares about a clean Model-View-Controller design with RESTful URIs behind a nice XHTML/CSS interface, with Ajax sprinkled through to improve UI response time. Yes, I also know how to build that for application for you in Perl, PHP, Java or even Tcl. I'd love to take a stab at it in Python or my beloved Ruby if you like. No system administrator, that's fine because I know apache inside and out and Unix/Linux systems are my bitch. No database administrator, that's fine because I know a lot about normalization, entity-relationship diagrams, indexing options of various databases, replication and high availability. No network administrator, that's fine because I can order the line, setup the router, and configure HSRP and BGP to make sure we never lose connectivity to the Internet. Above it all I know there is a business to run so I'll chart and diagram the hell out of this to prove that it saves/makes money.

I've spent all this time not only reading about that stuff, but creating opportunities to implement it. Yet time and time again I find that nobody who might hire me really cares. Do you have a degree? Do you look pretty next to the sales guy in front of clients? Can you confuse the client with marketing nonsense just enough to intimidate them into giving us more money? Can you do something crappy that works some of the time so we can get it out the door faster and cheaper?

Why have I tried at all? I'll admit that I've failed to be the best at what I do, and I find it a constant struggle. Yet, why even try that when the world rewards the cheap and fast. Why be Howard Roark when you can make your life so much simpler by just being Peter Keating?

I do not remember authorizing Summer weather in late May. I do enjoy a nice hot day, but hot days have a time and a place.

I probably wouldn't have noticed if I had a regular job to go to. This 4-plex is almost 100 years old and isn't the easiest thing to cool with a single window unit. I've spent most of the day writing copy, and sketching out a new website to focus on my professional life. VoodooPad has been an indispensable assistant there. A quick Cmd-Ctrl-Shift-4 and I get the image capture crosshairs and it copies my selection to the clipboard. I've been grabbing parts of websites that I found inspiring, grabbing a snippet and then pasting that straight into VoodooPad.

I've begun wondering about renting a new place with Julie. It'd be nice to have someone to split costs with, and the two of us could easily afford a house with a yard. It probably delays my buying a house for another year, but not having full-time employment makes a reasonable home loan pretty hard. Julie and I would spend a lot less time coordinating our schedules to be together. I wonder what kind of stress living together would put on our relationship though.

Some of my most vivid dreams involve airplanes. Usually it's a scary or weird dream. Last night's airplane dream had us flying over a city somewhat low and then the plane just exploded into a fireball. In the dream I felt relieved to have the plane explode instead of falling out of the sky.

I wonder if this is a sign that I'm on the road to recovery about flying?

I've found something that greatly eases the burning and itching that appears after I'm exposed to sunlight. When I was a kid they called it Hutchinson's Summer Prurigo but the common name now is Actinic Prurigo. Thank you Internet for coughing up an abstract on treatment of actinic prurigo in Chimila indians. I didn't have access to Thalidomide but vitamin E was easy enough.

I figured if 100 IU of vitamin E a day worked for them I would take 1000 IU. It has shortened healing time from a week to about 24 hours. I've been taking them for a few weeks now and even carelessly stood in the sun to see what would happen, with only minor after effects.

I think I've been a more pleasant person since the healthier skin has made my appearance more palatable. I don't labor under as much guilt from inflicting an unpleasant appearance on those near me.

I'm finally watching filmed entertainment and enjoying it again. Thank You Oldboy, Millions, Deadwood and others.

Julie and I continue to revel in the simple, happy days.

But the US still has asshats running around, as I was reminded in these remarks from the recently approved Justice Janice Rogers Brown:

...California Supreme Court Justice Janice Rogers Brown told an audience Sunday that people of faith were embroiled in a "war" against secular humanists who threatened to divorce America from its religious roots... From the LA Times

Nobody has said religion is going to be stamped out from America, in fact the very first amendment guarantees its free exercise. As Philip Pullman bluntly states in the children's series, His Dark Materials, the universe is divided into those who would struggle for wisdom, and those who fight for ignorance.

Oh, and the web development framework Ruby on Rails is as amazing as everyone says it is.

This is the first post on gnumatt.org from my new host DreamHost.

I feel weird about this because this is the first time I've ever hosted somewhere I didn't run the servers. Ever since I started working at ISPs in 1994 I've always been the sysadmin for the servers that I hosted my stuff on. In 2000 I started buying my own rackspace and bandwidth since I couldn't host at the place I worked.

I'm sort of happy to be making the day to day running of the servers someone else's problem. Whenever I've traveled I've always had to make arrangements to take care of the servers. Now I don't have to. Overall I'm feeling sort of down about it. I once had hopes of doing something more with the hosting setup.

I came down to Austin for SXSW 2005 Interactive. It's the first time I've been in a couple of years. I'm always surprised when people remember who I am from year to year.

This time someone said hello that I hadn't really talked to since I was like 18. It was Jon Lebkowsky. I met him, along with a bunch of other folks, in Atlanta to talk about EFF. Seeing him again reminded me of how high a priority political activism once was in my life.

Then today I went to a panel on how to create activist technology. It was exciting. Political change seems so doable.

Despite my interest in activism and the opportunities for change it offers I've never been effective at it. That realization stung a bit.

Where have I been? I feel like this space has become a stranger to me. I started this entry back in January. I've been wanting to write about Julie but I've been so busy spending time with her I've not had a moment to put pen to vellum, so to speak. I've also wondered what to write. Things with her are still changing and as soon as you describe something you start to put limits on it.

We met back in November at the Angelika Roundtable, this group where folks meet to discuss films every week. She dazzled me by correcting the group experts on Oscar trivia. She had a warm smile and a friendly demeanor. I asked my friends how I could get to know her better. Over the next couple of months I did my best to be around her and create opportunities to get to know her.

Things changed when she accidentally forwarded part of an email to the Dallas movie geek mailing list. The main part of the email was about the music in The Phantom of the Opera but forgotten at the bottom was a line from a friend encouraging Julie to suss out some details about this Matt fellow. At the time I was celebrating Christmas in Huntsville and was happy that serendipity had tipped her hand. I was elated to know that my curiosity was mutual.

What has happened since is more a blur of emotions rather than discrete moments. I do remember some moments like meeting her friends for the first time, or the first kiss. The strongest memories are the feelings. Feeling like I'd said all the wrong things, feeling like I'd found a partner to chase down great adventures with, or feeling an ease with her like we'd already been together for years.

It's been odd trying to shake off the solitary, nomad mindset I had been cultivating. I've felt a tad jaded about relationships in the not so distant past. It's been a while since I met somebody new and felt like this. Julie is so free from cynicism. I enjoy her ambition and the way she sees opportunity all around her. I'm really looking forward to spending time with her for a long time to come.

So things with DF reached a point some months ago where I realized that I'm just never going to have the relationship with her that I wanted and it was an impediment to building other relationships.

It had been pushed in different directions. At times close and intimate, and at other times light friendly contact. None of them worked out quite right despite some amazing peaks. This is something that involved years of investigation. Tired of the anger, and heartache I said "That's it. No more communication." DF was not pleased. Neither was I but I saw no other way.

I stuck to it. Over the next few months I received a few emails from DF but just read and filed them. Each time I wanted to respond and answer the questions but I stuck to my guns. Then I broke and answered DF last night. DF responded today.

Remember this my friend, this feeling right now. This shitty, kicked in the chest, cold sweat, trembling, shallow breathing, nothing will ever be right about that relationship feeling. That's what happens when you fuck with the rules you've setup.

Moved into the new place and took pictures.

Step 1. Get a job Step 2. Find a temporary place to live.

Todo Step 3. Buy a house

Amanda left today to move to Baltimore. Dallas is going to be a lot lonelier without her. I miss her. I've never really come clean with how much I count on her to connect me to the world because I'm all aloof and shit. The past two days I've been very angry and irritable. I had a lot of stuff welling up inside but no idea how to say it. This has been a very rough setback to my ten year plan to live in Dallas.

I spent last Thanksgiving with a friend's family. I came into this Thanksgiving holiday with no plans. This Thanksgiving, in typical Matt fashion, I decided I'd just be alone and go somewhere else till the holiday was over. (I've never liked the seemingly unnecessary interruption in productivity that holidays bring) Camping became a non-option because of most Texas campgrounds being closed due to flooding and freezing temperatures at other nearby spots. I kept thinking about one miserable Thanksgiving that involved eating at McDonalds. But this one won't be like that.

Two different people called me out of the blue to eat with their families on Thanksgiving. I'm genuinely stunned, the kind of stunned that maybe includes a few tears, by their spontaneous offers.

Sweet sweet nectar! I've reintroduced my body to the White Rock YMCA, and conveniently all my workouts were still in the system. I picked up right where I left off. Sadly my body wasn't right were I left off.

I can't hold the cell phone to my head too long without my arm really hurting. Rock on! I gave up World of Warcraft for this tonight.

Oh happy memories, the Fitlinxx website still measures my workout in VW Beetles lifted, gummy bears burned and FitPoints.

I think I will be very, very sore at work tomorrow. I'm trying to find a campsite in Texas that isn't flooded for the Thanksgiving holiday.

It took me about a week to get my bearings once I landed in Dallas. The near constant excitement of the previous month had settled in and given me a different way of being. I felt really lost and confused during my first week in Dallas.

Oddly, I finally felt normal again when I jumped in the car and took off for Austin to see 20x2 v4.5. Amanda was a great traveling companion down and back up.

That trip marked the first time I'd stayed at Thon's place just me and him. It's also the first time I didn't feel apprehensive around him. That apprehension came from feeling that I'd never delivered on the promise I showed when he hired me to work at BroadbandNow five years ago. This time it was gone and I found it really easy to talk with him.

The rest of my time in Dallas has marked a renewal of friendships and routines. I'm staying with my friend Dave. I'm back into the Angelika movie roundtable. I've seen a number of the dfw bloggers.

I need to find a good job, and buy a house to finish phase two of this project. I know more than ever before what I want to do. I just don't know how to make money at it.

I hate life.

I'm talking about love. You know it probably started out as this great idea in someone's garage. You know God was outsourcing that shit in the beginning. The little angel/architect/whatever put it out there and people couldn't get enough of it.

At first it was this underground thing that the cool people knew about. Then there was the backlash and someone came up with hate. Then God's little bureaucracy came along and unleashed a committee on love. Only a committee could fuck it up and add jealousy, longing, a watered-down version called like, unrequited love and all the other little baroque accoutrements that have come with love ever since.

And I hate love.

You're soaking in it. -Palmolive Ads

I've been missing some functionality in gnumatt.org for awhile. I've wanted to hold more posts on a page. I've wanted a separate area for quick notes. I've wanted a place to post pictures I take without having to build some photo gallery since I rarely have more than one worth keeping.

I've been inspired by all the pretty sites on cssvault to redo gnumatt.org. I spent time working on a redesign this weekend instead of helping other people out. I feel sorta guilty about not helping, but I'll get to them.

There is still much to do. I want sub-navigation items for the archives. I need to link the new category archives to real pages. I need to fill out the projects and about me pages. I need to build a headline image archive (I've got about 20 more to add). I need to get trackbacks up and working 100%.

Oh and this page validates as XHTML 1.0 Strict last time I checked! As porovaara would say UNH!

Sorry for dumping all that crap into the RSS feed that Livejournal picked up.

I took that picture at a graveyard in the Battle of the Little Bighorn battlefield. The story seems to have a special resonance with me on this anniversary of 9/11.

An engagement between the non-treaty Indians, the Lakota-Cheyenne, and the 7th U.S. Calvary occurred there June 25th, 1876. General [a breveted rank from the Civil War] Custer, who had lived among the Cheyenne and considered them the finest light calvary in the world, died fighting along with 210 other men under his command. It was the high watermark of Indian resistance to American expansion. During the fighting Custer's body was guarded by Cheyenne warriors from scalping and looting as he had been considered a friend to the indians.

I find some comfort in the idea that 9/11 will be a high watermark of Muslim fanaticism. Like Custer's Last Stand, 9/11 has galvanized popular support against a group of people. Unfortunately I wonder what role the Sykes-Picot agreement, Open Door policy, the CIA backed Shah of Iran, American support for Saddam Hussein, American support for Israel, and so forth had in fomenting fundamentalist anger at the American government. I hope someday that we, the citizens of the world, find some other way to settle our differences.

Been wandering around the city barefoot in pajama bottoms and a t-shirt. I'm having a hard time focusing on my life. Things to do and yet I'm not getting them done. Crazy. I know. Lots of staring into space though. Supposing someone interrupted my staring after I told them I'm a practicing catatonic they might say something like this:

You know Mr. Midboe I wouldn't be surprised if there was a girl or two at the center of this discombobulation.

"You'd be right," I'd say to my imaginary, but oddly formal, friend. "It's not the usual though. No Kathy this time. Been wondering about Jessica Cutler, R, and this girl at work."

What makes them do what they do? One day you're feeling exalted and the next you're road kill twitching on the highway before the rigor sets in.

I'd strike a classic Gallman pose and craftily declare "Yeah, but that's the price for admission to the great adventure! An adventure that will have a cool soundtrack thanks to Audioscrobbler."

Keep these verses in mind my brother: "He has made my teeth grind on gravel, and made me cower in ashes; my soul is bereft of peace; I have forgotten what happiness is;" Just substitute She for He. Those prophets back then swung the other way.

That'd be all we'd talk about and I'd feel better at the end, just like I do now.

Head out to the middle of nowhere. Take that road as far as it takes us....This is a beautiful country Monty. It's beautiful out there, looks like a different world. Mountains, hills, cows, farms and white churches.

Every man woman and child alive should see the desert one time before they die. Nothing at all for miles around. Nothing but sand and rocks and cactus and blue sky. Not a soul in sight. Silence. No car alarms. Nobody honking at you. No madmen cursing or pissing on the streets. You find the silence out there. You find the peace. You can find God.

So we drive West. Keep driving till we find a nice little town. These towns out in the desert you know why they got there? People wanted to get away from somewhere else. The deserts for starting over.

-James Brogan (Brian Cox) in 25th Hour

I've figured out my plan for September and October. I am traveling all across the country for at least 30 days. I bought a 30 day Discovery Pass from Greyhound, a new travel backpack and I will be getting some new shoes. I've never done something like this without my "safety blanket", my car. I'll be at the mercy of strangers more than ever before. While I don't have an itinerary I am trying to line up places to stay in a few cities: Knoxville, Toronto, Pittsburgh, Detroit, Denver, Portland, and San Francisco. I'm hoping I'll find people before I go and along the way who want help me out. Once I get out West I'm hoping to hike across the land. Just walk out the station and keep walking till I find the next station.

I want to reconnect with the country. I feel so isolated here. Forget the red state, blue state bullshit. I want to see the places and people that make this such a great nation. I want to remember why I'm going to vote this November. I hope I hear some great stories from the people I meet. I get such a thrill hearing someone who was a stranger 15 minutes ago talk about when their mother died, the time they hiked the Grand Canyon rim to rim or ranting about long haired hippies who didn't fight alongside them in Vietnam. I want my wanderlust quenched.

I'm tired of never being filled and always having to move. The urge to wander grows inside until it's all I can think about. Push it out of my head and it pops back in like a chronic pain. I find myself wanting to take bigger and bigger risks each time hoping that I'll cross some line and be done with this. I don't think this will be that time. I'm already thinking about a Eurail pass in some vague future.

Thinking about getting a 30 Day Discovery Pass from Greyhound. See the country in a new way. Amtrack has a 30 day rail pass too but they don't hit as many places as Greyhound.

This month, I'm moving out of the house I rent and putting everything into storage. After that the plan is to leave at some point in September take a circuit around the country and then go to Dallas.

I'm having a hard time with that. Despite the clarity of the decision a month ago push back from the locals has soured me on the idea somewhat. Also I'm feeling a little nervous leaving behind the mother's milk of America, money. My prospects for more are fuzzy. Conversations with Emily for the past month and a half, a talk with her mom, and not living in the same city as Emily since she was two till last August haven't made changing things again as easy as I'd like.

But staying means stagnation, defeat, isolation.

Grabbed a new 802.11g wireless router for the house hoping it would make the new powerbook happier. I have to configure the Internet connection w/new router.

Crap. It didn't work the first time.

Call up earthlink support to make sure I've got the basics right (username, password, pppoe/dhcp/etc.). Wade through the phone tree till I get the choice "1 for Windows, 2 for Mac, 3 for Other."

Hit 3 hoping I'll get the more "advanced" support people. I end up talking to "Monica." (Seems like an odd name for someone with such a strong Indian accent.) I can't get her to stop reading her support scripts to jump to the basic config info. While she's stumbling through script I realize I plugged a cable into the wrong port on the router. It works now.

Try to gracefully end the conversation at this point but she is still going through support scripts. Perhaps I was talking to a machine? It felt that way. Maybe it's Earthlink's contribution to performance art? Like some kind of in-game character from the movie eXistenZ.

I'd always been thrilled with earthlink support before. I guess this is what happens when they outsource their support.

I was a bit foolish this week and didn't really take any precautions from the sunlight. I even spent about 45 minutes underneath a cloudy sky eating lunch on Friday. It caught up with me.

Yesterday afternoon on into the evening left my forearms and neck broken out in that old familiar rash. My lips have gotten in on the action too. Although since moving back to Huntsville one part of them seems to be in permablister mode any way. Another new twist is the right side of my face around my eye. This showed up after enduring sandstorms in the Moroccan Sahara. I guess the sand blasting removed some protective layer of skin around my eye. My hands aren't having any problems. I guess they've completed their Spring "molting" from the semi-constant exposure to sunlight.

It's all so embarrassing not looking like everyone else. Thankfully right now it's not that bad. I can venture out into public without too much anxiety. It just burns and itches and irritates as my clothes rub against my skin.

I get up at seven, yeah. Go to work at eight*. I got no time for living yeah. I'm working all the time. They call me the Working Man.

I think this is just a fact of my body. Getting up at 7 in the am has never worked for me. I slept through school. I sleep through work. I just can't get the amount of rest I need by 7am. I need that extra hour of sleep in the morning. I can go to sleep at 10pm or 1am and still not feel rested with this 7am wake-up time.

I can unequivocally state that my most productive years have come when the work day began at 9am.

Are late sleepers a protected class in discrimination cases? Can I point to an institutionalized bias that has deprived me the full benefits of my citizenship because they left me tired?

I've given up on Huntsville having the movies or DVDs I'm interested in. I've accepted the lack of a decent movie theater. (Although the Film Coop's new monday movie thing is exciting) Half the time I can find the book I'm looking for, but Barnes and Noble is quite expensive. I miss having a quality used book store like Half Price in Dallas.

I've accepted Huntsville's modest offering of locally owned non-BBQ/soul food restaurants. The ones it does have I quite enjoy. I'm resigned to driving/flying to other cities to see the exhibits, artists, or cultural events that interest me since they annoyingly shun Huntsville, AL.

What I am currently finding absolutely ridiculous is that I can't find a place that sells archival quality storage boxes. Does nobody store things here?

Perhaps I'm just lazy in this instance. Do people here cut down a tree, strip the bark, pulp the wood, put together a box and treat it with special buffering agents to neutralize migrant acid and atmospheric pollutants?

I've been unpacking the personal history stuff that's filled up my living room since October. I break it down by person and then file it away. This included keys to two different girlfriend's places. Both have since moved at least twice.

I guess they aren't really "keys" anymore, just key shaped pieces of metal that don't do anything. What is a key that doesn't unlock anything?

With all the stuff I've saved from people over the years the things that have thrown me for the biggest loop today are a couple of notes and cards from Leia. Reading them now they come across as sincerely loving and heart warming. I wish I could have recognized them as such back then. I read them today, practically for the first time, and was genuinely touched. Just two years to late.

I was, and still am, stingy with my affection. I tend to lavish it on either people that aren't around or nature and the arts. It's as though my life would be too harsh in real-time so I experience it with a nice safe, tape delay.

I'd forgotten the thrill of posting a comment on some completely new person's website and getting a personal response back from them.

Got some past due sysadmin stuff done tonight. New toys coming in. A 1u rackmount server on Wednesday, and a 15" powerbook on Monday. I'm surprised Mac Resource is giving me $550 for my g3/500 dual usb ibook.

I spend a ridiculous amount of time working on my servers and playing with net widgets. It's hard for me to imagine a life where I didn't have servers to take care of that other people count on 24/7/365.

Nothing raises my ire quicker than righteous Christians. I can find myself foaming at the mouth with anger in mere moments. In my mid twenties, thanks to the writing of C.S. Lewis, I developed a more nuanced understanding of Christians. They aren't all Fred Phelps. I spend more time reading about Christians and Christianity than any other religion. Why do I spend so much time reacting to Christians? Doesn't that make me Christian in some sense, despite the fact that I would tell people not only do I not believe in the divine origins of the bible but have no belief in a benevolent divine presence concerning itself with the day to day lives of humanity on Earth.

Imagine if you will a vase on a pedestal. The space surrounding the vase is called the negative space. If you take away the vase you remove that negative space created by the vase. I seem to be in the Christian negative space. If Christianity were gone I don't know what would happen to that part of me. I just want to voice my dissent to Christans. Even in Jesus' time he had doubters. Heck, Jesus himself disputed with the Christian Right of his day, the Pharisees, over honoring the Sabbath and associating with sinners.

I admire people like Delay, Inhofe, and Armey and so on to a degree for putting their beliefs into action. However, I find their dispensationalist beliefs to be completely unacceptable. Why are some Christians so ready to selectively enforce Levitical rules? Why isn't a more progressive Christian voice prominent?

Why do I anchor myself to Christianity, even if just in the negative space around it, when it doesn't provide any guidance, solace or refuge for me.

While T.E. Lawrence wrote about Arabs in The Seven Pillars of Wisdom, this quote seems applicable to some Christians as well.

Semites had no half-tones in their register of vision. They were a people of primary colours, or rather of black and white, who saw the world always in contour. They were a dogmatic people, despising doubt, our modern crown of thorns. They did not understand our metaphysical difficulties, our introspective questionings. They knew only truth and untruth, belief and unbelief, without our hesitating retinue of finer shades.

The quote is from one of my favorite chapters.

From: Kathy O'Malley
Subject: non gui girl
Date; March 16, 2000 10:55:54 PM CST
To: Matt Midboe

i've given it some thought
see this shit is meaningless cuz alledgedly so much will change
but...
okay so it would be nice for the "plants" to automatically notify if
they need watering or sunlight or what have you. of course, if i was
richer i'd way it's be nice if they automatically were watered and
fed and shit without the nuisance of a maid or hired hand. it would
be nice to be constantly monitored for heart rate, blood pressure,
temp, bowel movements, nutrients consumed, overall metabolic
processing and shit, it will be nice to have access to the net 24/7,
which i don't, and all that stuff about the house and car or
transportation turning on for you, it would be really groovy if
movies and literature and media in general came with a barrage of
tags/flags/links to similar/reference/definition/history/allegory
stuff. tie it all together. tie it all down. use it as a trampoline
and bounce into the ether... ether.... ether... (cool fade/echo there
did you catch it). i would love to have a filter for this world a
better one than what i've got. to constantly record and edit and
deform/transform/generate/degenerate what i consume sensually receive
inputs. like if someone were yelling at me talking above a certain
decibel range it would be heard as a chipmunk or if some filter could
detect cursing or hostility and make it into "bliss" that would be
cool. as long as my awareness didn't extinguish the illusion the
fantasy and blow out the fire in my belly my little burning embers
that charm and woo my men into the night under the moon. how many
moons do i have left? it would be awesome to acurately detect
magnetic fluxes and space weather solar flares and sunspots and el
nino and see how they affect the weather and terrain and my
personality that day to really get it down. the numbers would have to
come up. it's not just pi you know. okay i hope it rocks my world. i
hope i have to take a time out to make sure i'm still breathing. i
don't think it will take place that. slow. churning. events begging
to utilize new technology aching to become commonplace like owning a
car and a dvdplayer and an mp3 player. all this entertainment. touch
screens for food orders when i give blood the separter uses a touch
screen. we are so bound by our physicality. want to hear more see
more touch more. it would be nice if i could eliminate all the stuff
i have and want cuz it's all in the ether and i experience it that
way.i don't know how that works. i associate static focused state
with using media currently. it's hard to live it. it's not mountain
biking. how does it become mountain biking?

kathy

What did I do to provoke the maelstrom of technological failings that plagued me for the last few days? It was a perfect storm. Sometimes it was just people I know like Rebecca calling me because her iBook wouldn't boot anymore. Most of it was aimed directly at me.

I have a few boxes hosted with different ISPs, in different countries even, yet they both had upstream routing problems hit them. I have a database of web sites that I check to see if they update and suddenly 20,000 of them vanished from the database. It kept about 50,000 in the database. Is my computer exercising some kind of editorial decisions now? The mighty Spam Assassin started choking on incoming emails and I had to turn it off because it was slowing down mail processing. Verisign's whois went down for a bit. However, the icing on the cake was the mysterious disappearance of one of my servers at about 2:30pm yesterday. I could ping it but some visciousness had rendered most of the servers unresponsive, including my already opened ssh connection. The support folk at that ISP didn't respond to any reboot requests till about 2:30am despite claims of 24/7/365 coverage.

On the plus side I did move my ass and get some nagging things done that I'd been putting off. Also the storm appears over, or maybe I'm just in the eye.