March 28, 2003

oregonasmic

dangerous fauna

Sir, we’ve got visuals. Some sand, some sky, some trees and a whole lotta moss and falling water.



KILLER BLIZZARD UPDATE

The snow is now too deep for Converse All-Stars. Even Hightop Converse All-Stars. Unfortunately my choices for footwear are limited to All-Stars, Chacos, Birkenstocks or bowling shoes. My feet are ill-equipped for surviving my home state.


user error

“My computer stopped working so I just threw it in my closet and forgot about it.”

“You know, we could open it up and see what might be wrong.”

“Hey yeah, let’s do that.”

“Well, this here is probably your problem.”

“What is?”

“You’ve got a nest of rats living in here.”

“Really?”

“Yeah.”

“Huh.

“…”

“You know, I vaguely remember installing them, too.”


kettle-cide

I got a new teakettle because I melted the old one in a horrible Three Mile Island incident. I put it on the stove, forgot about it for a couple hours, went downstairs to grab a sandwich, and lo and behold I had a glowing fuel rod melted all over the stove. Whoops.

The new guy whistles, so there will never again be a risk of losing another teakettle to scatterbraining. However, I’ve made tea a couple times, now, and every time the whistle scares the hell out of me. It’s really loud and sounds like a Portal to the Damned is opening up every time the water boils. I pull the kettle off the stove to stop the racket and the whistle gurgles into blissful silence.

I should really feel grateful that the sound stops when I intervene, but I can’t help feeling that every time I choke off the teakettle I’m killing it. Maybe I’m suffering from survivor’s guilt from the previous incident.


March 26, 2003

Brainside Out

Happy Apple starts in four minutes, but this is so important I need to dash it off, right now.

Thanks to endless domain-mongering and great verbal diligance, www.brainsideout.com has just been nursed into being. In all due time, everything at the ‘Bored will be relocated to this new home. Don’t update your links yet. Not yet, but soon. Soon. And yet. Soon, yet. Yet.

I still have time, so I’ll tell a story. We went to the beach along the Oregon coast. There was a street sign in town that had an image of a giant wave and said TSUNAMI EVACUATION ROUTE. It pointed away from the ocean. It’s counterintuitive, but apparently you’re supposed to run AWAY from the mile high wave of death. Who knew.


March 25, 2003

tar pits

I ran out of printer paper, so I filled my inkjet with looseleaf notebook paper. It works really well, though sometimes the printer gets excited while printing stuff out real fast in draft mode and crumples up all its finished sheets in one big messy pile.

So far I’ve found five of ten required scholarly sources for my research paper. I’ve tapped the holy grail of Inter-Library Loan, but they’ve mostly given me redundant PDF files and referred me to periodicals that are supposed to exist somewhere in the UMD library. What’s more, when they finally sent me a useful article in PDF form, they sent me the citation information for the journal that UMD doesn’t stock, rather than the article itself. Thanks, guys.

I noticed my pen wasn’t writing well, so I naturally brought the tip to my tongue to help it elucidate my thoughts. After a short moment I felt the distinct stinging taste of scorpions fill my mouth and I knew I was in for something interesting. As it turns out, riding around in my pocket through Portland and airports and school had loosened up the ink in my pen a bit, and it decided to find escape in my mouth.

I garbled a few obscenities and ran to the bathroom to survey the damage. My roommate peeked in and recoiled in terror. I rinsed repeatedly, but ink stains flesh for some reason. My teeth, mouth and lips are black. I look like I’ve been eating tar.


kids don’t run on apples

Over break I had lots of dreams. They were really neat, vivid dreams. It was almost as thought I took two week-long breaks; one of them I spent in Oregon and the other I spent in crazy dreamy-dream land, crashing my car into garages and running around with a fire-breathing firehose. It was a fun time and quite self-revealing, and I got excited while falling asleep every night, wondering where the couple pounds of free-association locked away in my skull would take me.

And now I’m back at school, where I hardly dream at all, and when I do they’re boring little stupid dreams about forgetting to turn in essays. I don’t really know why I don’t dream at school… maybe it’s because I live next to the machine room and listen to air compressors all night. Maybe it’s because my room doesn’t get very dark because the omni-directional SAF-T street lamps glare in my window through all dark hours. Maybe it’s because I only have neat dreams when my back feels like it needs to spend the night knitting itself back together.

Or maybe it’s because I find school so abhorrently boring that there isn’t enough here to keep my mind busy, even at night. A kid needs waterfalls, cliffs, turquoise pools, moss, huge tall trees, sea foam races, organic food superstores, microbreweries and a complete absence of billboards. Only there can the mind sufficiently wander through all hours. You need candy, too. Kids don’t run on apples.


March 24, 2003

blurm

New design. It’s still got a few kinks, but it’s what I’ve been able to muster during the last three hours of not studying and not writing and not doing homework.

The design layout is still corralled by tables, as I can’t figure out the CSS commands for arranging space independent of the HTML code. Ideally I want to do a design similar to that at Zeldman.com. All his style and layout is determined by the cascading style sheet, which leaves the HTML code responsible only for content. This separation of design and content allows quick, site-wide changes to design, as instead of changing colors, borders and backgrounds across hundreds of HTML files, I can just change the stylesheet that all those files have been told to reference.

You can see this in the green glob that now adorns the bottom of all the pages on my site. I changed the “bottom” style on the stylesheet to make it consistent in the blog template, but since all pages reference the “bottom” object, it changes them all against my wishes. I could quickly fix this by telling the blog index to reference a new stylesheet object, like “blog-bottom”, but since I plan on eventually changing all the pages to this new style anyway, it really isn’t worth the trouble, now. That, and I really, really should be doing homework.

This, my friends, is forward compatibility, and it saves me a bundle of time.