Oh that’s better.
For the first time in years, I can link people to xorph dot com–just plain Xorph Dot Com–without feeling like I’m showing off my dirty underwear.
Category: Pulverbatch
Wisdom of the Working-From-Home: First in a Series
If you make nachos with blue corn chips, salsa verde and mozzarella cheese, they will look gross but taste okay.
Not great, though.
Three years after switching to NewsBruiser, I finally have NFD looking like I wanted it to look all this time but was too lazy to figure out the CSS. Me, not it.
I’ve been writing HTML for over ten years and CSS for over six, just because it wasn’t hard to learn and I could do fun stuff with it, and now I find myself in the position of the guy who makes a living off his hobby. Admittedly, so far this has been largely the tedious bits–like if I spent most of my day trying to shake a little broken flange out of an O-scale model train–but compared to my previous job of shaking out, say, crusty ketchup from a broken bottle, it’s aces.
Other people that write good
UJ wrote a fantastic response to my “Christ of the Barricades” challenge, and Will wrote a prequel to Beloit, saved here from the LJ feed:
Tarnished as it is, the dirty chrome armour of the Heliocrashers shines as they blast through the wall: Erythrophobia zaps at a guard, but canon says that sonoluminescence doesn’t cause bubble fusion. So she punches him through a wall.
The other ‘crashers are covering her while she sets a charge against the generator’s critical weak point when canon oozes out of a grate and tears Erythrophobia in half. The charge doesn’t detonate because canon says they use fusion to fly, not fight: instead, her top half flies into a duct and her suit’s failing containment does the job just as well.
And then there’s stuff like Sumana’s MC Masala, which… you know about MC Masala, right? And Leonard is getting the kind of rejection letters most of us would kill for, for a story you will (when you get to see it) kill to have come up with.
There’s no unifying characteristic between the amazing writers with whom I associate, no New School or Movement, even though I keep trying to assign one. I guess I’m just going to have to publish all you guys?
Baudrillard would actually get a kick out of this whole thing
The phrase “Christ of the Barricades” popped into my head this evening and won’t leave. I knew I didn’t invent it, but my usual sources for cultural context nearly failed me–Maria hadn’t heard it, nor had Wikipedia, and Google gave me only one result. That result led me to historian Frank Paul Bowman, who wrote a book in French called Le Christ des barricades in 1987. Yes, in French, and no, it doesn’t appear to be available in translation.
Putting the phrase in French and applying it to 1789-1848 (the book’s subtitle) certainly places it in context, but that only makes me want to read more. Unfortunately, I know from painful experience that academic texts with intriguing titles end up being, too often, boring and labored with odd extended rants about Disneyland. Also I don’t know French. So I’ll probably never read Le Christ des barricades.
But that’s what we have participatory media for, I suppose. What does “Christ of the Barricades” mean to you? In 101 words?
My first day working from home (yesterday) went really well! Except I left Brenna unattended too long, and she ate Halo 2.
Today was the first time I tried my new anti-tendonitis workout plan: swimming at the Y! I never had time to do this when I had to commute, but now I can get up at a reasonable time, swim, shower, eat breakfast and still be ready to work by 8:30. I swam 16 lengths. I don’t think that is very many! Then I kind of wanted to throw up for a while. That’s how you know your workout was good.
The big news!
Today is my last day as a systems analyst in Troveris, the software division of Trover Solutions, an insurance subrogation company. I don’t want to try and explain insurance subrogation and you don’t want to hear it, so let’s just say this: insurance subrogation is not a bad or evil job, but it is boring.
Tomorrow, I start my new job as a consulting web developer for iNDELIBLE, a design firm in Manhattan. Unlike with Trover, there’s no point in trying to hide this blog by never linking or mentioning them, as my boss is already aware of it (he saw it during my phone interview as part of my web portfolio). I’ve been moonlighting on projects for them for the last three weeks, and I already enjoy the work more than what I’ve been doing. I’ll continue working from home while consulting; assuming all goes well for the next few months, I’ll be moving to New York in October to work in their offices as a full employee.
iNDELIBLE’s offices are in the same building as Fog Creek, where Sumana works, and it’s entirely due to Sumana’s agency on my behalf that I got this opportunity. I was and am very lucky to have a friend like her in my corner.
Talk about loaded
The real basilisk is sometimes called the “Jesus lizard,” but the other basilisk may have been based on the cobra, which has crownlike markings and projectile venom. The enemy of the cobra is, famously, the mongoose; one species of mongoose is the meerkat, which in turn is called the sun angel, and protects villagers from the werewolf devil of the moon.
Mulch, mulch, rumble rumble.
After almost exactly three years here, it finally happened: my work internets have locked everybody out of LJ, Blogspot, and every message board I even tried to keep up with. Curiously enough, Facebook and Myspace remain unaffected. The same disparity means that Flickr is banned, for being “remote network storage,” but GMail is untouched. Wait, did I say “curious?” I meant “blind and stupid.”
Anyway, the man remains unable to hold me down, and I’m learning Lynx. The guys in IT, by contrast, are learning nothing.
Actually I was just frequently late, and tired
On the back of my wallet there’s a ring imprinted into the leather from the inside, perfectly centered, about an inch and a half in diameter. It is very obviously a condom. Except it’s not, it’s the BBC I got as a souvenir on my trip to San Francisco in 2004. I’m serious.
I wonder if anybody ever notices it, when my wallet’s sitting out, and if they assume it is what it looks like. That’d probably be the biggest gap between assumption and truth I’ve ever presented about myself.
Except maybe when I always showed up late and tired for my freshman-year research assistant job, and my professor decided I was a pothead.