Starting today, I use OpenOffice Writer’s word counter for Anacrusis instead of MS Word’s.
Tah dah!
Category: Writing
Obligatory reflection
Thanks for everybody who called, wrote or commented to send me birthday wishes, and to all the people who showed up at my partylike entity. You’re all great! And I am made happy by material possessions: DC gave me more of the awesome restricted-access Actors Theatre notebooks, and Maria gave me about a jillion books and DVDs and an ice cream cake and apparently something else that hasn’t arrived yet, and Lisa gave me–exclamation marks!–my first-ever illustrated story! (Of Fortado.)
Despite my inexplicable knee-jerk belief of the past several months that I’ve been 26, I’m 24. Tonight I sent off the third-to-last thing I have to do to graduate. Almost done.
It doesn’t honestly feel like I’ve lived in Louisville that long. I feel so much more competent now, in so many areas, than I did two years ago: working with humans, writing code, writing, traveling, using public transportation, applying the principles of aikido to solve nonphysical conflicts–all the things I want to spend my whole life doing.
Also, I think this is the year my brain starts dying!
Actually I am quite good about commenting
I spent most of the past week and almost all of the last 24 hours writing code for my Master’s degree project, because I’m a terrible person. And then today I came in to work on zero sleep for the first time. This should be different.
On the bus here, I had a dozing dream about falling out onto a huge slick plain of PHP and whitespace. I knew it was stuff I’d written, but I couldn’t figure out where in the whole scheme it fit. I was lost! It could be miles to the nearest comment! It was pretty scary.
I have (wisely, I think) decided not to write an anacrusis about this.
Sometimes I come up with sentences that are too awful to be used in any story, ever, like
“There is nothing outside the text message.”
I need PHP to go up one level of a directory, then go back down several more, to include a file. I don’t know how to do this, but I’ve been getting around it by using a URL instead of a path; now Dreamhost is turning off the option of using URLs in include statements, for (good) security reasons, so I can’t do that anymore.
I also absolutely can’t find a way to do it the path way. It won’t work with an absolute path from the root directory, nor from the highest web-accessible directory (I’m in a Linux / Apache environment, if you hadn’t guessed). I can’t use ..s to ratchet up, or do any other kind of relative movement I can think of. Does anyone know how to get what I want?
Actually, Lisa, I think you’re the only PHP programmer who reads this, so maybe I should have just emailed you. But I might be wrong.
Update 0224 hrs: Never mind. I found out how to do it, but it doesn’t help, since I need to have Apache parse the file (a NewsBruiser portal CGI, if you hadn’t guessed) before I grab it, and an internal include obviously doesn’t do that. I’ll have to use the curl library, once I figure out what it is.
And I know I’m a bad programmer for going with this setup in the first place, but I had the choice of frames, meta refreshes or dumping a load on PHP, and it was rocks and frying pans all over.
Let’s see if LJ picks it up this time
In case you can’t read the text on the second one (which would be the back), it’s the Devil’s Dictionary 2.0 definition of “blog,” so of course this would be pending Mr. Knauss’s approval.
Seriously, if I got a couple dozen of these printed up, would anybody else be into it? I know my bitter, self-mocking iconoclasm is somewhat uncommon within my circle of readers, but there is a time and place for the ironic acknowledgement of one’s own participation in an overhyped and crass medium of expression. Like, say, concerts.
“[M]eaningful self-expression is not just a tool for success in the academy and the professional world (though it is that, too), but an essential component of finding and living our call to be human.”
Beautifully written and perfectly described. Sean’s a better diarist than I, and he’s the teacher I’ll never be, but this excerpt from one of his letters says exactly what I try to say whenever I discover a new and interesting human: clear thought and writing are rare, and powerful, and of tremendous value in the world.
If I read your blog or friend your LJ, it’s because I am fascinated by your finding and living of the call to be human.
Whoops. I don’t think anybody saw that, but if your RSS aggregator did happen to grab it in those fifteen minutes, I apologize for yanking it back out of sight. Send me an email telling me who it was about and I’ll give you a consolation prize.
Everybody else: don’t worry about it. Nothing to see here!
Let’s see if I can out-geek the Forge
All RPGs currently implemented on computers (including consoles) take the form of applications: behaviors written with an end in mind. But pen-and-paper RPGs aren’t applications. They’re operating systems.
Discuss! Or don’t.