is a blog by Brendan
I’m finally initiating the domain transfer to the PHPWebhosting name servers tonight; it should refresh around the world in less than 48 hours, so this thing may disappear for a while. I haven’t managed to get NewsBruiser to show anything on the temporary (subdomained) site over there, but then it may be a domain name problem in the first place. We’ll see.
Anyway, hang tough, and don’t plan on xorph@xorph being too reliable for a couple of days. If I go anywhere I’ll be back soon.
I haven’t written nearly enough lately, but today I was overtaken by the urge: blog! Blog away! Unfortunately, the university computer lab system is tenaciously stupid, so I had no outlet but my pocket Moleskine. Let’s see what we gots in there!
1528 hrs: These two guys are sitting in front of me, one seat apart, using the room’s wireless network and AIM to talk to each other with their laptops. Welcome to technology! Also, no fair, I want one!
It occurs to me that this is an auditorium, and there is no earthly good reason to have a wireless network in it. Except so that all the geeks who live and work in this building could talk to each other with their laptops. Oh.
1557 hrs and every day before my Object-Oriented class, at least five guys and a girl sitting directly behind me spend their between-class break talking about Magic, the card game. They’re all in this same room for the class right before this one, so it’s a solid fifteen minutes of rapid conversation. It approaches argument, as only geeks can argue: insistently, with weak attempts at sarcasm and hyperbole, over incredibly trivial things.
I mean, I played the game. Still do, maybe twice a year, with my very old decks. But LORD, we’re in grad school now! Shut up about your stupid Magic cards!
1620 hrs: The funny thing about watching your professor work in a Windows folder he’s got up on the projector is that you know exactly when he or she created the file he or she is demonstrating. Like, say, 0030 hrs last night.
1742 hrs: There’s a man on the bus a few seats away, wearing large suspenders with a tape measure print. Little does he suspect one of the crucial factors of suspenders: they’re elastic, and of practically no use as a measuring tool! Now, a tape measure belt, that I could understand.
I know, I know, this is kind of boring lately. Now that I don’t spend five days a week staring at a computer screen in an isolation cube, I just don’t have as much free brain with which to think up overly cute observations. It’s a conundrum. Well, it’s not really a conundrum.
I don’t actually have any promises that it’ll get better, although if I ever get this AIM-as-a-MUD-client idea off the ground, I’m sure I’ll bombard you with stupid nerd posts about its progress. I’d be using it mostly as a project to learn about Java (I’d probably try to turn Jaimbot into a communications layer), so I could justify it that way. Think I could get it approved as a class project for Object-Oriented?
The Devil’s Dictionary: Heh and double heh. As a blogger-hating blogger, I think that whole thing is great, actually. I want to keep up with it, and wish it had an RSS feed (unlikely). Thanks to Leonard for the tip-off.
I hated “Too Little Too Late” for a long time. After he picked up the album at Sam Goody in what, September?, Jon left it in his stereo most days; since it doubled as an alarm clock, we’d both wake up to that raucous opening riff every morning, puffy and tired and grouchy. I really resented that guitar, and even though I loved the album, I had to skip the first track to listen to it.
That was the Autumn of Sleepovers, when everyone in our little accidental clique ended up in bed together in some kind of combination. It was all very innocent, except when it wasn’t. And it was all very intimate, and a little desperate, in ways we couldn’t see at the time.
We never had any intention of becoming as self-involved as we did, but that’s the way structures function in small, overeducated, post-adolescent Western society. It tightened until it snapped, and after that we were both more free and more disparate.
I never had any intention of going through an experience like that, either, but I did. I learned a lot when I didn’t think I had much left to learn. I came out the other side still angsty, of course, but I’d grown; I’d also learned how to express myself in cartoons and small sentences. A year later I started this journal, in the small warm shelter of a dorm room shared with Jon and Amanda and sometimes Ken, and the urge to write had some of its origin in the fall of 2000.
I listened to Maroon for the first time in months today, which maybe wasn’t the wisest idea. I’m still at the office, and it’s all very vivid now: nostalgia, unfulfillment and ache.
Amanda, Tara, Lauren, Alison, Rachel, Darren, Ken, and most of all Jon: Forgive me this outburst. I miss you. Come back.
Okay, so at some point my subdomains stopped working. That’s fucking great. No wonder people think the site is down–I’ve been giving out notfallingdown.xorph and shamzmam.xorph (for AZWP) forever, and now they give big old 404s. This is ridiculous. I really need to change webhosts, but I need several hours to get through such a transfer and it’s time I don’t have.
It’s DONE: I have successfully categorized (frequently up to five times) every single blasted entry in the history of NFD. EVERY SINGLE ONE. Besides going through one month at a time and filing them all, this also included a second sweep through the entire thing to fill an important slot I didn’t think of until I was almost done (landmarks).
With that done, I’m going to my apartment* with Maria to take measurements, then we’re both heading to Richmond so that a) Maria can see my ancestral** home before Mom sells it and b) I can help Mom empty the house of objects so that she can sell it. I’m not actually very worked up about this. I moved out emotionally and mentally at the end of my junior year of high school; that summer I lived at GSP, and the summer after I lived in Brazil, and in between I lived in Erika’s car. Mostly I’m glad Mom found a good family for it. I hope they appreciate the trees.
So yeah, I’ll be home all weekend hawking the remnants of my childhood at The Yard Sale. Expect posts to drop precipitately, but not entirely. I’m pretty sure Mom isn’t selling the phones.
* Did I ever talk about our apartment hunt? Sufficient: It was long, it was hot, nobody in Louisville thinks having two bathrooms is important and we ended up with the first place we looked at. Which is great, but not cheap.
** Not actually “ancestral.” More like “built in 1989.”
It occurs to me that “exCentric” would have been a much better word to use than “exCentriate” in my dinner party entry the other day, but I’m not going to change it, because then this entry would have no purpose and you’d probably never know.
So the design isn’t quite done yet, but here it is: NFD now bruises its news with some of the neatest software I’ve ever had the chance to yell at. The archive navigation is a lot different now, but one thing I’m actually pretty proud of is that all the old permalinks will still work–if I’ve done it right, there’s a little script that will redirect you right to the newly bruised entry.
I actually started working on this over a week ago, and once I’d started using NB to post I couldn’t go back (which is why there hasn’t been anything on the old NFD page for so long). Switching my journal software was like walking into a dealership with a wheelbarrow and driving out with a red Ferrari, so I’ve been writing, but in here instead. You can read like two weeks of the stuff starting on June 27 (although I think this next one is my favorite yet).
The front-page design has been trickier, since I wanted to finally have something on this site that was valid XHTML and built entirely with CSS. I think it’s pretty close now, but the design still looks better in IE than Netscape. I also tried to tidy all the old code in the conversion, but I’m sure I missed something; if you find broken links or funny-looking entries, let me know.
So enjoy the calendar, the searchability, the randomnymity and the category madness; pretty soon there should be something else up top, either a random quote or a Today in History feature. Expect entries to be rather more frequent but correspondingly shorter, as now updating isn’t such an ordeal that I feel I have to save up my material. Expect also at least two more of the secret projects I’ll be developing this summer, involving obsessions and imperatives.
I really do hope you like the new NFD (BC). And I’d love to stay and type more, but today is Blood Drive Day and I’ve gotta go faint.
So I actually did it: Running on three hours of sleep, I wrote the ten-page culminating statement on My Theatre in three and a half hours, then presented it earlier tonight. And it was pretty good. I’m exasperated with myself for doing this yet again, but at the same time, I’m now fully convinced that I’m capable of flight and the picking up of cars.
I know there’s more to talk about, but I’m really too tired to be capable of rational discourse right now (even the paragraph above was written down on an envelope at around 4:00). But hey! New Guster!
