July 2002 Archives

I love the juxtaposition of the fish in the garden.

Today's photolog entry comes from my aunt's house, where everything is photogenic -- including the cats. This is Soochow, her current first-born. He's a sweet cat, but a bit loopy. You can tell he's happy to see me by the small droplets of drool escaping his mouth.

I think this is one of the coolest pictures I've ever taken. It's on display now in the photolog.

It's rare lately for me to have a really productive day on a weekend. Usually, I sort of veg around and don't get much done, but today, I was hardly home all day long.

What I don't get is why my ownedness is so high, compared to Phil (who got 50%) or Lloyd (who got 31.25%) both of whom update much more religiously than I do.

Kramer says Sagittarians should be trying to enjoy the atmosphere and the company and judge success on that this week (or at least, that's how I'd paraphrase what he said), and to be sure, I didn't catch any fish today. The company part is easy, because everyone seems to be having a down day today -- not just me.

This week's Friday Five is all about weblogs.

1. How long have you had a weblog? I don't know if you'd call my previous online writing a weblog, but I've been doing it since October, 2000.
2. What was your first post about?I wrote a bit of prose about.. um.. water.
3. How many changes (name, location, etc.) of your weblog have there been, if more than one? Two, I guess -- mostly, I just expand, rather than changing.
4. What CMS (content management system) do you use? Do you like it or do you want to try something else? I like MT. I think it's very versatile, though I wish I knew more about it. Someday, I'll take the time to learn.
5. Do you read people who have both a journal and a weblog? Or do you prefer to read people who have all of their writing in one central place? I prefer the personal sense of a journal, versus a weblog. If a writer does both, I usually read the journal more often, but then try to keep up with the weblog once or twice a week. If it's just a weblog, then I check it obsessively. Really.

Today's entry in my photolog is of my childhood teddy bear. He doesn't have a name -- the only named stuffed animal was a huge dog with big floppy ears that I pulled off more than once, called Big Bubba. He was 3 or 4 feet tall -- really big. I have no idea what happened to him. I probably threw him away when I was a teenager.

1. Where were you born? Corpus Christi, TX
2. If you still live there, where would you rather move to? If you don't live there, do you want to move back? Why or why not? I would never move back to Corpus Christi for any extended period of time. It's too small a city to give me the opportunities I want and keep me entertained.
3. Where in the world do you feel the safest? Banff, Alberta, Canada is a village with the squeakiest-clean image of any place I've ever visited. I'd feel safe walking the streets at 10pm. (Of course, in the summer, when I've visited Banff, it's still light at 10pm.
4. Do you feel you are well-traveled? Compared to a lot of people I know from south Texas, many of whom have never left the state, I feel fairly well-traveled. I've been all over the western US and Canada, although I haven't seen as much of the midwest and eastern portions, and I've been to Europe. Oh -- I've been to Mexico, as well, although that's a pretty short trip.
5. Where is the most interesting place you've been? Dublin was so interesting to me because everything there had such a history. In the US, "old" means a building was built around the turn of the century. In Ireland, it means it was built during the Dark Ages. It gave me some perspective.

There's really nothing like the satisfaction of knowing that the problem a coworker spent all day trying to debug (and which has, at least theoretically, affected 5,000+ users) came as a result of a sweep you and he ran three or four months ago.

No...

really.

Can I just say I'm glad my apprentice interview came -before- we found out what the problem was?

On the plus side, I was able to help him figure out the problem within about 5 minutes of the time I came to look at the code, thanks to the fact that it was buried in a system that I know far better than he does. It was educational and kind of amusing, but it rather sucks that we caused it to happen in the first place.

Studied nonchalance.

There are a couple of new entries in the photolog. I spent most of the night trying to retrieve these pictures from a faulty SmartMedia card, and so I'm thankful to have them now. However, I didn't have much time to write about all the pressing issues of the day -- those'll have to wait until tomorrow, I suppose.

I got this call from a girl at the Zach Scott Theater. She calls me every week or so to try to sell me tickets to their upcoming season. She's a nice enough girl, but she tends to call at the worst possible times. Her first call was on my moving day, when I was sitting around waiting for the moving guys at my old apartment and wondering where Bailey was and trying not to hurk. Needless to say, I asked her to call me back later. So she did -- repeatedly.

Anyway, she called again today, asking if I wanted to buy an executive pass. The short answer is that I didn't buy it from her, but we did have a 15-minute conversation about life and the state of the world. Poor girl -- I once made cold calls to conduct a survey about something or other, and I don't envy her for having to call people and try to sell them things. I think she was so astounded that I didn't hang up on her (and that I was polite) that she wanted to make it last as long as possible.

Ultimately, the conversation boiled down to the fact that I'm 25 years old, doing a job that's not terribly similar to the one I went to school to do, and that I'm happier than if I -had- gone into advertising or television production. And that she's in college and figures she won't know what she wants to do when she turns 50.

In the end, she said she'd call me back another time (I suggested next month, after Claudia comes back from Romania), and that it was nice to talk to me. I told her it was nice to talk to her, too.

It all felt vaguely like a first date. And if nothing else, I know she'll call me back.

Lloyd came up with this really cool idea for rating weblog entries.
Ý "So I thought about this a bit more, in a graphical way: envisioning each day on the weblog calendar as a colored dot or image, with the color indicating something about the content of the entry itself."

Recent updates to the photolog:

Product Placement: an homage to capitalism, advertising, and the virtues of Vanilla Coke

Oblique:some early, somewhat artistic digital photography I did in 2000

Umbrella:the world's coolest umbrella (belonging to me, of course)

Night at the Cactus:a grainy image of my favorite music venue here in Austin

I haven't written much about the rain. For as long as Shoal Creek stays within its banks, it doesn't affect me much. My roof seems secure enough, and while it's inconvenient, the rain isn't much of a threat to me at the moment.

From today and yesterday, a couple of entries in the photolog about a new birdfeeder I put out in front of the new place.

The first thing I read when I woke up this morning, after the part where the President urged everyone to be vigilant but thankful, was an article about the face recognition scanning software being expanded to Virginia Beach, despite the fact that the program was ended in Tampa Bay several months ago.

I posted a picture of my new nosering, in keeping with my post from yesterday.

1. Where are you right now?
I'm home right now. I had an uneventful day off, and it's almost bedtime. Tomorrow is Friday, but it'll feel a bit like Monday.
2. What have you lost recently? My cat. :(
3. What was the first CD you ever purchased? Does that embarrass you now? I don't remember specifically -- it was probably "Little Love Affairs" by Nanci Griffith, but it could've been any number of CDs. That doesn't embarrass me. I had good taste in music back then.
4. What is your favorite kind of writing pen? I lurrrrve gel writing pens. Blue gel writing pens. Bright blue, that shows up well on a black and white form.
5. What is your favorite ice cream flavor? It varies from time to time. This time of year, it's peaches and cream. Other times of year, it's chocolate-covered cherry or mint chocolate chip or... oooooh, Cherry Garcia. I'm changing my vote.

I keep meaning to update, and yet I never know where to start. There's a lot going on right now, and it's all a bit distracting. So I'll start with this: I've joined the 1000 Words project, meaning that I'm committing myself to trying to upload at least one picture a day into my photolog.