Grimly Fiendish

Bitch: Been noticing more and more that people seem to have been discovering 'target="_blank"' to make links open in a new window, and feeling compelled to show off their new knowledge. I hate that shit. If for some reason I want the clutter of a new frikkin window I can just shift-click; forcing a new window takes the new/same-window choice away from me.

Relief: Finally got annoyed enough to dig up the cure up again. For anyone else equally annoyed and using Firefox, "browser.tabs.showSingleWindowModePrefs = true" is your friend. Go to "about:config" to toggle the value, then rejoice at the new option under Preferences->Advanced->Tabbed Browsing.

You may express your appreciation at this tip in Twinkies.

I was originally going to type up a whole annotated photo-diary sort of thing for my trip a few months ago up to Canuckistan, but what slim notes I kept of the journey wound up being pretty boring. So instead I'll just slap up some of the less crappy shots I took along the way every so often.

Idaho had an educational rest stop consisting of twisty hiking trails which wound through a playground of rocks and logs. I'm not quite sure what to make of it on the whole. This image, for instance: "We really liked these rocks, so we built a resting area next to them with a nice sign...but we couldn't think of anything to put on it, really." I drove on...

...and saw bisons! I forget where this is. Montana, I think. I just remember it was cold and stupendously windy.

This wasn't an amazing photo in itself. Just an amazing collection of junk someone had on their property, which the overpass from the highway overlooked, and was the first thing seen upon entering this small town. The entire stretch of this town's main road (visible in the background) was completely ripped apart for some sort of construction project. There was no asphalt left anywhere, just gravelly mud. The junkyard rather set the theme for the rest of the place, really. I opted not to stay here.

And that signals the end of this entry. Stay tuned for the next in another few months or years.

So Matt, between being a professional beer connoisseur, 'tard-herder, and general artmonkey, how'd you find time to star in ST:TOS episodes as well?

This is what happens when you let pen freaks loose in the modern world.

And this is just an insanely cute puppy.

Lost power for a bit tonight, but the cause for it gave me an interesting photo opportunity:





Digital isn't really that good for long exposures, but it'll be a while before I see if any of the film shots I took turned out. Enjoy.

On the footsteps of yesterday's amusing little aside, I got a call from my mother yesterday, who often calls when something's gone wrong with her machine. "Just to let you know what's happening, my computer's stopped booting," she started. I groaned quietly, but true to form she kept talking without giving a chance for response. "I've been on the phone with HP tech support in India and they had me do a, a, what do you call it, restore thing, and that didn't fix it, it kept saying it couldn't find an NT loader and I'm just now on the way back from the post office, HP finally sent my XP CDs overnight to me, and--"

Here she paused to take a breath, so I quickly slipped in, "Remove the disk from the floppy drive."

Apparantly, HP/Compaq's outsourced help never thought to check the floppy drive (OK, obviously neither had she). She was in the midst of reformatting the drive as they'd suggested, and naturally HP has followed the current trend of not supplying the software on CD unless there's a dire emergency.

Oh, and the people in yesterday's saga did in fact reply. "We'd love to help you, but we can't reproduce the problem," they said. "Please send us exactly what you were submitting." So I did. Full name, requested login ID, selected radio buttons, everything. They replied again, quoting my full email with all that information, and said "We'll need your full name and requested login ID to help us find the account." The account which I'd been saying I couldn't create.

WHY MUST I BE SURROUNDED BY FRIKKIN IDIOTS?

This has been floating around for a while, but it looks like some people still haven't seen it. For their benefit: 99rooms

The man in the photo below is:

A. Renowned for his hauntingly beautiful panpipes solos,
B. An angry metalhead so badass he can kick your ass with only two feathers,
C. A street performer enacting his interpretation of the Icarus myth,
D. Preparing for covert infiltration of the next Pride Parade,
E. Currently in flight on board A Couple Tabs Too Many Airlines,
F. Rather frightening, really. He might start, like, hanging out with you or something.



(Sorry, Reinhold.)

Today I met Gar Gillies of Garnet, not far from where I'm staying here in Winnipeg. He made the amps for The Guess Who and was their manager as well. Pleasant old fellow. Makes a gizmo he calls the Guillotine, which I was curious about. It's capable of a nicely rumbly vintage rock sound, but not quite the sound I'm looking for. He looked a bit disappointed when I said so. My quest for Ultimate Tone continues. Where will it take me next?

I also installed Logjam on my notebook again, finally.

(The following is not depressed angst, merely some introspection I'm putting into words. It's really more for my own sake than anything else and not likely of interest to others, but I don't bother with private messages.)

Something rather odd occurred to me tonight. Someone made a literary reference, and as I mulled over it I realized it'd been over ten years since I'd read the book in question. This in turn lead to the further realization that I've been saying that phrase rather a lot to myself lately.

Ten years ago I was a voracious reader. I'd gone through a fair amount of the typical scifi and fantasy works, then moved on to classic literature, touched on a few biographies, dabbled a little in mystery. And of course outside of fiction the sciences held my fascination, particularly ethology, computer sciences, and electronics. Then about ten years ago, my reading fizzled out to pretty much just documentation I had to slog through.

I used to write quite a bit. Just letters, nothing artsy. But I maintained handwritten correspondence with a number of friends, and looked forward to email from them and others, which I would respond to at length and in short order. I've not hand-written anything longer than a quick note in, oh, probably something over ten years now, and I'm notoriously lax at replying to email. Not to mention my spelling and grammar have gone downhill as well.

Ten years ago, I used to play guitar and was quite well in practice. I'd been playing guitar since I'd found one kicking around the house as a teen, and had been playing various other instruments since elementary school. I could read sheet music (a rare thing for a guitarist), I knew some theory, I could imitate various other guitarists' styles at will and could improvise more or less. I'd hear or recall a song, and I wouldn't rest until I'd picked it apart. I'd practice for hours at a time, had the thick callouses on my fingertips to prove it, and had even done some recording and public performances, from standard rock fare to classical quartet. Then I stopped playing, about ten years ago.

And so on. (Actually, it's getting to be more like twelve years ago that most of these things fell by the wayside, but who's counting.) It's as if at some point I'd lost my interest in learning and creating and exploring, in being interesting, and apathy took the place of those interests. The only correlation I can draw in the timing is that I'd also left my academic environs completely behind at that point. Could it be so simple a thing as that? Or is it perhaps just something people commonly go through at some stage in their life? Yet I see people older than me pursuing advanced degrees and still enthralled with the same types of things I've let drop out of my life.

I don't know the answer. This entry is my reminder to keep trying to figure out how to get back to being more like I used to be before this decade-long cultural and intellectual black hole came about. Maybe I'll start by teasing my hair out like Motley Crue again...