Lunar Obverse

There’s nothing that affirms the bonds of friendship as hearing from a friend who is going through some troubles, and having that friend say:

I’m having a shitty day. Call me. I need to hear you laugh at me. That always makes me laugh.

…and knowing that that friend is actually serious.

The power of cynicism… Heh.

After that phone call, I walked around in the sunshine in my neighborhood, watching people, thinking about how silly all this seems sometimes. People take their toils so seriously. They see doom and gloom at every opportunity. They fall in love, they fall out of love, they get mad or are filled with sadness…

My view of the base nature of humanity, the absurdity of corruption, the bonds that are forged by a lack of perspective, all that combined in me and came out as a cosmically-inspired laugh.

It didn’t hurt (or help, I suppose) that I encouraged and extended this feeling by queuing up Bad Religion on my iPod, no doubt inspired by the gravity with which I’ve been experiencing life. The brutal, cynical straight talk of Greg Graffin and Brett Gurewitz always cheers me up. Or should I say Doctor Graffin? How many other punk frontmen have advanced degrees? Not many!

The absurdist humor in the advice given in “Slumber” is a perfect example. The narrator is attempting to cheer up a sad and isolated young man by pointing out how close death is, so why not choose to live as well as possible in the meantime?

so, you’re feeling unimportant,
‘cuz you’ve got nothing to say,
and your life is just a ramble,
no one understands you anyway

well, I’ve got a piece of news, son,
that might make you change your mind,
your life is historically meaningful,
and spans a significant time

slumber will come soon,
and you are helping put it to sleep,
side by side we do our share faithfully
assuring that slumber will come soon

well, now do you feel a little better?,
lift up your head and walk away,
knowing we’re all in this together,
for such a short time anyway

there is just no time to parade around sulking,
I would rather laugh than cry,
the rich, the poor, the strong, the weak,
we share this place together,
and we pitch in to help it die

I’m not good at giving morals,
and I don’t fear the consequence,
if life makes you scared and bitter,
at least its not for very long

Even the rueful self-awareness of the narrator in pointing out their own failure in delivering good news in such a dark way underscores the humanity of the message.

What else can I say but “Fuckin’ right”.

If the info in this thread in the Mac Ach forum at Ars Technica is correct, then I’m going to be mighty tempted to carefully pry open my new sexy thing and gently apply a new layer of thermal grease.

Also, if it’s true, then Apple had better update their technicians on how to properly apply said grease before I ever have to send mine back for any kind of repair, ’cause it’s not something I’m going to want to re-do. If I ever get the courage to actually do it.

Mine runs warmish, and the area right above the F-keys in the middle gets almost too warm to touch, but I rarely put a huge load on it. If I ever do get some games going, or some software compiling or anything heavy-duty, I might see the “too hot to touch” temperatures. And if that broke my new sexy thing I’d cry real tears and my heart would break into thirty-seven pieces.

Today was a very good day. I might even call it my best day in a long time.

Yes. I will call it that. Here I go:

Today was the best day I’ve had in a long time.

First, I weighed in and found my weight has hit the lowest level in over a year. Diets do work, friends. Don’t let anyone tell you differently, including that little negative voice in the back of your head.

The weather was perfect today. Sunny, blue sky, no wind. I woke up in plenty of time to go race. My nephew and my dad were there to see me turn in my second-best time ever, and my dad even got multiple pictures of when I crossed the finish line. I saw a friend I hadn’t seen in a while and he kinda-sorta invited me to run in the Helvetia 10K, and I was in such a good mood I actually considered it!

My dad helped me with some re-wiring and bought me a delicious soy chai and muffin.

There was a Mythbusters marathon on all day!

Heck, I even made an ex-girlfriend cower behind her imaginary boyfriend, simply by walking by! How great is that?

Yes, a good day. Whenever anyone would ask me how the day went… I would actually tell them, and talk about the 5K I ran and how well I did and how great it feels and what running has done for me. Normally I’m not so talk-y but today I was a chatterbox. It was kinda funny.

Tracy told me that, with the great day I was having, I should buy a lottery ticket!

So I walked down to the corner market and bought one of everything. One Megabucks, one PowerBall, and two scratch-offs with a potential prize of $10,000. I haven’t bought a lottery ticket of any kind in years. I was a chatterbox with the emotionally-detatched lady behind the counter and she just gave me an expressionless vacant stare as if I was high or drunk. I was high on the best day I’ve had in a long time, lady!

As I left, I turned back and made one last attempt to engage her by asking if she’d ever seen “My Name is Earl”.

“No,” she said. “What’s that?”

“It’s… um… a teevee… show?” I tried to explain about how Earl was a bad person but he bought a lottery ticket and got hit by a car and tried to turn his life around… but she just looked at me. Did she think I was a bad person now? Did she think I wanted to get hit by a car? Did she care? Did she even breathe? Holy crab!

I left before she harshed my groove.

I just didn’t want today to end.

I had to disable the recently-added “Recently Played” (songs) item in my sidebar.

Last.fm exports it as an image – and the image is too wide to fit in my sidebar.

If I scale it down to fit, it’ll be teensy-tiny and unreadable.

I can pull my recently-played tracks from last.fm as an RSS feed. If I do it that way, I can format it however I wish. It’ll just take some doing and a little bit of learning.

SIGH… I’ll add that to to-do list.

In Firefox, there’s a little circular thingie in the upper right-hand corner, in the menu bar. It spins around when a webpage is loading.

If you click that little circular thingie, it will stop what it’s doing and take you to the Firefox home page.

It will do this even if the page was in the process of re-publishing your entire blog to your webserver. Even if you didn’t want it to do that. Even if it was a complete accident, and you now have to re-re-publish it.

So don’t click that little circular thingie. Like I just did.

I’ve added another item to the sidebar, via Last.fm, my most recently-played music. It’s an experiment in using yet another “Web 2.0” site and all the social internetting that’s been going on lately.

I listen to a lot of music, and I’m always interested in finding more. Last.fm seems like a good way to do that, and to share my musical tastes with… um… whoever is out there reading this.

Right now, of course, it shows nothing. The playlist will fill up eventually… that’s the idea, anyway.

Haven’t paid them yet, so I’m using their free features. And if their “iScrobbler” plug-in munges my iTunes I’m gonna be madder than mad.

So drop me a line if you like (or dislike) what I’m listening to, and feel free to make suggestions based on what you see.

I’m a speed freak at the U-Scan. I try to hurry through it as fast as the machine will let me. Most times I’m already in position for the next option before it even comes up. I don’t know why (I’m the same way with ATMs). I just don’t like waiting. And it’s not because there are often people behind me. Like I care about them.

I got into trouble once at an unfamiliar store, where they must have set the response time on super slow. I confuzzled the machine greatly, requiring the attendants intervention and frustrating me. I must have grumbled at my friend about the damned machines for at least seven minutes and forty-seven seconds.

But last night, at my local QFC, where I’m on my home turf, I was zipping through just like normal. Until I got to the part about paying. I had a twenty-dollar bill, and I could tell it was a bit wrinkled so I used a precious second or two before the machine asked me to insert my money to try to flatten it out. Just being efficient. But trying to feed it into the machine wasn’t working. It just kept rejecting it. Again, it was slowing me down which is a cardinal sin and harshes my groove.

The nice attendant-lady gave me a couple of suggestions but it still wasn’t so work-y. Apologetically I offerred to pay with my debit card but she waved me over, took my twenty and surprised me by ringing me up at the center aisle, and giving me cash out of her drawer there.

“Wow, I didn’t know that was even an option” I said.

“Yeah,” she replied, smiling, “it helps sometimes.”

I mentally upgraded her from attendant to actual cashier.

Dear Harvey Danger,

Since your front man, Sean Nelson, has been having a run of bad luck lately, and is down in the dumps, I think the best thing for you all to do is to go out on tour. Surround yourselves with loving, adoring fans. Accept the accolades that those in the know, those who matter, are only too grateful to heap upon you.

I mean, I guess, sure, he’s run off to party in the ruins of New Orleans (the bastard!). But as soon as he gets back, tour.

And when you hinted that you’d start touring again in February, did you mean this year? ‘Cause in case you haven’t noticed, it’s practically May.

sincerely,

A Super Fan
Portland, OR.

OK, so it looks like I’ve wandered into a minefield with my new design. Y’know, the one that doesn’t work in Internet Explorer 6 or less. Which is the browser the vast majority of the public is still using stuck with.

Funny, I didn’t notice that during the design phase. I thought about booting my new sexy thing into XP last weekend to check it out, but it’s such a hassle to reboot and I didn’t think it mattered. Also, I didn’t want to be stuck in XP forever.

At any rate, I’m doing a lot of research on the topic, and as it turns out, there are a lot of workarounds and bug-exploits that will trick Internet Explorer (versions 6 or less) into rendering CSS2 elements the way every other browser does. It’s like a riddle: when is “the standard” not standards-compliant?

So I’m learning about the CSS box model, and the star HTML bug and the underscore hack, and conditional stylesheets and all sorts of other stuff.

And learning is fun.

It’s just not so fun when I’m doing it to support something that’s both widely-used and brain-damaged.

At any rate, don’t give up hope, IE >=6 users! First, as noted you could upgrade your browser to something more 21st Century:

• Firefox
• Opera
• …for those on Apple hardware, Safari works just fine

If you can’t switch from IE, you could try Internet Explorer 7 Beta 2, just released this week. I haven’t installed that, because I still need a version of IE 6 to test my fix, but I’ve heard it’s more *ahem* standards-compliant.

If you can’t upgrade your browser at all (shame on you, surfing from work with such restrictive IT folk! You’re going to get fired doing that!)… well, you can try to not load the CSS at all. I’m not sure how to do that, but that sounds like a great feature to add to my site, huh? I’ve seen it on other sites so I know it’s possible, though.

Still, hold on, I’m working on it. I do want people to be able to read my site. I swear. It’s not just for me and my closest friends. Honest.

I mean, c’mon. I’m a blogger, for crying out crab! I want attention!