Experimental feature added

Experimental feature added

One of the nice things about having a blog that nobody visits is that I can add CPU sucking tools and the light traffic won’t hurt it. I’ve added a new sidebar box called mail waiting. It logs into my IMAP server and checks the Pending folder in my mailbox and gets a list of messages. The Pending folder contains messages that I need to respond to. Don’t go sending me email just to see your name pop up in the list, I manually go through my mailbox and put messages into that Pending folder. I could have it list my whole Inbox but that wouldn’t really serve any purpose.

I am not a number.

I am not a number. I am a free man

-Number 6

The closer you are to Caesar the greater the fear. I contemplated this as I wove my way from the outer rings of the Albertville municipal court system towards the center. Unlike Dante I didn’t have a Virgil to guide me through. It all started June 19th on the way back from an Air show in Atlanta at around 2am. The Albertville police pulled my car over and decided that they wanted to do a search of the vehicle. It would end August 28th in a back-room deal with the prosecuting attorney.

Going to Huntsville. Be back

Going to Huntsville. Be back on Wednesday. I will be tilting at windmills in Albertville this tuesday. Maybe I’ll get a good story out of this.

Okay, I've got a blogchecker

Okay, I’ve got a blogchecker that runs through selected web sites in my links list and indicates their freshness. Right now they are all at five bars, but with each 12 hour time span of no updates they lose a bar. When one of those sites loses all it’s bars a random landmark in Los Angeles will be blown up by a bomb I have planted. So keep those blogs updated folks. I’m checking every hour for updates. I don’t have checking turned on for any of my livejournal friends because livejounal is so prone to overload already. I’m sure they don’t need me adding to their already overloaded and unviewable web servers.

I've been really busy at

I’ve been really busy at the computer. I redid the links section so that it’s now drawn out of an XML file instead of just being static HTML file. The reason for that is I’m building a blogchecker which will flag links that have been updated. The blogchecker reads in the list of links, checks the ones that I’ve flagged for checking and then notes in that XML file whether they’ve been updated. Then when you visit the site the link will be rendered differently depending on how recently it’s been updated. To be more specific, it will do this when I’m finished with it.

[Special note: I've been keeping

[Special note: I’ve been keeping a written journal for about four and a half years now. I’ve always kept them private till now. This is the first entry written since my decision to start blogging. Who knows, maybe they’re so awful they should stay private. :)]

Irving Park at Story 16:57

I find myself at yet another park in yet another city. I’ve spent time in hundreds of them around the country. Finding a park was often the first thing I did when arriving in a new city or town. I think I’m drawn to them because I know all the rules of a park. They are the same where ever you go. I never worry about upsetting someone else. Also I can get away from people. They clutter my life. People rarely go to a park. Even in a downtown park I’m typically the only one there. It’s clean. Just me watching the ebb and flow between man and nature.

After a weekend of much

After a weekend of much fragging in Unreal Tournament I finally returned to working on Dave’s blog. I’m surprised by the fact that the more I work on it the simpler it seems to put together. I was also able to drag and drop my existing comment system into his blog and it worked the first time. The only problem is that he has almost a whole year’s worth of blogs and they have some XML unfriendly markup in them. As Blogger has no way to programmatically grab blogs I think I’m going to have to edit each blog by hand and clean them up. It’s not hard at all, it’s just tedious. At least I’ve already done the first 10, only 20 to go.

The last time I talked

The last time I talked to Kathy, the thursday before she died, she kept talking about going on a trip somewhere. She had no idea where it would take her, and she wouldn’t tell me how she would start out the trip. She said she was nervous about leaving Huntsville behind when she took this trip. I grilled her again and again trying to get some idea of what direction she would head but to no avail. That weekend I kept hoping I would hear a knock on my apartment door and Kathy would be outside to surprise me. It never happened. I will regret always that I never suggested it.

Chimchim stumbled across the photography

Chimchim stumbled across the photography of Spencer Tunick and that reminded me of the HBO America Undercover special I saw about him. Which reminded me that the excellent documentary “How’s Your News?” is supposed to be on HBO. I decided to go look it up and they have their own website. Unfortunately it won’t be on HBO till April 2002. Which means no video release till after that some time, if ever.

Today when I got in

Today when I got in the car in the afternoon heat of Dallas I noticed a blister that had developed on the palm of my hand from the blazing hot steering wheel. It reminded me just how great the heat can be.

When I think of nature I personify it with two images. One is an ice cold humanoid figure that comes together in harsh trapezoidal angles. The other image is of a human flame all curvy and dripping. Nothing in nature grabs my attention more completely than an extreme temperature. Between the two extremes I hold heat in much more reverance. Perhaps that is a product of growing up in the South. As a child I spent a lot of time pondering all the ways that heat made the South what it is. I thought about why the South’s peculiar institution persisted as long as it did and I pictured hot, tired plantation owners not wanting to face the heat. I thought about Alabama’s red clay and how that persists as a reminder of Alabama’s slavery heritage. I thought of the slower way things move in the South and I pictured Southerners melting slowly under the hot sun like a Dali clock. In every book or short story I ever read that takes place in the South the heat lurks somewhere in town driving the story. Could Wiseblood, The Heart is a Lonely Hunter or To Kill a Mockingbird’s famous court scene have taken place on a pleasant 75 degree day in the North? As a child it always struck me as arbitrary that one place should be hot, and that it would have so strong an effect on the character of the people that live there.