Squublog

Now that last one I'm SURE I correctly set the date stuff on, and it still posted at first immediately to the current date, and then I had to edit it and reset the time stamp to make it go out to the future.

something is hose.

To My Readers that use an RSS Feed:

You poor, poor people. This place is very much NOT intended for that. For one thing, I don't use those things and so test that even less than I test the general workingness of this place as a blog. For another, I've been lately playing with blogging in a different way than the one I'm used to. I'm posting things to the future regularly. The interface for doing this is just a little screwy. There is a field for changing the date and time at which the post will appear; this date/time fills in by default to the current date and time when I start a post. There is a second field for selecting whether to post in the future or to post immediately. This is bad interface design: when I change that date, it should automatically assume I want to post on the date I've indicated. In fact there is no need for this to be two different data items. If the date/time is going to default anyway, then the thing should just always post on the date that's in that field.

My point there is that I regularly change the date but don't select the radio button to post on that date, so that posts are posting immediately, then I see that that's happened and I edit the post to change when it appears. I assume that for RSS people this means posts occasionally showing up and then vanishing or something.

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I realized just now that i'm probably wasting some of these useless posts by not skipping at least one day per weekend. With the dates. Posting. Dates.

But I've also just read the post where I thought about trying this thing because it just appeared today and I'm thinking now: man. What a goal! A whole year's worth of this crap. And the more I think about it, the more I want to do it. Maybe it'll be like an enema.

My wife's side of the family is going to be here for Thanksgiving. Today we had a few hours without my daughter so that we could try to clean up for that, and for my daughter's birthday party which will be the Saturday after (all of which will be long gone by the time this posts.) We are nowhere near finished cleaning up. I'm not sure it's even feasible at this point. I'm considering getting out some wood and boarding up the doors Wednesday night. Spray painting a sign on the wood. "Sorry Turkey."

Days ago (minutes ago) (an hour ago) (not yet available) I may have self-prevented-myself from doing what I am telling myself, yet have yet to have told myself, to do. Namely, if I go and update my blogroll now then some days from now (days before now, now, then,) I'll look pretty dumb telling myself to fix that mess.

Part of the problem is that I haven't put a "blogroll this" link on the top of my browser thing on this computer.

My other computer is currently a paperweight. (And I want to be a paperback writer)
(paperback writer)
(paperback writer
writer
writer)
(yeah)

Last time i went to blogrolling the site was all fucked up. It's been looking ever since I started actually using it like something that nobody actually maintains, a sort of end-of-its-life... thingy. Man I don't have words when I'm rushing through uselessness.

In something like three weeks my family's going to be 33% larger than it is now. Is that right? Let's see.

3 + (3x1/3) = 3 + (3/3) = 3 + 1 = 4

There, see? Nobody calls me stupid without being right. (I nearly said "25%" larger. Boy wouldn't that be something.)

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Continuing to be out of order. I'm somewhere in the middle-beginning of my "experiment." Don't know right now how much I've explained it. That's neither that nor this, nor there. Anywhere.

I have a gradually deteriorating collection of music. It's clear to me that I've reached, and long since begun the descent from, the pinnacle of my music collecting days. I still buy CDs, download stuff from some independent sites like DMusic, trade rips of stuff with friends (did I just say that out loud?); but it's nothing like it used to be. My buying/attaining now is always sporadic, never focused (sound familiar?) and just not as satisfying as it once was.

Still, on occasion I'll pull out something old to listen to and think about how I ought to write something about it. Never settle on what exactly I'd write, as reviewing music is a skill I've never worked on hard enough to even figure out, let alone master. Sometimes I think I'd just like to write about where I was when I got my hands on the thing, or when I first heard it. That wouldn't always work, though, as sometimes there's not much to tell related to that.

This "Musimembering" thing is something to do with that. I don't know if I'll keep it up - I'm buried in half-started projects to which I can't do justice, including this blog itself, and just writing this introduction (as well as the first example, which is pretty weak, and which will probably appear tomorrow,) is eating into time I really shouldn't be taking up with this garbage. Of course the way I am I'm going to want to keep doing these all RIGHT NOW, taking up more time, and burn out the idea quickly while wasting time better spent elsewhere. We'll just see what happens.

So excuse the first entry or two, I've had to start somewhere by way of diving in, and I'm certain I chose a pretty boring entry point.

So what, exactly, is this grand bumpity that you may or may not have been reading about? How's it work?

Good questions. I'm trying to figure that out even now, in what is, chronomologically, the third in the series. If it's a series.

There are a couple of ways that this could go. My usual method would be to make it as obtuse as possible. Is it a month of posts? (I've done that before, but this, obviously, would be that PLUS added hot sauce.) I could do it backwards: this would be the last post. But since I've already started, that doesn't quite make sense. So I'd sort of like to probably do it completely out of order. Still leaving open the question, for now, of the exact duration, I'm posting some block of entries to the future. The first post I did like that was destined for June 18, 2008. For some reason that doesn't feel far enough into the future for me. To make it really interesting I'd shoot for a year out, and do a full year of posts.

(Yes, I'm waiting for the laughter to die down.)

Yeah, I can't possibly set myself up for that kind of failure. That'd be dumb. So let's say we're going to end this thing on 8/8/8. It's a big date for a few persons I know, not the least of whom being our beloved Kingo, who may make a few appearances in this play. This won't be that post; I'll know it, I hope, when I'm writing it.

So where's that leave me? I could try to fill the space between June 18th, 2008, and August 8th, 2008. How many days is that? (I'm running out of now-time to finish this post. Dammit.) One month, 21 days. Hardly seems especially anything. If it stretches out PAST that end date, well, maybe we'll see.

I'm late in discovering that another blogger on another of my blogrolls hung up his (astonished) hat:

Here's this news: Astonished Head is...well, it's finished. I've got nothing more to say here, really, and rather than give the place new drapes I'm just going to shut it down. I mean, it'll still be here, hanging around in the trackless space between pings and packets, but there won't be any more writing at this place. It's been over five years, and I've got other web-based things I want to do.

I enjoyed reading about this guy's recumbent bike ride across the country. This would be where I'd go into more detail were I so inclined. Instead, I'm playing experimenter in a grand parade.

Wouldn't it be cool to start posting things to the future? On Tuesday, March 18, at 3:50pm (though the laptop I'm using doesn't know about the modifications to daylight savings time and so thinks it's still 2:50pm), I'm looking out the window at a pale gray day and a little rain. If this works right, happy b-day, brother o' mine.

A meme has tagged me. That's what they do, right? It's not the people involved who do it, it's the memes themselves.

DaveX at Startling Moniker tagged somebody in this institution; I'm going to go ahead and respond since Kingo ran off into the woods a few weeks back and I haven't heard a peep out of his shed since.

So. Rules:
1) Pick up the nearest book.
2) Open to page 123.
3) Find the fifth sentence.
4) Post the next three sentences.
5) Tag three people, and acknowledge who tagged you.

See there it doesn't say I have to say what book I picked up. I thought, being in my work office when I got tagged, that I'd be giving you a nice 3 sentence romp through some old Oracle reference book, but luck would have it that there was something else in the way. So here ya go:

Why don't other species have art? Once again, the answer that suggests itself--which does not mean that it is proven but only that it may well be provable--is that, lacking language, they lack the tools for creating surrogate stimulus combinations and hence they lack the perspective that permits exploration of the combinatorics of their own senses. Using acute observation and trial and error, Tinbergen cleverly devised the supernormal stimuli that enticed his birds (and other animals) into a host of bizarre behaviors.

Whoever guesses the book gets a big prize.

I have to tag three people. If I've still got three regular readers who are also bloggers beyond DaveX I'd be surprised. But just to piss some people off: Michael (kinda curious who owns the book closest to him,) Sarah (kinda curious if it's a different book,) and Taleswapper (I'm not sure, but I think he might have a book somewhere near him.)

All you others who got left out, your turn's next.

Oh, and DaveX: I think that Cage book you picked up is the one and only Cage book I've got in my collection. Currently it's in a box, with most everything else I used to have time for.