Log -- David Chess

log (2003/04/25 to 2003/05/01)

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Surprising fact:

Thursday, May 1, 2003
So I'm being very cruel and selfish lately. I've been (not only starting many paragraphs with "so", but also) browsing around the Web and reading interesting things and stuff, and not blogging them here in this here log.
This is awful of me, and probably reduces the utility of this space to you. On the other hand, being able to read something interesting and not feeling obliged to note it down for later is a nice liberating feeling.
Maybe soon I'll start actually throwing things away!
Happy Loyalty Day! Also Law Day. Both of those are probably reactions against that other May Day, and/or Beltane and/or the start of Outdoor Fucking. Not to mention National Masturbation Month (read the press release).
"Give yourself a hand": that's funny!
Wednesday, April 30, 2003
So here I am again at the end of a rather busy day (breakfast, work, dinner, taking the little daughter to ballet, going to the PTA meeting), lying on the bed without a whole heck of a lot of time before I'd like to be asleep. There's some documentation I should be working on, in fact, but heck I'm at home now, and although when I'm at work I'm always telling myself "I can work on that some more tonight at home" I hardly ever do.
Unless it's particularly interesting.
So anyway I probably won't be looking through the reader input or finding clever links to pass along to you, because those take more time than just woolgathering like this. I also don't seem to have any giant rats to present tonight; but that's okay.
So where I was on Monday (and for that matter on Sunday night) was Atlanta, Georgia, USA, talking (on Monday) to some folks at Georgia Tech. It was a relatively fun trip (for a rather rushed and hastily planned business trip).
Due to some complexities of scheduling I got a free First Class upgrade on the way back, which is somewhat less impressive on that plane than on some others whose First Class cabins I've walked through (no individual swivel seats or recliners or personal video screens), but the attendants do call you "Mr. Chess" (or at least they call me that), and offer you drinks and pretzels constantly rather than just whenever the cart goes by. And the seats are nice and wide.
The flight back spent quite a bit of time down low (ten thousand feet?), and it was early evening and night time, and the air was clear, and the works of Man were curly glyphs on the brown earth. Then at the end there was this amazing city with tall lit-up buildings, and these miles and miles of lights.
I always get all profound looking down at cities from airplanes. This time my Profound Thought was "man, there must be lots and lots of people just changing lightbulbs all the time".
I finished "The Eyre Affair" in the hotel, and in the airport coming back I bought Best American Erotica 2003; fun reading.
People sure get turned on by (um) a wide variety of stuff. One I particularly don't connect with is the "ponyboy" / "ponygirl" fetish (I'll let you Google up your own links if you want to research it), prominently featured in the story I last finished.
I mean, I can more or less grok the dominance / submission parts, it's the submission while pretending to be a horse part that doesn't quite reach me. It does, however, suggest entire new genres of erotica.
She pulled the yellow leather straps taut, tugging the hard ceramic beak tighter against my lips. I shook my head from side to side, and felt the tumescent red wattle flap from side to side, dangling warmly from under my chin.
She grabbed me by the hair, her fingers around the straps that bound my proud comb to the crown of my head. She bent my neck back, and I nearly fell over, my legs awkward in the knee-braces and the giant rubber feet; my arms were useless for balance, strapped as they were to my sides, my hands bent achingly into the dank warmth of my armpits.
"Do it," she hissed savagely into my ear, "do it now!"
A hot shiver ran through me, simultaneous fear and pride firing every nerve. I threw my head back still further, and the leather bit into my skin. I forced my mouth open behind the heavy beak bound across it.
"Cock a doodle do!" I cried in ecstasy, "Cock a doodle do!"

Well, maybe not.
Tuesday, April 29, 2003
On the one hand I like the hands-on feeling of writing my log in a flat text editor, typing the HTML and doing all the archiving and stuff by hand. On the other hand (note all the hands) there are times when I do have stuff I want to write down, but I hardly have any time at all, and so the overhead involved in the manual content-management is (smallish though it is) enough to keep me from getting quite over the edge of writing down interesting things.
Like tonight for instance.
Sunday, April 27, 2003
A kind reader writes:
Subject: re: giant rats of FLW etc
I loved this bit! Is there more somewhere, or did you just write this on the spur of the moment?

Ah, my best works are always the spontaneous ones. Spur of the moment, definitely, but there's always more somewhere.
Go see Kiki's Delivery Service, too, even if the ending is rather weak.

We did, a long time ago (before entry permalinks in fact; scroll down to Tuesday). And I had exactly the same impression; very good, but didn't really need the peculiar action-movie ending.
Spam subject line o' the day:
Spam: Your $10,000 Credit Line and Major Bank Visa OJLN

I'm wildly curious what the spammer's intent was in prefixing the text with "Spam:". Odd people, spammers.
So at M's recommendation I'm reading The Eyre Affair, and it's got me wanting to read Jane Eyre itself. At the moment, the references to Rochester keep making me think of Eddie Anderson.
I have the same problem with Tennessee Williams and Tennessee Ernie Ford.
Saturday, April 26, 2003
"Beyond Sympathy: the giant rats of Frank Lloyd Wright and the Obsidian Wheelbarrow":
The power of the state can be exercised only by those with sufficient sensitivity to knock down a garden-gnome at thirty paces. This principle has been followed, historically, in England, in Zambia, in the Canary Islands.
Without sympathy, my mule is barren. Without sympathy, or the patina of sympathy, my letters to the dark-haired woman with the balsa-wood fan may go unanswered.
Can we be sympathetic from a distance? Without meeting? Without the risk of contamination?

Ah, that felt good.
One thing that I think would be neat would be to have a website that was solely about itself. It would have an "about" page, and a "help" section, and a "news" section (probably on index.html) that would talk about the latest changes to the website, and it would have little biographies of the staff (concentrating on the roles they play in the development and maintenance of the website), and a place to report and track bugs in the website, and extensive customization features to let the user control the presentation of the website (cookies, alternate stylesheets, personalization of the homepage), and even discussion forums (carefully moderated and monitored to squelch any discussion that wandered offtopic, and talked about anything besides the website), and a place to download little gifs (or pngs, eh?) with the website logo, to be used when linking to the website from your blogroll.
Would that count as performance art?
So I'm home all by myself, which hardly ever happens (the little daughter is off at ballet, and M and the little boy are off at a movie), and which (as an only child) has a very sweet and nostalgic feel to it. So here I am writing in my weblog. I should put on some loud music or something.
I like Wikis, not only because they're an interesting and different form of collaborative object, but because they let me go around randomly proofreading and editing stuff, and I really like proofreading and editing stuff. I've been scribbling around on the Social Software Alliance Wiki, after seeing them taunted on NTK. A few luminaries there that I recognize (Stewart, Meg, Ward Cunningham, Howard Rheingold), but mostly it's just fun to dive in and be annoyingly helpful to a crowd of strangers who've asked for it. *8)

Looks like Opera 7 has mousewheel support now. I guess I should try it again. In my copious spare time.
But right now I think I'll go off and blow away another couple of hours playing Wind Waker. I'm up to the second temple!

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earlier entries

older log newer log reply about archive search home words site news talking place XML (RSS) Surprising fact:	Thursday, May 1, 2003 So I'm being very cruel and selfish lately. I've been (not only starting many paragraphs with "so", but also) browsing around the Web and reading interesting things and stuff, and not blogging them here in this here log. This is awful of me, and probably reduces the utility of this space to you. On the other hand, being able to read something interesting and not feeling obliged to note it down for later is a nice liberating feeling. Maybe soon I'll start actually throwing things away! Happy Loyalty Day! Also Law Day. Both of those are probably reactions against that other May Day, and/or Beltane and/or the start of Outdoor Fucking. Not to mention National Masturbation Month (read the press release). "Give yourself a hand": that's funny! Wednesday, April 30, 2003 So here I am again at the end of a rather busy day (breakfast, work, dinner, taking the little daughter to ballet, going to the PTA meeting), lying on the bed without a whole heck of a lot of time before I'd like to be asleep. There's some documentation I should be working on, in fact, but heck I'm at home now, and although when I'm at work I'm always telling myself "I can work on that some more tonight at home" I hardly ever do. Unless it's particularly interesting. So anyway I probably won't be looking through the reader input or finding clever links to pass along to you, because those take more time than just woolgathering like this. I also don't seem to have any giant rats to present tonight; but that's okay. So where I was on Monday (and for that matter on Sunday night) was Atlanta, Georgia, USA, talking (on Monday) to some folks at Georgia Tech. It was a relatively fun trip (for a rather rushed and hastily planned business trip). Due to some complexities of scheduling I got a free First Class upgrade on the way back, which is somewhat less impressive on that plane than on some others whose First Class cabins I've walked through (no individual swivel seats or recliners or personal video screens), but the attendants do call you "Mr. Chess" (or at least they call me that), and offer you drinks and pretzels constantly rather than just whenever the cart goes by. And the seats are nice and wide. The flight back spent quite a bit of time down low (ten thousand feet?), and it was early evening and night time, and the air was clear, and the works of Man were curly glyphs on the brown earth. Then at the end there was this amazing city with tall lit-up buildings, and these miles and miles of lights. I always get all profound looking down at cities from airplanes. This time my Profound Thought was "man, there must be lots and lots of people just changing lightbulbs all the time". I finished "The Eyre Affair" in the hotel, and in the airport coming back I bought Best American Erotica 2003; fun reading. People sure get turned on by (um) a wide variety of stuff. One I particularly don't connect with is the "ponyboy" / "ponygirl" fetish (I'll let you Google up your own links if you want to research it), prominently featured in the story I last finished. I mean, I can more or less grok the dominance / submission parts, it's the submission while pretending to be a horse part that doesn't quite reach me. It does, however, suggest entire new genres of erotica. She pulled the yellow leather straps taut, tugging the hard ceramic beak tighter against my lips. I shook my head from side to side, and felt the tumescent red wattle flap from side to side, dangling warmly from under my chin. She grabbed me by the hair, her fingers around the straps that bound my proud comb to the crown of my head. She bent my neck back, and I nearly fell over, my legs awkward in the knee-braces and the giant rubber feet; my arms were useless for balance, strapped as they were to my sides, my hands bent achingly into the dank warmth of my armpits. "Do it," she hissed savagely into my ear, "do it now!" A hot shiver ran through me, simultaneous fear and pride firing every nerve. I threw my head back still further, and the leather bit into my skin. I forced my mouth open behind the heavy beak bound across it. "Cock a doodle do!" I cried in ecstasy, "Cock a doodle do!" Well, maybe not. Tuesday, April 29, 2003 On the one hand I like the hands-on feeling of writing my log in a flat text editor, typing the HTML and doing all the archiving and stuff by hand. On the other hand (note all the hands) there are times when I do have stuff I want to write down, but I hardly have any time at all, and so the overhead involved in the manual content-management is (smallish though it is) enough to keep me from getting quite over the edge of writing down interesting things. Like tonight for instance. Sunday, April 27, 2003 A kind reader writes: Subject: re: giant rats of FLW etc I loved this bit! Is there more somewhere, or did you just write this on the spur of the moment? Ah, my best works are always the spontaneous ones. Spur of the moment, definitely, but there's always more somewhere. Go see Kiki's Delivery Service, too, even if the ending is rather weak. We did, a long time ago (before entry permalinks in fact; scroll down to Tuesday). And I had exactly the same impression; very good, but didn't really need the peculiar action-movie ending. Spam subject line o' the day: Spam: Your $10,000 Credit Line and Major Bank Visa OJLN I'm wildly curious what the spammer's intent was in prefixing the text with "Spam:". Odd people, spammers. So at M's recommendation I'm reading The Eyre Affair, and it's got me wanting to read Jane Eyre itself. At the moment, the references to Rochester keep making me think of Eddie Anderson. I have the same problem with Tennessee Williams and Tennessee Ernie Ford. Saturday, April 26, 2003 "Beyond Sympathy: the giant rats of Frank Lloyd Wright and the Obsidian Wheelbarrow": The power of the state can be exercised only by those with sufficient sensitivity to knock down a garden-gnome at thirty paces. This principle has been followed, historically, in England, in Zambia, in the Canary Islands. Without sympathy, my mule is barren. Without sympathy, or the patina of sympathy, my letters to the dark-haired woman with the balsa-wood fan may go unanswered. Can we be sympathetic from a distance? Without meeting? Without the risk of contamination? Ah, that felt good. One thing that I think would be neat would be to have a website that was solely about itself. It would have an "about" page, and a "help" section, and a "news" section (probably on index.html) that would talk about the latest changes to the website, and it would have little biographies of the staff (concentrating on the roles they play in the development and maintenance of the website), and a place to report and track bugs in the website, and extensive customization features to let the user control the presentation of the website (cookies, alternate stylesheets, personalization of the homepage), and even discussion forums (carefully moderated and monitored to squelch any discussion that wandered offtopic, and talked about anything besides the website), and a place to download little gifs (or pngs, eh?) with the website logo, to be used when linking to the website from your blogroll. Would that count as performance art? So I'm home all by myself, which hardly ever happens (the little daughter is off at ballet, and M and the little boy are off at a movie), and which (as an only child) has a very sweet and nostalgic feel to it. So here I am writing in my weblog. I should put on some loud music or something. I like Wikis, not only because they're an interesting and different form of collaborative object, but because they let me go around randomly proofreading and editing stuff, and I really like proofreading and editing stuff. I've been scribbling around on the Social Software Alliance Wiki, after seeing them taunted on NTK. A few luminaries there that I recognize (Stewart, Meg, Ward Cunningham, Howard Rheingold), but mostly it's just fun to dive in and be annoyingly helpful to a crowd of strangers who've asked for it. *8)
	Looks like Opera 7 has mousewheel support now. I guess I should try it again. In my copious spare time. But right now I think I'll go off and blow away another couple of hours playing Wind Waker. I'm up to the second temple!
top	earlier entries