yay! after a full day of playing around with adobe go and discovering (belatedly) that geocities does not allow you to link to your image files, i finally got my updates to come up. oh well. i learned a lot about go today and i learned a little about free web hosting. sigh.

we're going to a tiki bar called honolulu tonight. should be fun, even though shannon has to tape temptation island.

let me know what you think of my new layout.

a couple of small things for now. first, the all your base archive. second. well, i'm not sure what this is. someone insane, at any rate.

i've gotten to the "we find out what weird thing is going on" part of the wooden sea. i just wish that everything wasn't a reality-threatening event. what happened to ordinary, weird stuff? bah.

and the posting gets more and more random.....

i went to the courthouse on friday with vicki and filed the divorce papers. all that's left is a short appearance in front of the magistrate on the seventh of march and then that whole chapter of my life is closed. it's an odd feeling, though. sort of like there are random edges sticking out of the book - if i can take my chapter metaphor to a ridiculous extreme. there was a lot there that was not fully resolved but i didn't want to play games with her anymore and i knew that she didn't want to resolve the issues. that was, after all, one of the reasons for the divorce. i got the feeling that she wanted to talk about them at a later date, but i'd already moved on. that's the way it goes. opportunities are missed. thus the term 'window of opportunity.'

at any rate, i picked up a copy of the wooden sea by jonathan carroll. yes! good so far. doesn't have the slow entry that some of his have, though. it jumps right into the action. i'm not sure if this is a good thing or not, but i never am until after i finish the book. i'll get back to you on this point.

i also got a copy of the adventures of kavalier and klay by michael chabon. i'd been waiting for the paperback, but it was 20% off in hardback, so what the hell. a book is a book. i'm really looking forward to it. speaking of looking forward, i rented mission to mars and starship troopers last week and was appalled by both. i knew that they were bad, but i had no idea. starship troopers was actually disturbing in it's badness. i was physically repulsed. movies aren't s'posed to do that!

in other news, greg and meghan have split. this would not be such a big deal except that they have a son. greg is bracing himself for a serious court battle, which is stupid from meg's point of view. who would want to put their child through that? her parents don't like greg, though. we'll see what happens. i'm concerned, but i know greg will avail himself. in the long run, anyway.

i know. i know. it's been over a week since i updated this thing. work has been busier than hell. so many things going on. i'll skip some of the day to day stupidity and cut right to the chase on that whole scene. let's see. the computer conversion starts next week or whenever dell decides to finally make the computers and send them out. they're only a week or two overdue. no big deal. we discovered that symantec has published a new version of pcanywhere within the past week, so we're gunning for the update in the hopes that it solves all of our connection problems. and we've got a big list of things that we have to do to each computer as we do the installations. fun fun fun.

as for personal life. well, the news here is that i'm finally (!) filing the divorce papers tomorrow. i go pick vicki up from the old apartment and take her down to the courthouse where we sign all of the pieces of paper that we have to sign. and pay some money. and sign more paper. and then it will be all done. and i get to go to h&r block for tax form filling out time. and that's my plan for tomorrow.

not a lot of other things are going on, really. i've been so crazy here at work that i just haven't had time to do ANYTHING. hell, my brain is starting to hurt from inactivity. and too much exposure to network terms and troubleshooting. god, i hate that.

oy. so i didn't get a chance to post yesterday. i was just too busy and too worn out. my brain shut off somewhere around 11 am and i started running on instinct from there on in. sooooo many problems with the new computers. pcanywhere problems. hotlog problems. modem problems (microsoft networks is having password problems and the downtime could be as high as six or seven hours). ugh. if it could have gone wrong yesterday, it did.

still, things are quiet today. i have a bag of gummi bears and a glass of water, so i'm happy for the rest of the day.

oh, and they caught someone who has confessed to both galludet murders. we're not so sure that he committed the first one, though. it just doesn't seem likely. whatever....

sorry that i haven't posted anything lately. it's been too long. try this for now...

a bit of background. we went to new york and stayed with a friend of shannon's. this friend, W, works for shannon's parent company and is a nice guy. he's got good taste in music and art and is generally affable. oh, and he's got a passing attraction to shannon. but no big deal, right?

so we go up there and see things. we see the sol lewitt retrospective at the whitney and W takes us around chinatown and st. mark's place. cool and groovy.

we got back on sunday night with far too many books, a copy of the hour of the bewilderbeast (very good), sore throats, and not enough sleep (we hit the batcave on saturday night - i was mildly disappointed that there was no giant penny).

shannon sent W a thank you on monday and he reacted by telling her - at length - how much of an ungracious ass i was because i didn't thank him enough for all of the things he did for us over the weekend.

now, i know that i can be a rude bastard at times, but i'm not so rude to totally blow off someone who lent their apartment for a whole weekend. that's just stupid.

the current theory is that W is just being a man. he's jealous of me but he can't admit it. he wants shannon to see how wrong for her i am. uh huh. oh, and he got defensive when shannon accused him of this.

so anyway. that was my weekend and the immediate aftermath. shannon was too busy to argue with him yesterday and just got pissed at him for continuing the conversation past it's logical termination point "uh huh. matt's an ungracious twit. okay. what else do you have to say?"

one day our computers will arrive. one day....

i found the portfolio from toshio saeki to be profoundly erotic and disturbing at the same time. i think it's meant to be that way, but the subconscious realization jars with the conscious expectations in strange ways. i think that's the way of the world in a lot of ways, but it always hits me deep when i see something truthful. (on a side note, i find it interesting to note how difficult it is to find a hot wax scene in the yahoo photo galleries. even the ones under "erotica.")

if i were a conspiracy theorist, i might be worried by the fact that the white house shooting came so close on the heels of the second galludet university murder. almost like someone wants to keep the murders quiet. (quiet murders on a deaf campus. oh, i crack myself up. hee...) actually, it's just one of those bizarre coincidences that happens in a city this weird that has so many powerful people living in it.

speaking of conspiracies, though (how's that for a transition?) i've been talking to people over on the warren ellis delphi forum about planetary because i'm almost at the stage where i want to talk to people about the goings-on in the book. almost. i'm working my way up.

we're getting new computers at work. they've been delivering them piecemeal so far. all we have, to date, are the keyboards. just the keyboards. no mice. no monitors. just keyboards. that was sort of odd.

and now isreal has elected yet another hard-liner. does anyone else see the pattern there? they elect a hard-liner on the "no negotiation with the palestinians" platform and within a year, he's caving in because there is a vast gulf between campaign promises and the realities of power. and then the people get dissatisfied with him and elect yet another hard-liner who promises not to cave in. somewhere, somehow, someone is not paying attention. and god help us, the isrealis have nukes.

we've been following the galludet university murders. very interesting. almost like something that alan moore would write. it's sort of hard to avoid news of the murders, though. it's all over the local news. i just like the fact that the police "aren't sure that the murders are related." uh huh.

and in the "i feel like a twit" column, i sent a crap monitor to nevada. no monitor/cpu connector. the power doesn't work on the damned thing. i should have tested it before i sent it. damnation.

i should sort out my gallery pages soon. i'm running out of space on my geocities site. in with the new. out with the old. or something like that....

so i'm having some conversations with my cousin ed this week. what prompted it was the fact that the site that he sent me featuring art frahm was featured in this month's issue of playboy. the reason for frahm's inclusion in playboy is immediately obvious as soon as you look at his art. he's obviously a fetishist of some kind. but what's the deal with the celery?

as usual, the portions of the next novel threaten to grow out of control. i have so much plot that i'm not sure what to keep and what to throw away. i'm not entirely certain how much of it is really relevent, to tell the truth. i have all kinds of storylines sticking off in odd angles and i keep coming up with new ones that want to get grafted in. i know i should just knuckle down and hold it all together, but how? sigh. a challenge.

i guess that there was some kind of scuffle on the dance floor at catacomb this past saturday. and i missed it. poop. oh well. more news as i get it.

ah. nothing like getting all of your work done before 1. yahoo mail is acting twitchy, but that's such a big deal. it's not like the list is being especially chatty, anyway. maybe i can get the divorce documents done and get started on my podium rewrites today. oh. to dream....

it's been snowing on and off all day today. not proper snow, though. more like big, wet thumpy things that like to pretend that they're snow. they aspire, you understand. it's almost like an upgrade from rain to snow. more like slush falling from the sky. yes. it's as bad as it sounds. worse, even, because it doesn't stick. dammit.

there was a good article in nerve about shadow of the vampire. what's interesting (to me) is that shannon and i had already come to a lot of those conclusions yesterday before we read the editorial/article (i'm never sure exactly what they are over there).

listening to ok computer, it's interesting how many other influences i hear in their music. i swear that i've heard bowie at least twice in the guitar riffs. perfectly natural, to tell the truth. interesting that thom yorke would allow that kind of stuff to blend through, though.

i missed updating yesterday. so much was going on (well, i like to tell myself that, anyway) that i didn't get a chance. we went to see shadow of the vampire yesterday. willem dafoe was brilliant. malkovich wasn't that bad, but there were some major holes in the movie. not enough to make the movie bad, just enough to make the viewer wonder at some of the scenes. still, watching the vampire (pretending to be a method-actor) get drunk with the writer and producer was a stroke of genius.

we also watched erin brokovitch (on video). not a bad flick. great story. good acting. what made it interesting to me was that meg's father works for the company that gets sued. well, he sort of works for them. he's a lobbyist for the company. sigh. (for those of you following along at home, my cousin greg is the father of meg's son).

anyway. i'm off to join shan in the tub.

so far today, things have been tolerable. nevada had a problem with his video driver so we had to reinstall the whole thing. and his monitor died, too. so i have to send him a new one. on top of that, the lock-out that all of the states were s'posed to get last night never went out, so people have been entering cases when they weren't meant to be. this does not make qc any easier.

on an up-note, my computer is happier after i left it alone all night with the defragger running. not spectacularly better. just marginally. but still better.

we're talking about post-modernism on the list today. i like post-modernism (and i wish that someone besides heinlein had coined the term "grok"). i like discussing p-m. it helps to gain a better perspective on the theory as a whole. not that there really is a whole theory for post-modernism....

cyteen gets more interesting every day. definitely a book that grows on you. good storyteller. i'm just not sure about the writing style, frankly.

i installed norton utilities on my main work computer today, only to discover that the c drive was so fragmented that it wouldn't defrag properly. it got to 24% and just sort of sat there. it was kind of sad, really. my fingers are killing me from typing and dialing all day today. owtch. all of these damned corrections that had to go out. and the dot wanted to double check the data source about the bicycle helmets thing.

i cannot wait to get home tonight. i've just been dialing and placing and moving and talking and figuring things out for so long that my head's too heavy for me to hold up anymore. ugh.

i had a good idea about a descendant of james bond. call her jane bond. 007. still on her majesty's secret service. set in the far future, say 2300. in the setting of the same name. interstellar spy. i think it would be cool. a trifle action/adventurey but not necessarily in a bad way. especially not if they kept the production values high. a whole new set of villians. all new settings. and spaceships. what more could you ask for?