i've got a long day of work ahead of me. i have to draft an email about four things (and i can only remember two of them), write up a little instruction sheet about pcAnywhere, try to fix washington's access violation, deal with oregon's email situation (still sort of fuzzy to me right at the moment) and try to puzzle out why south carolina's hard drive keeps failing on her (and that's the replacement!). and i have to kill my boss for being such a bitch.

so now the pcAnywhere documentation is done (i was being yelled at that it was a priority - obviously. why else would they have told me about it two hours before they wanted it?). and sc is still getting random blue screens of death, which are always pleasant.

something not work-related now. joe went and got his vasectomy yesterday. i know this because he emailed me and told me all about it. in detail. i figured that if he's going to send me details, i might as well try and engage him in conversation about it. so i asked him if he jogged home from the operation. he told me no and then told me about the operation. novacaine in the nuts and then more detail.

and now i've finished with the cider house rules by john irving. i was going to ask the list which novel i should take to chicago, but i figured that by the time i got a response, i'd have already chosen something. so i just chose cryptonomicon by neal stephenson. good book so far.

oh yeah. and i got a new backpack last night. the bottom of the other one has been hanging on by a thread (har!) for a while now. it started getting bad when the forks would fall out the bottom. this one is nice and all. and they guy behind the counter asked me if i was going back to school, which puzzled me. didn't i give him a credit card for the purchase? how many high schoolers does he know with a credit card?

but tomorrow is chicago. i'll try to update as i can, but i wouldn't hold my breath, eccles. we're going to be out and about, not sitting around with high-speed connections...

hey eccles! after all the craziness over the weekend (i had over a hundred hits! woohooo!) it's good to know that you haven't abandoned me. everyone else showed up, read about the controversy and left. they don't come back. they're not regualars. but i have a regular reader and that's cool. just wanted to say thanks for sticking around. i appreciate it.

so what's going on over here? well. lemme tell you. there was some noise over the weekend that we might be able to move into the house that our friends andrew and jenna are vacating. (andrew got a job with microsoft in san francisco). unfortunately, to move into the house, we'd have to break our lease, which would require us paying two months rent to our rental agency. that's not good. we can't eat that kind of money and neither can andrew and jenna. so it looked good on paper but the practicalities just didn't work out. so we didn't actually get a place to go. not like we needed one, but they have a nice house and some more room would have been cool.

what else? chicago this weekend. that's a biggie. we leave friday afternoon and we're going to stay with boa, who's a trust fund baby with his own house. so that's nice. and we're going to chicago goth clubs friday, saturday and sunday nights. whew. our friend andi's in wisconsin right now, but she'll be in chicago for the weekend, too. so we're going to be hanging out with friends and having a joyous time. i'm really looking forward to that, lemme tell you.

and weapons of devotion is approaching the end. i still have seven chapters (give or take) to write, but i can see the end from here. that's a great thing, but i'm also sad. i like writing this book. it's fun. sure, i bitch about it a lot, but that's part of the fun.

and i came up with a framing device that should allow me to salvage not fish; duck. and i have a much better idea about the bob the merciless story (no title on that one yet). it was a productive night last night. i paced and was creative and it was all good.

so. just to reiterate. if you're reading this, wave to eccles. he's my regular reader. unless you're also a regular (in which case, you can email me and tell me so), he's the only one.

another day, another 1500 words. and not much else, really. i've been feeling lazy and apathetic all day long. not tired, exactly. just burned out. anxious, but not about anything in particular. bored, too. whew. brain burn.

so life is passing slowly. it happens, i s'pose.

anyway, we've only got a few more days before we're off to wild, sunny chicago for a few days. that should be a lot of fun, actually. between carrie monster, the whole chicago crowd and andi, there is great potential for hijinks to ensue. i'm hoping that it'll be enough to keep my mind busy for a while.

it was my brother's birthday on thursday and i competely missed it. so i sent him a card with a $20 bill in it. oops.

things happened. bad words were said. after some discussion within the culture list, i've decided to take down everything that i've written about what happened. not because i was forced to, but because it serves no good purpose to document how immature someone i really don't like was to me, my girlfriend and a very good friend of mine. (in doing so, he provided a very good example of why i don't like him, but that was, really, by the by.)

i still have the entire archive, but i also have a lot of stuff that i've written, both true and fictitious, that will never see the light of day. it does less damage to me to say that i have moved beyond this back onto those things in my life that are more important. i have books to finish and a life to lead.

in particular, i want to thank claire for pointing out my folly. i feel blessed that there are people in my life who feel confident enough in their friendship with me to tell me when i'm doing something that i really shouldn't do. i appreciate it and i am really, very happy that i belong to a community that fosters that kind of friendship. i just hope that they are always willing to do so for me, even when i don't necessarily want them to.

in other news, i think that the souvenir koan has finished it's run for now. i think it's served it's purpose as a refuge for all of the stray thoughts and ideas that have been bouncing through my mind for the past few months. if you're sorry to see it go, let me know. otherwise, go over there and read through the archive. it's not much, but it is a specific period of artistic expression in my life that isn't going away. it's just not ever going to be updated. until i decide to pick it up again, that is.

ah well. off to watch madonna on hbo.

good night, all.

this was cool: i mentioned an interview on the list and i got an email asking me about it. my response:

Rik wrote:
> Did you not have an interview today? Have you had it yet? And if so, how did you get on? And what was it for?
>
why yes. yes, i did. and i genuinely appreciate you asking. i'm touched.

um, lessee. bit of background: the company i'm interviewing with headhunted me off of monster.com for a contract position with another company. so today was sort of an informational informal kinda thing where they told me about how the process works and answered any questions i might have.

> Hope it went well. Or good luck if it's not happened yet.
>
it went well. she addressed all of my points and i didn't feel like i was stepping out of bounds when i asked about anything i was unsure about, so that's a good thing.

the next step is - if the second company likes my resume - that i go on an interview with that company. so until i get any information about that, it's up in the air. which suits me, frankly. i'm not sure what i want from my job, but i know that i don't like where i am. so i'm exploring my options.

expect updates every once in a while, i s'pose... (or read my blog).

anyway. i'm chilling at home, watching hannibal (which is marginally interesting for an afternoon off in the middle of the week).

matt
GSV Check One, Two

so it's noon and i'm still neck deep in polling. this is due to two factors. 1) we had nine files that went out last night that must be transferred to the states that didn't poll. 2) eleven states didn't fully poll last night (which has a lot more to do with #1 than anyone cares to think about).

on top of this, we have been instructed to downgrade the version of outlook that the states are using. this is silly because we have a fix that we've been working on, but we don't want to release it early. good one...

so i'm polling on one computer and goofing off on the other. writing, mostly. email, too.

weapons is cruising along. i'm already up to 29,645 words. whew.

not much going on right at the moment. i troubleshooted a modem this morning and it gave me none of the problems that the user complained of. go figure.

play this. it's hysterically funny to me because it's my local goth club and i know all of those people. others might find it marginally less humorous, though...

what else? not much, really. six feet under is done for the season, which is a pity. it's an excellent show and even though hbo is rebroadcasting the sopranos from the very beginning, it's still not the same. funny how, once the bar gets raised, everything under it just isn't the same.

my sig from last week:

On the overall scale of fucked-up sexual dynamics, a pair of religious blowjobs outranked a daily fuck with a woman that vacuumed hallways for a living. Apparently.

my sig from this week:

As he got to his car, George stopped and considered what to do with the rose. Bringing it to Sullivan might give her the right idea and he wasn’t entirely sure that he wanted that to happen. Of course, he wasn’t entirely certain why he didn’t want that to happen, either. He had learned (the hard way) that logic can’t always be applied to the murky undercurrents of emotion that connect people together. Things happen or they don’t and often there is no easy answer when we question our behavior in the cold, rational light of the next morning.

my new sig (and novel idea):

Today I chew foil. Soon I shall conquer the world. My name is Bob the Merciless, a name that was given to me by my wargaming buddies.

blah. what a day yesterday turned out to be. i got several hundred words written (something over a thousand, which brings me to 27,000 or so) on weapons, which is great. i also had to do a lot of little administrative shit, which isn't so great.it's pretty sad when i can sit down and configure a computer in almost no time flat. seriously.

anyway. i'm reading fargo rock city right now, which is a critical examination of heavy metal from the 80s. it sounds strange and it is, but it's also really interesting. the author makes the good point that nobody has ever really done this before.

attendant to this is the fact that i went out with joe and john last night, which was a distinct experience. those are two of the strangest, most unique individuals i know but, at the same time, they're extraordinarily interesting. neither one can stand the herd mentality of modern american culture and they both have this fucked up, live outside the lines because they don't know any other way to do it outlook on life. john likes me because we're both intrinsically misanthropic and joe likes me because i don't judge him (well, i do, but i don't let that judgement affect my interactions with him). joe likes john for the same reason and john likes joe because joe is almost exactly the opposite of john in almost every way. but, at the same time, they're both very similar. like i said, it was an interesting evening. it's not often that you find people that you get along with so well who are capable of thinking for themselves.

so i got home late last night and shan told me that someone saw my resume on moster.com and called to talk to me. cool beans! way to start the day.

oh. and i forgot to mention this article about velma.

okay. so the not fish; duck situation has gotten better. i did some major surgery with the editing equivalent of a hunting knife and cut out everything not strictly necessary to the central plot (such as it is). what came out was 50,000 words that needed less work than i thought. so that's okay. sort of. i puttered around with my notes and found some material that i think will fit into the story. my concern is that i don't know how much the additional material is going to enhance the story. some, maybe. it'll put a different spin on what's going on, that's for damned sure.

watch this space about that whole thing.

i'm getting the plot of weapons into an interesting place, i think. it's poking along right now as i try to manuever the pieces to where i want them to be. or where i think i want them to be. it's strange and difficult and it makes my head hurt, but i am at peace when i'm writing it and it's flowing, so i'm trying to take a zen-like stance towards the process. not easily done, though.

and work is just getting stupid. i made a "keeping you in the loop" comment to my boss in email and all of a sudden we have to have a meeting about something that the operations team could have handled on their own and reported about during the friday meeting. i objected, saying that i didn't think a meeting was strictly necessary and her response was "well i do." she has a good point, sort of, but she's really making a much bigger deal about something that we need to take a closer look at. i hate feeling like rodney dangerfield. no fucking respect, i tell ya.

on a related note, i applied for three jobs from monster.com this morning. i wonder if there's any way to put in "does not deal well with overzealous authority figures" on the resume without making it look bad? probably not.

my head hurts and i think it's the humidity fucking with my sinuses. i hate that. i hate a lot of things, now that i think about it. bitch bitch bitch.

i've been paying attention to not fish; duck for the past few days and i've come to the uncomfortable conclusion that it needs work. a lot of work. how much work? well, the story's been lost in there under all of the philosophical crap and that's not good. on top of that, there's a fair amount of extraneous fluff. i think that i've been trying to hard to keep it stuck in a structural mold and that's just not right. so now i have to go through and slice and chop and dice and revise. blah.

and the more i look at what i want to cut out, the more i have to consider what i have left over. y'see, i have this sort of half-written novel idea sitting here in a pile of notes and a lot of them came directly out of not fish; duck. when i wrote the novel, i decided that i wasn't going to use any of these notes until the next story. that was before i decided that i was going to write weapons of devotion, you see. so now i've got this big pile o' crap that i have to sort through and decide about. and try and finish weapons of devotion at the same time. first one, then the other. or both at the same time. or something.

like i said: bitch, bitch, bitch.

so the air conditioning in my office is out again. i'm usually not that bothered about things like that but i'm not really allowed to wear sandals to work, so not only am i forced to wear uncomfortable clothes, but i also have to sit in discomfortable temperatures. and my brain feels like it's been soaking in refried grease for a while.

my weekend was very odd and much, much too short. the power was out for several hours on saturday, so my only choice for entertainment (after several odd hours of re-editing not fish; duck and discovering that i really don't have anything that you could describe as a central story in there) was to get stoned and watch the rain come down. i drove through the district on both saturday night and sunday night and both times, there were huge swathes of the city with no power. very eerie, driving through city blocks that were absolutely black and lit only by headlights and candlepower. one road we tried to drive down was blocked by a big-ass tree. not just a tree. a big-ass tree. the superlatives are very important.

i ran into little john, the six foot nine, three hundred pound man who was the best man at my cousin's wedding. what's funny about running into little john is that he knows a whole bunch of people at catacomb that i also know. i walked right up to him and i could tell that he recognized me but didn't know from where. like i said: odd. (needless to say, i ran into him at catacomb on saturday night.)

sunday was mellow. our friend sarah (story in a second) came by and we had lunch and watched fear and loathing in las vegas and some george carlin, followed by the obligatory sunday night viewing.

okay. so the sarah story. a few weeks ago, shannon (the social butterfly) started talking to the other smokers in her building. one of them turned out to be this girl sarah. wait. i've already explained who sarah is. earlier. so we'll take sarah as read. (go read the archives if you don't believe me.)

catacomb is held on saturdays at a bar around the corner from where shannon works. this same bar (the meeting place) does karaoke on friday nights and sarah's a regular. we went there a week or two ago and sarah met our friend john. there was a love connection and i told john to pay attention to himself. next thing we know, sarah and john are dating and sarah's walking around with a shit-eating grin everywhere she goes. so that's sarah.

jesus. i can't keep the narrative straight, can i? can you say stream of consciousness?

okay, i'm going to try and update this a little more often than once a week for my eccles-enabled readers out there.

what to talk about today? how about the fact that my job is starting to get tedious? it really is. i need something new and different because i am getting fucking bored out of my mind by the endlessly repetitive nature of the complaints. now this is broken. now this doesn't work. hell with that...

i don't want to answer the phones any more. i want to sit in my little office and just develop things. make art. interesting and creative webpages. you know - stuff.

bah. i've updated my resume. now i just have to get some writing samples together. and find an editor. how difficult is this?

and now for something completely different.

it's a hot monday morning. it's nasty outside and it's nasty inside. the inside nastiness has as much to do with the lack of air conditioning as it does to do with the fact that my boss is back from her week-long jaunt to new orleans and the fact that our new network administrator thinks i'm an absolute twit and wants nothing to do with me. that's fair, really. i think he's an absolute twit and i really don't want to have much to do with him, either. but i have to work with them and, lately, things have really started to feel like work. the real appeal of this office was that work was fun and interesting. now it's just boring and tension-filled. i know, i'm whining because my perfect workplace is turning normal.

in other news, i think i can fairly state that my interest in a domain name of my very own is starting to peak significantly. the cost isn't too high and i think i can do something interesting with it. at least, i hope i can do something interesting with it. now i just have to put some effort in there.

i finished my edits on the podium and i'm poking around for an editor. i was hoping to get the editors i remembered from high school, but that may be problematic. maybe not. we'll see. it takes effort, but what doesn't? after this editing run, i'm looking at publishers. then marketers. i'm blessed, i think, in that i know several good marketers. better than me, anyway.

i'll keep this updated on what's going on.

okay. so some of the anger has levelled off a bit. but i am seriously considering getting my own domain name. what fun that will be!

anyway, i've decided to jump headfirst into eight-month-old edits for the podium, which is turning into a very daunting challenge. there are a lot of things i need to address with the story before i can let it loose on the world. gak. gak, indeed.

alright. now i'm pissed. yahoo/geocities pushed the line when they wouldn't allow images to be displayed anywhere but on geocities sites. fine. fair enough. now they've blocked things so you can't even put up a link to a single image. oh no! you have to put up a link to an html site. apparently there's not enough ad traffic to allow people to put up links to their pictures.

here's the official word from geocities:

Why won't my files load when I try to link to them outside of GeoCities?
Unfortunately, this isn't allowed. We've made changes to our system that prohibit certain files from loading outside of our domain (geocities.com). This means that some of the files stored in your Yahoo! GeoCities directory can't be referenced directly from links outside of geocities.com. However, these files will remain accessible from any geocities.com web page.
This change ensures that our resources are supporting visitors to Yahoo! GeoCities web pages and providing them with the best possible experience.

Please note: In compliance with our Yahoo! GeoCities Terms of Service (Section 5), we don't allow our members to use Yahoo! GeoCities primarily to store files for exclusive use at another site. Any violation of our Terms of Service may result in removal of your account.

If you want to link to files in your Yahoo! GeoCities directory from outside of our domain, you can bypass this limitation by linking to the entire HTML page rather than to specific images or other files within the page.

If you wish to further inquire about your account status, please contact us by filling out our feedback form.

this shit is enough to make me want to change hosting sites completely. anyone have a better place for me to go?