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Friday, November 30, 2001
For humanity's sake
Muchos gracias to Christopher at frootcake who guided me gently through archive hell, and Christopher at lost harbour for 404 page assistance (which I have yet to fix... soon, promise). Permalinks forthcoming for all my new bloggy pals.
The bf and I are about to embark on a road trip to Ohio to see his brother & our (our!) nephews, Gabe and Spam. His name's not really Spam. It's just what I like to call him. I aspire to be the wacky uncle.
I'm bringing Rory (uh, that's my PowerBook's name, I'm lame, I know) so I'll see if I can blog from the road! Who knows, this crazy scheme might just work. Too bad I don't have an AirPort card or I could scour Rte. 80 for unsecured 802.11b networks.
I'm all about doing good for humanity.
Posted at 11:57 PM | Comments (0)
Newsies
You know what chaps my hide?
My ISP won't offer the macromedia.x newsgroup hierarchy. (macromedia.freehand, macromedia.dreamweaver, etc). But today when I open my newsreader, I see that they HAVE decided to offer alt.binaries.pictures.orchids.
Now I almost hope that they ARE going out of business at midnight tonight. OY.
Posted at 11:34 AM | Comments (0)
Thursday, November 29, 2001
Archive madness
There are bunches of things I don't understand about Blogger.
Like how archives work.
I just fixed a broken link in an archived post from earlier this month. But hitting "publish" apparently doesn't actually publish the change, does it? Do I have to re-build the Archives whenever I edit an older post?
Anybody know the right way to do this?
I want to find out before I go and change the 15 or so broken links in older posts that point to outdated pages on the site. Oy. I wish I had a proper web hosting account so I could play with Greymatter or something.
Posted at 03:15 PM | Comments (0)
Going undah
Sigh. Looks like the company that provides our cable modem is going under. Or something. I can't actually tell from all the news reports. And they haven't contacted us to say that our service will be affected. Gee, I guess it's a good thing I never got around to cancelling my trusty old dialup ISP.
Posted at 03:00 PM | Comments (0)
Tuesday, November 27, 2001
Some lives read like a postcard, and some lives read like a book.
As I've mentioned here before, I retreated back to OS 9 after a few not-so-fun days of data loss because I didn't know what I was doing in X.
I miss a lot of things about that ultra-modern operating system... I miss instantaneous wake-from-sleep on my PowerBook. I miss non-sluggish multi-tasking. Luckily I just remembered that Peek-A-Boo, that Swiss Army knife of a utility, features a magical "Special Technology" extension that improves multi-tasking like nobody's business. If I set iTunes' importance to "high" it rips mp3s from CDs at full speed even when I'm rendering effects in PhotoShop! Whee.
Anyway, somebody's been doing searches on my Atomz box for Mac & PowerBook stuff so I thought I'd throw you a bone.
Posted at 10:19 AM | Comments (0)
Monday, November 26, 2001
Good luck with your god-damn cherries!
I meant to blog so many things this past week. So now I'll just write them all at once.
On Wednesday night, we made our semi-annual pilgrimage to see Kiki & Herb, now ensconced at the Westbeth. Oddly enough, they had only half the room filled with seats, which were pressed tightly together. I guess they were trying to recreate the cramped seating from Fez. The staging was great (Herb had a white piano, for god's sake) but the show suffered the same way it has suffered on off-nights in the past: some of the stories sometimes just don't quite gel and you're left with tragicomic farce which is hilarious and cutting but lacks emotional heft. There have been nights when Kiki's tales transported me and made me cry (especially the story of Yasaweh coupled with that Stevie Nicks song) but this time it didn't happen. The Miss-D bombshell was great, though, as was the Grey Gardens reference. Well, OK, the whole show is basically one big Grey Gardens reference, but this time they made it a bit more explicit.
Also, there wasn't nearly enough shrieking.
As for Thanksgiving, well, it was kind of a chore. For the past few years we've spent the holiday in my Aunt's fantastic apartment in Philly, in a gorgeous, hip hi-rise on Washington Square (yeah, they have one down there too, donchaknow!). Now, I'm not one for generic tower block living, but this building is the shit: Barcelona chairs in the lobby, doormen with gloves and an apartment itself in the corner of the building so the whole damn thing is made of windows.
Unfortunately, my wacky aunts decided to sell the place, so this year Thanksgiving happened at my parents' modest cape in New Jersey. No view. No doormen. And absolutely no Barcelona chairs.
The food was good, the chat was alright (my boring parents might even go see Amelie now), but I hate spending time with my family now because I feel so deceptive.
My brother told my parents that I was gay when I was in high school but they never really dealt with it, and neither have I. In fact, it almost seems like they've forgotten, or maybe he just spilled the beans in too oblique a way and they never really understood it in the first place.
So that means we don't talk about the bf, we don't talk about the wacky drag cabaret shows that are now the mainstay at the club I book (even if the aforementioned Kiki & Herb have jumped ship), we don't talk about really anything that actually has any relevance on my life.
I wanted to sit down and talk about it this time, at least with my mom (my dad and i barely talk, he's a real punch-ya-in-the-shoulder-hey-how-you-doin-kid kind of guy), but the circumstances were just So Wrong. My brother is in the midst of a real crisis--almost failing out of college, getting dumped by his girlfriend, talking about suicide... I'd go into more detail but all I really have is the summary my mom gave me since he won't really talk to me about it. I would have pushed the issue more with him, but I know he saw a doctor and got some meds and that he's dealing with it in a responsible way, even if he's too embarassed to talk to me about it.
The only really meaningful conversation I managed to get into was about school: my dad wants to give me the rest of the money I would need to finish up, which was pretty cool coming from Mr. Reticent. It was probably the longest conversation we've had in years... we actually spent quite a bit of time together, since he's getting into using their Mac a lot more now. So I taught him how to dub audio in iMovie, how to edit power lines and red eye out of pictures using Photoshop, how to organize his files and folders. It felt good. I even dragged my mom to the new Apple store in Tice's Corner, which was ever so nice. She even got to participate in an OS X demo. Now she's all "Brian, dear, which FreeBSD book should I buy so I can harness the power of the new Unix core in this operating system?" and I don't have the heart to tell them that they're still using old OS 9 because I don't know jack shit about Unix.
Of course all this hard work at family bonding came at the expensive of losing out on time with the ever so cool Tamara who was visiting NYC this week. So this will have to suffice as a bye-bye baby, see you soon!
What else happened this weekend?
Hmm.
The bf and I drove down to Princeton yesterday, and cleared out the Pixies & Kirsty MacColl sections in the Record Exchange. We saw The Man Who Wasn't There in the ickle theater in the center of town. I was underwhelmed by some aspects of the story, but I did enjoy the film's ambience, and the fine acting by just about everyone involved. Scarlet Johansson has this oddly wooden but affecting & reassuring presence in this flick, just as she did in Ghost World. I'm betting it'll land some Oscar nods, but probably for lesser categories like Best Supporting Actor... Best Lighting...
When we got out of the movie theater, we did a little book shopping (one of the book clerks appeared to be playing a MUD on the book-search computer... how quaint and collegiate of him!) and grabbed some sandwiches. Our picnic plans were ruined by the threat of rain, so we hit the road instead of wandering around the Princeton campus. I'd love to live there, it's so cute, but there's really just NOTHING to do unless you're a student or you work for, say, Johnson & Johnson or one of the other huge corporations on the way out of town. So fuck that.
We got home as it was getting dark, and once again I didn't get any of the things done that I had planned to. Now I've been invited to join a blog about HIV and related issues, and how it affects our lives as World AIDS Day approaches... come on peeps, I can barely get anything written in here and my Nanowrimo project is thoooouuuusands of words behind and the toilet needs scrubbing and there is a boyfriend who needs to have Christmas gifts bought for him and a living room to be rearranged and a new Ab Fab to be absorbed through the eyes.
Thus endeth today.
Posted at 09:15 PM | Comments (0)
Tuesday, November 20, 2001
Muzak
So I've started posting a few mp3s on here. Hopefully I'll organize them better, but for now I'll just post a link over there on the left every now and again. Whee.
Posted at 02:50 PM | Comments (0)
Monday, November 19, 2001
Tamara!
Last night we went to shopping with Tamara-from-the-west-coast.
She can stay here forever as far as I'm concerned; with her in tow, the girls made a complete run through H&M in less than 10 minutes!
Now, I'm all for shopping. But the thing is that gay boys get the Best Of Both Gender Worlds when it comes to shopping: the ability to love it and even relish it, while also GETTING IT OVER WITH QUICKLY. I can't take Girl Shopping. It invariably requires 3 or 4 trips to the dressing room and Long Periods Of Time In Front Of Mirrors and often ends in tears and cigarette burns.
So I was psyched about the H&M thing, but then I cancelled it out by spending the better part of an hour in the men's fragrance section of Sephora searching for A Signature Fragrance. Go figure. I guess my yin is not balanced with my yang. Or something.
I felt like a Proper Fag though, poring over the Issey Miyake and the Hermes and the Burberry and the Versace. Somehow I ended up coming home smelling like rum, though. Sigh.
Posted at 11:35 PM | Comments (0)
Foxy Biggerstaff
Would you think I was a dirty old man if I told you that I thought that the boy who played Gryffindor Quidditch Captain & Keeper Oliver Wood in the Harry Potter movie was kind of foxy? Would you? Hmm?
What if I told you that the actor's name was Sean Biggerstaff and he has a scottish accent? Now what do you think? Hmm?
p.s. the imdb tells me he's legal so at least this dumb website won't send me to prison.
Posted at 06:37 PM | Comments (1)
Pee.
So I'm in the midst of some web-house-cleaning.
And some house-house-cleaning. The identity of the peeing cat has been unearthed.
Posted at 12:24 AM | Comments (0)
Saturday, November 17, 2001
Beige
Despite being an ardent Mac user, I've decided to go beige.
Once again I will probably never finish this layout, nor apply to any other pages on this site.
Honestly, do I use this webspace for anything other than storing MP3s and graphics for IRC friends to copy from me? Grr.
Posted at 04:53 PM | Comments (0)
Friday, November 16, 2001
Echo
Don't you hate it when you talk to someone on the phone, and there is that weird echo where you can hear yourself talking? And all you can think is "do I always sound this stupid when i speak?" Because I hate that.
Posted at 03:32 PM | Comments (0)
My check has cleared
Today is a lost cause.
It's warm like springtime.
My phone is broken.
I have a new Lali Puna record to listen to.
My check has cleared.
It's time to go shopping.
Posted at 01:47 PM | Comments (0)
Wednesday, November 14, 2001
Games I Play
Today I am playing two games. One is the "Locking The Cats In Different Rooms To See If One Of Them Pees On Something" game. The other is the "Try To Eat Papardelle With Bolognese Sauce Without Spilling It On Lap" game. Actually, make that three games: now I am playing "Taking Dozens of Pictures of Self With Digital Camera and Hating All Of Them" as well. Scores at 11.
Posted at 02:38 PM | Comments (0)
Tuesday, November 13, 2001
The last four days
My camera broke. I tried to fix it and failed. I tried to fix it again and succeeded. Took some antibiotics. I figured out how to change the time on my watch for daylight savings whatever. One of my cats peed in the laundry basket. Took some antibiotics. One of my cats peed in the laundry basket again. One of my cats peed on the bf's pajamas while they were on the bed, so the mattress got peed on too. One of my cats is spending the rest of the week locked in the bathroom. Took some antibiotics. Watched Ab Fab. Sang the Ab Fab song by the Pet Shop Boys (Abby-bloody-ssinian-bloody-Vogue DARLING, yes please and thank you very much). Watched Angel with furrowed brows. Took some antibiotics. Donated my aging Mac tower to my pal Piff who has used it for nothing but IRC chat and games of NetFungus (who could ask for better, I mean honestly!?). Oh yes and once again I am late for work. And this page design is not even close to finished. And my stomach hurts from these icky ickle pills.
