Bad move, space cadet
Today I attempted to dereference a scalar variable of type class java.lang.String as a structure with members. I won't do that again.

Who knows whence comes the phrase Bad move, space cadet? I don't mean the deservedly unfamous garage band "Zoinks" who I have never heard but who obviously knew the origin of the phrase. This is an 80s thing. Early 80s.

%$#@!
After bike wreck two weeks ago, still have pain in my left side if I press there. It's very tender. Otherwise I am alert and healthy. I figure if I were bleeding internally or had ruptured something then I'd be a little more debacled or wan. I don't want to go back to the doctor. Even with insurance it is expensive. I'm going to wait and see what happens.

My insurance is of the variety that covers a disaster but not the little stuff.

Yesterday I tried to do some pushups. That was dumb. My arm is not mended. Three pushups later I was in pain and then my arm throbbed the rest of the night. Pullups are out of the question.

So then I tried to do some crunches and leg lifts and my left side got a sharp pain so I just stopped. I used a lot of harsh language. I sat on the floor for a while glowering at nothing.

spider
On my bathroom sink the littlest spider has strung her web between my shaving cream can and my toothpaste. Small silk house. What is she gonna catch with that? Yet now I cannot shave or brush teeth. Unless I am very careful. Yeah, I think I can do this without disrupting her web.

Eyes
My eyes always red when I wake up in the morning. They clear up after a couple of hours. But it's like I sleep on top of my eyeball or something. It's been this way for years. There's no outlook.

Michelle Obama says she was touched by first lady

What an unfortunate headline. Go AP.

Another 16 hour day. Got a lot accomplished. I get by with a little help from my friends.

That was a 16 hour work day. Glad it's over. Tomorrow's another. I have to be up in a few hours. *Stanley Kubrick war cry*

Broccoli for breakfast, at 3 p.m. Big bowl of steamed broccoli, a small tree of it. Add a little butter to it. Pour the coffee. Good stuff. Back to the salt mine.

Aslett CSS Hack to fix IE contained floats bug

Useful reading if you do CSS.

What's cool about my job is I can sit around all day in my office in my shorts, unshaven, and listen to loud music. Currently Dresden Dolls. Now and then I look out the window at the trees. They have bloomed and are gorgeous, shaking in sexual frenzy. Windy springtime tree sex.

I do research every day, and work hard. I'll do 70 hour weeks to keep my clients happy. I think about how to work smart rather than hard but it turns out I need both. (It would be good to be smarter. Still, as long as I can learn the skills I need, I'm set. What makes you stupid? Fear makes you stupid.) I worked hard to get here. It's been a weird journey.

I don't earn much money. I make ends meet. Eventually I'll need to earn more if I want to buy a house. I'm concerned more about poems. This is all beside the point. What's the point? Point is, dang, that Amanda Palmer belts out good music. Amanda Palmer I propose marriage. And I mean that in the unstalkiest way possible. I'm a neurotic wino but otherwise a great guy. I'd be plenty happy just to wake each morning and hear your voice.

Why Men Have Breasts

Yep. I used to be a dame.

If you read it, you also get treated to anthropologist Meredith Small exulting over actor Harrison Ford. Can't miss out on that.

In DC in 1998 or thereabouts Harrison Ford came to town to shoot a film. The film crew was shooting near the downtown office where I worked (this was Academy for Educational Development when they had an office on 23rd St just north of Foggy Bottom). Rumors of Ford ran wild. All the girls in the office were dashing about and giggling. I am not making this up. I was making fun of them, and Kimberly hmmphed at me.

cilantro
I'm wondering how much cilantro the human body can withstand.

Wall Street
The movie Wall Street is predictable and a vehicle for delivery of platitudes. Errr. I mean it's dated. I'm watching it anyway. I watched part of it when it first came out -- 1989? Watching it again I remember most of it.

I sold that building two years later and made 800,000. It was better than sex. Today 800,000 is just another payday.

*yawn*

Ranya
In the coffeehouse on our date I was stuttering at Ranya. Take your time she said placatingly. Instantly I despised her. I never saw her again.

Yes, yes, I know.

lap dance
I mentioned this earlier to lesbian_ninja. The topic was lap dancing. One time I had a lap dance in Albuquerque. I was 21. I just felt awkward the whole time. Same year I saw Wall Street I think.

From a distance in the dim bar the dancer looked sexy. Keith paid her ten bucks to dance for me. Up close she was harsh, haggard, detached. Tired and bored. Whiff of sweat under thick perfume. She and I were both glad when it was over. I did not own sufficient sangfroid to buy her a drink.

What I found sexy then and I find sexy now are fairly different.

The Icy Dock is working well. It's chock full of storage. Its cooling fan is loud. It's a solid, useful, loud device. Four stars out of five. It is not better than sex. I put it under my desk on top of a small wood box to keep it out of the sea of dust that washes my home unless I sweep twice each week. If dust = dead skin is there enough skin?



The poet Hayden Carruth has a funny poem about dust. In his Collected Shorter. Copper Canyon. I built a pretty web site today and learned additional Photoshop skills. Nothing else to report. I hope Gekko gets his comeuppance soon. Guy has it comin. Tomorrow will be a busy day.

Insomnia. Here's the dawn, colored blue. I took this opportunity to configure DomainKeys and DKIM email authentication on my server. I kept the RSA encryption to a meager 128 bits to conserve memory. Later this year I'll upgrade to a Windows 2008 server with much more memory. For now this should help convince Yahoo to allow my and my clients' email to reach Yahoo email addresses.

I got an Icy Dock. I'll set it up tomorrow. And I got a 1TB Seagate Barracuda to go in it. I'll put three other drives in there too, hopefully allowing more airflow inside my hot, hot computer chassis. Tonight my mainboard alarm started beeping. I had never heard it before but immediately realized what it was: a signal that my CPU was overheating. It has never done that before.

I dig these goofy hard drive names. Raptor, Barracuda. Like the drive is a predatory, swift, and fierce barracuda. I don't want a predatory hard drive. I want a fast, cool, capacious drive. What animal avatar would that be? A walrus?

Still not sleepy. I've slept maybe five hours in the past 48 hours. I want to just keep working. I'm editing and augmenting my business web site. It needs it.

work
Worked my ass off today. Got a lot done. Tomorrow: meeting with new client. Need to get perfect with the CitySoft platform. Need to cram more ColdFusion in my head. And get better at SQL. Do some marketing. Focus less on poems and more on business for a while so I can keep food on the table.

But my markup validates.

AG
Keep thinking about this person. Can't shake her off. What the hell. This is gonna be one of those five year recovery periods. %$#@! Coming up on the end of year 4. I remember the first year. I was the hurtin'est dog in the pound. I'm hoping I do not run into her in DC when I visit for a week in July. I don't want to see her.

I don't know what the solution is but believe it involves dancing. It certainly involves hanging out w/ my cool siblings and cool niece and cool nephew.

bro
Last night Ian beat me at chess. He's quite smart. I like having him around. He's a considerate housemate. He hangs out in his room and reads and listens to music. Studying for his PhD at U of Chicago. Last night I astonished him twice, by listening to Madonna's Ray of Light CD then watching an episode of Bob Ross. Happy little trees.

soledad
I've been pretty solitary these past six months. Holed up, read books, did web work, did gym, wrote poems. A few dates, a few flirtations, but that's all I feel like doing. Maybe in a year. This is shaping up to be a regular Dear Diary entry.

DC
I'm coming there 16 - 21 July. To catch up with clients who like to see my face now and then. Many friends there I miss a lot. All of whom should move to Chicago. We have fun here. A very bicycle friendly town. And we have this gigantic silver bean that we keep in a park. It's worth it to move here just for the gigantic silver bean.

gigantic silver bean
Who knows what's inside it. Money? Is that where the city keeps its budget? Is it solid? Or maybe full of pennies? Dark matter? Music? Mayonnaise?

( Yanked from wiki: )

Chicago
I invite my entire flist to move to Chicago. You can stay with me till you get your own place. It will be crowded with all of you here. But we can play chess and Settlers of Catan. Who's got wood for sheep? Does that joke ever get old?

Song for my sister
When I was ten and she was seven
I should have gotten my sister out of there,
I should have said Come on, sis,
pack your bag, we're getting out of here,
we're joining the circus and not coming back
till our parents come to their senses.

(Start of poem. Dunno the rest yet.) Ya'll have a good night.

tigerlily35

• Scrubbed sulfurous pit of bathroom before it became a conduit to hell from which demons sprang to engulf Chicago.


• Scrubbed godless warren of kitchen.


• Cleaned rest of home — less dust means better sleep; uncluttered means I get more accomplished; cleaning = procrastination device.


• Did not figure out weird form validation problem in ColdFusion. The markup is simple. The form validates onServer but not onSubmit. Weird javascript error. So I omit onSubmit and went with onServer. Sent it to client. It's a huge form, very complicated. It's a pretty form the masses will flock to.


• Read some way into Conversations with Nelson Algren.


• Re-taught myself the bowline, the sheet bend, and the double half hitch. In case I need them. Uh oh. Have tied myself to chair. HALP!


• Web project management stuff.


• Neti potted twice. Shave / shower, in four minutes.


• Software updates and disk defrags for various computers in my home.


• Laundry. That same brassiere is still down there lying on the table where it was three weeks ago. Refrained from running it up flagpole.


• Endured ignominy of realtor leading potential buyers through my apartment. My landlord is selling the building. Time to pick up stakes? Hope not, as I like this place.


• Grocery shopping.


• Arranged salsa dancing next week w/ J and other friends.


• Noted that, since I turned 40 this month, my monthly fee for health insurance increased by $40. I love my country.


• Dinner with sister, her bf, and niece and nephew. I brought shrimp that we peeled and steamed for Shrimp Caesar Salad. Played games with kids. Nephew had a challenging evening. I love him a ton and my sis is wonder-mom but, holy mackerel, that was a challenging evening. He is age 4, extremely smart, intrepid, and froward. Sis's patience continues to astound.


• Called my Pop.


• LJ stuff.

Comics

1. Re: new Iron Man comic book series (volume V!), released just in time to cash in on Iron Man movie:
   
   to editors at Marvel Inc.
   Gentlemen,
   
   In Invincible Iron Man v. 5, # 1, by Fraction and Larroca, page 1, panel 2, some text confuses me.
   
   "She and her friends have all chipped in on minutes they'll use to call family in London or New York, or boys in towns that they like."
   
   Did the girls, before they expired, choose their boyfriends based on the towns in which the boys resided?
   
   I'm unable to continue reading the comic book until you clear this up for me.
   
   Sincerely,
   
   Eric Bourland
   
   (The girls were killed in a terrorist attack, seemingly electrical / industrial in nature. I won't get a reply. Is it wrong of me to expect craft in stories I read? If you don't have the craft, I'm not going to read your writing, not even your comic book.)
   


2. I liked it better when Catwoman was evil and a genuine foil to Batman and his catamite bat-a-mite, Robin. Now she is Cleaning Up the Gotham Night. We desperately need our heroes don't we?


3. That's it today. Early to bed.


4. Who da man? You da man. Or da woman.

Sheet bend. Source: www1.br.cc.va.us/murray/Arboriculture/tree_climbing/knots/

1. finished setting up BlogCFC on my server; now to set up different blogs for different sites including libidinouswino.org

2. made progress with libidinouswino.org (nexus of smut and grammar) (and cash cow) (well, cash rabbit) (cash cicada?)

3. fixed long and complex update form for client

4. unsuccessfully tried to talk her into connecting that form directly to the database

5. wrote long, polite letter to another client explaining difficulties of editing a complex navigation menu in a WYSIWYG editor

6. patched a couple of holes in my CMS

7. read further on DKIM and DomainKeys and decided to not implement them on my server since they are resource intensive and my server does not have a ton of resources to spare

8. sent timeline and budget to another, new client

9. fixed feedback problem with some colleagues on experts-exchange.com; was called a gentleman

10. grocery shopping

11. made big batch of shrimp and cous cous that will last for three dinners

12. puttered

13. napped

14. read LJ

15. letter to EF written and posted

16. revised poem about dancing policemen in Granada

17. now the computer is going to beat me in chess, a little more at-risk each time

Here's good news.

Internet Explorer 8 and Acid2: A Milestone

Nice work. Sure makes my job easier.