love my computer: March 2004 Archives

i should write i should post i should blog dammit blog but what would i say if i did? i am unwilling to try & explain my life at this point (it would only confuse me) (or you, if there are any you's left who still come here) and i'm sure i have other things to say however this $2.50 per hour internet thang is seriously impeding the flow of whatever those other things might be. composing offline just isn't the same, there is something in the connection itself that is a conduit for the expression of any inspiration i may have on hand; disconnected, it seeks other outlets. it's revived my long-dormant semi-obsessive tendency to frequent the stationery aisles, impulsively purchasing more spiral notebooks & cool pens than i possibly need. i have also been up to my elbows in glitterpolish & crazy glue & discarded things, to the extent that the finished products are less decorative than they are an infestation of sparkly crap covering every flat surface everywhere.

another thing i can't seem to do offline, is code. i can download code with the intention to modify it & upload later, but when the modem clicks off, so does the part of my brain that had those great ideas for those cool modifications. i am perfectly capable of doing some pretty extensive shit with code & having it right the first time, it's not like the old days of testing wild guesses, all elebendy kabillion of 'em, before i had a working finished product, so i don't really *need* to be online like i did then. well, at least not for that reason. but i do, apparently, need to be online.

there are parts of my brain that are conditioned to work on a computer that is actively switching packets in the background. i can get as far as the first impulse to look something up, & it's over. i might not need the answer to continue, but the sheer fact of not being able to have that answer till i log back on ... ADD ... look! a shiny thing!

weeks. it will be a few more weeks, two-ish, until this business with the offlineness is resolved. until then, i am ... somewhere between a holding pattern, and a test pattern. i am something filling in spacetime until the real something happens.

& if & when the apocalypse comes, and i survive, you will find me holed up in an abandoned ISP with a case of red bull & a generator, working diligently day & night to get the connections back running. and i know others who are of the same mindset. i comfort myself with this, whenever i am forced to face the depth breadth & extent of my need. there are worse things to be dependent on, than a blast-proof packet switching network that connects me to a mind-bogglingly vast array of things. even if some of those things are parts of my self.

god i love the internet.

copied out of a text file of one of my notepad blogging adventures. have uploaded some cool pictures have many many many more in store for when i can be more online. which is to say not yet.

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right before i fell offline, i went a little nuts. i imported both kdblog databases and added some entries manually from the old surreally dreamlog. i tried to export my old blogger archives but the FTP kept failing and ... i haven't given up. i'm not sure why not, but i haven't. so. i had all this content and i wanted to manage it in an obsessive and totally superfluous fashion. i installed this MT plugin that generates yearly calendars and one that groups archive lists by year, making the date headers links to the calendars. i changed the archiving filenames so that they now publish to directories by month and year, placing the monthly archives as the index file in the month folders. if you go to dotlizard.com/2002/ you see the calendar. if you go to dotlizard.com/2002/03 yo see the monthly archive. since the entry title now determines the filename, i placed meta http refresh tags in all the old kdblog archives to forward directly to the page on dotlizard. i did the same thing with all my old archives here, so links will always go the same place. i completely redid the next/previous entry by category navigation. i had abandoned the weekly archiving, but i have now rewritten the PHP and it does list the weeklies in spelled out ordinal numbers, one through one hundred twenty nine at this point. it lives in a page preserved from the old bug design. i also installed the 'on this day' plugin and so the archives include links to entries from prior years.

i stopped myself before i adapted the six kdblog skins to work with these templates.

i had so much fun.