It's been an odd sort of week with all those bits of change again. For a long while I was contentedly on that four-month cycle: university term, another university term, summer, repeat. Then there was stability. Three years of only sporadic change with the fundamentals dragging out for much longer. But now, for some reason I'm thinking in fours again. Part of that is Sharyl, moving up next weekend. Another part of that is creative contemplation.

I'm thinking about my continuing ed. I've made it a bit of a habit to take some evening courses, to register in something creative at a local school, and to learn something out of my element. I'm considering the next round. I'm thinking of taking an art course. Cliche, I know. But it has potential. What would that stimulate, again? The left or the right brain? I can never seem to keep those straight.

I spent some time last night flinging writing projects of the past present, and future into my new project system. I call it the Scribbler. It's a little PHP script with a database backend: it's a crude sort of content management system that lets me put all my writing work into one central repository. Those who find that sort of thing interesting can feel free to browse randomly through the first bits that are lingering there. As time goes on I'll pack it full of more stuff that I dig out of the secret corners of my hard drive. As always, it's disclaimed with the work-in-progress flag. I don't need the criticism: my ego is fragile enough already.

August 31, 2004 after 10AM | code , play , writing | maybe more»

I'd say it's been a queit week, but then I'd be lying.

For a brief reprise: sharyl is moving to edmonton after being accepted to university | blue, despite the bettacam disappearing, is still alive, even perky | the cable guy arrives on Saturday | Derek and Shannon arrive tonight | the parents are in town on the weekend for a relative-event | I took Tuesday off and spent it feeling nostalgic for my big U days as I showed sis around the campus | work is work is work | we bought Hot Shots Golf Fore! for the PS2 on the weekend, and have wasted far too many hours playing | Brett and Lenore's housewarming was a blast | work on the new wedding (not us, duh) website has reached the deep infrastructure stage, and now needs design input | I'm writing PHP out my @$$ these days, and have put together an entire CMS to manage all my writing projects, which is like 98% done | the jackhammers have subsided | the sun is shining, briefly | I need to take some more photos, though I did take a series of feetsacross the high level bridge the other day to add to the gallery soon -- soon | 208 with effort | databases are looming, and I think I need to focus -- at least based on various emails and phone calls | I am tending towards the cryptic | and other things too...

And that was just in the last seven days.

One of these days I'll open up the world to it all: In fact, that aforementioned CMS is a branch of a new idealism I've stumbled across. I've been scribbling words on to both paper and silicon for years now. It's not for the sake of publication: in fact, 98% of what I write off-hours is for a very small audience. If it's useful or interesting for someone else, then great. But I tend toward the idea of vastening for publication. Or at least, I have in the past. Most writers are struggling under two false pretenses: (a) that someone cares what they are writing, and (b) that someone cares enough to publish and/or purchase what they are writing. I struggle under that -- and not just internally. When you inform the world that you write, they immediately want to know: are you going to try and get it published.

Define publication.

I'm working on a author's CMS. Ultimately, it will be an online tool for working on any document, long or short, but geared towards the novel or book. The beauty of it will be that instant publication online will be the result of it. Sort of a blog for fiction, where stories are broken into chapters, and chapters are broken into modules. Modules can be shuffled, moved, edited, recycled, or whatever. Everything is sortable and editable: and instantly navigable in different forms.

It's just a little pet project, but as I get work done on it (read: content filling it), watch for me opening the doors to the whole thing. It could be fun.

Meanwhile, I'll sit back and imagine the city is stalking me. It is.

August 26, 2004 after 10AM | friends , life , photography , play , scatter | maybe more»

The hills are alive witth the sound of music... Correction: The jackhammers have returned.

Close, but it could have just been a short meaningless dream.

At some point we thought this was all done: they had ripped out ninety-seven percent of the flooring on the perimeter steps of our office building. There was noise and piles of broken tile the colour of brick. And then for two weeks : nothing.

The crew emerged from the hidden depths of the city again this morning. They came with their tools. They have been making a whole lot of noise all day.

They seem to enjoy it.

I seem to think they are not working fast enough to make tomorrow a quiet day. Pity.

August 17, 2004 after 3PM | stress , work | maybe more»

Apparently blue is a bit of a brooder. He's healthy -- at least as far as my diagnosis abilities can derive from his otherwise active behavior -- but the poor little fish seems a little too morose and stressed to eat. That's too bad. According to a handful of Google searches, he's just pouting about his recent move, and he should pick up in a few days.

In other -- much more important news -- Karin and I are doing dinner out tonight. For some reason I seem to remember that about, well, uh, exactly a year ago, we had this really big party. Inivted a whole bunch of friends and relatives. I seem to recall that Karin wore a really nice dress, we were paraded around a little bit, and everyone kept taking our pictures. Funny how those things just sort of linger in your mind.

August 16, 2004 after 10AM | fish , food | maybe more»

The first step in assuming responsibility of something larger than oneself is to grasp the effort involved in menial caregiving, and purchase something within the limits of disposability. In other words, if my new fish were to die in the near future, no big loss. It would suck for the fish, but a new one costs, like, three dollars.

I bought one of those little mini-aquariums yesterday. It came with the standard assortment of plastic plants, a burst bag of green gravel, and a little jar of chemical which makes the water you and I consume everyday, safe for habitation by aquatic animals.

And then I went back to the pet store later and picked up blue. He is a male betta, officially termed Betta Splendens and popularly known as a Siamese Fighting Fish. He was living in a small plastic drinking cup, stacked neatly on the shelf with about thirty of his closest relatives -- and I'm still not sure if he likes his new digs, a spacious two litres of green-hued plastic, more or less than the plastic cup.

Some of you, the astute ones, may have already seen the webcam. No guarantees on how long that will last. Perhaps only until I'm certain he's not going to expire when I go home at night. Perhaps.

August 13, 2004 after 11AM | fish , meta | maybe more»

I don't know what disturbs me more: that McDonalds sold twenty-two billion dollars worth of hamburgers last year in the US. Or that Americans ate a little over a trillion dollars worth of fast food last year. Stats. Click here.

August 13, 2004 after 9AM | food , opinions | maybe more»

Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the western spiral arm of the Galaxy lies a small unregarded yellow sun. Orbiting this at some staggeringly complex and varying distance every one-hundred and twenty years or so, is a sizable conglomeration of dust, ice, and (quite possibly) highly intellegent aliens who have disguised themselves as a large and unweilding comet so they can observe our little blue-green planet without fear of reprisal.

This comet has -- or had -- a problem, which was this: most of the dust and ice particles living on it were unhappy for pretty much of the time. Many solutions were suggested for this problem, but most of these were largely concerned with the casual lolling about the sun that had already been going on with the comet for a very long time, which is odd because on the whole it wasn't the comet who was unhappy.

So it happened: revolution, rotation, and quite possibly even gravity, and then some of the ice and dust particles found themselves unceremoniously dumped from the back side of the comet as it continued to loll casually around the sun and they were left to float helplessly in space.

Then, one quiet August evening shortly after midnight, this little blue-green planet passed (with the great interest of its inhabitants) through a lonely cloud of dust and ice, casually picking up a few hundred-thousand stranded dust and ice hitchhikers as if to thumb its nose at the long-past comet, an already strained relationship, the comet having, itself, occasionally threatened to hitch a ride on that same planet in an event comparable to an ape being hit with a baseball bat.

Coincidentally, five ape-decended life forms on the aforementoined blue-green planet found themselves escaping a completely different problem. This problem went something like this: Being a human lends itself to the general evolutionary conclusion that bad things come from dark places. This conclusion has itself lead to the development of some of mankind's most interesting inventions. One human, a man by the name of Edison, was so concerned with the growing issue of scary-dark places that he invented a way of harnessing the residual energy of the aforementioned sun and releasing it in the form of a small, nearly self-contained, vacuum sealed bulb. Consequently, anywhere large collections of human beings gather -- cities, football games, or even odd little campgrounds in the wilderness of Northern Saskatchewan -- they bring these little bulbs and create a comfortable glow called light-pollution which protects them from the dark, much like an ostrich sticking its head in the sand. Unfortunately, light pollution has a way of causing great bother to those folks, specifically the five (aforementioned) ape-decended life forms who, showing great interest in the grand galactic affairs and complex relationships of planets and comets, would rather look into the sky than look at each other.

And so the five humans found themselves inside of yet another of mankind's great polluting devices -- a car -- travelling as quickly as possible away from their big, glowing, light-polluting city.

Yet another great human invention: The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy has a few things to say on the subject of towels: "A towel, it says, is about the most massively useful thing an interstellar hitchhiker can have." It goes on like this for some pages, listing the various practical applications of towels in everyday life. In short, if you ever meet a computer programmer in everyday life and ask him about his towel, he will grin wickedly and wink knowingly in your general direction.

Unfortunately, had that same work of fiction ever bothered to mention the massive utility of a cellular phone while driving on a dark, unlit, country road at two o'clock in the morning, those same computer programmers would probably have been much better off.

Incedentally, our five protagonists had neither a towel nor a cell phone.

Also incedentally, the practical mechanical knowledge required to diagnose the unholy screeching sound emitting from the (yes, aforementioned) car when one of the unsuspectingly jealous rocks on the road wedges itself into the brake pad of a load of five humans going deep into the late-night darkness of the countryside to look at some much prettier rocks falling from the sky -- that knowledge would also, very much likey, have been more useful than knowing about the comedic-value of towels.

Our five protagonists found themselves in just such a situation, and having conclusively decided that forty kilometers was just simply too far to push a car back into the percieved safety of the city's light pollution, much more effort was mustered to envision a way to solve the growing problem of being nearly alone on a dark country road with an undrivable car when all anyone really wanted to do was look up at the mysterious glowing lights in the dark sky. This solution inevitably involved a whole bunch of walking, and another whole bunch of recruiting of the assistance of other happenstance human beings who, on the whole, were probably much less concerned about towels than the rest of us and who were practical enough to have brought both a cell phone and some basic mechanical knowledge into the dark countryside late at night.

Somewhere, far out in space, is a sizable conglomeration of dust, ice, and (quite possibly) highly intellegent aliens who have disguised themselves as a large and unweilding comet so they can observe our little blue-green planet and our efforts to spy on their galactic politics -- and last night, even as we crawled into the relative safety of our beds, they were all laughing us.

August 12, 2004 after 10AM | friends , play , travel , weird | maybe more»

I was disappointed that we couldn't watch Jess last night. A consequence of work: sleep or don't bother. I'm sure the fiddle was wonderful.

Occasionally, as the city lurks behind corners one can't anticipate, there is surprise. Other times, there is the draw of indulgence, when the light beams fall across the thin carpet and it is possible to stretch out and imagine something both within and beyond that scope.

I find myself wrapping deeper into certain elements: the foci of my life are narrowing, bending inwards, and drawing frail webs of casual emergence. There are patterns, relationships, and defining moments of pure ecstatic revelation when I can align matter and energy, syneristically, into something chaotically wonderful. It seems abstract. It is abstract. There are elements of surprise around every corner, and the patterns dance like fractaline waves, their nuances offering better and bolder imaginings.

Distill creativity. Bottle it.

There are answers there that are too simple. There are other which have complexity beyond complexity.

I find a cool and refreshing pint can clear those complexities quite easily.

August 11, 2004 after 3PM | friends , play | maybe more»

Some of us already know this story.

It was raining in Saskatchewan this weekend. As haunting cold drew us from the city to the nether-lake-regions of our neighbor's north. We pondered the brevity of life, and mused at the complexity of life in a tent. It was cold, but the meals followed in quick succession and the beer flowed like water.

Saturday was morose. Glum clouds hung heavy, and the air was damp, moist, and threatening. I nursed a maple malt from the banks of False Creek, hunched deep into a red lawnchair, and pulled a dog-eared copy of Adam's second classic from my car as I settled in for a quiet, and dislocated, afternoon.

One chapter later, there was a scream.

The campsite was full of kids. It was the modern parking-lot campground, trailers, boats, recreational vehicles, cars, trucks with idling diesel cummins engines purring in four directions, almost within arm's length. It was the kind of place you bring families, because the wilderness is cautiously kept at bay by the hum of humanity. The campsite was full of kids, pushing their bikes, toys, and siblings through the sandy soil. The campsite was full of kids because it was exactly that type of place.

And the air was full of shouts, hollars, and screams --playful and casual, in the way of children lingering too long in some immature state of mind which defines them as children.

But this scream was different.

I looked up from my book, tipping the rim of my hat back far enough to observe the surrounding maze of trees and metal pushed through the rugged complexity. A ten year old boy had run, darted, leapt in fear and agony into the raodway, his shirt and pants dancing with a scortching trim of fresh flames eating away the fabric faster than his naive soul could comprehend. In a moment that seemed to pull time like cold taffy, stretching tendrils of glistening, sugary pain into fragile webs, he had dropped to the road, screeching, brushing the attacker into suffocated oblivion.

Another moment stretched out.

Mute. But the screems continued.

And people tried to do something worth doing. It happened and then it was over. Odd how that works. Odd how a moment can linger in your mind. Odd how you would never imagine it so odd.

August 9, 2004 after 12PM | life , stress , travel , weather , weird | maybe more»

I've been steering clear of details for a while. I don't know why, other than there can be more interesting things to read about than my life.

First, we all now understand the consequences of visiting the land of mosquitos. Three days post, I am glad to report I am bite free. The same can not be said about my wife.

Second, upon re-reading Nineteen Eighty-Four after a decade lapse, I am finding myself haunted by the relevancy of this story. Literally, there is no comparison. But extraction and literary interpretation can bring haunting images to one's dreamstates.

Third, coding. There is something tediously rewarding among the silicon dance, despite the slipping hours.

And I'm certain there must be more somewhere...

August 3, 2004 after 9AM | code , politics , thinking | maybe more»