A year ago today I was contemplating writing a novel, pondering characters both simple and complex, and readying myself for a grand story. Today, I sit quietly and ponder the activation of one of my largest publications to date. Oddly enough, it doesn't fizzle my brain too much.

September 30, 2004 after 1PM | code , work , writing | maybe more»

Oddly enough, those weird pattern networks are appearing again.

There must be something in the air.

Jess, hiding out on the east coast for a while, has been spinning some enviable tales on her extended vacation. I've found myself picking through them a little more thoroughly than I would usually have time for, partly because my work-website is about to go live and I'm just on the verge of being mentally fried, but also because travel tales are always more interesting than sitting, complaining, in one's office tales... and I write that from personal experience.

I'll spare the exact details, but ultimately via the infmaous Milkcrate, I wound up leafing through the archives of Image 9000, the photo-blog of Jess' quasi-travel companion slash "guy"...

Normally, this would be of little consequence, and I would have simply lurked around for a while, read the walls, and then lurked away unseen. But I stumbled upon this link which revealed not one, but two parallel facinations: not only is Mr. 9000 the only other person I've met to have at least one photo of a shopping buggy on their website, but even more surprisingly, he's about the only person in the existence of humanity who has obviously read one of my favorite novels.

I just thought it was interesting. Subtle. But interesting.

September 29, 2004 after 8PM | friends , photography , weird | maybe more»

Building a website is nothing like building a house. For example, if you build a house and decide you want to change the location of the kitchen, you have until a certain time in the process. Then, tough. The kitchen is where it is, and no amount of complaining will adjust that fact.

A website on the other hand is maleable. It's like modelling clay. Fundamentally, it is difficult to manuplate and change, but once you get the hang of it, the clay can be anything.

I've just spent the last nine months of my job building a website. No, correction. A Website. A massive and complex database of information fronted by a glistening facade of images and text, menus and buttons.

Tomorrow, it goes live.

Now, don't get me wrong. I live and breathe Internet. It is the railroad of my generation -- people's fortunes are lost an made in it's construction and operation. HTML puts food on my table, water in my sink, and DVDs in my DVD player. I write code for fun (case in point, look at what you're reading) and profit. It is a fundamental part of who I am these days.

But, tomorrow, it goes live. It is a project of a scope of which I have never before undertaken.

And tomorrow, it goes live.

I'm not saying it's anything special. It's a website. It's sixteen hundred pages large. It's a few dozen megabytes in size. It's a complex maze of decades woth of information, readable, printable, savable. It still needs to mature, like a fine wine, with the effort of time and dozens of people who need to hop on board (finally) and add their two cents. It is just a website.

But. Tomorrow. It goes live. Sigh.

September 29, 2004 after 2PM | code , house , technology , work | maybe more»

I've contemplated something.

But, I'm not sure: significant things demand significant attention. And I'm not sure if, in this case, significant attention requires something as significant as it's own website. I mean, after all, Brett and Lenore did it. They took the plunge. They tried to orchestrate their own little construction in the midst of a larger one.

A decision is immenent: I pondered it a little, even stretching to consider a domain name fitting for the grand event. But I think, perhaps, that this -- here -- is where this site becomes more interesting. And so, simply, I'll avoid the tangled distractions of yet another website, and focus my energies here. And begin the bold story of another, less abstract garden, somewhere in a little prairie town called Edmonton.

Thus: a new theme... build and home. The story of the following, begins:

The city, it seems, has woven us a step deeper into it's patterns. It hasn't consumed us, but rather than rootless waifs dancing across its surface, we are setting tendrils and finding our place. Last night, amidst a flury of random emotions, we started a "file."

Oh, it's not a big file. It's just a thin little legal-sized pile of documents. But it's our file, with our names on it, and some numbers that would be meaningless beyond the context of us. Last night we sat down, created some simple sheets of paper, tucked them away in the safe confines of something larger than anything we can imagine right now, and set a cascading snowball in motion that will ultimately lead to us orchestrating the chain of events. Those events, pending a million unsettled factors will -- in a few years time -- and stetching year imortal, find me standing in a small patch dirt, pulling weeds and tending the few little bits of life that etch themselves into some managable meaning between the tides of everything that makes us human. A lot, a yard, a block of cement that creates a drive leading up to a complex entangled structure, otherwise known as a house.

It's a frightening thing. Consuming. Yet, powerful. Fundamental. And, reassuring that everything is worth something. Eventually.

September 29, 2004 after 11AM | friends , house , meta | maybe more»

I drove across the highlevel bridge in commuter traffic yesterday. I was to meet Karin at Sharyl's digs, and trek out for another blog-worthy event. The assorted vehicles crawled impatiently across the black, steel behemoth, and I -- in the little red truck -- thanked the mighty zarquon that my own commute does not include such traffic anymore.

Climbing to the south side of the river valley, Strathcona awaited. In all it's glory. In all it's weirdness.

Five students, garbed in bright orange shirts, disturbing wigs, and with undercoatings of the latest in neo-gothic fashions wandered stoicly down the centre median, large posterboard signs heralding the downtrodden message:

www.whatisbeauty.ca

Simple. Clean. And by their "alternative" appearance, one's first assumption is a call to action. "Visit our site." "Read our literature." "Feel our pain." "We are outcast and sick of it." "Please do not adjust your set: we have a message to slap in your face."

For some reason, it stuck in my mind. Sort of. It lingered there, nearly forgotten until I saw a very similar message in this morning's newspaper. Different, but similar.

So I checked.

I dared. I opened my web browser, and type in the mysterious URL.

And I was saddened. Disappointed. Slapped, rudely, in the face by yet another cheap attempt at advertisement. Go there. Visit. Whatever.

And the world takes another step down the ladder of good taste.

September 29, 2004 after 10AM | life , opinions | maybe more»

Sometimes I like to look for the patterns of things. I think it might just be some primal evolutionary remnant of some larger geek-path chromosomal marker.

For example, and admittedly it's not a very good one, I'm drawing convolutions from people-thoughts: I finally got in touch with Gene last night. Gene, never introduced here previous, was my über-studious university roomie for a couple years. I called him, because he called me, because, well, who knows. I called him back because I had recieved an email from Doug, the very nearly Dr. Doug, Phd in astrophysics, who I had written an email to just last week.

The connection there is that we are all mutual aquaintances -- and that's as far as I'll push that line... Also, I would lament on the emotional pain involved in having super-successful (academically, at least) friends... but, well...

I had written Doug last week, mostly, not entirely but mostly, because I had just fired up my new gmail account and wanted to send it for a whirl, and I had fired up a gmail account because another totally disconnected group of people made mild-mannered contact and aided that process in itself.

(See any patterns, yet?)

The ultimate stretch here is -- and ultimately there is no weighted significance to this whatsoever -- is that group A has indirectly resulted in the contact with group B by party C (or, your's truly)...

Bing, bong, boing! But whatever...

Patterns, right? And patterns are what shape this silly life. Or maybe, I'm just drawing conclusions where there are vague, unimportant references to my quasi-reality. It could also be that I'm stressed, overworked, and have nothing interesting to write about in that state...

More likely.

September 28, 2004 after 12PM | friends , thinking | maybe more»

Without trying to stir speculation or pre-emptive expectations, I wanted to mention that Karin and I put a hold on an empty lot in the south-west corner of Edmonton this weekend. No obligation. No conditions. We just confirmed a location in the vast scheme of the house-building universe, and have nudged that project into the first stages of readiness. Imagine a huge boulder on the top of a very steep hill: we stuck a plank under the bottom edge of that boulder creating a lever-sort of contraption, and are preparing to take a very big jump at the other end. Roll, boulder, roll.

Ok. So that was a mediocre analogy. But give me a break. I'm tired.

In other news: life continues as required.

September 27, 2004 after 12PM | house , life | maybe more»

I thought it might be fun to bring some life to my life, so -- about three weeks ago -- I picked up some potting soil and a little, wee, bag of seed. Call it a green thumb. Call it a strangely cheap and portable hobby. Call it whatever. I've decided to go into the mini-lawn business.

I've had some limited success growing little pots of turf on my windowsill in my office. Plants are great. They just sit there getting bigger and bigger. And the joy of growing grass, is that every so often, when you need a break, you can take the scissors and give it a quick mow. Zen.

I'm not actually going into business. I just thought I'd entertain myself. And I thought I'd write about it now to ease the crankpot tension of that previous post (next post, depending on which order you're reading)...

Unfortunately, my greens are off. Blah. Colours.

September 24, 2004 after 11AM | work | maybe more»

Read this slowly, in a longing -- sad -- sort of way. Like your facing the inevitable.

It's not that I'm tired of being political, but with the looming elections (here and abroad) the issues have become clouded in a media frenzy of fragmented, quasi-facts. Things are mis-shapen, changed, or manipulated to form orwellian truths. The slide, we realize too late, is in progress. I see a pattern emerging, and it only those with even more raw opinions than myself who will be able to step from the ebbs and tides of the city's lights and project their strength to the rest of us. It's not that big brother is watching. It's that there are echos of uncertainty in what that even means anymore.

I stumbled across a blog last night that had been written by yet another a tangled soul. He had filled a page with hollow comments about the crumbling of society (in his opinion) by the shift away from (in my words) the intolerance of rigid-class America. The partisan bashing -- the ignorance -- the arrogance that I see everywhere now broke through somewhere, so I flamed him. Annonymously, I wrote that he was a drone in a society that was like an unruley bully, slowly maturing and realizing what he interpretted as respect from others was actually fear and hate -- but unable to cope with that realization, continued to turn to force and pain to exert his will. I told him he had just not explained why society was crumbling, but rather, through his rant, demonstrated the attitutes that will eventually allow the tides of fear to break across the shores of calm, and wreak havoc.

It was a short comment, about one paragraph in length, and I went back this morning to see if there had been a retort -- an angry comment -- anything.

The blog had been deleted. Oddly enough, I don't think people realize that others listen and read when they say or write silly things. And I don't think those same people realize that harsh opinions are open to harsher citicism.

I really have no opinion. I have thoughts and worries, and sometimes I need to explain them in words. Mostly, though, I'm apolitica, in the most maniplated of meanings. I care, deeply, but sometimes it seems like trying to convince a can of yellow paint that it is really a can of yellow paint, when the can of yellow paint thinks it's a yellow lemon. Everyone else knows, but what can one do?

There are bends in reality. I can see them. I can feel outside influences. We go on with our lives like the wars and the hostages are characters in a really dramatic reality tv show that people are just bored of watching. And folks sit back and suggest that there should be limits to freedom -- or that equality is great, as long as it only applies to a finite and narrow set of "us." So I dare you. Flame me. Write your narrow-minded comments below. Tell me how world decay can only be solved by brute intolerance and the blind application of political systems on foreign cultures. Explain to me in your stilted arrogance everything you think you believe. I'll laugh. Then, I'll sigh. Then I'll feel sad that the world is slipping in the long, dark fundamentals of unpredictable anarchy.

It is that. And that is all.

September 24, 2004 after 11AM | opinions , politics , stress | maybe more»

There is humour in the city. Humour in the darkness and blindness of not knowing what lurks behind the colourful billboards and flashing light-matricies. And there is something behind the cracks, but we think we know what it is...

It seems like I sit and wonder about these things all the time. I'm trying to join the fractured elements of whatever I can grasp out of the air and construct it into a thing that I can see more clearly. I can see it now, but it is floating in the jetsom of my brain and I can't figure out how to clear away the mess and reach out to it.

I had an idea. Blogs. These things. They are literal self-expressions, of a sort. They exist because real people drain their minds to the digital places, sharing their every whim with the netwerk of electronic wanderers. It's this, I think, that makes these blogs universally popular and also universally hated. The arguement falls something along the line of artistic expression versus defining art: what constitutes the elements of free expression, but also becomes a useful addition to the pool of thought and idea that makes up the blogosphere? In other words, are the shared journals and ramblings of a thousand-million people the makings of something grander and bolder than humanity has ever created -- or the flotsom, garbage and cheap roadside junk-stands on the cliche'd metaphor of the digital highway?

And so what? It takes publishing to a quasi-grass roots level, letting folks like the reallivepreacher make the jump, bound across that threshold. People will read what they think is (a) important, (b) interesting, (c) valid, and (d) real.

Ah, but you say, people read fiction all the time. And people -- most normal, sane people -- don't think fiction is real, or are at least able to parse the absolute concrete from the absolute mind-vapor on a fairly consistent basis. So people don't care if something is REAL, right?

Perhaps: but I wouldn't read a news story that I knew was fabricated. As an example, supermarket tabloids, in my humble opinion, grasp at the absurd every day -- and people purchase them. Don't kid yourself. The publishers make a lot of money. But you need to remember: grasping at the distant truth is a more literal truth of such publications, and most folks will tell you: it's for entertainment. Rarely do people believe: and when they do, society goes to great lengths to discredit those people.

So -- back to the real.

Blogs are real: presumably, because real people write them. Real people, mostly, read them as well -- though that is an "audience factor", and I'm still building to that. But what if: what if you -- YOU -- came across a blog that was not real? What if you, wandering through the incoherent ramblings of a million digital journals, stumbled upon a glimpse into the life of a completely fictional person? Would you know?

I think it is a valid question. How would you know? Honestly, I don't think I could tell. I don't think I could differentiate between the incoherent ramblings of (for example) girl "A" who is a real live person, sitting in her quiet two-bedroom apartment, waxing-poetic to a keyboard and girl "B" who is actually a fourty-seven year old man, writing the fictional account of a person sitting in her quiet two-bedroom apartment, waxing-poetic to a keyboard. For example.

Just for example.

So what happens now?

We sit here and ponder the influence on internet culture through chat and instant messaging, through email and other forms of direct digital communication. Fraud and misrepresentation, we call it. It's harmful, misleading, and meant to cause harm and mis-direction to many impressionable minds. But what about the indirect communication? What about fiction? What about the idea that I could sit down, right at this very moment, and start writing as someone else, setting my words adrift in the digital ether, afloat in the tides of a vast sea of information: is that wrong? Is that mis-representation? Or merely fiction? And ultimately, with no other influence than the occasional passer-by believing the illusion, what harm have I acheived?

It's all hypothetical. But it would be an interesting experiment in a new kind of fiction: stories the audience doesn't even know they are reading...

The idea lingers. It's The Matrix. It is an illusion, just the control is different. Who creates the illusion? Who controls the illusion? Who controls the ideas and threads of human thought? And what really is the impact of fiction-unrecognized?

Which brings us back to blogs. These things. They are literal self-expressions, of a sort. They exist because real people drain their minds to the digital places, sharing their every whim with the netwerk of electronic wanderers. And do we continue to trust those people as real? And what kind of skill -- if any -- would it take to create the illusion of real that we continue to trust. I'm real. I assure you. If I were to make someone up, they might be a certain level more interesting than a mis-directed twenty-something lingering in a life where barbeques, ten-kilometer runs, and plastic aquariums seem to consume more of my time that anything. Or would I? You would wonder.

Though -- and I ask because I am truely considering the experimental, yet fraudulent existence of a blog-sprite -- could you find me if I was someone else?

September 23, 2004 after 9AM | city , meta , thinking , writing | maybe more»

I have four gmail invites left. If anyone cares. If anyone even knows what I'm talking about... I'm willing to share.

September 22, 2004 after 12PM | meta | maybe more»

... involved taking some brad-time to tune into the long-awaited internet broadcast of the teritiary phase of Douglas Adams’ The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy on the BBC4. Thirty minutes of completely unrelatable joy at thirty-two kilobits per second real audio... live... a new episode for the first time in twenty-five years: In which Arthur wakes up, Trillian opts out, and Marvin is stuck fast ...

I shiver. And then I return to the monotony of web design details for the remainder of the afternoon.

September 21, 2004 after 12PM | code , play | maybe more»

Typically I step back from the hypocritical whining of the Monday-Morning Distressor. Yes, mondays are painful, dragging oneself to work after a weekend of whateverness, but they are also repetitive, predictable, and inevitable. There is rarely ever cause to fluster one's emotions over the return of the work-week illusionstate.

But this was a weekend.

A real weekend. A painful weekend of late-dancing-or-driving-nights, ten-kilometer-early morning-runs, box-hauling afternoons, and long winded days of too much food that I wouldn't normally eat.

This morning I woke up at 4:30, walking to get a glass of water from the bathroom, crashing into doors in a combination of groggy-barely-awakeness and I-can-feel-every-muscle-in-my-body pain-ness. That's what the weekend did to me.

It's not that I'm out of shape. It's that these types of weekends are meant to be spread out over three or four. Saturday mornings are for visiting the pancake house for a stack of blueberry waffles, not moving six truckloads of moving boxes and dislodging someone's trailer hitch from where it detatched from the bulb and rammed through the torn metal of his tailgate. Sunday afternoon are for sitting in Starbucks with a coffee and the weekender section of the newspaper, not running through the rolling river-valley of Red Deer. Friday nights, are meant for parties, which is where we were, and that's okay, too.

It was all good. And every once in a while we need a weekend like that to remind us why we dislike Mondays, perhaps, occasionally: because we seem to be one step closer to the next painful weekend.

On a different note: Kudos out to Mom and Dad, and Aunt Laurie and Uncle Dale who all pledged us money for the run on Sunday. Our team raised a cool $300. And our event (the Red Deer Terry Fox Run) raised a whopping $23,000!

September 20, 2004 after 8AM | fitness , volunteer | maybe more»

Flow and gush. I don't know where in the lurkings of the city my plain-drain existenz has been drizzled. It seems to flood by, and then disappear.

Karin and I are doing this, this weeknd:

Let's work together to end cancer and keep Terry's dream alive. All money raised goes to cancer research; please support my participation by clicking on this link and donating: http://www.terryfoxrun.org/ENRunner/default.asp?s=1&RunnerID=11351

No obs, but ya'know. I feel it necessary to endorse and put the call out for the so-little I ask otherwise. My audience of you eight or so.

Otherwise, drizzle. We lurchingly find ourselves digging deeper and deeper. Rooting. Etching a place, where we think we might belong. Odd how that happens. And time passes, quick, slow, always.

I think I want to write more substance, but I don't know where to begin. Someone should suggest a topic, and we'll go from there. Hey, I haven't even been out with the digicam lately. What's with that? That's like words, except with color and shape and light extrapolated from photons and pixels. How the line blurs.

And other things. I'm sure this isn't the last.

September 15, 2004 after 11AM | fitness , volunteer | maybe more»

Because that's what number this is, and because that's approximately how many new pics I uploaded (give or take a dozen) to the gallery, randomly scattered, or even in THIS ONE.

Mentally, I'm strained. Pardon the edge.

September 7, 2004 after 10PM | photography | maybe more»

We found a little edge of peace in what we had been looking for. We drove in circles, examining, and parting the fringes of unfmailiar territory. I don't know where any of that will lead to, but it seems to be some kind of tough and binding fabric holding the raw planks of support in place. We etched our own place there, paused to take pictures, and then returned thinking of what could be, should be, or might actually occur in a rawly conceivable timeframe.

It holds, and becomes mystically cryptic in its essence.

I've grass. It's right there behind me, sprouting like a newly seeded lawn, which it could only ever be if someone made the leap from reality to fiction, or from imagined to concrete.

I've grass. Though often thought holds that if ever there was a tiny etch of life that should be somewhere grander than on the sill of my working mind, this should be one of those things.

I've grass. And trapped in the creamless delight and confines of some sort of mental atrocity, they sprout and being their drab life locked away from a truer calling, deeper and stronger.

One should never assume that there is a grander truth hidden behind a simpler one. It creates doubt, and lurking in the shadows of the city, a meaner and more coniving unreality is holding court to pounce when you stop looking at the fringes of what has absolute meaning, and what could simply be a fragmented trim around a glossy attraction. It requires focus, and too often we find ourselves shifting and loosing perception of a blurless mindscape.

I've grass, and the grass is peering out the window. It's looking for something. Longing, if grass could long.

There is an absolute honesty hidden in the fringes of something I can't yet see. I want to draw it, paint it, write the words that compose a million billion sihouettes of imagery and shadow that inscribe the series of life surrounding the complexity of its existence in nowhere. I long for something. I long for complexity in the rolling emergent elements of neural cells and quantum mental states. I long for, perhaps in some small way, understanding of something no one has satisfactorily explained. And in that, a grasp from the everyday trend of looking deeper and further into the trailing tails of those comet-like thoughts that bash through a vacuum and paralyze us with wonder. In that there is meticulous understanding of some sort. And perhaps peace. Or perhaps more frustration. Ah, well. It's all simply grass. Just grass.

September 7, 2004 after 9AM | life , thinking | maybe more»