Journal of Post-Ralphaelite Thought

 I just checked and the last time I updated this thing was in October 2017. Why was I gone so long? Call me lazy, or a coward, or just not willing to shout outrage into the shitstorm thunderstorm that America under our previous grifter-in-chief had become. A man could go permanently hoarse yelling that much. It was a mental health decision on my part, okay? But now I'm back. Things still suck a lot (<cough>Ted Cruz, Matt Gaetz, Mitch McConnell</cough>) but they don't suck as much as they did last year. Plus I retired from Sisyphean Corp last year after 20 years of whining and having a steady income, and God only knows there's nothing the Internet needs more than another old white guy with too much time on his hands pissing and moaning about what's wrong with the world on his blog. So don't expect much.  I've given up the world of IT and resumed my past life as a painter, which is fun. If you know anything about me In Real Life, you can probably find...

Now that 2011 has come and gone, I've decided to take some time before heading back to work to come up with some New Year's resolutions for 2012. I've never had much luck in the past with keeping resolutions, so my first resolution is to only resolve to do things that I stand half a chance of achieving. That being said... I resolve to lose 20 pounds by the end of the year. This sounds hard but isn't. What's hard is keeping it off. Amazon's MP3 store has a slew of weigh-loss auto-suggestion audio files which you listen to while going to sleep at night. I managed to lose about 10 pounds before the holidays doing this - time to get back on track. I resolve to paint more. I've got a MFA in painting, and these days I hardly ever pick up a brush. To go along with that... I resolve to clean out my studio and keep it clean . This means getting rid of a ridiculous amount of crap that currently live in my studio. The problem is that I'm a world class pack ...

We are defined by our habits and god knows I'm a creature of habit. There are certain websites I go to almost daily, for information and entertainment. In no particular order, here's my daily reading list. This will go a long way to explaining why I hold the peculiar opinions that I do. Slashdot.org   "News for Nerds, Stuff that Matters," is their tagline. Where else can you read about programming, intellectual property law, the latest video game or the politics of anti-terrorism?  The stories are good, but the reader comments are where the real fun is. Geek cred at Slashdot can in part be determined by how low your user ID is (indicating how long you've had an account): mine is in the low 70,000's; account numbers are now in the millions range. Comics Curmudgeon Every few days Josh Fruhlinger waxes eloquently about ... oh hell, he waxes snarkily , about the daily funny pages. He spares no one. His favorites are the "soap opera" strips like Mar...

I noticed my blog images have been busted today (I use Blogger). Apparently Google, who owns Blogger, is having issues with some or all of their images servers. This is intermittent: sometimes they'll be busted and sometimes not; no doubt this is because they are massively clustered. Blogger (in case you were not aware) uses Picasa Web Albums as their back-end image server, which means when you upload an image for Blogger, it's stored on a special Picasa Web Album associated with your blog. Update -- looks like their tech wizards have this fixed.

Now there's a new way to blog on the run. BlogPress Lite is a free iPhone app from InfoThinker, written with the support of the Blogger team at Google. It supports adding photos, with hooks into your Blogger Picasa account. The full version supports blogging platforms. Needless to say I'm writing this while lying in bed, since I'm not quite ready to get up.

Merry Christmas/Happy Hanukkah/Cozy Kwanzaa/Saturnalia/Solstice to all who put up with my nonsense and lunatic prattling. It's been an interesting year, eh? A holiday shout out to several of my blogging buddies, who, though I don't always agree with, have become good friends. This includes the Whited Sepulchre , TarrantLibertyGuy, Browncoat Libertarian and Stephen Smith . Proof you can disagree without being disagreeable. A special shout as well to my old friend Dan , who I've known since 5th grade and who writes much better than I and has led a much more interesting life as well.

Thanks to a recent post, I've stumbled on The Japing Ape . Human sexuality, in all its absurdity, seems to be the chief interest of Gorilla Bananas (the world's leading anthropological ape). No offense to others, but it is a welcome change to Libertarian politics. Mr. Bananas has a gift for the literary turn of phrase, which is both engaging and insightful. Funny stuff - in a twisted, slightly Stiff Upper Lip sort of way.

Okay, I've given in and switched from the old version of Blogger to the Beta version (which has been around for 6 months now), not that anyone out there actually reads this drivel, much less gives a shit about how I do it. However, since blogging software, in the broadest sense, overlaps somewhat with what I do for a living, I thought I'd comment on it, whether anyone cares or not. From a technical perspective, the biggest change is that the new Beta version is dynamically rendered from a database, where as the old (or as we like to say in the marketing world "classic") version rendered the pages as static files, written to a file system. There are advantages to doing it each way. Static (Classic Blogger) pages can be FTPed to another site, which was a feature touted by Blogger. These can be delivered from a simple web server, which can run on a lower powered box. They are also pretty much platform independent: your webserver can run on Windows, Unix, Mac OS, Solari...

Blogger has a "Mail to Blog" feature that allows you to email postings. Since I've decided it's a bad idea to post from my office (call me paranoid) this is a cool feature. In addition, one can (supposedly) post from cellphone, though I've not quite figured that out yet. This is my test post; if it works well, I may be posting more often. And since I can send email from my GMail account using my cell, that's another option, too. Now I have no excuse, other than my own laziness, for keeping this up-to-date.

I talk about Google a lot but they are one of the more interesting Internet companies around. Today's topic: Google Ads. I use Google ads because they're easy--just sign up and stick some JavaScript in your page code. Okay, I've never made a dime out of them and doubt I ever will (since there are about 3 people besides myself who read this blog). What they are good for is the comic relief of occasionally odd connections you will see with the content on the page. For a long time, all I ever saw on Google Ads was ads for blogging software or services. What a sad comment on my blog. Today, I notice the ads are for a grave/monument page on Yahoo. WTF??? Then I realize I have a story about my aunt's funeral and about singing the Verdi Requiem.