Mike Wilson

So, with Teri’s book release the other day I’ve started noticing tendrils of my relatively recent past snaking around looking for connections. It’s tough to describe what that means.

But today I reconnected, via facebook, with one of the core crowd from Social Circles back in the early 2ks.  He was one of the good guys and sorta dropped off the face of the earth for a bit.

As I did.

But I did it for a bit of a different reason (not knowing what his was I know only that it wasn’t mine.)

I left largely because I had spent a lot of time conducting myself pretty badly and I needed to get away from the constant reminders of it.  The particulars are unimportant here and will almost certainly be addressed some place where I can actually give them some air.

So now the “recommended friends” list on facebook is starting to populate with familiar faces and names.  Some of them it’s nice to see are newly hyphenated.

But it’ll start happening over the next few days.  I can feel the gravity well starting to cause me to list off to one side.

Just you wait ‘enry ‘iggins.

Just you wait.

Just got into a couple parallel discussions on Twitter with Windows haters. The length people will go to in order to hate Microsoft is really quite impressive. I mentioned something about not switching to something else because of gaming and I was POUNCED upon. It was really really funny.

I am certainly NOT in the Gates fan club. But to trash what is almost certainly the most widely spread piece of software in the world because you’re a hipster jackass is really just humorous.

Let me be clear though. It’s a desktop operating system. It’s not up to the stability requirements of being a server OS, much less a “high availability” server system.

My primary box is a 2 year old gaming rig with a new vid card (I chronicled that escapade a couple weeks ago.) It handles everything I throw at it and does so with remarkable aplomb. I don’t get blue screens, it doesn’t spontaneously reboot. I don’t get bizarre crashing. It runs smoothly.

Every desktop OS has it’s annoyances.

When you get religious about it, you just sound like an asshole.

So apparently it’s entirely insufficient to buy the Gatorade for helping alleviate a hangover the next day.

Turns out you have to remember to drink it.

meh.

Retarded and awesome.

I can’t tell if it’s supposed to be a joke or just is one.

But I can’t. stop. watching.

Love it.

UPDATE: Ok, swapped out that vid for one that allows embedding.

Ya know what’s funny about this? It’s actually better than most of the serious hip hop produced in the last 15 years.

Happens all the time. I think I’ve figured it out again. I post simple nonsense and bullshit for a while then ebb towards longer pieces. That gets my mind to the process of composing large essays and “really just doing it right dammit.” (Drives me batshit that dammit is spelled dammit and not damnit, which strikes me as more etymologically correct.)

Of course the paralysis of that ensues prevents me from posting anything.

Then I, in essence, lay down until the feeling goes away and I start posting lolcats again.

ad infinitum.

“Hi Eugene, so how’s your comfort level with C++?”
“Eugene?”
“This isn’t… please hold…”
… 90 seconds …
“Hi, sorry about that Paul. So how’s your…”
“I’m Michael. Goodbye.”
“Wai..”

*click*

*twitch*

So what the hell has happened to all the leatherman tools I would otherwise be able to say I’ve “accumulated” over the years?

I don’t carry them around the world for use in diving expeditions in the arctic circle. I don’t use them “on the job” and I don’t loan them out. I use them to get thumb drive out of those unforgivably stout plastic packages.

Given that I’ve had nearly a dozen of these things in the last few years, it stands to reason that there should be at least a couple… I don’t know… around.

I love those damn things. They’re the perfect everything. The big ones, the small ones. They’re the gadget that delivers on the Swiss Army Knife promise of having everything you could possibly need in a tool, while actually being a tool rather than a red sheathed curiosity.

Nowhere. I haven’t seen one in two years.

During the slow steady excavation of my apartment I’ve uncovered some really odd stuff, a shoebox full of floppys. Yes, 5.25″ discs. SOME of them even have a round little divot taken out of the other side so I could write to it on the old Franklin Ace 1000. Stuff like that.

But no leatherman tools.

Harrumpf.

60 years old. Truer today than it was then.

Well, the job recs anyway.

Go to indeed.com which aggregates a rather distressing number of the job sites out there.

Enter your search criteria and hit search. Then click on “RSS Feed” up there and subscribe to the resulting feed in your feed reader of choice.

Tada!

Repeat as necessary.

Then use your time and energy doing stuff that bears fruit rather than typing the same fucking search criteria in to 15 separate sites every morning for an hour, only to see the same jobs again and again.

(Yeah, yeah, I suppose you could click on “save as email alert” instead. But… why? I’d rather NOT have another login/registration process, thank youverymuch.

Yesterday I caught myself compensating for ADDness in a fairly odd way. Of course, once I did I threw myself totally off kilter for about four hours. But hey, that’s how it goes.

The hunt has me in a blind panic, and as any ADDer who’s been told “don’t get up from that chair until you finish your homework” can tell you, there’s NO worse thing for productivity than deadline panic. What starts as a simple out of phase harmonic disturbance in your head turns into a thunderous cacophony of pressures, voices, and raw stress.

Fun! (for values of “fun” approximating “holy shit I’m gonna die in 3…2…”)

I realized all of a sudden (and it’s strange to say it that way) that I was washing a pan, putting a pair of jeans in the laundry bag, writing an email, emptying a garbage pail into a bag (can’t get the bags to stay on) then washing a dish, checking dice.com, picking up a few socks and putting them in the laundry basket, looking for my MS Office dvds and organizing a bookshelf for a couple minutes, checking monster.com, washing another dish, responding to two job recs I’d saved on dice, wrote some ftp client code, moved a couple unused books to a shelf farther away, then brought a couple poignant ones closer to the computers, where I checked craig’s list (which is unadulterated ASS btw. Please address all complaints to this brick wall next to me. Craig’s list is the ghetto of the internet), etc, etc.

I was cruising like that for about two hours. Sure, I was sufficiently caffeinated (which I’ve noticed is getting tougher and tougher to do.)

So yeah, it turns out that if multiple, entirely disparate projects are fragmented into sufficiently small chunks, I can be relatively productive by rotating around the task list (in a random order, otherwise I get locked up again.)

Of course some things actually require blocks of attention (any reasonable coding task) but that’s ok, those require attention because they’re WORTH the attention.

So… yeah. Fun.

UPDATE: Just realized that I should probably write more about that, but there was a dish to wash.

It would pay, I think, to organize my giant hybrid ToDoList from hell that way. Colorize projects or something so that I could pick the next task off of any of N individual project lists. To have tripped over this accidentally is relatively important. Of course, if I push it too hard I’ll get that whole Gurdgeiff springback thing. (oh, go look it up on here someplace. I’m too lazy to find the link.)

More as I think of it, or maybe a bit after.

hmmpf. wtf is that sock doing THERE?

Posting works, ftp upload works.

two great tastes that taste great together.

More tomorrow.

Promised myself I’d do something uncharacteristically sensible and go to bed before midnight tonight.

nn o/

I need that opening clip of Samir in Office Space, screaming at his steering wheel having what anyone who has ever sat in traffic knows is a perfectly fucking reasonable temper tantrum.

I’ve just spent the better part of 2 hours banging my head against a desk and playing indiscretely with large sharp objects while trying to get xmlrpc to hit this site.

I’ve done a lot of xmlrpc programming. I know it’s not magic. Google docs works beautifully.

The python code is dead simple. Set about four fields and flip the switch.

I was getting 301s. Of all fucking errors, 301s. “moved permanently.” Checked the logs, nothing.

While LOOKING at the logs, I said “ooh, someone’s banging on my site, can’t have that.” So I blocked the ip address from getting here.

Well…

GUESS WHOSE FUCKING IP ADDRESS I BLOCKED!

That’s right, Freak Boy Wonder managed to lock himself out of his own site. That’s some fine police work there Lou.

I was able to log into the wifi network of an unsuspecting neighbor and fix that particular stroke of brilliance.

I spent 45 minutes following threads of php code through the server side interface (which supports Blogger, metaWeblog, Movable Type, and everyotherdamnthing.)

Pulled down the wordpresslib library, thinking that might exist because of some bizarre peculiarity in the wp host code.

Same thing.

*twitch*

Then I had that moment, that one thought that I can almost rely on when things have gone from black to darker.

“Wouldn’t it be stupid if I needed a trailing forward slash on the filename?”

Now, a file path (on a real OS or online) is “blahblah.com/directory/directory/directory/file” The existence of a “/” means that the preceding is a path. If you’re specifying a file, you don’t need one on the end.

*sigh*

UnLESS you’re calling an xmlrpc server (in wordpress only?)

So yes. It’s all fixeded now.

But I don’t feel any better.

Now on to the FTP code.

Testing automated posting script, phase one (neat stuff coming if you can see this.)

What about THIS!?!

Been trying to get xmlrpc to work on this site.  notsogood.  This is coming from google docs, just in case something’s REALLY wonky with my python install

A double of cask strength Talisker (107.8 proof), on the rocks with a Montecristo white label.

I could get used to this whole “being an adult” shit.

Now I just need a hat.

It’s 3:00 am, so I’ll keep this short and sweet.

Tonight I smoked (and quite enjoyed) my first cigar ever.

I also drank a couple glasses of cognac of such a rarity that it can no longer be purchased… anywhere … by anyone.

I did this while sitting on my father’s screened in front porch, rain in the background, having the best conversation I’ve ever had with him.

Ever.

At one point I looked back and forth between the cigar and the congac a couple times and smiling, I said “my god, this is a civilized motherfucking experience.”

To which he replied (with a slight chuckle and grin only he can manage.)

“No shit.”

I realized also that any little aptitude I have at telling a story comes from his enthralling monologues.

I was just about to press the button on a zippered Franklin Covey “Day Timer” classic size (8.5″x5.5″) with 2 page per day pages.

at about $90. (Cheaper than daytimer.com I noticed!)

Fortunately I stopped just short of pressing the button when I realized that in no currently addressable universe do I have $90 to spend on a fucking planner.

So I’ve been trying to hit OpenOffice with a wrench to make it print something like that. Well… something exactly like that.

Like this:

I can print the thing landscape then slice it. Once done, I can use my trusty levenger’s circa paper punch to punch holes in the thing then bind it. All that post-processing is easy.

But making something that prints that?

Help

Via a buddy on twitter:

I need to get an electronic copy of Alinsky’s Rules For Radicals.

Lemme know if you have any ideas.

Google, Torrent, etc. All a bust so far.