So…life's a real bitch, ain't it? Today, when I got off work, I went out to my car and hit the unlock button on the ol' keychain, just like I do every time I get into my car. Mark was riding with me, and he was a little slow opening the door, so he got it right when the car was relocking itself. Well, the alarm started going off. No problem. You just shut the door and hit the disarm/unlock button and the shit goes off, right? No harm, no foul, right?

Nope.

The fucking thing kept blaring. We both get in the car and I'm maniacally hitting the unlock button, trying to get the motherfucker to turn off. No such luck. Finally, it just…stops. Strange. So I go to start the car, and the fucking thing starts going off again. It won't even let me start the car. The ignition is locked the fuck out. Awesome. So I climb out, still pushing that button like a madman, and nothing is happening. So I do what any other sane person in my position would do.

I kicked a dent in the side of my car.

Oddly enough, this had no effect on the blaring car alarm. It would go off for about 30 seconds to a minute, then stop. As soon as you tried to open one of the doors again, it would start right the fuck back up. I walked to a pharmacy down the street and they miraculously had the right battery for the remote. So I bought the battery, replaced it, went back to my car…nothing.

I called St. Matthews Imports and they referred me to Swope. Swope then tells me it's real easy to fix.

"Just insert the key into the ignition and push and hold the security button on your stereo…"

This is when I interrupt him to let him know that I no longer have the factory stereo installed.

"Oh. Well. You'll have to get it here so we can have a technician take a look at it."

Brooksie came and picked me up, thank the fuck christ. We came home, I found my spare remote, made sure to put the new battery in it, then went down to try again. Still nothing. Fuck.

So…the car has gas, a charged battery, nothing wrong with it…and I have to get the motherfucker towed all the way out to Hurstbourne and then pay some dickhead to fix this shit for me.

I swear…I want to find the middle-management asshole that thought up this safety "feature" and smack him upside his damn head.

Irony? The car is officially paid off, as of today.

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- 07:23 pm:: im
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found this via the official unofficial Mudhoney fan site—a video wherein the boys of Mudhoney talk about how much they enjoyed their visit to my lovely louisville. <tear>

now, the really funny part of this story, and something I had previously decided *not* to post about after much debate, was the fact that, during the show and much to his embarrassment, Mark Arm gave a great shout out to the place and people of… lexington. it was a pretty funny incident that had him stumbling over himself trying to save face. perhaps it was the chorus of boos and surprised laughter that clued him in.

that's ok Mark, we love you too!

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as you may remember from waaaay back in 2005, i was attempting to participate—or procrastipating—in that year's NaNoWriMo, or National Novel Writing Month "competition." i managed to get a whole 1900 words or so written (out of 50k) before the month was up.

well, i'm back in the saddle, once again trying to make some progress with this thing. i haven't made a ton of progress in the "torrential flow of words" department, but i have managed to finish the first chapter and throw down a few notes about ideas and events in the novel.

and i also managed to finally, after three years, get a basic outline hashed out for the thing.

so, i'm not going to hit my goal (set at the beginning of this week) of an additional 3000 words by monday, but i have made some progress in other areas, so i'm pretty happy.

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so, i've had this problem for a while now… i say problem but really… i've had this annoyance for a while now. y'know how people ask if you have a website, or you sign up for thousands of profiles on thousands of different sites online and they all have a place for you to put your web address, right? well, me, being the guy i am, i pretty much always fill that bit in… and i pretty much always use bipolar. that's fine, but it's always kind of bothered me. i mean obviously i like brian and all, but it's always just seemed a little weird that my go-to site, my site that is kind of the champion of my online identity, is one that i share with another guy.

i think originally the idea was sparked in my head by the inimitable merlin mann with a 43folders.com post about personal status pages. then a couple months ago, my daily web travels brought me to something that got me thinking about it again, in a slightly different light. here're some links in roughly chronological order:

• my social map is totally decentralized…
• FriendFeed, The Centralized Me, and Data Portability
• (De-)centralised me
• I want my blog to be the aggregator

obviously, these guys are talking about something much bigger than a personal status page, tossing around words like ownership and portability. still, this fueled the fire, and got me working.

i think it was about two weeks later (which is like superman speed for me), i'd thrown together a design and finished the page—matthewrasnake.com.

this is a one-page site, which is basically just an overview of my entire web-world. a centralized me. all the data still lives on my various decentralized profiles, so this doesn't address—or even consider, really—data portability, but instead relies on RSS feeds and APIs from and through which i can gather together my various bits.

so, if you're looking for me online, or wondering what i've been up to, now there's a quick easy place to go. also, probably more importantly, now i have something to enter in all those form fields without feeling weird about it.

here's a couple other links that are related, but didn't really fit in with those above…

• The Aggregated Me
• Social Graph Central

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Hard to believe it's been well over a year since my last post here. In that last post, I promised I'd tell my brother's story when the time was right, but now I'm not convinced there ever will be a right time. I had hoped to get Javan to write something for me, but he got a surprise opportunity to sail the high seas as a midshipman on a british frigate before I could gently pester him. In lieu of that, I'll fall back to a message that he posted two days after the terrible attacks at Virginia Tech.

On 16 April 2007, Cadet Matthew Joseph La Porte was fatally wounded while actively resisting an armed attacker. In an act of total selflessness and extreme valor, Cadet La Porte threw himself in the line of fire between the gunman and several endangered civilians, and began to fight the attacker hand-to-hand before being mortally wounded by handgun fire. La Porte died a hero, and indeed, showed us all the true meaning of "deeds not words."

As many of you know, Matt was my best friend on this campus. I was lucky enough to spend many hours with him on his last full day on this earth, and both of his last two meals, the two of us had together. His last meal was Burger King, a whopper, king-size fry, and king-size cherry lime slushie. He was still hungry afterwards.

A year later, and the wounds are still fresh. I don't want to take this post too far, because ultimately it's my brother's loss to deal with in his own way, but I did want to take a moment to honor his friend. I'm sure Javan's had enough of public platitudes, but I would appreciate, if you think of him, to send some mental goodwill his way.

Matt La Porte bio at New York Times.

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i'm not quite ready to talk about the recent tragic events at Tech, where my brother attends college. his story will keep, until i have more time to tell it appropriately.

as occasionally happens, i have been quiet on bipolar, but working busily behind the scenes. in fact, i have gone a little plugin crazy. last week i added the gregarious plugin, which gives us digg buttons on posts that have been dugg, and a "share this" link which now lives at the bottom of each post, and is great on the off chance you might want to bookmark or share us on one of several social link-sharing services. the "share this" page also gives you the opportunity to email a link to a particular post directly to a friend, directly from the page. part of the impetus for this addition was brian's recent lamentation on our lack of social penetration (yeah, knock it off) and his self-referential digging. plus, i have a few major posts in the works that i think might be suited to a digg-type feeding frenzy. we'll see.

with this addition i've also reformatted the post-ending link bonanza just a bit, i think making things a bit nicer. gone is the abbreviated "pl," in favor of the slightly less obfuscated "permalink."

the other obvious thing you might notice, looking down there, is a new starred rating thingy, again for individual posts. apparently, this plugin only allows you to vote once, and doesn't allow yout to change that vote once it's cast. i may have to do something about that, but i'll let it stand for now.

one less obvious addition is a "subcribe to comments" plugin, which allows you to indicate whether you want, when you comment on a post, to have subsequent comments sent to you via email. there's also a subscription management feature, so you can come in and remove yourself from subscribed posts if you like.

a very obscure (to you the viewer, anyway) plugin is one which checks for incoming links to a post (from offsite), and registers any that are found as "pingbacks" without the offsite poster having to actually initiate a formal pingback. if you understand what that means, congratulations, you're an official blog geek.

behind the scenes, i've also added a plugin that counts post views, mainly for the benefit of the last recently added plugin… a bipolar stats page. The plugin lists on that page many various stats from the blog, including the new post ratings and post views. One really fun feature (i thought, anyway) is the ability to see the nicks off all previous commenters, and the ability to go to a page listing all their comments. being that we allow "anonymous" comments (i.e. you don't have to register), many people have visited and used different nicks, so the list is rather longer than the actual number of individuals who've commented.

i still have a short list of plugins left to test and install, but i thought these were the most immediately useful ones.

here's what i've installed:

• gregarious
• kramer
• subscribe to comments
• wp-postratings
• wp-postviews
• wp-stats

here's what i'm still considering:

• im online
• lightbox 2 wordpress
• in series
• google sitemap generator
• next of kin

so digg, email, subscribe, rate, view, and link away.

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a cow-orker was asking about Sonic Youth today, specifically for a "best of" type of list. i responded with a limited list and the stipulation that i never feel comfortable picking favorites. i figured, with my resurgence on ye olde bipolar, it might be an interesting thing to pass along.

the following list is primarily made up of my highest rated SY tracks in iTunes, though i haven't rated every track that's in my library, so i don't claim it to be a complete list. i did cherry pick a couple of tracks from among the currently unrated ones, to fill out the list.

Washing Machine

Skip Tracer

No Queen Blues

Becuz

Confusion is Sex

Inhuman

Confusion is Next

A Thousand Leaves

Hoarfrost

Hits of Sunshine

Sunday

Bad Moon Rising

Death Valley '69

Flower

Murray Street

Disconnection Notice

NYC Ghosts & Flowers

NYC Ghosts & Flowers

Dirty

Hendrix Necro

so, if you've never heard of 'em, or you just haven't made up your mind about 'em yet, i'd say these are a really great starting point.

Technorati Tags: Sonic Youth, music, lists

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don't have a lot to talk about today, so it seems like a great time to work in a mention of the puffin's latest blogging co-venture (now with his lovely wife, Allison), wherein he waxes poetic about the latest inspiring (and uninspiring) works in the comic book industry, she waxes poetic about high-falutin' sciency stuff, and they both entreat you with their occasional musings on the music scene and their own interesting undertakings.

appropriately enough, they've called it nerd [heart] geek.

oh, and in other news, i've just switched over from bloglines to our benevolent information overlords' "Reader" thingy. thanks to a conversation i was having with neil this afternoon where i was telling him about the two online feed readers, and where i convinced myself to go ahead and make the google plunge.

like my buddy Charlie has said… i wouldn't bow to our great and glorious overlords, except that they make such darned useful, usable stuff!

Technorati Tags: comics, comic books, puffin, rss, aggregator, friends

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so yeah, work has been a might annoying the last week or so. i really enjoy being a web developer, aside from the occasional annoyances, mainly having to do with browser compatibility issues and occasionally poor support of web standards. i enjoy the problem solving, and making pretty, functional things. i've realized that i really don't enjoy doing diagrams, documentation, proposals and estimates. i suppose it won't be quite as bad once i have a clue as to what i'm doing, but it's just terribly annoying to have to do things, and finish them on some kind of deadline, when you don't really understand what it is you're supposed to be delivering.

probably the most annoying part of the job is the way there tend to be dry spells in work, followed by a few weeks where every day is full and the deadline for every project practically overlaps. and then there's the equipment malfunctioning and behaving improperly. gah.

well, anyway, i'm just frustrated after a long, trying couple of weeks. good thing is, we're closed for Good Friday, and i could really use the long weekend.

Technorati Tags: work, deadline, developer, browser, problem, compatibility

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the coming of the spring means the growing of the grass means the breaking of the backs in physical labor. ugh. each time i have to mow the grass, i think loudly to myself "man, i should've sprung for the self-propelled mower, it'd've been worth the extra $75 bucks or so." i'm not one for regret, but i do occasionally have to kick myself in the ass for things.

so, this season i figured I really needed to do the whole "tune-up" thing with the lawnmower, so i was going to take it to mowermd near where i work, for a nominal (I thought) fee of about $50. drop it off, pick it up, no muss, no fuss. well, i put it off (actually i got so busy at work i never had time to set up a drop-off time) until we just had to mow the grass this weekend.

we found out from sara's brother-in-law that he just takes his blade to fern creek hardware and has it sharpened. so, we made our trip out there, and that and the new spark plug cost less than $10. we got a funnel and an empty milk jug to drain last year's oil, and i pretty much had the entire tune-up done for less than $15 and 45 minutes work. felt pretty good to accomplish that, i have to say.

in linux news, i've installed a mess of software via the package manager, some of which i've been looking for on the mac and pc for a goodly portion of time. life with linux is looking up! oh, and i cleared up the screen resolution thing pretty easily (though required a couple reboots), and then killed the network by switching to static local IP address instead of dynamic. well, that's fixed now too, so we're looking good. still have to get an FTP client working (i'm not sado-masochistic enough to be willing to learn command-line FTP). hell, that's why xerox invented windows.

also, happy birthday to my sis!

Technorati Tags: linux, spring, yardwork, mower, FTP, manual labor

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i have stripped the new laptop of the shackles of oppression, by installing the new ubuntu 7.04 beta release. thus far, the beta is performing admirably, though we did have to undo the stupid Firefox "use Linux backspace convention" (i.e. an intentionally added firefox bug where backspace does not equal browser "back" button) breakage. i haven't yet attempted a SMB connection to my desktop windows shares, and i haven't done much beyond launching open office and surfing the web. the only serious OS/driver problem i've run into is that it refuses to drive the laptop display at its native resolution (1280 x 800). there seems to be some chatter on some forums about ways to fix this, so hopefully i'll get this addressed in the near future.

bottom line is that i am now officially a linux geek—my primary machine at home is exclusively running linux… at least until i can get a chance to figure out how to install Mac OSX on there…

Technorati Tags: oppression, ubuntu, beta, firefox, linux, laptop

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