alright, i've been reading erasing.org for several months now, on a mostly daily basis, and i just now clicked the Sadness link. such a simple concept, replacing words in corporate slogans with the word sadness. simple, profound (in spots), and so much the story of my life (at times).

so, i got an email from since he's been reading, he's not really finding anything out about my life, but about the other useless crap i've felt compelled to fill these pages with for the past few posts.

i figured he would have liked the "holy grail" post, but then he's heard about her enough times, it's old news to him. i figured he would have liked my "year in review" post since i provided a brief roadmap to some of the more important points of my life that have occurred since the inception of this blog.

but he's right. with the exception of the "holy grail" post, everything else has pretty much just been filler.

so, i've been busy at work, at least until a week ago, when the frantic activity suddenly came to a grinding halt due to the fact that no one could seem to get me the remaining three pieces of content that i needed to complete the new corvus site (on which, btw, are welcome).

in my home life, i've been busy cataloging my comics, now that brian and i are helping beta-test OmniComics and catching up on email. i've now got five emails in my inbox at home, compared to the 25 that were sitting in there for a few weeks. i've been trying to refine my focus a little, concentrate on certain projects, see them through to completion… y'know, the way it should be done. like the puffin i tend to get 15 or 20 projects going at the same time, and just never finish them. when i think about all the things i've got "waiting in the wings" i just feel kind of hopeless and lost. so, it's been good to finish the email project, to be near completion on the comics project, (and yes, i'm still working on the bipolar redesign project, which is… uhm… kinda close).

overall, i can't say i'm really happy, but i'm not really depressed either. i'm just kind of… here. and i don't know, maybe that's even worse than the other two.

ah, don't worry 'bout li'l ol' me though, i'll be fine.

i wrote a long ass post yesterday, but blogger ate it. i guess they were still working on the new server and i was one of the lucky ones it burped on.

then, i was going to rewrite a brief version of the update today, but (surprise, surprise) i got caught up in doing a temporary redesign (the one between this and the permanent redesign) today while i was busy doing nothing else at work.

so this little post is filler. filler and crap. but now you know that a bipolar redesign is actually in progress, so if it's not up by the end of next week, you can all and give me shit for it.

and tomorrow, i'll try to rewrite yesterday's post. believe me, it's not time sensitive shit i'm talking about here.

g'night all.

yet again, i've let more than a week slip by without a post. i think i've been too grouchy lately for the people i hang out with to chastise me for it too harshly. up til today, i've had my head either buried in work, been playing "timsplitters", entering my comic book collection into my recently restored OmniComics database, or trying to re-start the reorganization of my personal life (ie. cleaning the hell out of my room).

i did get one email from nathan demanding that i update soon, since he finally went to the trouble of adding me to his AvantGo client on his Visor handheld. (hi nate)

which reminds me, a while back, we added some code to our pages to make them "AvantGo friendly." if you use AvantGo, and you'd (for some reason) like to be able to read us on your handheld, just use the following links:

for brian's blog, use /bipolar/blog.html
for my blog, use /bipolar/mlog.html
(just a note, if you try to load these links in anything other than AvantGo, you'll be redirected to our frameset, so you can see bipolar in all it's black skull-festooned glory.)
if users of any other handheld browser software want this ability or are having trouble getting the pages to load, just send me a note, and i'll see if i can make it work.

hrm. well, i just attempted to create an AvantGo "channel" for us here, but it would seem that if we get more than 5,000 subscribers, we'll have to pay $5,000. not that this is ever going to happen, but i don't want to open a $5,000 can of worms, no matter what the odds.
so, while we're not an official channel, you can still download us to your heart's content just by adding us to your download (or channel) list.

in other news, after three weeks of torturous work, i've been sitting on my ass here at work ALL DAY waiting for three paragraphs of content and some revised images for the project i've been working on. it's bad enough we had to push back the original deadline a week, but now we're so close and i've not been able to do a damned thing because i'm waiting for content. grrr. but, hopefully we'll have the new site up in the next day or so and i'll put in a link so you can see what i've been working on so diligently (before today, anyway).

in other other news,
this Salon article brings the whole technical virgin thing into better focus. it's now been upgraded (in my opinion) from the status of "funny joke site" into the realm of "pointed social satire." i never thought people could actually be crazy enough to believe that only "traditional sex" is "real" sex. apparently i was wrong.

4:32 still waiting for content.

i'm generally not a violent person, but every once in a while, if the wind is right and the planets are aligned, certain people–just by their being within my sphere of perception–cause me to imagine bashing their head forcefully & repeatedly against the metal corners of my cubicle until their blood stains the fabric walls and bits of bone and brain collect on the floor at my feet.

mind you, this doesn't happen very often.

i came across a link today that reminded me quite a bit of brian, & some of the online shenanigans i've participated in or been privy to. shauna of flaunt.net (along with a friend) has recently created whowouldbuythat.com which is dedicated to uncovering the strangest of online auctions.

in other news, i spent a few minutes last night (or hours, really) helping paul with the puffin-a-go-go. he's added a few links to his "go-go-to" section, and I managed to get his archives up and running, so all you puffin readers run over there and check up on any posts you might have missed.

well, i suppose since i'm here at work, i should probably do some.

it would appear that we've achieved a paltry 69% rating on bloghop.com. all you regulars do us a favor and:

Rate Us on BlogHop.com!
      help?

c'mon now, be honest. you love us, don't you.

we observed World AIDS Day yesterday by joining many of our weblogging brothers and sisters in the Day Without Weblogs campaign. i've personally been blessed with not having to endure the loss of a friend or loved one. i was touched by the number of personal stories i found when checking the sites i read on a daily basis. i look forward to going back and reading them more closely over the weekend.

i spent the past several days tinkering with some leftover computer hardware from work, and have finally cobbled together a useable system. the most amazing thing is, i've even managed to get the DSL modem installed and working. hopefully in the next few days i'll be able to extend the scope of this high speed mutha all over the house. we're going for a full-on internet-connected home network.

so, since i've got this blazin internet connection, a snappy new (to me, anyway) computer, and i'm still up at 7:00am, i figured i throw a quick post up.

managed to get brian to the airport in time not only to catch his flight, but to sit, have a brew, and attempt to calm his pre-virgin-flight nerves. haven't heard from him yet, so i'm hoping he's alright. i'm sure nanette's taking great care of him.
      as much as i'll miss his crazy antics while he's gone, it'll be nice to have my room to myself again for a few days.

it was nice this evening to get to see the puffin, who i haven't seen since saturday or sunday… tonight we mourned the loss of dedden's very uncomfortably over beers at a place called "the back door" which, while having an amazing assortment of frat boys, sorority girls, hippies, and old people, didn't really seem to have many of our type of people. in fact, i think it was pretty much just us.

well, gotta get back to phase two of this high-speed internet plan–installing a network card and making all our computers communicate and cooperate.

that's 1, brian.

[ i've just realized that that paragraph about dedden's and the puffin is a horribly executed run on sentence, but you know, so what. ]

well, i'm at home now. thankfully i had enough foresight to find out the 800 number for my ISP before leaving the 'ville, so i can post for all you lovely people to read.

enjoyed the ride down immensely, what with the new MP3 CD player I got and all. it's a little quirky, but it does well enough i suppose. earlier today i scoured through my mp3s on my computer at work and pulled out just enough to fill a cd, which i think came out to about 165 songs. slammed them all into the root directory of the disk, deleted the track numbers from their filenames, and pretty much wrote them to the cd in alphabetical order. the funny part was that, with the player set on random, the first hour was pretty much Billy Idol, Liz Phair, Chris Isaac, Beastie Boys, NIN, & Bloodloss, then when i see the first signs for Princeton, it suddenly becomes Kid A time. three songs from Kid A–almost consecutively–played me in on the last leg from the parkway to my parent's house. i was excited and amused by how appropriately the mood was set. another funny observation i made was that, despite the number of Mudhoney tracks on the disc, i don't recall any getting played. apparently hour four would have been Mudhoney hour if the trip had lasted that long.

walked into the house, gave my mom and my little bro a hug, then pretty much just submitted myself to my brother's always animated discussions. i see a lot of myself in him, and then there are other things that he's not managed to avoid like i did when i was his age. i walk back into his bedroom (which used to be mine, ages ago.) and hear Hank Williams, Jr. playing on his stereo. i informed him that i was going to take him to Wal-Mart (the only thing that passes for a record store in these parts–that i'm aware of) and buy him a cd or two. i've decided that Kid A is at the top of my list. (paul will love to hear this.)

after somewhat settling in, we set up the laptop, logged on, chatted with brian (& paul, very briefly) for a bit, started doing some remote setup of the new x:13 server (soon, soon), and had what was basically a warm-up round of political discussions with my little bro… a mini version of the large discussion/argument i'm likely to have with my father tomorrow night after all the guests leave. thankfully, my brother's only 13, and still has quite a few years to figure things out.

happy smallpox and genocide day to all you turkey (& mock turkey) eaters out there.

g'night.

i think i may have a new monkeywrench convert on my hands. brian really seemed to enjoy the show as much as i did.

for those of you who don't know, the monkeywrench fucking rock. that's all there is to it. i was concerned since i thought the latest monkeywrench album Electric Children didn't rock quite as hard as Clean as a Broke Dick Dog… boy was i wrong. they brought so much out of those songs it was just amazing.

we had a great time earlier (before the show) hanging out with nanette who showed us around chicago a bit before we had to go to the show. looking forward to spending some more time with her tomorrow seeing sights and hopefully doing some (cheap) fun stuff. it really sucks that i had to spend all my money on my car, but, i suppose if i hadn't, we might not be here right now. luckily brian's got a buck or two, so we should be alright. if our luck holds out (it's been pretty good so far this trip) we'll have a place to stay tomorrow night that doesn't require money–if nanette can swing it for us. right now, my primary concern is finding our way out of chicago, to a hotel, and getting some damn sleep. i was so tired & hungry before we had dinner with nanette that i was starting to get dizzy. that doesn't happen too often.

there'll be more to write about, we're attempting to keep a trip log of some sort, so we'll probably have a lengthy update when we get back home.

gah. gotta get outta here. need sleep.

(ie. a quick update to yesterday's update for people who actually may, for some reason, care)

after setting up the permalinks (the little "PL"s you see at the bottom of every post) last night, i realized that it was going to horribly horribly break all the fancy-shmancy JavaScripts I'd written to protect the integrity of bipolar's frames. after quite a bit of frustration and discovery, i think i've finally gotten the problems licked, and made a few improvements to the original scripts in the process. so, permalink away!

in the event that anyone is not familiar with weblogs in general, or blogger blogs specifically, basically the permalinks provide you with a direct link (including an internal anchor tag) to a post in the blog's archives. this way, you can reference a specific post, and not worry about it getting bumped off the front page and yada yada yada.

if anyone has questions about how, what, or why I've done certain things certain ways, i'd be more than happy to discuss it with you. if anybody wants to see the javascript code (which i've moved out into include files) just email me (click the "m@" at the end of any post).

well, thought I'd do a quick little update before I leave work. one thing of note is that I've added permalinks (at the end of each post, use the "PL" links to link to individual posts) not that I can really imagine that anyone will ever need or want to do this. I'll have to add it to brian's blog tonight, if he wants it.

yesterday was comics & denny's day, and after doing that thing, Paul and I went over to his house to watch Star Trek: Voyager (which I'm completely out of the loop on, not having seen an episode in something like two years now.) It was a fun little episode, lots of Seven of Nine, which always makes Voyager worth watching.

I've had jack to do today, sat around in my new cube most of the day just surfing the web, found some weird stuff, but nothing really cool enough to write about. checked out some other blogs, saturn.org, powazek.com, and some others I didn't pay as much attention to. I pretty much clicked almost every link on saturn.org, there's some interesting stuff there.

I had an idea that I was going to finish what I started talking about in yesterday's post, but I don't think I can.

I keep wondering why I'm doing this. right now I guess I'm doubting my reasons for keeping this up, and wondering what the ultimate purpose is. I'd like to think that I do it to give myself a forum, somewhere to work out the things in my head, since I can't seem to find time (or enough inspiration) to do my other creative writing stuff anymore. i'd like to think I do it to communicate things to those people I should talk to everyday but can't, i'd like to think i'm doing it for something other than my ego, vanity, and desire for recognition.

hopefully I'll feel better about this whole thing tomorrow.