there's something about the woods in winter. i'm not really sure exactly what it is that i like so much about them. i mean, i love the woods in summer too, the full trees, the waving green leaves, the birdsong filling the air, the feeling of closeness and solitude–connection with nature. but in the winter. hmmm. the cool air. the open sky. the trees bare, revealing their underlying structure. the silence of the woods, broken only by the occasional chatter of the last squirrels hoarding for the winter, the seemingly distant calls of the few birds that tough out the cold months, the crunch of dry leaves under your feet.

during the spring and summer months, i never really think about camping all that much, but as soon as fall and winter roll around, especially winter, i really get the urge to just run off into the woods and stay there for days. i would love to just take a weekend, hike deep into the woods away from civilization, spend my days wandering around, reading a book by a stream somewhere, writing whatever thoughts enter my head, building a fire and cooking up big pots of beef stew and strong coffee, staring up at the clear night sky counting the stars, watching the smoke and embers rise and disappear while one side of my body freezes and the other cooks. i wanna wake up and see the morning fog drifting through the trees as the birds sing to me.

the only thing i can imagine that would be better than this, would be having someone there to share it with. someone to sit close to, more to be near each other than to share warmth. someone to point out the little things that give me wonder, someone with whom to share my joy.

wow. it's amazing how much can happen in one day. basically, Friday evening was insane. i went to bed that night, wondering how in the hell i was going to fit the entirety of the worthy events into a single update. i kind of figured i'd have to space it out over the course of several. lucky for you i have a bad memory, and time has a way of dulling things down.

Paul and i spent the majority of the night (after my third night in a row of drinking) "thinking outside the box". at this point i can't remember how many different subjects we covered, but i know technology, philosophy, politics, sociology, and religion were all dealt with. I'll challenge you all with the question he presented to my drunk ass on my back porch after finally getting home from the bar (he has a singular knack for timing these things).

if you want to participate, with the answer to the following question:
Suppose, on halloween, you meet someone dressed in a slightly ratty suit, with a flat black-haired head, greenish face paint, and two metal "connectors" sticking out of either side of his neck. Who is he dressed as?

i'll post the results (and the answer i'm looking for) by the end of the week. i'll give ya till next Monday.

this particular question, i believe is what sparked our entire conversation that night. we talked about semantics, trademarks and abuse of same, and the general stupidity or laziness of the majority of the nation. at least this time, i didn't get the feeling the apocalypse was nearing.

by the time Paul & I finished talking, it was already almost 7 in the morning, and i had to get some sleep before going into work on a damned Saturday. no sooner had i fallen into the very edges of sleep, than i was shocked awake by the very loud sound of a transformer blowing up 20 feet from my window and all the various lights and contstant household sounds going dark and silent. i groaningly pulled myself out of my comfortable bed, hoping my house was not being utterly consumed by fire, because a fire would certainly prevent me from getting to sleep anytime soon, and would be a major hassle. once i realized the house was relatively safe from immediate destruction (barring, of course, attack by terrorists or space aliens) i went to the kitchen and called the electric company's automated "our service sucks" hotline and reported the trouble. Jess & I sat up chatting for a little while, and at one point, she suggested (as many many people have) that I should go back to college and get my degree. i thought about it for a minute before coming to a conclusion.

the only major that i could conceivably see myself taking would be something along the lines of "Theoretical Realism." I think it would be kind of neat to be a degreed theoretical realist. I could tell people with authority when they were living in a fantasy world, or i could come up with various theories attempting to explain what exactly reality is, and why it sucks so much.

then i thought of an even better degree program, which i would just have to follow all the way to the doctorate level. I mean, wouldn't you like to be referred to as a "Doctor of Omniscience"… ? you know, you'd start out with your bachelors in omniscient studies, move up to masters, then get the PhD. sounds fun.

well. i guess that's it. i'm drained for now. i'm not omniscient yet.

well, it's official. SyncIt is one of the best tools i've downloaded in quite some time. it's almost totally unobtrusive, (all you have to ever deal with, directly–after setup anyway–is the little system tray icon…), and it works like a charm. imagine my surprise when I opened up Netscape today and actually checked my bookmarks, and found that they'd also been whipped into shape by SyncIt! I haven't used netscape's bookmarks in ages, not since I (ugh. groan.) started using IE on a regular basis. And, not really having read the instructions to the program that much at all, i'd just assumed it was going to work its magic only on IE… silly me.

so anyway. it's pretty damn cool.

**update 12/17/2004** it's also pretty much defunct. see bookmarksync on sourceforge

god this week has been rough. i haven't really felt awake almost the entire time. i'm not sleeping enough, and when I do sleep, I don't sleep very well. I'm gonna have to start exercising, cut down on my smoking, start eating right… damn sometimes i feel really fucking old.

wanna know what the hell's taken me so long to update? (probably not, but since you're already here… )

reason #1 – New Spider-Man game for PlayStation

this is probably the best Spider-Man game I've ever seen. there are some quirky things with it, but it's generally just great! I've been vegged out for several days in my off time playing this excellent game. (brian pointed out a little while back that I hadn't yet fessed up to being a comic geek. well, I think this post will remedy that.)

reason #2 – OmniCom 3.0

brian found this earlier last week, and almost immediately after he'd shown it to me, I was online attempting to download it. four days later, I paid the shareware fee (& I never pay shareware fees).
    this little beaut is a comic book database program that's pretty much the closest thing we've found to exactly what we'd been looking for. it's a great program right now, and from what the programmer's told me, the next release should be even better. the installation routine in the last release (3.0) is a little wonky–you pretty much have to install it where it wants to go (ie. you can't choose a directory)–but if you just let it do it's thing you won't regret it (and the author says he'll do his best to fix the install problems ASAP, so you may not even have to worry about it). If you're looking for a program to catalogue and track your comic collection, this is it. don't look any farther. the author seems like a great guy, the registration (a measly $15) was promptly delivered, and he's been very open to some of the ideas we've presented to him for the next version of the program.

now, go get 'em!

I started out this past week doing pretty well, updated three times in two days… kinda fell off after that.

to follow up on my last post, the next day I was once again working a little late, and once again ran into the janitor in the bathroom before going home. this time he was rather more friendly, he actually spoke to me, and he seemed to be in better spirits. I wanted to tell him that I thought he was doing a great job, but I couldn't figure out how to say it. I guess even despite my last post, you just can't really tell these people that you appreciate them without sounding like a bastard. probably the best way to respect them and show your appreciation, I guess, is to just do your part to not make their job more difficult than it needs to be. clean up after yourself, don't smear shit on the walls, don't piss in the floor, don't pump the soap dispenser out all over the counter, don't put an entire roll of toilet paper IN the toilet.

I can't help but think that his improved attitude and friendliness towards me was some form of positive karmic feedback as a result of my contemplation of him, his position, and my presenting my ideas and trying to engender respect for him and his fellow "menial laborers" among the readers of this weblog.

in other news, the site we're working on at my new job has slipped by yet another "deadline," but we'll hopefully have it up this week (people are thinking it might go live tomorrow, but that hope is probably unfounded). If it goes live, I'll link it in here, so you guys can go check out the demos for a laugh or two.

since I hardly ever include a link, I'll just post this one here for your surfing pleasure. my apologies if I've posted it before.

I've finally started my new job at Corvus, been there for three days now actually, and I'm liking it so far. damn well ought to be, I've been trying to land a "real" job for, oh, almost six years now…

funny thing is that the new job is almost like the two months I spent off work–sitting around on the computer, making web pages. surprisingly low pressure so far, but they're probably taking it easy on me…

can't think of anything else to talk about…

well, today's x-men day. I must say, though I myself never read any of the x-men books, I'm pretty excited about the new movie. perhaps it's an illness I've caught from brian (jerk boy, over there yesterday with Paul who'd weaseled his way into a preview pass somehow, and invited brian rather than me because he actually reads x-men or something. man, the nerve of some people).

anyway, it's gotten some decent reviews, and it'll hopefully bring comic movies back up to the level of the first Keaton Batman movie. also, there's hope that if this movie is a success, someone will actually get around to finishing that damned Spider-Man movie they've been promising for almost more than 5 years now.

oh yeah, and Rebecca Romijn-Stamos is… pretty much… naked. why the hell would I not watch this movie?

a follow-up to yesterday's "vanity insanity"

damned interesting. after waking up last night and checking my e-mail, I was very surprised to see, in the latest glassdog MEMO, a brief entry discussing the same subject as my own post earlier that morning.
    the entry was about egosurf.com, a site that makes vain pursuits such as mine much easier, and which even includes an option for e-mail updates from a continuous search. ** update 12/17/2004** egosurf.com is no more. just use google. for the "e-mail update" feature, just use google alerts.

what a relief, now I don't have to waste two hours wading through links that end up not having anything to do with me.

yes my friends, it's come down to this. I have absolutely nothing of importance to say this evening, so I'll just leave you to explore a fancy little site I found honoring one of the funniest characters to exist on TV in the past few years–Chester, from Sifl & Olly. This little site seems to be a great source of sound bites and other Chester related thingies, but since my computer at home is so CRAP, I haven't really been able to download the sound files (which are in RealAudio format for those of you who might care.)

check out Stolen Holiday and have yourselves a few laughs while I'm working my ass off at my new job.

**update 12/17/2004** stolen holiday is gone, so have this link to the official Sifl & Olly site instead.

g'night.

just ran across an interesting tidbit on my daily surf–amiga.org–about the fact that Amiga (Yes, they're still around…), along with Sun, Intel, Motorola, Espial, and maybe some others are about to launch a new Java developer's portal called devicetop.com. it's nice to see that the new Amiga is running with such high-profile buddies. before now, I haven't mentioned my Amiga fetish, but it was bound to come out sooner or later, so I figured now was as good a time as any. If half of what Amiga are promising comes true, things could get very interesting in the computer and consumer electronics worlds.

one interesting thing came out in the press release for devicetop.com that gave me pause. I'm really fond of the english language, and really enjoy when people do weird things with it. down towards the bottom of the page, after several miles of comments about "smart devices" and "information appliances," there's a comment about this joint initiative for widespread use of Java (portable programming technology, as if you didn't know) in these devices. they use the term "device agnostic" to describe a piece of software.
      correct me if I'm wrong, but agnostic generally describes ignorance of the existence of (usually God, or a higher power). so what they're talking about is software that is ignorant of the existence of the hardware on which it is run…. I suppose it makes sense, but it really struck me odd. kind of attributes the properties of self-awareness and the capability for doubt on these so-called "smart devices." perhaps that's what makes them so "smart."

well. that was really pointless. thought I was going somewhere with that, but it just kind of fizzled out.

which reminds me of a discussion I just had with brian (the guy who writes stuff over there writing a lot…). because it's been this way for so long, I second guess myself and don't say what I want to say. apparently I don't have that problem here (when I actually bother to write something, I tend to ramble).

for those of you asking, yes, I will shut up now.