October, 2002: 48 posts.

A site I worked on has been launched – LANGNews.com – search engines, feel free to index it! Ready, set, google!

Potential clients, check my clean code and hire me. No, really.

Okay, proposals to work on that are very overdue. Back to work.

  Now, listen carefully:
    path:
      follow path;
        gate:
          open gate,
            through gate,
              close gate.

– Dr. Stephen Falken, WarGames

I am up late. I am contemplating a word. The word is “stench” and I am not explaining what I mean here. But know that I am in deep contemplation right now. I must now sleep. I am contemplating redemption right now. Many many thoughts in my head. More than I can possibly relate here.

And now I am thinking of a woman who I have known for two weeks. It’s like a lifetime. It’s like an eyeblink.

I wonder, what is love??

And now I must go to sleep.

Onward

Sign Michael Moore’s Antiwar Petition, if you are so inclined.

So last night was really cool. I got to go have fondue and see a great movie with great people. A good time with good people is not unprecented.

The fondue was really awesome. It was pricey, but awesome. We dipped bread and veggies and apples in a garlic-y cheese fondue pot as the first course, along with salads. The second course was various meats (marinated chicken, top sirloin, shrimp, lobster) and vegetables (mushrooms, potatoes, zucchini, carrots) which you place in a special broth that’s boiling. You cook your own food, and they give you an array of sauces. This was all at Forever Fondue in Mission Valley. It was a social fun food thing. None of this is unprecedented.

The dessert was various fruits and some cake and cheesecake which we dipped or drizzled in melted milk chocolate from the fondue pot. Highly yummy. This also is not unprecedented.

After, we went and saw the very funny movie Barbershop (Cedric the Entertainer cracks me up). It had us all laughing! I really like Ice Cube as an actor. The movie was maybe a little predictable, but the textures of what feels like real life. While I’m not black, I remember going to the barbershop as a teenager and getting the same kind of comfort and banter you can only get at a barbershop. As to the reaction the movie has gotten from “black leaders,” I really like Oliver Willis’ How “Barbershop” Exposed Jesse & Al, and having now seen it, I couldn’t agree more with Oliver. Again, none of the above is unprecedented.

As Jennifer said in her journal, the Fondue Foursome was unique. It was unique in that the “party of four” consisted of my good good and longtime friend Erin (we worked at the San Diego Public Library together in the late 1980’s); Jennifer, the wife from whom I’m separated and will, we have decided, divorce; and my new girlfriend, Leah came. Yes, it sounds strange. We remarked that someone should be filming this or that it’s like something from a Woody Allen movie, but really, it was unremarkable in how it looked. We got along wonderfully. Jennifer and I have come to this interesting space where we are good good friends. We agree that we no longer want to have a relationship that is marital. We have gone through counseling, and speak and have spoken at length about what we want for the future. For neither of us does that future include a world where Joe and Jennifer are married. Having deep knowledge of that is a blessing for both of us, and it took quite some time to realize it. At the beginning of the separation I desperately wanted her back, and she wanted nothing to do with me. We went to counseling, and later, she wanted me back, and I found myself not wanting her back. As we have spent more time hanging out as friends, we realize that neither of us really wants the other back. Friends, yes. Husband and wife, no. Anyone I or Jenny or Leah or Erin told about this particular Friday night at Fondue and Movies before the fact did not believe it. So I suppose that it really is unprecedented.

Which brings me to say something more about Leah. She’s a wonderful person, and I have not known her very long at all. It is true that we have moved very fast, and we realize that danger and are attempting to turn the pot down so we don’t boil over. Neither of us wants to get scalded. But I know that we have a wonderful time together, we are both creative in a visual way, and when I look into her eyes there’s a familiarity there that I can’t say I’ve ever felt before. My Mother, who definitely reads this journal, has warned me of this concept of “glimmerance” – that new love blinds. She’s right, and is backed up by my counselor, who warns me to slow down. She describes new love as a kind of temporary insanity. So my new girlfriend and I feel like sailors on the sea, trying to find a way out of the fog of newness, and see where we stand when we can see each other clearly and rationally. The irrationality and mania of new love is wonderful, but it is not, uh, encouraging of rational decision-making. Some may say that the Fondue party was a bad idea to begin with, but as it was not based in malice or a desire to create jealousy or enmity, I can’t see how it was a bad thing. We had a great time, I think.

And so it goes, my unique life with unexpected things happening all the time. I had been quite nervous about it all, but life will surprise you when you’re honest and open your heart.

I’m working on this theory about stupid/fearless. That when you open your heart and are honest with people you’re in this stupid/fearless mode. You must be prepared for rejection, for bad feelings, but if you open your heart to people who are coming also from a place of honesty and openness, the risk in being stupid/fearless goes way down, and things are stupid melts away, and it’s fearless – fearless truth, and fearless honesty. If it all is based on respect, it is good.

And things are good. I realize with every waking hour how lucky I am to have the friends and family that I have.

Onward.

These were sent to me by my good friend Erin after my posting about Religion and freethought. These are excellent food for thought and have given me much to think about. I was raised Roman Catholic, and always have presumed that I would return to that sphere, IF I went back to religion in any way. I am thankful for Erin, and further, my parents, both of whom sent me excellent advice today. Email from loved ones is a wonderful thing.

» Definitions of Humanism

» John S. Spong’s column The Bishop’s Voice. He also wrote Christianity Must Change Or Die

» The Center for Progressive Christianity

» The Jesus Seminar: inquiry after the voice of Jesus

Gail suggests I look at C S Lewis’ book Mere Christianity — and also here’s a website: The Mere Christianity Study Guide.

More food for thought. Thanks to all who are reading and contributing!

Jennifer has an interesting and good take on hers and my good relationship. Hey, the girl is cool. And yes, for a while we absolutely felt hatred and enmity. But you know what? Hatred stinks. Nothing but trouble it is. One interesting tidbit, or not very-interesting tidbit — she will likely keep the last name she got via me. It’s not really mine per se, I was given it to me through my father. It’s not a bad name, and easy to spell.

We had a good lunch and good conversation. And hey, we got free brownies at Oscar’s because they missed something on our order. What’s that you say? Should you be eating brownies Joe? Aren’t you losing weight? Well, yes. I’m currently at pre-separation weight minus 70 pounds. That’s 70 pounds in 5 months. Weight loss has slowed, but I’m fitter than I used to be by several million miles. Still much weight to lose.

Well, fit other than a cold which is coming on me now, Racquetball is still excellent for my activity. Two times a week and very fun, racquetball is. Talk like Yoda I will now stop.

I AM BEHIND
Yes, this blog has not been updated. Patience, sil vous plait, por favor, bitte, please.

I think Charles is back in business with his blog. Go Charles!

Steve and Natty are engaged, and still adventuring around the country!

The Onion A/V Club asks notable folks: Is There a God? The Onion is satire, but these folks took the question pretty seriously. I’m not sure how I would answer that question right now, as I have indicated.

Point and Shoot Tips (from photo.net)

Some cool words: alas, oft, bereft.

Is the Keywords meta tag dead? (via Janece)

Lura says, about San Diego Blog Meetups:

A popular person needs to organize this so as to draw from a larger base. Joe, I nominate you. Be our leader, our local hero. Please take these ideas as your own and make this whole thing work better.

Let me think about it. If folks have ideas about how to handle this, or want to be notified if something happens with this, please drop me a note. I have some possible ideas – probably a simple notification list that sends out notes on some regular basis that it’s happening, and by soliciting feedback in the form of locations or whatever… So many ideas, so little time…

L.A. (Being A Recap Of Last Weekend’s Trip to Los Angeles):

On Sunday Erin and Jenny and I went to Los Angeles. It was quite fun. On the way I some Wireless (WiFi aka 802.11b aka AirPort) Access Point scanning. Driving north on Interstate 5 (we call them “freeways” in California) I turned on my clamshell iBook in Orange County. MacStumbler almost immediately started alerting me to APs. I was quite surprised that driving at freeway speeds we would spot any. Obviously at freeway speeds there was no time to join any of these networks and use their net connections, but it was enough time to “see” them. So this makes me want to do more “war-driving” – just to see what’s out there. Supposedly the government wants to make this illegal, but it’s illegal to use computer resources – wardriving strikes me more like mapping or exploring. It’s certainly not nefarious when practiced by someone who is merely curious.

Anyway, we went to several places, here are my brief experiences of them:

World Book & News: Greatest newsstand ever, still. On Cahuenga just off Hollywood Blvd. No real finds, but it was cool.

Amoeba Music: Massive new record store (part of a small chain) on Sunset and Cahuenga – near the site of the Cinerama Dome. Great record store with excellent new and used sections – lots of DVDs, including import/non-US encoded/region discs. Definitely a place I’d return to. They had some Zappa vinyl that made me think twice about abandoning vinyl. I have no turntable – so who needs vinyl now? Maybe when I make my millions.

Canter’s Deli: Pastrami delights. Classic.

Aron’s Records: On North Highland Avenue North of Sunset Blvd, worth a visit. Much smaller than Ameoba, but with great quality.

Giant Robot: West of the 405 on Sawtelle. Very excellent and clever merchandise, but too expensive.

Santa Monica Promenade: Always fun for a visit.

Hennessey + Ingalls: Great art & architecture bookstore. Also in the category of “when I get rich, I’ll buy lots” – just looking for books I can look for at the library this trip.

It was a great trip.

PHP Database Abstraction Layers:
» PEAR::DB
» PEAR::MDB
» Metabase
» AdoDB

OS X
O’Reilly Mac OS X Conference Report from the estimable TidBITS

Mozilla Development
The book Creating Applications with Mozilla is available online.

.NET
Alan Cooper on Dot Net

Woz
This Steve Wozniak article is worth a read. Woz was a prime mover at the beginning of Apple‘s history. Very interesting cat.

Kynn!
This review of Kynn’s CSS in 24 Hours is pretty cool. Go Kynn!

CF
CFML Reference

OSX Shareware
AudioHijack is an excellent piece of shareware that will let you record whatever audio is playing on your Mac to an AIFF file. Very cool.

New Words
Back in early September, Ben Forta, Cold Fusion guru spoke at UCSD on Cold Fusion MX and other things. I’ve (uh, finally) written up my notes and they may be of value to someone. Feel free to check them out at:

Misc: Ben Forta Speaks.

It may, perhaps, possibly, be of interest to folks out there. The most compelling stuff was definitely the web services capabilities of CFMX. And Forta is a great speaker overall.

Updated Words
My piece on words called I am a Frank Zappa Fan was updated with several excellent links to painlessly find out more about Frank.

RSS
I’ve added an RSS XML addition to the blog. It’s not strictly speaking a full RSS Feed but it will do for now as it will update when the blog is updated.

Referers
The blog has had a referers page for a while. Now the home page of ArtLung.com has its own Referers Page.

New Header
Regular readers may have noted the new header on the blog which was put in place on 18 Oct 2002. It features an image of my very own right iris as taken by Jon Miles of Miles Research. It’s really nifty to get closeup images of your own iris like that.

This is New York (Sassy should like this one)
This New York Primer makes me laugh.

Turn The Tables on Telemarketers
The Direct Marketing sector regards the telephone as one of its most successful tools. Consumers experience telemarketing from a completely different point of view: more than 92% perceive commercial telephone calls as a violation of privacy. Telemarketers make use of a telescript – a guideline for a telephone conversation. This script creates an imbalance in the conversation between the marketer and the consumer. It is this imbalance, most of all, that makes telemarketing successful. The EGBG Counterscript attempts to redress that balance. (from John)

The NOAA Photo Library has lots of great free clipart/stock photos. I think of stock photography and clip art interchangeably. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has so many cool images. Mmmmm, weather.

Talking To Your Kids About Fascism

A Guide To Building Secure Web Applications

Shaloman, the Isreali Super Hero! Pretty funny. What are Scott Shaw’s Oddball Comics?

Mormon Temples and Temple Rituals

The idea of Smart Mobs is really intriguing to me.

(Reminds me of the line Swarm! Swarm! from Rushmore.)

Darpa’s Information Awareness Office has a logo which conspiracy theorists will love.

Jon Sullivan has a fascinating copyright policy for his website. It’s fascinating inasmuch as he claims no copyright whatsoever. Read his un-copyright policy.

A QuickBooks Software Development Kit is available. They’re encouraging developers to check it out.

Asteroid Impact Could Have Led To Nuclear War (between Pakistan and India)

On October 11th I saw Stew play music at Java Joe’s in Ocean Beach. He did something unusual for him as a solo artist, as even as part of his band The Negro Problem: he played a cover. The one he played was a song I had never heard before. A remarkable number from the Rolling Stone’s Beggars’s Banquet: it’s called Stray Cat Blues. He prefaced this with the note that this album came out in 1967 or 1968 – and given that the Stones were at the time the biggest band in pop, the lyrical content of the song is unbelievably. He said it was the kind of thing that maybe R.Kelly would write about if he actually had the guts to write about what he does. The song is pretty unbelievable when you think about it. Stew was right when he shared with the audience that any artist couldn’t put out a record like this, even the hardest rapper wouldn’t dare make allusions to sexual interactions with underage girls as boldly as this song does. And yet the Stones were huge at the time. You can check the lyrics to Stray Cat Blues here.

The last few days I’ve been deep in thought. I haven’t been blogging all my deepest thoughts here though. I’m still having thoughts though. I have lots of thoughts: about divorce, weight loss, work, freelancing, work in respiratory therapy, girlfriends, old girlfriends, friendships, honesty, religion, faith, abstract emotions, love, mistakes, learning from mistakes, and much more. I do feel pretty good lately, but with a side dish of stress. I still have so much to learn from life, and I’m trying to make a go of it the best way I know how. As much as I think I’ve reached a plateau of enlightenment in the past five months, I still have much more to learn. It continues to be an interesting life, filled with love from many quarters, as well as challenges galore.

Still and all, I am a very lucky man.

    With love,
        Onward.

Iris Gaines:
    You know, I believe we have two lives.
Roy Hobbs:
    How … what do you mean?
Iris Gaines:
    The life we learn with and the life we live with after that.
from The Natural

Dori of BackupBrain writes:

Macromedia’s got something cool in their pocket, but I had to sign an NDA. Keep an eye out for this one, folks.

To which I think aloud:

I saw and heard Ben Forta speak here in San Diego last month and he referred to a new Macromedia product in beta — the intriguing description was of a product:

“in between Word and Excel”

Could it be that Dori and Ben are referring to the same thing?

I feel great today. The weather is a little gray. But I feel great today. More to come later…

Check this: http://www.youmaybenext.com/ —

“a company in San Diego, Pangea Intellectual Properties (PANIP LLC) is suing companies all across the country. They claim that if you use graphical and textural information on a video screen for purposes of making a sale, then you are infringing on their patent. US Patent No 5,576,951.

And if you accept information to conduct automatic financial transactions via a telephone line & video screen, you’re infringing on their patent. US Patent No. 6,289,319″

Read the linked news articles to assess legitimacy.

It’s also interesting that the list of known defendents include none in California.

Anyone know about these Pangea people? Looks like www.panip.com/ is down. (via web405 list)

I’m still optimizing the code, but you can check out a Random San Diego Blogger from the San Diego Bloggers Page. Go now!

It’s the poor craftsman that blames his tools (or racquet). I’m playing this afternoon.

DeeIsChristina.com (link from Erin). The new record by Christina Aguilera should be good. I’m going to pick it up when cashflow is a bit better. So far I’m actually impressed. Check out christinaaguilera.to for current Xtina (yeah, that’s apparently her nickname) news. And yes, I think her fashion choices stink lately.

All Kinds of Lab Stuff
Articles and code snippets for web geeks: some new, some old, all have been enhanced lately. Bookmark it and tell your friends!
» Change Form Input Direction
» Auto-Calculator
» Dropdown / Select Box Navigation with JavaScript
» Onmouseover in a TR tag
» Changing the color of a form element when it’s blank
» Mozilla Rounded Corners
» HTML Tags for Java Applets, circa 1999
» Dropdown Navigation Where Only Some Links Open New Windows

The RSS Feed, the means by which I can syndicate the content here, has been upgraded. It also does validate.