7/22/2000

How dull it is to to pause, to make an end,
to rust unburnish'd, not to shine in use!
posted 2:41 AM

7/21/2000

One feature I'd love to see on deja.com: a link from every post to babelfish, so if I find something that looks promising, but happens to be in German, I can translate it on the fly without having to copy and paste the URL (making sure to strip it down to just the barebones URL, without all of the session info, etc.) into the Babelfish interface. That would be cool.
posted 7:10 PM
Heh. I'm inspiring.
posted 4:33 PM
After watching Apollo 13, I was filled with a sense that anything was possible. Thanks to Matt, I just watched the first four episodes of From the Earth to the Moon on DVD, and I now find myself filled with a sense that I was right, but I now have a much stronger sense of the toll that such heroics exact.

I'm obsessed lately, with the idea that there is something missing in my life, my generation, my upbringing, and my sense of self. The discipline, the bravery, the sheer effort of will, the astounding advances in technology that are the result of intelligent and at times somewhat plodding thought and activity, solving small problems one at a time in order to achieve great things. We are governed, in my opinion, by a sense that great efforts (and, it would seem, great wealth) are easy, that we can, through some blazing insight, accomplish more than the tireless pursuit of small excellences will bring. Maybe it's just me; I was for a time intending to be an artist, and believed all the idiotic myths of the artist as Vasari and the Modernists would have had us believe, the ubermensch that transcended all earthly hindrances to deliver a flashing vision of the divine. For a time after that belief in mythology was ruptured, first by psychology and sociology, and then later by sudden acquaintance with the pathetic idiocy of man as political animal, as egotistical self-serving seeker of transitory pleasure, I flirted with mysticism and the idea that logic could save us from ourselves. A quick tour through the joyless existence that many unemployed and underemployed liberal arts graduates endure made me take stock and realize that the basic necessities (food, shelter, love, and friendship) can drive anyone to abandon even their most cherished beliefs in an effort to survive, to thrive, and to be happy. Later still, I found that one can compromise, can still manage to seek the ideal through engaging the mundane.

I'm still trying to figure it all out. For me, that means spending time with history, with education, with service. I'm still very impatient, undisciplined, lazy. I am still filled with unnamed rage, with the irrational hope that insights and art will triumph, that justice will prevail, and that my efforts to achieve some form of greatness will be rewarded and recognized. In the meantime, I struggle with my own self doubt and a feeling that success must come as my due, not through prolonged and intense (and sometimes even insensibly boring) activity, even though I resist. I'm trying. I'm doing my best to remember that I have to be kind, compassionate, and patient. I seek out examples, in an effort to find someone or something that I can emulate, that will teach me lessons I need to learn. And while it continues to stare me in the face, I continue to be overwhelmed by the noise in my head, the thoughts that plague me like mosquitos, that I'm not worth it, that my value is on par with the same myths that led me to paint and draw and write. But I keep trying. And that's something,right?
posted 2:59 AM

7/20/2000

I love Emo Philips. I was curious what he'd been up to, but I'm not surprised he's found a more accepting audience in the British. (Thanks to Steve Sharp for the URL.)
posted 12:13 PM
Oh, and I got a powerbook today. With airport. I really like this wireless networking thing. Now if they could work on the wireless power supply, without exposing small animals walking around the AirPlug to death by shortwave radiation, I'd be really happy.
posted 3:49 AM
A few observations upon revisiting my old fascination with P. J. O'Rourke, and applying his attitude to the things that trouble my soul from day to day:
More later, perhaps.
posted 3:42 AM

7/18/2000

Oh, and I spent some time this afternoon fixing bugs in the DHTML GUIs dynamic poetry game, so it will work in IE5/Mac. Not all there yet (there are some problems with the tab widget, for example) but it's coming.
posted 3:08 AM
So I built my first real, useful Macintosh application tonight. Oh, sure, it doesn't really do anything useful yet, but that's just because I haven't written the Palm conduit that will use the preferences file this application lets you create. :^)

Maybe now I will be able to sleep without counting out memory locations all night... (0x07BD4A50, 0x07BD4a60, ...)
posted 2:52 AM

7/16/2000

Ya know, if there had been a better comics store in Bangor, I'd have read more X-Men. As it stood, I only got second-hand Sgt. Rock and Haunted Tank comix, which is good if the woods behind your house are infested with Nazi machine gun nests, but not much help dealing with your status as a mutant.
posted 12:31 PM