The official day of shame has come (on Mardi Gras, no less).
Now That DMB Has Lost Their Soul or: How I Learned to Start Worrying and Hate “the Bomb”. My take on Everyday, from a few past posts of mine and then some. § “”
Now That DMB Has Lost Their Soul or: How I Learned to Start Worrying and Hate “the Bomb”. My take on Everyday, from a few past posts of mine and then some. § “”
Saturday morning I was planning on hiking Flat Top, one of the Peaks of Otter, between Lynchburg and Roanoke. So I drive up to the Blue Ridge Parkway to head on down, only to find that the Parkway’s closed at Petites Gap from the recent snow (apparently).
After turning around (and still intent on getting out), and with the sun out (with a nice brisk breeze), I decided to head to James River Face Wilderness instead—which is conveniently the northern boundary of the Parkway. I was just looking for a morning/afternoon hike, so I made the short hike up the Appalachian Trail to Matts Creek Shelter adjacent to (of all places) Matts Creek where the local AT club built a sweet log bridge.
Seeing as it was so nice out and I had nothing but time, I decided to play poohsticks on the bridge. For those of you not familiar with the highly competitive game of poohsticks, you throw a twig into the creek below and follow it as it floats and bobs beneath the bridge and down the creek. Completely relaxing and engrossing.
I followed that up with the extreme sport of stream pebble throwing. It was just fun just to hear the bloop! sounds the rocks made and watch the concentric ripples in the creek.
Sometimes you gotta listen to the 3rd grader inside you. § “”
Gotta love Wednesday Dollar Corona night (though The Leafe on Mug Night has a muy superior beer selection).
The loaded cheese fries there are the best I’ve found anywhere. Not necessarily good for you, but it’s the little things in life that gets you through (finals).
From: Brent Zacharias [mailto:brent.zacharias@sympatico]
Sent: Saturday, February 17, 2001 11:16 PM
To: chad at zero-kelvin.com
Subject: hi How are you
Hi Kelvin I may have the wrong person but if you remember michelle from pembroke Ontario then you know who I am . If so then email me at brent.zacharias@sympatico If your middle name is roeshell then we have a match if not I apologize for wasting your time and thankyou for going through the trouble of having to go through my message. have a really nice day!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Looks like a post to [Nancies]. God bless Canada and modern technology. § “”
The CSS went through like a breeze. The HTML 4.0 validator pulled on some loose threads and hiccupped on the JavaScript for the image MouseOver at the top of the page. It turns out that the validator has a problem with name statements in an img tag. But the name attribute for an img tag is legit. So now I have two more pieces of web flare on the right.
(Original point:) WaSP has launched their browser upgrade initiative (generation ≥ 5.0). Anyone on Netscape 4, please upgrade to 6. There are so many reasons why 4 is bad. You’ll thank me once you have. Well, maybe not, but perhaps a nice thought walking to the kitchen??
Lookin’ forward to starting on my Irish Red batch Saturday (mmmm…beer), and doing some hiking (finally) in the Blue Ridge on Sunday. The cold weather hasn’t been too condusive to my innate desire to be outside. § “”
These two I have no clue: K Records and their new releases section, along with Mackie Designs. WTF? Then there’s a referral from MusicStation’s MusicNewsWire and a South African search engine. Riiiight.
Then I peeked into the site logs to find that netizens (is that still a word?) from Estonia, Germany, France, and Great Britain have somehow found their way to these strange lands. Whoda thought? § “”
Of course, this wasn’t Contact, this was real-life. I had given my notice to my realtors here that I wouldn’t be renewing after March, and I put in my application for the new place last Wednesday. The application fees and whatnot for the realtors up in Charlottesville was $220 total, $50 of which was refundable, and the remainder was refundable only 72 hours after I paid.
So I write my boss an email asking about the status of the position up in Charlottesville, and he calls me back at 11 o’clock saying that he spoke with his new boss. Here I am, all waiting for the official go-ahead, and BOOM!, he says that they weren’t going to persue it at this time. (Quick side note: minor restructuring for my department. We used to be managed by a group under the vestige of corporate, but are now directly under corporate). Yet not a few weeks before my boss’ old boss asked why the position wasn’t filled already. Fun.
It’s always fun to be trapped in a political bru-haha. We actually do need another person up in Charlottesville, we have for a while. So, anyhow, I get the call from my boss with the answer I was least expecting to hear, hang up the phone, and call the Cville realtors as quickly as possible. I signed the agreement Wednesday at noon. I had a 72-hour refund window for my additional $170, I was now in hour 71.
So I call, withdraw my application (ga’dammit) then frantically call the realtors here in Lynchburg to make sure they haven’t already rented my apartment out. Which they hadn’t—thank god. As far as I was concerned, on Wednesday I was all but moved up there. My day didn’t get any better from there, but it didn’t do downhill either. One big plateau.
So now, I’m all pissed off and dismayed, and the cookie jar syndrome has kicked in. The “you can’t have it, so I want it even more now” type thing. We actually do need another person up in Cville, and I (hope) the position will open up again. I was really stoked about being up there for the DMB concert on April 21st, aside from getting out of Fallwell-ville, but alas. I’ll still be there, come hell, high water, or just standing in the parking lot (I’ve learned not to take concert tickets for granted, especially highly publicized ones). That, and I’m only an hour away, the hell if I’m gonna miss it. So now I get to look forward to another several months of driving to Manassas (and back) to see my girlfriend of four-plus years.
We didn’t need a mouse to navigate the Web then.
I can remember dialing up to the VAX at Lynchburg College (where my dad taught) at 2400 baud (now at 56000) on our Mac Performa. The Internet then was a term for GOPHER, FTP, Email, IRC, HTTP (“the Web”), etc., but for me then consisted largely of Gopher space, using Lynx. The http:// prefix was a necessity, and as many sites were resolved just by their IP addresses as by their domain names. A graphical browser like Mosaic or Netscape, with it’s big pink throbbing N, wasn’t standard fare for me until later. We were relative late-comers, this was only 1994.
The first email I got was a forward: “How Email is Like a Penis”. What a start. I’d chat with my friends from school on DALnet’s IRC (Internet Relay Chat) server into the wee hours whether we had class the next day or not. The first time I used IRC, I ended up talking to a girl from Brazil who would be going to Swarthmore College (where one of my friends would be going) in the fall. Our email address domains were a mouthful too: roberts2 (at) acavax.lynchburg.edu, carobe (at) gopher.cc.wm.edu, cockingjmb (at) rascal.guilford.edu, not to mention my friends who used CompuServe, with their 9-numeral long screen names.
The technology’s changed, and so have people’s attitudes about it. For one of my papers freshman year in college, many of my sources were URLs, which the teacher didn’t find particularly resourceful (despite the fact the class was using a mailing list to post assignments). Now they’re mandatory, and the Internet (at least in American society) is ubiquitous. § “”
I got Peter Griesar’s Disposable Love Songs, Dear Charlottesville (a local regional sampler - used), a beaten used digipak of U2’s Achtung Baby (just for the alternative casing and cheap price), and an apartment.
843 ft² compared with the 637 ft² I have now. All the unmarked nooks are closets. The entrance is at the lower bottom left.
I still have yet to see the actual apartment space, but so far it looks like the only down side is that the “study” (== too small for to be a bedroom) is larger than the kitchen.
If this is boring you to tears, it’s probably painfully clear by now this is largely for the benefit of friends and family. 03.28.01: T-minus 7 weeks and counting…. § “”
My temporary solution—a deep breath and some Agents of Good Roots in the CD player.
(This message brought to you by the Chad-Roberts Residential Transition Team.) § “”
Last night I went to bed, all nice and comfy, only to hear a pathetic meow from one if the cats, followed shortly thereafter by a mobile weight on the bed.
Since I’d been away for so long recently, I indulged Jareth feebly petting him in the dark. But that didn’t last for long. Given my apartment, which could probably power a suburb of San Francisco on static discharge alone, something was bound to happen. And it did.
By the second or third time around, Jareth had built up a happily content purr, and an electrical charge. The next time I motioned up to pet his head ZAP! The small arc of static electricity lit up his head, and left me seeing spots in the near darkness. Needless to say, Jareth was not happy, but for whatever reason stayed a few more times only for the static to build up again and shock him again. (Then I booted him off the bed and went to sleep.)
I still think that PG&E in California could end the crisis now and build a few cat fur power plants. :) Venture capital funds anyone? § “”
I think Mays summed up blogging nicely:
blah. i don't really have anything to say. well, i mean, i DO, but nothing of any serious substance. not that much of anything i ever say or post about has actual substance regularly, but still ...True dat.some things i want to say, but shouldn't. some things i need to say, but can't. some things i shouldn't say, but probably will anyway. love it.
On the topic of blogs, I read Ev’s near-eulogy for Pyra this morning. Blogger will still keep on keepin’ on, but now Ev is Pyra.
It looks like the three Bloggies Pyra won for Blogger (best weblog directory or update monitor, best web application for weblogs, and best weblog resource) are doing as much good as a paper cocktail umbrella in this rainstorm. For what it’s worth at this point guys: job well done.
As a follow up to my previous post, I calculated that I ended up driving damn near 1000 miles between Friday to Monday nights. Whoo-hoo! § “”
