Timeline Meme

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I guess it’s a good day for picking up on memes — this one comes from Mike.

  • 25 Years Ago (1980): Hmmm…seven years old. Kindergarden? I’d be living in Anchorage, probably at the Big Grey House. I’m not sure, but this may have been the year that I got chicken pox and, no matter what mom told me, scratched, and ended up leaving three small scars in a triangle on my forehead, just above my left eyebrow. They’re still there. Of course, that might not have happened that year, but I only remember a few things from that long ago.

  • 15 Years Ago (1990): Bartlett High Apathy Club 1990 Sixteen years old, and a Junior at Bartlett High School. I had a small core group of friends, was working on tech crew for the school theatre, played one of the orphans in our production of Oliver!, playing violin in the school orchestra, and singing in the school choir. I was also one of the members of the Bartlett High School Apathy Club, a club spearheaded by Royce and Rod mostly to give us all an excuse to hang out after school and watch movies. In other words, yes — I was a geek. :)

  • 10 Years Ago (1995): Me at City Lights - dancing, running around to Ministry, or possibly just having a fit of some sort. ;)
    Twenty-one years old, legal to (in order) be drafted, live on my own, drive, smoke, and drink. I lived in no less than four places over the course of my 21st year…in January, I’d have been living in a horrid little apartment in Fairview, one of the more ghetto areas of Anchorage (our apartment was broken into less than two weeks after we moved in…while we were home), and was so uncomfortable with leaving my computers and music unattended that I took them with me when I went to my folks house across town for a few days over Christmas. This was right towards the beginning of my DJ career, during my time at City Lights.

  • 5 Years Ago (2000): Twenty-six. Getting more and more frustrated with Anchorage, and thinking more and more seriously about leaving, though it would take me another year or so to actually follow through with that plan. Living at The Pit, a huge basement apartment in Turnagain, one of Anchorage’s ritzier areas. Still DJing here and there around town and enjoying what little celebrity status I had. The main party years were done with, but I still had a fairly sizeable group of friends and acquaintances around town. Deeply embroiled in one of the more memorable of my many tumultuous relationships — those of you who know about the statuesque redhead in my life can fill in the blanks. Those of you who don’t…sorry, but some stories just aren’t safe to tell publicly yet….

  • 3 Years Ago (2002): New Years Eve 2001 Twenty-eight. Finally out of Anchorage, midway through my first year in Seattle. Living in what I not-so-affectionately termed the Shoebox, dating Candice, and working through a temp agency, for Xerox, at Arthur Andersen (before that silly business with Enron did them in). Later in the year I’d lose the position at Arthur Andersen and Xerox would place me in the copy shop on the Microsoft campus, Candice and I would split up (amicably, we’re still friends — in fact, she was here with Prairie and I for New Years Eve this year), and I’d move over to the building I’m living in now.

  • Last Year (2004): Thirty (and therefore past due for my time at Carousel). Dating Prairie (at least, I’m pretty sure we’d admitted that we were dating by this point…it was a question we danced around for a while, as each of us had dating histories that made us more than a little cautious about the whole relationship thing). At the beginning of the year it had only been a couple months since I did a spectacular job of losing my position at Microsoft, and I’d recently started working for my current company, bussing down to the Georgetown area of Seattle every day.

  • Yesterday: Thirty-one. Yesterday was Tuesday, my usual pizza-and-movie night. Well, any night can be a movie night if I’ve actually made it through my reading list in NetNewsWire or if I’m just sick of sitting at the computer, but on Tuesdays, the local Dominos Pizza has a two-for-one special which can generally feed me for the next two or three days. I ended up watching a 37 year old historical drama and thoroughly enjoying it. Not a bad day.

  • Today: I’m still thirty-one. Imagine that. Got up, skimmed a few things on the ‘puter while I tried to convince myself that I was anywhere close to conscious, showered, and wandered the six blocks to work. Passed DeAnna on the way and nodded hi — we happen to pass each other every few weeks, but as we’re both on our way to work, there’s generally not a lot of time for chit-chat. Seeing her reminded me that I promised to scan something for her weeks ago that I thought she’d get a grin out of (a letter she sent me before I went to Germany in the summer of ’91, as we lived just a few blocks away from each other, rode the same bus to school, and I made what were probably painfully clumsy attempts at flirting with her) — of course, I then promptly forgot again until just now as I was typing this out. Maybe I’ll actually remember to do that before I crash out tonight. Eeep. Worked, came home, chatted with Prairie until she wandered off to take a hot bath (temperatures in Ellensburg are apparently in the teens these days), and then got sucked into writing all this out.

  • Tomorrow: Wow, I’ll still be thirty-one! Though I will be one day closer to thirty-two. Woohoo? No big plans — it’s Thursday. I never could get the hang of Thursdays.

  • Next Year (2006): Okay, thirty-two. Wow, I thought I’d never get there! By next January, I should be living somewhere else, as Prairie and I are planning on getting a place together this summer. Just where, we’re not entirely sure yet. She’s ready to get out of Ellensburg, and so is starting the process of applying to other schools to teach at (she currently teaches 100-level English courses at CWU). She’s planning on tossing applications out at schools in the Seattle and Portland areas, and possibly as far south as California, since we’ve heard that there may be good teaching opportunities down that direction. While I’m enjoying my time in Seattle, I figure that while I’ve just got a job, she’s got a Career, so if she finds a good opportunity in Seattle, wonderful…but if she finds one in Portland or California, it’ll be easy enough for me to pack up and try someplace new for a while. Besides, if she gets a good offer, I’ve always wanted to spend some time in San Francisco….

  • 3 Years Forward (2008): I’ll be thirty-four. By this point, I’d really like to be enrolled in college somewhere, working my way towards a degree in…well, in something. While I’ve had plenty of people tell me that I’d make a wonderful teacher, and it’s something that’s definitely worth giving some serious thought to, there are so many things that catch my interest from time to time (over the years, everything from architecture to linguistics and many, many things in between have sounded fascinating) that it’s hard to tell where I might end up. Pity I’m not independently wealthy, I’d love to just go the perma-student route.

  • 5 Years Forward (2010): Thirty-six. I should be well on my way to a master’s degree by this point, if all goes according to plan. I’d like to be out of debt (outside of school debts, at least) by this point, which is something I’ve been struggling with for years now. I’m not really all that far in debt — probably somewhere around four or five grand, not counting debts to parents (which could up to to, oh, seven or eight grand at least, I think), so it’s certainly doable within five years…I just suck at money management. Prairie’s promised to try to help me out with this, though. I wonder if she really knows what she’s getting into….

  • 10 Years Forward (2015): Forty-one. Let’s see — assuming I actually managed to get myself a degree, then I might be employed somewhere that I can consider a career by this stage. Or maybe not — careers these days often seem to involve a lot of office-speak and buzzwords that drive me up the wall. Heh — in a perfect world, I’d have stumbled into some substantial amount of money and/or cleaned up my credit, gotten a business loan, and opened up a sucessful dance club in whatever city I’m living in at this point. Even if I’m not DJing, I could handle being the guy in charge!

  • 15 Years Forward (2020): Forty-six. My nephew Noah will be midway through his teens by this point. Since Prairie and I are (at least at the current moment) in no hurry to either explore marriage or children, I’ll have had fifteen years to perfect being the uncle who spoils his nephew rotten and lets him get away with all the stuff his parents never do. That’s about as good as a goal as anything else for fifteen years on, I think.

  • 25 Years Forward (2030): Fifty-six. I really don’t know — I have difficulties planning things a week in advance, and I’m supposed to be thinking a quarter-century into the future? Hmm…I’ll just assume that I’ll have slid comfortably into “dirty old man” territory, and doing my best to enjoy the rest of my years. :)

iTunes “I Put A Spell On You” by Marilyn Manson from the album Lost Highway (1996, 3:30).

De-Lurker Day

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Don't be a stranger...

Well, the day’s actually almost over, but I just now found about about this thanks to Carla saying hi — today’s been declared De-Lurker Day!

I know you’re out there. My stats tell me you’re out there. And today you have a once in a lifetime chance to let your presence be known.

Well, okay, technically you have that chance everyday, but today is De-Lurking Day! A special day celebrating lurkers, and exhorting you to muster the strength and bravery to click on that comment button and end the deafening silence.

So say hi, or tell me your wish for 2005, or what you’re having for lunch, or your diabolical plan for world domination– whatever.

Sounds good to me — so…who’s out there?

iTunes “Crying from Outside” by Tear Garden, The from the album To Be an Angel Blind, the Crippled Soul Divide (1996, 7:03).

Veronica Moser, Type Key Spammer

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While there’s a fair amount of chatter today about spammers shifting tactics away from comments and towards Trackback (which my linklog got hit with this morning, actually), I just ran into a different approach — my first TypeKey authenticated spammer.

In theory, enabling TypeKey is supposed to be one of the more effective way of combatting comment spam, as it presents a much higher (and supposedly non-scriptable) barrier to the spammer. As the Six Apart Guide to Comment Spam notes:

The worst case scenario…would be if a spammer created a TypeKey account, and used it to send spam to your weblog. However, because the first comment from any TypeKey user must be approved by your before being published, the only way a spammer could sneak spam onto your site would be to first submit a comment that appears to be legitimate. While it’s possible that some spammers might attempt this, it is highly unlikely that they would be able to do this using automated scripts. If they do and are reported to Six Apart, TypeKey’s terms of service allows us to disable their accounts.

Apparently, that’s just what has happened to me. I noticed a comment that fit the profile of a standard spam comment pop up in my comments RSS feed: all it said was “Very interesting,” and included a link to http://veronicamoser.com/. I didn’t have a clue who Veronica was, so I did a quick Google — the results were pretty telling.

Since this was the first time I’ve seen this type of attack, though, I went ahead and left the comment (though I did edit out the active link) and sent a quick note to Six Apart. I’m rather surprised that someone went through this much trouble — barring a new script attack, ‘Veronica’ would have had to sign up for a TypeKey account, visit my page, sign in to the TypeKey system, and then manually post the comment. I’m also fairly amused that they used the name ‘Type Key Spammer‘ for their TypeKey profile — essentially thumbing their nose at authority, I suppose.

Of course, the one worry is if this might be a test case, and someone actually is working out a script to continue with the comment spam attacks even in the face of TypeKey authentication. We can always report the offending TypeKey account to Six Apart, of course, but if the spammers keep creating new accounts…well, it’ll just be one more side to the battle against spam.

Whee. :P

On Ebonics

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Another link that deserves more attention than it might get just tossed into the linklog: Dean Emsay’s “Understanding Language” post and the associated discussion thread. As someone who’s long had an (entirely unschooled) interest in language and linguistics, much of what’s in here is absolutely fascinating.

(via Anil)

Quick Review: The Lion in Winter

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I’m not really sure when I put The Lion in Winter in my queue, nor what prompted me to do so. When I popped it in tonight, I wasn’t really sure that I was in a mood for a historical drama, either, but I figured that I’d at least give it a shot. In the end, I’m very glad I did — what a wonderful, deliciously wicked film!

It’s Christmas in England, and Henry II (Peter O’Toole) needs to name the heir to his throne. He favors younger son John (Nigel Terry), his wife Eleanor of Aquitane (Katharine Hepburn, in an Oscar-winning performance) — who he releases from imprisonment to join the family for the holiday — favors elder son Richard (Anthony Hopkins, in his first screen role), while middle son Geoffrey (John Castle) stands nearby, nearly ignored. France’s King Philip (Timothy Dalton), whose sister Alais (Jane Merrow) is to be married to the Henry’s successor — and who has become Henry’s mistress in the interim — joins the party to ensure that his interests are looked to. Everyone here is motivated purely in their own interests, however, and the gathering soon devolves into some of the most vicious scheming, plotting, and verbal backstabbing I’ve seen in quite a while.

James Goldman‘s script, adapted from his own play, is a masterpiece, full of clever wordplay and innuendo. Watching the characters tear into each other, I was reminded strongly of two more recent films that I enjoy — The Ref and War of the Roses — only where those movies carry the viciousness beyond the verbal realm and into out and out physical battles, much of the fun in The Lion in Winter is that not only are all the battles fought merely with words, but there’s no need for actual physical violence, and the tale would suffer for it if it were there.

There’s no need for a literal knife in the back when a well-sharpened tongue can cut just as deeply, and often leave a more lasting scar. The pen is mightier than the sword, indeed.

iTunes “Menofearthereaper (Concrete No Fee No Fear)” by Pop Will Eat Itself from the album Two Fingers My Friends! (1995, 5:54).

My best photos of 2004

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Seattle, WA

I’ve just created a flickr photoset of my favorite photographs from this past year (hey, every news organization on the planet does this, I might as well join in the fun, right?).

Seventy-nine photos culled from a little over four thousand. Some have been featured on this weblog in the past, some were already on flickr, but quite a few of them are being posted publicly for the first time. I had fun picking out which ones to toss up — hopefully you enjoy looking through them.

Enjoy the show!

Wishlist: MT ‘tag’ category plugin

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Thanks to Flickr, I’m becoming more and more of a fan of keywords or ‘tags‘ as categorization tools. Rather than having a set number of categories or sub-categories, tags are an amazingly simple way to categorize items (such as photos on Flickr, or links on del.icio.us [which I really need to look more closely at]) just by tossing whatever descriptive terms you want into the tag field.

What I want now is a way to use tags in my Movable Type installation rather than categories. I have no idea if this is even possible with the current plugin scheme, or if it would take a lot of lower-level source code hacking (seems like it might…I’m guessing you’d need to disable MT’s category system, replace it with the tag system, remove the Category drop-down menu from the MT interface and replace it with a field for inputting tags, incorporate a tag search feature, etc.), but I’d love to see it. Even better would be if enabling the tag system in MT would automatically create a dynamically-generated tags page similar to Flickr‘s, with the top X (50? 100? 150? User-definable?) tags displayed using variable sizes, and a link to a full tag list.

Okay, I want to rip off Flickr’s entire tag system and use it on my MT blog. Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, right? ;)

Of course, I can’t code a “hello world” application (well, maybe in BASIC, but not in anything more complex than that), let alone tackle a project like this. But I can dream.

Barring some kind soul figuring out how to shoehorn such a thing into MT, though, do any of the current weblogging tools support tag-based categorization? I’m not entirely sure if that one feature would be enough to tempt me away from MT, but it’s obviously bouncing around my brain enough to make me ask…

Addendum: Just before posting this, I looked at the ‘Keywords’ field in the MT interface. Hmmm. Maybe all we need is a plugin to parse and interact with the keyword field that’s already there? Damn, I wish I knew more about programming…. Ideas, anyone?

Later tonight I may see what resources I can find to toss this idea into the wider MT community and see if some bigger brains than mine feel like poking around with this.

Update: Ben Hammersly is doing something similar, only rather than being an internal categorization system, it uses keywords to link to del.icio.us tags. Not quite what I’m thinking.

A comment there led me to this directory — which might be close to what I’m thinking of, though as the documentation is little more than “put it in your plugins directory”, it’s a little hard to tell what it would actually do.

No solutions yet, but apparently others have at least started looking this direction, so there’s hope…

Update: Another piece of the puzzle, and this from someone who pokes their head in here from time to time: Dan has PHP code for a weighted keyword list. Now, if those could be linked into some sort of category-like listing…

Moose or Mouse?

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The actual story itself is mildly amusing, but what really made me laugh was that when I read the summary on Fark — “Mouse causes auto accident by climbing inside the driver’s pants” — I actually read it as “Moose causes auto accident by climbing inside the driver’s pants”.

Big pants. Or tiny moose. Either way, wouldn’t the antlers get rather uncomfortable?

iTunes “This One-Eyed Man is King” by Legendary Pink Dots, The from the album From Here You’ll Watch the World Go By (1995, 5:12).

New Earth Time

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Via Mike Whybark: New Earth Time.

Their site goes into more detail, but in brief, timezones are a pain in the butt. As the ‘net connects more and more of us in real-time, perceived distances become smaller and smaller (my Flickr contacts page, for instance, has a few people scattered across the US and others in Luxembourg, Singapore, Johannesburg, Brisbane, and Tunis). Rather than having to deal with local time zones and the bother of constantly converting back and forth, NET is an attempt to standardize one global time system.

This isn’t the first time something like this has been put forward, of course. Mike referenced WRLD.time, which I’d not heard of before, and I remember Swatch Internet Time. These projects always interest me, though, and I’d be thrilled if this actually caught on.

Okay, well maybe “thrilled” is a bit much, but it’d at least fall into the “really nifty” category.

The NET site provides a couple different javascript clocks, and pointers to both Windows and Mac clock applications. The Mac software they link to is an old System 9 menu bar extention, so it’s not terribly useful under OS X — but as the JavaScript clocks look fairly simple, it strikes me that it shouldn’t be terribly hard to slap together a Tiger Dashboard widget (and, should such a thing be put together, it seems to be that it would be useful to include a converter, too…). Not that I know the first thing about doing that, aside from the very theoritical basics, but it doesn’t seem like it’d be very difficult.

Then, as long as I’m daydreaming, I wonder how hard it would be to hack around and automatically compute the NET time from the post time of each entry to include that in the dateline of each post on my site…

Visual Halo

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As long as I did manage to come up with working recordable DVDs, I decided to finally follow through with a project I’d had in mind for a while now. Sometime last year I found a repository of videos from Nine Inch Nails, including the uncensored version of “Closer” and the infamous Broken short film. Most of the videos have been available on VHS for a while now, but the DVD version hasn’t been released yet, so I decided to play with iDVD.

I’ve not really poked around with either iDVD or iMovie in the past, as I don’t have any sort of video input other than my iSight. Home movies aren’t exactly something I’m playing with at the moment, in other words. Still, it was really easy to put this project together: opened iDVD, chose an appropriate background theme, tossed in the videos, added background music from iTunes for the different menus, and burn. Nice and easy, and now I’ve got my own DVD of Nine Inch Nails videos — and even when they are officially released on DVD, I’d lay good money down that the collection won’t include the Broken short film, so I’ve got that, too.

Visual Halo main menu

iTunes “Closer to God” by Nine Inch Nails from the album Closer to God (1994, 5:05).