.blindness.

I never signed up for the "real" tumblr because I wanted to host this myself, and I thought it would be nice to hack at it if necessary. So I was running Gelato CMS which seemed like the best open-source PHP tumblr clone. It became apparent that the developer of Gelato wasn't going to develop it any further and a few things had stopped working (due to changes in YouTube and Vimeo embeds, etc.) so I figured I would keep this site "current" on my own.
I didn't want to work in PHP though, so tonight I wrote a gelato clone in Rails. It's a bit of a mess still and I haven't ported over every single feature (such as the commenting, which was only picked up by spammers anyway) but for now the basic functionality is here. I've kept this same crazy theme though i think I'm going to overhaul it at some point, and there will be other things I add as my time allows.

A nightmare; a repetitive loop. I was standing in the bathroom at my parents' house, trying to take a shower. I kept removing my t-shirt and finding that I had another layer on, but it was impossible to fully remove my clothing.

The always-excellent Matt Yglesias has written a post about how the filibuster has become a routine piece of Senate business, and how wrong that is. It's good to see this because I've been confused as to why the press is now referring to cloture votes as if they are the actual vote on a bill. Only 50 votes are needed to pass a bill; it's just that the obstructionist Republicans will attempt to block every single Democrat-written bill, I guess. This is all the more reason why we need to get Al Franken seated ASAP.

"important things with demetri martin" was funny at times and tedious at others. This guy really carefully walks the line between too-cute Wes Anderson style cleverness and really weird, brilliant Steven Wright-style cleverness. And I say this as a big Wes Anderson fan. I think I'll keep watching, but this wasn't totally amazing or anything. I kinda feel like Adult Swim weirdness like Tim and Eric and Xavier: Renegade Angel has raised the comedy bar quite high for me...

"Steelers entering the final year of their contract 2include RB Willie Parker, LB James Harrison, WR Hines Ward, TE Heath Miller, C Justin Hartwig, S Ryan Clark, CB Deshea Townsend, DE Brett Keisel, NG Casey Hampton, K Jeff Reed."

On one of the music mailing lists I'm on, the guy who runs Scat Records announced that he was going away for a few weeks and he needed a house-sitter, but Steelers fans would be preferred. I wrote him back and said I would love to spend a few weeks in Columbus. Then I went back to my endless activity - tracing over the coastlines of all Northern European countries in an atlas, using a mechanical pencil. I noticed some weird fjords in Norway that looked like rifles or something. Then I went there, and saw that on this mountain cliff there were three giant telescopes mounted, which is what looked like rifles in the coastline. I walked inland a bit, along a wooded path, and came to a fence. Mounted on top of the fence were four wicker baskets, where local farmers were encouraged to place extra crops to freely exchange. The four baskets were for blueberries, blackberries, eggplant, and squash. All of them were full, but the fruit/veg inside were somewhat misshapen (though huge). I took a few blueberries that were the side of golfballs, some bigger, and strangely elongated and ugly. I knew my partner would be excited at free blueberries, and huge ones too. Before I could see her again I had to fly home to see my parents. I left the blueberries with a note. and then suddenly was at my parents' house. I was sitting on the front porch and my Dad's two sisters had come over to visit. My one aunt was showing me her passport, which she had modified to include a big fold-out section with photos of the entire family at different points in our lives, though badly photoshopped for comedic effect. My aunt had an afro in her own photo, and the pictures of me from high school were altered in some strange way that I wasn't very comfortable with. She had spent a lot of money to do this. I reached for my own passport and then realised that it had not been stamped or even checked at any point in the journey between Norway and the US. I became panicked at this but my mother laughed and handed me the phone. It was her friend, who needed help with her broadband setup. I was not in the mood to do this, and felt it would be impossible to explain over the phone anyway. I told her I would come over some time to see it, a bit rudely, and hung up. In the meantime my father and his side of the family were spraying water around the yard with the garden hose, and everyone was lounging around in pools of soapy water in the grass. I felt disgusted at them all, and started to go up to my old room. My mother stopped me to say we were all going out to eat but I told her I had too much work to do at my day job and i wasn't hungry anyway. In my room, there were still some dirty clothes on the floor from when I had last visited over a year ago.

Mi Ami - "Watersports" (Quarterstick) -- Quite a different beast from Russ Waterhouse's brilliant Watersports project, this is guitar-heavy indie-funk-dance (enough hypens!) with some dark, psychedelic moments. The obvious comparisons are New Age Steppers or Rip, Rig and Panic, but maybe that's too easy; Mi Ami has the punk edge too, but maybe it's more of a punk-after-30-years edge. Some of the guitar parts are total shredding spikes of noise and the vocals extend into the yelping arena quite a bit. I think I like it; I think I could end up listening to this a lot.

I'm not sure who's walking into a bigger mess - Obama having to clean up after 8 years of Bush, or me coming back from 2 days abroad to realise how much of a mess I left the kitchen after Sunday's AFC Championship culinary feast. Here's a fantasy: Geithner can't get confirmed cause of his tax problem so Obama appoints Jon Corzine instead!!! It won't happen but it would be give this progressive a bit more confidence.

I have 71 .rm files I want to convert to .mp3. for file in *.rm; newname=`basename $file .rm` mplayer -quiet -vo null -vc dummy -ao pcm:file=$newname.wav $newname.rm && lame $newname.wav $newname.mp3 && rm $newname.wav; done

I was involved in some sort of thrilling hostage situation at a public library where I worked. I did the IT support and someone was holding me and my staff at gunpoint. The library was a huge circular tower, maybe 30 floors, and were somewhere around floor 23 and I needed to do something to a server on the 26th floor. The gunmen were controlling exactly what I could do, but they also needed me so they were letting me on the server a bit. Somehow I "escaped" and went down to the street level. The front door of the library was a giant bank vault door that opened inward. There was a small elephant that they kept chained just inside the doorway; she was trained to close the door when people left. The library was deserted and I left, but freed the elephant. It ran out of the building and into the streets, and also a tiger appeared from somewhere.

I was running the camera/sound on a Louis Theroux episode. Louis and I were in a big muddy tunnel that was semi-underground and there were rats everywhere. We were done filming for the day so I suggested we go have a drink somewhere. The woman he was interviewing came along and we went back to Louis' flat, which was small and kinda crummy. The woman's name was Stoney Farnsworth and I made a joke about her sounding posh. Louis looked bad - he started to talk about these problems he was having with his roommates. Then, the 3 roommates came into the kitchen, where we were sitting. They were kinda tough, ugly people, and they confronted Louis about something. Stoney and I went into the other room cause it was getting awkward and talked about something for awhile. Then we went into the bathroom, where Louis was crying. His roommates had put him in a wig and dressed him all grunge, and he looked like Kurt Cobain.