Larry's Self-Indulgent Web Log

This may be the last post I make using Blogger. I've decided my heart belongs to LiveJournal. I've posted my two most recent entries to my journal there. Eventually I'm going to figure out a way to pack up all of the entries I've stored on Blogger and move them to LJ.

I had to shut the puppy and kitty into two separate rooms in preparation for receiving a grocery delivery sometime in the next hour and a half. I feel like a heel. To get Cole into the second bedroom, I got him all excited about his favorite toy (a stuffed toy duck that squeaks), threw it in the room, and then closed the door when he chased it in there. Okay, listen, we have to resort to this kind of trickery because he's such a pill about it if he knows he's going to be shut in a room. But still... I feel like a butt-head. Oh well. He'll get a nice yummy dog treat after the groceries come.

Hmmm, and then just as I was about to post that paragraph above... The groceries came! How's that for timing?

Well, there's another load off my mind. I finally filed my taxes. It's the third time I've used TurboTaxWeb to do so, but I think it's also the first time I've been able to file completely electronically. I didn't even have to sign a piece of paper and mail it in, as I had to do the last couple of times. Gotta love technology.

Good grief. Two cars towed in two days.

The first one was semi-planned. A friend of mine wants to borrow my old Chevy Spectrum, which needed a new battery and new brakes. Since it wouldn't start, and I was kind of afraid to drive it even if it could start, I had it towed. It was something I'd been putting off for a while, so it was good to get it over with. That was Monday night.

Then last night, I stopped at a Chevron station to gas up my Insight. It wouldn't start. The dashboard would just go dark when I turned the key. This had happened briefly on the trip back up from Oregon Sunday night, so I figured if I tried enough times, it would eventually start. Nope. Had to call Honda Care and have them send out a tow truck. (Next time I need to stress very loudly that they need to send a flat-bed tow truck instead of a front-wheel-lift truck. The low front cowling on the Insight is easy to scrape up with a wheel lift, and there's no place to stick the magnetic-mount tail lights since it's an aluminum car body.)

This time, it turned out to be a bad starter (a new one is due to arrive at the dealership's service shop and be installed tomorrow). But I have to wonder how many more times I'm going to have the Insight die on me before my warranty runs out. This is the second time I've had to have it towed due to this sort of thing, and I've had it for only less than a year.

Inarticulateness sucks.

My friend "cyrano" used to have this way of pronouncing "cool" (the interjection) as "kyool" (consonant "y"). That was years ago. Mysteriously, one of my co-workers has picked up this habit, seemingly from out of nowhere.

Two things happened yesterday that made me a lot more impressed with LiveJournal.

First, I discovered that not only does it have a published client/server protocol specification to make it friendly to geeks like me, but also someone has written a module in Perl (my favorite programming language) that makes it a lot easier to write Perl programs that use the protocol.

Second... I found out about a bug in LiveJournal that another user discovered. When I wrote to Brad Fitzpatrick (LiveJournal's creator) about how it definitely looked like a bug that needed fixing, I was expecting him to say he didn't have time to fix it right away--but what I didn't expect is that he would also point me in the direction of the source code so I could fix it myself if I had the time (also offering a suggestion or two on how to fix it). Okay, that really shouldn't have been such a surprise--it says right there on LiveJournal's front page that it's all open-source (how did I miss seeing that?). Anyway, I did have the time to fix the bug, so I did. I posted a message on the development team's board announcing it and asking if anyone could check my work. But Brad already sounds pleased with how it looks and says he'll be testing it himself tomorrow.

Stuff like this doesn't happen with Blogger. I think my days with Blogger are numbered.

As I was coming back from lunch in Pioneer Square today, I walked past Metzker's Maps on First Avenue. They had a map on display in the window that blew me away. It was a Mercator-projection world map drawn by James Plakovic. Rather than using lines and colors, however, he used musical notes on a huge orchestral-sized score. It looked like legitimate music to me. Amazing. Yes, I found an on-line store that sells this map.

I suppose it was only a matter of time before I got a spam like this one:

Minister Charles Simpson has the power to make you a LEGALLY ORDAINED MINISTER within 48 hours!!!! 7

BE ORDAINED NOW!

As a minister, you will be authorized to perform the rites and ceremonies of the church!!

WEDDINGS
MARRY your BROTHER, SISTER, or your BEST FRIEND!!
Don't settle for being the BEST MAN OR BRIDES' MAID
Most states require that you register your certificate (THAT WE SEND YOU) with the state prior to conducting the ceremony.

FUNERALS
A very hard time for you and your family
Don't settle for a minister you don't know!!
Most states require that you register your certificate (THAT WE SEND YOU) with the state prior to conducting the ceremony.

BAPTISMS
You can say "WELCOME TO THE WORLD!!!! I AM YOUR MINISTER AND YOUR UNCLE!!"
What a special way to welcome a child of God.

FORGIVENESS OF SINS
The Catholic Church has practiced the forgiveness of sins for centuries
**Forgiveness of Sins is granted to all who ask in sincerity and willingness to change for the better!!

And so on, and so forth, ad nauseam.

I drove to the Park & Ride this morning. When I turned on the radio, I unwittingly bore witness to an historic moment (for better or worse) for Seattle public radio. Cheryl Waters was doing a show from the KCMU studios on the University of Washington campus, and talking to John in the Morning (do you suppose it's his real name?) as he gave a cell-phone play-by-play of himself as he approached and entered their new studios near Seattle Center. He bid Cheryl goodbye, hung up the phone, someone somewhere threw a switch, and he was broadcasting from the new studios of the radio station formerly known as KCMU--now known as KEXP. As an added flourish, he made his first song "Lust for Life" by Iggy Pop.

I know one immediate effect this will have on what the station plays. They won't be able to use any of the great station IDs they've been saving up over the years from celebrities of various stripes. My favorite (recounted from memory): "This is Graham Chapman of Monty Python, and I almost always listen to KCMU, Seattle. And, to several goats. And, to a cat... And to my aunt, who lives in Brighton."

There is something that makes me nervous about the whole thing. Apparently this big change is due to a new working relationship with the Experience Music Project, which, like Seattle's still-under-construction football stadium, is regarded by a large chunk of the local population as Paul Allen's personal multi-million-dollar sandbox.

(Speaking of the football stadium, that reminds me of one of my favorite jokes, originally from Clark Humphrey. I think he wrote that he would like to see Royal Brougham Way renamed to Long Street or Long Avenue, something like that. That way the new home of the Seahawks could have an official street address of 4th and Long.)

Aha. The timestamp bug is apparently a known problem. I guess I was making things worse by going back and editing that post. Well, anyway, you should see it here in about 25 minutes or so. ;-)

Blogger's clocks are really screwy today. My previous post was made at about 10:11. The timestamp said 11:11. I shrugged it off as a daylight-savings-time misconfiguration. Now I'm looking at my private editing view of the entry, and it says 12:11. Very, very strange. (By the way, my watch reads 11:31 as I make this post.)