Mar 2002, 98 entries

The 25th year of life during the first 27 year cycle. The Queen of Clubs is “a symbol for a positive and strong will. Her quest for knowledge is insatiable, and they are impatient and intolerant of ignorance or mental laziness in others.”http://metasymbology.com/qot.htm

Given that life moves in 27 year cycles, two cycles would be 54 years. Incidentally, 54 is the number of cards in a deck, counting jokers.

This implies that every year has a card associated with it. Using our best judgement, Rick and I determined that the years should go in this order:

Age 1-13: The Hearts.
Age 14-26: The Clubs.
Age 27: The first joker.
Age 28-40: The Diamonds
Age 41-53: The Spades
Age 54: The second joker.

Repeat.

The current year for me, it appears is the Queen of Clubs.

A friend of mine chooses to think of his life in 27 year cycles. I think it’s a great idea, since 27 is the year rock stars tend to die. Kurt Cobain, the most recent. We’re both 25 now, meaning we have 2 years left in our cycle. This is convenient because I plan on completing the book in my 27th year, opening up the next 27 years for an entirely different project. K also plans on having her first exhibit around the same time. Yesterday we decided that we’d make the big move to New York City in our 27th year. It’s all I’ve been able to think about since.

I’ve remained blissfully ignorant of the inner workings of xml and the process of integrating it with perl, until tonight. I just haven’t wanted to learn, but now that I have, it all seems so strangely simple. It’s that same barrier that most people have with html, I think. Anyway, now, the amazonid module will cache all requests in xml, and check the cache before pinging the amazon site for the info. I’ll have to set it up so that the cache is updated frequently enough, but that info isn’t very dynamic, so it doesn’t need to be too often. Cool, eh?

Also, I’m storing the asin information in a public directory /xml so that others can feel free to use it too, if they so desire (and are too lazy to scrape amazon’s site). It probably won’t be much use until it has a larger selection of asins, however, I won’t ever come anywhere close to having a comprehensive selection. I wonder how difficult it would be to circumvent Amazon’s stubborn reluctance of opening up a way for people to more easily gleen item information from the site by creating a network of sites that store asin information in xml? I wonder if they’d fire me for doing something like that?

This page is a simple imitation of a friend’s website that checks kexp.org’s playlist and then checks amazon for some album info if it exists.

This is just a test for the experimental [amazonid|0375412530] syntaxThere’s additional item information down here in the footnotes… or at least there’s supposed to be. Carpe!:

My top book recommendation at the moment is: Back When We Were Grownups: A Novel.

Basically, this new tag take an asin and checks amazon for relevant asin info. It’ll be pretty slow right now since there’s no caching of the information, but that’ll change if I find this useful at all.

Wow, it actually works. That’s amazing! Now, what should I do with it, if anything?

Noam Chomsky is often accused of being an anarchist. I need to learn more about the subtleties of anarchic societies, as they’ll become a key part of the book in part 2.

I prefer to stick to the general convention of only capitalizing proper nouns. I’m a little torn about capitalizing nodes that are actually features, like Recent Comments, but I think it makes sense, since in a sense they are the names of the features, and therefore are proper nouns. Everything else, lower case.

This node has come under some abiguity because now there are two books. Up until about November of 2002, “the book” was The Most Beautiful One, but after November of 2002, “the book” might also be Sister Cities, renamed Man Versus Himself. Make your best guess.

created and destroyed over a dozen times since 1999.

My history on the web goes something like this:

Had a journal at diaryland that lasted from October to December of 1998. Got kicked off for impersonating Andrew.

Bought my first domain, ianomalous.coma play on words since my diaryland diary was anonymous.diaryland.com, and a really bad idea. I met Stephen and used the Journaling Script, an early version of diary-x. Using the Journaling Script, kv and I started something called the “people pages” where we allowed diarists to write about each other in what quickly became a great way of insulting everyone you knew. I destroyed it after a couple months, and all 1000 or so members disappeared into the ether (from my perspective).

Got tired of the horrible domain name at ianomalous (see The Great American Url for domain name choosing advice) and moved to Mockerybird in December of 1999. There I tried the journal format for a couple more months, then moved to the increasingly popular weblog format. I felt like there needed to be a better way of creating content than around time, so around December of 2001 I temporarily tried an experimental wiki-style manifesto format that was really confusing before I got discouraged and moved back to a weblog.

Then, in February of 2002, I erased everything and started with a clean server. Building from scratch, I spent the next two months slowly designing and creating the current iteration of Mockerybird, this wiki-weblog-novel hybrid, that, instead focusing on time, focuses on the node, the word. We’ll see how long it lasts.

Where I live, although not where I’ve done a lot of my writing. The first part was written here, but everything past that has been written in Kentucky, Laguna Beach, and Top Pot.

I figured out the crontab business, so hopefully email subscriptions will begin to be sent out (full of bugs and half-finished copy) on the 59th minute of every hour.

5:14, update: didn’t work the first hour… I fixed a few things, and we’ll check back at 6. (I couldn’t do the 12th minute due to some unforeseen issues with the mysql db, that only allows me to retrieve updates within the last physical hour, not the last 60 minutes…)

6:18, update 2: okay, much better. I must warn you, yes you, that you may get some extra emails during the day while I test this.

Nonsense is fascinating to me, because it requires such a stretching of our thinking process to exist within nonsense. Usually, when unexpected, it annoys and irritates us, but I think when intentionally seeking it, it has a cleansing side-effect for our thoughts. It’s like the apple-juice and castor oil diet. Of course, it’s the mortal enemy of logic, and in the book, it’s Mrs. Remington’s mental state.

This will be Francie’s strong-suit, and her weapon against the other housemates.

Everything written by people other than me is copyrighted to them, of course. Everything else, however, is free for you to steal and copy as long as it was written or designed by me, with one exception.

The categories, nodes, and writing that live under story are not entirely up for grabs. Feel free to steal any half-baked ideas, mixed metaphors, transparent characters, disposable plots, tired settings, removable components, half-assed caricatures of daydreamed foes, etc, basically feel free to copy anything EXCEPT for the exact words that are written. Everything else is yours, I hope you do use it to your heart’s content and your soul’s benefit. My hope is that someday soon the code that I’ve written for the backend of this site will be yours for the taking as well.

Phew! The email subscriptions tool is all set to go, I just need to hook it up to a cron job to run hourly, daily, and weekly. Quite snazzy, I must say.

Try not to pluralize node names when creating them, or linking to them, since that will most likely confuse people in the long run. (Of course, this node is pluaralized, but that’s because it wouldn’t make sense otherwise.) If you’re linking to a node that doesn’t exist yet, use this syntax [node|nodes], so that the word nodes actually links to the node node.

So, for example, here’s a link to themes.