Steerable Headlights

Just when I was starting to adjust to night road lighting - aside from my recent non-sleep, non-eating, high-stress migraine causing week - and they went and fucked it up again.

There was the brief period where they decided that the super-bright blue headlamps were a good idea - and then everyone realized that was d-u-m-b. We went back to the yellow lamps, a cleaned up yellow, but yellow nonetheless.

Today it all ends. Today we have the steerable blue headlamp. Just what I needed - now they can fucking aim.

Bandwidth Galore

So I promised Nate and A-ron last night that I'd set up some redirecting sub-domains for the proboard they set up for King (technically speaking, I offered to host the damn thing on the understanding that someone else would do the database transfer because do the words 'not how i want to spend my sunday night' mean anything to you :P) I also offered to host a photo gallery of any pictures anyone had laying around of him.

So, I thought that before I actually set these up and went any further with it, I should check in on my disk space and my bandwidth usage to make sure that I was still in the clear. My usage has changed drastically over the last few months when I switched to gallery software that can't be hotlinked - the bandwidth went down but as the images came up on the server, the disk usage went up. Anyway, I saw this today and got a chuckle out of it so i thought I would share.



Think i'm good? :P

In any case, if you're interested the sub-domains are king.bitterepiphany.com and stryphe.bitterepiphany.com and, yes, they work with or without the w's. I'm not sure the trickle down is quite ready yet but they are set up and should be operational as soon as my server can get the information out. The offer for server space is still up if someone ambitious wanted me to host it :P

Halloween Lights

In an effort to let things go back to normal and in a natural response to something I rant about every year, thus ends the streak of depressing, king-themed posts. (Not saying they won't be back, just saying i'm ending the streak :P)

I hate the lights people put on their houses. There are some neighborhoods where you can go and find nothing but tastefully decorated homes with an almost elegant air to the lighting. There are neighborhoods you can go and see nothing but stark lawns. My neighborhood is somewhere in the middle. Yes, that's right ladies and gentlemen, welcome to Twinkle-Town.

Now i'm not against the twinkle light. They're cute and they're sparkely and, hey, i used to have some that twinkled along to music. The problem, however, is that in a neighborhood like mine, no one cares that all 10 of their strands of twinkle lights twinkle at different times. There is always one, on a bush somewhere - net lights usually - that looks like the house is undergoing a spontaneous power surge while half of the twinkle lights on the tree in front blink on eight counts - one lone strand hanging in the middle that stays on all the time. Meanwhile, and in the same yard, there is a 6 foot tall inflatable santa illumniated by two spots - one red and one green - and two raindeer made entirely of lights and reebar that flash on and off. Then there's the icicle lighting that runs along the gutters across all of the eaves. Half the strands are blue and half are white, and not in any format or order. They only actually cover 2/3rds of the house and the strand over the living room window is dead. The ones that cross the peak are blinking appaplectically......

I hate the twinkle light installer.

And so, one would ask, why the rant about twinkle lights in the end of October. No one, not even Martha Stewart, is working on getting their christmas decor up yet. And thus we enter the realm of the Halloween Light.

I remember halloween lights from when I was a kid. You saw them in places where you normally wouldn't see an outdoor strand of lights - usually in a classroom when the teacher was trying to be festive and, in my very early teens, my parents bought a ton of them for a halloween party they threw. These were OK. They were a single strands, they all had a shape (a frankenstien head or a skeleton hanging off of the light like a shaped shade.) They didn't twinkle or dance. They didn't do anything.

Perhaps my neighborhood is becoming more ghetto and I just haven't noticed the speed at which it's happening but when I looked out the window last week, I realized that my twinkle light nighbmare was about to start beginnning two months early. Orange net lights - blinking bats - giant inflatable characters - glowing casper door decorations. You have to be fucking kidding me?

Halloween is supposed to be a little bit scary. Jesus, in better years, we hang severed witches heads from posts in the yard - illuminate it with torches along our styrofoam tombstone cemetary. Carved pumpkins and feet upon feet of artificial spider webbing. Hay bales, fake rats, spiders that fall from the ceiling when they register a noise, a ghost that responds to motion and cackles ghoulishly. These things are halloween.

Net lights? Net lights are for christmas time and college dorm rooms. Halloween is about being a little bit spooked - net lights are not spooky! And, in any case, any occasion to let Joe Homeowner put up another strand of lights that he can't seem to plug in at the same time as the other strand sof lights (EXTENSION CORDS PEOPLE!) is not an occasion i'm a fan of.

Please, i'm begging you, don't make me do this again in a month.

Shell-Shocked

I used to be a trooper.

Today, however...today I didn't want to explain that, in the death of a friend, an old friend became a human being again and an even older friend became an ever larger pock mark on society. I don't want to explain what it feels like to have every bad memory - every horrible situation you've ever endured - dragged up in the span of four hours. To stare at one friend in a casket and see another in a closet. To watch a man you love more than anything in the world lose his best friend - his brother - and see a memory standing in a shadow enduring the same pain. To look across the room and see someone and know that the words "how did this get so fucked up" don't even begin to sum up the damage that the course of one evening can do - and then to realize that for all the damage it did, it's finally becoming nothing more than one evening. Or to look at see someone, that for five years of space and time, has neither grown nor changed - to realize that, with him, it will never be just one evening. To watch a mother suffer the grief of losing a son.

I don't know how to write or explain what it feels like to watch as four days pass, stuck on a single pervasive thought; "This wasn't supposed to happen yet - things weren't OK between us yet." I struggle between thinking the things, once intended as jokes, that became a part of my ingrained reality; that King was supposed to live in our guest bedroom in perpetuity - that he would follow Mike anywhere and that meant that he would always be a part of my life. no matter what. There was supposed to be time to work things out. There was supposed to be a time - and it felt so close around the corner - when I would be in a place where my own life didn't keep me too exhausted to deal with his. Things were supposed to go back to normal - they were supposed to go back to the way they were before Sean lied - before King lied.

It isn't that I worry that he didn't understand. I'm sure he did. King, for all the people he knew, knew me well enough to understand all of the reasons I pulled away from him. He knew that my goal wasn't to get away from him, but only to keep my head above water - to get myself to a better place.

I think he knew I loved him.

I say that I think he knew it because things were never the same - things never got back to normal. Things never got back the way they were supposed to be - and it wasn't his fault, it was my choice. Some may have wanted a goodbye or one last conversation - all I wanted was to take back the one warning I ever gave him; don't touch me. It never had anything to do with him, but he respected it nonetheless. King wasn't handed the moniker "hoover" for no reason, and while I'm not eager to return to those days in any quick manner, two years ago I asked and I never rescinded the request.

There are few things I wouldn't give for one more hug.

Static

Walking the line between memoriam and tastelessness is surprisingly difficult. You want to say so many things - yet one of the many hazards of grief is saying something only to realize that it was misunderstood or misinterpreted by a person going through the same process themselves, but I realized, while I was sitting here trying to find pictures or mementos that I don't have any of those pictures that you look at and assume he would want shared. Not that he would want any shared - he used to give me hell for taking his picture. All I have are images like this - that, humiliating as they both might find this story and the fuss I made over chronicling it, this and every other story like it is still quintessential King.

I've known him for five years and you can look back through the depths of bloggy history and discover a story, a great length and detail, of every time he made me cry and every time he made me laugh and every time he made me want to wring his neck and I like that. I like that I can thumb through the pages of a digital history book and see imprints and memories.

Pictures are supposed to say 1000 words but I’m going to rely on this one to say far more than that because, for all my ability toward the obvious yet occasionally profound, I don't have anything near a summation yet.

Spell checked it just for you. :)

Firefly

So...there was the torture epsiode which I really really really ignored...in fact, i fast forwarded through most of it, but then there was the episode where Julie Cooper and Mitchum Huntzburger played a whore and a sherrif. So...wow...

Dramatic Irony

So by virtue of the fact that, despite a new season of TV, there is still not enough to keep my PC running with some eipsode of something entertaining for the 20 hours a day I require it, i've found myself rather impressionable.

So right now i'm watching the world's longest pilot - Firefly. Okay, beef's I have simply on principal? It's a western. It airs on the sci-fi channel. It started with a scene of war and there were needles and guns and other senesless TV violence. The entire thing is done in this horrible Bonanza-esque verbal styling which is driving me mad, but they've done a few things, in terms of cinematography that I appreciate. In watching a lot of ABC and WB lately i've noticed a few things about TV that bother me. First of all, no matter how many people are in the room at any given point, the perosn delivering the set line is the only one speaking. Now I gather that their purpose is to emphasize the spoken line and, naturally, avoid writing dialogue that they don't have to write but it's one of the many things that annoys me about TV.

Naturally, I was impressed when, during some random scene in this god forsaken program, they actually had people in the background carrying on their conversation.

Anywhoo, it's better than nothing, I suppose.

So, Firefly, well, it gets an "I'd rather watch this than gilmore girls re-runs...again."

Anyway, the interesting thing about this that i've noticed is that, having watched like 1/3rd of one episode while Mike was tending to drum lessons with Clayton one night, I like this show considerably more knowing that the main characters survive. I'm not one for suspense, i rpefer to know that no one is going to die or be significantly injured. So thank you, Douglas Adams, for little me know that no more than a sperm whale, a bowl of petunias, anda bruse will be sustained during the progress of this scene - i wish more people would afford me that luxury :P

Guilt, Vomit & Rootbeer

Oh yeah, tonight is not going that well. I'm off to take three...or possibly seven...advil and hope that I can sleep.

Seriously, the more the muscles in my head, shoulders and neck relax, the more i realize that they're completely tense.

DJ RX Rox the C-Span

So we all know about my obsessive love for C-Span, namely that I watch it...constantly...like oxygen. MSNBC ran an article about this guy a few days ago and Mike passed it along to me because he knew that I would be instantaniously obsessed.

thepartyparty.com where DJ RX rocks clips from c-span. Unbelievably excellent - seriously, buy the album, download the album, donate to the site. Hilarious and Excellent :)

Kay's To-Do List

- Call Grandmother. Grovel.
- Update Guestbook Links
- Update Forum Links
- Write up Forum Guidelines for Site Rule's doc
- Bookmarks. Yes, I did forget about those and no, i'm not sorry :P
- Stare sadly at the most recent chapter of Chronicles and wonder why it has only been clicked 8 times. Be sad.
- Find place to stash crappy schwag.
- Get coffee.

Temporary Post...possibly...unless I forget

- Delete this post.

There we go :)

I'm a...Student?

I went to Carthage today to talk with the admissions office about the dreaded spring semester - either poli-sci, philosophy, or lit as an aim to be turned into a cheerful tenured professorship at one of the nations many universities. That is, after i go through a masters and doctoral program. (Ah, joy.) The time has finally come for me to land on my fall back career choice and I can genuinely say that I will be doing it because those who can do and those who can't teach. I am not interesting in pleasing others enough, or doing the drugs required to become a great author. I have no interest in dying of an ulcer by the time i'm 35 for a political career and I have no interest in standing in the unemployment line as long as someone who majored in philosophy would.

I asked all of the odd questions that a person like me asks. "Fuck the dining hall hours. Tell me, are you still getting security through the same company? Have you managed to get that odd, sticky substance off the stairwell in the dorms and is Greg Campbell still on his 'no parking' tear?" Yes, I ask questions that a person with experience would ask and I wasn't all too pleased with the answers. Same security company - and a lot of the same security officers - which is good, because I liked a lot of them. Greg Campbell still hasn't gotten the stick out of his ass regarding parking - though my offer to paint a forest mural on the side of a parking garage still stands. And, no, Michelle informed me that my left shoe is still firmly affixed to the third floor steps.

They have made some other changes though. The massive red doors that made you fully aware that you were walking into Lentz hall are gone. That's kind of sad. I've been walking thorugh those giant red doors since I was 3 and a half. When I last attended Carthage, they'd just finished remods on the new library and it was gorgeous. The old library at the end of Straz, however, was still all caution-tapey. It's gorgeous. They've got great geeked out conference rooms and classrooms in that area - a starbucks. Rock on :) I hope they carry the remod over to the other half of the building :)

The rest of this process leaves me with lots of phone calls but I'm feeling slightly better about making them now that I have the general gist of an answer to my big question: "Who really needs a highschool diploma anyway?" The answer? Stupid people. Fortunately, I don't fall into that category.

Now, i just have to write an essay about how much of an attachment I feel to Carthage. How jarring I found it to see that the red doors, so indicative of Lentz Hall - doors that i've been walking through since my mother was a student in the early 90's - were missing, but that it is a sign of progress and change. And then probably some drivel about how I would like to take part in that progress and change. Who the hell knows, I can bullshit with the best of them and if there is anything I know about Carthage, they love bullshit.

Anywhoo, I've been feeling bad about how little i've been blogging lately and I thought I should make a post of some kind to change that :)

I'm off to stare at my updates and wish they were better.

Are You Happy With Your Wash?

Violence is not the answer. You’ll catch more flies with honey than with vinegar.

I am not happy with my internet service provider. But since it is midnight and I am tired and relatively cranky, I am stuck in limbo because calling them now will only end in me yelling.

I have been patient. I have been understanding. I wanted quietly while they were fallen victim to the day when the internet got bigger than it’s britches and suddenly I couldn’t load images from pix8, photohut, putfile, photobucket or tinypic. I did that in spite of the fact that it brought nearly everything I do on the internet to a grinding halt. Sure I could watch c-span or read news but my day to day usage was stopped. The very site I help run was basically off limits to me for all of the images hosted on one of those sites.

Tonight I noticed some odd and incredibly annoying timeouts and I was patient and understanding because I considered it a temporary thing that would go away – or maybe I just needed to cycle my cable modem and things would be peachy. I am, after all, capable of the standard tech support run around so I waited.

For the second time in two weeks everything I do has skidded to a stop and I am not happy with my wash!

Timeouts on Posting This Count: ||||

Alegbra, PHP and Getting More Than You Bargined For

Jesus christ.

So i'll spare you all the story of how i ended up in this PERL and PHP course in the first place and cut right the to chase. My professor was a math teacher in a former incarnation. I swear to god.

Every single one of his assignments is, more or less, an alegebra problem. The script part - that's easy. Well, barring the fact that I can't expect this book to be good for anything and spend most of my time deferring to the gods that are geeky kids explaining things to toher geeky kids all over the internet but FUCK have I had enough math for today.

Whatever happened to a good old fashioned regular data input script output. Why must it all involve an e-commerace coupon fuctionality?

*cries*

Will work for coffee.