06.29.00 >> HTML is not sexy. It is not a language of romance. You cannot snuggle up to your honeypot and call them "Mon petit document object model." On the other hand, you can set the valign attribute to "top" or "bottom." There's some mixed messages here.

06.28.00 >> I think Zannah and I are going to storm the ABC studios and demand to be on this show. The computer game rocks, and if this finally sees broadcast, I may have to start watching TV again. (courtesy o' /usr/bin/girl)

I talked to Felix this morning. He's healthy. Chipper, even. Yay! We're going to attempt to get together for the 4th o'July. Yayer!

It's Wednesday, which means you point your IRC client to irc.skunkworks.cx and join #blogirc for the random fun starting around 7pm CDT. Pounce!

06.27.00 >> Happiness is a friend coming to visit and offering to bring Thai food because you're sick. (And I went to the doc today - strep throat. Yay.)

It's twenty past midnight and I'm finally getting to my bloody dinner. Soup. Soup because I have either tonsillitis or strep throat, and now because of too much stuff I had to get done today. This is going to be a long, journally rant/minddump. Enjoy it if you can.

It's not really a surprise to me that I got sick, since I've been stressing over a) finishing this web site project I've been hired to do, and doing a meticulous job of it so that they'll offer to hire me for full time work, which will help in b) figuring out where I'm going to live in a month, which is made difficult enough since I'm stuck in traffic for 2 to 3 hours a day, so when I get home I have no energy whatsoever for anything, let alone sifting through apartment listings, and c) day to day administrivia; bills and how the hell am I going to pack stuff for the move? I'm just surprised that this sore throat, that appeared Thursday, went away Friday, and resurfaced a bit Sunday, chose Monday to explode.

Saturday at the faire was a lot of fun, although I had spent all of Friday night trying to track down people who had said that they wanted to go, but all ended up scarfering on me. Going to the faire alone ended up being a good move, as I was free to leave when I wish and do whatever I wanted afterwards. As I have several friends and acquaintences that work at the faire, or are regular visitors, I get to participate in the proceedings a little bit without actually having to work there. That, and if there was any tourist trap anywhere that's Queer Friendly, it's the faire.

Even the afternoon rain that cleared the faire out of most of the visitors didn't bring me down, as it started when I was with Felix, so I got stuck in his shop waiting for the rain to end. Felix is this tailor (he'd say seampster) from Minnesota that started flirting with me a couple years ago. A very sweet guy, but since I usually go to the faire in a group, I never get to spend more than a few minutes with him to say hello and to catch up on what's new, before he gets a customer he has to attend to or my friends get impatient and want to move on. This time, with the rain, I got to spend a happy afternoon being innocently affectionate and flirtatious. But:

I wish I had known this sore throat was going to explode on me, or I wouldn't have kissed Felix and shared his mug. Now the poor lad is going to get sick, I know it, and he and his store crew will have to deal with it if it hasn't gone away by next weekend. Fuck. I feel horrible. Poor Felix.

Sunday went okay as well, despite having to fight my way past two car accidents (one on LSD, one on the Stevenson) to get into the city, then finding no prospects for parking that didn't involve having to move my car by 6pm. Over 350,000 people showed up for Chicago's Pride Parade, which lasted two, maybe two and a half hours. Fortunately, I had been invited to a party at an apartment right on the parade route, so we got a second-floor view of the parade and a place to escape the crowds. (Until my friend Laurenn and I decided that we needed to get some swag and finaggled our way almost up to the front of the crowd.) Now, I have to say that I don't understand what all the complaining abou pride events is about. Take the parade: Sure, the commoditization of the gay identity is lamentable, but c'mon. It's a fucking parade. If you're looking for intellectual discourse and political action, you're in the wrong place. We can do that sort of thing the rest of the year. At the parade, we're here to see the pretty floats and to yell at folks to throw us some decent swag. Just like any other parade, really. It's fun. Relax, already.

(There's also that whole visibility to others and to our own isolated kind thing, but what the hell, I'm not in the mood to get into that here just now.)

So I got to hang out with some coworkers (and I have to say that it's so refreshing to work in a place that, instead of being the Token Homo and wondering who I can be out to, the attitude is more along the lines of "oh, you too?"), watch people in the crowds (there was one guy that looked a lot like my asshole-ex, except he had hair even more reminiscient of David Bowie circa "Let's Dance", making him even more a look-alike), and go through my swag towards the end (key chains, a mango smoothie, condoms and lube, a Blue Meanies sticker, invites to two separate showings of Rocky Horror, candy). I helped tidy up the apartment a bit, and decided to walk the 13 blocks back to my car when I saw that the line to get on the El was a block long and going nowhere. On the walk back, I realized I had twenty minutes to move my car before I could be ticketed, and my internal soundtrack switched over to that of Run Lola Run. Weird.

But now I have this verdammte throat infection. Today (yesterday, it's now 1:44am) at work, I started feeling like hell - even moreso than I did when I woke up - and decided to have a sick day the next day. A good move, after my sinuses clogged up and I became a phlegm machine. I should be asleep, considering that I haven't gotten more than six hours of sleep on any given night this past couple of weeks. Good night.

06.26.00 >> You fucking rock, Jess.

Nik deserves an award. I don't know which award, but he's earned it.

They finished the first rough map of the human genome. Whether or not this means they'll be able to stop idiotdrivers from spreading, I don't know.

In the meantime, Yahoo! gets wise and taps Google as it's new default search engine, to back up the human-generated directories.

The inimitable Joe Clark brings us Calque-o-Rama, a semicontest that would be even more fun for us all if uReach hadn't started sucking (no, I haven't had time to find a way around that problem yet). Anyway, translate early, translate often. Chatting with Joe about it last night, I started mangling "Safety Dance" in German:

Wir können tanzen, wann wir wollen.
Wir können deine Freunde hinterverlassen.
Und deine Freunde tanzen nicht,
Und wenn sie tanzen nicht,
Dann sind sie keine Freunde von mir...

Does Jay piss you off with his ability to make beautiful pages? Yeah, me too. *grump*

06.24.00 >> Today I'm at the Renaissance faire. Yes, I have a costume. Yes, you can laugh.

06.23.00 >> A friend pointed me today towards blather, which is a collaborative site connecting thoughts about a word, and linking each word in a thought to other words that have thoughts connected to them. Very cool experiment.

So my pizza just showed up, but the delivery guy hit the doorbell twice then knocked, like it was urgent or as if he had been trying for a few minutes. I could see the first, as it had been raining, but it's stopped. I could see the latter, but he had just arrived. Why all the fuss? "Oh my god! I'm here and it's stopped raining!" Yeah, S.O.S., mate.

06.22.00 >> I've kinda gotten over the whole talking-about-weblogs-in-my-weblog thing, but I still gotta shout out for my goombahs: the WireMommy Halfhearted Weblog is alive again after a month-long absence. Woo!

It was really bad hummus! It wasn't good, flavorful hummus, nor was it good, plain hummus. It was hummus that was trying to be flavorful and failing miserably. A truly evil attempt at food.

It looks like my updates aren't being noticed by Weblogs.com, so please do not forget me in this time of trouble if you use that service to check up on us folks.

Why, when I do a search on Ditto.com for "navel orange," do I get this? That's creepy, and it's just not right.

06.20.00 >> Chicago's Adler Planetarium is hosting an exhibit of photos taken by the Hubble Space Telescope for the next few months. They seem to be really breathtaking photos, I think. The thumbnails are too small for me to tell at 1024x768.

I must be slipping. Stereolab released a new EP a month ago and I only found it yesterday. How can I be a proper groupie at this rate?

To continue the post-punk meme I touched on a couple days ago (and spurred on by this month's meanderings from Dan o'UltraSparky), I came up with something that makes me very glad that I don't design "inspirational materials" that you see in less mindful offices, or on the folders of young schoolchildren. Think of a kitten, dyed blue, and dangling from a branch by one paw. Below it, a caption: "Hang in there, fucker."

What's really sad is that the name that popped into my head for this kitten was Post-Punk Participle. The only way I can go any lower is if I explained the name. (If you don't get it, just don't worry about it.)

Speaking of UltraSparky, the conversation with Peter o'Proven nearly got me in trouble at my gig today, as I was giggling uncontrollably. Or it would have nearly gotten me in trouble, if there had been anyone around who cared what I was reading on the side, which there wasn't.

For all my fellow pagan folks (if there's any of you reading... probably, right?) who like the accoutrements, there's E-Witch, which is like eBay, but more witchily inclined. My favorite section (or it would be, if there was actually any merchandise) is the technopagan category.

06.18.00 >> I have cargo shorts. This is great. I like having my thigh being a pocket. Now, in order to get cargo shorts in my size, I had to go to the Gap. Now, I know I should be above brand snobbery, but the post-punk portion of my brain is going "Gah! The Gap! How could you! When did you get processed!?" Then again, the pulp fiction explorer portion that wants to traverse the little known areas of both Internet and globe, that holds fliegerbrille as necessary travel equipment, is saying, "Good show! A fine choice! Now all we need is travel arrangements to Chichen Itza and we're off!" I think I need to repartition my brain or something.

So we have similar last names, and we share some genetic traits. Yeah, I can see it.

Happy Father's day to my dad and newly-be'dadded brother, and Happy 1st Anniversary to my roommates Sam and Genna. May all your years work out as well as the first. Maybe not with the kooky gay roommate that was responsible for bringing you two together hanging around all the time, but... you know. :)

uReach can blow me. They've switched the way they deliver wav files of voice mail messages or something, because now when I save a wav file, Quicktime can't play it back unless it has a cache file to accompany it. I'm wondering if this is something weird with IE5/Mac or if they've done it to draw people back to their site (or some other inscrutable reason). What this means to you, dear reader, is that my plans for the second Tally Sound Files have been thwarted! I'll see what I can do to work around this. There must be a way.

06.17.00 >> If it seems that I've been pretty link-deficient this past week or two, it's because I have been Real Busy(tm) doing all sorts of important freelancing business, and therefore not surfing the web to bring you new stuff. Except the stuff I'm posting to Web Queeries and being too lazy to copy here. Today I did even less non-surfing, as I slept most of the day, to catch up on the sleep I hadn't been getting over the week because I had been Real Busy(tm). Oh, and the trip to the karaoke restaurant last night until 4am. That too. Why are you reading this?

Oh, and John had to go and give it all away, so now we have to kill him, or whatever it is that Big Kahuna KamehemeDan deems as a fit punishment.

And I haven't read MetaFilter in perhaps three weeks. I'm scared of the swamp I'll have to wade through to catch up. Eep!

06.15.00 >> Belatedly, I am Ruthenium, a "hard, white metal. It does not tarnish at room temperatures, but oxidises in air at about 800°C. The metal is not attacked by hot or cold acids or aqua regia, but when potassium chlorate is added to the solution, it oxidises explosively." Boom-skala-boom!

So apparently yesterday was connect-with-other-Chicago-webloggers day. At lunch, I ran into Dan, and though we were both in a state of out of it, we discussed pushing back the weekend-long CHIxLM shindig we've been planning until July, as the rest of June seems hectic for all involved. Email to/from Paul in the afternoon, and then that evening, the overworked John popped into #blogirc. We found that we both work within the same area that Everybody Else seems to work, and discussed the possibility of dinner one of these evenings. Ended up talking on the phone for a few minutes. It would all be so fabulous, except it's really just a bunch of webgeeks running around frantically being geeky. That's cool, though.

06.14.00 >> Tonight is #blogirc night. IRC over to irc.skunkworks.cx (port 6667), join the channel #blogirc. Go nuts.

Yesterday's Traffic Encounter: Police Out Jogging. With a full procession. Motorcycle cops, squad cars, a S.W.A.P. bus, you'd have thought it was the mayor. Nice thighs on some of the joggers, though.

Alert reader Andy points out that there actually is a subway station at State and Harrison, which is only a block north of Balbo. I had forgotten it was there... the corner is dominated by the South Loop Club and a church/missionary type building. No, wait, that's State and Balbo. State and Harrison is the parking garage and the high school. Oy... Foot in Mouth Award goes to me, especially since I didn't live on Harrison and Balbo, it was Harrison and Polk. Oops. (Hey, it was only for eight months.)

06.12.00 >> Zannah's mention on Friday of how Stockholm's Ikea is putting want ads on the bathroom walls reminded me of a bit of bathroom graffiti I had seen in college. First, someone scratched:

          PEOPLE
          SHOULD
          FUCK
          MORE

Which later got changed to:

          PEOPLE
          SHOULD
spend big BUCKs on
          MORE computers

Granted, it was the graphics/computer animation department.

So I'm driving into work today, heading up Archer to avoid the endless construction zone that is I55, and at the Pulaski light I'm behind this old geezer. Now, mind you, I don't have anything against the aged. But if you're a little addle-brained, regardless of the cause, if you obstruct the flow of traffic, I will mock you and say rude, unkind things.

So I'm behind this geezer, and the light turns green, and the geezer goes, then stops. Geezer had not noticed the funeral procession turning from Pulaski onto Archer. For some reason, the procession is turning from the right lane of north-bound Pulaski into the left lane of northeast-bound Archer. We can't pass them politely; our options are to wait or to bust through the line. Geezer decides to wait -- good choice, really -- but that puts him, me, and whoever was behind me in the middle of the intersection, sitting ducks for when the light turns red. Which it does. Fortunately, no one honks at us, the last car in the procession makes the turn, and we head down Archer.

This should have sent me on my happy way, but at the next stoplight, 49th St/Avery, there's another funeral procession, now blocking the funeral procession that was blocking us back on Pulaski. Nice. It was almost like "Dueling Banjos," except more somber.

The moral of this story is that I'm glad the folks I'm freelancing for at the moment show some understanding as to why I don't always make it into work on time.

Hmm. This is turning into TrafficWeblog, isn't it? Considering that's where I've been spending an appreciable portion of my life lately, I'm not too surprised.

06.10.00 >> Nothing there yet, but be an early adopter anyway.

Relaxation is good. Today was tense, but I'm relaxing now with The Matrix. I love watching this movie from the point of view of a Chicagoan. I know (and I know that you know) that this wasn't filmed in Chicago (and you know that it was filmed in Sydney, Australia), but what I love is all the little inconsistencies in the locations they name. Meet us under the Wells Street bridge. Under it? You'd be in the Chicago River. We need an exit. / Got one. A subway station. State and Balbo. For eight months I lived right on the corner of State and Balbo (okay, Plymouth and Balbo, but Plymouth is something like 16W on the grid, where State is 0E/W), and there's no subway station there. A couple blocks south, sure, there's one for the red line, but not on that corner. Okay, so I'm a perfectionist.

Speaking of needing to relax, I've been writing a lot about all the running around I've been doing. I've been freelancing near to full time, and the ad agency, should they decide they like me and my work, could hire me on full time. I've been pondering if I'd like it there or not. The people are very cool, sure, but would I enjoy the work? I realized something tonight: I've been able to get out of bed for this job. Sure, with traffic sucking as it has this last week, I only made it there exactly on time once (yesterday), but I can get out of bed for it. And now it's clear. I'm enjoying my work.

Gods, it's been so long since I've been able to say that. Months. Almost a year. It's over; I'm alive again.

Happy Birthday to my roommate Genna! Woop woop woop!

06.09.00 >> More voice mail mayhem, this time from Stef: Fiendish Thingymix!

Happiness is a 128MB RAM chip for my laptop that finally arrived today. I have earned this.

06.08.00 >> Ohfercryinoutloud! Neale parodies the Cease and Desist letter. I feel better now. Oh happy day!

[Update to below] Bad: Tai Chi was cancelled. Worse: Because my teachers' Nana is on her deathbed. :( I'm telling ya, it's hard to maintain a positive attitude in the midst of all this.

Today's activities include not developing psychokinetic powers so I won't destroy Chicago in my fury. It took me two fucking hours to get to work today. Two! Hours! Traffic is getting worse and worse, radio's reporting of travel times is shoddy at best, and at this rate, soon it won't even be worth it to get out of bed. I am so bloody tense right now. At least I have Tai Chi Chih class tonight to work it out of my system. But, if objects start moving around your desk or things suddenly explode, I apologize in advance. Also, to those who have emailed me recently, I'm behind on email again, so it'll be a few days before I get back to ye. Special thanks to those who congratulated me on my recently new uncledom! (All two of you, but still, thanks.) I'm thinking maybe I should become a Pokémon: Bitterjase, I choose you! *grumble*

06.07.00 >> Wow, maybe they should have put the warning that the photo was of a graphic nature before they showed the picture. Just maybe! Ya think?! (Warning. The link points to a story containing a photo of a graphic nature. Not for the squeamish.)

06.04.00 >> There's this ringing in my left ear that still hasn't gone quiet. It's 20 past five in the evening and I'm just now waking up. And I'm still tired. I smell all sweaty and I feel gross. Someone tell me why clubbing is fun again?

06.03.00 >> Ask the Head. Have you had recent dental work? Remember, these questions require electricity. The answer is yes. Zappa's not really dead, is he? Sure, in Hollywood. But not for you. Spooky.

06.02.00 >> I am so tired.

I'm working in-office for a client on one of their client's new website, and I was supposed to be there this morning by 10am. I left home at 9:10am, I can make it to near-downtown and find somewhere to park in 50 minutes, can't I?

HA HA HA HA HA HA HA No. Because of idiotdrivers and construction, it still took me over an hour to get to the office, then I drove around for 25 minutes looking for a parking space before leaving it on the street with the emergency lights on so I could tell my client that I wasn't really as late as I seemed. Dropped my stuff off, went back down, drove around for another five or ten minutes before finally finding a space had opened up... blah. Traffic on the way home was no picnic, either. I need a drink. And I don't drink. I have to go to the store to get some hamburger buns so I can cook dinner and quarters so I can do laundry, but I have no energy to do these things just yet.

The good news is that Adam is back, and he found a GLAAD alert which details what all the Eminem brouhaha is about.