01.15.00 >> Prolific has a new hairstyle! It is good! Go enjoy it! ....Why is she linking me with all these sites that look better than mine? (Not that I mind. Thanks, Prol!)

Hot damn, Sam, it really does say lemon bioflavonoids.

01.14.00 >> Our network was down today when our gateway went ongepotchket on us. Repeated calls to our provider got us nowhere until they saw that it really was a problem on their end. Oops. More updates tomorrow.

I woke up and was doing a little pre-work surfing, and the You're Not Really on Fire Alarm went off. The YNRo Fire Alarm is what alerts you to a potential fire in the building you live in, even if you live in the unit at the very end and it's on the opposite end of the building, or even if it's just some idiot doing something dumb that set off their fire alarm, like baking aluminum in their microwave. The roommates and I got dressed and trudged out into the cold to see no smoke and no flames. Five minutes later, Maintenance lets us know we can go back in. Good morning to you, too. Better safe than crisp, I suppose.

01.13.00 >> According to Reuters, Bill Gates steps down as CEO of Microsoft; Steve Ballmer tapped for position. Gates will remain a chairman and will be "chief 'software architect'."

Go join weblogs-social@egroups.com. (I'm the 13th to join... is that a portent or what.)

Well, this is fun. The company I work for was bought out a few months ago by a larger corporation; you've probably heard of them. A couple weeks ago, I was put on a retention plan that lasts until the end of May, which is fine by me as I was already looking to leave by that time, anyway. Said retention plan also comes with a generous bonus if I stick around that long. However, I just found out that the two or three main web sites I work on, accounting for about 85% of the work I do here, could be assimilated (as in, history and made obsolete) as soon as mid-February, and that realistically, I may be unemployed as soon as then. How nice. Then again, considering how fast we've usually moved (like a snail) and how fast our new keepers have been moving (like a mushroom; i.e., they're everywhere but not doing anything), I'm not worried about this news. Yet.

More meta silliness; welcome to Metaaffectivelog.

Weblog notes: I miss Wendell. Wendell, come home. Also, Zannah has her log listed as '/usr/bin/girl' on Weblog Monitor, but her graphic says 'a girl, a browser, & a lot of spare time.' Not only that, but her <title> says 'a girl, a browser, and way too much spare time.' So, um, which is it? (Whichever it is, get well soon, Zannah! Welcome to weblogging. Here is your complimentary flu.) Also also, John's premiere weblogger IRC session on #BlogIRC was a hit. I had too much fun, even if I got cranky towards the end and said many foolish things. But I wouldn't have it any other way. Thanks to everyone who participated and made it keen; hopefully we can do this again and soon. Also also also, I got Neale's email yesterday, finally. For those who are wondering, and to recap for those who asked, anything resembling flirting twixt Neale and I is totally tongue-in-cheek and in jest. Besides, from what I can tell from Neale's epinion bio, he's not really my type: he's married, they have a 2 year old child, and from what I can gather, he looks like a big happy letter e. Even if that was what I'm looking for, he lives in Australia, which would bring new meaning to "long distance relationship." Put the gossip away, gang. Sheesh. If you haven't figured out from three months of tallies that I'm a silly git, you never will. :)

Sex-o-matic.

Huzzah! Now Katie serves Satan, too.

Here's what O'Reilly Books has to say about the Dark One:

The BLINK element is Marc Andreessen's contribution to horrifying web pages. All content of the element flashes on and off uncontrollably in a distracting manner. The more content you place inside the element, the more difficult it is to read between the flashes. Please don't use this tag. I beg you. This element does not have any attributes or even handlers.

-- Danny Goodman, Dynamic HTML

Of course, with XML, we could just have <satan> and get it over with.

01.12.00 >> Sounds like me: secular Wicca.

01.11.00 >> You know, I'd really like to recommend Slightly North of Tomorrow to you all, but I can't. Not won't, as in I hate it, but can't, as in I can't decide either way. The font's too small on my Mac and I can't read it. :(

In the Utterly Silly Department: I'm Dan Pope. Who're you?

Damn. And I tried billing myself with "too much chutzpah." I'm handing that title over to Neo Flux, and gladly. (found via wetlog. That's the one written by sex-o-matic Neale.)

Wow, sex-o-matic. People using AOL's search engine will now be able to find this site by looking for sex-o-matic. How sex-o-matic is that? Sex-o-matic.

I'm reading, Neale, but I still haven't received your email. My roommate/sysadmin and I tried futzing with nmn's DNS this morning, so that the site would be accessible via http://nullmeansnull.com, sans www. But that failed and brought up our server's main site. Then I wondered if that futzed up email, but it hasn't. In fact, you could send email to anything (other than "sam") @ nullmeansnull.com, and it'll get to me. You could send email to bigridiculouspornwatchingzygotes@nullmeansnull.com and I'd receive it. Weird. At any rate, Neale, I eagerly await the arrival of your email. You charming, sex-o-matic venus freak, you.

Speaking of sex-o-matics, here's Tham's Sexed-Up Grammar Guide. Any of my friends can shut up about my Ares fetish, now. (courtesy o' memepool via BrainLog)

Another neat weblog: a girl, a browser, and a lot of spare time. Found on Turlyming dot com, which I check out enough to put on the right. But now I have to work. Really. Honest.

I just got back from seeing Sleepy Hollow (it's just after midnight so technically it's the 11th), and damn. What a swank film. It had a kind of weird logic to it, but what the hell, it was fun.

So one of my roommates has decided to combine a weblog with an experiment in DBI/DBD in perl. Now he has a weblog that he can update from his two-way email pager. Swank. Even better, he'll soon release the source for it.

And I still need to email people. My spool is down to just over 2200, so I'm making progress.

01.10.00 >> Beat people up.

Ooh. Today's date looks binary. Or something.

Well, not quite the GLBT blog portal, but it's still GLBT and it's still BLOGS. (courtesy o' Turlyming dot com)

01.09.00 >> No links, no nothing, really... spent the weekend away from computers and enjoyed it. I'm still behind on email, if I need to write you back. I've got 2400+ emails in my spool; be gentle.

Ya know, Bloat! just isn't the same without Sally. It feels otherworldly when it's... nice.

So now me and the Guy aren't dating anymore. Which makes me happy for him, as he needs time off from everything after his last beau, but it leaves me feeling kind of dangling and eh. Maybe bleh. Maybe blah. Ah well.

What's really disturbing is when you go to a novelty store and see a pair of blow-up sex dolls, one male and one female, marketed with the same names as your father and his twin sister.

01.07.00 >> I still haven't seen The Matrix, but people keep pointing me to parodies...

L00k 4t m3, tr1inity. I'm an er33t hax0r. i 0wn j00. 1 g0t r3wt on al j00r box0rs. h4w! And now that I'm root, I'm gonna prove it to you. I mean, how can he be the one... if he's phonejacked?

[root@nebuchadnezzar /root]$ ping -f _

Yes, I used a <blink> tag. I serve Satan now. At any rate, the parody gets one new page a day, so keep checking back in. Brought to you by the fine people of efnet #nerds.

01.06.00 >> I've been doing some thinking about folks in weblogland getting into a tizzy over people misspelling "millennium" (usually with one n). I'm looking at it from the other side now. Really, how often, before 1999, did you use the word "millennium" in regular conversation, much less in your pages or in whatever else you happened to be writing? If you said often, then I hope you're a historian, an astronomer, an astrologer, or someone working for the international time standards committee whatever-it-is. If you aren't, you've probably said (and written) "antidisestablishmentarianism" more than you've said (and written) "millennium." For a word that, on average, hardly ever comes up, I think we can let a few misspellings go by without all the hoopla. Correct people, yes, sure, please do... but jumping around all aggrivated seems silly to me now. (And yes, I made some hoopla myself too in regards to "millennium" and the Cheerios Portal last month. I feel bad about it. I'm going to go find a hug.)

In Chicago, we pronounce the h in "historian," so it's "a historian" instead of "an historian." There's your missing n right there. Oi! ;)

I've consigned myself to reading the specifications for HTML 4.01, but it seems less fun and interesting than having sandpaper surgically implanted inside my thighs.

In meetings a good portion of the day. Bleh.

I should really pay attention to weblog entry dates. Coffee A Gogo hasn't been updated since the end of September. I still like the stuff there, though, and hope that it gets revived.

01.05.00 >> Fortune Cookie programs for *nix are weird:

(1) Alexander the Great was a great general.
(2) Great generals are forewarned.
(3) Forewarned is forearmed.
(4) Four is an even number.
(5) Four is certainly an odd number of arms for a man to have.
(6) The only number that is both even and odd is infinity.

Therefore, Alexander the Great had an infinite number of arms.

Oops. Wire Mommy found Bibleman via mrpants. Please visit mrpants. The little critter in the logo is cute as all get out. And he talks about Japanese stuff. You can't lose.

Strange Brew points us towards Mr. T vs. Pikachu, but why stop there? Here's Mr. T vs. Everything.

I'm stealing two links from Wire Mommy today. First, since I'm a Steve Reeves fan (stop laughing!), check out No Shoes, No Shirt, No Surrender, the Hercules video montage set to Duran Duran. No lie. Secondly, related to the old Dungeons and Dragons cartoon, is that Willie Aames, the voice of Hank (as well as being in Charles in Charge and Eight is Enough), is now Bibleman. I really don't know what to say at this point.

Also D&D cartoonish: the script for the unproduced last episode.

01.04.00 >> Woohah. Now there's one more place to list your weblog. (courtesy o' Eatonweb)

I got the coolest thing I think I've ever gotten in the mail last night. For xmas, Amanda and Michael released Pounce #2, a completed (wow!) issue of their zine. Included was a summation of 50 bad poems, which had me in hysterics. I really, really, really, really, really think it should be a webpage. Amanda. Hint. A webpage, Amanda. 50 bad poems on a web page, hint. Hint, Amanda.

Everyone's redesigning weblogs but me. Dammit. Latest suspects: GeneHack's gone green, Rebecca's Pocket has a new bannerheaderthinger, and Prolific would be there soon if not for gremlins. Gadzooks and geewillikers. It's hard being a perfectionist and a lazy SOB simultaneously.

Ick. My car's in the shop from making A Noise when I accelerate. So I'm at home while they're looking at it. Ugh.

Punk ass! Adam Twelve is back up, but it looks like he lost a few days worth of updates. Ack.

01.03.00 >> Mmmmmmmm. Stories about scars. I have a submission to prepare.

Though I kind of ignored his posting to the eGroups Weblog list, pb is proposing a weblog slam, a mix between a poetry slam and weblogs. I'm in, if it ever happens.

Finally, some lesbian weblog action. Please enjoy Coffee A Gogo. (By the way, Matthew, I said I'd email you the compiled list, right? Oi. As soon as I finish this other thing...)

I just noticed something. There's metalog and there's also Metalog. Maybe there should be a fight. Not like an actual rumble, but maybe something along the lines of the band vs. band albums out there, or the designer vs. designer projects that are popping up on design-oriented sites. A weblog vs. weblog link-off. Hmm.

Parker Brothers wasn't the first company to mass-produce Ouija boards.

01.02.00 >> Tom has resolved to "do more gay things." That's cool, but... what makes something a gay thing? What's the difference, really, between a gay thing and a straight thing, other than whom you do it with? I suppose he can go gay square dancing, or some such. I shouldn't jest, though, I know the feeling. The I'm surrounded by all these straight people and what the hell am I going to do now? feeling.

A slightly different version of the story from yesterday, posted to {fray}. (It's last on the page. Thanks for the heads up, Prol!)

I'm going to change the format of Running Tally a bit; I used to tack entries on the end of a day, so while the current (or most recent) day was on top of the tally, reading down took you through the day in chronological order. Now I'm putting the newest entries up top. It's easier for you guys to find the latest updates that way. I also want to spruce up the design, but I only have idea fragments dancing around in my head. (No, not like sugarplums.)

It's starting to hit me that it's 2000. It feels like it should be such a big change from 1999, even though you know it wouldn't be. It does seem like a huge fresh start, though. I suppose it has something to do with how 2000 was some mythical future-saturated year, even as recently as two decades ago, when things would be So Much Better. Then again, in 1981 I was 6, and I remember listening to my parents' Jim Croce 8-tracks on the stereo when we lived in St. Louis, so I guess things have changed.

01.01.00 >> And we're all still here! Congratulations to herbivore.sscnet.ucla.edu, the first hit to null means null in 2000 (by CST reckoning)!

So the partiers-that-be are hanging around downstairs listening to a Bill Hicks CD, and I'm reading the back of an RPG book on the Web (Digital Web 2.0 for Mage, for those who know/care), and listed in the Website Resources, I find Robot Wisdom, sorta:

http://www.mcs.net/~jorn/home.html -- Robert Wisdom, a real-life Virtual Adept, explores politics and futurism.

....Robert Wisdom?

New Year's 2012 at my pad went like this:

The roommates, who were supposed to be around Peoria, stayed home. The more the merrier. I accidentally invite two people who had previously dated and split on not-so-happy terms. I warn them both the day before when I realize my mistake and they both seem relatively cool with it. No blow ups occur. We watch the South Park movie, blowing my half-hearted resolution to swear less out of the water. (Shut your... Okay, forget it.) We play Atmosfear, if you remember that board game. We hook the tv to the antenna outlet about 10 minutes before midnight and watch the countdown there. We break out the glowsticks and turn off the lights. Last words in a year starting with 19 are made. First words in a year starting with 20 are made. There's no other gay lads to kiss, so Jordan grabs me and gives me a quick one. We run outside and hear people hooping and hollering and we join in. We get responses. There's so many fireworks going off, the echoes coming from several directions, that it sounds like a war. Sam gives us a sermon taken from a Happy Noodle Boy strip in a Johnny the Homicidal Maniac anthology. We see glimpses of fireworks. We run around in the above-freezing temperature weather. I toss champaigne up in the air, it accidentally lands on someone else (sorry, again!). We head back inside, Stesha and I go back outside, head down the valley wall to see more fireworks just over the valley's far ridge. I recite Carroll's The Jabberwock and some guys in the apartment complex next door are playing with a light-up frisbee. Back inside, we break open a couple light sticks and paint a couple people. The smell of phosphorescents make a couple people sick, so we clear the smell out as best we can. The first song we dance to in the new year is "Twiggy Twiggy / Twiggy vs. James Bond" by Pizzicato Five. We watch some episodes of the old Dungeons & Dragons cartoon. I lose coherence at 3.30am and crash upstairs.

All in all, a good year, for the first few hours.