Now, the first post with Pivot. The first official one, that is.

I'm still in the process of hacking up Pivot's layout, and writing this entry feels a bit like having freshly moved, with all the boxes still unpacked, but already having a phone plugged in and making a call about how the move in itself has gone very smooth, and no bumps were in the road.

The archives are for later,because I may have misplaced some of the code.

Suspect a pattern.
Feel a connection.
Collect information.
Combine information.
Add spiff.
Tadaa essay.

Due to an increase in Significant Personal Development Event Occurrence frequency, all events and occurences in the year 2002 have now been relocated into the Far Past section, the effect of which will be that the date/time information of each archive record is now fully open to corruption, allowing events from 1999 to be indexed as if they happened two years ago. 2003 is next to go, although it might take until three-quarters of 2005 have passed before the Far Past section Nearest Limit will be only a year behind.

Memory is great. Except when it isn't. For those cases, there are solutions in the form of weblog tools.

The computer don't ferget.

– X? What the hell is X? How am I supposed to tell f I have X or not?

– Easy. If you had X, you'd know.

The previous incarnation of this entry was pure angst. It is eradicated now.

There is something hollow in me, and I feel tired. I'll explore physiological options first, such as getting enough vitamins or fresh air.

For all I know, the position of my speakers might be such that I'm at a knot of tones that coincidentally resonate with parts of my inner ear and make me feel congested. If you spread your arms outward and forward, as if greeting a large crowd; that's about their location.

Will open window now.

I've been upgrading the layout of the new log system I'm using, Pivot. It looks very nice, if I do say so myself, although some tweaking is still in order.

But the question is, why did I do that?

Why on earth did I spend many hours spread across several days fiddling with a little thing like the New Entry form which ultimately came down to just changing the colour scheme and switching some parts here and there? Why did I spend a whole day of my two-week vacation wading through what I like to call 'Programmer's HTML', transforming tables into divs left right and center?

Because it was easy.
I know HTML and CSS almost like the back of my hand now (hey now what's that little vein there?), and although I also felt it was necessary to create entries in a comfortable environment, making it valuable for me to put my time in, I also just plain liked being busy with it. Being good at it made it fun.

The point of this is that I rarely do that for other projects, the bigger ones. For instance, my final school project, also known as The EGO Project. The briefing can be summarized as "Show us that you've learned something in the past 4 years by making something totally 1337 that has a clear connection to yourself as a person".

This project is rather big. It runs parallel to other projects in the second half of the year, and there have been concept-meetings and design-meetings with the various teachers. There's stress on getting you in the habit of drafting a concept first, on paper, in text, coming up with a style, layout and interaction model next, and then you start production.

I passed the Concept- and Design-checkpoint alright, but I'm seriously slacking off on the production. I'm not making my bright ideas a reality. The question that I ask myself is, why? How is it that I am willing to spend days on a single page, but not even a few hours a day on a huge project like EGO?

The first and easiest answer is, discipline, or rather, lack thereof. I'm a lazy bitch. I'd much rather sleep or lie back with a book and a drink than work, create and produce. But that's not really true.

I can set myself to work if I want to. I have that much discipline. The Pivot story is an example of that. And even when I do have the mental energy to sit my butt in front of the screen and start a foaming-at-the-mouth-coding frenzy, I tend to drift off and start coding just for the heck of it, building all kinds of handy functions and libraries and testing them, which is all fine and dandy, and at the end of it, I do have something to show for all my work, but despite my having been in the zone and having worked hard, I still can't cross items off my to-do list. So general laziness isn't it.

Then what? If I'm not Slacker By Nature, there must be some other reason why devote time and attention to these little, personal things, and not to the (generally larger) projects others give me?

Maybe that's it. I just want to do my own thing and not have to worry or care about others' problems. Then again, that's not entirely true either. I'm a helpful person. I'm willing to do stuff and make use of the skills and knowledge I have, for people. In fact, part of my motivation to gain those two is furthering my ability to help, although I admit that due to my helpful, somewhat submissive nature I've learned things and taken up jobs that, at the core, I don't really mind, but don't truly want either.

Which brings me to the third option, not being to passionate about the projects. Maybe my not-minds are not being replaced with true wants properly and are affecting me by making me lazy and apathetic towards assignments. I'm supposed/asked to do certain things, and I do them not because I want them, but because I don't mind doing them.

And that leads me to the most basic question of all:

What do I want?

---

A small pause in writing after noticing that being good at something basically makes everything fun for me, regardless of whether it's a Want or a Don't Mind, showed me that the issue is actually twofold:

On one side you have What do I want, because when I don't know how to do something, actually wanting to be able to do it is an enormous factor in making me learn (efficiently), and on the other hand there is the self-discipline to set myself to learning in the case there is no real desire to learn, but still an obligation to do so.

P.S.
I enjoyed writing this entry. I was very much capable of doing it, I wanted it, and thus I spent two and a half hours on it.

I got out just in time, it seems. The all new, extra round Blogger. Now with more font-size and caramel than ever!

I posted a small'n to test whether publishing is still as sluggish, and it is.

Funny how I only noticed the extremity of Blogger's slowness after switching to Pivot, which posts and publishes instantaneously.

What do you mean. I didn't draw a charicature.

I don't want to complain.

To anyone.

--

It's like all parts of me, all of my distinct properties, once personified or objectifed in some way, are lying at a bottom and my self is floating somewhere else.

Today is an experiment of now-mindedness.

This is currently happening.

I owned a white Smart, and promised to drive Mr. Scott to Philadelphia, but I was worried, and asked How the fuck are we going to cross the Atlantic? By plane, naturally, but these plane tickets, they're expensive.

*****.
I'm having a ******* off-day to-*******-day.
****.

*****.
************.

But most ******* interestingly, this doesn't **** up my view on the world.

In *******-fact, while I'm ******* annoyed by all ******** guys I work with, I'm currently in ******* love with every girl I know.

That's ******* right, I ******* mean you.

Why?

I'm doing the get out of shower sit down in front of computer unclothed-thing

It was only a matter of time.

Oh, the joys and comfort of having the feeling that, after so much time spent watching the pieces, certain views are nearing completion and parts of them begin to resemble things that make sense, rather than looking like new questions, only slightly augmenting or even contradicting that which has come before and lies next to it.

Oh, nice. So what things are we talking about here, specifically?

Why, everything, of course.
Not much else is there?

There is still much to learn.

I've not noticed it so much, but apparently I'm still used to the Guilder, instead of the Euro.

I just realised that, converted to guilders, my bank account has 5 figures.

It's just that I don't need anything.
Or maybe I just don't know what I'm missing.

Say something funny.

All you know is where you are not.

While sitting on a park bench near a very long street,
I saw a pretty little girl on a bus stop seat.
Across the asphalt road, not too far from where I sat,
She smiled a me a little, made my face a little red.
The bus came, she boarded it; it drove her fast away.
I watched it as it disappeared, and on that bench I stayed.

Scene 1

Some things you can only get into if you've already been in them for a long while, or since the beginning.

FTP closes in 30 minutes.

Sweet.
Let's begin writing the content.

We really didn't expect this from you.

Apparently, there is a discrepancy between my being not a model [something] and being a nice guy.

Right outside my office window, on a small triangle between the side road, railway and industrial complexes, there is a big bush. It's like a mountain of leaves. As if they clipped a swatch of Columbian rainforest and grafted it here. The steady rainfall at the moment adds to that.

It's just lovely, the rich green, the detail, the way its leafy surface is waving in the wind.

The base of this bush mountain is a bit sandy, still healing from the hurt done by construction materials and heavy equipment when the street adjacent to it was being repaved.

Cd given to me by coworker which contains 447 Megabytes of The Aphex Twin will see but a meager percentage of its contents copied, since The Aphex Twin are mostly, as they say, 'hardcore', and I am not hardcore, I am softcore. No, make that just soft. I am soft. My core is. Squishy, even.

Parts that will find their way onto my HD include the GAK ep as well as tracks like Dodeccaheedron, Analogue Bubblebath 1 and We Have Arrived (TTQ) (not QQT, which is too hardcore for me).

More Musica.

I'm stepping up by experimenting.

This particular entry has comments enabled.

Just so you know.

And this particular entry, in continuation of the spirit of the previous one, does not have comments enabled.

I know, judging from the fact that the total amount of emails directly inspired by one of my posts in the last 3+ years can be counted on one hand, that sending an email is an enormousy difficult decision to make. Such a thing carries a great deal of weight and one should not attempt to write one if one's heart isn't fully into it.

This is why I have decided to accomodate. There exist rare occasions where I enjoy some feedback. By enabling comments for these entries, I hope to lower the response-threshold a bit.

It's a feature, but not a standard one.

And naturally there's that innate desire of mine to just plain be better than everyone else.

When I think about it, I can't think of a reason why. I really have no conscious desire to be better than everyone, but I still get that slight puff of discomfort when I see some being happily and seemingly effortlessly better at something I want to be Very good at.

Not the real masters, I'm not 'threatened' by them. It's those that are a bit, but nonetheless considerable amount better that give me the puff.

Apparently I'm competitive. Go figure.

Work in garden
Rub in eyes

Half a gun don't shoot so good.

Diploma = true.

Blorp.

I like that word.

Blorp.

Especially with a nice, rrround R.

Yes, I haven't had much loggable thoughts. There are, as per natural, ups and downs, and I'm fairly sure that my posting this is an indication that there's an up in the sine wave of posting frequency.

It's possibly also a sign of something else. I noticed a decline in entry writing in most of the logs I like to read. Perhaps it's summer, perhaps it's been (over?) 4 years since The Weblog Hype started, and the momentum has been reduced in all but those who have the ability to create their own spark.

Sparketh I?
We'll see.

Whaev.

Orange is a juicy tasty fruit, I say.
Cocu says the ball is a brick.

Call me silly, but with Aphex Twin, for the first time I have the idea that music is art, a form of self-expression, and not just entertainment (despite the wonderfulness of most other music I have).

It's probably the way he just goes every which way. Loud, cupboard-quivering industrial Techno/Hardcore beats (Isopropanol, Phloam) and strange fleebles of sound with subtle non-drumming (Melodies From Mars 1–11). Maybe working as a duo produces slightly more temperate, controlled music. Aphex Twin is one man.

I haven't had this experience with movies or books yet.

... so that life itself becomes the poem, and escapism a moot point, irrelevant because there is nothing to escape from/you already have escaped permanently, and all you see contains your own mental signature — coloured by mind, as it is, instead of artificially coloured glasses that you need to take off after some time.

Bucephalus Bouncing Ball is mixed under BOAC or reversed and Acrid Avid Jam Shred and Time Flies (slow)?

when the loudest sound your hear is the soft, steady chug, chug of your bike while you ride it, surrounded by light green and bright blue in every direction.

I've noticed that, when working on something, at the first sign of doubt, the first sign of not instantly seeing the next step, I switch into Distracted mode, and go do Other Stuff that invariably is far easier to focus upon, and always takes far more time.

I've decided to better myself.
No more.
I'll be strong.

There is no try, there is do, or not do.

BOSS (calmly, matter-of-factly):
"I think we'll just turn your 1-year contract into one for an indefinite period."

OK NICE.

It's about as good as when, at the end of my internship, he said: "Betcha wanna stay and work here now, don't ya?"

Personal slogan:
I don't get it.

The overlap is mystifying.

Yes, quite.

Something Slow.
Superficially Sluggish.
Commotionally Calm.
Rampant Rest.
Stressfully Sleepy.
Ludicrous Laziness.
Heraldic Holiday.
Drastic Daze.
Intractable Inactivity.

I don't know who you are, but I owe you a debt of gratitude. It has been your ignorance of two artists's discographies that allowed me to expand my own artist repertoire. I cannot be certain whether by now you've realised that Little Fluffy Clouds was produced by The Orb, and not by Orbital, but since I found out after a small entry on DollarShort, I can now say that I am happy that the latest addition to my playlist consists of — you guessed it — The Orb.

Your mistake is forgiven, of course, what with three equally popular British artists with 'orb' or 'orbit' in their name. In fact, Little Fluffy clouds is so close in style to what Orbital has made so far, that even I, Orbital Addict, did not notice.

Thanks!
- Wil

And just as I imagined the metaphor for a bad thing, it turned out to be a good thing.

Undoubtedly one of the most enjoyable the best photograph I've ever seen.

I doodled a little head on my trusty notepad, and underneath it, in frivolous and subtly-serifed type, I wrote down:

Peskabloo!

I took it to Notepad, and this is what followed suit:

bloke soap
bloop sake
kalpos boe
kaspeloob
ska bool EP
pabs loeko
peaks loob
sepokloab
lake boops
oops blake
laks poboe
be poo slak
pablo ekso
ska be polo
polka boes
sloak ploeb
koal spoeb
lose pokab
look, b peas

You may think that everything is strange to me.
Rest assured,
It is.
I don't get it.
I really don't.
And I'm enjoying every minute of it.

Make dreams a reality? Nah! Reality a dream!

As I bike across the narrow path that cuts through farmlands with both the sun and wind backing me up, everything as quiet as can be, I pondered the possibility of my actually being dead already and in heaven. Heaven is an effortlessly comfortable bikeride back home.

– Not all that glitters is gold
– You're right! It's something better!

I feel more connected to people than I did be—
no that could be misleading. How about: I find it takes less effort to travel the connection that already exists between me and other people.

Entry soundtrack to follow (for the curious: Aphex Twin - Melodies From Mars #06. Or #07. Maybe #08. I'll see.).


Now I have to write this fornicating letter to Amsterdam's No #1 ISP, telling them to shove their connection where the sun don't be shinin'. In more civilised words.

So how is it possible that the Pivot file "module_db.php" was suddenly renamed to "module_dbb.php"?

Seriously, how does that happen?

A bug?
But pivot doesn't rewrite filenames, certainly not its own. Only humans do. Hm. Some joker?

Ah well. This is one of those cases; easier done than said.

I think I can't fully give myself because deep down inside of me the notion has rooted and is growing that it's basically Playstuff Bullshit and it's being taken so seriously that the internal contradiction is slowly pushing apart the two core entities: the skill to do it and the belief in the purpose.

So I'm tired.

But I do not know what steps to take.

Ah, look, it's official now.

Oh, weblog, yes. Yes ok. Weblog. My day. My Saturday, in fact. Went karting. Yay. Europe's largest indoor track! Exciting! Riveting! Not.

My back and tailbone now lack about a square inch of skin each, and it hurts. The back one has a piece of bandage thing taped to it. I am officially wounded. I can't sit up properly, I can't sit back at all, I can't even throw my backpack over my shoulder because its lower tip will then hit my tail stump and Dang. Hoo Haa.

I am never going to do it again.

In fact, I've been traumatized to the point of never wanting to own or drive any vehicle that can reach speeds of 35kph or more.

Also, I've discovered what understeering feels like for real, and thus I'd like to suggest that my nickname become Squeaky.

Speaking of traffic, last Friday two signs were placed at the start and end of a bicycle path I take daily. "Closed 12-7 to 18-7," they say. Some re-asphaltation, I assume. It's now14-7 and those signs are the only things there.

So there you have it.
A weblog entry.

This code (assuming that it's the second script element in my source):

window.onload = prep;

function prep()
{
document.getElementsByTagName('script')[1].innerHTML = '';
}

Creates an "Unknown Runtime Error" in IE.

IE has problems with suicide, it seems.

This, but not that.
Such, but not so.

Why is That and So so hard?

Minnesota.

No just kidding.


My dad's in Spain for the coming two, three or four weeks, so I'm squatting his home since this week.

I have no time at all. I get home at 19:30. I haven't even unpacked. I haven't even installed my own computer yet. I haven't even picked up the laundry yet. I haven't even done any dishes yet (I am thankful that he has large amounts of cutlery and dito quantities of plates.) I have about 15 minutes in the morning to re-read a few pages of Maya, which I love and which is written by the author of Sophie's World and which my dad couldn't get through, which I think is because it's 'level up' compared to Sophie's World, and he was already hammered by the philosophical implications of said book, even though it was more like a primer in philosophy*.

*) By this I do not mean to say my dad's a complete dumbass. He's got sweet insight in people and their emotions. He's a talker/listener/feeler, not really a writer/reader/thinker/scientist. This is why I tend to go to him in person or phone him instead of email.