Got the Worm
Due to the combined efforts of the cat, the rainstorm, and a terrible amalgam of just about every adulthood anxiety-related dream I've ever had (missing class/work, oversleeping, cat throwing up on everything, and so on), I was awake by 4:20am.
I'm not sure why the cat thought I should be awake by 4:20am, but he did. Unlike other times where he at least goes through the drill of showing me the food and water dishes, just in case they're empty, this time he didn't even bother. "Oh, you're awake now? Great. Talk to me."
By 5:30am he was sitting around in the bathroom waiting for me to take a shower. He would wander into the living room again and check on me about every 10 minutes to see what was holding me up. Ivan Cat, Executive Vice President of Scheduling and Efficiency.
Regardless, in return for all that micromanagement, he eventually got a bath himself. That'll teach him.
I took pictures.
* * *
Man, the rain just started again, and it's really coming down. I've never seen it rain this hard here. It rains often, and ceaselessly sometimes, but seldom with any great force.
* * *
I took advantage of my early wakefulness by checking my email (of which I had none — why don't people email me between 11pm and 4am?), and then doing some work on the site engine. It had been a while.
Newest enhancement was to create "pretty quotes." See? It ended up requiring far more work than I'd estimated, requiring me to escape out all the explicitly written HTML tags before parsing out the format of the remaining text, but that was probably a good idea anyway and needed to have been done. (Quotation marks were simply the first set of characters I'd written substitutions for which are a consistent part of HTML tags).
I still consider the idea occasionally of switching to one of the commercially available site engines (Blogger, MovableType, Greymatter, and so on), but then I think back to my original intentions and inspirations when establishing this site, and I usually drop the idea.
Back in early 2001, I had encountered several basic online diaries and LiveJournal-style weblogs, but had pretty uniformly been turned off by them, both because of cluttery and inelegant presentation, and disappointing content1.
At that point I happened across Lisa Ko's [long defunct] blog at [now appropriately enough named] incommunicado.net. The writing was honest and creative, the visual site design was clean and attractive (and was reworked about every 3 months as well, which kept things sort of interesting), and despite using Greymatter, it still successfully avoided that very canned look that even so many blogs today have.
My journals in recent life had not been very private in subject matter anyway2, and now that I'd seen what a good web journal could be, I decided it was something worth trying. Since I did software for a living (in a very build vs. buy organization, no less), I decided it was silly for me not to write my own (especially since the options at the time were pretty lowly), and it gave me a good project to work on.
So, here we are. Now with pretty quotes. And apostrophes, of course.
1Don't get me wrong — there are many very interesting, well-written journals on LJ, but the lack of quality in the rest has become such a widespread perception that it would be a cliche to go into detail about it.
2I kept a private journal off and on through 7th grade or so, but during an out-of-town grandmother's visit, she not only found the journal while poking through my room (I'm still not entirely sure what she was looking for), but even stayed up all night reading the whole thing, and then in the morning confessed straightaway to it with a smile on her face and wanted to discuss its contents. I was horrified, and from then on, even when I did keep a journal, I always had some sort of perceived audience in mind and kept the subject matter appropriate to it.
I'm not sure why the cat thought I should be awake by 4:20am, but he did. Unlike other times where he at least goes through the drill of showing me the food and water dishes, just in case they're empty, this time he didn't even bother. "Oh, you're awake now? Great. Talk to me."
By 5:30am he was sitting around in the bathroom waiting for me to take a shower. He would wander into the living room again and check on me about every 10 minutes to see what was holding me up. Ivan Cat, Executive Vice President of Scheduling and Efficiency.
Regardless, in return for all that micromanagement, he eventually got a bath himself. That'll teach him.
I took pictures.
* * *
Man, the rain just started again, and it's really coming down. I've never seen it rain this hard here. It rains often, and ceaselessly sometimes, but seldom with any great force.
* * *
I took advantage of my early wakefulness by checking my email (of which I had none — why don't people email me between 11pm and 4am?), and then doing some work on the site engine. It had been a while.
Newest enhancement was to create "pretty quotes." See? It ended up requiring far more work than I'd estimated, requiring me to escape out all the explicitly written HTML tags before parsing out the format of the remaining text, but that was probably a good idea anyway and needed to have been done. (Quotation marks were simply the first set of characters I'd written substitutions for which are a consistent part of HTML tags).
I still consider the idea occasionally of switching to one of the commercially available site engines (Blogger, MovableType, Greymatter, and so on), but then I think back to my original intentions and inspirations when establishing this site, and I usually drop the idea.
Back in early 2001, I had encountered several basic online diaries and LiveJournal-style weblogs, but had pretty uniformly been turned off by them, both because of cluttery and inelegant presentation, and disappointing content1.
At that point I happened across Lisa Ko's [long defunct] blog at [now appropriately enough named] incommunicado.net. The writing was honest and creative, the visual site design was clean and attractive (and was reworked about every 3 months as well, which kept things sort of interesting), and despite using Greymatter, it still successfully avoided that very canned look that even so many blogs today have.
My journals in recent life had not been very private in subject matter anyway2, and now that I'd seen what a good web journal could be, I decided it was something worth trying. Since I did software for a living (in a very build vs. buy organization, no less), I decided it was silly for me not to write my own (especially since the options at the time were pretty lowly), and it gave me a good project to work on.
So, here we are. Now with pretty quotes. And apostrophes, of course.
1Don't get me wrong — there are many very interesting, well-written journals on LJ, but the lack of quality in the rest has become such a widespread perception that it would be a cliche to go into detail about it.
2I kept a private journal off and on through 7th grade or so, but during an out-of-town grandmother's visit, she not only found the journal while poking through my room (I'm still not entirely sure what she was looking for), but even stayed up all night reading the whole thing, and then in the morning confessed straightaway to it with a smile on her face and wanted to discuss its contents. I was horrified, and from then on, even when I did keep a journal, I always had some sort of perceived audience in mind and kept the subject matter appropriate to it.