Random Thoughts

I don't like relying on a free service for my blog. I'll be damned if I'll have advertising inserted into my comment tracker, or create a nice template just so people can click on my profile and see the ugly default bland colors of blogger.com. I'll be moving this shortly to a new site running (likely) bBlog , an open source blogger that uses PHP, MySQL, and Apache.

I abhor sitting down and channel surfing in an attempt to find something worth watching on television. I love the visual medium; I have a 65" HDTV that is causing problems with finding a new home. We have to make sure it will fit. So, I can't bear to channel surf, yet I buy a $2500 television set? What gives? Why, it's elementary, son. Digitally recorded media. We have Time Warner for our cable provider down here in North Caroltucky, and they have finally provided a DVR/PVR box that has a functional interface AND does high def. It's not as good as TiVo (I still love you, TiVo) but it does HD and I don't have to purchase a very expensive satellite dish receiver. I already get their Road Runner cable internet, so I believe it is slightly cheaper to have the whole enchilada. Once a week I sit down for a few minutes and scan through the upcoming HD programming and select things for it to record. Additionally, I obtain copies of television shows off the interne

I was enthusiastic about starting into my personal writing challenge last week, but I spent all day Friday just fooling around with my blog code to try to make something attractive. Then, I spent all weekend hanging out with the wife, playing WoW . This is the design I came up with; I hope y'all like it. It's irritating that HTML doesn't like tabs. What I mean by that is, offline reading material is organized in paragraphs, with the leading paragraph indented a certain amount. All my life I've been reading books and magazines and whatnot in lots of varying formats, but that one fact remained a constant. Well, except for the first line of a chapter, where people often like to get creative. Damn illuminated manuscripts and their frivolity! Anyway, my point is that if you want to create paragraphs or breaks in thought on the interwebnet, without getting fancy, your primary recourse is an empty line. O the wasted space sacrificed to the gods of HTML who reserved inde

Because of an old friend and NaNoWriMo , I'm finally going to force myself to write a novel. In case you aren't familiar with NaNoWriMo, it stands for "National Novel Writing Month." It is a sort of contest every year which challenges procrastinating writers to write a 50,000 word (175-page) novel. The challenge starts November 1st and runs until midnight of November 30. An excerpt from the site: Valuing enthusiasm and perseverance over talent and craft, NaNoWriMo is a novel-writing program for everyone who has thought fleetingly about writing a novel but has been scared away by the time and effort involved. But, instead of waiting a couple months for someone else's arbitrary date, I am challenging myself with my own Personal Novel Writing Month (I just made that up). I am starting today, Friday August 12th, and I will have until Sunday, September 11 to write 50,000 words. I've attributed part of this self-challenge to a friend because he had the chutzpah to