found_drama

Twilight grey Victorian take on a grocery store. The aisles a little too narrow. Shopping for magazines. The building seems to get narrower and narrower the whole time. The lights dimmer. The magazine covers less glossy.

1. Last night I topped 150 pages in the draft of my novel-writing project.
2. Last night the heat kicked on, signalling the mental start of the Vermont winter.
3. This morning I topped 100,000 miles in my little Neon. w00t!

currently playing: hold music

Good news: A will get more work done. Bad news: A will be in Hanover Monday thru Friday.

currently playing: Fatboy Slim “Santa Cruz”

1. From a postcard sent by a friend: It was cloudy for our trip so we couldn’t see these islands. it was so cloudy it looked like we were in our own little world or like there wasn’t enough memory in the Acadia Park system to show anything father than 50 feet.
2. Irony defined: Drive in to Montpelier. Can’t find a place to park… Drive by a gathering parade of protestors. Note sign “No Blood for Oil”. Still can’t find a place to park. Ponder why protestors are showing up one or two to a car.
3. Essay question: What defines “existing in nature” - - what does it take for something to be synthetic? If you use two rocks to chip out an arrowhead, is that synthetic? What about polyethylene? (Isn’t it sort of made through products that do (pre-)exist in nature?)

Back-drop is essentially a mid-to-late-80s live action children’s television show. Something very closely linked to Reagan’s D.A.R.E. program. Cheesy set that’s supposed to be an urban youth center but has obviously too much land out back to be urban and is obviously too well funded to be real. The youth center counselors are clean cut go-getters — the kind that would appear in a late-80’s government-funded public service announcement or a late-30’s Berlin poster. I’m not actually here. It’s more like I’m watching this on TV. But I’m clearly supposed to empathize with the adolescent protagonist — brown hair, an 18 year old playing a 12-to-14 year old (you know the type). He’s naive to the world around him and slightly confused. He’s been riding his scooter (motorcycle?) over from his mom’s apartment to this place and is a little disheveled. All he really wants to do is take it out back to do a little motocross. But there’s the whole forced routine with the stunningly-blonde counselor. Then it gets really TV. Really end of a G.I. Joe episode. WWF wrestler Rick Flair shows up out of a puff of smoke. He’s not wearing his usual gear though. He’s got on some sort of spandex super-hero outfit. But the outfit isn’t very late-80s. It’s more like late-60s cartoonish. Maroon, with sweeping rings that seem to float around the shoulders, a neckline that plunges to the navel, and a big gold belt. He almost looks like a carton of McDonald’s fries with his own platinum blonde hair. I don’t even really know who Rick Flair is but this is him. And for just a moment, you’re supposed to believe that he’s one of the good guys. Because the celebrity guest always is. But as soon as the very mundane but very pretty boy counselor has turned his back, Rick Flair is all up in the kid’s face. Calling him Joey (even though his name totally isn’t Joey) and telling him to try some “Peppers”. He’s got this brownish light-fast medicine bottle out and is shoving it in “Joey’s” face. TRY SOME PEPPERS! Except that they can’t all be the same drug. The pills are all white. But they’re all different sizes. TRY SOME PEPPERS. “Joey” takes some, just to get Rick Flair off his back. And then Rick gives him the whole bottle and disappears in a puff of smoke. But Joey can’t handled the Peppers and spills the bottle all over the place. Revealing the mushroom-shaped pills with little red dots on them. Then Joey starts to lose it…

Trouble sleeping last night. Dreams that aren’t worth posting here because all they really seem to be are chilling previews of some stuff scheduled for Friday.

So instead I jumped out of bed and decided to try and cross off one of the things on my to do list. AFP548 had a great article that introduces launchd (much better than Apple’s own kb article) so I decided this morning I’d read it and follow along. And test it out.

So far so good. Put together a single stupid shell script that echos a “test” string and the date to a log file. The tricky part is making the .plist file and then “getting it” that you need to use launchctl to add the job in. That being said, two small adjustments later and I had it going. Not too shabby.

Once again, I’d like to announce that I don’t particularly care for .plist files. Once again, I’d like to announce that their documentation behind their meta-DTDs sucks.

Luckily, there’s a Launchd Editor over at CodePoetry. (Shareware!)

With this first test/learning experience out of the way, I’m a little less intimidated moving forward with getting my automated jobs into launchd and all that. The first misconception that this cleared up was that I’d have to redo all my scripts etc. to bew compatible w/ launchd. Fortunately (and this should have been the most obvious part) launchd is (as the name implies) the launcher - - the same ol’ shell scripts work as always. The other misconception that I had was that there was a single flat plist file controlling everything in launchd. Nope — if I’m not mistaken, there’s a plist for each item that launchd loads up. This makes sense except for the fact that this creates 1+n places to look for instantiating files and plists/configurations — n being the number of users in the system.

More to follow…

After the other night I kind of wanted to give up… But the Malkovich restoration continues. I’ve managed to neglect DHL’ing the bunk hard drive back but soon enough. I guess I was holding out for the remote possibility I’d get stuff off of it. Not so much. Anyways…:

…that was successful. But then I managed to embarrass myself by leaving off the “z” in “tar -xvzf $BACKUPS/iTunesLib.tar” - - wow. That was about 24 hours and a heart attack wasted. I’m in some sort of technological Cthulhu campaign, I’m convinced. Especially now that I spent half the night callings banks and stuff to get passwords on accounts reset only to find that those reset passwords don’t work an hour later or at all.

How much more fun could this be?

If I’d known then what was in store for me, I might have skipped the oysters - - or slurped down the last one and then impaled my eyeball on mother of pearl.

No really… Let’s get things back to normal, shall we?

currently playing: Sister Machine Gun “Nothing”

Boogie Nights as a Ken Burns documentary. Lots of panning over an oversized indoor pool. Lots of porn playing in the background. Or being made. Voice overs left and right from film makers, stars, starlets, and hangers on. Weird outfits.

Via Boing Boing: a Giant Pink Bunny!

Boy oh boy…

Malkovich is slowly returning to its former self. The big items on the restoration/recovery list are basically done. The iTunes Library back-up will untar overnight… There’s still lots to be done but we at least appear to be functional again. The next week will see some major attn devoted to some kind of new/improved back-up plans. Rsync’ing to DMG’s perhaps? A few other things cross the mind. Must… be… some… happy… medium…

But it’s too late to think about that tonight.

In other news… T & B have wedding pics up on Flickr. Exciting! S had a birfday. And I’ve been writing like crazy.

Time for bed…

current music: the hiss of “Craig” untar’ing those mp3s…