the pod bay door

Another Saturday drifts into history. It was a lazy day. I didn’t sleep well, I woke up at 4:00 am with a killer cramp in my right calf, very painful. Had coffee this morning with a good friend, then saw 8 Mile, did Costco for fun, and retired to bed for a few hours. As for 8 Mile, I liked it – what can I say? I am not a fan of hip hop/rap, but Eminem is engaging in this movie, he definitely has a screen presence. The story follows a Detroit rapper named Rabbit, as he climbs the local scene towards better things like a recording contract. Rabbit’s final rap in the movie was, I admit, brilliant.

Please welcome Keith to the ranks of (non)blogging.

I’m still working on loading Gallery. But I am losing patience with programs whose downloading and installation instructions are ambiguous and fuzzy at the best of times. In fact, I’ve been really cranky all week! My head’s feeling very heavy tonight.
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While in NYC I went down to the WTC site on November 5, 2002. The site has been emptied of debris, and the subway track for Line 1 in being rebuilt, in addition to a temporary WTC station for the PATH Trains to New Jersey. I’ll upload more pictures from NYC soon.

Click on the picture for a larger view. Note on the left the Deutsche Bank building, still covered in netting since September 11, 2001. The three black plaques on the wire mesh fences in the middle show the names of everyone who perished on the site that day.

I’ve had a day of mixed emotions. Family issues surfaced, so I looked to a friend for kind words, went for a walk at lunch, and fed one of the library squirrels some almonds. It was fascinating to watch the squirrel take each nut from my fingers, assess it for a second or two, then scoot off to bury it, each time choosing a different location and then covering it with leaves. A magpie came by a used its beak to move a few leaves over, but the squirrel chased it away.

After working out tonight, I felt like writing a thousand words about my life, its ups and downs. Maybe another time. Painful episodes can be especially draining – thank God for good friends.

Geoff and I were talking today about issues of privacy on the Internet, specifically how e-mails can be tracked down by bots and spiders, resulting tons of spam. Recently I deleted one of my aliases, lightspeed@telusplanet.net, because I was getting 15-20 spam messages a day on that one. Click on the “Contact” link to the right, and notice the e-mail that appears in the “To” field. It’s up to you to make the changes to that address; I don’t link to my actual e-mail address, because if I did, it would be one more place for the spiders and crawlers to find said e-mail address, and start spamming me.

Keith also discovered that information on my domain was publically available via a Whois server. This included my home address and unlisted phone number! (Thanks, Keith.) Since then, I’ve edited this information out from my domain registration site. Within 24 hours, my address and phone number no longer appeared in the Whois db (although my work phone number appears there now).
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Forgive me some random thoughts:

It’s an evening of mixed emotions, a draining day at work but one that reaffirmed my faith in being blessed to work with people who care about what they do. In other news, I’ve lost or misplaced a cheque for $60, and am angry at my own ineptitude – I had the cheque yesterday, and now it’s gone. Duh. Since my return from NYC, I’ve yet to work out, and am feeling frumpy. So I just ordered a pizza.

While I was in NYC, I checked my website on different computers, and was distressed to see how bad it looks on other browsers and machines. In two cases, the right-hand column moves itself to the left, over top of the blog entries. Keith has known this for a while; it will take me sometime to recode the site.

I saw the following in New York :

Movies (9): Last Orders, Secretary, Tully, The Grey Zone, Femme Fatale, Far From Heaven, Bloody Sunday, Auto Focus, Igby Goes Down.

Comedy (3): Al Franken, Janeane Garofalo, Bill Maher.

Music (1): Yes.

Theatre (1): Frankie and Johnny in the Claire de Lune.

I awoke one morning last week at The Leo House in NYC to discover I’d left my hotel room key in the door the night before. No one mugged or killed me, as far as I can tell. In the past I’ve left my car keys in my car overnight twice at Marmot Basin (when I skied in the mid-80s), and have previously left my house keys in the front door of my house overnight as well. One time in the mid-90s I went to work and left the front door of my house open. None of this is a good sign.

Some of you know that two of my cars have been lost in fires, and that last year I backed out of my driveway with my back door, driver’s side, open, smashing it into the column holding up the carport. That car went up in flames last February. Yesterday, driving to work in a daze, I entered the Education Car Park and took too sharp a right turn going up the ramp, and scraped the back door, passenger side, something fierce.

I’m fortunate to work with some great people, so when I returned to work, there was no anxiety about having a desk and an e-mail inbox full of paper and e-mails and books and memos and shyte. I survived the day, and am home, blitzed in the head. I won’t get back into my regular workouts for a couple more days (daze?).

Here’s an interesting essay from Pete Townsend on the future of The Who; thanks to Chris (brother) for bringing this one to my attention.

I want to put notice out that I agree with Geoff, and that he and I and many others blog because it’s fun, and for any other reasons that may emerge from the fun doing it, such as learning more code, improving one’s writing skills, sharing ideas and thoughts and comments, regardless of how useful or informative they might seem to someone else, meeting other bloggers, developing a new community of contacts and friends, whatevahdafuck, as Tony Soprano would say. The full essay to which Geoff refers is at Library Juice, and addresses the number of “wild librarian” sites that have appeared in the past few years. I don’t emphasize on my site that I’m a librarian per se, nor is my profession the focus of the site or the blog. It’s a pastime, a hobby, and as Geoff reminds me, a place to vent from time to time. So there. Nyah. Thpppppttt!