infobong.com

gulf war syndrome

In the past few months, pro-war types attacked peace demonstrators suggesting that they couldn't "support the troops" and oppose the war. Now it looks like its G.W. Bush who doesn't support the troops. First, he proposes veterans' benefits to pay for his tax break for the rich. Now, he's trying to trim imminent-danger pay from $225 to $150 while there are troops overseas fighting a war he started. An editorial in Army house organ, Army Times, takes Bush to task for his stinginess toward the armed services.

I frankly don't understand how the pro-war types could be so profoundly lacking in nuance to understand the difference between supporting the war and supporting troops. Jay-Z could summarize his position in a few lines in a rap cut, it shouldn't be that hard to grok.

It wouldn't surprise me if these folks are just cravenly disingenuous. There seems to be a pround lack of moral clarity in people who will support a president who lied to start a war but demanded Clinton be impeached for a personal indiscretion.

is he rich like me

Last night, Jordan held a backyard potluck party to coincide with a trip to see the new zombi flick 28 Days. He asked guests to bring body-part themed dishes in the spirit of the film's zombi story. As a vegetarian, I racked my brain to think of plant foods that would evoke viscera while still being edible. It finally occurred to me that seitan could be passed of as a variety of body parts. My last batch of seitan was particularly pale and gnarly, so I settled on passing it off as zombi brains. I used them in a potato salad, "potato salad with zombi brains and sun-dried tomatoes," that is.

When I got to the party, I was pleasantly surprised. Nearly everyone made vegetarian horror movie dishes. Jordan made a sort of minestrone he called Sudden Infant Death Soup, another person made fried rice with soy chorizo, and there was Sangria with a beautifully carved apple skull. I took care to garnish the top of my potato salad with green onions and sliced seitan. One guest told me, "Your dish was the only one that really scared me," which I took as a compliment.

Althought it evoked dread in its consumers, I got a few compliments on the salad, so I've posted the recipe below.

Potato Salad with Zombi Brains and Sun-Dried Tomatoes

Prepare this dressing the night before, so the tomatoes and herbs have time to marinade in the vinegar. Pour the vinegar into a small plastic container like tupperware. Chop the sun-dried tomatoes in to tiny pieces, perhaps a quarter-inch square, then add to the vinegar. Crush the garlic into the container with a press or carefully mince the garlic, then add to container with oregano and thyme. Place lid on container, then shake up the ingredients to mix.

After you've given the dressing time to brew, peel and dice the potatoes and add to a saucepan. If you like your potato salad pasty, cut them into smaller pieces. If you like it chunkier, cut them larger. Add enough water to cover the potatoes and pour in the salt. Bring to a boil, then reduce to a simmer. Cook the potatoes until they're pretty soft; you'll want them nice and mushy for the salad. Once the potatoes are cooked, drain off the water. Chop the green onions into small, latitudinal slices, set aside a few tablespoons for garnish then add the rest to the potatoes. Slice the seitan into thin strips, save a few particularly gnarly-looking pieces for garnish, then add the rest. Shake up the salad dressing, then pour into saucepan. Measure out the oil, add to dressing container to pick up any leftover herbs, shake up, then pour into the pan. With a large spoon, mix up the ingredients until you get a pasty, pinkish mixture. Move to your serving dish, then garnish with green onions and carefully arranged seitan slices. Serve hot, or chill for a few hours and serve cold.

their sunshine faces

Edith's post on Cocteau Twins' lyrics inspired me to find a site with lyrics for a similarly unintelligible band, My Bloody Valentine. I had always thought that the line from "When You Sleep" was "When I look at you/ Ohhhh, I don't know we're through," but the site insists the lyrics are, "When I look at you/ Oh, I don't know what's (true)." The site does acknowledge that MBV's lyrics have a degree of ambiguity saying, "the lyrics are not as important to the sonic structure of the songs as they are in traditional recording techniques."

In related news, I received word yesterday that the Austin Shoegazer Meetup is canceled this month for lack of interest. Considering the latest issue of Magnet has a feature on the shoegazer revival, surely there are at least five shoegazer fans in the ATX that want to get coffee and discuss Movable Type, effects pedals, or whatever it is shoegazer fans talk about.

a select team of employees

Today I started training at my new job. We were only there for a few hours today while the managers and trainers introduced themselves and talked about the job. One particularly gung-ho manager got up, introduced himsellf, and asked,

"How many of you have heard of ambiguity?"

A few hands went up and I thought to myself, "Is this some lame postmodernism joke?"

It was not. He went on to explain, "It means you can do things with both hands, or it means you can deal with lots of stuff at the same time. A lot like working here."

Needless to say, I feel a little ambivalent about working at this place.

When I was a kid, my left-handed father would joke, "Well, really I'm ambidextrous; I mess up with either hand." Now I wonder if Dad came up with that on his own or lifted it from some Borscht Belt comedian.

terrible iraqi weapons

Hopefully today's Boondocks comic is an indication of what's to come in the next presidential election. I'm a little bemused about all the recent news reports that suggest Bush misrepresented evidence about WMDs to drag us into war. I thought that all along, so I wonder why papers like The Washington Post were hawkish before the war, but second-guess the president now.

come and read underground literature

The Rhizome Collective is hosting a benefit for The Austin Zine Library Saturday night. At one meetup, we discussed similarities between 'zines and Weblogs, so this project may be of interest to persons of blog throughout the Central Texas Austin area. Here's some information I pulled off the Library's Website:

I might add that I saw the Lost Film Festival tour at Rhizome this year, and I was quite impressed with their urban sustainability project out on the East side. If you have a passing interest in anarchy and voluntary simplicity, you should definitely check out the Rhizome space.

Finally, I ran across a 'zine library operating out of my former stomping grounds, Norman, OK. The Okie Dokie Zine Lending Library is perhaps the Netflix of 'zine culture, allowing users to check out 'zine by mail for one-month terms. I published a little 'zine called Au Jus when I lived in Norman, and it seemed to be greeted with bewilderment, so I'm glad to see someone in the Norm keeping the 'zine flame alive.

easy way out of ontological confusion

In These Times is a title I read on occasion, but I should read more often. On one of my rare visits to their site today, I ran across this piece by Slavoj Žižek discussing the ways the Matrix movies invite philosophical interpretation. Like others, he suggests that "the matrix" might be read as the sum of the social and political institutions that determine our perceptions of the real, but, as always, his assertions are unmistakably clear:

Of course, the first movie invites these post-structuralist/postmodern readings in the scene where Neo pulls Baudrillard's Simulation and Simulacra off of the shelf. One thing I found interesting about this story, though, is Žižek alludes to his "Lacanian friends." Up to this point, I had considered Žižek as a follower of Lacan, and he uses Lacanian ideas in this piece, so perhaps this is his way of saying his ideas are distinct from Lacan's.

record people like us

In a Morning Edition story on struggling record stores, NPR featured an interview the owner of my favorite record store in the whole wide world, Philadelphia's AKA Music. Although crap bonanzas like Tower Records are losing money these days, Mike at AKA says his store is doing well. He attributes his success to emphasing indie rock, obscurities, and experimental classical and electronic music, rather than commercial, mainstream crap.

a completely unintentional mistake

Although there is a ring of truth to labeling President Bus a "Professional Fascist" on a newscast, I find it difficult to believe that it was a mistake, as New Zealand TV3 spokesperson Roger Beaumont asserts. (Doesn't Roger Beaumont sound like a name for a movie test-pilot, or, more obviously, a cowboy?) Clearly the perpetrator needs to be found and hailed as a champion of the truth.

tired and overused

If you read Blogdex regularly, you'll quickly notice that any mainstream news story that mentions blogs will rise to the top of the charts. Most of the news reports seem to rehash a lot of the hype that surrounds blogging, which often leads me to wonder why people bother to blog them. The New York Times has apparently caught onto this trend, and seemingly publishes a blog story every Sunday, which blogs reliably comment on, link to, and otherwise promote.

Today's story on blogging in the corprorate world is bound to make an appearance, but it makes a few points that merit posting it here. This spring I took a course in in the School of Information on Knowledge Management systems, and we often discussed how "the power of blogs" might be harnessed in the corporate world. For the term paper I wrote about diffusion theory and social context, and how blogs might be used for better knowledge diffusion, since they offer room for added social context. A quote from Alan M. Meckler, CEO of Jupitermedia sums up in one sentence what took me 12 pages to accomplish in my paper: "But it doesn't work unless you have some personality in it."

your friendly local media monopoly

My cable modem connection has not been working since about 10 am yesterday. I have intermittent problems with the service, but generally rebooting the modem or sheer patience will bring back my phat pipe, but by 5pm yesterday it was clear the connection wasn't coming back.

I called the tech support folks at AOL-Time Warner, who adminster connectivity issues, although I am ostensibly an Earthlink subscriber. After telling me to check the physical connection on all of the cables, the tech support woman said there was nothing she could do remotely and scheduled me for a service call between 10am and 7pm Monday. Of course I am annoyed because I'll have no broadband over the weekend and I have to wait as long as nine hours on Monday for some schlub to do ten minutes worth of work.

Before I got off the phone, I asked the woman, "Is there a local number that I can use for dial-up in the interim?"

Not realizing that I'm an Earthlink subscriber, she informed me, "Oh, you need to get online and go to the Road Runner homepage, and look up a number there. We can't give out dial-up numbers over the phone."

"Um, let me get this straight. My cable modem is working, so I need to use a dial-up connection to get online. But in order to set up a dial-up connection, I need to get online."

"That's correct. Oh, that is pretty stupid."

"Um, yeah. Like, no one in management thought that through?"

She didn't offer to let me speak to a manager, and I didn't feel like pressing the issue, so I just hung up.

This afternoon, I got online at the RTF graduate student lab in loverly UA9, and got a local Earthlink access number, so I now I'm surfing the Internet, 1995-style.

back for redistricting

Most observers expected Gov. Perry to call a special session of the legislature to deal with public school finances, but he's planning a special session to re-introduce the redistricting legislation that would split Austin into wonky, Gerrymandered districts.

completely wrapped in cling-film

In class this semester, we read portions of Henry Jenkins' seminal text on fan-art, Textual Poachers, which led me to see the derivative works in a whole new light. One of the, um, oddest collections of fan-art I've found is Ulrich Haarbürste's collection of stories about wrapping rock-and-roll icon Roy Orbison in cling-wrap. Tonight, I checked up on the site, and Ulrich has added two more new entries. Here's an excerpt from Story 4:

I continue to be amazed by the way Ulrich's imagination can create new situations for wrapping Mr. Orbison: Story 5 features Ulrich standing in for the conceptual artist Christo.

In related news, The Washington Post reports copyright holders are beginning to crack down on fan fiction authors. Hopefully, Ulrich will remain free to write about his Saran Wrap fantasies.

charged psychological overtones

Yesterday afternoon I went downtown to check out the current exhibition at the Austin Museum of Art, "Embracing the Present: The UBS Art Collection," which is, not suprisingly, art from a corporate collection. A lot of household names are represented in the show, including Andy Warhol, Gerhard Richter, and Cindy Sherman, but the pieces from the big names seemed to be lesser works.

As I stood in one gallery, a woman walked in with her two daughters who looked maybe fourteen and eleven. The younger daughter looked at Jean-Michel Basquiat's "Tobacco versus Red Chief" with its wacky colors and childlike scrawlings, and exclaimed "Oh I like that one!"

The mother read the card, and said, "Basquiat... I think there was a movie about him."

I was all, "Yeah, it had David Bowie as Warhol."

I bat about .500 talking to strangers in museums, and this time I was talking out of place. The woman said, "That's right," and acted a little put-off.

The youngest daughter looked at the card, did the math, and said "He lived to be 28. Wait, why he die so young?"

Put in an uneviable position, the woman said, "Well sometimes artists live crazy lives and do crazy things, and it catches up with them..."

Basquiat seemed oddly representative of the pieces on display. It seemed as if the collectors fell victim to the Tulipmania that afflicted the art world in the 1980s with iffy pieces from the likes of David Salle. One photograph, Paradise by Thomas Struth surprised me with its high contrast and lack of detail.

There were a few pieces, I enjoyed. My sentimental favorite was Frank Thiel's Potsdamer Platz. My sister Julia lives near Potsdamer Platz in East Berlin and speaks of it in dismissive tones. This photograph from 1995 shows the place under construction. If you rebuilt Times Square from scratch in the image of the Sony Metreon, it might look like this, so, yeah, yuck.

Afterwards I walked down Congress to check out the show at Arthouse...

hybrid diary/guide site

Arthouse has blog art on display! I checked out their current show, "New American Talent: The Eighteenth Exhibition," yesterday afternoon and was pleasantly surprised by a video installation. Siebren Versteeg's CC consists of a video monitor looping talking heads from CNN and Headline News, while closed captions scroll on below. The captions don't quite fit the visuals, however. Rather than detailing political events and world affairs, they describe more prosaic material, the stuff of daily life. The description card said that the piece pulls text from Weblogs around the 'net, then randomly displays them on screen.

I wondered if there was a political element to the piece, privileging the experience of ordinary people over the rich and powerful. In a paper I wrote last semester on Weblogs, I noted how self-conciously political 'zine editors attempted to challenge the mass media by writing on personal topics In his book "Zines Stephen Duncombe uses the example of Jen Payne, who writes about her life in a Connecticut town - standard fare for persons of blog online journals. Duncombe explains, “Whereas the rule of thumb regarding publication in the mainstream media is ‘man bites dog’ – that is, what is considered newsworthy is what is out of the ordinary – what Jen and many other writers of perzine honor is the opposite: the everyday.” I wondered if Versteeg had a similar project in mind with "CC."

I thought the rest of the show was quite good, but I didn't take good notes, unfortunately, so I'm not able to relate the other paintings and photographs that struck me.

the contest against entrenched power

A while ago on Jared's Headspace, Average Joe asked, "when did liberals start referring to themselves as 'progressives'? You couldn't find more gratuitous self- pleasuring if you handed out jars of Vaseline in prison." I was a little surprised by this remark since I learned about the Progressive movement in high school history, but I tried to I tried to outline its emergence during the height of the Industrial Revolution in the US.

But the text of this Bill Moyers speech does the job of explaining the history of the Progressive movement and more. It offers reasons why the principles of Progressivism are even more relevant today in the face increasing corporate control of daily life and unabashed power plays by the wealthy and callous.

poorly-funded and ill-connected critics

David was parodying high-profile persons of blog, so he may be interested in Neal Pollack's post today. (Note the sweet Sex Pistols-inspired redesign) He rips on self-important bloggers like Andrew Sullivan as usual, but Pollack outdoes himself today, asserting:

appellation spring

I am not a blogger; the word is used by a commercial entity and pompous right-wingers. Besides, "blogger" seems so reductive and marginalizing. I am a person of blog.

mirror man mirror me

puddle, East Austin

if the cell is a blank cell

I found a useful resource over on Blogdex. This page provides documentation for all of the Movable Type template tags, which is organized differently from the Movable Type documentation.

love it live

OK, I've never liked the San Antonio Spurs. I wasn't even aware of the team until the media frenzy over the macho high-school jocks in Northern California known as "The Spur Posse." During my last year at OU, I finally developed an active interest in basketball. I excitedly followed Latrell Sprewell and my Knicks through the playoffs, only to lose to the Spurs in the championship series. Now that I live in the Lone Star State, I profess my fandom for OU alum Eduardo Najera and the Dallas Mavericks, which were unceremoniously knocked out of the playoffs this year by the Spurs, so I've been rooting for the New Jersey Nets for the past few weeks.

But tonight, I was a little glad to see the Spurs win the championship. Knowing David Robinson was retiring might have softened me up a little, but one moment warmed my heart. At the end of the fourth quarter, it was pretty clear the Nets were going to lose, but after a rebound, New Jersey's Jason Kidd deliberately fouled his buddy Tim Duncan, so Jersey could get the ball with time after Duncan shot his free throws. Knowing Kidd was playing his heart out, the San Antonio player gave his pal a warm pat on the back and headed for the line. Watching this, I felt warm and fuzzy all over.

After the game ended and the Spurs were on the court to collect their trophies, I noticed something a little odd. Spurs chairman Peter Holt was on the court with an usual fashion statement: he paired a conservative business suit with a "dinner-plate" cowboy-style belt buckle. (see image) I guess it is Texas and everything, but that just looks weird. Yeah, I still don't know what to think of them Spurs.

i miss you sundown

As a newcomer to Austin, I'm still getting a sense of the local climate, so I frequently use weather.com's My Weather page to get the current conditions and forecasts for Austin, as well as Philadelphia and Tulsa. When you configure the page, it offers a plethora of information options, from forecasts to allergy alerts to earthquake reports. But, the nice folks at the Weather Channel omit one piece of information I expect and frequently seek: sunrise and sunset times. I must be getting old, since I remember TV forecasts including this information when I was a child, but its not on weather.com or The Statesman's weather page.

After some poking, I found this National Weather Service interface, that takes you to a text-only Navy page that gives the local times for sunrise and sunset. Still, it seems like it would be trivial for weather.com to add this bit of information, which would help me and others decide when to go out and take photos.

make the iPods scratch

Philadelphia's DJ Botany 500 has a business renting iPods to restaurants in Libertyland, reports Citypaper. He compiles custom mixes to fit the ambience of the restaurant, uploads them to an iPod, then delivers the set to the restaurant, who plays the mixes over the restaurant PA. According to the story, he's able to "perform" at several venues at the same time, and the music fits the restaurant better than either radio or cable services. Botany says the ASCAP and BMI licenses restaurants obviate copyright issues surrounding the practice.

I'm reminded of an older Wired News story detailing iPod "DJ Nights" at a club in Manhattan. Apt offers a DJ table with a mixer and two iPods and allows to mix - and even scratch - on the iPods.

time-sucking procrastination tool

After I added Prentiss as a friend last Friday, I had about 30,000 people in my Friendster network. I haven't added any new people as friends in a week, yet now my Friendster network is 44214 people, a jump of nearly 50%. I'm sure the number of people on Friendster is growing rapidly, considering the outages this week, but I also suspect that the number of links between nodes is increasing as well, so my personal network may be growing at a faster rate than the number of users.

If you use Friendster for any amount of time, you'll see personalities like God, Lone Star, and Xanax, and know there are plenty of impostors on the service. Although I'm fairly confident lesser lights like Anton Newcombe and Casey Spooner are who they say they are, the Village Voice has an item about friendsters impersonating New York celebs like Moby and Jay-Z. Naw, really?

you've got me under the sea

This afternoon, I caught Norman's Starlight Mints play an in-store at Waterloo records. I'm not a huge fan of the Mints, but it was free entertainment, and I thought I might run into some fellow Sooners there. As the band set up, I scanned the room and saw a hipster looking guy wearing a Norman Tigers football jersey, but I didn't see any Norman people I recognized.

The band was about to start, when the singer said, "Wait. We need a bass player. Where's Blaine?"

"Is Blaine Nelson playing for the Starlight Mints?" I thought to myself.

Indeed he was. Blaine is an outstanding bassist, who has played with my pal George in the latin jazz band Conjunto Clave and the insanely amazing Ills, which could only be described as live, improvisational drum-and-bass. It struck me as a little odd for a Jazzhead like Blaine to play an indie band like the Starlight Mints.

The Mints sound a little like mid-90s Flaming Lips with a little bit of that Olivia Tremor Control non-sequitural wackiness thrown in, a sound I imagine is hard to pull off live. When I saw them at Philadelphia's Khyber a year ago, they annoyed me, but today's show was solid and enjoyable. Perhaps the new bassist made all the difference.

After the set, I went up to Blaine who was packing gear on the stage. We exchanged greeting and shook hands, and briefly caught up.

I asked, "What are you doing playing in an indie rock band?" which elicited a smile from the keyboardist.

Blaine shrugged, and said, "Its a job."

The irony of his response was lost on me at the moment, but gave me a good chuckle as I drove home.

continually evolving computational ecology

Ars Electronica has awarded Austin computer artist and friendster Jared Tarbell an "Honorary Mention" in the "Net Vision/ Net Excellence" category for his Levitated.net site. Congrats Jared, I never imagined anyone could do what you do with Flash.

with a heart full of napalm

Whoa. The Stooges, the band that gave this site its tagline, is getting back together for a reunion tour. And the Jim O'Rourke-fortified Sonic Youth is opening for Iggy and the boys. Drool. Its a pity they're not coming anywhere near Austin. Anyone up for a road-trip to Detroit?

if you're nervous use the payphone

hip-hop hooray

After massaging my import files and much template surgery, I'm going to say that infobong.com is ready for prime time. I don't know what I did, but the titlebar finally looks right in Netcape 6+, which brings me joy. I was going to redesign the whole site from the ground up, but I made few tweaks here and there, and I'm happy with the way it looks.

BTW, if you're exporting entries from MT, follow the directions and export in Netscape, not IE. I would have saved myself a lot of trouble when migrating if I had done this when backing up the old m4dbl0g site, since IE did a lot of funky things with the resulting text file.

la fromage de la fromage

In case any of you were wondering what I've been listening to, I thought I would post my current Winamp playlist, which is, as always, laden with mainstream crap. Matthew and I went and saw Black Lipstick play the Sacred Cup Coffeehouse last night, and they covered the Stone's "Happy," so I popped the joint on my playlist.

Pixies - Velouria
ABBA - Fernando
Beyoncé Knowles feat. Jay-Z - Crazy In Love
La Dusseldorf - Geld
Fischerspooner - Emerge
Portishead - Airbus Reconstruction
Icu - Flower and Moon
Justin Timberlake / 50 Cent - Cry Me A River (Remix)
The Rolling Stones - Happy
Black Lipstick - W.W.D.Y.D.
Lil Kim - Magic Stick (Feat 50 Cent)
Mojave 3 - In Love With A View
The Hidden Persuaders - Auto Mechanic
Warlocks - House Of Glass
Kris Kristofferson - Late John Garfield Blues
The Flaming Lips - The Abandoned Hospital Ship
Mojave 3 - Return To Sender
The Byrds - Draft Morning (alternate end)
Spacemen 3 - May The Circle Be Unbroken
Cat Power - American Flag
Roxy Music - Prairie Rose
Social Distortion - Story Of My Life
The Byrds - Wasn't Born To Follow
50 Cent - In Da Club (Dirty)
Captain Beefheart - Electricity
The Jesus and Mary Chain - Head On
Kris Kristofferson - Border Lord
The Flaming Lips - Fight Test
Frankie Smith - Double Dutch Bus
Band Aid - Do They Know It's Christmas?
Ludacris - Act A Fool (Dirty)
TI and P.S.C. - Never Scared (Ft Killa Mike Bone Crusher)
Nancy Sinatra - These Boots Were Made For Walking
The Fall - New Big Prinz
DAT Politics - 3
Fanny Pack - Cameltoe
Donovan - There is a Mountain
Verve - On Your Own
Unknown Artist - JJ FAD - SUPERSONIC.MP3
Zombies - She's Not There
Captain Beefheart - Call on Me
Urban Dance Squad - Deeper Shade Of Soul
Erase Errata - High Society
Captain Beefheart - Moonlight on Vermont
Pavement - Rattled By The Rush
Urban Dance Squad - No Kid

a rubber band strapped to a quarter

While my dad was working in Phoenix last summer, he spotted a Rent-A-Tire outlet. On the phone, he expressed bewilderment at why anyone would want to rent tires. I explained certain tires - like the Yokohamas immortalized in "Bling Bling" - are status symbols in hip-hop and other subcultures, and persons with limited financial means might be inclined to finance some flashy rims and tires.

Just the other day, I drove past Austin's Rent-A-Tire and noticed an Expedition with a sweet set of spinner rims and wondered if the proud owner had just leased them. I spoke to my dad on the phone this morning and he was all, "Did you know there are truck rims that keep spinning after the car stops?"

"Oh yeah, spinners and choppers."

"Did you know they cost over $14,000 for a set?"

That I didn't know. He pointed me to this Time magazine article on specialty rims that notes a limited edition set of wheels can cost $14,400, but I'm sure there are less-expensive spinners out there.

flattered and weirdly curious

I've finally broken down and started using the enormously fun and wildly addictive Friendster.com, which connects you to your friends' friends through relative links. It reminds me quite a bit of Everything2. While Everything2 shows user-defined relationships between ideas, Friendster shows relationships between people.

Prentiss has a thread about Friendster going on over at his blog, and points to a Village Voice story about the uses and gratifications of Friendster and comments on its exploding size.

One thing about Friendster I find quite interesting is how many semi-famous people are in my "personal network," as Friendster calls it. When I only had three friends on the service, I wanted to see who else was a Brian Jonestown Massacre fan, so I clicked on the band on my profile, to pull up the other fans. The first person in the results was none other than Anton Newcombe the creative force behind BJM. Casey Spooner from Fischerspooner is also in my network, along with many "A-List" bloggers and EFF big-shots.

summer migration

Well, I've gotten this joint up and running, thanks to David, who helped me sort out the old getting-Movable-Type-to-talk-to-MySQL issues. Hopefully this site will be just as fun as the old one, only with an easier-to-remember URL.

check, check one?

Is this thing working? I was having troubles posting here, so I abandoned the blog for a few weeks. Look forward to some changes to this site.