Feaverish

If you’re wondering why the dearth of posts of late, it’s because I’ve been busy. Busy, for me, means fewer than, say, six hours of responsibility-free time per day. It’s very stressful.

Pritchy.com was launched last week, though the international press paid little notice; it’s a simple site, but it gets the job done. I’m at least proud of the fact that it basically took only two weekends of hard workââ�¬â��again, relatively speakingââ�¬â��to build a website from scratch. I learned a few CSS tricks, and I’m starting to get the hang of Flash’s interface, which could come in handy down the road sometime. I’d like for the flash embed to be standards-compliant, and a pretty little contact form would be nice, but that’s gonna have to wait for another free weekend.

I’m also redesigning our website here at work. Again, it’s a simple affair, but when the dust has settled at least there’ll be one fewer tables-based site, and one more XHTML Strict site. I’d like to take it further, maybe some sIFR or some nifty Javascript, but as usual my ambition far outstrips my ability, so it’ll be interesting to see the final result. At least I finally get to use some sans-serifs.

This weekend’s shaping up to be pretty busy as well, what with Tiger “on the truck for delivery,” according to FedEx. Did you ever notice that FedEx’s logo makes a little forward-pointing arrow? It’s formed by the apertures of the E and the X. I just noticed that a couple of days ago. It’s either some kind of subliminal advertising or directions for the truck drivers, i.e. “Packages go in that end.”

It’s been linked all over, but Darth Vader’s blog is pretty funny, even if ââ�¬â�� like me ââ�¬â�� you’ve no particular affinity for Star Wars. I did catch one of the “classic” Star Warses on the telly the other day, though. I can’t remember which one, but I think it was the second one. You know, where the ââ�¬â�� what’s it called ââ�¬â�� Empire like, stikes back? (This was a lot funnier to me this morning while I was peeing, I swear.)

And though you’d think having the movie interrupted every four minutes by margarine and toilet-cleanser commercials would be annoying, it really didn’t bother me. In fact, the writing, pacing, and character development of the movie and the Saturday-afternoon-grade commercials were so similar I hardly even noticed the juxtaposition.

We got this new coffee pot at work, and besides being pretty snazzy, it’s got a bunch of Mac-like touches. Note the use of Myriad on the control panel, and the brushed aluminum. It’s also super high tech extreme to the maxx, especially compared to the coffee machine it replaces: a spoon, a glass, and a #10 can of Folgers crystals ha ha I would never!!!

The cool thing about this coffee pot, though, is that it gradually learns what you want by keeping track of how you make your coffee every day. It seems to work pretty well, too. On Wednesday, after an initial week of experimentation, it brewed a pot at just the right strength. On Thursday it suggested I enjoy a sesame bagel with my coffee, and just this morning it offered me coffee, a donut, and a handjob.

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The new Of Montreal album, The Sunlandic Twins, is frickin’ awesome. The liner notes read: “Produced, arranged, composed, performed, engineered, and mixed by Prince Kevin Barnes.” Wha? That’s just too much talent for one man (unless that man is me, or, evidently, Prince).

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Holy cannoli, has it really been ten days since I last posted? Well, I’ve been busy. And by busy I mean deathly ill. Self-diagnosis suggested avian flu, or possibly this.

I’m better now, so it’s time to get back to kickin’ ass and taking names, aka blogging. And speaking of social blog-type stuff, Flickr just upgraded all their Pro accounts, doubling the storage and upload limits, and, most importantly to me, giving all current Pro users two free Pro accounts to give out. Anybody got a Pro account they want to share with their favorite blogger? Or me ha ha? Should the opportunity arise I’ll totally Pay It Forward, Kevin Spacey-style.

Seriously, if you give me a free account I promise to post a picture of myself every week OR never post a picture of myself for as long as this blog shall live. It’s up to you!

A lot of you have been asking how a rugged, active guy like me keeps his hair looking so Jude Law-scious all the time. Maybe he’s born with it; maybe it’s Johnson’sÃ�® Baby Shampoo.

As an enthusiastic but top-heavy urban cyclist, fairly �¾ of my precious shower time is spent trying to get a congealed mass of blood, bugs, and gravel out of my hair. But harsh shampoos and cleansers left my hair feeling dry and stringy!

Baby shampoo to the rescue. It gets rid of all the gunk but leaves my hair as greasy soft as a fry grill plush doll. Not only that, but my head smells like baby all day. If there’s a more potent aphrodisiac than baby head smell, science has yet to discover it. Women who normally wouldn’t spit on me with a ten-foot pole throw themselves on me like I’m the Pope’s grave [too soon. ââ�¬â�� ed.] if the shampoo tricks them into thinking I’m burdened with a child.

Seriously, they should bottle this stuff.

Saul Bellow died today. He was my favorite author, and Humboldt’s Gift, Henderson the Rain King, Herzog, and Mr. Sammler’s Planet are all high on my list of favorite books, with The Adventures of Augie March perched like an iguana-hunting eagle at the top.

There’s nothing I could say that others haven’t said better, so I’ll just close with the opening paragraph of Augie. It always leaves me with a lump in my throat, but especially so today:

“I am an American, Chicago bornââ�¬â��Chicago, that somber cityââ�¬â��and go at things as I have taught myself, free-style, and will make the record in my own way: first to knock, first admitted; sometimes an innocent knock, sometimes a not so innocent. But a man’s character is his fate, says Heraclitus, and in the end there isn’t any way to disguise the nature of the knocks by acoustical work on the door or gloving the knuckles.”

I put up a new website this weekend. It’s my second ever, and so far I’m pretty happy with it. L needed a site her students could visit to find assignments and due dates and whatnot, and also a little showcase of her school’s goings-on. On Friday night she gave me some general direction, Saturday morning I took some photos (the header is a close-up of a vase we had tucked away in a cabinet), and by Saturday afternoon the homepage was ready to go. Naturally, it’s XHTML 1.0 Strict and valid CSS (the very first creative element I had for the site was the tagline “Strict teachers need Strict XHTML“).

Here’s a screenshot of the finished product (and by “finished product” I mean splash page ââ�¬â�� it’s the only thing up so far, and even it’s not actually finished):

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I got my new Mac mini a couple of weeks ago, but work’s been so busy I didn’t even open the box until Friday. Of course, like a true Mac Nut, I captured the process in exquisite detail.

If you’re a Portland native, you’ve probably been saying this forever, but for those of you not from Portland, “off college” is the politically-correct replacement for “handicapped.” As in: “ever since the porpoise attack, he’s been totally off-college from the waist down.”

You ever feel like you’ve read the whole internet? Like, cover to cover?