The "indie" comic book that got me into comics, Scud: The Disposable Assassin, remained unfinished for about ten years. Then Rob put his heart back together, took all the loose ends (and even some of the tight ones), and reconnected them all in a glorious four-issue finale that won me back. Forever. I couldn't be happier with the outcome of the story or of its author's struggle to complete it.

I've been taking some time this last week or so to realize — with my heart, rather than my head — how to live my own life. On Tuesday night, I went to the local bowling alley long after I should have been asleep, and I ended up in the bar singing karaoke for the first time in my life to Crowded House. (Yes, I am a child of the 80's, and damn happy to be one.) Another night, I was sleepless until the sun came up writing down a rather long list of significant changes to my website, all related to what I just now decided to call (because I love giving clever names to things) Project Boomerang.

A while back, while I wasn't looking, social networking sites became the Current Big Thing, and for a long time, I could care less*. Then I started to realize that I was living in a town where everyone I knew was leaving it, and I left the city where I knew everyone. So I started to brainstorm ways to get back in touch with people, and that became a mission to get back in touch with everyone who's ever known me — even the people that I clashed with. Facebook's been a big help in finding old classmates and some ex-co-workers, but I could really care less about any and all of the bells and whistles and cheap excuses for real communication that they offer like little snacky candy bars, to maximize the amount of time you waste looking at their branded pages. So I'm thinking there's a better way to deal with it. I may want business cards.

Over the weekend, I went back to my old stompin' grounds. As I was packing and driving out (with a new headset for my cellphone — it's almost the law!), I learned that my first bandmates were performing a short set with their newest ensemble, the Revolutionary Patriots, and so I spent the first evening of my weekend hanging out with friends I hadn't seen in years. The rest of the weekend lined up just like that. Old friends started coming out of the woodwork, and a few new friends showed up that happened to know other old friends. I even ran into my big sis without trying. This is what happens when I feel like I'm home.

I've lost, or broken, connections to a lot of people who can be a lot stronger together than they can by themselves. Like it or not, we all share the same soul, from the moment we first lay eyes on each other to the moment we close them for the last time. I'm going to start putting this soul back together, and you're going to help me, because it's all that you'll ever have or need.

* I now realize that this grammar is incorrect — it should be, "I couldn't care less". Thanks to reader Simon Ciacirelli for spotting this!

Last weekend we went up the coast to several points north, notably Cambria and Hearst Castle. Very good times. They are photographically documented very well here.

Also, these artifacts from my childhood were unearthed during the adventure.

It officially became an adventure when we stopped in Morro Bay to see Morro Rock, the giant volcanic plug that's plopped down near the beach. While leaping playfully from rock to rock along the beach, I hopped onto a large rock that turned out to be less solidly placed than the others, and when it gave way it also tipped over and pinned my pant leg down. I needed eowyn797's help to get me unstuck. I also scraped my right hand very slightly on the rock while we were freeing my leg. ADVENTURE! And yes, I did say the quote in the subject line while this was happening.

Yanagi Sushi in Pismo Beach (easily visible from the freeway) is still the most awesome place we ever have lunch/dinner whenever we drive that far north. I highly recommend it for anyone passing through there. Everything we've had there the last 4 or 5 times we've gone up there has been fabulous. The Golden California Roll was the first thing to capture my heart, but seriously, just get anything. It'll probably be awesome.

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My DVD burner started petering out earlier this week, and its replacement (which arrived today) just happens to be the same model as eowyn797's. Our computers are matching! Teehee.

Our router is also showing signs of decay — the connection drops when too many connections are made, but "too many connections" wasn't too many before. Our new replacement router (not yet installed), like most routers now, contains both ethernet and wireless connectors, but we don't have any wireless stuff (or any reason to switch) yet. It also happens to be supported by an open source firmware that is supposed to be impressive, so I may check that out later if/when we have a reason to go wireless.

I recently learned how to convert regular old AVI video to a format called DPG, which is basically just an MPEG-1 modification that can be played back on the Nintendo DS using homebrew software. I don't use the DS for watching video, but it's just one of those neat things I like to figure out how to do every once in a while.

I quietly started using Thunderbird (Portable) for email, since I have both my Gmail account and my work email (IMAP) configured in it. It's surprisingly handy to have both email accounts available through the same interface, on a USB drive that I can take with me, and with neither account storing mail on my device. (Edit: Incidentally, the Win32-based PortableApps, with its ability to travel between home and work, is probably the only thing keeping me from exploring the current crop of useful Linux stuff and considering it as a permanent home OS.)

My phone's data cable was giving me trouble on the home PC a long time ago, so I just forgot about it for a while, but I recently took it to work and got the data connection working there — which means, in short, that I can get camera pictures off it, and put other ringtones on it. (I have a lj pics gallery called "crappyphonepics" set aside specifically for these pictures.) In retrospect, it's probably not the driver or software that was having trouble. It sometimes takes some jiggling of the power cable to get the phone to start charging, which could mean that the phone's connecting thingy is a little messed up. It's showing its age.

Today we were at a local Gamestop, briefly, browsing the Wii selection (for future reference; we're not getting one until we get a bigger place). There was a Wii on display, with the latest Smash Bros. offering, so I figured I'd take a moment to figure out the controls. There's a single-player "story" mode in this one, so I played it solo a bit, and a little kid was checking it out with me. After a whlie, the kid noticed that I was playing with an unfamliiar character, who happened to be Pit, who I first saw in the NES' Kid Icarus.

The kid asks who that is, and I say, "Oh, that's Pit, he's this angel dude from a game that was probably made long before you were born."

He scoffed. "Yeah, right; I'm 7 years old."

I didn't feel like getting into the history of video games, so I let him slide. As far as he knew, I was ancient.

Addendum: eowyn797 told me I should "LJ" this. The word has officially become a verb in our home.

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I'm picking up some French, as part of a long-term plan, and while I don't know a great many words yet, we have a recent favorite restaurant in town called Pacific Crepes (which serves, more or less, raw awesomeness), and I was able to understand and exchange a few words with the French-speaking staff. Also, I know for a fact that at least two (and possibly three) of my co-workers speak French, so I'll be inviting them to lunch there sometime soon to immerse myself in the language.

When I was in elementary school, there was a used book sale in the auditorium, and I picked up a book on Geometry (the regular old mathematical kind, not the "Sacred Geometry" of my tarot deck). I didn't know, back then, that I would have a Geometry class in high school, I just knew that I liked the subject matter, the ideas, the shapes, and the logic. As a result, when I took Geometry in high school, I passed it embarrassingly easily. (I'd argue, at this point, that grade-school kids should be given the opportunity to read textbooks way the hell above their grade level, but I wouldn't know where to start arguing.)

Christmas and New Year's were good. They were spent relatively quietly; we got to bed at least an hour before midnight on New Year's Eve, though I woke eowyn797 up for a few seconds at midnight, which I identified by the distant commotion outside, to wish her a happy new year.

At the end of 2004, the year that she and I met, the word for the year was Union. This year, in an effort to re-orient myself, I revisited the deck briefly, and was given a card marked "The Line", which contained the word "Extension". Without taking the word into account, I quickly understood what it meant to me, and the simplicity it represented.

In life, there is a straight line between you and anything you want. It may help to visualize that line, and follow it. It will help to develop a sense of when you are veering off of that direct path, and to re-evaluate what you're doing when you realize that you are. (My words, no one else's.)

I kind of dropped off the face of the written web because I haven't had anything to say from the top of a podium lately. I'm more interested in personal communication. Let's all get back to letters, emails, IM, and phone calls for a while, yeah?

A friend had an idea, wherein people would try to mimic the expression of Donald Sutherland in this scene from Invasion of the Body Snatchers:




I gave it a shot, and this was the frightening result: ( D: )

Learn something new about yourself as often as you can.

For example, today I discovered, with eowyn797's assistance, that I like curry.

(It was mild, but I figure I can work my way up.)

I haven't been enjoying my job much lately, but the job has not been responsible for this so much as my general mood. I've started working to correct this by taking the right supplements (just vitamins, not pharmaceuticals, legal or otherwise), and I realized that another important piece of the puzzle was missing. I was missing music — not just any music, but music that actually lifted me. Not much will do the trick these days, but there is at least one source that has never failed me: Medeski, Martin, and Wood. My collection was curiously missing from my Full Albums folder, so I'll be reacquainting myself with them tomorrow at work, behind on deadlines and not letting it get to me. When you have a job with deadlines, you need a way to deal with them, and a way to deal with them.

I am finally taking my first steps into ajax coding, sans XML, and it will be a big help in the thing I'm doing right now. It might help to be able to do this at work too, I guess.

That ol' Zaca fire that isn't raging any more is still doing crappy things, thanks to the wonderful winds that kick up here in Southern California — we get another couple days of ash, and a completely grayscale sky during the day. I had the misfortune of choosing yesterday morning to clean up the bathroom, and when I came home later in the day, the bathtub and all the surfaces were sooty again. If we close the windows, it gets unbearable in here (who needs air conditioning in a city like Santa Barbara, anyway?), so pretty much everything was gritty — especially our desks and everything next to a window. (I still haven't washed my car, so that's one less thing to feel I've wasted.)

The air quality and temperature is supposed to be the suck for the next day or two at least, so today will be spent partly in a movie theatre, and tomorrow will be spent indoors at work.

I have joined the ranks of people who are Orange Box bound. Rather, I will have, once it arrives.

I haven't played a real FPS for years, and I'm willing to bet my "skillz" have deteriorated accordingly, but darn it, I can't help digging Portal, and I rather like the art in Team Fortress 2. Half-Life 2 wasn't as interesting to me on first glance, but I know how it goes — it'll grow on me. Two games for what I paid is pretty good, and three is really good. (I don't know whether the additional "episodes" of HL2 should really count as two more separate games, so I'll just say that three for the price of one is really good.)

It should be interesting; I wonder whether I'll run into former teammates from my friendly gaming clans of yore, like XP or 23. If any of them are reading this, |23|JohnnyBastard is dead; long live the Kermix. I'll see you soon.

Let's say you have several hundred CDs full of mp3s and/or other data, but you don't want to go searching through them all the time to find stuff. Just dump their contents into a bunch of searchable text files!

First, make sure you have them sorted — it won't do any good to index their contents if you don't know where they are. So sort them alphabetically or numerically or however you can find them easily.

Next, open up a command prompt (Start, Run, CMD will usually do it).

Pop a CD in the drive, wait for it to spin up, and type this next line in the command prompt window. Substitute c:\cdname.txt for the name and location of the text file; the filename should correspond to the name or number of the CD, so that when you do a Windows Search through the directory that contains your text files, you can recognize the filename.

dir /s > c:\cdname.txt

Copy the created text files into their own little folder wherever you want it.

From here, there are multiple ways to look up your stuff depending on what you have; the default way is to use Windows Search, within the folder, searching for "All files and folders", and entering your search term in the space that asks for "A word or phrase in the file". There are also text editors (particularly ones made for programmers) that will let you search the text of an entire subset of files.

You could also try to put all the contents into one file, but it could get difficult to read without some additional formatting. If you really want to dump the listings directly beneath each other, use >> instead of > in the command line above to append the contents of an existing file. (The benefit of this, of course, is the ability to just open one monstrous text file and search directly within it.)