Daily Archives: December 2, 2011

Endings and Beginnings

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Damn.

There was a possibility that I’d be playing brass carols at the mall tonight as part of an incentive to get shoppers to dump more money into the Salvation Army’s red bucket there.  In anticipation of this, I took the tuba out of the case this morning, discovered that two valves (out of four) were pretty much completely frozen, and spent an extra 15 minutes before I left the house getting them cleaned and oiled and movable and yada yada yada.

Then I got an email at about noon informing me that our group wasn’t needed.

Just damn.  I was looking forward to learning if I still knew how to play tuba.  Maybe next week.

I think I wrote an entry in this’yere blog a year or two ago that described my general blase attitude each December.  In fact, I know I did.  Maybe I’ll put a link to it in this entry if I remember to later.  As a recap, I get incredibly unmotivated to do anything during the last 5 or 6 weeks of the year.  This year is no different.  I’ve had one project on my plate for the last week.  ONE project.  Normally, there are no less than 4 lined up and waiting.  Now it’s down to one, and my group has decided that we’re going to use the month of December mainly for cleaning up/organizing our web server and rewriting/improving older stuff that can be improved.

One project and then it’s just goofing-off for the rest of the year.

And I just cannot motivate myself to do that one project.  Oh, I take a look at it every now and then and I send emails to the person who requested it  (just to ask a few questions and let her know that I’m still thinking about it and it’s the most important thing in the world, etc.), but I’m basically just ignoring it.  I’ve got the attention span of a bowl of peanut butter these days, and even though I get to work with every intention of taking care of that one project, I end up surfing the web and editing photos and talking to other people in the office and fixing old code and before I know what’s happening, it’s 5:00 and I’m gone.

Maybe tomorrow I’ll take care of that stupid one project.

Today, however, I started a new blog.  I mentioned yesterday that I was considering putting it on the tumblr.com platform.  After I took a closer look at that solution, I decided to stick with blogger.  I could’ve gone the WordPress route, I guess, or just built my own, but blogger is an old friend at this point.

At any rate, I’ll be locking down this blog within the next week or two.  If you want to continue to read it (I’ll still be updating it), drop me an email and let me know.

The new blog, which I will attempt to update regularly, is called “Frowsy Noise” and you can click on that title right there if you want to see it.  It is not associated with any of my existing email addresses at the moment.  If I’m able to lock “Stuff Nobody Reads” down then maybe I’ll move FN under my regular email at some point.  Until then, however, it’s out there all alone and it needs your support.

Go ahead.  Follow it.  Comment on it.  It’ll be fun.

TWD

first things first

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The definition of FROWSY

1: musty, stale <a frowsy smell of stale beer and stale smoke — W. S. Maugham>


2: having a slovenly or uncared-for appearance <a couple of frowsy stuffed chairs — R. M. Williams>

Had to get the definition out of the way right off the bat.  Frowsy.  It’s an interesting word, that.  Meaning both “bad smell” and “bad look.”  With that sort of adaptability, I thought it only right and proper that I should apply it to noise, which – as far as I know – has neither olfactory nor visual properties (short of looking at noise in an oscilloscope or whatever that noise-watching-scope is called, but let’s not pick at that particular bundle of nits).
If you’re reading this page on or around December 2, 2011, then there’s a good chance that you were directed here from my other blog, which will be more-or-less locked down in the near future.  It was never intended to be available to more than my family and a small circle of friends.  I was somewhat off-put when I discovered that it had been indexed by various search engines and was being accessed by a handful of folks who visited my website (The Unofficial Furman Football Page).  I was not, like, freaking out about it or anything; but, as I said, that blog was never intended to be public.  I’ll continue to update it (as always because – at least mainly because – it helps me remember what I was doing during a given year), but its public visibility will hopefully be coming to an abrupt end.  
This little electronic scratch-pad, however, is open to whomever gets bored enough to look at it.  I envision it as being a place for me to post photos, thoughts, rants, lectures, notes…generally any old smelly thing that drips out of my head.  If you’ve been reading my other blog as a way to keep up with what I’m doing, then this blog – which I shall now refer to as “FN” – should fill that informational gap for you (for example, I’m currently at work, I’m bored, and the possible red-kettle caroling gig that I was scheduled to do this evening has been cancelled).  If you’ve read the other blog more as a way to gauge my mental stability, well….FN won’t be quite so personally revealing.
Another difference between this blog and that blog is that I’d love to get some feedback (in the form of comments) on FN.  Sure, I accepted comments on the other blog, but I wouldn’t say I encouraged them.  FN is different.  The more you comment (hey, tell your friends!), the more potential there will be for me to see something to write about – and, when you get right down to it, this is really all about writing.  I like to do it.  I just don’t always know where to start.
So then.  If you’ve been following my drivel for a while, welcome to the next phase.  It will hopefully be a bit more diverse and a lot more frequently-updated than you’ve gotten used to.  If you’ve never been subjected to my literary purges, then welcome aboard.  I hope you enjoy yourself.
Just remember those two golden rules:

• The cats were here first. • If it’s in the fridge, it’s fair game.


Winding Down 2011

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So.  December 1st already.  How ’bout that?

I’ve decided to attempt to go out of 2011 in the same manner that I began it.  To wit, by posting every day for the month of December.

This publishing marathon very nearly began disastrously, as I’ve been trying for several days to get an operating system installed on my laptop, and – until about 15 minutes ago – had been completely unable to do so.  I’d go through all of the installation steps, reboot the machine to finish up, and get cryptic error messages or missing displays or (in the case of the current system that I’m using) security errors whenever I tried to launch a browser.

At least for the moment, however, I’m able to see this page long enough actually to get a post written and, one hopes, published.

I’ve also decided that, sometime this month, I’ll launch a new blog to replace this one, which was never really intended to be very public.  Google’s continual combination of various things, however (blogger.com, gmail, google+, facebook, etc) has gotten me nervous that I’ll forget to hit a check box somewhere and “Stuff Nobody Reads” will suddenly become common knowledge to about 1200 people instead of the 8 or 9 who currently know about it.

So, as I said, I’ll be starting a new blog – probably on the tumblr.com platform – and will more or less lock this one down and continue to use it as a more personal journal for myself.

I’ve yet to come up with a name for the new blog, but you can rest easy knowing that the title of it will be clever and witty and the content will be topical, hard-hitting, and generally grammatically correct.

If you have suggestions for the new title, please feel free to let me know what those suggestions are.

For right now, though, I’m just going to run a few more software updates on the laptop (I’ve settled on Fedora 12 for the OS if you’re wondering), try to get it to reboot successfully, and then go to sleep.  The year may have gone by very quickly, but this week is dragging by slower than a very slow thing.

TWD