I realize that I'm becoming like all those other bloggers who get made fun of for their inconsequential little posts. And I'm told by my web stats that there are actually people who read this every day. So I feel bad, of course. I've never been able to come up with a spectacular piece of writing every day. I used to be able to get a photo that'd I'd taken scanned and published but the picture river has dried up. I refuse to walk around and snap stupid lomo-ish digital photos of abstract stuff just to have something to publish. I've tried not to write drivel.

In the interest of "having something to say", I've thought about getting glamorous jobs such as a backhoe operator that would put me in contact with people I find interesting and foreign. He's an example of me going on and on about my glamorous life in Bombay during this week two years ago. (God, don't' those two look good? (and sweaty)) I'm reminded that I only wrote a couple of times a week when I was living 50 times as fast as I am now so I shouldn't be so hard on myself.

But I gotta do something to justify the time I'm spending on developing my back-end content-management system. My back-end is pretty sore from sitting in front of my computer for 20 hours a day for the last 2 weeks. It's time to justify it. (And I don't mean that in the formatting sense!)

Oh shit, I just had another idea: to add a "save as draft" functionality to it. So I could squirrel away ideas until I was ready to make blog entries out of them.

It really is becoming quite monstrous. And I love it. Yes I do.

SO HERE IT IS: my big piece of content for you to manage. A story called "The Greatest Night of My Life". I'm going to publish it serially and I'm not going to put the actual text in this blog (except for teasers). (the reasons should be obvious, if you read it from the archives you'd have a pretty tough time making sense of the ordering of the sections.)

Damn, I'm being long-winded.

Here's today's teaser paragraph:

I watched Diane getting ready in her room. She was being extra nice and not yelling and trying to make herself pretty. I was only 13 but I knew that Diane was putting on makeup badly. Red stripes on her cheeks, blue streaks on her eyelids, lip-gloss and curling-iron curls of bleached-white hair framing her puffy red face. Diane was the ugliest woman I'd ever seen and she was even stupider than she was ugly. At one point I saw her breasts as she pulled on her shirt but I didn't get excited. That was the first time I'd ever seen bare boobs and contrary to what I'd been told, I found that it was possible to not enjoy it.

Are you a cooperationist? I was thinking about reading Edmund Wilson after my brain synapse book and I stumbled across this essay after reading David Mertz's introduction to programming Tk with Python. Now that I think of it, that path of discovery supports his viewpoint in this article. I wonder if EW is a computer guy like Mertz...

He has a fun little test to see how the brain computes using prejudices and not with mathematics and while I like his rip of Wilson, recently I'm finding myself tempted by the same fallacies as Wilson, namely, over-reductionist thinking. The problem with being a amateur scientificalistically thinking sorta person is getting too hot on one subject and using it to explain everything.

One simple insight of most moderately sophisticated philosophy of science is that sciences explain in myriad orthogonal levels. The true stories told by physics (whether by today's physics, or by some future physics which corrects today's mistakes) neither contradict nor affirm the true stories of sociology, or even chemistry (themselves, of course, subject to the same fallibilist caveats). One type of truth may speak at one level of explanation, and another truth at quite a different level.

The other reason I'm putting this link in my blog is that I like the dude's retro style. I had a web page like that back in the mid 90's also. Notice how he got fancy with the horizontal bars instead of just using the old <HR>'s and some of you may even recognize the old gopher icons that used to tell you if you were going to be dumped into the world of gopher. It used to be that if you were really taking care of your readers, you made custom icons for all the items in your bulleted lists of links. Man, they just don't make 'em like that any more.

Here's your word for the day: orthography

I’m writing this from Word and publishing it in my blog because after looking at all the xml editing tools on the market, they all suck, except maybe XmetaL (but it costs too much). I mean I installed them all. From funky Python-based summer-school projects to the enterprise-class document repository engines.

So I found a little proggie that reads .doc or .rtf and converts to xml or xhtml. It even writes schemas and dtd’s. upCast is its name and it’s what I’m going to use to generate xml in my blog. Words just knows how to let me type as fast as I want, and I like that. I also know how to make it save the current date, time and do things like increment the blog Entry ID. So I use word to create the entries, export some rather nice xml (unlike native word xml), and boo-ya, it starts the long journey though my custom crunching and smoshing and codifying to end up on primco.org.

Well, I've made a hell of a lot of progress in the last couple of days. Leanin' that XSLT into my brain. Oh I know, who'd want to bother with that stuff. You've said it time and again. I know. But I couldn’t resist. It's just so OPEN. I can't help but fall in.

XSLT is starting to work for me, thanks to G. Ken Holman and a lot of people on the net. It’s totally stupid and arcane and it’s almost killed me to make a little blogging program that’s based in XML and XSLT.

I’ll be proudly reviewing my little creation soon but lemme put it down now, Wednesday, February 13 (oh love those dates) (I can format the fuck out of a date now.)

All my blog posts are stored in an xml file. It’s sent through a stylesheet transformation or two and I get a folder full of html pages, all broken up by week and sorted all nice. I could have easily typed every one of those entries (a whole year’s worth, and probably a few more years worth) over again, with one finger pecking on the keys of an old typewriter and stopping to use the white-out every other word in less time than it took me to write my own blogger tool. I’m still not finished. This only publishes from a data file. I still can’t do any input.

So there you have it. You.. You..