Adam Bosworth explains why, even though I spent the only dollars I’ve ever spent on a computer book on an XSLT book, it was probably wasted money.

This is the paradox: XML was chosen in part because humans could read and write it, unlike the highly efficient babel of binary formats that preceded it. Yet languages encoded as XML grammars and used for manipulating XML can only really be read and written by programs (and a few very smart people). This is why books for XML and Java and books on XSLT sell in such great numbers. In making the formats easy and interoperable, we made the programming hard.

Uusally reading a resume wouldn’t be that fun, unless you were voyeuristically looking at someone’s resume who you knew was a total idiot and they were making themselves look brilliant. That might be fun. But I think reading my friend John’s resume is fun just because he’s led an interesting life and it’s written in a very friendly prose style. It’s better than any resume I’ve ever read.

Ed: the kind of man who ignores young boys until there’s a real lesson to be taught to them. Who’s nickname for me was “Red on da head like a dick onna dog.” Who probably stood 5’6”. Who smiled with his entire upper body and scattered the hundreds of cigarette butts that retards and boys scavenged. For whom the lyric was written, “Gas-fume casualty in a repossessed car, Vietnam vet playing air guitar.”

Part three in “The Greatest Night of My Life”.

While Angel, the kids and I, were in the trailer’s living room, Mario and David the mental patient were in our room having a “hobo smoke”. David swore by the hobo smoke: you take a piece of newspaper, rip a long strip, roll it, light it, and smoke it. Tobacco was optional. If you were living it up that day, you could gather all the cigarette butts you could find, empty them onto the paper and smoke that. There were hundreds of cigarette butts on the ground around the trailer, but thanks to David and us, there wasn’t a lick of tobacco stuck to any of them.

Installment two in “The Greatest Night of My Life”.

Well, the [swing bike](http://cgi.ebay.com/aw-cgi/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=1072985473) that I was lusting after, and was for a short time high bidder on, is going to sell for over 400 bucks. 38 minutes left and all I can do is watch it go. Especially sad when I was the one who popped the reserve on that sucker.

I guess I'll just have to wait for a rusted one to show up. Bummer.

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](/writing/its_just_like_not_being_there/ah_bed_with_two_mattresses_please.html) 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](/writing/stories/greatest_night_1.html)". 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.

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