They must've coated the building with some no-stick shit 'cause today the spray-paint is gone. Taking it off didn't even hurt the mural. Whew. I was thinking about organizing a mob to get those fuckers and publicly spank them in front of thousands of onlookers.

Every goddamn day of the past 9 years I've walked out my front door and seen old Georgia O'Keefe. There's always a bunch of people standing on the corner straining to get the whole facade to fit in their 50mm lens. I'm proud and a bit weary of it at the same time.

Here's a view of the top, which I prefer to the "celebration-of-the-handicapped-minority-aids-activist-dykes-in-wheelchairs" thing going on next to Georgia, which is now spray-painted over.

This is truly the most beautifully painted building I've ever seen. I've been on Lapidge for every day of its life. I'm not sure what they can do to restore it. Keith Sklar's "Learning Wall" used to my favorite building painting before it got fucked up. I think I heard that he destroyed it himself because it had accumulated some graffiti. Hope the same thing doesn't (I know it won't) happen here.

Now THIS motherfucker can write. I'm floored and flittering about. I skated as fast as I could down to Bi-Rite for a sandwich so I could get back and write about this writing. As I was eating my food in the 70+ degree heat on my front stoop, a mural tour operator pointed out that someone had vandalized the women’s building recently and I’ll take a photo of that after I’m done with this.

I didn’t know what it was when I followed the link from Ftrain and I’ve only read 5 posts but, damn. Damn. The Men was the first thing I read and since one of my first hobbies was cross-stitching and crocheting when I was in fifth grade I read some more. “Pet Ownership” was the tip-off that something deeper was going on:

He was really better off in a cage in the shelter than home with me. And later I realized that even when you and I were together, I still always felt like I was coming home to an empty house.

A failed relationship. In “Crocheting” it comes back, “Knots. I just sit and tie knots, over and over and over again.” And I think I’m going to like this....guy? Is it a guy? Maybe not? (I still hadn’t figured out that it was Joshua Allen writing this stuff.) The parallels are building faster than I can handle. I’m listening to “The Doctor Came at Dawn” by Smog and “Television Bingo” is basically a Smog song that’s not afraid to be funny.

So it’s on to Shinkicker and now I’m not sure if this is fiction or what. Can this kid really be real? She’s so perfect. So beautiful.  “My daughter, shinkicker is what her business cards say, so cute, made with the ditto machine on the back porch.” And he’s so proud of her. And I think of having children: can I make something that beautiful? And of Marcie and her biological clock. Sending her a link to this story is sweet punishment. “I told her she couldn’t put our phone number on the cards so she used our Thomas Guide coordinates instead.”  While I paste a url into my mail software I notice that it’s /box/000482.html and that’s got to be the cutest web address I’ve ever seen. He’s using post office box addressing. I’m crushing.

I’m starting to get giddy at this point and I try Voigt-Kampff on for size. And now we have the best yet. Maybe there’s hope around the corner for this guy. He seems to attract and appreciate fine individuals:

She returns a few hours later, somehow carrying four cocktails, each one the color and consistency of a sleet-packed cumulus cloud. She says something along the lines of: “You’re going to have to help me get my arms in the holes of that jacket,” except it sounded practically obscene the way she said it.

The guy knows what I like.

Back home, it takes three mirrors to make it out: KLondike 3-5652. Ma says I should act now before she passes out, I argue that she seems like the type of girl who would stay up late with a bottle of white wine, scrawling poems on her wallpaper with bloodied fingernails. She needs to simmer.

KLondike 3-5652 sends me running for my phone to try and figure out if I can change my number to those digits I used to find in my mother’s address book from the fifties. Hmm, AL 2-8041. Alaska 2? I was BA 6-1336 as a kid. I now have huge amounts of admiration for this writer. I don’t care if it’s true or not. Then he proceeds to have a, what should I say, “high fantasy” conversation that reminds me of Anne, who could burn up the email like this guy, and then it all comes slamming down. Like it is a fantasy dreamt up by a guy who’s relationship is described in The Gel:

Those days have been gutted and buried in burlap sacks. Those days knock on the floorboards late at night with rotting hands, bony knuckles. We can still be friends, they say in that awful zombie voice, the vowels drawn out way too long, the dry coughing spells, and I have to turn up my white noise maker so the house shudders under the weight of chirping crickets and burbling brooks.

Remember folks, this is only the first four posts I’ve read. He’s already mentioned dendrites and killing with coffee spoons. So finally I follow Poem Tag to its rightful end.

He put my love in clear perspective.

Just this week I had a little bit of a turnaround on the direction of my app and it might turn out to be more general purpose than I had initially planned. Just as a little background, I'm writing a blogging tool that doesn't rely on a server-side process like blogger or all the others. I'm learning to program with this app so it's gonna be a Frankenstein monster by the time I'm done. I decided to make it because I want my blogging to be integrated with all the writing that I'd do on my website. It needs to be in xml at some point so that it can be re-arranged and restructured and integrated with non-blog material. For example, for a few months I was publishing a photo a day and later I wanted to make those posts into a gallery but then I had to make all new webpages instead of just flagging the posts and changing the page template. http://ftrain.com showed me that I can extend the longevity of blog posts by making the content structure fluid. I'm not interested in feedback mechanisms right now. I don't think the kind of writing I do warrants it. It's more important for me to be able to easily insert a photo or video (that comes from a media database) than have someone be able to post a comment.

I want a tool for generating a static website on my local computer that I upload. If I could figure out WebDav, I might use that but seriously doubt I will because there's a slim chance that any webhoster will support it. If I need to travel, the damn app is coming with me. I went to India with a laptop so I don't think I need to make it harder to build and use just so it is a stupid web app. If I'm posting photos or vids I need to have Photoshop or AfterEffects installed anyways.

It started out with me trying to just export blogger posts to XML and create a scripted XSLT processing system. XSLT turned out to be ridiculously hard to use and definitely not CMS-in-a-box. And, I had no way to compose xml. I developed a system using Word and then doing XSLT on the XML that Word saves. This was still limited because I had to script the timestamping and ID'ing and categorizing with Word macros. That's when I started using Python. It was still going to be a non-gui XML, XSLT templating system but that broke down as soon as I realized that XML was a crappy storage format because parsing and writing with DOM or SAX is about 500 times more slow and complicated than a database query/update. When I gave up on xml, I said, well, might as well build a damn gui/database app and be done with it. That's where I am now. XML export will probably be the last thing I work on.

I chose Metakit because it looked really lightweight interesting and I didn't want to use one of the Unix db or MS formats. Metakit turned out to be a serious challenge because of the limited docs. I felt like I was being left in the dust by the hardcore c++ coders that primarily used it. And I was used to relational/sql and Metakit is quite different. I'm still on the fence but I'm not sure where to go. Most of the work I've done so far is write wrapper functions for Metakit. I can't seem to get my head around pickle.

I chose wxWindows and PythonCard because Tkinter just seemed clunky and unix-centric. Tkinter seemed to go against the grain. I really wish I could just use visual studio and bang out the forms with VB. But now that MS is abandoning old VB and transitioning to .NET, I didn't want to learn that stuff. Maybe .NET would be great for my app but I don't have the green for the software and it's too new. My experience in the past is that you go looking for some piece of VB code on the net, you find it, but it's a damn ActiveX control that the guy is selling for 49.95. I figure .NET's gonna be this way also.

I now have a schema for blog posts, an app that will let you create posts with titles, summary and bodytext and choose some categories. The schema is simple and blog-centric. It's not Docbook. It's not BlogML either. There's post filtering and date selection and two ways to edit. I have to hand-code if I want an image. I'm using the same plain text markup that textrouter uses (but with less features) and I also have it round-tripping the post through a Word editing session. It stores in MetaKit and the next thing is to use my hard-won XSLT experience and write some slick exporting functions to generate my blog. Right now, I'm composing with my app and pasting the posts into blogger and letting it publish.

It's going to be pretty dumb right now with no revision control but soon I'd like my app to know what to export, when. Right now I control it with a 'publish' Boolean. I want my app to integrate with a more general purpose publishing system so I really only want it to export plain xml (looks like separate files for each post unfortunately) that will get scooped up by some other CMS / template system that I write later.