I have this routine every morning when I wake up: I rush out to the living room, turn on the PowerBook, collect all the mail I've received since the last time I checked mail (about 1am, generally) -- usually between 25 and 40 messages, fire up Netscape, read Jon Carroll's column from The San Francisco Chronicle, Suck, Cybersleaze, and WELL conferences, and then I traverse the usual suspects in the World of Online Journals, using my own list of journals or the Open Pages site.
It's either online addiction or lack of a life: pick one.
Darin played poker with the boys last night and came close-but-no-cigar to taking home a big pot. He called me before he started playing to ask what time he should be home by. "Midnight?" I said, although that was a pretty arbitrary time on my part.
"I'll be home way before midnight," he said.
Heh. Guess who won on that?
I watched yet another made-for-cable erotic thriller ("You've been watching a lot of those lately," Darin commented) and I was very proud of myself that I guessed the main plot point within 5 minutes of the opening. Perhaps there is only one plot element in these things.
Guessing the plot of various kinds of shows is good practice for dreaming up plots of your own, particularly when you're plot-weak the way I am. I play this game with all types of TV shows and movies, and half the time I'm surprised by what happens and half the time I've come up with a more interesting story line than they did.
Spent a couple of hours in Menlo Park, first at Kepler's Bookstore -- amazingly, I walked out with no purchases! a first! -- and then at Cafe Borrone. On Borrone's sound system they had Italian cafe music playing. A constant backdrop of accordions playing perky little tunes.
This reminds me of the funniest fundraiser I ever heard of. A local music group called Those Darn Accordions! were going to have a telethon in which they'd play Lady of Spain for 24 or 48 hours straight...unless paid not to.
I spent my time in Cafe Borrone mostly productively: first, going through the paper and finding out what I've been missing (not much); second, reading the BBEdit documentation and finding out how much I can automate little things I want to do.
I've recently started reading about Perl and CGI, because I've finally understood what they're for. (Greg: Duh.) No, really. I mean, I knew what they were, but why in the heck would I ever want to use them?
Then one day I thought about putting together a form on my page, so readers could send me mail. Or join the Paperwork Notify list. Or join the journals mailing list. And what a pain, having to come up with a different form for each one. Unless, of course, there were some way of automating it...
Ding ding ding.
That's how I learn about stuff: I get interested in something, and then I have to know all about it. All about it. I end up annoying everyone around me because I talk incessantly about the same damn things over and over -- until I move on to something else that I have to know all about.
Sometimes finding out about something means bothering someone who already knows about it. I'm sure CJ lives in fear that I'll show up, O'Reilly CGI book in hand, and say, "Start 'splainin'." (Darin has already perfected the art of the "Not now, dear" stare. I'm sure CJ has too, but unfortunately it only works on Lance.)
What I want to do is have an exec cgi include that counts down to when I leave for LA. I've got most of the problem licked, but I won't get it up on the index page in time to get this issue out. Sigh. Tomorrow. Tomorrow it will be done.
After all, tomorrow is another month.