So I decided to take a photo of myself every day for a year. I was more inspired by the Noah K thing than by anything else. I’m mostly curious to see if you actually can see my S.A.D. in action (…the answer, so far,appears to be yes). Here’s the first month:

You’ll notice a drastic change somewhere in there — no, no the shaved head, silly! I got a new camera. I love it, but now I’m going to have to go pro again at Flickr, and that will pain me. Also aggravating: waiting on these guys to send me my new 2 gig memory card. Apparently, the “Express Shipping” I shelled out for means “within 8 business days.” Who knew? This is made more annoying by the fact that the camera came with only a 16 MB memory card. Out of the box, the SD600 can take 8 whole pictures at the default settings before the memory card is full. Crazy.

I learned something about myself while waiting at the window for my McDonald’s Big Breakfast™ this morning. (It’s an occasional indulgence, and yes, I know, I am contributing to the collapse of the american medical system and putting money in the pockets of a company that is basically evil and generally helping to bring about the death of all that is holy and right. But it’s sooo tasty.)

So I’m sitting there, about 45 seconds after I first pulled up to the order stand, and the lady walks up with my bag in her hand. This expediency in itself is remarkable, but this franchise was just remodeled, doing away with the playground and most of the dining room. It’s basically one big kitchen now.

But anyway, as she is putting the bag in my hand, I see a cup fall out of the little cup-dispenser thing, plop, right onto the counter without even a wobble. Like it had jumped. This is weird enough for me at this point, as I’ve been up all night playing Morrowind and drinking coffee, and I’m wondering if I’m having my first-ever hallucination. Then the cup starts moving. It slides itself over underneath the soda fountain, and then some concoction of water and corn syrup begins to dispense itself into said cup. I’m staring at this whole process while the lady is holding the bag out to me—wondering, I’m sure, if this guy in the purple Altima is a little bit special. She soon seems to realize what it is I’m staring at, grins, and actually chuckles a bit. I grin also, albeit a bit sheepishly, take my bag and go.

It occurs to me only later how truly problematic the whole thing was. That little gadget was probably designed just as much to shave a few employee hours off the payroll as it was to save a few seconds at the drive through. I’d also be willing to bet there’s nobody within a two hour drive who would know what to do with the thing when it inevitably breaks.

None of this entered my mind while I was there at the drive through. All I thought, at that moment, was “Oh. How cool is that.” This is what I have learned: technophilia trumps all of that social responsibility claptrap. If I had been born a few decades earlier, and been a nuclear physicist, and been attached to the Manhattan Project, I would not have been able to come up with any poignant words from hindu scripture. I would have been too busy thinking “Oooh. Coool.“

The unordered list has a storied history in blogdom, as does random bitching, so here I give you my bid for inclusion in the annals of history. Also, I don’t really have time for the well-written, well researched post these days, plus I fear that my boring working environment may be killing my brain, so expect me to be hitting ‘publish’ instead of ’save’ more often from now on. Fair warning.

• Soccer, Football, Footie, Futból, whatever you call it, I don’t care. Oh, you say it promotes international unity and ZZzzzzz. I don’t care. True, the rules are admirably simple compared to most American sports; but why is it that people assume I’m supposed to like soccer even though I don’t enjoy watching football, baseball, basketball, hockey, golf, softball, or any other sport involving moving an object from place to place? I just don’t enjoy it. Incorporate this into your worldview and move the fuck on.
• Terrorists. McDonald’s and R.J. Reynolds will each kill more people this year than all the world’s terrorists have since the modern media created them. It is terrible that anyone must die due to another person being so warped that they place a lower value on human life than they do on some other goal. This holds true whether that villain is a religious extremist, a corporate CEO, or an American president. But terrorists hold no patent on callous disregard of life, and their stated goal is to inspire fear. Their victims should be mourned, they should be brought to justice, but they should otherwise be resoundingly ignored.
• How close to insolvency the [movie | music | TV | bandwidth | aerospace] industry is. Good! That’ll teach the indolent bastards to innovate more and lobby less. Fuckers.
• How great you think Vox is. If I don’t get to play with the shiny new toy, then kindly shut up about it. I’m currently involved in a couple of private betas, and yet somehow I manage to hold conversations on other topics.

And last, briefest, and certainly not least:

• Amanda. Fucking. Congdon.

You’ve probably noticed that I’ve quit posting my photos and favorites from Flickr (quick, think of an f-word…) to the front page. It just started to seem like filler, and I am very anti-that, being someone who reads or at least skims something like 150 newsfeeds daily. The links, however, still get posted, as I always thought that sort of content should live in the main column anyway.

But pushing my photos back to the sidebar does present me with a quandary, though, in that I really enjoyed showing off my Flickr favorites in that way. I’ve always taken a wee bit of pride in my curatorial capacity over that collection of photos, and I have a love for each and every one of them. So, I now offer an Atom feed for those who really want to have their feedreaders spammed with my favorite photos. Everybody’s happy!

For those of you keeping track at home, I now have feeds for entries, comments, links, photos, and favorites, as well as for every single post on the weblog (right now: 1,042). So that works out to about, say, a billion feeds out there in the world, some in multiple formats, as a result of my daily activities.

So much for being against filler.

So I met David Sedaris last Tuesday. He likes to converse with his fans when signing autographs, coming up with a personal inscription off the cuff. I know this because the husband’s store was sponsoring the show, and I had been helping corral the roughly 2,000 attendees all evening before gleefully flinging off my volunteer cap and taking my place near the front of the autograph line. Retail hath its privileges. This was how I came to be standing across a table from one of my favorite authors, also probably the most famous person I’ll ever meet, an actual expat, and a former New Yorker — about the closest you can get in Charleston, SC to a member of the non-existent gay mafia. And he had not a clue, at first blush, that I was not a heterosexual. I have no idea how I feel about that, but it does make for a story.

The teenysomething who immediately preceded me had been subjected to the “so what do you do” question, evidently his question of the night. She stated that she was still in college, but she had been so inspired by Mr Sedaris’ work that she planned to be a writer. He stated that she was a pretty girl, writing was a really shitty way to make a living, and that she just might be better off becoming a prostitute or something. Her reaction betrayed perhaps a little less familiarity with his writing, and his humor, than she had implied. As she skulked off, I immediately imposed myself, grinning, in front of the author as he was still gazing crossly at her retreating back. He turned to me, conversationally, and said “What? She is quite attractive. I think she’d make a fine prostitute. You’d have sex with her, right?” And I did not know what to say. I think I managed a “pardon?” Gamely, he continued “That girl, she’s pretty enough to be a hooker, right?”

I have no memory whatsoever of the rest of the encounter. The ‘pusher’, the woman from Dan’s store whose job it was that evening to move the books along and ensure that the post-it with my name on it was properly oriented, filled me in later. Apparently, I then raised my right hand at about chest height, palm out, fingers splayed, and waved it about a bit. “Hello. Gaaaay.” This makes sense to me, in that I did roughly the same thing when my mom asked me shortly after I turned 18 if registering for selective service made me the slightest bit anxious. Mom and I shared a hearty laugh that afternoon, also marking the first time since I had come out at 14 that the subject of my queerness had come up between us without becoming a Conversation. Anyway, somehow I managed to make it through, despite the blackout of both all higher language functions and memory, without leaving too much of an impression on the distinguished author. It seemed to me, later in the evening, that in this case it might be a good thing to not be very memorable. Thus, the inscription:

So I just got cable internet installed (income tax and a fat bonus check helped out), and I’m doing some serious catching up. Del.icio.us, flickr, Firefox, and Bloglines have become major obsessions. It’s been my experience that when I use things on a regular basis, I tend to think of ways they could be better, so look for more of the old webgeekery soon.

First up is the Netflix Preview Direct Link script, a user script for Greasemonkey. Greasemonkey, if you haven’t heard of it, is an extension to Firefox that lets you have domain-specific user javascript, just as you might have user-defined styles. The script I wrote changes the “Preview” button in Netflix to link directly to the movie file instead of displaying it embedded in the page (which no worky in Firefox). The script is generously hosted by the guy whose script I cribbed from. There is also a very useful Greasemonkey Script Repository.

I’m also going to probably have to learn how to edit extensions for Firefox, to keep AdBlock from coming up every time I Ctrl+Shift+A to insert a link in Blogger. And how to edit firefox chrome to remap Ctrl+N and shift+click (old habits) to open a new tab instead of a window. And I’ll have to write a script so that Ctrl+Shift+I and B in Blogger work like they used to, instead of inserting a <span>. Hmm. Okay, that’s enough for one day.