Category: Deep Thoughts

Last night I performed an idiocy. However, it all panned out and I rather enjoyed the results. For the second time in the last month and a half, I locked my keys in the car. Al least I didn’t do it in Chicago this time. Instead I merely had to walk back to campus and collect the wife’s keys and return home. All without forking over the $65.

The stormy season in Indiana has officially begun as of last night. While I was walking all over town I was witness to one of the best lightening displays ever. It wasn’t just the incredibly bright bolts slashing down from the heavens, but huge arcing webs of light running from horizon to horizon. If I hadn’t been outside I would have though I’d stumbled onto the set of Frankenstein or Mr. Wizard’s Lab.

The gods were smiling on me as well. The driving rain that was all but promised by the imposing cloud/lightening combination did not materialize the entire time I was in transit from home to campus and back. There was a bit of a sprinkle off and on, but I remained relatively dry.

After a long winter the raw power of a summer storm becomes an abstract memory – something I know I know, but can only recall the details in a detached sort of way. Last night provided enough tactile stimuli to re-establish the proper relationship of the near immortal Fezboy! with the natural universe. Quite tiny, really.

More grumbling from the gods today. The skies are swollen and everything is just dim. Speaking of swollen skies, I read a forecast for Flowertown last night. It told Fezboy! that I can expect "Ominous clouds" tomorrow. WTF?! Purple prose notwithstanding, I think that is a bit much. Whatever happened to "mostly cloudy" or "overcast"? Ominous . . . sheesh!

Just spent the last hour or so trying to install a service pack for CorelDraw 10. "Trying" being the operative word here. Unfortunately I installed the downloadable trial version of CorelDraw many moons ago. Instead of buying a license for it, my inestimable employers purchased the software off of the shelf. Anyway, the service pack is convinced that I don’t have anything other than the trial version of the software on my box and won’t let me install the service pack. I’ve dumped the whole CorelDraw and reloaded, but to no avail. This bites! Not like it isn’t the first bad experience I’ve had with CD10 or anything. . .

And still the inbox fills and nothing gets accomplished. . . .

Okay, again with the feel-good, chicken soup pap. Read about the honest cabbie in Chicago. Link leads to an interview transcript. Read the three links above the transcript for the actual story.

Kind of like Pay It Forward without the attached box office hype. I promise to get off of this smarmy, smiles-n-teddy bears kick after this post.

The problems my mother in law has been experiencing getting on-line are over. Hooray! Fezboy! is off the hook and no longer has to feel responsible for getting her connected to the interwebnet-thingy so she can correspond with the outside world.

It has been fun watching her go from entirely sceptical about the whole email/internet thing to becoming fairly addicted to the nightly exchange of correspondence. She had well over seventy messages sitting in her inbox when she was finally able to log on. How cool is that?

Okay, Fezboy! will stop being so sappy now. This is hardly the techno-savvy, cutting-edge, sarcastic image I’m trying to project.

Crazy night last night – did not sleep much. I received a message from my "stepfather" detailing my shortcomings for missing mother’s day on Sunday. I won’t drag out the family laundry for a public airing, just suffice it to say that the irony was rich. So I spent most of last night alternately drafting a flaming response and debating whether or not to send it. For now it sits in my draft folder awaiting a final verdict.

btw – I did not actually miss Mother’s Day, the delivery of an e-card was somehow or another ballsed-up by Blue Mountain. So while it appears that Fezboy! did miss this solemn occasion, he really did not for what it is worth.

Needless to say, there was not much sleep had by Fezboy! last evening. Tiredness reigns supreme and there is a whole list of urgent projects nestled in my Inbox here at work. I foresee lotsa black and grey tones in today’s design efforts . . .

Total brainwarp this afternoon. A trip to the public library yielded texts on relational databases using FileMaker Pro 5, two excellent introductory texts on XML, and an interesting read on Apache servers. The proverbial technology ship has come in here at Monroe County Library. Anyway, it will be an interesting bike ride home this evening as I don’t have anything to carry the books I will check out. Oh well, the pain and suffering I must go through in order to bring you, my loyal readers, the highest quality web goodies.

We took a quick ride out to Kliendorf’s, a trip to yesteryear. It is a hardware store that holds just about any spare part to any thing manufactured since about 1937. Sifting through the piles of stuff we were continually assaulted by a inexplicable army of plaster yard animals. Obviously an outdoor sale gone awry several years back or something. Anyhoo, on nearly every shelf in some vaguely camoflauged position was a twelve inch plaster squirrel, dog, tortise, rabbit, or owl. A bit unnerving.

Another hour or so at the library and then off for ice cream! Hooray! Such is the joyful life lead by Fezboy!

Alas and woe. Actually, hooray and mirth. Well, no, alas and woe. I have found kindred souls here at the i-cynic. I have vague inklings of scepticism, but for now I really like this site.

Woke up this morning after a night of turbulent rolling in bed. I think I might be coming down with what the wife has been sufferring through for the last few weeks. I can feel the snot building behind the eyes and I can only wait for the dam to break and the goo to come flooding out. That would be a relief in many ways, I suppose, perhaps it would no longer feel like a railroad spike had been driven behind each eye. Anyhoo – not to be too whingy the first few times out (again).

Today should be extra nice. Melissa is working a half day, and I – not at all. After bliggity-bliggity-blogging for a bit, I’ll shower and then do a little spring maintenance on the bicycles. Not the hoary old in-town commuter bikes, but the full on sleek road bikes. We’re going on our first ride of the season. It’s a bit late in coming, but I generally am in all things. Hey, watch your mind! We’ll probably take the camera and shoot the last roll of b/w film. It’s really gray out today so that might not provide the best opportunities for shooting. A ride out to Nashville is not out of the question. It’s a lovely ride, fairly short, but not really a tourist destination for the "please, no more country crafts, please, I beg of you" crowd. There is an excellent climb about two-thirds the way there and at the top you can oogle a picture perfect, lush valley with a big red barn in the foreground. It’s postcardesque.

Oh, and my welcome back wasn’t particularly coherent last night so I’d like to take this opportunity to say, welcome back. The updates should happen more regularly now. I’m out of school for the semester and I have removed Fezboy!’s blog from the Blogger tit. Things are now run by a series of server-side includes and a bit of shifting now and again. I hope to figure out if my ISP supports backend database functionality. If so, I will automate this whole process over the course of this summer. Also, be on the lookout for subtle design shifts and new features as we go along. Currently the design is based on a significant use of Cascading Style Sheets, although I have resorted to a basic table structure to help support the <div> layout in Netscape 4.x. Hopefully this browser will die out soon and I can remove the crutches from the whole thing. At that time it will be super groovy and adapt to the user’s (that’s you, buddy) browser window width. The folks at c.i.w.a.s. will be so proud. I should confess that I share many of the same views and attitudes expressed in c.i.w.a.s. and this site will reflect these views. The concession of adding the table to support the page structure was difficult and I cannot guarantee that it will be around much longer.

So, make yourselves at home. Drop me a line and let me know what you think of the new look and the new "guarantee" of regular updates. It is a pleasure to have you here.

Well, Fezboy is back. Whatever that means. . . It’s been a long time in coming, but I hope you will be pleased. Since I’ve spent the majority of this day working on the redesign, content will have to suffer. Anyway, good to see you again. More later . . .