Bleeding Fiction

This is my hundreth blog post, boys and girls, and today we're going to celebrate. Do you see all of the decorations and party favors and noise makers and festive hats? They're just waiting for you to try them out. And we can have cake. Oh yes, cake. That's because the number one hundred is an important number. Can you tell me why it's important?

Yes, that's right! It's because we have a base-ten counting system. And do you know why that is?

Right again! It's because we each have ten fingers and ten toes. Except for Zoloff there. He has tentacles that each end in three poison spines. But remember that different is special.

Now, can you think of any other reasons the number one hundred is important? No? Well, are there one hundred days in a year? No, there aren't. One hundred hours in a day? No?

Hhm...

You know, children, I can't think of any, either. I can tell you this, though: if we counted in base three instead of base ten, which we might do if we all had spines like Zoloff, the number one-hundred would only equal nine. In fact, if you count in the right base, the number one-hundred could equal almost anything! I guess the number one hundred isn't very important after all.

Blog: Slightly wonked due to a hacker. Bastard. Host is cool, providing on-site visits and discussions of poetry. Also, she fixed the blog. Mostly. Last update along these lines lost to the digital ether. Good riddance, I say.

Vitaly: Got married recently. Yay! Nice wedding, very traditional, right down to the break-dancing-Brad-Pitt-look-alike rabbi.

Kiki: Now engaged. About damn time. She and Raphael have only been dating for eight and a half years.

Erin McKeown: Free show at South Street Seaport past Thursday. Excellent music, as always. Open air = poor acoustics but great breeze. Too much sitting, not enough dancing.

Visitations: Something Positive went pro; creator-dude Randy got mad donations and quit his job to do the comic. That's cool. Also, Bekah started a livejournal. Its bilingualness astounds me. Go be astounded too.

Lena: What I said I'd write: Everything she says about why she and I should not be together makes perfect sense. But my life bleeds fiction and makes no sense, so there. Plus, I love fairy tales and happily-ever-afters.

Mother: In hospital for non-serious, non-diabetes problems. Yeesh.

Borges: My current reading. Witty and self-deprecating. Major images are mirrors, labyrinths and knife-fights. Very cool.

Saved: A movie. Pokes fun at very religious types. Funny as hell. Go see it. I want to see it again. And own it on DVD.

Work: Increasingly less busy. Or decreasingly busy. Whichever. Yay.

School: Registration papers to arrive... soon?

Writing: It's June. Leave me the fuck alone.

Back to a regular schedule presently.

Today marks not only Halloween but also the first anniversary of Bleeding Fiction. It was one year ago today that the site went live. To celebrate, I went out to a Halloween party-sort-of-thing at the home of a friend of Jeni's. There were some people there I'd met before and some new people besides. Wasn't a big thing; mostly sitting around talking and answering the door for the trick-or-treaters.

So, if you remember way back when I complained a bit about blogs. I haven't changed my mind about them so much, but I'm a little more comfortable now with the things the technology can do. I'm still not Making Light or Die Puny Humans, but I never really expected or wanted to be. I don't know that this space has done what I set out for it to do. Come to think of it, I'm not sure I set out for it to do much of anything. But almost two-hundred posts later it's been a good tool for self-indulgence and people have from time to time provided me with witty commentary. That's something, I guess.

And so, for another year, Bleeding Fiction will continue. The only question is: who has ideas for a sight re-design?

So, most of you know that I've been pirating internet service from whichever apartments around me have accessable wireless internet for the past three months. That stopped today when the last of the available internet sites became password protected. If you remember, my reason for pirating to begin with was that I couldn't get my own wireless internet to work. So, I figured I was screwed.

Desperate, I tried to get my own internet working one last time. Through the expiditious measure of uninstalling everything and starting the entire process over from scratch (and also using my other wireless router instead of the one I'd first tried to use), I finally met with success!

So now I have my own extraordinarily stable internet access that's not stolen from anyone else.

It goes very nicely with my new desk and bookshelf.

to the comment-spammer who posted more than thirty online poker ads between this blog and the Fables in the middle of the night, from over twenty five IP addresses, thereby forcing me to spit into the wind by deleting the spam and banning the IP addresses:

There is a very special layer of hell reserved for people like you, and in that layer of hell people like me are given egg beaters and stacks of poker chips and asked to be creative.

I am very, very creative.

For no discernable reason whatsoever my neighbor's wireless signal started interfering with my own yesterday. I hadn't changed any of my settings, so I can only assume it was something on their end. (Please note that I use the word "neighbor" loosely here. It could be the person in the apartment next door, but this is wireless in Seattle so it could equally be a person two floors down or in the next building over or across the road and up the street. That's why I didn't knock on the door to see what was up.) I fiddled with my settings for a while to try to get it back to normal - I changed the channel my stuff was working on a few different times, I changed my WEP Key, I reset the modem and router, etc.

Nothing came of it, so I called tech support. First I tried Comcast, my fun ISP. They were sympathetic and kept me on the phone for about forty five minutes, but ultimately had nothing useful to say at all. Then I called Dell, whereupon I spoke to a fellow who identified himself as "Sean." He was friendly and earnest. He's also Indian, as is Dell's entire help desk, and his name is no more Sean than mine is Jasamita. I know why this happens, but I still think it's silly and, more, doesn't ultimately help anything.

Anyway, after an hour and a half on the phone with Sean he gave up on me and transferred me to his manager, who I spoke to for another two hours or so. The people at Dell are very friendly, but not always the most helpful sorts. For example, this is the end result of my time: My internet works again, seemingly stably, though God only knows if that will last. However, I now seem to be running it from a different bit of software than previously (from the card software instead of the router software, I think). I also had to disable my WEP, because it apparently interferes with my ability to connect to my router (funny. It never did before...). I have a firewall now, but the only thing it seems to stop is port scans from my router.

All of which means that I've effectively insulated my computer from myself. I used to know how my network dealie worked, more or less. I knew which program was running it, at the very least, and I knew the different ways I could muck with it (and put it back) in order to get something done. Right now, I've got no clue at all what makes the thing tick. I find this very annoying.

I've been having some issues with my blog(s) and email address(es) over the past few days. I can't always see either blog, although I'm assured that they're both up and running.

Some email is getting dropped, too, or at least delayed. If you've sent me email over the past few days and not received a response (or if you send me email over the next few days and don't hear back), please send it again.

Hopefully things will settle down soon. Barring that, well, my phone works just fine.

I forgot to mention:

I can't seem to send email or connect to AIM right now. I don't know why. If you want to communicate something to me that requires a response, please call.

My email works again. Yay!

So does AIM.

I'm bored with my current site design.

Someone send me a new one, please.

Preferably before the end of this month, when my blog hits it's second year anniversary.

As a few people have noticed already (Hey Ed, hey Erik), bleedingfiction is kinda, sorta, more-or-less alive again. There are still a few kinks to work out (we're trying to get all of the old entries and comments back, for example), but there's no reason to keep from forging on ahead with the blogging.

I've moved from Greymatter to Movable Type, as far as software goes, so you should see a few new features around here, including Categories, better spam filtration and (potentially) an RSS feed. It's mostly a matter of me figuring out how the software works, which I'll get to here and there as time allows.

Also in the works is getting the blog's visuals over to something neat. I don't want to go back to my old look, but I'd rather something a little more exciting than what you're looking at now. If anyone knows of any sites that have cool looking, pre-made Movable Type templates that I can grab and fiddle with, please let me know.

That's it for now, but I assure you that more is on the way. Welcome back, everyone!

Comments weren't working quite right for a while, which kept me from blogging. I mean, what's the point of entries without the possibility of feedback? Anyway, that's mostly fixed now. Please comment freely. I'm working on hooking TypeKey up to the blog, so my commenters can become Trusted and get their posts fast-tracked, but until then everyone will have their comments subject to delay, pending my Authentication. Not that big a deal, really.

I'm still working on changing the layout of the new blog - particularly into adding all of the old links and things. If anyone has any templates to share, I'm open to recommendations. Also, I'm still trying to get all of the old blog's entries uploaded. Hopefully, that won't be too much longer.

Actual content will follow presently.

Thanks to Bettina, my wonderful blog host, I've been looking at some MovableType styles to use for the blog instead of this crappy one. I've narrowed it down to three, but I'm in an indecisive mood today and just can't coose between them. So, in grand intarweb fashion, I'm polling my readers. What do you think, folks? Do I go with:

Option 1

Option 2

or

Option 3

Vote now, or forever rest in peace.

As you may have noticed, almost all of the entries from the old bleedingfiction.com are now up on the new blog. This is thanks entirely to my totally awesome web hostess, Bettina. I moved on from there and assigned categories to most of the old posts.

Still ahead, I have to re-load all of the old pictures I'd stored on the server and put into my posts. Also, I need to fix the internal links - where I link one of my own entries in a later entry - because MovableType uses a different naming convention than Graymatter does.

I'm not sure if anyone cares about any of this, but I like looking through my blog archives on occasion, seeing where I was and what I wrote. And I think it's neat that I can now do it by category.

Can one of my tech-savvy friends who knows something about OpenSearch/xml coding make me a firefox search plugin for my blog? It'd be extremely convenient for me to have.

Please and thank you.

Countdown: 50 days