I cannot sleep more than three or four hours at a stretch, blaaarrrghhh!!!  Man.  It’s my brain, it’s working overtime for sure.  I had such a huge week (for me).  It was big in a lot of ways that I can’t really express… really it’s been working up to this for many many many months, but now seems especially important in terms of setting priorities, getting my head together in the place that it needs to be in order to continue doing what it is that I need to do, which is to be a fucking SINGER again, and to live my life the happiest most sensible way I know how.  Things are clicking in my mind I guess you’d say.  Gears have been turning, feet are moving, words are being said and plans are starting to be formed which I cannot yet reveal.

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Okay guys and gals.  I feel bad for everybody who missed that show, ‘cuz it was incredible. To you, and you, and you, and you and you and you and you and you, and all of y’all (y’all know who you are), I am sorry y’all couldn’t go but now I’m kinda glad I didn’t take you.  Because I wasn’t there to chit-chat or to make time with anybody, I had no agenda but to sit there and hear every single note with no distractions.  I didn’t know a soul and nobody knew me — except Bruce, the owner of the Empty Bottle who sponsored the show, and this one nice kid who said hi.  But as it turned out it was a real good thing I went by myself ‘cuz I had ‘er all to myself, heheh.  Well, me and about I’d say maybe 100, 150 other people at most.  They didn’t sell out, it was comfortable. Nobody talked, everybody listened, it was a beautiful thing.

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Last night was fun.  I wanted to go see Brother Danielson ‘cuz he’s my friend, but I couldn’t face the clusterfuck at the Bottle so I went to the Court & Spark / Manishevitz show instead.  Got all dolled up for it too, just for the hell of it… wore a dress and did my hair different, I looked hot.  Oo-wee baby!!  See, I don’t usually make the effort unless there’s just nothing better to do, heheh. Doing it to impress somebody would be pointless since I’d never be able to keep up the charade more than 24 hours.

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I don’t think any non-Midwesterners will know what I’m talking about, but for years I’ve been seeing these commercials on TV by a bankruptcy lawyer named Peter Francis Geraci.  Now, I’m not nearly as much of a princess as I claim to be; I’m broke all the time like everybody else I know.  So when I hear those gloom’n'doom ads it really gets me in the pit of my stomach.  "Need Bankruptcy Relief? Afraid of Losing Your House or Car? Then Listen to my Chapter 13 Info Tapes!!"

Well I finally figured out how to defeat that fscker.  He won’t be scaring me anymore, because, drumroll please…

THE GUY IS WEARING EYELINER.

Swear to god.  Look at him!!  HA HA HA!!

Also, I don’t think it’s even possible to create a website any more eye-poppingly horrible than that.  He obviously can’t even afford to get his kid to do it.

Just a few things I want to always remember and never forget. In no particular order.

• File away all paperwork instead of leaving it laying around in piles.


• Enjoy things that amuse me, even if it means I might look foolish to others.


• Sing the praises of wonderful people.


• Check the van every day lest I be ticketed for street-cleaning.


• Be funnier.


• Treasure my family.


• Do something every day to further my own physical health.

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My mom sent me a video clip of a guy juggling balls onto a piano keyboard, playing all kinds of complicated melodies with chords and everything.  I found a copy of the clip on the web over here if you want to check it out.  As a musician and a juggler (former juggler?  non-practicing juggler I guess) this was driving me crazy, I had to know if it was for real or not.  I asked Harper but he wasn’t sure.  My verdict is NO.  He’s a great juggler but there’s no way on earth that the notes you hear out the speakers are corresponding to the same notes he’s hitting on the keyboard.  Gotta be using a sequencer, and the balls must be just triggering the notes.  Still… pretty amazing showmanship there, you gotta give him that much.

I spent from 2pm to 1:30 am doing backups with Kelly for mister Sonny Smith.  Nora was there too for the first song but she had to leave early to go to her bartender job… we missed her, ‘cuz as a threesome it was Super Swanky!!  We’re not even done with the singing yet but man, am I glad I horned in on that gig.  I am completely toast right now but I wanna say: that guy is a fucking genius.  You mark my words, you’re gonna be hearing his name.  He’s amazing, he blows me away.  As a songwriter I mean.  The singing was a whole lot harder than I imagined it would be but I think I did alright… Kelly seemed to know what she was doing a lot better than I did so I just followed along with her, harmonizing either over or under whatever she was doing.  I just love singing with her SO much, and she cracks me up so bad, I love her to death.  Thank god I get the chance to do stuff like that every once in awhile, that’s the stuff that really makes life worth livin’.

Okay, that’s all I can get out right now.  Goodnight and have a pleasant tomorrow (=today).  :-) zzzzzzzzzz

I got another virus this morning with my own domain as the return address… don’t know if this is going out to people other than me, but if you get one, IT’S NOT MINE!  Look at the headers and you’ll see it came from the U.K., from someone using Outlook Express.  Which, if you know me at all, you’ll know I would never use if it were the last e-mail client on earth, ha ha.

I had the geekiest weekend ever.  The sun’s shining, the birds are singing, and I’m inside on the computer, coding and typing away like a fool.  John had a bad attack of comment-spam on his blog so I helped him upgrade his software and installed a blacklist for him; tonight I’ll be doing the same thing for Soren. Messed with my templates and blog settings, worked on the video list and held court in the comments section here, trying (and failing) to explain the workings of a minor scale.  (What do I look like?  I’m the worst teacher on earth, dude.) Did a lot of housecleaning too, it’s about time.  Today I’ll be doin’ a little singing, a little coding, maybe a little more cleaning, and who knows what else. Bring it on!

Sorry I’ve been so quiet here, not a whole lot to talk about.  Haven’t been doing much of anything but puttering around at home.  I know, I’m a real barrel ‘o’ monkeys aren’t I?  It’s the heat, it’s a bitch, and the mold from all the rain has been giving me allergies pretty bad… but the bright side is that the gross weather makes me not want to eat that much, so I’m droppin’ like a pound every few days.  I’m cool with that!  For awhile I kept losing the same five pounds over and over but I finally broke below that and have my sights set on the notch below.

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Yup, I got about ten inches chopped off yesterday evening.  Big whoop, you say?  Well it’s somewhat noteworthy for me since I only get it done maybe once every two or three years.  I didn’t go to Archer’s this time, I actually paid for it!  Went to the salon up the street, and was rewarded by tons of good neighborhood gossip about the different businesses opening and closing around here.  (That’s what hairdressers are really good for.)

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So I’ve been playing with PmWiki a whole lot the past few days.  I tried a few others but that’s the one I settled on due to its built-in password protection, easy configuration and not completely butt-ugly look and feel.  Today I whipped together a new wiki for myself to use, I called it /notebook, just because "notepad" was already taken, ha ha. I slapped together the beginnings of the same video list I was working on before… it looks like it’ll be plenty easy for me to use, and it’ll save me from typing a lot of code too.  So I guess this is where I’m headed in terms of keeping track of my stupid videos.  Who knows, I might start keeping other stuff on there too, no reason why not.  I’m going to take my sweet time getting stuff transferred — for now I’ll just have to remember to look in four or five different places if I want to find anything.  heheh.

From the PmWiki documentation:

The term “i18n” is commonly used as an abbreviation for the English word “internationalization”. The abbreviation is derived from the fact that there are 18 letters between the “i” and the final “n” and few people want to type them all out.

Wow, all this time I thought it was just l33t speak! Same thing with "l10n" (localization), I just thought people were being clever with their shorthand. Never tried counting the letters so I never made that connection… seems so obvious now that I’ve had it pointed out to me.

I dunno why that blows my mind so much.

I don’t want to keep backups on my computers anymore, I don’t trust ‘em!  I fry computers.  So anyway, one of the biggest projects I’ve had for the last twenty years or so is to catalog my video collection.  If I lost that list, I’d be sooo screwed.  It’s not really a database, it’s just a bunch of text files with some pictures and links for cross-referencing.  I’m currently storing it in a huge Notebook but since that’s Mac-only, it worries me that I might not be able to access that data if my iBook crashes.  It’s just styled text with links, so I might as well store it in css/HTML files that I can edit on any platform and from any computer (theoretically).  So I decided to keep it on my website from now on (maybe, if it works out).  I’m just setting the thing up now, wanna see? Voila, My Notepad. (Sorry, it’s gone now)

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Rob?  I mean, whoever?  In OS X is it possible to create a bookmarklet (favelet) on one’s desktop?  They work fine for me inside my browser toolbar, but I can’t seem to drag those little things to my desktop.  Any bookmark with an ordinary http: URL works fine; I drag it to the desktop and a .webloc file is created.  But when I do the same thing with a bookmarklet, which begins with javascript: instead of http:, the resulting file is a clipping of the text of the bookmarklet, rather than a .webloc file.  Does OS X even have a built-in handler for a javascript uri?  I couldn’t find anything when I looked for it using RCDefaultApp.

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Happy Tesla’s birthday!  :-)