I had high hopes for last week. It started off with me officially becoming an old man, celebrating my 30th birthday. It ended with me laid up in bed for the better part of 4 days with a nasty cold. Good times.
On the plus side, I had more satisfying nose-blowing experiences in the last 48 hours than I've had in my entire life. It was great. I'm a weirdo in that I really enjoy some parts of being sick.
- The disappearance, if only for a day or two, of that nagging voice in the back of my head that keeps telling me I have to do work at all times or else I'm going to die unfulfilled, having accomplished nothing. The nagging really gets annoying, and being able to watch movies guilt-free is a liberating experience (This weekend, it was Shoot 'Em Up, The Bourne Trilogy, Tropic Thunder, The Illusionist, et al.). On the other hand, that voice is probably the only thing that keeps me from being a homeless, unemployed deadbeat. Oh, wait, I already am. So I guess it serves no purpose. Awesome.
- I like how boogers smell.
- The sheer joy of reaching near-incinerating temperatures under my blankets. When I don't care about sweating (being a disgusting, mucus-leaking mess causes one to lose the drive for hygiene), I can cover myself in a ton of blankets and crank up the temperature under the covers into at least the 90s, if not triple digits. I bake and love every minute of it. No electric blanket or anything - just pure body heat.
- And the peak of this recent bout with infection: successful nose-blowing -
- In order for blowing your nose to be successful, there has a partial or complete blockage (and complete blockages almost never successfully expelled in one shot). The best situation is for there to be a small bubble in one nostril that inflates and deflates with every breath. If you breathe lightly, it doesn't come out - but it does rise and fall. When you feel that - it's game on.
- All it takes is a tissue, folded over once - since the force behind the coming blow will be strong enough to rip through one layer. Then a deep breath, a finger closing the other nostril to increase the blowing speed (I'm a righty snot catcher, so its index finger to cover left nostril, or thumb for the right) - and the explosion. If executed properly, you will feel the partial blockage in the back of your nose completely come free, immediately followed by the most satisfying thump in your tissue. The thump really hits home because it works both in the awesome sound it makes and the small tap I feel through the tissues in the palm of my hand.
- From then on out, its just all glory. Switch to two hands to use the outside edges of the tissue to wipe any side splatter off the outside of the nose. Then pull it away and separate the now folded and stuck together halves to see the product of your efforts. Yes, I made that, and then I shot it out of my nose, thank you very much.
So, anyhow. Frustration-wise, my PhpBB Joomla Comments plugin 95% works, but it's going to require a large rewrite because of naming collisions with certain functions in Joomla and PhpBB (relating to dealing with UTF). So the one thing I thought was almost done is now a week or two off. On top of that, the really cool feature for this site I was excited about was going to be the addition of an XML-RPC capability, which would allow me to update the site from outside the browser. That way, I could throw together outlines of posts I wanted to write into a desktop app and work on them as I pleased before publishing them. Joomla has a nasty habit of letting me type 90% of a post and then having me time-out of my session in the admin, causing it to lose almost all of my work.
Unfortunately, that too became a frustration. The plugin, the Movable Type XML-RPC API - is stripping out all brackets, which renders writing HTML impossible. I contacted the author of the plugin, but as you can see, his native language is Japanese. This makes communicating a little cumbersome.
However, I guess in my "emphasize-the-negative, forget-the- positive over 5 year near-depression" I did manage to accomplish something pretty damn big as my cold was beginning to sweep me to the bed - Preppermint was finally migrated to IIS7 and .NET 3.5 after a six-month struggle. When I finally beat the stumbling block that had held us up for so long, the solution was so stupid it almost removed any joy I got from the situation - but I did manage to hit Deirdre up for a "And! that! is! how! it's! done!" Danny McBride high-five session (I tried to find the clip of that from "Hot Rod" but couldn't. Interwebs, you have failed me.). I'll explain what all of that means later, but basically it means big changes for Preppermint in the very near future. So, there was that. I also built Rock a radio studio in his house, which was pretty cool.
As you can see, when I do sit down to write something it tends to be long because I can't type as fast as I can think, so my mind races ahead and starts making connections to things that I will have to write about as well, before I'm even done typing my last thought. I'm not a particularly slow typer, it's just that I make mistakes too frequently, so I end up having to go back to fix them before I can continue, and my mind wanders. The result is choppy half-work, like this.
Wait, where was I?...
Oh, yes. As I get back into the groove of writing again on a regular basis, I promise you the posts will be less choppy and more coherent (but will still contain the same amount of parenthetical asides - although I may adopt the footnotes method of Dream Loom). I'd say something about frequency too here, but I think it's better that I prove it before I promise it. I also promise a post about why I hate "Benny and the Jets", a topic that has bugged me a great deal for the past few months.
Finally, I also want to say that the microphones, stands and cords arrived, meaning that I now have all the equipment necessary for podcasts to begin. I want to get them started before Christmas, but between the template for the site, the comments plugin and Preppermint, I may hold off a couple more weeks. But I will begin gathering drops, looping beds and writing and producing promos. I want the podcast to be technically well done, so there's still some research about the mp4 container format, xml feeds and itunes submission to be done. Rest assured - now that I've spent money on the equipment, this thing is happening for sure.
