Everything In Between

While I was not as productive as I would have hoped last night, I was plenty productive today. In fact, I’ve had one of those incredibly full days again, though in light of my current state of literally painful exhaustion it will not be documented as thoroughly as it might otherwise have been. That is another one of those good signs that means I’m really beginning to get myself on some sort of roll, even if I’m not sure what that roll is yet.

Squash the Schooling

I was smart enough to try and, thankfully, actually able to take a nap sometime around eight o’clock in the morning today. Since I had woken up at seven o’clock in the evening the previous day, I knew that I was in danger of fucking up my entire Sunday if I either did or didn’t take that nap. I really didn’t know what was going to happen today, but the nap actually saved the whole day.

I woke up at around 12:30 PM when my alarm clock went off for the third time. (I snoozed.) Getting up was the hardest part. Nevertheless, I made it out of the house on time and headed toward my uncle’s for our scheduled Squash game.

The game went swimmingly, though we didn’t have as much time on the courts as last time. I made sure to stretch thoroughly both before and after the game this time, since last week I forgot to stretch after playing and my whole body ached for days. I’m also getting noticeably better remarkably fast! (Yay.)

After that, we stopped off at Gray’s Papaya so that I could try, for the first time, one of their supposedly mindblowing hot dogs. They were extremely good (admittedly the best hot dogs I’ve ever had) but I wouldn’t have given them that much praise. Perhaps I’m just not a dog person.

Anyway, I shared the excitement of my recent communications and hypertext experiments with my uncle. Somehow, the conversation strayed off onto the horrendous copy I have written on my web site, and from there it strayed further away towards schooling. I’ll be tight-lipped about the whole thing and just say that I quietly waded through at least a good half-hour lecture on the importance and benefits of schooling.

I’ve heard that lecture before, and I don’t even disagree with it. Nevertheless, I am always frustrated when people try to convince me of things that they seem to think I am not convinced about. I’ve learned to just quiet myself instead of arguing with the person, since this conversation never goes anywhere.

However, one of the absolute gems I gleaned from the conversation was that in order to write effective marketing copy (which is essentially what business web sites are), one needs to ask oneself a single question. “What is the benefit for the client of my product or service?” When I got home, I started re-writing my entire business web site while trying to keep that thought in my mind.

I think I did a pretty good job, but I’m sure that it can still be improved. My uncle and I have another Squash date next Saturday, and he offered to give me his input on my web site if I arrived early. I would like to take him up on his offer, as my uncle is probably the best businessman and marketer that I know.

BYTE the Dust

While I was still working on rewriting all of the copy for my business web site, I got a phone call from the person who invited me out to the BYTE party tonight. We made plans to meet and I started getting ready to go out. Our plan, which we kept, was to meet at 11:45 PM (too late for my liking, but that’s how these parties work) and would head to the club sometime shortly after midnight.

As I feared, the party was a rather typical stand-and-model affair, not something I generally enjoy. The music was preposterously loud, the venue was ridiculously small, and the crowd was…actually the crowd was the best thing about the whole affair, but I was still left feeling pretty bored for a great deal of the time. Thankfully, I ran into someone I knew from my old affiliations with New York University’s WHAP club, an extra-curricular club which has since dissolved. Meeting him and getting to catch up on some old times literally saved the night.

At worst, it was a boring parade of fashionistas and snobbish, drunken partygoers whose apparent purpose in life is to rock out to techno and trance. At best, it was a night out trying to be social in spite of the loud, pounding music, a chance to let myself practice having fun in relatively unpleasant social situations, and a constant show of tight clothes and lots of flesh. I have absolutely no intention of doing this on a regular basis, but the fact that I haven’t been out in so long made tonight far more palpable, even to the point of almost being truly enjoyable.

Interestingly, I also ran into an ancient acquaintance from the BDSM scene. We chit-chatted a little, remarked on how long it’s been since we saw one another, and caught up on some of the shallower aspects of each other’s lives. I have no doubt that there will be talk of me in my old social circles now, and though I expect no repercussion, I do wonder what inevitable ripples may come of it.

Miscellaneous Tidbits

Other things that either happened today or that I thought about today:

• I gave Danica a call to pick up her things, and she said she’d come gather the rest of her belongings tonight. When I left the house it was nearing eleven o’clock, so I gave her a call and told her to reschedule for another time since I knew it would be impractical for her to lug her suitcase up to my apartment and then all the way back down so late at night. She left me a message apologizing for the ill-concieved planning, and I responded with a SMS telling her not to worry, but to pick up her things as soon as she could.

• I toyed with the idea of writing a “Ten Things to Watch Out for in Underground Nightclubs” list, but could only think of three off the top of my head, so I’ll leave that for another time.

• NYCwireless, an organization promoting the adoption of wireless networking technologies in New York City, has sent a call for volunteers to aid in the implementation of a new design for their site in CSS. Feeling somewhat more confident of my abilities after my recent experiments, I sent them a letter offering my volunteer services and will see what comes of it.

• DSCN0678
• Originally uploaded by maymaym.
• Added to the photostream on 12 Mar ’05, 5.32am PST.

In all my excitement over the various techy things I’ve been doing lately, personal blogging has waned and as a result several days have gone by without mentioning a single word about how I’m doing. Of course, that is a sign in and of itself that things are much better than they used to be and that my motivation to do work is returning. I have been following a few leads that will hopefully net me a project or two, and which will ideally be something small so I can ease back into the routines of work.

In the meantime, Danica has moved more of her things out of the apartment but has yet to completely transfer everything. Silverware, several pots and pans, a few cusions, some CDs, and various other odds and ends are still strewn about in the corner of my living room. I am eager for her to remove these items because then I can begin to think clearly about filling my apartment with the furniture I need.

In the corner across from her things is where the couch used to be. It’s vacant now and I’ve stacked a few of my things that don’t fit on my computer table on the floor there. Above them are my DVD shelves and to their right is an antique wooden unit which is holding my CDs.

The vast empty space has been somewhat difficult to deal with, emotionally. In order to cope, I’ve been spending the vast majority of my time online facing the wall with my back turned to the open space. This helps me forget about all that space, though it’s not a solution.

I don’t have nearly enough places to go out as I’d like to. Thankfully, the Bipolar Disorder Meetup Group is meeting this Monday and I’m looking forward to attending just for the opportunity to be social. I have not gone to the gym at all this week, which is bad and wrong and I hope that tomorow’s Squash game with my uncle will put me back in the mood for it.

Yesterday, I stayed up all night playing with PHP sessions and creating Maymay Media’s contact page which was a badly needed addition to the site that I can finally say is done. I went to sleep well after sunrise and didn’t wake up until 7:40 PM tonight. Then I got online, and Liz was gracious enough to break my script. (She discovered a design error in the processing page and I corrected it.)

I had been expecting Danica to come back sometime today since she did not have to be at work, but from the looks of things I don’t think she has been here at all today. I’m not sure how to go about filling my apartment with furniture, but I don’t even want to think about it until she removes all her things. Right now my priorities are simply to stay social, stay active, and stay happy.

I’m pissed at myself for having fucked up my schedule once again. I hope that waking up so late today won’t have disastrous consequences on the rest of my week.

I will do my best to stay productive throughout the night and keep my Squash game appointment tomorrow. I have yet to decide whether or not to go out clubbing Sunday night with someone who invited me to the monthly BYTE party in the East Village. I am inclined to go, if only to be out and say I did something, but I am apprehensive because it sounds a lot like just another dance club that I will surely hate.

Later this week, I have Jury Duty, and I am not looking forward to that at all. And y’know, this entry is rather mundane. For now, mundane is good. Now…where’s breakfast?

The Importance of Context and Relevance

Context and relevance are two of the most important aspects of effective communication. If the context of a message is not understood then the commuication will likely be disregarded, or worse—misinterpreted. If the message isn’t relevant to the topic at hand then it will be useless to everybody involved.

In order to ensure that a message is successfully received and has the desired effect, one must first ensure that the context for that message is properly set up and that the message itself is relevant to the subject matter.

An excellent example of a scenario where a loss of context and/or relevance can easily cause communication problems is receiving email messages. Surely everyone has recieved an email that they simply don’t know what to do with or why they’ve gotten it. (By the way, for some unbelievably insightful tips on composing effective email messages, read this article [via 43 Folders].)

The same thing can—and does—happen on the web. For example, let’s say you’re reading a page which has a link in its text to another page. You decide to follow the link but once you’ve arrived at the new page you find yourself staring at an enormous amount of other text that doesn’t have anything to do with why you followed the link in the first place. Suddenly you’re confused, you feel lost, and you quickly push the “Back” button of your browser.

What went wrong here? Context was lost; the destination page had no relevance to the source page. If it did, you couldn’t find it because it wasn’t clearly identified. This is a confusing and frustrating situation, and one that I’m willing to bet happens way too often on the web.

On my own blog, I frequently link to entries I’ve previously written. Sometimes these entries can be quite long, and I’m not always referencing the entire entry in my link. But by pointing the link to a specific “intra-page” anchor by using a fragment identifier and clearly marking the relevance of this information in both the link itself (with a descriptive title) and in the landing page (with what I’ve come to call a relevancy message), context is preserved and confusion is eliminated.

To see what I’m talking about in practice, check out my experiment pages. It’s a demo of the problem and relevancy messages in action.

CSS2 The Rescue

There’s only one problem left. How does one insert text into the landing page which will be viewable when someone follows a specially-crafted link to it, but not when they arrive at the page via any other link? Though it is possible to program this into your pages using PHP or another web scripting language, CSS level 2 offers a much simpler and maintainable solution: the :target and :before pseudo-classes.

When used in combination, the :target and :before pseudo-classes can be used to generate text on a page at a specific point in the document when your page is linked to in a certain way. By using an additional CSS2 function, attr(), we can also generate customized text for each landing spot within the document. Let’s take a look at each component separately.

The HTML You’ll Need

Let’s say you’re writing about apples. In your text, you link to a previous article you wrote about oranges. Your link in the article on apples might look like this:

<a href="oranges.html" title="Oranges have a thick, white pith beneath their skin." >oranges</a>

And your text in the article on oranges might look like this:

<p>[…] The skin of an orange is thick, porous, and varies in color from deep to light orange. There is a bitter-tasting white pith underneath the outter-most layer of the fruit's skin. […]</p>

In order to link directly to the paragraph mentioning the orange’s pith you need to insert a named anchor just after the opening paragraph tag where that content was written. You also need to append this name to the URI of the link, as a fragment identifier. The resulting HTML for the link might look like this:

<a href="oranges.html#skin" title="Oranges have a thick, white pith beneath their skin." >oranges</a>

The resulting HTML for the paragraph about oranges might look like this:

<p><a id="skin"></a>The skin of an orange is thick, porous, and varies in color from deep to light orange. There is a bitter-tasting pith underneath the outter-most layer of the fruit's skin.</p>

The CSS You’ll Need

Once the HTML is in place, you need to create a style rule to generate the text you’ll want to display before the paragraph. Your style sheet might look like this:

a:target::before { content: "Here's what I referenced with my link on the last page: "; font-size: larger; font-weight: bold; }

You can even take it one step further. By adding a title attribute with some helpful text in your named anchor, you can actually display that text (specific to the reference you’re making) instead of the generic “Here’s what I referenced…” text. The CSS for that would look like this, and it would display whatever you write as the title for each named anchor you use:

a:target::before { content: attr(title); }

Limitations

The major drawback to this technique is that you need to change the code of the destination document for it to work. Specifically, you need to insert named anchors (though you can also target any element by giving it an unique id), and you need to insert a style rule. (However, see below for another experiment that will let site owners allow people to get around this limitation.)

Another major drawback is that it requires a fully CSS2-compliant browser. That means Internet Explorer 5 and 6 (both Macintosh and Windows versions) will not show the special content on the destination page. They will, however, move focus to the point in the document at which the anchor resides.

Looking to the Future

I have been playing with this technique recently on my blog (can you find the links I’ve used this on? ;). The obvious benefit is creating a far more seamless transition from one page to another and maintaining the same context across web pages. This is invaluable for me and my readers in particular, since I tend to enjoy writing and end up writing far longer entries than I probably should. (Even though I use headings to divide my entries into logical chunks, it’s still good to have another trick up my sleeve to help usability!)

However, this technique is ripe for expansion. For instance, I have created another experiment to dynamically generate the content of the CSS rule based upon a variable in a GET querystring. (It uses three lines of PHP, and that link itself is a proof-of-concept.) This will allow people to write links that point to my documents and insert their own special relevance-describing blurbs in front of the fragment they’ve linked to. (Yes, I realize this may pose XSS security problems, I’m still just playing with the concept.)

Exploring all of this is a lot of fun. The crux of this technique relies upon accessible and clever hypertext copywriting to enhance usability when linking to web pages and referencing information across pages or, one day, sites. As is the case with most things Web, simple is better.

I’m very eager to hear about comments on this technique. Are there dangers I haven’t seen yet? Can you think of another way to use it that I haven’t mentioned here? Are you already using it on your own site? All feedback welcome. :)

Just a few notes before I take a nap, or possibly retire for the day.

• On Wednesday, the movers came to take the bulk of Danica’s belongings to her new apartment. Despite earlier insistence that I would not help her out in the morning, I ended up waking up slightly prior to eight o’clock to help her disassemble the sofa and gather a few other things. The movers were out of here by nine o’clock, and Danica left shortly thereafter to meet them at her new place.

  I spent a great deal of the day surfing online and trying to do work. I was too tired to really be productive nor did I feel capable of going to the gym, but in the end I did manage to switch the Maymay Media weblog template over to the new design and fix up the home page a little. I still need to do a lot of work on that site.

• Later that afternoon, just before it started getting dark, Danica returned to the apartment. She started packing various other things she left here (evidently there’s no such thing as “moving day” for her) as I was on the computer. In the evening, I decided to come downtown with her to help her take more things on a single trip.

  We left the apartment at around 9:30 PM, and I did not make it back home until almost two o’clock in the morning. The trains were running local for some reason, the stuff was heavy, and the elevators in the station were acting up. Eventually, we made it to her new place and set her things down.

  I got to meet Georgi, her new cat, who took to me instantly. (I’m a cat person; they like me.) Then we went out for dinner (pizza) at Two Boots. Saying goodbye was awkward and Danica wanted me to stay at her place for the night. Nevertheless, I took the long, boring subway ride I know so damn well back home and got back online to check email before what was supposed to be a decently-early bedtime.

  I actually didn’t go to sleep until 8:30 AM. I was tired, but somehow I couldn’t get used to the emptyness of the apartment, so I sat at my computer all night importing as many of Danica’s CDs she still had here. She said she’d be back early this morning to come and pick up more of her things. By the time she arrived I had been sleeping for several hours.

• She woke me up, um, rather sexually sometime around noon. She was moody pretty much from then on all day today. She later confessed to not taking her medications for almost two weeks now because she can’t find them anywhere. This was not really a surprise considering the monumental and drastic mood swings she’s been having today. (Crying, laughing, crying, laughing, you know the drill.)

  She packed more of her things, but not all of them. (Yes, there really is that much…stuff.) We ordered Indian takeout for breakfast (er, lunch, actually) and then she packed some more. She left moments ago in tears, saying that she was angry at herself for not getting as many things done today as she had planned. (That always happens, though. Even to me.)

So due to my extremely long Wednesday and total lack of sleep, I completely fucked up today. I had intended to go to the Metropolitan Museum of Art with Christine (she called me yesterday and we made plans) but I had to break them before I went to bed in the morning since I knew I would be useless today. (I sent her a SMS, which I really hope she received.)

After that, I had wanted to go to the Web Design Meetup, and had I done so this would have been the first Web Design Meetup that I attended. As it stands now, however, I’m going to have to wait another month since there’s no chance in hell that I’ll be able to make it this time anymore.

This is really, really frustrating because it feels like yet another day going by that I don’t have my life in order. I imagine Danica feels similarly, but at least I can handle it, well, not that badly. And now to forget about everything for a few hours to prevent my head from hitting the keyboard.

I don’t typically propogate memes but, for some reason, I did this time. So, without further ado, here’s the meme.

The Instructions

1. Grab the nearest book.
2. Open the book to page 123.
3. Find the fifth sentence.
4. Post the text of the next 3 sentences on your blog along with these instructions.
5. Don’t you dare dig for that “cool” or “intellectual” book in your closet! I know you were thinking about it! Just pick up whatever is closest.

Mastering Regular Expressions was Mine

Amazingly, I happen to actually be on page 123 in one of the books I’m reading, which happens to be right next to my computer on my desk right now, which happens to be Mastering Regular Expressions by Jeffrey Friedl. Here are the fifth, sixth, and seventh sentences:

• Sun’s Java regex package supports set operations within character classes.
• For example, you can match all non-vowel English letters with “[a-z] minus [aeiou]”.
• The nomenclature for this may seem a bit odd a first—it’s written as [[a-z]&&[^aeiou]], and read aloud as “this and not that.”

By the way, did you notice the typo? Yes, it was actually in the book. I pick up on so many errors like that all the time that I’m always considering becoming an editor.

Update (added 9:02 PM): Okay, enough people have asked me about this, unable to find the error in one of the sentences above, that I figure it’s time I let the cat out of the bag. If you really want to know where it is, here’s the answer.

Wow, I’m tired. Hungry too, so there shall be snacking before bed tonight, but today was so full for the first time in a while that it deserves some special effort to document tonight. It also deserves this effort because it can serve as yet another reminder of why having full days are important to my mental well-being.

I feel…optimistic. And I haven’t even checked my email yet. (I suppose I don’t want to jinx it. Read on, you’ll see.)

The Long Night Before

Last night I only managed a meager five hours of rest. As sometimes happens, I was simply unable to pull myself into bed despite my sleepiness. I tried to keep repeating this Ian L. Flemming quote in my mind, but that did not seem to move me to action.

I shall not waste my days in trying to prolong them.

Of course, the result of staying awake well past midnight was that I woke up feeling hazy and disoriented today. I had nothing other than a dentist’s appointment planned for the day, and indeed that appointment is what roused me from bed in the morning. I was expecting today to be bland and empty, like many of my previous days.

Morning Dentistry

I woke up at seven o’clock when my cell phone’s alarm clock started ringing. I immediately wanted to go back to sleep for at least another half hour but somehow convinced myself that I’d be better off killing my time on the ‘Net instead of on the bed. I got dressed in an effort to wake myself up faster, and left the house only a few minutes later than I had intended to.

I walked the fifteen blocks to my dentist’s for my appointment at eight o’clock, and was out of there by eight-thirty. My dentist merely had to seal off one of the tooth implants I had gotten (which is another story entirely) and measure the space between two teeth on the upper-right side of my mouth, so it wasn’t even unpleasant. The sun was out, people were getting their morning coffee, and I enjoyed my leisurely stroll back home.

When I returned, Danica was already in the shower preparing for work. I logged back online and started killing my never-ending stream of blog spam. (I guess it makes me feel pseudo-productive to do that.) Soon, I got a phone call from my dentist with the best news I’ve heard in a long, long time.

I won’t need braces again! This just about made my day right then and there. I immediately called my periodontist, set an appointment for the implant to be placed, and will hopefully have this whole damn ordeal behind me for the rest of my life by the end of next month!

Java and Job Hunts

It was nearing noon now, and Danica left for work in good spirits and on good terms with me. I spent a good deal of time talking to several online friends and by two o’clock had convinced myself to start a serious job-hunting effort for almost any part-time work. Beggars can’t be choosers, you know.

However, after setting up an account with Monster and beginning to fill out their pedantic forms with overtly general fluff, I reversed my efforts. Thankfully, I realized that hunting for a generic job can be done successfully one way and one way only: proactive searching, not passive waiting. So I gave up on Monster and started Googling for various New York City-based job sites.

Of all things, the one that showed the most promise was actually CraigsList! I was initially hesitant of even searching on CraigsList due to my previous experiences searching through the job listings there. However, after combing through hundreds upon hundreds of frustrating “Office Assistant” classifieds (and that’s after filtering out the many more “Actress” and “Model” postings), I gave CraigsList a shot and cynically searched for “web design.”

Incredibly, one of the first few postings I read came from what appeared to be a reasonable person with reasonable requests for a reasonably small web site for a reasonable fee. The ad even went so far as to discourage Flash-only “web designers” from even responding. (Do you have any idea how rare it is for a small business owner not to want a stupid Flash intro on their site?) All in all, it seemed very reasonable and so I composed a (carefully written) reply and hit the send button.

Here’s hoping something comes of it! If not, then this at least gives me some hope that there are actually decent web design job opportunities to be found on CraigsList. I have decided to subscribe to several search result news feeds for pertinent terms in my field and see what comes of it. (Note to self: sit down and come up with several relevant search terms.)

A Rather Upbeat Evening

Monty, his Python, and the Web

Some time around 4:30 PM Danica called me on her break at work and told me that Eric Idle (from Monty Python) would be speaking and, possibly, signing stuff in Barnes and Noble. She asked if perhaps I would like to come down to hear him or get my Monty Python and the Holy Grail DVD signed or at least hand it to her so she could get it signed for me. Since I had no real plans, wanted to get out of the house, and noticed that CV (a college club whose members I used to be close with, though I like to think I still am) was meeting to present what would be a very interesting topic for discussion, I said sure.

I told her I’d meet her at six o’clock to give her my DVD so she could try to get it signed for me and thanked her. She asked if I might want to stick around afterwards but also told me that Randy might be there. I declined, citing Randy’s possible presence as my reason for doing so.

I got out of the house, took the subway downtown, and gave Danica my DVD when I saw her. Then I went to browse the computer section of Barnes and Noble for a while, since I had so much time to kill before the CV meeting later tonight. I ended up buying a web design book for my father.

To kill yet more time, I called my father up and went to meet him at his studio office to give him the book. He gave me a wooden box (perfect for weed, he said jokingly, yet I still reminded him that I don’t do drugs) and some money. Then I ate a late lunch at Chelsea Market (mmm, Thai food is yummy), and finally headed to the subways again so I could make the CV meeting.

Going with the Flow

Throughout the day on the subways I continued reading Speed Up Your Site. Interestingly, the end of the first chapter and, so far, all of the second is about the experience of flow, more colloquially known as “runner’s high,” and how it relates to web design (PDF file), web surfing, and the web at large. As I was reading, I found myself thinking about all the other things it relates to, and realized that I was probably experiencing experiential flow.

(At this late hour, my mind is still lighting up and trying to go off on various different tangents. If I really let myself ramble, this one part of the entry would be pages long. There’s lots to talk about when discussing flow, but I’ll have to save all of that for another time.)

I arrived at Columbia University a little earlier than I would have expected, so I waited (slightly anxiously) outside the classroom for people to arrive. It didn’t take long, and I was soon greeted by and greeting many familiar faces. Better yet, there were plenty of new faces there as well and I’m always happy when I get to meet new people (although I was really glad to get to talk to the folks I hadn’t seen in ages, too)!

The meeting went wonderfully, even if the topic was changed at the last moment. I met at least five new, friendly people, and actually had unexpectedly keen conversations with two of them. Of course, the rarity of having an intelligent discussion with a relative stranger highlighted tonight’s serendipity in light of my recent blog post on the matter. Which reminds me of another quote.

Ask and you shall receive.

I arrived home after one o’clock in the morning. Danica is nowhere to be found, so I can only assume she’s with Randy or at her new apartment. Tomorrow I have plans to attend another social event (the monthly meeting of the New York City Mac Meetup Group) and I am really looking forward to it.

I think this is worth saving. While speaking about efficiency in the workplace (or rather the typical lack thereof) with Char, the topic of computers and automation came up as it always seems to do with me. She made a good point, namely that proofreading is not (yet) desireable to automate, and likely never would be.

Nevertheless, silly technical mistakes like typos and incorrect spelling should be a thing of the past thanks to spell checkers and the like built into most good computer word processing applications these days. Unfortuantely, few people really use these tools to their fullest advantage. This whole topic can probably be a series of posts on its own, but for now I’ll just save this one snippet from the conversation:

Spell check is the best thing since sliced bread, but you still gotta spread your own butter!

Taking Care of the Apartment

The other day, I went shopping for some housewares. I got myself a new kettle, Brita® pitcher and some filters, some large tupperware, scissors, and other assorted household necessities. I spent an outrageous amount of money (including groceries for the week), but it felt more than good to actually get that stuff over and done with.

Next came household maintenance, including vacuuming (still need a new vacuum cleaner), taking out the garbage, fixing my paper towel holder thingy which fell off the kitchen wall, dishes, cleaning the bathroom a little, and yet more. Danica has been clearing her stuff out of the way for the past couple of days now and it finally began to show some visible progress two days ago. While the majority of the floorspace is still littered with her stuff and large cardboard and plastic boxes, there is actually more space to spread my own things out now.

Most of the cleaning involved picking up discarded tissues, toilet paper, and napkins that had been left by Danica. I tossed an empty toilet paper cylinder (at least she had replaced it on her own this time), did some of her dishes, wiped down the table and kitchen counter, collected some of her reciepts and papers into more manageable piles, and put some of her knick-knacks into her moving boxes. It will certainly be a relief not to have to continue to do this sort of cleaning up after her. (Note to self: if I get a roommate, ensure that they are capable of actually keeping a tidy space.)

I don’t have nearly enough crap to fill up the whole apartment, but having extra space is always nice. She has called the movers and set a date—this upcoming Wednesday, which would be the 9^th of March—for the (major part of the) move. This means I intend to collect no less than one-and-a-half week’s rent money from her immediately, and I left a note for her to that effect just now.

Nights are Quiet

Interestingly, Danica called me about an hour ago and told me she would not be coming home tonight. She is spending the second night in a row tonight babysitting a co-worker’s pet. In fact, she is adopting the pet. When she called and told me that she had been given cat food and booze, I told her to remember that the cat food is for the pet and the booze is for her, and that it was very important that she did not mix the two up.

Keeping a sense of humor about such things is very helpful. It’s also easy for me to do when I’m exhausted. I only managed to sleep about three hours last night and still kept my Squash date with my uncle. Playing Squash was an intense workout, but it was also very fun. I’m looking forward to another game next Sunday.

It’s still very hard for me to be alone here. When Danica is fully moved out it will mark the very first time in my life where I am truly, completely alone. I will somehow have to make a home of this house, at least for the next year, and right now that seems impossible to do when I have to do it all on my own.

In Other Personal News

The other noteworthy events that have happened over the past couple of days are fading from my memory very quickly. I have little desire to save them from slipping away, however, because I feel they are mostly superfluous to everything I have already written about with one exception, which is still too half-baked and personal for me to feel comfortable sharing with the world. This is the reason for my lack of intense self-reflection lately.

Instead, I have been a bit of an online social butterfly lately, engaging in various debates on online sites, friends’ blogs, and the like. One particularly interesting conversation took place with a pastor’s wife and involved the controvercial Vagina Monologues play. I was proud of myself for showing such intense and fierce loyalty to my friend in this discussion.

Short Self-Studies on Abraham Maslow

I’ve also been doing some very general research on a one Abraham Maslow who is most famous for his theory of the so-called Hierarchy of Need among living creatures. I never heard of this before, nor of the man, but apparently everyone else has.

Reading a few articles on his work made me feel exceptionally bright; I have been articulating many of the same things as he said years ago for a long time in various forms. In fact, I was reminded of the time when Charla first introduced me to Ayn Ran.

She had said, Are you sure you’ve never heard of her before? I assured her I had not, and wanted to know more about why she was relevant to our discussion on ethics and morals. She told me, and I will never forget this because it makes me feel so validated (and smart), Because you’re saying everything we learned in our lecture today about her. Those who call me arrogant are absolutely correct in their assessments.

Anyway, while reading about Maslow’s theories, I was very glad to notice many traits of what he termed self-actualizers in myself. I noticed both the positive traits and the negative traits, however, so this self-study has not helped me reach any conclusions to the question, “Would I really prefer to be an average person?” (Sometimes I ask that question hourly, usually triggered by different things, and usually set aside with the temporary conclusion that no, I would not prefer it.)

Nevertheless, it was educational, informative, and now I have some ammunition to back up what I’ve been saying about people and their motivations, wants, and needs (and the difference between the three) for a long time. Personally, I found plenty of his work to be extremely simplistic, but Maslow himself admitted to this and this mitigates my scorn of some of his methodologies and conclusions. There is no doubt that there is much ground left to cover for future philosophical psychologists.

Hell, maybe I should be doing that instead of writing computer code for a living.

Back to the Practical

In the meantime, however, I have a dental appointment scheduled for eight o’clock tomorrow morning (er, this morning now) so there isn’t much time to be contemplating what my calling is. I’m a little pissed that I haven’t figured that out yet. I know, I know, patience is a virtue.

After the dental exam, I don’t have any concrete plans for the day. My calendar is full of Meetup meetings, starting with Tuesday’s Mac Meetup Group (which I currently organize) and continuing every day with a different group until Friday’s Rubik’s Cube Meetup (which I also organize, but which currently has only one local member—me! Come on and get out here folks, I’ll teach you to solve it yourself in a matter of days). I am hoping to meet some interesting people this week.

I desperately need an extended social life. I love you all (I’m speaking to my frequent commenters now), but none of you save for family is in New York, and now that I have my own bachelor pad, I should probably be putting it to good use with parties and whatnot. Or at the very least haul my ass off to other people’s apartments for parties.

This seems like as good a way as any to expand my social horizons, so I’m going to see what comes of it. Of course, I have no interest in getting to know people I don’t like, so clubbing and hitting the bars are out. Since I don’t go to school or have any other structured social activity like a nine-to-five, that pretty much forces me to get creative.

Feel free to pass any suggestions you might have my way. Many thanks, and a Gmail account to you and a friend of your choosing if your suggestion nets me a new acquaintance.

So I couldn’t sleep. This is bad because I have a Squash game with my uncle in the early afternoon tomorow. I ended up at a friend’s blog and wanting to comment, but unfortunately, I needed to get myself a Xanga account to do so.

Following is a republication of my Xanga review, first published moments ago on my Xanga page. Enjoy.

My Review of Xanga.com

I’ve finally found a reason to join Xanga: commenting on my friends’ Xanga blogs. Yes, this is literally the only good reason you can possibly have to join this horrendous so-called “service.” Every single feature provided by Xanga is provided elsewhere and is executed at least ten times better.

First and foremost among Xanga’s failings are their blatant disregard for Web standards. This has a powerful and direct impact on its users in the form of browser compatibility. The only way you’re going to get a halfway decent user experience browsing Xanga sites is by using Internet Explorer 6.

The worst offenses, at least for me, came in the form of JavaScript requirements and pop-up windows. Xanga’s insistence on using these techniques creates a mass of confusion as multiple windows try to open themselves each time one clicks on a link to do something. Reminiscent of the Pixies song, I keep thinking “Where is my window?!”

Worse, with my personal adjustments to my Firefox browser using the amazing Tabbrowser Extensions package, many of these windows never appeared at all which rendered my primary browser largely useless for using Xanga. Since JavaScript is more or less a requirement for using the site, many of Xanga’s features simply don’t work for anyone without this capability. Also, the whole site is an absolute mess when it comes to accessibility, but since that won’t even concern most people I’m not going to get into it.

Of course, that’s not all that sucks about Xanga. For instance, where are the comment previews? Oh, right, JavaScript! Naturally, Blogger, as just one example, has this handy feature (and it doesn’t require JavaScript!), along with spell-checking (which unfortunately does), completely customizeable (X)HTML templates (not just a silly, restricted header), a fantastic WYSIWYG post editor if you want it, and even SFTP support so you can post your blog on your own remote server if you’d like to. All this for the low, low price of zero dollars.

“Okay, but Blogger won’t let me have multiple profile pictures,” you might be saying. True, but LiveJournal does. Even better, LiveJournal’s focus on community makes keeping track of and organizing your friends’ blogs a snap. And keeping up with your seventy-million friends is made even easier by letting you read their RSS or Atom news feeds in your favorite news aggregator or reader, something Xanga doesn’t yet publish.

In addition to those bonuses, LiveJournal makes it drop-dead simple to join and post to community blogs. In contrast, Xanga pathetically offers blogrings as its form of community, which are really nothing more than lists of Xanga members who claim to be interested in a specific topic. Bafflingly, there is no search feature for Xanga’s blogrings, which means that finding the few blogrings you want to join out of the thousands that have been created is masochistic at worst and an exercise in patience at best. In response to this stupidity, hundreds of blogrings have adopted ridiculously decorative names such as “°°°//!ChRiS!°°°” (note the stupid symbols everywhere) in order to be listed near the top in Xanga’s default alphabetic sorting order.

If you think using Xanga to organize your social life via it’s “Events” feature, is going to help get you in order, then you’re in for a nasty shock. First of all, no body’s going to look at your events page out of sheer fascination, and Xanga’s not going to help you attract attention to it. No, you actually have to email your event to folks to let them know about it after you create it.

In all fairness, screw that, and get yourself on over to Multiply, which will actually make sure your friends get notified of your events via email alerts and news feeds! Moreover, Multiply offers numerous things Xanga can’t even begin to dream about, like classifieds listings, a personal photo album, and more.

For the geekier of us out there, Xanga is even more annoying. Have you actually tried to create your own header using valid, semantic markup and inline styles? Well, don’t bother, since Xanga actually filters out certain CSS attributes from tags such as the position property. Imagine my frustration after checking and re-checking my code four times only to discover that it had been altered without feedback right under my nose! Augh!

To top it all off, Xanga adds insult to injury as they slather my pages with advertisements for their own “Premium” service. It appears that they really haven’t yet understood that teasing users with innocent-looking links to features that are unavailable and then demanding that they pay for a feature other services provide for free is not the best marketing strategy. Besides, designing the home page like it’s 1996 (with its 74 validation errors and busy appearance) certainly doesn’t inspire much confidence in the reliability of the service.

To be fair, the one thing Xanga has that no other service has are “eProps.” What are eProps? I’ll let my friend explain that one.

Blarg. [eProps are a] 13 year old girl’s wet dream.

I don’t want to write right now.