Miscellaneous Garbage
Folks, I am now about to take you on a ride into the dark and dingy world of weblogging. For the next few minutes, the Oddball Update will descend into that insipid realm of self-serving content spewage that means absolutely nothing to anybody but the author. It’s a 99.9% waste of the Internet, sucking up bandwidth like a cheap Hoover and giving back absolutely nothing to society. Were this a different weblogging application, I could check a box and this post would remain a “note to self” that no one else would ever see, but I can’t do that because it isn’t. (You follow?) So you’ll be reading this right along with me; get used to it.
It’s not often that I remember dreams, but I sure remembered last night’s. The entirety of last night—and parts of this morning—were immensely surreal, filled with oddities that seemed to belong more in a Lewis Carroll novel than in my waking life. The early a.m. hours consisted of me repeatedly falling asleep and waking up again, all the while dreaming about some of the weirdest junk yet. What was memorable about it—and I don’t usually remember dreams—was the strange commentary the different dreamscapes seemed to have on my real life. Mostly in a humorous fashion…but not entirely.
So one part of my dream involved me waking up on a cool, crisp autumn morning, where everything is covered by dew and the sun is barely coming up, and realizing for some insipid reason that I’ve got to run down to the grocery store and buy something. I don’t know what, but I got up and left the house and walked to the store. (Okay, instantly I know I must be in a parallel universe because I didn’t take the car.) It was my house here in Florida that I left, but downtown was all quaint and small, like an old-fashion English village with “Ye Olde” signs hung over general stores and the like. So I bought my [whatever it was], noticing that the morning crowds were beginning to gather, and went home.
When I returned to my street, I noticed two things. The first of which was the street itself, which had shrunk measurably in size. The second of which was the huge conglomerate of old fogies which had situated itself all up and down the street. There appeared to be some kind of “Fogey Fest” going on; here were all these elderly folks gathering about and joking it up. There were tables loaded with merchandise, all kinds of old people selling stuff, bartering, carrying on and on. Nobody seemed to notice I was there, which got real irritating real fast, because they kept getting in my way on the increasingly narrow street, and I couldn’t get through to my damn house.
Eventually I shoved past a particularly thick entanglement of fogies right before my street, and as soon as I got through, I noticed that I had gone too far—my street must have been behind me somewhere. So I shoved back through the crowd, and saw that I had again gone too far. It was right about then that I came to the sickening realization that my street was GONE—the fogies swallowed it up, I remember thinking, and quite absurdly now that I remember it. Somehow I eventually found my way back to the house, although such an event occurred during that part of the dream that I don’t really remember anymore. (More likely, I probably woke up and terminated the whole plot thread.)
The dream then transitioned into another, totally different portion. I was in my ‘89 Formula, driving down a major boulevard that looked like a combination of SR-436 in Orlando and Telegraph Road in Detroit. The roads were crammed full of traffic around me and, not wanting to sit behind them, I was driving on the side of the road with my foot pinning the accelerator to the firewall, rocketing along the uneven gravel shoulder at ludicrously unsafe speeds, occasionally dodging back in and out of traffic. I remember being just a tad worried that “somebody might not like my driving like this,” but I did nothing about it. Night fell extremely rapidly, and for reasons unknown I pulled over and parked in the tiny parking lot behind some dump (it looked like a liquor store or something like that).
I don’t know why I stopped here, but I immediately regretted it. I sat there behind the wheel and let the car idle, and that’s when I started to see the idiot lights on the dashboard. The Formula’s dash was adorned with a circular deep-well guage (like the ones on the old first-generation Mustangs) which served as a crude, 1970s-looking “Message Center”. It was just a smoked-plexi gauge that registered with messages in amber when there was trouble. What’s weird was that the messages on the face couldn’t possibly have changed, not considering the way they were designed—the characters weren’t LCD or digital or anything that could change on the fly; it looked like they were simply cut out of the smoked plexi like a permanent telltale. Yet they did change, and quite often as I sat there reading them:
ELECTRICAL SYSTEM MAINTENANCE 2 YEARS OVERDUE was the first message. The “2” then began incrementing upwards, one by one, until it reached 16 YEARS OVERDUE. Okay, so the electrical system’s never been so much as looked at. That’s not a good thing. Then, a new message: FIRE IN TRANSMISSION.
“Fire in transmission”? Yeah, okay—now the sucker was reading like an annunciator in a nuclear power plant. For some reason I read this as “instant death unless you get out of the car now,” so I jumped out and ran to a safe distance. It was at this point that I noticed there didn’t seem to be any fire. It was also right about then that I realized I was in a really seedy area of downtown Detroit that ranks right up there as probably one of the last places you want to be stranded with an old car that’s telling you stuff like “fire in transmission.” Fire or no fire, I decided to leave.
Just when a dream starts to get really absurd—when the laws of physics start breaking and such—you know you’re about to wake up. As I attempted to get back in the Formula, I noticed that the door was locked. So I pulled out my keys and went to unlock it, and every time I tried to insert the key in the lock, the key flipped upside down so it obviously wouldn’t go in right. This made no sense at all. Of course I started to freak out because I figured I was gonna be walking home through a crap-ass ghetto in the middle of the night, but thankfully, right then I woke up.
Strange how so many of my dreams seem to involve locks. I’m either in a room trying to lock somebody else out and they always just walk right in anyway no matter how many deadbolts I’ve thrown or keys I’ve turned, or I’m locked out of the only safe place for miles and can’t get in, even if I have the means. I suppose a psychoanalyst would have a field day with that one.
Heh…for a moment after waking up, I admit that I thought perhaps I was still dreaming. It was six o’clock in the morning, with one hour to go before my alarm was set to trip, and what do I hear? The sound of some fogey-tastic idiot next door SWEEPING THE PATIO. Ka-swish. Ka-swish. Ka-swish. Yeah, I need to hear this at 6 a.m.! Christ, if you need something to do that early in the morning, go do Step-A-Robics or something. Just leave my ears out of it.
Anyway, that was about it for the weird dreams.
Now, let’s totally change gears. Earlier I mentioned that if I were using a different piece of weblogging software, I could just click a button and make this a private entry for my own use only. Ah, the world of weblogging software—it’s a tumultuous one, filled with many different players, but seemingly none that are just right for your application. Each blog tool does half a million things you want, and doesn’t do one crucial other thing. Hence, you can’t use it. And if it so happens that you find that perfect blog tool—like I thought I did with pMachine—then either the licensing changes or the product gets abandoned.
When I first started using weblog tools, I began with Movable Type. Movable Type has some great features, but best of all it’s incredibly easy to use. The problem is, it uses CGI to build static pages rather than a structured query language to pull results in real-time. Thus it is slow and a huge load on the server every time you make a change. Not only that, but in recent months Movable Type has been totally stagnant while its development team, once so proud of the application, has moved on to to a brand new hosted blog tool (meaning one that you don’t install on your own server, but which you get an account for on someone else’s server, like LiveJournal). This makes installation easy (by making it a non-issue entirely) but I will never use a hosted service because it takes me out of the loop. I want every nuance of the system to be under my ultimate control, on my server.
Movable Type, meanwhile, the original self-install blog tool, sat around and received very little attention until recently. A major update to version 3.0 was just released over the weekend, and two things are wrong with it: 1) it contains basically nothing new of any use, and 2) oh yeah, now you have to pay BIG BUCKS for it. It’s clear that the developers have repositioned Movable Type as a developer’s platform, and they expect Joe Blogger to use their hosted service, TypePad. NOPE! Sorry! I’m not Joe Blogger, so I’m out.
Meanwhile, over at the Oddball Update, I’ve been using an application called pMachine. I must have got my foot in the door just as this tool was on its way out, because ongoing development of pMachine is pretty much at a halt. Now there’s a new tool from the same developers called ExpressionEngine. It’s got mad features and looks a treat, but it costs $149 friggin’ dollars. NOPE! Sorry! My stupid little hobby isn’t worth that much money.
The version of pMachine I’m using right now works, but it won’t be updated anymore. Not only that, but its user community seems to be shrinking. I’m using a few plugins/hacks on this site that are mysteriously no longer available for download anywhere. Guess I’m on a sinking ship here. I’d jump, but there’s nothing equivalent to jump to, not yet anyway.
However, I bring all this up because I may have just found a new Golden Gem of Weblog Tools. It’s called b2evolution. A new version was just released this morning that sports a lot of features I already use here, plus features I’ve wanted. I might give it a try, but if I do so, it won’t be on this website—not right away. I’ll probably set up a test installation on my other server, maybe even use it for a new website I’ve got in the works. I was already set up to use Movable Type on that other server, but I’m ditching that Perl-based garbage. These days if it’s not PHP, it blows.
Okay, randomness over! (Jeeze, after a week and a half of no updates, now I post this tripe. It figures.)
Categorized as Randomness