Category: blogging

Where write about writing, and my website sounds familiar.

Posted on

Post #1683


Thursday and I knew this weather couldn’t last.

The little weatherbar at the bottom of my FireFox window says there’ll be rain tomorrow, and today was cool and cloudy. Something in me must’ve known, because, even though I pulled the cover off the barbecue, I didn’t pull out the patio set umbrella, seat cushions, or hammock. But, I won’t be daunted. I still fired up the grill tonight to cook some tri-tip for the Lost crew (yes, we get together to watch Lost… we’re some kinda nerdy).

The tri-tip ended up a tad overdone, and Sharaun ended up mad at me for cutting her good pan (or something), being a lecherous drunk, and breaking one of our good wine glasses. I conceded two out of the three and apologized, but I thought I had a defensible position on the third and I stood my ground. Anyway, it was a good night, and I had a good time with our friends. Let’s do this blog thing now.

Today on the blog, I wanted to debut something new I wanted to try. In an effort to battle bloggers-block, which is something I’ve been known to suffer from at times, although not lately I think, I sat down the other day and tried to come up with ideas for new content. And, while I didn’t come up with anything Earth-shattering as a deep well of new and exciting material, other than the standards I draw on now, I did think of a what might be a novel concept for driving content. The idea is something I want to try calling “You Decide Friday.” What this means is, occasionally, I will try posting a poll at the end my regular entry. In the poll will be a few topic ideas I’ve pre-populated, and users will be able to add their own ideas (I think, we’ll see how that works out). The idea being that I leave the poll open for a couple days and let folks vote on what they’d like me to write about the coming Friday.

I dunno, I think it could be fun… if I can get participation. Regardless, since it’s just a thought I can scrap it if I’m unhappy. So, that being said, today I’d like to present the first “You Decide Friday” poll. Use the voting options below to tell me what you’d like me to write about. You can choose from my already-populated ideas, or suggest your own (everyone will be able to see and vote on your suggestions). To add your own suggestion, click the “Add an Answer” link, type away, then press “Vote.” And, for those wondering, yes – you can indeed cheat by deleting your pharaohweb.com cookies (I didn’t enable the fancier anti-cheat IP logging because it’s kinda crappy for folks who share IPs – all the people I work with). But, don’t cheat, OK? Thanks.

What are you waiting for, start telling me what to do around here:

Changing subjects: Today I woke up feeling like Beatles, and decided to blast Sgt. Pepper on the way into work. With the windows rolled down, the drive was chilly… but it was worth it to let the world know that I 1) have amazing taste in music and 2) am not skittish about sharing that taste with them , you know, philanthropically, as a way to culture them a bit. As the familiar songs threatened to burst my eardrums, I couldn’t help but smile. When “Getting Better” came on, those initial guitar stabs nearly brought tears to my eyes. See, once upon a time, something happened to me in the backseat of a car while that song played, and I’ve never been able to get the memory and the song disassociated from one another. It’s not a bad thing, really, the feelings that swell up when I hear those first strains of rock and roll are nothing less than joy and ecstasy. Look, I’ve even written about this before… some four years ago. Wonder how long I’ll be able to almost perfectly call up those feeling and emotions when I hear that song… is that a lifetime thing?

Well, that’s it for tonight friends. Be sure to enjoy your weekends, I’m gonna do my best with mine. Until Monday, goodnight – and don’t forget to vote.

Posted on

they weren’t that far off


Well, it’s 8pm on Wednesday night and I’ll be leaving for the airport in about 30min to retrieve my wife and daughter. At long last, our family reunited. Sharaun’s feeling better, but not 100%. She called from Chicago during her layover, and I heard Keaton in the background playing in a rocking chair. Taking a suggestion from a friend more thoughtful than I, I stopped off after getting a haircut today to pick up a mylar Backyardigans “Happy Birthday’ balloon which I’ll use as a welcome home prop for Keaton at the airport. I didn’t get anything for Sharaun, I hope that’s OK (that’s OK, right blog?). Anyway, I wrote just a tiny bit upon getting home from work today (I split a little early for lack of concentration). Here it is, be warned: I took license.

It’s been a thousand years or more since I bedded the woman under the sun.

I remember it fondly because our communal joy was used as the basis as a new religion, the point-infinity of zero-time in which the people of that world consider consciousness to have begun. As trees thrashed in the soil, our wrestling drove up mountains, broken and shattered peaks looming around us in the midst of our eternal ecstasy. Our fantastic perspiration dotted the firmament with a flood of salty oceans and seas. Living beings sprang forth from the union of our flesh, animals winged and legged sprouting where we brushed, budding from the rich loam of our combined corpus, pushing through that single-skin and living, breathing. The sound of our tryst established the pantheon of world-language, each rumbling low and trilling high adding depth and soul to spoken word, the genesis of communication.

Each coordinated push of our bodies establishing the regular cadence of time, the cradle of eternity, the friction of our motion warming the surface of the world and giving life to all manner of plant and flower. Beauty bloomed around us, tickling our ticklish bits as it pushed through to touch our flesh and bend to the sun of our union. The fluid results of our strained efforts being the Philosopher’s Stone, that golden egg from which all base and divine sprang and will one day return – Aqua Vitae. As breath filled the first lungs ever to breathe, some of those infant-beings glimpsed our culminating love and the imprint of that God-Union was burned red-hot into their consciousness, destined to be collectively passed down and re-interpreted throughout time, understood and misunderstood by the legacy human froth spilled foaming from our joy.

They called it the Big Bang, and they weren’t that far off.

How’s that for blasphemy? Goodnight and happy Lent.

Posted on

shepherd’s pie


Hey internet. How was your Wednesday? Mine was OK. I went to work, where things were, surprisingly, busy today. It was a nice change, as the slowness I’ve been working through lately had my apathy at record highs of late. I think I needed a little kick to get me ambulatory again. I also learned that Radiohead is definitely coming to the city for their In Rainbows tour. Wild horses couldn’t keep me away. It’ll be my third time seeing them… I’m so excited.

I hadn’t really planned on writing tonight. In fact, I was going to take the night off because 1) I had nothing to write about and wasn’t feeling guilty about it, and 2) I felt like not writing. But… then… as I often to, I became bored just sitting on the couch listening to music (Sharaun was out and about so I had the place to myself). I tried reading some from a book a buddy lent me, but I’m having the hardest time getting into it. So, to the internet I turned. And, after my standard ~20 page surfing cycle, I ended up back here in the old familiar WordPress post window… stringing words together for no reason at all. So, I decided I’ll just post a bunch of random, un-connected stuff I’ve been saving up for a while… sort of like a shephard’s pie of a blog. Here goes.

I had planned to write a blog about something I recently did, but I ended up chatting with Ben about it yesterday morning via IM, and the chat sums it up nicely and is a good break from my normal dry paragraph-style narrative. So, here’s there story, in the no-caps shorthand that is IM-speak:

Dave:
dude… i have to tell you what i did the other night.
so, i notice in my logs that a ton of my bandwidth is people hotlinking my blog-accompanying images and using them for forum avatars, myspace profile avatars, etc. so, i set out to eff the bandwidth-stealing hotlinkers.
the internet taught me how to put a mod-rewrite .htaccess that’ll swap any hotlinked image out for one of my choosing.
so…
now, when anyone hotlinks my blog-accompanying images, they get instead a picture of some dude’s nuts with a beach in the background. it’s outstanding

Ben:
HAHAHAH

Dave:
this pic is priceless

Ben:
OMG… that is the funniest thing I’ve ever heard.

Dave:
here’s the actual image (warning, don’t open with people around). i should write about it… right?

Ben:
Yeah, you totally should. Hilarious.

Dave:
is that img classic, or what? pat was at my place while i was doing this… and we were giddy

Ben:
Outstanding.

Dave:
we actually went to a couple pages from my logs where people had been stealing and looked at their new nutsack avatars for a laugh.

Ben:
hahahahaha. Ohhh.. it’s sooo good.

Dave:
hehe, i thought so too

Ben:
you should screencap those

Dave:
steal my bandwidth, will ya? oh yeah i totally should.

Ben:
fantastic

Dave:
balls in profile w/the ocean behind.

Ben:
So excellent.

Well, that was fun.

Want to see something neat? Take a look at the I-got-a-new-iPod Christmas traffic spike my entry “new iPod & I want my old tunes!” Kinda neat to see the internet turning to my tiny blog in their time of holiday need… I wonder if anyone actually managed to get help from the entry?

ipod_post_stats550.jpg

Oh, what? That wasn’t neat at all? Oh my, I’m sorry. I’ll do better next time. But, next time is gonna have to be tomorrow or something, because I’m outta here tonight. Sorry I left you with such a stanky post. Better luck next time.

Goodnight and I’ll talk to you tomorrow.

Posted on

play-by-play hyperbolized-realism


First off: Yes, the James story was fiction. I couldn’t think of anything to write, so I decided to tell a story. Thanks to those who mentioned enjoying it. Somehow, though, I don’t think storytelling is my thing – so I stick to the regular play-by-play hyperbolized-realism I seem to be better at.

Ready for an abbreviated weekend report? OK:

Friday: Anthony calls me around 10am to say he may have an extra ticket to this big ol’ rock show going down in the city. Asks me, if it becomes available, would I want to go. I say “yup.” Noon, the ticket is mine, and I’m to be at his house by 3pm. We arrive in San Francisco sometime around 6pm and stand in line in the freezing cold with eight-thousand other mods-‘n’-rockers to get in. It was a packed bill at six bands. I was excited to see Modest Mouse and Spoon, but the entire show ending up being quite enjoyable. Anthony and I even braved the very young crowd to crush right up into the guts of the floor by Modest Mouse’s set. Home by 2am.

Saturday: Used the morning to catch up on three days of little sleep, woke up at 10:30am. Took a shower, pulled on some jeans, and made the conscious decision to not don a shirt. I intended to remain shirtless the entire day. Sharaun went on a Christmas shopping odyssey and was gone all day, stopping home only briefly around 5pm to bring in a take-and-bake pizza, cook it, eat a slice and head back out. I spent most of the day playing with Keaton and taking picture of CDs I’m selling on Ebay. Never did put on a shirt, either. Not even when a friend dropped by unannounced later in the evening on the way between two bars. I stood there in the living room and had a half-hour conversation barefoot, barechested, and bedenimed. A great lazy day spent being daddy.

Sunday: Church. Driving there we saw a bum on the offramp holding a ridiculously small scrap of cardboard, on which I assume a standard plea for assistance. You know, something boilerplate bum-verbiage, including go-tos like “God bless,” “Vietnam vet,” “anything helps,” and “hungry.” The little piece of cardboard was so tiny, though, that we had no chance of reading it. I jokingly said, “You need a bigger piece of cardboard, buddy.” Sharaun made some comment about him needing one of those big spinny arrows or placards like the sign-people on the corner use to bring in potential homebuyers or lure people to the Cheesesteak joint. Sounded like a brilliant idea to me. I predict panhandlers will soon turn to this more animated form of begging. After church I repaired some of the faux-stonework that has fallen off the front of our house. The fallen pieces stayed where they fell for years now, and the guys were giving me crap about it the other day. So yeah, Sunday I made fun of bums and did home repair.

For some reason the other day, Sharaun had Keaton’s old bouncer out from storage. She took a picture of Keaton sitting in it, and I thought it would be fun to compare that with a picture of her in it when she really used to use it. So, for a lark, here’s three months and twenty-two months. Pretty sure she’s over the weight limit in that second one…

Moving on…

Back some time ago, I made the decision to digitize (convert to MP3) my entire CD collection. After which I sold off all my then-redundant physical discs for profit. If you’ve been with me for a while, you’ll remember that the plan took a long time, but was ultimately wildly successful. I ended up selling ~600 CDs, making a little money in the process. Not bad. In fact, it financed a bit of my Lasik surgery, so it was well worth it. When I sold my discs, though, I held onto all my prized Beatles bootlegs (as well as some other prized bootlegs from various other artists). I knew that, one day, I’d start selling them off too –but I hung onto them partly because of my strong attachment to them, and also because I figured they could fetch more if sold properly (“marketed” as sufficiently rare, etc. – which they indeed are). Anyway, I wrote this whole mess because I wanted to share some statistics:

Selling non-bootleg CDs, I made a somewhat respectable amount per CD. Bootlegs, however, have proven to be much more lucrative. Over the past couple weeks, I’ve been slowly but surely offloading my entire Beatles bootleg collection online. What’s amazing is that, on average, I’ve been making more than ten times what I made selling my “commercial” discs. Not to mention I’ve got another pile of bootlegs from artists who aren’t the Beatles, which I’m hoping will pull just as much dough. As an example of this insanity, while packing up one nine-CD set for sale, I happened upon my original purchase invoice from back in the mid 1990s. Right now, it looks like it’s actually going to make money over that cost, meaning the dang thing actually appreciated while I owned it. Unbelievable.

As you can imagine, I’m working frantically to get all the discs up for sale, as I suspect this is the season where I’ll realize the highest profit on them, capitalizing on Christmas gifts for collectors. It’s bittersweet, selling them off. It feels good to make money, but those things were such a big part of my life at one point. It was such fun acquiring and hearing them for the first time. Scouring obscure record bins for high-priced “imports,” dealing with shady mail-order joints advertised in the back of Goldmine, ordering from “contacts” in Japan and Europe… it was all a big game of cloak-and-dagger where the reward was untold joy at getting to hear Beatles stuff I’d never before heard. It’s sad to see them go, but it’s not that sad… I still have the music, after all.

Anyway, dolla-dolla-billz y’all. Dolla-dolla-billz. Can the RIAA send me to Rikers for this?

Goodnight.

Posted on

the day james died


The day started like any other day, I woke up in my bed at home. A few people had crashed at the house, I’m sure their parents thought mine were home. Instead they were states away visiting family. Being sixteen and excited about the prospect of having a real “my folks are out of town” party, I had declined to join them. Chris’ older brother got us the keg. It was a wild night. Someone brought cocaine.

James was already dead when I walked out of my bedroom. Everyone else was still asleep. Mark was on the couch, Eric was on the chair, Tim and Scott both on the floor, next to James. We’d all tidied the place a bit just before calling it night, as the early light was filling the sky; it was only just hours ago, so things looked pretty unremarkable – only the quarter-full keg in the laundry room to give us away. James was plenty alive then. We all were.

Beer and weed; then the coke. I think it was Mark who brought that, not even he’d tried it before. No one wanted to, of course, but we all did. It was glorious; what God must’ve intended sixteen to feel like. We bounced off walls. We sat around the table in the dark outside, the screened-in porch lit by the moon and the cherries from our cigarettes alone. As the hours passed and the sky began to go from black to grey, we all came down pretty hard. It was the last time we saw James alive.

He didn’t look dead. He looked like Tim and Scott, sleeping on the floor in front of the entertainment center. He looked pretty much like he’d always looked. I walked right past him, right out the front door to get the paper. Mark sat up as I came back in the door. We shared a sly grin; silently acknowledging a shared rough night’s sleep. I threw the paper at Eric, hitting him in the leg. Tim and Scott were up now too. Scott kicked James, and no one was concerned at his lack of reaction

It was probably fifteen minutes later when Mark shouted to the porch that there was something wrong with James. Tim, Scott, Eric and I were on the porch again, having morning cigarettes and trying to shake the cobwebs. I remember the day being warm, even in the mid-morning. Tim and Scott went inside, Eric and I stayed to finish our cigarettes. No sooner had they left than did Scott come rushing back out. “James won’t wake up, man. Something’s really wrong.”

I can remember the immediate crushing fear that dropped down onto me, even before I’d put out the cigarette and followed them back into the house. I think I knew as soon as I heard them. Everyone of us knew what was wrong; none of us knew what to do. Eric and I wanted to call 911. Tim was doing CPR, saying how they just did it at dive practice and he remembered how. Scott was back on the porch with a new cigarette. We all watched Tim, hoping James would wake up. He stopped, and it was silent.

When we piled into the car, we put James in the middle seat between Eric and Tim. Scott stayed at the house to wait, Mark rode shotgun. I remember what was on the radio, and still can’t listen to it. Tim went into the emergency room while we all waited in the car, parked in the drive-up loop. He came back with two guys and a nurse following. No one said a word to any of us; they just took James and left. Parking, we went inside.

I thought we were all going to jail. James was dead. We’d done drugs; we’d been drunk; James was gone. No one spoke at all. We sat in the waiting room and looked at our feet.

Ten minutes later, a nurse came out and told Eric we’d brought our friend just in time; that we’d done the right thing and he was going to be OK.

And that’s how James came back from the dead. Not a single one of us was asked to fill out any paperwork. No one ever asked our names. We simply gave the desk attendant James’ full name and phone number, and were told we could go. No one wanted to know what happened; they never even asked.

His parents never knew who brought him. He never told.

Posted on

who are you guys?


Another day at the fount-of-busy that is the sawmill. It’s hard for me to believe that this was only my third day back, like being dropped into a jungle thick with undergrowth and having to machete (as a verb, mind you) my way out. Stupid work, where’s my warm-up time? Where’s my trial-run? Where’s my mulligan? Anyway, I feel like I’m kicking butt. And, despite having had to go back to work to get that feeling – I kinda like it. You just don’t go home from a long day sitting on the couch reading a book thinking, “Yeah, I kicked ass today.” Then again, the ass-kicking means nothing to no-one, in the long-run. There, I think that’s sufficiently pro’d and con’d as per my style – never say anything, stay on the fence, the non-committal commitment. What?

Sometimes I wonder about people reading this blog. Do I know them? Do they know me? My stats tell me I also get a “decent” amount of daily traffic. I mean, check it out, here’s a snapshot of my daily traffic numbers over the past week or so:


sounds familiar visitors per day

Surprisingly, this graph says that sounds familiar averages between sixty and seventy unique hits a day. This is exciting to me. Sixty people a day? Who the heck are all of you? I know I get the random Google or Yahoo-referred visitor, who likely only stay to read what they came for and then move onto the next stop on the internet, and that these visitors can add up… but still, that leaves some percentage (I bet greater than fifty percent) of those ~sixty daily visitors who are real readers. Maybe not repeat readers, the basic stats package I have doesn’t go into that much detail (and even when I had StatTraq installed it wasn’t easy to track), but they are real people who at least alight here at sounds familiar whether by chance or will.

As an aside: I think it’s interesting that there’s an almost triple-traffic spike on October 29th – which is the day I wrote about two extremely internet-vogue items: the OiNK raid and the new Radiohead album. Seems blogging about current events can really boost your audience.

And, since we’re talking about my traffic patterns here at the old blog (because I can think of nothing else to write about), let’s back this thing out and take a look at visitors in week time-chunks:

Visitors per week.
sounds familiar visitors per week

Seems to prove out the sixty-seventy per-day thing, at least for the past couple weeks, but it also shows that, on the whole, traffic is on the decline from some sort of visitor heyday back towards the middle of the year. Again, the data seems odd to me. I mean, did I really have some three-thousand visitors back in the second week of June? The only thing I wrote about that week was the Santa Maria style BBQ Anthony I and built, and I can’t even get those entries to show up on Google with hand-picked keywords. Funny, but three-thousand visitors is totally intriguing. Wonder what what would happen if we zoomed out and looked at things from a month-chunk basis?


sounds familiar visitors per month

Holy crap what?! Hovering over that June 2007 peak on the live page tells me that it sits at 10,423 visitors. Ten-thousand?! What the crap? How is that even possible? Looking at this, I start thinking the 3,000 peak from the week-level graph may just be the downtrending “tail” from this huge early-June spike. So, what happened earlier in June or late May? On the 29th of May, I wrote about how my then host, StartLogic, sucked ass. That could draw visitors, I suppose. On the 31st of May, I mentioned the Arcade Fire show we attended in Berkeley, and linked to several popular Arcade Fire sites. I guess that could also pull visitors. I’m not sure, but it sure was fun to look at all this, was it not?

Oh, it wasn’t? Sorry.

Well, then, check this out. While this whole page about some cool things in China is neat-o, I’m linking it because I want you to scroll down to the big black box with the skull and crossbones that says “The Deadly South Peak.” There’s a written account there from a Western guy who hiked this trail in China, and the pictures and story are very well done. You have to see this trail to believe it. I checked, and the trip from Shanghai to Xi’an, which is about 75mi south of Mt. Haushan, is only a two-and-a-half hour flight and is relatively cheap. I’m thinking, “Hey, I go to Shanghai a couple times a year… maybe I should go climb this thing.” Man, would that be an adventure. An insane, ill-fated adventure on which I would likely kill or injure myself… but an adventure nonetheless. I think, if I could get someone to try it with me – it might be up for it. You down?

Goodnight.

Posted on

angry, resigned, jaded


I did write Sunday, but it was only this, and it wasn’t enough.

Sunday and… and… Oh Lord in Heaven I can barely stand to type it… and… I have to go to work tomorrow. It’s my absolute last day of this nine week vacation, and it’s a day of tears and anguish. I had planned, like a good conscientious homeowner, to mow the lawn today. But, when I got up to change into the ratty clothes I wear to cut grass, I had a sudden change of heart. Mow the lawn on my last day of freedom? I think not. No sir, I most certainly think not. You see, even knowing that today is very likely the last chance I’ll have to mow before next weekend (being that it’s gonna be dark after work now with the time change), I just couldn’t bring myself to sacrifice my last day to something so work-like. Instead, I want to read my book, listen to some Dylan, maybe take a nap after playing with Keaton – yeah, wide open.

After that the apathy overcame me, and I just gave up on posting for the day.

Today, however, was Monday (noobs: I write at night, the evening before I post, hence the date discrepancy) and it was my first day back at work. I look back on the day I wrote this entry, on my last day of work some two months ago, and it seems so far away… so why does my time off seem to have gone by so fast? I went into work this morning, and it was like picking up right where I left off. No gradual ramp into activity, rather a nose-dive into the same frigid waters of stress and deadlines. The shock of how quickly things got busy really surprised me. Then again, maybe I’m more overwhelmed than busy – I always have had a problem with trying to solve problems myself rather than let them be solved elsewhere. In some ways, I guess my coming back feels like a big inheritance of problems. I’ve gotten better, for the most part I can force myself to let those working for me solve the problems… but that temptation to jump in and run is still there.

Anyway, I’m starting to not make sense. Regarding my first day back: I thought it went extremely well. I wasn’t crushed by having to return, more like I slid right back into place. That in itself is kinda scary, like I’m so accustomed to work it’s like riding a bike… but it was also kinda nice. Actually, I felt like I got quite a bit “done” today – which is to say, I did a lot to understand what happened while I was out, and get myself back into the game. I know I was dreading it, and I can’t say I wouldn’t have rather lounge about the house reading, but, in the end, it really wasn’t as bad as I thought. Sort of like slamming into a brick wall with a seatbelt on, or something. And now the cycle begins anew: wake, work, family, sleep, repeat. I wonder how I’ll feel come the end of the week? A fellow worker said that his first three post-sabbatical weeks went: angry, resigned, jaded. After that, jaded was permanent. I’ll let you know.

Right now, though, Sharaun’s gone at some chef-kinda party, Keaton’s down for the night, and I’ve put on the Figurines’ latest album (which is no longer new at all) to give it another go. I loved their first album so much I just can’t seem to accept the fact that their follow-up didn’t do much for me. And, it does have some goodness, it just doesn’t hold a candle to their debut. Stinks. I hate it when that happens. The other night I TiVo’d a bunch of old black and white western serials off of the old-stuff channel, and I’ve really been enjoying then. The times when the kids of this nation were weaned on cowboy-‘n’-indian movies has always seemed like good times to me, not sure why. I figure it’s somehow good, from a cultural-history perspective or something, to know about the Trail Blazers’ spot in old-timey westerns.

Goooooood night.