Goofing Off

I must admit that I’m guilty of slacking off lately.The stress of trying to fine tune my Movable Type templates, finish the next section of Stevens’ Complete Poems and start getting my house ready for sale has finally driven me to quick, short-term amusements.

Unaware of the compulsive qualities of the game, I recently downloaded a seemingly harmless game called "Nomia" from Apple’s Download Page. Little did I realize that I would soon become addicted to this game.

You can tell just how addicted I’ve become by checking out the "high scores" page at Nomia. Every time you see my name there it means that I’ve played the same game again. (And if the truth be told, I don’t even bother to post scores that aren’t as high as my previous high score.)

I justify my addiction to this game by rationalizing that picking words out of such mazes will help me build my poetic skills. After all, they almost appear like concrete poems.

However, the fact that someone named "Crispy Nomia King" continually posts nearly unbeatable scores probably brings out my competitive skills. Of course, I’m not sure who this "person" is or even if it is a real person.

Got Those Moving On Blues

It may appear I’ve gone on an indeterminant vacation after my recent trip to Colorado, but unfortunately it’s just not so. True, I’m still stuck on some of Steven’s long poems and haven’t decided how I feel about the next section of his poems, but I haven’t JUST been loafing (though I am looking forward to some loafing as soon as I’m done here).

After repeated “outages” on my old ISP, I decided to take Shelley Powers up on her invitation to join her network. As a result, I’ve spent most of the last two days trying to get my site transferred to its new home on the “burningbird.net, and despite Shelley’s reassuring title of “Linux for Poets,” there’s nothing poetic about this technical crap.

If everyday language had been as rigid about grammar as these technical languages, we’d still be wandering alone on the plains of Africa, throwing rocks at our nearest neighbor.

If I’d sent one of my ex-students into the virtual limbo that I was sent into because of a simple extra “/” he would have bolted the educational system and ended his days serving hamburgers at the nearest MacDonald’s.

I assumed that having gone through the anguish of shoving Movable Type around for nearly a year now that I wouldn’t have any particular problem merely transferring my site “as is” directly over to a new server.

We all know what happens when we make assumptions, now, don’t we? But in this case, at least, it only made an ass out of me, not you, because I couldn’t find a way to get “you” over there.

It turns out this filing cabinet metaphor only takes you so far. At least now I remember why I never put any folders within folders in my real filing cabinet. Who’d guess that the system just plain couldn’t find a folder within a folder? Or that it’d merely run around inside a folder chasing it’s tail rather than looking outside its own folder?

No matter how optimistic Bloggers are that they’re going to change the world, most of the world is going to avoid the virtual hell of setting up a blog until someone comes up with something a lot easier than this to work with.

I would send you over to my virtual new home, which is, after many hours of re-arranging, the same as my old home, except that wouldn’t make much sense because shortly my old address will become my new address even though my new home is an ocean away from my old home. Stange that I’ll be moving from England to Canada, even though I really live in Vancouver USA, but my address will remain the same, and you can still visit me here at my old location for another year.

Let’s hope that old friends like Jonathon Delacour will be able to find me at my old, new address.