Some things you might’ve noticed: 1) I changed the image name of the the Valentine. It shouldn’t hurt anything on your site if you’ve linked to the post, but if you’ve linked to the image, you’ll need to update it. (You’ll see it’s a simple change.) If you’re sucking it down off my site onto your own page, though, you’re gonna get a broken image. Which is your cue to copy it to your own server if you wanna keep it. 2) I’ve been mucking around with the stylesheet and layout here. Let me know if it creates any problems in your browser. Thanks…

Dreamlog: I woke up this morning with the following thought fully-formed in my head: “I need to mention my dream on web-goddess. I was out on a date with Jack Nicholson and we were on the Tube in London and we had to hide from Lara Flynn Boyle, who was working on the platform we were approaching.” The weird thing is, though, I’m not sure whether I actually had that dream (since I can’t remember any of it), or whether I simply made it up and then dreamt about posting it. Isn’t that odd?

This Salon article about the “new slackers” really annoyed me. First of all, the reference to Richard Linklater’s film Slacker is totally incorrect. There was no “just-out-of-college temp slave” made famous in that movie. Linklater was depicting an entire culture, not some Ethan Hawke wannabe. The camera just follows interesting people around Austin, Texas, and none of them bear any resemblance to the newly unemployed dot-commers profiled in the article. What, they couldn’t spare 97 minutes for some cinematic research?
 
The whole thing just smacks of Schadenfreude, you know? It’s like, everybody’s been slagging off the dot-commers for a while now, but these authors have taken it a step further: “Hey! This means we can rag on Generation X for being unemployed, ambition-less, waste-of-space slackers again!” And that’s just bollocks. That stereotype was never true in the first place, and taking a few well-deserved months off after a year of working sixteen hour days doesn’t make you a derelict either. I swear, if I was in their situation and some smug, smarmy Boomer accused me of being a slacker, I’d kick their ass. *pause* Well, no, I wouldn’t. I’m a wuss. But I would use their e-mail address to sign them up for pr0n.

I can’t help laughing. William Shatner will host the Miss USA pageant this Friday in Gary, Indiana. Y’all know that I regularly defend my Hoosier state, but there’s nothing that can be said for Gary. If you ever have the misfortune of driving to Chicago on the Indiana Toll Road, you’ll see why: it’s the ugliest city in the country. It literally looks like hell, all fire and brimstone and sulphurous fumes from the steel mills. (A helpful tip: when you find yourself rolling up the windows and putting the air on “recycle,” you’re in Gary.) And it was the murder capital of the country for, what, several years during the 90’s? I guess they’re hoping Captain Kirk’s endorsement will turn things around… but it doesn’t seem bloody likely.

It’s always fun to quit listening to my work mp3 collection for a couple weeks and then revisit it. I just snorted out loud when Wyclef Jean’s “The Rambler” came on. There’s nothing funnier in the world than hearing Kenny Rogers sing, “You got to know when to hold ’em…” and then hearing Wyclef shout “Ghetto! Ghetto!” in the background.

I was reading not.so.soft today and reflecting for the 43rd time how much the owner, Meg, reminds me of me. I mean, she lives in London, listens to Ani Difranco, and works in web design. She’s also a great writer (which I’m not, but aspire to be). Okay, so those are normal, “Huh, she kinda sounds like me” type similarities. But today, she posted a picture of herself… and she’s totally my doppelgänger! I’m serious; that’s me with my hair braided and my glasses on. I’m freaked out.

Grrrr. I was just checking my bandwidth statistics at Portland and I was shocked to discover that during February my site has exceeded the montly allowance by more than 500%. And you know why? Because of the Valentine. I’m really glad that so many people posted it on their site, but for future reference, it’s always best to copy an image to your own server and link to it there. Otherwise my host has to bear the brunt of serving images to lots of un-related sites, and then the patient yet frustrated web-goddess has to pay an extra $20 for her bandwidth that month. And that pisses her off.

“Roll Your Own” Comments System
Based on the e-mails I’ve been getting, it seems other people have run into problems modifying Steve’s PHP comments system for use with their own weblogs. Since I’m in a magnanimous mood, I decided to write up a step-by-step description of everything it took to get mine working. It’s in layman’s terms, and as long as you’ve got PHP support at your host you shouldn’t have any trouble implementing it. It also lists all the problems and workarounds I found, so hopefully you’ll have it easier than I did. Let me know how it goes!

Dubya gave his first press conference, and the verdict wasn’t good. My favorite part: “An informal poll of White House reporters indicated that 100 percent were confident Bush had absolutely no idea what the BBC reporter was talking about. That won’t be in their stories Friday, I’ll bet.”

Awww! A little bilingual Indiana boy called 911 and calmly translated the operator’s CPR instructions to his mother in Spanish. He ended up saving his brother’s life. That stuff makes me get all teary.