raleighnet.org

Rockville is like the Sims for struggling musicians. Your goal is to meet up with people to form a band, record a few songs, get them to the radio station and get a number 1 song. It looks interesting, but after about a half hour’s worth of clicking around, I can’t seem to figure out how to book a show (earn money). All of the gigs seem to be full.

I never had the patience for the Sims.

Earlier tonight, I enjoyed one of those moments where everything in the universe seemed to be converging to make one simply perfect moment. more…
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I’ve been spending the whole evening watching a Dinner for Five marathon on the independent film channel. If you haven’t seen it, Jon Favreau (writer and star of Swingers and Made, etc.) is a host leading a dinner party with 4 other celebrities. It’s surprisingly engaging.

Part of that is that they’re entertainers, so they know how to be interesting, and part of it is that Favreau (or his pre-interviewers) has done his homework, so he is able to direct the conversation towards interesting stories. While I’m sure it’s very artificial, it doesn’t feel as artificial as some of the late-night talk shows.

It has me wanting to go to my own micro-dinner party with smart, interesting people. There should be a company that does that. Sort of like a dating service, but more oriented towards bringing small, diverse groups of people together. Seed the thing with a moderator who can draw everybody out and make everybody as interesting as they can be. I think something like that could fly.

I just finished cataloging my personal library. At least I’ve finished the bar code scanning portion of the festivities. Putting the library back together again may be a task best left to all the kings horses and all the kings men. Books have been stacked and flung here and there with wild abandon. And the dust … let me tell you about the dust.

It’s everywhere. There’s no escaping it. It hangs in the air like a smoky jazz club. An industrious group of mites had set up a little ski resort. Really quite the site to see the little guys shredding through the top 100 inches of pristine packed powder down the north face of Great Expectations.

I think I may have even discovered the fossilized remains of some prehistoric dinosaur preserved in the strata about half way down to the shelf. To be fair, it might also have been an old noodle of some kind.

My clothes are filthy. When I move around a cloud follows me like an actual, honest to goodness, real life version of pigpen. My hands are black. My lungs are black. My heart is black too, but that’s another story entirely having to do with a meeting in the forest and an ill advised bargain for power. In retrospect, I probably didn’t make a very good deal. I mean it’s cool and all that I always know when some channel somewhere is showing an episode of WKRP in Cincinnati, but really over time the luster of the show has worn thin. Hey, at least I’m not the goat right?

Anyway, the HTML export features of Readerware isn’t very flexible and I’ll need to spend some time tweaking it. What I really need is a server that runs PHP and MySQL - plus the skills to actually use that. I’m sure I’ll be updating this, but in the mean time, here is a quick and dirty output.

I have got to pick myself up some of the cookie dough mentioned in This Blog Post. I mean take a look at the picture on the linked page. How cool is that? It comes in different colors like playdough, and it’s gotta be the greatest idea in baked goods since (wait for it…) sliced bread. I don’t bake or anything. I mean seriously, I don’t even microwave frozen dinners anymore, but that just looks like too much fun to pass up.

Some interesting musings on the growing popularity of sending e-mail attachments.

I don’t notice this is increasing. I’ve been getting overly large attachments since I was a wee little information consumer. Certainly less experienced users generally think nothing of pushing multi-megabyte files through struggling mail servers, and even mail admins who should know better have sent me 4 or 5 meg files (much to my surprise). I can see where that could grow to be a problem/pain for the network techs, but I don’t believe that the users will ever see a problem/need to change.

Schrage’s speculation that something to deal with and push attachments around may be the next IM/Gaming platform offers some interesting avenues of speculation, but I’m not sure it’s going to happen. Most of the people sending these files have no concept of the need to worry about attachment size. I mean, even if they did have some understanding, most of the time they don’t even know how big the files are, and most clients I’ve worked with don’t provide a lot of help/feedback in that department.

Striking a delicate balance between the creepy and the comedic:

Sure, you know what they look like when they’re masturbating, going to the washroom, and running four hours on their treadmill to exorcise their demons. […] [but] when you see them in the produce aisle putting kumquats into their cart, try to remember that your intimacy only goes one way. [link]

The rest of the site looks promising as well.

I think I may finally have to delete my season pass to Inside The Actors Studio.

I mean, when they had Billy Joel on, I raised my eyebrow. When they had Ben Afflek on, I had serious questions. When they had Antonio Banderas on, I was pretty sure they had finally been reduced to blatantly whoring themselves.

But, tonight, I come home from dinner, and find James Lipton interviewing Pierce Brosnan. I haven’t watched it yet, but I can’t wait to hear about all the intense sense memory work he had to do to get in touch with his brilliant portrayal of Remington Freaking Steele.

Have they done Keanu yet, because you have to know he’s next. Seriously, WTF!?

People used to know me as Biff Raleigh. For most of my early years, that was my name. I won’t go into the long and sordid story of how I came to be called Biff. Needless to say, parents can be cruel. Hey, at least I didn’t have George Forman or Frank Zappa naming me.

I mention it here, because I was trying to dig up an e-mail address or something for some old friends, and I realized if they were ever searching for me, they’d never find me. Now, hopefully, there will be something for their most likely search to hit on.

I can’t find them either. I’m guessing the names are too common, or they’ve changed or they aren’t on the web or my search-fu is not up to snuff. Anyway, I went to Millard North High School in Omana, NE. I graduated in the class of 1988 or the class of ‘88. After that, I went to Kearney State College in Kearney, NE. After that, I went to University of Nebraska at Omaha. After that I got the hell out of Nebraska. Hey, I’m no dummy. It’s cold there a lot and it snows and stuff.

Speaking of searching, a few days ago, the cache that Google had for my site was much more current than the one they have now. I suspect they may have pulled their most recent cache in response to a complaint from that company I’ve been fighting with. Not sure about that, but other things lead me to suspect it’s probably the case. Google seems to play too fast and lose with their indexes. It makes me wonder what else I’m not seeing when I go to find somebody or research a company. I think I need to start looking for a new default search engine.

That puts me approximately here:
1 ——–*———– 0

I can’t believe I’ve already used up something like 41% of my life. I would have thought that I would have accomplished more by this point. I was thinking, maybe it’s just that I don’t have any goals, so I figured I’d sit down and come up with some.

My Life Goals

• Graduate College
• Move Someplace with Decent Weather
• Get Job as Creative Director
• Purchase a Home
• Learn to Fly - I have this one partially struck out. I have about 3 or 4 hours. I have taken off, flown around and landed. In doing that, I accomplished my main goal, so I’m not sure I want to put in the time/expense of actually getting a pilot’s license (unless I am one day in a position to buy my own plane)
• Buy Own Plane (what the hell)
• Write a Novel
• Retire a Millionaire
• Buy Vacation Home - Maybe a cabin in the woods on a lake or some place down by the beach, some place quiet where I can get away when I need a break
• Learn a Second Language
• Learn to Sail
• Create One Thing That is Genuinely, Intrinsically Good
• ??????

Is that it? Somehow it just doesn’t feel like a full and complete life. Within that, I suppose there will be other things like watch lots of TV, read lots of interesting books, listen to lots of interesting music, meet a few interesting people, fall in love a few times. Those things just don’t seem like goals though. Find a way to live forever seems like a goal. With anticipated advances in biotech and nano-science, that even seems like it might be possible.

I don’t know. I think I need more ideas. What are your goals?