A fence is: sit at the cost of walk.

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'm learning how to use Alpha to automate more of my web page creation, particularly the handling of links. It's kind of clunky, but it's comprehensive, customizable and free. The only thing that concerns me is that I might begin to become dependent upon this environment and no longer be functional when I'm stranded in Outer Mongolia with a 300 baud modem and a Commodore 64 (with an 80-column card and 1541 single sided 150 kilobyte floppy drive!).

Would you hire someone who refused to do other things until he had help on the first problem he encountered?

Something that has been fucked up with the Macintosh since 1984: why is it that when you send it off on a mission to do something (such as delete files) it stops on the very first error and refuses to do anything else until you attend to its whining? This can be a very serious shortcoming. I have put Macs to tasks that should have taken all night only to discover that it worked five minutes, found something it couldn't handle, and sat running the screen saver at full throttle the rest of the night. Why can't errors be queued up and complained about after the useful work is done? Would you hire someone who refused to do other things until he had help on the first problem he encountered? Of course not.

Another geeky musing: screen-saver-like idle programs could make computers a lot more humanlike if they did things like going through the text documents on hard drives checking the spelling.

A weed whacker obsessively trimmed along the high wooden privacy fence that serves as a Berlin Wall across the most obvious path to the JPA Fastmart.

T


here are some noises the box fan in my room cannot obscure as I attempt to sleep during the daylight. The other day Monster Boy could be heard compulsively popping the air pockets on packing material like an adolescent examining his pimples in a mirror. Today at the apartment complex behind the house a weed whacker obsessively trimmed along the high wooden privacy fence that serves as a Berlin Wall across the most obvious path to the JPA Fastmart. Its pitch was just a little too high to sink into the auditory haze spawned by my indispensible fan. As a result I was up and about just a little past noon.

A


t Plan 9 I found an unexpected surprise in one of the several used CD racks (this time of year, Plan 9 is inundated with used CDs). It was a 1994 album by the Cleveland band Cobra Verde entitled viva la muerte. In case you don't recall, it is the members of a Cobra Verde that constitute the bulk of Guided by Voices these days. Since it would be fair to say that I am obsessed with the latest GBV CD, I thought the $5 price tag was a trivial price for satisfying my curiosity about the guys now playing the instruments in GBV. I have to say though that when I finally listened to viva la muerte I was not impressed. It starts out sounding like bad Blue Öyster Cult and gradually grows more gothic until it loses the shelfish and sounds like bad The Cult. The vocals sound something like Ian Astbury of the Cult, but not quite as good. The blues influence is there, but it's not as evident as I imagined it would be. I have to give Cobra Verde some credit for being good musicians and somewhat experimental. But the song writing is pathetic and the vocals are irritating. Having Bob Pollard of Guided by Voices do the singing and songwriting was a masterstroke. With him as their front man, they make incredibly good music. Without him, they flail at the margins of parochial home-town Ohio retro hard rock. I feel kind of bad writing this negative review in as much as it's one of the few statements of any consequence about Cobra Verde on the Web.

I


  took another nap that lasted about an hour and a half. Then I joined the housemates in the living room. I'd been incubating negative thoughts about the Peggy and Zach situation all day and was in a fairly bad mood about it. Coffee helped reverse this feeling, as did hanging out with the couples.

There is a time and place for goth music, and an outdoor picnic is probably not one of them.

T


oday was Zachary's 21st birthday. Now he has access to alcohol fettered only by his limited cash flow. We had a barbecue in the back yard in celebration. Matthew made a vegetable and tofu marinade and we toasted hot dogs and Smart Dogs™ over charcoal. Smart Dogs™ are made of tofu and designed mostly for vegetarians, which most of us are (but not me or Zach). In addition to the members of our household, we were joined by Leticia the Brazilian Girl (she's still in town but Cecelia has departed for New York) and, much later, by Zach's father (with a stewardess girlfriend) as well as Wonderboy Neek and a youthful male friend. Always brimming with social skills, Matthew tried unsuccessfully to invite Angela, the oldest and nicest of our new neighbors. It's the thought that counts.

As we cooked and lounged in the yard, music blared from Monster Boy's stereo. Naturally, Monster Boy was intent on playing morbid goth music. But Deya, Matthew and I somehow managed to convince him that there is a time and place for goth music, and an outdoor picnic is probably not one of them. I've heard so much goth music lately that I sort of miss the incessant techno of the Dynashack.

A bottle of Jagermeister was perhaps Zachary's first legal liquor bottle purchase. I had some of that and some "jello shooters" (refrigerated jello mostly consisting of vodka), becoming mildly drunk. Monster Boy, on the other hand, seemed to be particularly fucked-up. Juvenile as always, he and Matthew banged their heads on a window pane to show how tough or punk rock they are. They encouraged me to do the same. My response was, "I didn't get to be 29 years old by doing stupid shit like that." For this Leah chided me (as usual) with the term "old goat." I get lots of ribbing for my age in my new household, but I don't really care.

I had an hour-long pre-work nap.

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