The Mines and The Miners

Or, Happy Two Weeks And A Day After New Year! I figured I should try to post at least once a month, so I hereby declare this the “post of the month until proven otherwise”. It’s fairly prestigious.

I meant to post the exciting events of URBANA 06, which I attended from Dec. 27 through the turn of the year, but I’m not very reliable when it comes to posting here (you probably have not noticed) so I decided just to say it was awesome and i’m sure I will talk about it later as events warrant. To summarize, I was in St. Louis over the change of the year with a few other people (or should I say a tens of thousands). I spent the St. Louis New Year in the Edward Jones Dome and I spent the Missoula New Year in my hotel hallway sitting beneath this window and talking with the most wonderful woman I have been blessed to know (she’s the blurry one in the picture).

Since then, i’ve been getting back into the ol’ swing o’ things. Perhaps i’ll let you know how that goes. Wait expectantly. Or don’t.

dark sky burning
raining its glow
the sailor’s fear

tracks in the air
declare the passing
triumph of spirit

who sought to struggle on
turning inward gaze toward hope
brought by the morning light

It seems that I have joined the flickr legions. I didn’t even realize what was happening until I was already part of the system and it was too late for me. Like Tenar, I am trapped in this knowledge, yet afraid to throw it away and flee. So, I shall remain for now. Feel free to avail yourself of the new awesomeness that is my flicker account.

As a sidenote, I am now fairly recovered from the sickness that was harassing me during the past fortnight, and per Beth’s suggestion I have decided on a name for my bear-shaped companion containing Grade A Clover Honey. This bottle shall henceforth be know as “Molly“.
This past weekend witnessed the recurrence of the InterVarsity Christmas Formal. As such, there was some standing around, some dancing, and a playlist that was, to quote my own category, “Decidedly Random”.

I, of course, proceeded to post copious quantities of pictures on flickr to relieve the weight of my compulsion. I think it helped. And since there are no videos, you cannot tell how poorly I dance…or, to put it another way, how poorly the word “dancing” applies to what it is that I do. I think we can all be thankful that we don’t have to see that.

I could be one of those people who posts obscure inside jokes and amuses himself at the expense of readers…for instance, I could mention Holly’s concern for Shakiro Cedric Potter-Leonard, and then we would all have a good laugh and be glad we are all in on the joke…but I won’t. Actually, I can’t think offhand of anyone who does that among the blogs that I read, so I’m not sure why I brought it up. Speaking of blogs, though, isn’t it nice when people think your blog/website is worth linking to, so that everyone who visits them can come visit your pages and your page hits go up and life is wonderful. Then I thought of my own site, and I feel kind of sorry for the people who were willing to link to it, because I still don’t update it with anything useful and when I do update it at all it ends up being some inside joke about butterflies and ugly sweaters. Well, I guess I only did that this once…but my point is still relevant…sort of. Another thing that people get to know about me (was there a first thing?) is my excessive use of the ellipsis. I use ellipses in my informal writing because it mirrors the drawling, fragmented manner in which I speak.

Wow. This post turned into a weird conglomeration of random thoughts. I’m going to post it, but I’m blaming its quality on the fact that I am sick and my brain is working in the same way that a rusting old Chevy on blocks in the front yard is considered to be in mint condition. I’m going to add the fact that I just lost “the game”, and I’m going to qualify that by saying that I will do my best to avoid inside jokes from here on out, and I will replace them with references to obscure science fiction works and classical literature with occasional forays into the use of semicolons and arcane sentence structures.

To continue the molodrama, here I present two of my constant companions in these days of illness.

So, I had some time and I thought, “why not put some pictures on my website?” Thus, in the usual self-promotional manner I present my new About page…well, ok…it’s the same old About page with some new links at the bottom where you can browse a few random photos. Are you happy now?

Speaking of monkeys, if you have not seen me recently then you are probably not aware of my current participation in the informal No-Shave November. As a consequence of my participation, I am experiencing my annual facial hair annoyance and (in my opinion) generally scuzzy appearance. We shall see how long I can keep this up…I bet I break down and trim it in less than a week.

Previously, I mentioned that I do not have the time to overhaul my old CMS. At this time, I have decided to accomplish a smaller task which I do have time for (hopefully), and that is the creation of a PHP image gallery. In a few recent projects, I have had the need for a gallery which outstripped the scale and features of my old SCMS module. As a result, I have leaned heavily upon Gallery 2. Gallery has the features that I require, but the code bloat and the inherent slowness that results make it unreliable and underperforming for certain situations at both large and small scales. For this reason, I will be developing a new (yes, yet another…) PHP multimedia gallery with the features/performance/customization capabilities that I need.

On an aesthetic note, I have decided to use a modified version of the Connections Reloaded theme by Ajay D’Souza. This theme is itself a variant of the beautiful Connections theme by Patricia Müller. I will be continuing modifications of the theme as I have the time.

This will be, we all hope, a slightly more updated version of my website. No longer will it languish in the stagnant realm of abandoned web pages.

I have decided that I simply do not have the time to fully rewrite a new version of my Small Common Module System (SCMS) upon which this site used to be based (for an active example, see umtiv.org). Now that I have decided that, it remains to be seen what I will do with this site. My friend Steve has inspired me to do something useful with it, so I look forward to seeing what form that will take.