You will have to make do with the web as-is for a day or two as I pummel away on Opinionation and get back to the main idea of this log.

Sensiva is a Windows utility which lets you put the extra buttons on your mouse to work. After setting the "drawing" button, it recognizes the curves as the mouse sweeps around with the button down. For example: change the browser setting so that when one draws an "M", it goes to webmail. An overlaid extra invisible [yet visual] interface, it succeeds where other programs of its type fail.

Now, the part I found odd was that each of the default events set off a sound. If I drag to the right in my browser, I go forward in the history and a nice English voice says, "Forward." So, I think to turn it off and then notice they supply extra voices on their website in several languages (protected member area with cookies, so no direct link).

While considering how funny it would be to use the "German Female Voice", I noted that their store of German sounds was unique: it had a Robotz voice. Everybody loves robots, so I installed that one. Now my events all sound like Trans Am is talking to me from the future. As the cursor draws lines and curves and angles on the screen, the speakers emit the stilted conversation of an incomprehensible intelligence.

Samples: "alles markieren" "unterschrift" "drukken" "wiederholen" "ausschneiden" "Nachrichten" "einfEen" "verkleinern" "Arbeitsfläche"

Thanks to Jack Letourneau for corrections. Me German tain't so grate.

Gary North's computer still works after Y2K. (Thanks to Nat for supplying this, as it is not on his site or the mailing list's site.)

Surreal images from "slide sandwiching"... be sure to click next to see even more neat non-digital photo manipulation.

This image struck me as surreal only because it's strikingly familiar to my mind's eye... looks much like sunset over the Ocean of Tears. (couldn't find one from Gargoyle Island)

Rob Gray does some of the style I was looking for. This sky is very slick, but there's something wrong with the time-lapse effect applied to water. Then again, it looks grand and tricks the eye in this shot and especially this otherworldly war of fog and rock.

Polished off The World's Shortest Stories, and went looking for "nanofiction" on the net. Then I was so consumed I wrote some myself. It's fun trying to squeeze a plot into 55 words! Since this is the end of the entry, feel free to skip the dramatic confusion that is:

Compression
Through the wall, I heard my cellophane rustling. A period of silence was interrupted by pattering outside, and then my door opened. He rushed inside! Stumbling as if drunk, grasping at air with jaws agape, he crumpled blue to the carpet. I stared. He thrashed silently. I sat perfectly still. He stopped. Out rolled my gumball.

Brak Show Debuts Feb. 20 on Cartoon Network (scroll down)

Finally, a bit of confirmation. I will remind everyone about this later, but for now be enticed with a quote.

"I am so tired. I've been taping my new show and hobnobbing with the big time celebrities appearing on my show and eating butter. I'm worn out, buddy buddy! Television is hard. How does Space Ghost do it? Man!"

Hooray!

Pictures of me on the web are few and far between. This is a good thing. Here's a few that escaped my omniscient gaze... but not for long. (Just trust me and click a few, this is an exercise in secondary captioning.)

That's me in the middle.
Here I am as a kid, swinging free on a branch.
Time lapse photo of me out in the yard.
Right after my first day of junior high school!
Singin' in the rain! To the oldies!1!!
I spent much of high school inside my one-way mirrorball.
Most recent picture.
This is where I travelled into the future to take a picture of my old, nitrous-oxide-wracked self.

Buddyhead interviews Tristeza

I like the Jimmy Lavalle [aka "Album Leaf"] solo album. Mellow to the point of severity and reminding me more of Gastr del Sol's noise experiments at points than Tristeza, check an mp3 at insound: Album Leaf - Airplane.mp3

Once I sat on a camel. It was supposed to take me somewhere, but it didn't. Then a kind fellow poked me with a stick. Thanks!

Make sure you have a .wav plugin for this one. Quicktime should work.

Waterman's Virtual Library puts 3rd grade class collaborations online in linear multimedia. I grinned so much after visiting this my head just about split open end-wise.

Giving each child a line of the story leads to interesting contrasts between intense actors-to-be and monotone. My favorite line: "It takes years for a zebra to grow his stripes back!" (from Hugo the Bully)

Walking to work takes too much concentration in the winter, thanks to the ice and snow. No longer can I contemplate and jot down notes whilst stepping, for fear of falling upon the hard ground. Therefore, I will convince a techno-mage cobbler to whip me up a pair of Boots of Levitation. (Why do they always have to be "gem-encrusted"?)

I have the spells and materials, but man... 3D4 hours is just too much time to waste. Instead, I shall build a big old magnetic field and float around in it.

Bah, what am I thinking? It would take forever to collect that many magnets and release the spirits of chaos within them. A LEGO hoverbike would do just the trick; I've already got the bricks. Now, to wait for someone to develop the shrink ray.

Simplify? The Stealth Hoverboard from Go-Ped is exactly what I want: the "most evolutionary development in personal transportation since the foot." What are those wheels for, then? They're facing the wrong angle to be gyroscopic antiforce generators... I do believe I'm being tricked here. Antigravity News and Space Drive Technology has many more believable gyroscope conveyances, and that's not saying much.

Maybe a hovercraft would suffice? No way. Too wide and low to the ground. I should just be able to fly around without a vehicle. How hard can it possibly be? Here we are, a levitation tincture sounds simple enough. Clean the cheesecloth, and remember: for external use only! Hold it... foiled again. It only works under the light of a pale moon, and I don't have a third eye. *blink*

Aha, this must be the one. Razorwing's schools of practice for levitation matches my requirements perfectly. It only takes 4 candles, a feather, and silence! I have those in hand. Plus, it helps if performed dawn and outside; couldn't be any more perfect for flying to work. I am all set.


Nuts to meditation, I have failed for the last time. Can someone give me a fog to work?

Pictures of Sammy Hagar on tour in my high school town of Merrill, Wisconsin... pardon me while I burst into flame.

twt.com -> Why? TWT!
It's a "low cost" DNA technologies corporation based in Madison here. And hey look, there's good old Tommy stopping by.

Now I know where to look if a sudden craving to work in the biotech industry overtakes me. The only position there I could possibly fit in would be database/network administrator. It scares me when folks combine; it means you're bound to become the all around computer help and that's never any fun.

toi.com -> Transitions sunlight-sensitive lenses
I used to have these in school, and the other kids would tease me to no end about them. No idea why, I thought they were neat-o.

the.com -> Completely blank
cbg.com -> ICG Communications (eh?)
b0b.com -> Bobby Lee's Pedal Steel Pages

Finally a pita I can truly hate. (Do I really need to outline reasons? Pure evil.)

Tee hee! It's one big incestuous family. Manero [not incestuous at all, honest] kindly alerted me to the fact that Berry370 liked one of my old link bars so much, they decided to rip it off completely. Well, looking at the page makes me laugh more and more. You should visit. You will learn about dogs.

Then, I found the other pita using it which is somehow strangely related. Riley370 is a mishmash of good ol' Kikaze and the infamous Linkbar o' Doom. Haha... at the top of the page is a link to this mystery person's Geocities page - a rearranged copy of the pita in a reverse layout. [I find this whole thing increasingly humorous the more I think about it.]

Orange pita anonymous person: AMEN to your rationale at least!

Gilbert's pita rules. Being that I once lived in Wausau, this faux-terrorism bit is especially humorous. Sherlock would have guessed a fake bomb complete with flashing red light was the prank of a kid.

"A 53-year-old woman later turned herself in and said it was a joke."

Must pay more attention. Somehow I missed Tom Millionaire's Ship of Jokes, a Flash-requiring expedition of Maakies. More of those seafaring raunchy jokes we've come to know and love, with that odd tilt every so often that makes one think. Thanks Dumbmonkey.

Bob Green compares the major easy-logging options. Linked from Treehouse.

Interesting brain-twitch: when one looks at this Mars Robot log the ad seems somehow more intrusive than usual. Mayhap because I got one that matched the green of the page?

Moving past that, it has got some nift robot content. Shall I lift a link? Why not: Superior compilation of Star Wars Legos posed in scenes

Incubus is playing with Mr. Bungle on a semi-national tour. Warner Brothers is no help whatsoever, being only 6 months behind, so look to the unofficial fan site's tour dates.

System of a Down headlining? Sure, they may have intensity, but certainly not half the level of creativity in an Incubus or Bungle.

Puya is opening; apparently a band peddling some Puerto Rican variant of metal. Sounds interesting, no? Songs appear to vary from traditional horn and percussion singalongs to the rhythmic sing-chording that's so hot with the kids these days, then all the way back to reggae rock.

Through no fault of my own, the page is almost Lynx-friendly. This astounds and pleases me. I'm just hoping I didn't lose any readers with the redesign... I would much prefer to lose them with my obtuse links and commentary. [Many tweaks needed yet, so please let me know if text is jumbled or unreadable.]

Working to the beat of the Dismemberment Plan and I realized that I forgot to mention somethin'.

Almost all of the Plan's entire discography is available in RealAudio to convince you to love them. I hadn't heard their comp appearances; both of those are there for you to snare as well.

Plus, Travis mumbles about a Plan Radio Hour with hand-picked tunes and posts a Steely Dan mp3 on the news page. It's pop music for the new -- ahh, never mind.

Universal Buzz now has a band we know and love playing live for the new year. Fugazi chugs through an excellent set!

I don't know about godfathers of punk, but someday they'll be godfathers of something all their own. Contract acute boogiemania now!

Not so faithful Zelda-based Java game

Overly dramatic doom-metal band makes Flash page! Masses go crazy!

Sarcasm aside, while stumbling through unknown band pages I found one with a most excellent credo. 3d5spd say: SKIN + BONE + ELECTRICS + RHYTHMETICS + SYNTHETICS = ethical bias

Apparently one of the many Atlantian bands popping up these days, they suckered me with that line. Even though I usually ignore anything that gets described as "psychedelica", I shall have to check out those mp3s.

Ink 19 is one more in the pantheon of net music magazines.

Can this possibly be one month of reviews? I guess it's "Winter 99". Fairly impressive range.

Rumors of Ativin's death - truth in journalism or just a horrible way to start a review? [Hi Clint!]

Their Best Boy Electric review is a complete copout. I know what genre they play, now tell me: how is the record compared to the rest of the genre? What stylings make them unique?

Pic of Ian blowing a trademark bubble in their Don Caballero review. Hopefully I will get to see those guys next time they roll back around the midwest.

One must realize Bruce Sterling is a fountain of snow, but he shore is funny, hyuk! What's he talkin bout maw?

Perl Monks looks like a handy place to ask and answer questions.

WFUV's The Big Broadcast chronicles old pop and jazz radio, and some kind person has posted a page with mp3s of said show. Are you still reading? If you have any bandwidth at all, go now.

The classic Prisoners Dilemma [divined from a bovine inversus link] leads me to wonder, how could I find Scientific American's 1983 #248 online? Douglas Hofstadter wrote one of his Metamagical Themae columns around AI and the Prisoners Dilemma. Their site only goes back to 1996.

Why won't magazines like Sci Am digitize/scan their back content and sell access to the back issues? I don't want to have to track down a meatspace copy, this is the Internet Age, by gum!

(The Social Dilemmas site has many more fun and exciting ethical problems for pondering.)

Manero linked Q3A vs Karnov, an in-depth comparison of the two games by the inimitable JeffK. Parodic oddness.

Other don't-miss twisted geek humor can be found in Something Awful. Cranky Steve's *ahem* map reviews, for example. And it started out so innocently: "Welcome to ICQ".

Get lost in HypEcrite's research links.

Or just explore their concrete poetry, aka Zen Lunacy. I particularly enjoyed thrashing doves and sight is just dust.

Poffelipoff's postcard ASCII brings shape out of shadow.

In this collection I found an ASCII Roy Lichtenstein. That's just plain bizarre.

The world is only changed by people without set thought patterns. Obvious, right?

Here's the redesign. Looks better in browsers that fully support CSS's border properties *cough* IE *cough*, but let me know if you see trouble.