Adventures In Blogging

Spent tonight playing with Nucleus, got far enough to realize that it’s not going to retrofit on top of my current site… It’s going to have to wait until I get to chromewaves 3.0 before it gets implemented. Same goes for the URL rewrite engine that I want to get working. It just makes more sense to build the site around the underlying technologies and architectures than try to force them into the existing site. Nucleus is pretty nice. Imported my Blogger entries without a hitch.

Speaking of Blogger, it’s starting to tick me off – mainly the archive functions. Sometimes they publish nicely, other times they just go to kack. I’ve bypassed the javascript it used to include the archive links because they were throwing up bizarre javascript errors… It works better now and is more navigable, but it does serve as a reminder that I need a better, more robust system.

np – The 6ths / Wasp’s Nest

Cut Your Hair

Had an illuminating conversation with my barber this evening about removing one’s own warts with razor blades and hot pokers. I shit you not.

I am currently installing and playing with a couple of blog publishing programs – pMachine and Nucleus. If I take to either one, I may be switching from Blogger sooner than I anticipated. They’re both PHP-based and exist locally on my domain, which I’d ultimately prefer to something hosted remotely, like Blogger. I still haven’t been told if Moveable Type has been enabled on my site, that’s also an option but I like having full access to the application.

np – Unwound / Leaves Turn Inside You

Lay It Down Clown

I don’t know who this Canadian official was, but I’d like to vote for him.

Canada Silent After Report Says Bush Called ‘Moron’

np – Galaxie 500 / Copenhagen

All Families Are Psychotic

I’ve always been lukewarm on Douglas Coupland. On one hand, I feel like it’s almost my patriotic duty to support him, and I do find a fair bit of merit and wit in his work (I’ve read ‘Generation X’, ‘Life After God’, ‘Shampoo Planet’ and ‘Miss Wyoming’ before this one, if you need the establish credibility), but as a writer he frustrates me. I found the characters in his earlier work to be woefully one-dimensional, like they weren’t so much actual people as thinly-constructed charicatures to act as vessels for Coupland’s monologues. And therein laid the problem – all the characters sounded like the same person. They might have had various individual quirks or traits assigned the them (this one has a hat! this one has an accent!) but they were all Coupland.

The last novel of his I read was ‘Miss Wyoming’, and I admit I was pleasantly surprised by the strides he’d made as a writer. While the narrative itself was fairly forgettable (I don’t really remember what it was about), at least it was better written. So after going to see him speak at the International Festival Of Authors, I came away even more impressed by the man and was eager to read his latest, ‘All Families Are Psychotic’. Mark kindly lent me his autographed-by-Doug copy, which I finished today. And once again, my feelings are mixed.

On a superficial level, I enjoyed it. It was a pretty quick read and there were a number of funny scenes, but I can’t help but feel disappointed. Disappointed because I perceive Coupland as having taken a bit of a step back as a writer. Within the first few chapters, he’s already established the Drummond family as such an over-the-top, unbelievably dysfunctional cast of characters that they were, from the get go, impossible for me to relate to. Maybe that was Coupland’s intent, to create as motley a crew as possible, but I think by doing so he does the rest of the book a disservice. He digs a credibility hole for himself early on, and I suppose it’s commendable that he manages do dig himself out of it by book’s end, but imagine how good it could have been if he hadn’t handicapped himself like that. It’s like trying to elicit real sympathy for Wile. E. Coyote – maybe if he didn’t do so many danged stupid things you might feel bad for him.

I will probably come back and clarify this review a little later, it’s not sounding quite as I’d like.

np – Elf Power / A Dream In Sound

Monkey Knife Fight

I don’t like talking to clients. I don’t like having to play corporate politics or carefully choose my words on the possibility they *might* be interpreted in some way that could be deemed counterproductive or whatever. I don’t have Tourettes or anything, but I hate having to run what I want to say through that extra filter…

Yeah, they want me to talk to clients. Important higher-up supposedly techie clients, but clients nonetheless. Why can’t they just leave me to happily crunch away at code all day?

In other work-related news, my brother was not laid off today.

I’m thinking that even if I don’t overhaul my site design anytime soon, I want to change the architecture. No pages except the homepage are being spidered by Google on account of how I’ve built the links. Gonna see what I can do about that.

np – Tobin Sprout / Let’s Welcome The Circus People