Darnit. I wrote a nice little piece on the train this morning and I want to blog it, but I wrote it on my powerbook (sans floppy drive) and I don't have a way to get it onto the web. (I can't hook my personal PB to the work network for various personal liability reasons.)

I'm seriously thinking about getting one of these Q Drives, like the ThumbDrive but more stylish (and can fit on your keychain!) Either of these would have probably been a great help on my trip, and they'd still be useful now. All I really need is 16 megs.

Hey everyone, spread the word! The 2001 Weblogger Purity Test Survey is up and running!

Stage One is a call for questions. Go to the site (http://pure.fury.com) and submit the questions that you think should be asked of webloggers. You can also read the most recent submissions from other bloggers and readers.

The site will be open for submissions until August 15th, when a few of us will hide away and pick out the best 200 or so questions and present the test survey for the month of September.

Then, it's tallying up the responses and seeing what the state-of-the-blogunion is for 2001.

For right now, spread the word, and submit your questions!

The pressures of time keep weighing on me, especially since I wake up at 6 each morning now to get to work. Habitually night-time has always been my productive time. On a normal night I'd go to sleep at around 12:30, but if I was in the middle of a project I would stay up until 2 or 3 on occasion. Now I simply can't do that and be up to make the train, with whom no excuses can be made for tardiness (well, almost. I've found that, on occasion, having missed the train at Emeryville by just a few minutes, I can beat it to Hayward station, 20 miles down the way, and catch it there, but that's another story).

So without the luxury of sleeping 'till 8 I have to set a boundary on my nighttime productivity. On train days I get back home around 7:30 in the evening. To be rested by 6 I need to get to sleep by 11, midnight at the latest. This basically gives me four hours of personal time a day, counting dinner, getting ready for bed, and any [gasp] weekday socializing.

What's the solution? Ditch the arduous palm V/stowaway keyboard combination and make the powerbook earn its keep. I'm actually glad that I don't have a net connection because if I did that's exactly where my two hours of train time would go. Starting today those two hours are Fury time, devoted to writing and, more importantly, coding projects.

The full effect will be realized once Apple releases OS X 10.1, which I'll finally install, moving forward from OS 9 for the first time in nearly a year when I installed and promptly removed OS X Public Beta 1. Once I install OS X, I'll be able to put in mySQL, Apache, and PHP, letting me have a full coding and development environment in a 6 pound package. Technically I could do the same thing now with OS X 10.0.4, LinuxPPC, or VirtualPC, but I'd rather have a more stable and elegant environment. I'm all for the bleeding edge, but not when it's jagged as well.

Well, that's all for the moment. I hope you enjoyed today's verboten work quickies, but I spent less time writing them then I would otherwise spend on email, so I'm secure in my internal justification. Besides, I don't smoke or take coffee breaks, and I usually eat lunch at my desk, so my tiller is still on the rise. Now I'm getting back to implementing underblog, watching the beautiful bay wetlands go by (no, I'm actually not being sarcastic. They're pretty nice in their own way). Well, that and occasionally spying for rabbits fleeing the great steel beast.

Oh my god. I got the link to Dictionaraoke from LYD, where he also linked to their rendition of NIN's Closer.

I try not to crib links, but I have to, because their rendition of Green Eggs & Ham is simply the most amazing thing I've heard for three months (and that includes POE's Haunted, which is also amazing).

Go to the site, but the gist is they took known songs or written works and remixed them, using only the word readings from Merriam-Webster's Speaking Dictionary mixed with music and beats. This is really amazing.

When people write something they think is funny, then "LOL" themselves.

I just picture them doing this in person, telling a joke and laughing to a silent listener. Gak. And people overuse LOL too much as it is. What's next? "LOL(S)" (Laughing out loud, seriously!)? I've never seen a single person read something on a screen and literally "Roll on the floor, laughing out loud."

Now that webcams are everywhere and people's bandwidth is increasing, I expect people to retort to an insincere LOL with a "PE" (Prove it.)

Fury.com: Now 3% banality free...

So there's a lot of political buzz about the findings of a commission on election reform, chaired by Pres. Ford and Pres. Carter. The most compelling recommendation was to make Election Day a federal holiday, so people would be able to go to the polls.

So I'll admit that it took me 10 hours, but the nagging in the back of the head finally made its way to the front: What about the absentee ballots? Ordinarily they have to be received by 7pm on election day (details vary by county and state). If it's a federal holiday, will the post office deliver mail? I could easily see there being enough ballots to make a difference sitting undelivered on election day until it's past the deadline. And of course it's a federal crime to go and get yours back once you realize it won't count.

Then again, the report's a hundred pages long. Hopefully they've thought of that already.

(The other quirk in the article is that, apparently, the panel found that "CNN's John King and Major Garrett contributed to this report." Silly formatting...)

So Sunday I went back to helping Chris shoot his film short (currently referred to as the 'Untitled Sundance Project'). We filmed on the Berkeley campus for about six hours, and I didn't have sunscreen on for... about six hours. I now have a toasted face.

The shooting went great however, with the small mishap of having one roll of miniDV tape break during review, so we had to reshoot several scenes. All in all I have to say I'm very impressed with the cast in this piece. Since Chris lives in LA but came up here for a weekend of shooting, he didn't get the chance to meet his actors before shooting, but it couldn't have turned out better.

They're all part of an acting troupe (organization, what have you), called Bare Witness. They were superb. you should go to their site and check out their short character pieces.

Anyhow, late for work, must go work. Underblog's design is coming along great. The code will be in place soon and then I'll be able to share it with everyone.

Oh, and totally off topic, I discovered yesterday that, apparently, 'Mr. Longarm' owns the trademark on the color yellow.

This is beautiful.

Okay, so I didn't actually skip out on seeing PotA with friends last night. We enjoyed the movie, but I could see how both of the reviews I read were justifiable.After seeing it, I had many questions, with one at the forefront of my brain (small spoiler).

Anyhow, hats off and much flag-waving to all the bloggers who are starting the 24-hour blogathon today at noon! I'm helping my friend Chris make a movie today, and I'm going to a BBQ at Ali and Mark's after that, but I'll be cutting out early to work on two projects I hope to get out of the door this weekend, underblog and Blog Purity 2001.

Have a great weekend! Talk to you soon.

I'm skipping out on movies tonight to work on Underblog.... This is gonna be fun. You'll love it.