Entries this day: Guess_whose_back NY_times Site accupuncture miki_olivia

Guess whose back

10:54am JST Wednesday 19 May 2004

I lay in bed letting my back heal itself, half sleeping, half checking the clock for 9am to call Tomoko and be all, "um; no" about meeting her today. I called the chiropractor that Jimmy told me about starting at about 6am. They apparently open at 10am. I have an appointment for 6pm.

Took a hot shower and practiced some yoga poses to stretch my back, starting with tadasana, the standing pose. Those seemed to help my back release some. Maybe I'll get back into doing those.

My back seemed to get worse after carrying my laundry upstairs and hanging it up. Maybe I'll stop doing that.

NY times

Sent:		Tuesday, May 18 2004 7:34PM
To:		feedback@nytimes.com [feedback@nytimes.com]
Subject:	Suggestion Comment

When I'm reading an article, and decide I want to click one of the
pictures, I don't want to have to think about it.  In every other
website in the known universe, we just click the picture.  By making
me think, I lose track of my train of thought reading the article.
I'm like, wtf?  why didn't the picture open?  Oh yeah, on NY Times I
have to look for the answer, a tiny bit of text.  If there are 3
pictures, this could take a week to read the article: clicking on the
picture, wondering why it didn't open, losing my train of thought,
looking for the answer, reading different text, moving my mouse off
the picture I want to enlarge onto the magical text that enlarges the
picture, clicking the text, clicking again after adjusting the precise
position of the mouse cursor because I missed it the first time,
successfully opening the picture, wondering where I was in the
article.

Let us just click the picture!

Site

10:59am JST Wednesday 19 May 2004

I got a link from Ben Batschelet to a website with a pretty cool interface. I'm inspired to redesign my site again, adding functionality by making it db driven. I've considered putting my pictures in a database, and now I'm considering putting my journal entries and other writings in a db as well. It would make for more complicated copying to my site (I think), but the extra functionality would be pretty cool.

That would solve Tim's complaint (and my own) about not being able to easily navigate my images.

If I do this, I would probably incorporate an actual login for people to leave comments that aren't anonymous. I might (!) write an email verifier thing, but I can probably find one that's already been written.

3:05pm JST Wednesday 19 May 2004

Hmm.

So it seems this cat's site is powered by Movabletype, a blogging platform. My amazement of the site has suddenly gone down from the perspective of "wow; this guy can write prose *and* code." I'm not saying he can't write code, but I'm *guessing* that he didn't write most of the functionality of the site.

What is my point? I have prided myself in that I have had a journal online since before it was cool to do so. I didn't have a domain since before it was cool to have one (was it ever not cool? or just not possible?) but I had a journal online. [[ it *might* just be that I had a journal online before *I* knew how cool it was. In my mind, this is just as acceptable. ((I made up the name Thunder Rabbit on my own, though other people have done the same; there's a whole game or something that uses that name. I don't chide myself for stealing the idea from someone else and then coveting it as my own; I honestly made it up myself. (but I didn't make up the words themselves, dammit))) But I don't think livejournal or deadjournal or any other blog-helpful software was around before I started. I don't think the word "blog" was around before I started. ]] I like knowing I wrote all this myself. (but even that's not true; my brother Fred wrote a lot of mysterious-to-me regex stuff that makes the indexing possible on my journal (and where would I be without perl, written by LW (I'm not putting his name here because I'm not trying to drop names like I know anything about him; I don't, except that he's the cat who wrote perl) and the http itself by TBL?)

I didn't write emacs, perl, linux, but I use them as givens. I didn't write "I have only succeeded because I've stood on the shoulders of giants." (or whatever that quote is)

(I *did* write, "It takes longer to live a biography than to read one.")

Again, what is my point? Kim Sawyer did a personality test on me and one of the results suggested that I like to (and am able to) build my own structure, my own organization of things. I don't like having to use an already existing structure. I guess this, like most things, has its limits. I'm happy to use http, emacs, linux, OS X, and I pretty much have no idea how *any* of them work. My point seems to be that I'm hesitant to mold myself to the structure of MovableType (*).

(*) though from the faq I get that I will have access to the source code; that makes it more acceptable to me.

I'm going to go cook eggs and rice with spinach, none of which I made, using pans and stuff that I also didn't make.

It's something ubiquitous like this that I want to make for the world.

accupuncture

5:41pm JST Wednesday 19 May 2004

I have eight needles in my back now. There's a chiropractor quite close to my house, and he accupunctured me and used incense to do some sort of heat treatment stuff on my back. Not as hot as I thought it might be.

Got 8 little needles in my back now. They'll stay for up to 2 weeks.

miki olivia

11:59pm JST Wednesday 19 May 2004

KG Miki came over around 7:30pm tonight to be here when Olivia arrived. This might be the only day Miki is able to chat with Liv; Miki is leaving for Sydney on Sunday, and will be back the day Liv leaves for London.

We took a nap for a bit while waiting and engaged in a small tickle fight near the end.

- - - -

Went to Motosumiyoshi to get Olivia (she had never been to this apartment before) and arrived just as she was coming through the gates at the bottom of the stairs. She came up to hug me and then went back down to get her stuff; I wanted to help, but simply couldn't with my back.

The girls' normal walking speed was a bit too fast for my preference, but I kept up with them.

- - - -

Chatty chat chat for about an hour before Miki had to go back home. Olivia walked her to the station, and bought me a bento on the way back, and then chatachat chat with Olivia until we fell asleep.