Entries this day: AM_dream Back_at_the_wack_trackbacks But_first Done_installing_trackbacks day night

AM dream

3:53am JST Sunday 30 January 2005

"I don't want you to touch the body," I told her. "I want you to tell me in _your professional opinion_ who the person is and what is his state."

I was talking to my mom.

She had just arrived home.

I was blind and my boyfriend had been murdered, or so I suspected. I was as brilliant as Jubal in Stranger in a Strange Land and Michael the Man from Mars was my lover. He had been planning to escape prison in a body bag, but the plan was for him to be alive, not dead.

I had opened the bag and found him not responsive. I didn't touch him, but I couldn't see him.

"I want you to give your professional opinion. Do not touch the body." I didn't want her to leave any traces for the investigators to find. "Is it Michael?" (oh damn, I thought, I'm not as smart as Jubal; I was supposed to not seed her mind with his name. She was supposed to come up with that. Well, she was my mom, she would understand.)

"I'm going to use your statement as a professional witness. I'm going to write a statement tonight and in the morning I'm going to take it to a judge and I'm going to have the murderer in hand tomorrow night if at all possible."

I was quite sure of myself. I was Jubal; who was I not to believe myself?

We were in the courtyard of a cabin when I was waiting for my mom to come home. I told her I had bad news but that I need her to stay calm.

We were walking outside and under a bridge in a well lit open area as I told her my plan.

We arrived at the body bag, and I unzipped it. The body was white and dusty and my mom gasped a little to see it. She stepped down to have a better look and put her boot on the dust/sand covering his chest. I thought, "a little bootprint wouldn't kill him would it? They wouldn't suspect my mom, right?"

While she was looking at the body and I was thinking I shouldn't have mentioned his name,

My heater beeped that it was going to quit.

Perfect timing for me to write down the dream.

Back at the wack trackbacks

9:11am JST Monday 19 June 2006 (update)

(I wiped out all the trackback stuff; no humans were using them, and I am in the process of creating a new indexing system. Plus, I can just outsource trackbacks to any of the social bookmarking sites.)

4:50am JST Sunday 30 January 2005

Okay; I'm going to start fresh-ish (I'm still tired) on my trackback code thing.

The page with the code that works is here (and I guess for good measure I should ping it), and my page with the code that doesn't work is *here*.

Hmm. Now it works. I'm not sure why. Well, this is good. Lemme just compare this code with the code I used last night.

Okay, this is very good. It seems just to be a matter of spacing. I imagine I can't have a space in the middle of "return false"

5:29am

That's it!

But first

5:29am JST Sunday 30 January 2005

But first, before I go and add trackback code to all my entries, I must state the following (in Abe Simpson voice, cause it's really pointless to say this anyway):

<whine/rant/boast> When *I* was a boy, we didn't *have* trackbacks and permalinks. We didn't even have cheap domain names! Domain names cost a hundred dollars and that was a lot of money in those days! There was nothing called a blog - all we had was Geocities, and that was before Yahoo! bought them. In fact, Yahoo! was the only search engine back then, and they didn't have a good email service until they bought rocketmail, which my good friend kT showed me when I was at college. Oh, those were the days, playing frisbee in the water fountain with no water and trying to pass Physics II with Maggie.

Now where was I?

Oh yes, I was writing online before blogging existed!</whine/rant/boast>

6:25am

And this seems to be the final missing piece. I wondered why I didn't know how to Auto-Discover trackback URLs. Semi-according to movabletype, tb.cgi doesn't have that functionality. It was written years ago; hasn't it been updated by someone???

Done installing trackbacks

7:27am JST Sunday 30 January 2005

Okay, that was relatively painless. To simplify things, I did have to change the permalinks of all my entries a very little bit. In the past, I had appended a number to the name of the entries, which would have uniquely identified them in case I had the same name entry but different extension. But I don't think I ever had that situation, so the unique identifier was pretty much superfluous. When I added the ability to view slices of my journal, those identifiers changed depending on what slice was being viewed. When I added the trackbacks, the permalinks would have been all flocked up. Even at the time I had created the unique IDs, they would be reshuffled if I added an entry between two existing entries.

So I'm cutting my losses and removing the unique ID.

And now I'm going to sleep again.

ps: From here, I have no way of testing the auto-discovery of trackback URIs. If you can do it, feel free to let me know.

day

1:13am JST Monday 31 January 2005

Slept like a dog then met Hitomi in Kawasaki for pudding from our favorite pudding shop in Azaelea. We went to the bench on top of the bridge arch thing near Cinecitta and slurped pudding while enjoying a bit of sunshine.

Wandered around the game center where (nothing really struck our collective fancy, but) we struck it rich and found about 15 tokens (they call them medals) in one of the machines.

Snagged them and will use them a different day when it's not so crowded and smokey in there.

Went back underground to Azaelea and scoped the worlds shortest escalator, and I marveled at the number of people who would stand on it. We didn't do any real research, but of the 8 people we saw, probably 6 stood on it. The thing is 3 steps tall. And it's going down. And it's on the right hand side of the stairs (in Japan, traffic circulates on the left). And below it, unavoidably, are stairs.

During our adventure, I apparently kept checking my watch. Hitomi didn't freak, but she let me know it didn't make for relaxed chillin' with me checking the time all the time. Crud. She was right; I should have set my alarm and been done with it.

I knew I wouldn't have much time, but went to hang with her anyway;... maybe probably should have just scheduled for another time.

Once she called me on that, I quit checking, but I felt kinda embarassed and it wasn't 100% okay afterward. Ah well, lesson probably learned.

We went to Kawasaki station where I grabbed some foodage and we ate under the clock until it was time for me to go.

night

1:23am JST Monday 31 January 2005

I had been checking my watch because I didn't want to be late meeting Ikumi before we went to see Les Liaisons Dangereuses, assistant directed by my friend Louise from Gaba, and performed by TIP (Tokyo International Players) who have been performing in Tokyo for over 100 years.

She texted me as I arrived in Musashikosugi and we met at St Mark Cafe. Ended up well on time to leave; we were (just barely) first in line at the theater. Had to wait about 10 minutes for them to open the doors. Front row center seats; awesome. (Well, in the front row after the first two reserved rows.)

In the play, Madame de Tourvel, played by Alice Hackett, was utterly believable to me. That's a crummy word, believable, but for me she just was exactly as she said; her acting was perfect. Emotions, lines, crying, physical pain, emotional anguish, all perfect.

The two lead actors (had far more complex lines, but) threw me off with their frequent slips. He would backtrack on words and one time they were just so off; someone missed a line or said a wrong line or something cause their lines didn't line up.

"if blah blah blah then I will not."

"You don't!"

They stood for 5 seconds in frozen silence working out how to recover, as I just felt embarassed for them. Finally, he just walked away from the position to the next point (during more silence) and they started anew. Oh man, it was rough.

I'm not saying what they do is easy or doable by anyone; I'm just saying I was fully distracted by the hole.

- - - -

At the end of the show, I asked Louise to get Alice so I could tell her her performace was perfect. I didn't tell the perfect performer at the last performance (A Doll's House), so I wanted to be sure to this time.

- - - -

Michael, Charles, and Daniella (oh, and Jimmy, but he's also with TIP) were there to see the play; they all work at Gaba as well. Daniella had to zip home, but Ikumi and I joined Michael and Charles and another Japanese woman whose name I never learned for drinks at an Irish bar in Roppongi.

I was entertained to see "Fish and Chips" and "Bangers and Mash" on the menu, for these items are in the menu in our level 2 book (of 7) (actually 3 of 8 if you count 0), based in England. Not in our book, but on tonight's menu was "Irish Lawyer" for 1100 yen, so I got that, specifically for the reason that I had no idea what it was, except that it had a funny name for food.

Our food took a really long time to arrive, there was ice in my first glass of orange juice, we got a cheeseburger that no one ordered (nor ate, though he left it with us), but the bar had relatively few smokers, so I would definitely go back. (next time I'm in Roppongi (almost never))

During our chow, I felt amazed to learn Charles has received a university degree in chemistry in Japanese. He embarked on his chemistry career after a year of learning Japanese. Holy cow. I can tell he has worked much harder to learn Japanese than I. He modestly says, "well, I had to."

We made it back just in time for last train. In Nakameguro, I decided it was high time to ask the guys what the cables were for between the rails. They were obviously not for tension (too flimsy), and obviously not for signaling (not electrically closed).

Turns out, they are for signaling. Those points that appear not to be electrically closed, are in fact, connected. The wires are basically long antennas for the control station to talk to the train guys via walkie talkie. Kick ass.

While on the subject, I asked about some other cables, that ran underneath the edge of the platform. They were even less carefully maintained; sometimes they were broken and sproining like guitar strings.

They are to detect fallen items. I didn't ask if they detect via closing a circuit or by tension placed on the wires... next time I'll do that.

On the train, Michael and I explained that we swat students (with pants down) six times (three on each ass cheek) with a leather belt for not doing homework.