daniel talsky is the sweet snob now

Posted by tiny daniel at 3:37 AM | Permalink

I still get weird fan mail for old entries sometimes, but does anyone actually subscribe to / check here anymore?

Posted by tiny daniel at 11:28 PM | Permalink

Someone found the tinyblog googling for tortellini the other day, and found me on facebook to send me the first-in-a-goddamn-long-time fan mail.

She told me about her blog, with a hilarious post about her first goatherding experience.

So, I decided to maybe, possibly do a tinyblog post every once in a while.

It's hard because now I've got a girlfriend I have to be careful not to embarrass by writing "interesting" personal stories. It's amazing how difficult that makes it to write the tinyblog.

Posted by tiny daniel at 12:46 PM | Permalink

a) Yes, I checked in those shell scripts we were talking about and forgot I did, now all the running executables that serve an [Product] function are checked into CVS for sure.

b) Yes, I checked in those shell scripts, but I think there's probably still some floating out there and investigation would take a real HelpDesk job handed to me by craig to be worth doing.

c) No, I haven't checked in the shell scripts but I do remember them and will soon.

d) No, I haven't checked in the shell scripts, and although I vaguely remember the conversation, I have no idea what shell scripts I was talking about anymore. Do we really have to deal with this?

e) [Product] is a totally fucked product and I rue the day I ever got involved with it. Can't you just fix some bugs like a nice developer and stop trying to wrangle the horrific mess of an IT situation around this product? It would make my life a lot easier.

Posted by tiny daniel at 11:22 AM | Permalink

vs.

Some of you know this, but I post this blog in two locations. Since 2000 I've had the blog here at http://tinyplace.org/tinyblog. This is the main home of the tinyblog.

But, for the last several years, a bunch of my friends had livejournals, and kept an active community there. So, in order to let them easily read the tinyblog, I installed a Movable Type plugin that crossposts all my entries to an exact copy of the tinyblog called tinylj.

Over time, the only people besides my mom and occasional old friend who comments on the main tinyblog are 1 million spammers. Most people who comment, comment to the livejournal, even though the tinyplace.org location is the real permanent record of posts.

So, sorry to the occasional person who comments on the main blog, but I'm turning comments off there. No one reads them anyway, so you can just email me at danieltalsky@gmail.com and I can save myself a lot of spam administration.

Thanks to both my tinyblog and tinylj readers... this blog has been an awesome place to tell my stories over the years and I'm sure it will for years to come.

One last note: a lot of people didn't quite get the end of the story of my last post. Grau and I just agreed not to talk about politics anymore, and our friendship has been great. Grau is an awesome guy and he just misunderstood me and I think my post helped him a lot to understand. It was funny, at the time, all of his blog readers commented on his original "our friendship is over" post with resounding "hell yeah!"'s. Only one person told him they thought it was shitty.

Ok, I'll put the 4th wall back in now.

Posted by tiny daniel at 11:20 AM | Permalink

Bare-faced Daniel photos to come, but here's the only pictures I have of my new place (the craigslist ad I found the apartment on is gone because I already signed the lease).

The view from outside:

The lovely kitchen:

View from the deck:

The wee living toom:

Posted by tiny daniel at 2:10 PM | Permalink

It's been too long since I just wrote what was on my mind. That's how I used to do it back in the day. No record reviews, no photos (I didn't have a digital camera or scanner back in 2000), no tech news (I didn't know any tech but what it took to run a blog), just me thinking aloud and trying to think of whatever wacky shit would get people to read my blog.

I turned 33 and that put some things in perspective. I had some kind of feeling like something was going to go sproing or blow up but it didn't. Some of my girlfriends met each other and my friends, and I drank a lot of rum and helped break Jacob's all-time-hot-tub-capacity-record (old record: 14, new record: 16).

All my old friends from Rockford are my myspace or facebook friends. My mom is like the lone holdout. My mom's going to do bees this year so I'm going back to Rockford in the fall for the honey harvest. Nothing blew up. I just lived a year, and maybe didn't do such a bad job this time. I have few complaints. I give myself like an "Exceeds Expectations". Let's try it again right?

For my upstairs neighbors though, things DID change quite a bit. They've been married for 16 years and just decided to break up. They couldn't handle the planning of the guy's 50th birthday party I guess. That was the final straw.

Ok, some shout outs:

Amanda-K: Damn girl, you've stuck by me. Sure I'll DJ your damn wedding, even if you already have the playlist picked out. Nice owl sketch on your invite.

Amanda-Portland: Karmapa 08! Okay, fine, don't like seafood, even though it's the best thing ever. You're my sangha forever.

Amanda-Work: What a surprise you turned out to be! Glad you're probably gonna get the hell out of dodge. You need a larger ecosystem. Daaamn.

Bri: That's a hell of a boobie cake and I'm down with caramel buttercream from now on. You can hit me with the Alpha Dirty Delta paddle anytime.

Katie Meyer: You got a good man, and you happen to be one of the coolest girls I've ever met. Don't every change. No, I'm kidding, you have to change, but keep being like... an earth-muffin-gone-wild like you are.

Steph: Wow... way to kick up all the old feelings via Facebook. You're old school, right back to goo, pickle. I'm still a fan.

Sodenkamp: Once my partner. Now my friend. It's perfect. I'm glad we make money separately now, cause you're a good friend. Good as in valuable.

Metal Heart: Way to show me the art of mysterious loving. I still don't know what fucking language you're speaking. Is it bearfish? Kittenbear? You still owe me a glass unicorn and some K.B. bling.

David Clees: Hey man, the therapy is pretty funny anyway, even if I'm still a fucker. I hope this is helping, because it's expensive. I think it is.

David T: We invented the Apple Pastorius together and it's still one of my favorite desserts ever. You still listen to Jaco?

L'ellen: Sweet thang. I wish I was as cool as you are when I was 23.

Suki Tsunami: OUUUCHHH. OWWWW.

Lenzini and Wilder: You two help keep my job exciting. I work hard for you! Who else would I bring music, salami and cactuses into work for? I even installed windows live chat on my fricking MAC just so you could draw me a picture of a cactus in a shiny question mark box.

Bougieman: You are the dirtiest man I have ever met. I didn't even know people got so dirty like you. You are bent man. Completely twisted to the core. And yet... you are the sweetest. You make dirty horrible comics forever you beautiful rubberfaced man.

Jesse (James) (With no 'i'): Hug dates rule. I'll tell you how to sell yourself anytime. You are totally salable.

Rachel: Talk about steadfast. I can't come to the fund raiser but I'm damn well coming to the dance.

Blackbraid: You wily man... what did you do with the Daniel we all knew and loved!

Marc from the Dodos: You write real pretty songs.

Okay, that's enough with the shout outs. No one reads this anyway. It's okay, it's just for me. It's actually more private to write on a blog than on Microsoft Word, cause there's so much writing on the web you have anonymity by default. No one cares! Unless they google "dirty comic cactus jaco pastorius earth-muffin-gone-wild" and then I will be the number one hit and they will read with rapt attention.

You know, I still get a lot of hits for "girls arm wrestling" which is evidently a very erotic experience. It wasn't very erotic for me when a girl from my work many years ago beat me armwrestling at a Redmond Azteca and saw me on TV naked except for a rabbit skin jacket.

Posted by tiny daniel at 12:01 AM | Permalink

Posted by tiny daniel at 1:26 AM | Permalink

lik-m-aid was like a stick of semi hard sugar with packets of pixie stick dust to eat them in. It was like a top tier candy for me and my sister.

The caramel candy bars we sold in our middle school. Vicious, addictive. I think I bought my whole box. Caramello is okay, but those things were pure bliss, I had a whole system for eating them.

Mainly now it's just chocolate and chocolate ice cream. And chocolate gelato. I don't hate green tea tiramisu, or regular tiramisu either.

I also love spumoni. Spumoni is the weird bright three layer ice cream they only serve at down home Italian restaurants. Chocolate, cherry and... the green is pistachio supposedly. Neopolitan sucks though as far as I'm concerned. Vanilla, chocolate and strawberry. There's a Simpson's episode where Homer eats out all the chocolate from a quart box of Neopolitan and says, "Marge, we need more chocolate, strawberry and vanilla ice cream!"

If I had to choose though, probably sushi over all of it.

Posted by tiny daniel at 4:11 AM | Permalink

I want a band called AAA Aardvark. It would be like the phone book entry of band names. Someone would always buy our album because it would be the first item in the stack and more people would notice it.

Or, my rapper name is Anvil Esquire. That would still be in the A's for sure. Maybe my band could be called AAA AArdvark presents Anvil Esquire.

I can rap.

Posted by tiny daniel at 2:28 AM | Permalink

Poor old girl, limping along, hardly anything to say except a photo now and then.

This one's an old one from not that long after burning man. My man Todd right here made The Crow Bar on the internet. He is the O.G. Drinky Crow. When this motherfucker says The Abyss is Calling..., he means it. I'd take this opportunity to call him a fucking goth, but he might respond by calling me a fucking hippie, and I don't know if I can take that anymore.

It's been a nice, hot summer.

Punk rock ferry worker.

I suppose I should redo the categories so people can find the coolest of the old posts. It's on my list. And damn lucky to be there.

Posted by tiny daniel at 11:55 PM | Permalink

I once had this friend who really liked Pink Floyd, which is cool. He admired how they used layered, but very simple riffs to create moody affecting songs with potent emotional imagery.

But, he had kind of a blind spot.

"Pink Floyd's music isn't depressing," he'd say, "I don't get why people say that."

Well... hmmm... you know, they wrote an album called The Dark Side of the Moon, a concept album about things in life that suck, that's still one of the best selling albums of all times. They wrote an album called The Wall that is about a rock singer's repression by his mother, British society, and the warring world, resulting in his complete and utter madness. Oh yes, they wrote an album called Wish You Were Here about how LSD, madness and the music business destroyed a fellow band mate and bummed the rest of them out. The early albums are perhaps a bit cheerier, but they're not as famous either.

Okay, I'm oversimplifying the themes to all these albums but I, to this day, wonder what he thought Pink Floyd's music was about.

The kicker, though, was when he told me that a friend of his gave his mom a recording of the Pink Floyd song, Mother, for mother's day, and thought it was a really sweet thing to do. I mean, if you barely listen to the song I guess it could sound like a lonely person merely asking his mother for shelter and answers from the world. But to look at the lyrics as a whole it makes it clear that the song is not about a healthy reliance on one's mother:

Momma's gonna make all of your nightmares come true Momma's gonna put all of her fears into you Momma's gonna keep you right here under her wing She won't let you fly, but she might let you sing Momma's gonna keep baby cozy and warm

Weird. He was a weird kid, and he never washed his feet.

Whatever... I was just thinking about it because my mom is coming to town tonight and because I went to go see The Wall laser show a couple of weeks ago. It's a really slow album and I like it a lot better with the movie.

Posted by tiny daniel at 1:14 PM | Permalink

About this time of year I go out with Zan to go get some nettles from Discovery Park. I get a bunch. I make tea with it, I cook it up and eat it like greens, I sting myself in the joints with it. I basically get as much of it in my system as I can while I have a batch of it.

Zan also tinctures it with vodka and makes nettle vodka shots, but I don't go that far.

Why? Because the hayfever I get in a few months is completely crippling for a few weeks, and nettles seem to make it better. Plus, the stings improve local circulation in joints that have limited mobility from me smashing the bones around them.

Also, it's really tasty and nutritious. I stew it with chicken and chicken broth. This year I blended the greens with a little onion and milk to make a Chicken Cream of Nettle. It came out rich and delicious.

When I do it, I feel like a total witch for a couple of months.

Posted by tiny daniel at 1:18 AM | Permalink

I never knew about eruvs until today.

Observant Jews, for those who don't know, have to follow some pretty strict rules about what they can and can't do on the sabbath. It's a "no work" holiday, and they get very serious about what they can and can't do. There's two separate rules for what you can do in your own home, and what you can do outside of the home.

Like... you can't carry your keys around outside of your home. You can't flip a light switch. For some you can't rip toilet paper. You know, work.

So it blew me away today to read a Harper's Weekly article/diagram about an eruv. Evidently there's this idea of a "shared space". You just string up some lines sectioning off an area, and then it's a sort of shared structure where jews can be basically "at home", thus, able to perform the home based tasks on sabbath. The Harper's article is about a big one covering much of the island of Manhattan.

I was blown away. How strange, I thought, until I googled and saw that there's probably one in every major city in the US. It would be interesting to get a google maps layer with all the eruv's in the country on it. I wonder how many square miles of eruv there is in the whole country. I wonder if I'm in an eruv.

Posted by tiny daniel at 12:27 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

Once I get to sleep, I'm out until something really loud wakes me up, or until someone says my name.

It's not so easy to get there, though.

Tonight I did that rarest of things. I went to bed for an hour, and finally got up in frustration to work. Then I went back and laid down. Then I got up to blog, ruefully. It's worse when I have somewhere I have to be in the morning. That's the worst.

When I sleep with another person and I have it, I keep them up too. I don't try to. I can lay there very still with them, and even feel very relaxed. After many minutes pass it becomes quite clear that no one is sleeping. Then at least I have company.

Tonight I went to bed and it was almost like my heart was thumping, laughing at me. Like, OH no honey, you're not getting to sleep. You shouldn't even be laying down! Even still, as I write this, at 6:38 a.m., I still couldn't go lay down and sleep. I didn't even drink much coffee today! Maybe I should have drunk more.

Posted by tiny daniel at 6:32 AM | Permalink

If there was ever a story to my life, I've lost the thread of it. I'd pray to God if I thought I would get guided to my fate, but I don't think that. I mainly hear resounding silence. Even psychologists say you can ask yourself... your innermost self or whatever.

I ask. But me and my innermost self are quite silent. I ask myself what it is that I most desire, and I get lukewarm answers: I'd like to be a rapper, I'd like to have a nice girlfriend, I'd like to make enough money to have a car, pay off my taxes and move to Bellingham. I started out my life as a teenager with such vision and now perhaps I am boring? Perhaps netflix has ended my aspiration? I want things, but nothing so bad it burns in me and I'd be willing to give up everything for it, or even work hard for it. I'm 31 and I look at what I've accomplished and wonder if I should have just picked something arbitrarily.

The dharma has been a blessing and a curse. I like to and want to help all beings, and have learned to let go of a lot of attachment. But I have too much attachment to up and go in retreat like my sister, but too little to get out there in the rat race and fuck shit up. It's been going on like this for a couple of years. I don't see a solution.

Just letting you know. In case you have any ideas.

Probably has something to do with watching Stranger than Fiction. God, Maggie Gyllenhaal is so dreamy. She really is.

Posted by tiny daniel at 7:41 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

I remember a scant few dreams a year. Some people tell me to write down my dreams, and then I'll remember them more often. But, when I put pen and paper by the bed, they are long since buried or shuffled away by the time I remember one.

I almost never have one when I have a full night's sleep. It's almost always in a luxury nap of some sort. Like, when you wake up too early, go out and have a bloody mary with breakfast, and then come home for a nap in the sun. Or if I fall asleep at a friends house.

I just met someone who said that I could remember my dreams if I let myself fall asleep during meditation a few times. I do that anyway sometimes, and while it's very relaxing, it doesn't help.

So, I was thinking I would make a conscious effort to remember some dreams so I can blog them. Maybe even tonight.

Posted by tiny daniel at 2:03 AM | Permalink

I thought about running a big long post thanking the tinyblog for all the times it was there for me to kick off the new life of the tinyblog. But, part of this new relaunch is about concentrating on the NEW tinyblog and not so much looking back to the past.

I'd like to clean up my old posts and find ways to present them, but I think that, most of all, for my own sanity. I'd better just start blogging again. About the present.

But perhaps, if YOU have a favorite old post, or would like to thank the tinyblog for something, you can do it in the comments.

Posted by tiny daniel at 3:48 AM | Permalink

I am slowly but surely bringing the tinyblog back to life.

Posted by tiny daniel at 6:45 PM | Permalink

There's no tinyblog for the moment... but I do photoblog over on the flickr.

Posted by tiny daniel at 1:14 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Okay, I'm just taking an official tinyblog break. I'm working on some back end changes for the tinyblog and I'll let you know when I'm ready to get it going again. Plus, I need a break.

If you subscribe to the tinyblog, then you'll see the next time I post. If you don't, then email me at danieltalsky@gmail.com and let me know you'd like to know when it comes back.

Posted by tiny daniel at 11:19 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Normally I avoid such memes because I don't like to obligate myself to clutter the tinyblog with them... but this one I like.

Make your desire known in the comments and if I know anything, I will say something I adore about you. You can, but don't have to pass it on.

I have actually two sets of comments, so I will wait a week or so and then do a big post commending each commentor for their adorable acts or qualities. This comes from saltcellar, who said something very nice about me indeed.

Posted by tiny daniel at 3:12 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

I never thought I'd see the day when there was a positive article about psilocybe cubensis in the Wall Street Journal.

The thrust of the article was that they found the mushroom to have potential to be clinically useful, since it gave 2/3 of the people who took it in this study an experience they rated as "among the top five most meaningful experiences in their lives". The other one third, unfortunately, said they experienced pretty serious anxiety and depression.

I have from time to time, encountered this fungal psychadelic, sold as a fairly common street drug, and I can testify that I have had both experiences. In spite of that, I have to say that the experiences I had with this innocent looking fungus influenced my life and the way that I see the planet in a positive and...spiritually accurate way.

(this is just a pretty picture of passionflowers I took in Seattle the other day. it has nothing to do with the post, but I like pretty pictures, and they are kind of trippy)

I have had several skeptical (straight-edge) intellectuals question me about the authenticity and quality of these experiences, and I can say that although they probably remained doubters, I certainly piqued their curiousity.

I certainly don't think one can reach enlightenment directly through any kind of food, drug, book or anything else but real spiritual work. I know there is potential, if one abuses something like this, to just spin oneself off into confusion, and not stay grounded in the real challenges and joys of this world.

However, sometimes the dull habitual nature of this modern world can dampen one's sense of wonder, and realization of our profound interdependance with each other. Sometimes a little shot in the arm, a reminder of the passion and turbulence, the depth and breadth of feeling and connection to other beings, really makes pressing on another day more bearable.

I don't think my spiritual teacher would really recommend it (in fact, I know he doesn't) but sometimes I still make myself a strong tea, light candles on the shrine, and climb into bed to connect with the profound teachers of the universe and take a 10,000 foot view of my own tiny life. It's not like a fun party for me. Sometimes it's pretty painful to see myself through such a lens. I might just still be doing it when I'm 60 though.

Posted by tiny daniel at 10:27 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Jacob hadn't taken the Free Ride Taxi out for awhile, but he brought it along when we went out to get a bite to eat. Since it was with us, we decided we might as well see if we could pick up a fare or two.

On the way, Jacob told me a little about what the experience was like. You get a lot of visual attention. People aren't sure what to make of the taxi and whether or not they should hail it. People ask the same questions over and over: What kind of car is this, where did you get it, what are your hours, etc.

We hit Eastlake on the way to Cap Hill and got a fare (what do you call it if it's a free ride?). Three mellow Eastlakers on their way to Pioneer Square. Two of them were a couple, and there was a nice third-wheel guy with a humorous smirk.

The bewilderment is the fun part. As soon as they figure out you're not going to charge them then there's this intense curiousity where they're trying to figure out what's in it for you.

They were like, "No, really, we can give you some money!" or "We have some weed!"

Finally they settled down and the banter began. They were curious if we were planning to rape and pillage them. This was a major topic of conversation. You could tell they were kind of hoping we would. They suggested we had stopped primarily because the girl had a nice rack. She did, but we mainly stopped because they were trying to hail a cab.

In the back seat of the cab, the "oh shit!" handles are custom chrome jobs of buxom women that Jacob got out of a trucker catalog. The girl was rubbing them seductively and I thought to myself I should try and get a photo of that before they got out of the cab.

They kept trying to promote the show they were going to. Some silly rockabilly swing something or other. We were trying to be polite and not say we didn't like to go see generic-ass shows in Pioneer square thank you very much.

Finally we made it to their destination and they asked again if there was anything they could do for us. I thought, "Hey, now's the time for me to get a photo of the girl getting cosy with the buxom chrome lass."

I said, "Yeah, let me get a picture of you fondling the girl."

They got the wrong idea.

By the time I turned around and realized what was going on, I realized that the one guy had been kneading his girlfriend's nice rack for a good several seconds. Normally not one to blush, I found myself profoundly embarrassed that this was what they thought I had requested, and that the price of the ride was a sexual thrill. I was so stunned that I didn't even get a picture unfortunately. But I did clarify what I wanted, and got it.

That was our only fare that night. Perhaps I will ride with Jacob again.

Posted by tiny daniel at 6:54 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

I think hearing the melancholy sounds of James Taylor as my mom drove me to daycare when I was a kid kind of scarred me. I could just feel the deep sadness in “You've Got a Friend” and all those easy listening singer-songwritery songs of the late 70's. I never recovered from it as a melodramatic malaise I think. Now I am sort of a drama queen. I can hear those songs in my head sometimes, and I don't think I have any of them. No, that's not true. I have some Carol King and Carly Simon. I read this interview with Carly Simon once and she was telling the interviewer that she has to be spanked to calm herself down sometimes. She said she's been in a position before she's about to go on TV or something where she has to get a stagehand or something to do it for her. That really made me laugh, but I actually kind of understood. I would totally spank Carly Simon. TMI, I know.

I feel like I have been living so heedlessly and now I am almost in an accidental place. It's like a hotel in the Dallas suburbs and I was here for a business meeting but it got canceled. And here I am...I'm already in the hotel room. I could order room service but I know it would be no comfort. The movie that's on is something horrible like Splash and I can't even stand to see Tom Hanks' stupid young face. There's no flights until morning. The hotel bar is depressing and the piano is broken. There's no place to buy a book and I know no one in this town. I'm sitting on the edge of the bed, like I could just open up a notebook and write a great play about a hotel in Dallas. But no. I decide perhaps Darryl Hannah will be offset Tom Hanks...just enough. Wow. That is really a train wreck of a metaphor. I'm just typing.

Posted by tiny daniel at 11:37 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

"I check my look in the mirror / I wanna change my clothes, my hair, my face"

I'm gonna too. I shaved off my beard and I'm gonna keep it shaved as long as I can stand to.

And the hair. It's going too. I haven't set a date... I might get a trim to clean up the split ends and then make sure it's out to the required 10 inches for donation to Locks of Love.

But, I am really going to do it. Andrew Dunloy and I decided to do it on the same day. I'm not sure when, but by the end of the Fire Dog year at the latest.

If you find a photo of a hairstyle you think would look good on me would you send it my way? I'm open to suggestion but think short.

I've had long hair ever since my friend Nicole G. told me once back in 1993 in a University of Washington dorm room not to cut my hair again until she told me to. I wish I knew how to get a hold of her for permission, but the internet has not been kind in that regard. Sorry Nicole.

Posted by tiny daniel at 5:41 PM | Permalink | Comments (5)

I don't know what I ate, I just know what it feels like to be poisoned. Hurting at every weak place, stomach cramps and puking up bile for a day and then days later, every joint stiff. The headache is still home.

I made a big pot of chicken with greens from the garden. It was my first real meal in three days.

I can hardly move my neck. I have fantasies of angels coming to massage me and minister to me. I'm so behind and I just have to keep working, in the hole again.

Nate is gone now. I was too poisoned to go to meditation by myself. We should have done Chenrezig one last time. We did sing the purification mantra for a solid half hour though, when we were walking to catch the bus. Maybe that's what this is. Purification.

It's funny, for the solstice parade this year I got painted as a poisonous salamander. (I'm naked, so this is NOT safe for work: Salamander Front, Salamander Back). Now I feel like a real poisonous salamander. If you like pictures of naked, painted people, I took a lot of them.

Posted by tiny daniel at 2:12 AM | Permalink

If so, just email me.

Posted by tiny daniel at 6:35 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

It's going well. Here you can see one tiny potato sprout making its way up through the mulch (wood shavings from my landlord's shop).

I like to sit in a portable chair and read at the edge of the garden when my mind gets blown from programming. This is how I found out there is some kind of inter-species war going on between certain members of the squirrel persuasion and certain (unnamed) members of the crow population. I had no idea these creatures could make such a bizarre set of noises.

I don't care. I'm eating thick radish sprouts wrapped in purple mustard green sprouts wrapped in collard leaves wrapped in Israeli lettuce. Now that's my kind of salad.

Posted by tiny daniel at 6:18 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Talked to Miss Rose this evening in the garden, and had a houseguest. He's passed out on the couch. He brought a lady to my house and massaged her feet. She teaches yoga classes in her home, about 3 blocks away from me. I could make it to something like that!

Miss Rose says Pennsylvania is nicer than Transylvania. Okay, no she doesn't say that. She does says she likes Pittsburgh better than Philly though. And that she doesn't live that close to either. And we talked about spirit guides. My mom's and others. Not mine, I hardly even have dreams. What do I know from spirit guides?

Okay, maybe a little. Can I get a witness? Can I get an amen!?

Posted by tiny daniel at 2:52 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

More lowlight photos... this time with the help of a little LED flashlight.

This is the only way I can spend time with my sweet garden at night.

Posted by tiny daniel at 3:02 AM | Permalink

I think it's safe to say a good time was had by all.

Thank you to my rappers Elree and Sir Mark the Poet, you guys rocked the mic and kept it real.

Kisses were certainly stolen (and given away) and no complaints were issued. Just as I suspected.

If it turns out my raps got recorded okay I'll probably post them. It sure was fun.

If you got photos, especially of the rapping, hook me up!

Oh yes, and I played a lot of Gnarls Barkley, who I'm basically in love with. The video of him singing the recorded version with the weird Rorschach animation is cool enough. But then this video of him singing it live WAY slower and more balls out at the top of the pops. Man he is something else.

Posted by tiny daniel at 3:14 PM | Permalink

Some nights I take care of my morning self. I clean up for him and set out the coffee all nice. The grinder is full, the filter is in the holder, the jar is clean. I make nice lists of what to start on, with the most important thing at the top. I get all the easy emails out of the way for him so there's not so many.

Some nights I make a mess in the kitchen and leave him to fend for himself when he's weak and defenseless. I leave every surface dirty. I lump into bed tired and unmeditated and still can't get to sleep. When is that Neko Case song going to get out of my head?

The Lion's Jaws

You're gone, the trees are so quiet
When your hand was in my pocket
How they swayed from side to side
Now the meddling sky and my snowy eye
Sees a different night

The night I fell into the lion's jaws
To my regret and your delight

Those teeth themselves could not divine
Nor their pressure estimate
The haze I wish to never break
And to never contemplate

Momentum for the sake of momentum
Momentum for the sake of momentum
Of momentum

(sure, you can listen, if you think it will help)

What the hell does that song mean? Why the hell can't I sleep? Can't someone come over at 2 a.m. and massage me?

Posted by tiny daniel at 2:45 AM | Permalink

It was a sweet weekend with some sweet friends. I took some sweet pictures.

First, on Friday night, I did a massage trade and then went out bowling with Chris, Beth and Scott. Scott messed up his leg playing softball over the weekend and had to limp up to bowl. Sadly, he kicked all our asses:

Then, on Saturday, I mellowed out, wrote some rhymes for my party, and went to a potluck. I wanted to make something cool, so I made this polish soup called Chlodnik. It's a creamy beet soup that you eat room temp, with a garnish of radishes, carrots, scallions, dill and hard boiled eggs.

Then Sunday, I walked around Capitol Hill and took photos, including this photo of the coolest graffiti I've seen in a while:

Later I went out and had the most lovely picnic in recent memory and hung out with some sweet pretty friends. I'm happy I have such good friends. I needed them this weekend and they totally came through for me.

Posted by tiny daniel at 1:59 AM | Permalink

Wait until you see the website.

Posted by tiny daniel at 2:26 AM | Permalink

Andy Dunloy came over the other day. He smiled at me and said, "We're doing the devil's work tonight."

I raised an eyebrow.

"I need you to help me go to a couple of jobsites and get some stuff."

"Well Andy, I'm on retreat, so I need to be a little more careful than I normally would about stealing."

"Well," he said, "can you just sit in the car?"

"Well, I don't want to come if you're taking anything of value...I'm not going to be involved if you're grabbing nice lumber or something. We need to be sensitive to that."

He smiled, "Do I look like someone who's not sensitive? I just need some scraps to build some shelving with."

It's true. He is, and he was. We talked for a little while longer and asked what we were working on. He's been doing sales work for Greenlake Jewelry Works. He's gonna run that place some day.

I told him about how I've been involved with doing contact improvisational dance.

"You see, you just come up on someone like this," I came up and began to demonstrate as he looked at me strangely, "and then you just spontaneously move against them and they do the same thing. A whole roomful of people doing this. It's fun. And athletic."

He thought about it for awhile. "Man, Daniel, where do you come up with stuff like this?"

"Uhhh, it's just out of the general Daniel Talsky Pool of Weirdness ™."

He opened the door to walk to the car.

"How vast that pool must be."

Posted by tiny daniel at 12:07 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

For those who didn't get an invite (because I don't have your Email address or because you're a big pain in my ass, one of the two), this is the invite to my birthday party on May 6th. If you want to be added to the Evite and RSVP officially (which I'd like, if you plan to come), then just email me (danieltalsky@gmail.com)

I am throwing myself
(AND MY MAN JACOB SAYLES!)
a birthday party, and it's a Saturday.

It's low frills chilling out...I just want all my old peeps, new peeps and medium peeps around me so I can celebrate my life. My birthday party is on the 9th, and my friend Jacob's is on the 3rd, so we're doubling the fun.

The name of the party is "Rhymin' and Stealin'" after the Beastie Boys song of the same name.

Some people have expressed concern about the stealing kisses part, so PLEASE read the FAQ.

There's two parts to the party:

Part I: Mellow BBQ / Housewarming (rated G) : 3 - 9pm
Part II: Rhymin' and Stealin'! (rated PG-13) : 9pm - passout am

Finally, we'll party until it doesn't seem like a party anymore. If you want to crash you're welcome, but you'd probably better bring a sleeping bag.

FOR DIRECTIONS, THE ACTUAL DETAILS AND MORE INFO...
I beg you to read the FAQ for an exhaustive breakdown of the spirit of the party:

Posted by tiny daniel at 2:09 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

You know what the best thing about influenza is? It sounds like a poem title, like a hot latin dance that is too cool to even have made it to the states, like a tough drink made mostly with gin, a dash of diced habenero peppers and pomagranite seeds, and a dash of bitters.

You know what the worst thing about influenza is? The days on end of writhing join pain that comes on each late afternoon allowing for only about an hour of troubled sleep until it lets up at 7 a.m. finally allowing for an unbroken few hours.

Right in the middle is being completely worthless to leave the house, or attend to any important business like getting up to go get toilet paper. Also in the middle is merciful landlords who bring movies, toilet paper and juice, and friends who come over and make chicken soup.

But no one's around at 3 a.m. when it's raging at it's apex and not all of the heaters and comforters in the world can stop that one trickle of cold air from sucking all available heat out of the body.

It's day four and I'm pretty sick of it. It sucks for it to be the middle of the afternoon and be too tired to sit up and read a book. It just goes to all my kinks and broken parts and says, "Fuck you, higher form of life." I mean, christ, scientists can't even decide if viruses are alive or not...just self-replicating little biological machines that wreak their havok until the autoimmune system figures it out.

Plus, not having had any coffee in three days adds a hammering, persistant caffeine-withdrawal headache into the mix, leaving me, at best able to sit up and watch movies and at worst unable to get up and pee without a pretty serious internal pep talk.

It's not as bad tonight. It's gonna get better soon. I can tell.

(For all those wondering what happened to "I'm OK":
a) I think I caught it in one of its downcycles and
b) I chose to go sit in my cold office for several hours and then go out for a nice walk on Lake City Way. That very evening I was bed-bound again.)

Posted by tiny daniel at 12:25 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

To anyone out there wondering how I am...

I'm ok!

Posted by tiny daniel at 1:18 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

The end of building is ruin.
The end of meeting is parting.
The end of accumulation is dispersal.
The end of birth is death.

Posted by tiny daniel at 2:47 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

It's a sunny day and I'm sitting in my house all day. I don't even want to step outside. Who needs outside? Who needs the sun?

I'm cleaning house and trying to rub two sticks together in my mind and just hit that vital point of inspiration that makes one want to head back into the thick of it after two frustrating weeks.

What does anyone do for inspiration besides cleaning their house? Heavy metal?

Posted by tiny daniel at 11:31 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

Thanks so much Carol. I am very happy to have access to a brand new Canon PowerShot A610. Now, more self portraits!

Posted by tiny daniel at 6:32 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

All in all it was a wonderful day, but not such a good day for food. I woke up and went straight to a brunch, but the hordes had already descended and all the food was gone.

A couple of friends and I went outside to get some breakfast. We thought about going to a sort-of chichi breakfast place in Capitol Hill called Coastal Kitchen. Coastal Kitchen has a great breakfast menu, and a rotating regional menu (like for instance, this month...Portugal). My companions thought it would be too yuppie and expensive so we decided to try another place.

It was basically just a bar, but looked to have breakfast, so we walked in and asked if they were serving any more. She said only the regular breakfast menu and not the Brunch menu anymore. Of course everything I wanted was on the brunch menu, but there was one thing on the breakfast menu that looked decent so we sat down.

Only with coffee in hand did I discover that they didn't have the right sausage for that. I sighed a pained sigh that I'm sure people who have been out to eat with me when I'm feeling difficult well know. "Is it possible I can just have what I want off the brunch menu?" I pointed. He went to check. No dice. They had just shut down the brunch setup for real. So I got an omelette and it was bland and the salmon was tough and the whole breakfast thing just didn't work out for me, except for the bloody mary.

Then, tonight, I got hungry for sushi. I mean really hungry. Like, cascading low blood sugar hungry. I wanted to go to my favorite cheap sushi place but didn't check the internets right. Got all the way out there and it was closed. But sushi was calling for me, so I went to another place, even farther from home, that was more expensive and not as good.

45 minutes wait. No way. So walking down the street I end up again at a bar. Ready to eat stray body parts. The special: crispy chicken sandwich: 9.99. Sounds good, right? A crispy chicken sandwich for ten dollars has to be pretty delicious right? Hopefully, I quizzed the waitress, "Well, it has pepper jack cheese." she offered.

It was breaded chicken on a hamburger bun. I shoulda got the meatloaf. However, it came hot (but slowly), and that was it's saving grace. It was better than the omelette.

Plus, I spent every last dollar on those two meals!

This tale of urban horror is brought to you by the Naked Lady Brunch Party, and Knob Creek bourbon.

Posted by tiny daniel at 1:41 AM | Permalink

The complete list of danieltalsky.com slogans:

Remember, before each of them you have to mentally say, "Daniel Talsky Dot Com (comma)":

Like hairless cats that mind.
better'n' a barrel of monkeys
More ice cream than you can remember.
Eat orzo for breakfast.
Orange flavored napalm for the soul.
When danger calls, take a message.
Striding purposely in every direction.
Tell the invisible man I can't see him today.
Let sleeping bags lie.
A little pain never hurt anyone.
The learning curve is steep today.
MINE.
Making trouble, one step at a time.
My advice to you: eat more hash browns.
Expectations are pre-meditated disappointment.
You toucha my website, I breaka you face.
No parking.
So simple, a child could do it.
Daniel Talsky, now a commercial entity.
May it benefit beings.
I like to cook.
Amazing Grace saved a wretch like me.
I am watching The Hour of Power.
Love is not the answer, it is the assignment.
A friend to all.
Man of my dreams.
...for president in 2008.
A good place to while away the meaningless hours.
An illusory place.
So sophisticated, it could be from Paris.
Good as gravy.
Completely serious.
Take a walk on the wild side.
Enchanted.
More than you ever imagined possible.
Like a velvet glove cast in iron.
You can dance if you want to.
Very strange.
24 Hour Brain-A-Thon.
Operators are standing by.
Get your feet off the Davenport!
International!
When I awaken, I must be mistaken.
Brandishing more force than I can skillfully wield.
The same as every other place.
Lama la chhap su chhio.
Do you feel anything yet?
A streetlamp of poetry.
Vanity incarnate.
Getting stronger every day.
Egg Nog.
More accurate than a Sphygmomanometer.
The #2 most requested lips in America.

I wrote about 2/3's of them, the rest are reader submissions. I'm thinking about making a brutal cut, but I need new blood. Any suggestions? Come up with as many as you can. Plus, I think I'll pick a winner. I am the sole judge and arbiter. Any good ones get added but the best one gets something special in the mail.

Posted by tiny daniel at 5:21 PM | Permalink

putting out

I've got to get some new skillz. I love to help people. I love to provide value to the world, especially value that hardly anyone else can provide. I love to be able to provide value for value, and help people in kind when they help me, without being asked. I love to put out. When I put out, the world works. When I don't, the world breaks.

unskilled willing hands

I have two hands and am willing, and that is good. When I go to people's houses I like to wash their dishes and clean their kitchens. Even bathrooms are not too bad, especially if they start out really dirty, because then they look so transformed when I'm done. I like to weed. It makes me feel good, to do these little things for people that I know they are dreading anyway, but sometimes it makes them feel wierd.

massage

I can do massage. I do! I love it. But it's just so damn hard to get people to ask for it and show up for it. I can ask people if they want massage, but let me tell you how sick a person can get of hearing, "It's okay. I'm fine." I'm sure you are, you wall of man, you tide of woman. Plus. I know I'm the human bulldozer, not everyone wants to let me push and pull at them. And massage...it's so personal. People have to really let you in. It's even more personal than dishes. Well, to some people. But it's true I love to work for people that way, grabbing tissue and making it warm and liquidy. Another downfall is that it's more useful if you can work with a person regularly, and that's very hard to do in this busy world.

(Sometimes though, even one time can really help. I had a wonderful time the other day. I went over to a friend's house and he had an ice pack on his arm. He said he was getting tennis elbow and he didn't even play tennis! "Lemme at it!" I said, "it's tendonitis and you should have told me before." I pulled and dug at his arms for a half an hour and then he moved and twisted his hands in surprise. "It. It doesn't hurt. Hey, isn't that crazy? It doesn't hurt!" he said to the other people on the couch. "It feels like cool water running through my veins." he said to me quietly.)

10010100

Computer Skillz I have. That's for damn sure. I can program in a few languages. I understand the languages of display and the languages of the web very well. I know how to take people's gestating ideas and craft them into something and help them publish it. Publish. I can publish on the web and I can publish in print.

I know about filesystems and file types. I know how to make a computer usable...to put important icons where people will easily find them. I know how to research and find the best free piece of software for any job. I know how to help people organize information and display it. I know how to architect an idea and turn it into a computer program. I know how to get music in all it's formats and convert them, rip them and burn them and all the other violence you can do to music. I can write. Some would say.

But...I can't be in front of a computer endlessly. I have to find some things I can do to be useful that are not in front of a computer. I like the computer, I love the computer. I live the computer, anyone who knows me knows it's true. But as I get older I'm going to have to grow away from it. Perhaps as I make my fortune I can begin to step away from the stiff ways humans have to interact with computers.

pregnant!

I feel so pregnant right now. A few days ago I had some mad council (counsel?) of men, and it left me feeling full and generous and grown up and mature. Like I want to test my own mettle, cradle people, lift them up.

In February and March I get to teach another web class. Teaching is wonderful, but in order to teach computer stuff you have to sit and research and prepare course materials...in front of a computer.

I'm not talking about crafts... I'm talking about real useful skillz that if I spend my time doing them they actually make other people's lives easier. Like...carpentry seems cool. Trying my hand at little bits of jewelrymaking with Andrew Dunloy has been nice. I even tried a bit of bookbinding. It's just hard to make a new committment to something and be bad at something at first. I think that's a big part of the reason grown-ups get so set in their ways. They hate to have to do something and be really shitty at it for a long time. I do anyways.

Well, in the meantime...computers and massage and dishes are okay. I'm just thinking aloud. I love to put out.

Posted by tiny daniel at 3:02 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

To be honest, I'm kind of sick of it. It was fun when I could use it for pictures, but now I just don't know what to say. When I first started writing it, it was really awesome for spilling my guts. Now, when I have revelatory experiences I just don't think it's appropriate for some segment of my readership, and that makes for a boring, boring blog. Maybe someday I'll take all these stories and format them so people can find the good bits. Or use it to write a silly autobiographical book.

I'm not even the only tinyblog!

There's been tinyblog, a simple weblog tool. That's been around for awhile. I can't find the page anymore, but it used to link back to my page in tribute. I can't tell if it's the same thing as PHPTinyBlog which has a snarky FAQ and doesn't link to me. Plus, there's what looks to be a Japanese weblog tool written in Python called tinyblog. (Google translation is no help.)

And then now, there's actually another tinyblog BLOG. Well, technically it looks like it's called tinymeat tinyblog. It looks nice, but I'm still grouchy about it. Mainly because me and the weblog tool used to have the whole first page of google! Mainly because when I wanted to find an old post all I had to do was type tinyblog and a few words of the title into google. Now google's starting to index him and my precious namespace is under competition.

For christ's sake he even has a Tinystore. I mean, tinyplace is kind of different...I never capitalize the 't'. Hehehehe, but clearly it's a similar theme. However, Tinymeat is clearly a primarily dot com kinda thing, and tinyplace is strictly a dot org kinda thing. I just loved having this namespace to myself, but I guess all good things must come to an end. I'm just sore cause he never said "hi", but I never really said hi to him either.

But hey, a referrer log means more than an email anyway. So I guess this is my "hi". Hi, Tinymeat, you slick design bastard. We even have kind of a similar design sensibility. Only the tinyblog design is like from 2000. Who knows what it would look like if I designed it today.

I think the tinyblog has a limited lifespan. I think when I leave Seattle and go to Berkeley I'm going to retire it.

At least I have danieltalsky.com.

How did the internet get so damn crowded all of a sudden.

Posted by tiny daniel at 1:13 AM | Permalink

Ben made his camera go away the other day. Gone, gone, gone. It was a good little camera and it gave the tinyblog much photo love.

Thank you little Kodak Easyshare.

Now it's just me and the cameraphone.

Maybe I'll even break out the film camera

Flatbed scanning.... noooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo!.

Posted by tiny daniel at 2:12 AM | Permalink

Asshole posted the pictures of me in six braids on her Fangsgiving post, but like, Frida Kahlo styley.

Also, when we were in the car she coined a term to describe my general personality, "cantankerismé". I spelled it cantankarisma, but. she said it had to have an é to make it "frenchey pretenchey"

Posted by tiny daniel at 2:14 AM | Permalink

I did a little butchery this evening.

Last year, almost to the day, saltcellar brought a frozen 22(?) pound turkey to my house in his backpack.

"Here," he said, "my mom bought a hundred dollars worth of groceries at Fred Meyer, and she got this turkey for free. She doesn't eat birds, so I thought maybe you could use it.

"Sure. I'll take it," I said, and put it into my freezer.

Since then, I have entertained many guests by showing them the entire turkey in my freezer. It filled up almost my whole freezer. I wish I would have taken a picture.

I don't have a big roasting pan, and really wasn't interested in roasting the whole thing, so I just left it in there for a long time. Finally, the discussion went in the direction that if I wasn't going to roast it whole, I could probably thaw it, cut it up, and roast or boil the individual parts and get Ben, the human eating machine, to help me consume it's raw protein goodness, so the turkey's life would not have been in vain.

Now, as you can probably imagine, this is not a pleasant job to attempt, and one has to think several days in advance to defrost the turkey before one attempts it. So, after a good solid year in my freezer, I finally pulled it out and slammed it down on the grate of my fridge just a few days ago.

Then, I didn't do my normal grocery shopping for work on Sunday, and we went out to eat today. It seemed like it was tonight or never to do this bird in.

I covered my floor with newspaper and a big pan, cut open the webbing and sliced open the bag. I let the turkey drain a little and pulled out the organ meats. Then, I set the turkey on a pan, and grabbed my Henckels 4-star and dug in. I wish someone would have been there to witness me slicing and rending this great beast on my kitchen floor.

Finally, I popped the wings in the oven to bake for a midnight snack, popped the meaty carcass in a pot of boiling water for broth for tomorrow, and put the breasts and legs into big gallon ziplocs and put them in my fridge for easy cooking and consumption.

Thank you to the turkey, may it experience many lives better than that one.

Just pulled the wings out of the oven. Delicious.

Posted by tiny daniel at 12:12 AM | Permalink

(in no particular order)

Bought a new mala.

Got clean laundry to 90%, for the first time in a month. This is very difficult for me and usually requires outside assistance.

Started reading another Saul Bellow book.

Took Rowan to Game Day and really had a great time with her because she's a smart, fun kid.

Found out people were gossiping about me at a party. (gasp!)

Made stuffing.

Talked about an upcoming website called Eyeball Tornado.

Drank a lot of coffee.

Sliced my finger to the knuckle.

Enjoyed The Stranger's first annual Uncle Issue "Touched by an Uncle" and all of its various grodiness. That's what makes The Stranger so cool.

Drank a white russian made by the deft hand of Asshole.

Did a lot of few minute massages.

Got very wet in the very seasonable Seattle rain.

Found out that there are a range of mountains called Blue Mountains in Washington state. The internet is almost silent about them. Anyone know?

Some other cool stuff too...

Say hi. Who reads these days?

Posted by tiny daniel at 1:26 AM | Permalink

So I broke my phone, but I was on the way out with the phone company anyway. I have a new lil phone that's sleek and works well and doesn't have any visible antenna. And it has a camera too. Seems a little better.

I did six braids. I already took it out or I'd show you, but next time I will.

Some good friends gave me an old computer and a monitor. It was running Windows 98 but I put a stop to that. I put a nice fresh install of Ubuntu, the latest version, "The Breezy Badger". Now I have a rock solid little box for my living room. It's like a pentium 3 but Andy's grandpa or whatever put a buttload of RAM in it. (That's a metric buttload. (1mBL)) So it runs pretty nice, actually.

They may be humble toys...no tiny Ipods or whatever, but the fact that I have a little music server in my living room, and a way to write and watch movies is a pretty big improvement.

Being able to make calls from my office is pretty cool too.

Posted by tiny daniel at 1:32 AM | Permalink

Posted by tiny daniel at 9:22 PM | Permalink | Comments (7)

I keep wanting to show this comic to my east coast friends ever since it showed up in a recent issue of The Stranger. It's not on the artist's website, but other hilarious comics of his are. If he minds me posting it here, I'm sure he or his lawyers will ceaseanddesist me.

Hey, thanks to everyone who wrote and wished me well. I still feel just as punk, but it was heartening to see so many people cared enough to send me a note.

Posted by tiny daniel at 2:06 PM | Permalink

Last year I started writing a list of all the people I absolutely had to buy presents for, and started writing a book of poetry for other people I wanted to show I gave a shit. Last year I came up with a halloween costume idea and executed on it and carved a damn pumpkin too. Last year I had a ragged joyful fucking Christmas and broke my arm but still felt nonetheless that I was basically on top of things.

This year I am totally behind. This year I am filled with dread at the thought of it. This year it seems too expensive. This year it seems like "goddamnit running my life just by itself is hard enough". This year I can't even write letters to anyone or practice any damn dharma or do just about anything else useful but bill hours and pay my bills. This year I do not feel like I have my shit together.

I know from expereience, that if I ignore the holdays, they just hurt worse. They are rushing up and I just can't seem to stand up and make myself get started. It's true, I'm dealing with some pretty heavy shit, but so is everyone. Fuck, man, it's time to start praying again. I am at wit's end.

Posted by tiny daniel at 2:58 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

I wrote in one of my burning man stories, the story of a mysterious bar out in deep playa. There were hot girls dancing out on the bar in the middle of the middle of nowhere, and it blew my mind.

They put up a cool site for the Sunrise Saloon. It's almost like a little game...there's a little area in each photo you can click to see the next one.

Posted by tiny daniel at 5:54 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

For one thing, this is my 800th tinyblog post. Check out the first one. Or, all of them.

For another thing, I just want to give props to the sweetest Firefox skin evah!

It's called pimpzilla.

Posted by tiny daniel at 1:16 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

As people who know me even kinda well know, I have what I just found out psychologists now call a Body-focused Repetitive Behavior. I don't remember when I first started biting my nails, but now that I'm 30, I feel like I want to stop.

When I was reading today, I was surprised to see the clinical advice (besides drugs):

Therapy for these disorders consists of two parts. The first, is Habit Reversal Training (HRT), a four-step process which teaches you awareness of your habits, how to relax, how to breathe and center yourself, and to perform a competing and opposing muscle response. (I have described this technique in a previous issue of TLC's IN TOUCH, in an article on cognitive/behavioral therapy for trich, which I'm sure you can get copies of.) It can be extremely useful if practiced daily and stubbornly, as it must become as automatic as the habit you are aiming to eliminate. These are stubborn problems for two reasons. First, you have probably rehearsed the unwanted behaviors hundreds or even thousands of times. It is important to accept that they will not simply be overcome in a few days or weeks. Second, you are fighting the fact that they feel good to do, and provide much short range satisfaction and either stimulation or soothing. It takes time and a good deal of effort to master, but I believe it is worth it. Research shows it to be an effective technique. The second part is known as Stimulus Control (SC). Skin picking and nail biting are a complex behaviors, with many different inputs. SC is a behavioral treatment that seeks to help sufferers first identify, and then eliminate, avoid, or change the particular activities, environmental factors, mood states, or circumstances that have become associated with, and that trigger picking or pulling. The goal here, is to consciously control these triggers that lead to the undesirable behaviors, and to create new learned connections between the urges new non-destructive behaviors."

http://www.homestead.com/westsuffolkpsych/SkinPicking.html

Most of the time I'm in this group:

Some do it in an automatic way, as if they are in a trance and not really thinking about what they are doing. Usually, they are involved in some other activity at the same time such as reading, talking on the phone, working at the computer, watching TV, etc.

So I would say about 90% of the time I really just don't even have it in my mind. One time I tried to stop doing it before, and I just couldn't stand the feel of new fingernails, and I would just notice I was doing it.

I feel kinda crazy lately. SPACE MADNESS!!!

Posted by tiny daniel at 2:37 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

What a beautiful sad lonely night.

Posted by tiny daniel at 1:43 AM | Permalink

As you may know, I did this thing at burning man where I was "The Witness". I even wore a T-shirt. I tried to experience all the creativity that people were manifesting. Then, I took pictures, and did my best to write nakedly and honestly about my experience at burning man.

Lots of people saw me and said that they wished they had written, but it really did take a very specific kind of determination to see through the busyness, excitement, intoxication and haze and just get the writing done.

I prepared as much as I could before I left, so that when I got back I could hit it hard and throw up the photos and stories so people could see it right away when they got back. I think I did a pretty good job. I wish I could have written even more about little playa stories, but I guess this is a handful for anyone to read. Please take a look when you get a chance and let me know what you think:
http://tinyplace.org/thewitness

Posted by tiny daniel at 2:55 PM | Permalink

Finally, all the hummus is made, the eggs are boiled, the laundry is clean, and I am going to Burning Man in the morning. This will be the last post.

The Witness site is up and ready to go for when I come back now. I even wrote myself a little custom content management system so it won't be such a chore when I come back and want to post all my experiences.

I will be available by phone still for Sunday, but then that's about it until the 6th or so. I will be back the 7th. It's been interesting seeing everyone go, one by one. Only a couple of people I know who are going still have yet to leave.

Thanks Ben Sodenkamp, for taking up the slack. Thanks, Mom for giving me a place to decompress. Thanks to Morgen Bell for all your help with my The Witness branding. Thanks Jess for making some time for me. Thanks, Roseanne for being completely undeterrable in being my friend.

And to all my Rockford homies...after I get back from Burning Man, I'm going to be here in Seattle for a week, and then I'm coming to Rockford to help my mom harvest honey. We are gonna have a big BBQ bitches! I'll be there from the Sept. 14th to the 24th so don't say you weren't warned.

Posted by tiny daniel at 12:29 AM | Permalink

I was hanging out with my friend Andy watching movies over the weekend. Andy is one of those sweet guys with no mental filter, and listening to him talk is like putting some kind of magical stethoscope to his brain.

"My nuts itch. Do you like lunchmeat?" he'll say.

So we're sitting there, and he's telling me about how he and his lovely fiancee are doing. "Yeah," he says, "we've been talking about a baby. She's been talking about her biological clock and stuff."

He thinks for awhile, intent on polishing a piece of jewelry. "Yeah. She's been talking about a baby a lot."

He looks up and me after another moment, the reality finally sinking in, "I need to get that girl a guinea pig, stat!"

Posted by tiny daniel at 11:53 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

I wore one of my 'the witness' t-shirts today and I can feel it pulsing inside of me. I wore a long-sleeve shirt on top of it. I can't expose it yet because it's not time yet. Even when I was burning hot inside the bus and the movie theater I still left the outer shirt on.

I took myself out to see a dorky, romantic movie tonight that no one had heard of or wanted to see with me, just to show myself some kind of stoopid tenderness. It was worth it, cause good movies make me want to spit art out of my nipples. My tiny, almost non-existent nipples. I wonder if I can bill for that.

HA! The Witness Does Not Bill! Speaking of Bill, I wonder how he's adjusting to Seattle. It's no Pittsburgh I can tell you that. No, not YOU, Bill. The other Bill.

As a matter of fact I wonder how my sweet upstairs neighbors are adjusting to Seattle, they just got back from Boston. They left me $8 in ice cream coupons for watering the garden and checking the mail. They're nice.

And speaking of Burning Ma'am, the dorkiest dork in dorkport probably spent about 35 hours perfecting an illustration of my silly little joke:

I think this should be our pod's theme.

Posted by tiny daniel at 12:37 AM | Permalink | Comments (4)

I'm going to Burning Ma'am this year. My darling clients over at Utilikilts gave me the golden ticket in a bar of chocolate (actually it was barbequed ribs) and the idea grew on me until it was as big as my body.

Now here I am buying final supplies and having meetings with my "pod". My camp is EPT (not the pregnancy indicator) and our theme this year is "El Pollo Molestado", or "The Annoyed Chicken".

The theme of Burning Man this year is Psyche.

But I decided I needed my own theme. That's the thing with Burning Ma'am. You need themes. Onionskin layers of themes until there's no detail left unthemed except for your own drunkenness. And even that has a theme.

So, partially because I thought it was a cool idea, and partially because I'm too lazy to come up with much in the way of costumes, I decided my theme would be The Witness. I even came up with my own logo. I even went so far as to bribe a friend into actually silkscreening it onto t-shirts (minus the spooky eye) that I'm going to wear the whole time. We were quite tempted to silkscreen one shirt with "The WITLESS" just to see if anyone was paying attention, but not quite tempted enough to actually do it.

Since everyone goes to Burning Ma'am to be really interesting...and have themes of all sorts, and take a bunch of Psilocybin and really grok the themes in relation to their own theme, I thought I would just have a theme that sat around and watched all the other themes. Like, how completely meta.

Posted by tiny daniel at 1:12 AM | Permalink

Going to my friend's doctorate thesis defense entitled "Study of Protein-Crystal Surface Interactions Using Solid State NMR Dipolar Recoupling Techniques". Wonder if I should bring a book? Really though, I'm proud of her and have no doubt that she'll nail it.

She's been working hard writing the thesis and practicing her defense and I have no doubt she'll know more about Protein-Crystal Surface Interactions Using Solid State NMR Dipolar Recoupling Techniques then the people grilling her. Go Jennifer!

In case this piqued your interest and you'd like to explore nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectroscopy, be my guest.

Posted by tiny daniel at 10:37 AM | Permalink

To fulfill my end of the deal I will publish a beach poem from a day at the beach.

the trick to building awesome sandcastles

set them up to have a destruction
as cool as their creation

Posted by tiny daniel at 1:56 AM | Permalink

I've gotta say more about shaving my beard off because it really feels drastic! If you've only met me in the past year it would probably trip you out, because I think it looks quite different.

First of all, a sweetnerd friend got a great shot of it in process. The lady who cut it was very sweet and said I didn't look like a mass murderer now. Mass murderer, terrorist, sheesh. I think I just look younger...and I seem to lose a certain authority.

Plus, it's a lot easier to wipe food off my face with the back of my hand.

And I have no soul patch to twirl while I program computers.

And I have to wipe sharp bits of metal against my face to maintain it. My skin doesn't like this. Which is why I have a beard most of the year.

I don't know what possessed me, but it makes me almost jump every time I look in the mirror. God, do I have a funny face!

I feel like such a naked faced boy!

Posted by tiny daniel at 11:08 PM | Permalink | Comments (6)

Posted by tiny daniel at 2:11 AM | Permalink

...you think quite seriously to yourself, "I wish I was watching the old Punky Brewster cartoon with my sister on the carpet right now. And maybe with Soleil-Moon Frye too. And maybe with her magical friend Glomer, too."

Then you remember that your sister is in three-year retreat, that Soleil-Moon Frye is married (and kinda hot!), and that Glomer is a fictional character who can transport beings across the world in the blink of an eye.

The Fantasy:

The Reality:

Posted by tiny daniel at 5:37 PM | Permalink

I'm pouring out a virtual 40 for my lost homeys. Josh, Terra, Yoni, Sonja, Krista, I know I fucked up, I miss you guys.

Posted by tiny daniel at 1:16 AM | Permalink

Ben and I just made a very nice sale with a local Seattle company called Utilikilts. We're doing an employee organization tool for thier intranet and hosting it, and will eventually be doing the badly needed revamp of their public website.

They make sturdy skirts for men, and Ben and I wrote some merchandise into our contracts:

Plus, I wish I could show you, but I don't want to jump the gun. We just paid talented designer Von Glitscka to redesign our website with our new branding. Expect to see an amazing Roboticat website up soon!

Posted by tiny daniel at 10:21 AM | Permalink | Comments (5)

Whaddya know, the kid has had a life outside of the tinyblog masthead. I'm happy to report that he's a happy, healthy kid with some mad Aikido skillz who thinks he's Robert Plant (kinda looks like Robert Plant, too!).

I asked him if he remembered living with me and he gave me a knowing look. "Yeah," he said, "I remember some things."

I wondered what. I wondered if he remembered my less than shining moments, like when he put a big wad of gum into my pants. I looked down and I was like, "What the hell!?" I got so mad I grab him and shook him. Turns out you can get gum out of pants with an ice cube. Who knew.

Or I wondered if he remembered that I told him when he was 5 and really into the Star Wars movies that when he was 7 and the new Star Wars movie (episode 1) came out, I would take him the first day it came out and his momma wouldn't have anything to say about it. I did...the only available tickets on opening day were for a 4am showing...so I had him sleep over at my house that night (I was long since broken up with his mom by then) and we got up first thing in the morning and watched it. He was stoked.

Some previous tinyblog remembrances:
greek-grak-grok-groke-gruke
interview with aidan

Posted by tiny daniel at 11:11 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Thanks everyone who acknowleged me so warmly on my birthday.

Special props to Loverzan who made a fine hostess and cooked me birthday muffins and to Sam, who showed me some new kung-fu (Ding Do-Wah Sinus Strike). Little did I know, I would need it later.

After leaving the Wedge, we were hosted by the fine Aaron Silverburg, who reluctantly allowed us to compete in the first annual Daniel David Talsky Birthday Smackdown, brought to you by 18 pounds of sexual sweat.

(Ben now has to challenge both of us.)

Cats represent mothafucka!

Posted by tiny daniel at 12:18 AM | Permalink

Crop Circles
Harbor Island
I-5 Filigree
Two Small Boats
Lake Shore Drive

Posted by tiny daniel at 2:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Posted by tiny daniel at 4:51 PM | Permalink

I think you know where to fire the laser!

Went for a walk and saw this table with a lamp on it just sitting in someone's yard among the ferns, like something out of Narnia.

Coloring the coloring book inside my head.

Posted by tiny daniel at 1:35 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

industrial hemp, point! and counterpoint!

More info for.

More info agin'. (That last one is just a short, but brilliant political answer by Ari Fleischer....it's about 2/3 of the way down the page...just search for "hemp" on the page.)

Posted by tiny daniel at 7:08 PM | Permalink

"The treatment of prisoners is a good indicator of how civilized a society is."
Winston Churchill

I've been thinking so much about imprisonment lately. I've always had a certain morbid fascination with the death penalty, the US penal system, and torture. Even as a kid, I would have long tortured sessions of thought wondering what I would do if I were physically tortured to give up information that would harm someone I loved. I wondered if I could handle the pain...and guessed that I probably could not. The idea of the damage to my body sickened me.

I remember the day about 10 years ago that I picked up Loompanics Press' You Are Going to Prison, and it's sickening accounts of the inevitable brutal combat and vicious sexual assault situations in US state and federal lockup. I remember I gave a passage to a young girlfriend of mine at the time, and she was so shaken up by it that she brought it up as one of the reasons she broke up with me. I wish I would have kept it to myself, but I was so disturbed and just wanted to share the experience with someone somehow.

Just recently it entered my mind again vividly as I found out that a friend of mine is facing life in prison under the three strikes laws. Again I started reading about prison and obsessing about how I would handle myself in a situation where one can easily be forced to "fuck or fight" to minimize brutal assault and sexual slavery.

I don't do anything that would get me sent to prison, but so many people who go to prison are just regular guys like me who made one error in judgement. I do my best to make choices that don't put me in that universe, but one can never be sure. Once you make the mistake you can't take it back. They come get you physically and detain you, they make a decision which is beyond your power, and if you are convicted you lose your ability to be considered a human being in our society.

Looking for information I read the Human Rights Watch information about prisons, and with great pain, the report on male rape in US prisons, and a numbness crept over me. It just seems like there has to be a better way. I am not that naive...I know that to some extent it's this population of human beings creating their own problem. And there's so much money to be made from incarceration that it's difficult to expect meaningful change that would really be in society's best interests. I am not trying to be some kind of bleeding heart liberal and say, "Oh, if we just realized how much these people are hurting and treat them better and give them a nice pat on the head each day and tell them what a good person they are, then they will stop being such bad boys and they will exude sunshine from their pores."

At the same time...I just think there has to be a better way. To non-naively invest in these people's lives, and by proxy the lives of everyone. How can we think we can just cut off 2.8% of the US population from our caring or consideration and somehow it doesn't cheapen us as human beings?

There are voices of sanity. There are organizations that try to make some kind of difference. Like the Prison Dharma Network, Amnesty International, the Prison Book Program, and Human Rights Watch.

Just recently I found a little comfort in the amazing weblog of Shaun Attwood, Jon's Jail Journal which he writes from prison using a ballpoint pen refill. His level of humor about his situation has somehow chilled me out a little, and it seems a little less painful to hear that there's some skinny white boy out there making it without getting too fucked up. The BBC has written a couple of articles about him, which are a good summary if you don't feel like reading his whole weblog. I'm working my way through it and enjoying every word.

Posted by tiny daniel at 3:09 PM | Permalink | Comments (5)

Lorelei broke up with Colin after five years. I could hardly believe it.

Lorelei is such a good friend of mine, and has the esteemed distinction of being the only person who ever lived with me for a whole year and never got in a fight with me. (I think I'm best in small doses.)

As soon as I found out, I told her we'd better get out the fuck out of dodge and go camping somewhere as soon as possible. That turned out (a month later) to be this weekend. I figured this would be the only way to hear and tell the full story about our breakups and subsequent life.

I picked her up in Bellingham and we drove out in WA-2 through such lovely towns as Concrete and a strange faux-western town called Winthrop, where we unfortunately stopped for coffee. I wanted to take a couple of photos of Winthrop, but Lorelei talked me out of it, on the grounds that Winthrop was the kind of place where one should go and then leave forever without a trace.

Finally we made it to our first destination, one of the rare free campsites, near Loup Loup in Eastern Washington in time to see an eerie moon rise above the lake.

For dinner I was going to make Heartbreak Soup, a kind of salty beet soup for which I can unfortunately not reveal the recipe. It's inspired by a Love and Rockets comic story by the same name. It is a healing balm for heartbreak, but as she and I began to get stoned on the ample Sake we brought, it became clear to me that she was at peace with her breakup, and I was mainly making it for myself.

Indeed the last long road trip I went on was one of many with Roseanne. Like this trip, I was the sole driver on our many road trips, since at the time, Roseanne did not drive. Sometimes the memories (of her elaborate road snacking setups, her massaging my upper arm while I drove and started to get sore, and her appreciative looks while I drove for hours and days on end) were almost too much to bear. What can be done but to go make new memories and make heartbreak soup?

Lorelei and I got ourselves good and drunk, ate the soup with drunken gusto and laughed about stupid jokes from years ago. We peed drunkenly in the bushes, talked about our new hotties and policies, and actually spoke very little of the past.

Finally we fell laughing into the tent, and I had many strange dreams that I can only half remember. I woke, bleary and cold, to Lorelei pushing against the side of the tent, and something sliding down the side. I was uncomprehending, and only half aware of her putting on outside clothes and unzipping the flap.

"It's snowing," she said.

I got it together. The hangover gods had been quite kind to us, but our campsite was covered in snow. We had left things out, and we scrambled to get snow off of everything and get everything packed up in the car in some kind of order. Cooking breakfast on the burner was out of the question, so we first had an ill-fated breakfast and another ill-fated coffee attempt in Wenatchee. I got gas, left my debit card in Okanagan, and we headed out into the wilds of eastern Washington again, looking for somewhere breathtaking to walk around in.

We found it in Dry Falls National Park. It was, in fact, truly breathtaking, and we took pictures at a view point before heading into the park proper.

It was such an mellow, spooky grey day, and the palette of the park was such a rich mix of muted colors of moss, lichen, rocks and grasses everywhere. The air smelled sweet with the fragrant smells of wormwood (vital ingredient of absinthe).

Realizing, after driving around all day in the gentle rain, that nowhere in all of Washinton state was going to be dry, we came back to Seattle, had a hot pizza at Santorini's, and camped blissfully in my warm bed.

Posted by tiny daniel at 5:27 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

Roboticat moved to lusher quarters today. Carpet and paint and everything.

Posted by tiny daniel at 2:30 PM | Permalink | Comments (5)

The beginning of march and everything is starting to bloom. Other parts of the world may have their vivid autumns, but in Seattle in early spring, the world is transformed into bursts of pink, white, yellow and red as all the cherry blossoms, apple blossoms, and scotch broom bloom.

 

 

 

Posted by tiny daniel at 4:59 PM | Permalink | Comments (6)

I was sitting at Whole Foods, and this guy pulls up a cart full of daughter. He looks casually at her as he begins to pack things up, "She can sleep anywhere."

I laughed, looking at her face pressed up against the mesh. "I guess so!" I said, "Can I take a picture?"

Posted by tiny daniel at 10:52 AM | Permalink

The post office was out of almost every cool kind of stamps so I ended up getting purple heart stamps, they're not that exciting, in fact kind of creepy. I want YEAR OF THE COCK stamps, but they're not out yet.

I'm still feeling shitty, but not quite so crazy. It's amazing how email conversations with Loverzan still have the power to calm me down a little.

Posted by tiny daniel at 9:44 PM | Permalink

My guitar brain wants to kill your mama me.

I've been so overwhelmed with helplessness and emotionality this past couple of weeks that I've had the distinct feeling of my brain actually wanting to leap out of my skull and attack me!

I've just been so aware of my shortcomings and so powerless to mitigate them. I feel ineffective and a menace to all those around me. It's like someone is walking around holding up a mirror to my face. What makes it worse is that although it's painful, I know how forgetful I am, and I know how easy it is to go back to just living like the gentle bulldozer that I am, and just pretend that everything's okay.

I think: Should I just go to a fucking psychologist? Should I set aside more time to practice dharma? Lay in bed and sleep every minute I'm not working? Should I hole up in a clock tower and do something that will get me shot? Drink to oblivion? Should I play Frank Zappa really loud until my brain is forced to drizzle gently and harmlessly out my ears? Should I tell my brain to "bring it on"? Should I start walking towards Canada? Should I just shun all human contact so no one gets burned? But instead I just blunder on.

I'm actually doing a pretty good job of fronting. Considering I think I've had strep throat for about 2 1/2 weeks now, and the whole brain thing. Here's today's Zen question, what's the sound of one person's brain reaching out and slapping them? When is this going to calm down!?

Oh yeah, and Loverzan put up her latest series of cool emotional landscape paintings. They're quite potent and cool.

Posted by tiny daniel at 10:46 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

huantla: special snow rolled into "snow reefers" and smoked by wild Eskimo youth

Also indespensible is the shift key FAQ.

And, when, exactly did the Weekly World News start sounding like The Onion?

word.

Posted by tiny daniel at 2:32 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

I weighed myself the other day, and saw with a shock that I am at my absolute top weight ever, at 137 lbs. This evidently means I am no longer an official lightweight. From now on you can refer to me as a Super Lightweight, or as is my preference, a Junior Welterweight.

Oh yeah, I have a little story too.

I went to a friend's house with Nate to kick it supa-mellow and watch some Chappelle's Show. Not having a TV, cable shows are still kind of a delightful novelty for me. We were there for a few hours, and finally left late in the evening.

There was frost on the ground when we left, and about 30 kids standing in a big group down at the end of the street. It seemed like a strange hour...and I could hear some kind of interesting noise so I wanted to go check it out. As I got closer I saw the core was one group of about five guys huddled up next to each other. I could only just barely hear, but it sounded like they were making some kind of music. The rest was mostly stragglers and one group of girls giggling off to the side.

I was a hair intimidated by their street presence on this suburban street, but man, if there's some kind of street rhyming going on in Shoreline then I want to hear it. So I went right up to them and circled around a little, but they were just kind of wrapping up the rhyme they were doing, and I didn't end up hearing anything.

I looked up and saw that Nate had thought we were parked this way and had just kept walking towards the end of the street. I called out to him and the core group of guys finally looked up at me and asked me what I wanted. I said, "I just wanted to hear some rhymes."

The ringleader-lookin' guy gave me a raised eyebrow and said, "You got five bucks?" I thought about just telling them to piss off and seeing if I could goad them into rhyming, but then I realized I did indeed have five bucks and like...what the hell...what was five dollars to me?

I pulled it out and gave it to him, and it was like flipping a switch in their attitude. "You wanna flow?" one of them said. I probably couldn't rhyme my way out of a paper bag, so I just said, "Hell no, I want to listen. Shit, it's my five bucks!"

So they circled up and fully three of them started beatboxing as one. I was just so sad I didn't have anything to record them with...one guy laying down a thick, heavy amazing beat that filled the street, and the others doing some strange clipped kind of sporadic percussion.

As two of them started to rhyme I was dimly aware of a car pulling up and talking to one of them. I didn't hear the exchange at all, but evidently it was come kinda signal to break the party up. Several of them just stopped and started walking behind the house they were near...into some kind of backyard shed.

"Hey wait," the man I had given the fiver to said, "he gave us five bucks. We can do it a cappella!" The bassy beatboxer said something dismissive and kept walking.

Only this guy, and one short beat boxer stayed. They looked at me for just a moment and then the beat boxer started a quiet, whispering, clicking beat, and the one remaining rapper busted one last fierce rhyme. I don't remember a word of it, but it seemed spontaneous by the way he had to pause and fake a couple of times...but mostly he just rocked it out.

I don't remember what the rhyme was about, but when he wrapped it up a few short minutes later, he gave me a bit of a worried look. I chuckled at him, "I got my money's worth," and he smiled as I walked off.

Best rap show I've ever been to in Shoreline.

Then the next night I went to a crazy 80's roller skating party. So it was a pretty good weekend, really. I think the hokey pokey really is what it's all about.

Posted by tiny daniel at 6:04 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

A good friend of mine went to Evergreen State College a few years back, and so I have sort of a strange satellite friend group in Olympia, Washington. Also known as Oly. It's the capitol of the state, and home to one of the most notoriously hippie schools in the state...so it's this weird mix of students, hicks and politics.

There are several plots of land where students and other sweet ne'er-do-wells congregate in makeshift structures so as to afford books or beer or both, and the Bog is one of them. Chickens and beasts abound. Luckily the place is well protected.

The place is littered with tenderly constructed makeshift houses, which I have been informed are all built strictly to code, using only the most state-of-the-art building materials. Of course, these houses are supported by the finest amenities.

As well, there is all manner of useful and/or nonsensical stuff lying around, and the idea of personal property here is evidently a bit loose, if a bit distressingly at times. (Dear Cara, I "borrowed" some butter.)

Really I came down here to see a good friend of mine off to Arizona, and to see her pretty new pit bull pup.

We were going to see another friend's band, Head For the Hills play some amazing bluegrass at a brewpub in Oly called The Fish Bowl, but we showed up quite late for his set. I was bummed. I've heard him play guitar, but never seen him play banjo. We hung out and drank a beer, and the band invited us back for a nice little personal set. Sublime.

(Note: Yes, the dog did pick up the bowling ball, and drag it around.)

Posted by tiny daniel at 7:36 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

I'm starting to have a little LiveJournal community, but those LiveJournal people are so insular that they only read blogs via their friends pages. Even my good buddy Busta doesn't read my blog because it doesn't show up on my friends' page.

So, I spent an afternoon installing a MovableType plugin, so I could make my posts replicate over in LiveJournal land, and show up on people's friends pages. But no dice! They would show up on my LJ , but not on the friends pages.

Bah! An afternoon wasted! But finally I had some determination the other day and contacted livejournal about it. They gave me a useful suggestion and now I can actually make my entries show up on the friends pages.

So, this is a Hi there! To LJ people, and an invitation to visit the real tinyblog, or just read my entries on the friends page.

I've been writing the tinyblog since 2000, and have written some crazy-ass stories about myself and other people, and posted some links to some truly worthless things, like articles about squirrels that can waterski, and recipes for twinkie sushi.

I wish there was a way to unify the comments, so I didn't have two different sets of comments, but oh well. Welcome!

Posted by tiny daniel at 2:09 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Nate and I went on a trip, and we brought with us:

An albatross,
a ballistics manual,
a cephalopod,
Daschle comma Tom,
Ecclesiastes,
Farfegnugen,
GZA from the Wu-Tang Clan,
Heat-in-a-Can,
the Imperial Guard,
a Japanese exclamation: Bonzai!,
karma accumulated since beginningless time,
a laser gun,
a Motley Crue t-shirt from the girls, girls, girls tour,
Narcolepsy,
an obstrician,
a pomegranate,
Queer Eye for the Straight Guy season 2 5 DVD set with all the special features including in-depth cast bios,
the Refuge Tree (om ah hung),
the Science Project of Nate (involving red food coloring and baking soda),
a Torque Wrench,
an unspecified undulating unguent,
velour of the finest quality,
a waterbed,
eXistenz, the movie (it was either that or a Xylophone),
Yertle the Turtle, and
a zamboni.

Posted by tiny daniel at 12:46 AM | Permalink | Comments (4)

I think it's a good name for a kid (for a person who can only name their kid weird names). She says it's a stripper name. What self-respecting stripper would call their kid velour?

Posted by tiny daniel at 10:01 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

I wrote this post in a half-hallucinatory state a week ago when I got sick. Then I just got confused and fell asleep in the middle of posting it. I found it on the laptop yesterday:

Yesterday morning someone I know woke me up and we had a brief conversation. I woke up later and felt relieved for a moment that the conversation was a dream, I had felt so bad about it. Then I remembered again that it wasn't actually a dream and that was the worst.

Tonight I went and ate some noodle soup and I ate too much. As soon as I got up I felt bad in the intestines, like a cold black hole right in the center of my guts. Finally got what Ben and his kid had. I'm so sore and tired. I have to communicate with clients tomorrow and I only have exactly as much energy as I need, it feels like. Just enough, I hope.

All I could eat tonight was yogurt, and it was good. All the little yogurt buggies were just what I needed. Would I not be the first person to wish I could make it all go away for one day?

Can you believe this quiet room is on the same planet where people are fucking each other and chopping each other up with machetes? Stupid stupid fuckers. This post is going nowhere.

Ahhh, delirious posts that go nowhere, how I love them.

We got a new client today...looks like we'll be doing some work for the Seattle Baroque Orchestra. The new year is starting to calm down.

Posted by tiny daniel at 2:59 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

I know it's egocentric, but I just feel like it's my own mind that's creating all this cold and all of this street lettuce.

Some guy was sweeping the street in the university district in the cold. So thorough, he was...scraping bits of gum off the street...so thorough and officious, I was amazed that there was this big fresh piece of lettuce on the sidewalk, plain as day. It was like a beacon to me in the cold, this beacon of lettuce. This fine upstanding lettuce untouched by frost and the sins of the world.

As soon as I was Emailing myself the picture from my phone he hustled in and gathered it briskly into his dustpan.

Posted by tiny daniel at 12:48 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

It's been a rough weekend...some combination of brain chemistry, wierd interpersonal stuff hidden deep in my craw, and just the cold, cold, cold outside.

I looked so cute today! I bought a new fuzzy corduroy on supa' sale and my double-braid came out so perfect and shiny.

My main job today was to go get groceries for a special appreciation dinner for my friend Beth for helping me not to have such a barren hard drive and doing a lot of driving and helping me out when I broke my arm and just generally being a champion friend. I figured it would cheer me up a little cause yesterday felt so pervasively cheerless, but I kept missing busses, and the bus there only comes every hour, so it was late in the day before I could finally be useful.

I had this fantasy that I would see someone I knew at Whole Foods and be able to shine my braids at them and talk to them warmly and not feel so inhuman. But I think the world could discern my internal poverty and all the world seemed so cold, cold, cold.

Posted by tiny daniel at 10:50 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

I meant to give a couple more timely updates for people wondering about the arm, complete with photos of my couple of trips to Harborview. Sheesh, I just looked and I can't believe the movie reviews were my last post!

So here's the short version...when I finally went back the next time for x-rays, all appeared to be in place. In fact, it's a little amazing to me. I looked at the xrays from right after the break and then the ones from just after I got my cast off, and it healed really well. The bones were actually a little crushed down and out at the break and they seemed to elongate out into the proper shape. It was really quite amazing.

Now the bone is almost completely healed and I am out of my cast. My wrist is still quite stiff and weak, but it's so nice to be able to braid myself and do dishes already!

I've been very busy with christmas, and making my special christmas card for this year. I think it's finally to everyone in the mail, so I will now post the .pdf here for everyone to read:

(this is a 453k .pdf file, so it shouldn't be too bad to download even at dial-up speed)

This was my Christmas in poetry (and illustrations)...enjoy!

Posted by tiny daniel at 9:28 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

If someone asked me to produce a nomination for the most amazing public project ever realized on the internet, it would probably be the Wikipedia.

For those just tuning in, a wiki is a website that allows anyone to add new pages and edit existing pages (basically). And the wikipedia is a very successful attempt to create an informative encyclopedia using this model. It's an open-source encyclopedia.

In fact, if you don't understand the difference between commercial software and open-source software, the wikipedia is a good way to understand it. Go take a look at the Encyclopedia Brittanica for a moment. What are it's defining characteristics? It has a unified editorial voice, professional research and editing, it's a little outdated, it's missing entries for rapidly changing cultural ideas and specific technical ideas, and it costs money.

The wikipedia? It's free. It has varying levels of quality and styles. It's has entries for everything from Britney Spears and Reality TV to BitTorrent. Most of these articles are of surprising quality.

More and more, things that I used to look up on google first for general knowledge, I now check the Wikipedia first to get a balanced and thoughtful picture.

Why does it work? Because there's a dedicated community of people keeping eyeballs on their own corner of the wikipedia, correcting errors and updating information.

But is it a perfect world? No, people obviously just fuck around with pages, and sometimes they stay for a long time. There is a page of short-lived or otherwise jokes that got posted to specific entries. Or, people have genuine differences of opinion that cause edit wars. Notably the sites for Bush and Kerry had some serious struggles in the weeks leading up to the election.

But in spite of wierdnesses, it is an incredibly informative document. When I first found it, I thought I could contribute to some topics I knew something about, but I was surprised (then) to discover how exhaustive the information about Tibetan Buddhism or PHP already is. I did however, end up contributing. I wrote the (unfortunately citation-free) October 2004 update about the conflict in Darfur.

Go take a look...do you know of any other interesting remnants of Wikipedia culture? Interesting, funny or amazing articles? Leave 'em in the comments!

Posted by tiny daniel at 3:59 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

It's been so amazing in Seattle these last few days. Bright fall days, and foggy fall nights. Last night I was out without a camera and regretted it, because every branch made spiderwebs of shadows, and the stadium lights made a huge dome of daylight. Tonight I was prepared.

Posted by tiny daniel at 1:56 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

Do you believe in hell? It's not very popular these days.

Posted by tiny daniel at 1:19 AM | Permalink | Comments (5)

You make me wanna slam my head against the wall
You make me do the limbo
You make me wanna buy a slurpee at the mall
You make me watch the Gong Show
There's really something kinda strange about you, baby, but I can't exactly seem to put my finger on it

You make me
You make me
You make me
That's what you do to me

You make me wanna hide a weasel in my shorts
You make me wanna phone home
You make me wanna write a dozen book reports
Then pack myself in styrofoam
Sometimes you make me want to build a model of the Eiffel Tower out of Belgian waffles

You make me
You make me
You make me
That's what you do to me

You make me wanna hang out in a trailer park
Then take my hamster to the beach
You make me wanna do my laundry in the dark
And use a recommended bleach
When I'm with you I don't know whether I should study neurosurgery or go to see the Care Bears movie

(You make me) That's what you do
(You make me) That's what you do
(You make me) That's what, what you do to me

You make me wanna break the laws of time and space
You make me wanna eat pork
You make me wanna staple bagels to my face
Then remove 'em with a pitchfork
You know there's something quite unusual about you but I can't exactly seem to put my finger on it

You make me
You make me
You make me
That's what you do to me

-- Weird Al Yankovic's "You Make Me"

I'll see if I can come up with the .mp3, if you haven't heard this early Yankovic gem, then I assign you to listen to it as soon as I post it...and do 3 hail marys.

Posted by tiny daniel at 12:19 AM | Permalink

I'm very careful to put all of my data on a different physical drive than my Operating System, so if I need to blow it all out (as sometimes happens when you're running windows) I have a way to put everything that's important to me in one place and leave it untouched when I have to do the dirty work.

I just got a copy of XP and was exited to give it a whirl on my system. I entered setup and the first thing I did was take a deep breath and...format my data drive. The one critical moment where it's most important to make sure you're deleting the right partition. It took a little while for me to figure it out. That everything that is stored on my computer that's important to me was gone. Five years of photos, music, invoices, writing, original photoshop files, original templates for much of the print work that I do for our business, old difficult to find classic games and emulators, the original comps for every website I've ever done, installation media for hundreds of installed programs...and probably a bunch of things that I just haven't thought of yet. Oh christ, the fonts, the fonts....oh the humanity.

Luckliy, the bulk of the work and writing I do gets stored online, and the most precious of things are all in email attachments, the tinyblog, and on Robotic Cat Communications' servers. Plus, I put about 80% of the music and about 90% of the photos on Rzan's portable hard drive...so some of it will get recovered. I'll need a few days or weeks to let it all really sink in.

Whew. Non-attachment. I just hope I didn't screw anyone else. Now just to log onto all my servers and type:
mv -r * > /dev/null
Then my non-attachment to data will be complete. Well, no it won't.

Mourn with me people, mourn for my lost data.

Posted by tiny daniel at 11:23 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Ubuntu is very cool, even for non-geeks. Ubuntu Linux is also cool...but pretty much only for geeks.

Other linux distros that are cool include:

- Gentoo, which has a reputation for being super easy to use and almost dummy proof, but requires a lot of time and bandwidth to install and keep updated.

- Mandrakelinux, a well supported distro with good package management.

- Also, for the very paranoid, there's Tinfoil Hat Linux.

- And, it's not Linux, but here at Roboticat we use FreeBSD, which has the very cool package management of the ports tree (although Gentoo's version seems pretty darn cool too.) The BSD operating systems are a lot like Linux, in that they are UNIX-like systems that run on a PC, and have a bloody huge user community. Plus a little devil for a mascot.

I guess grun-tu-molani is pretty cool too.

(P.S. The first person to post the correct meaning of grun-tu-molani and it's correct source in the comments gets a special prize in the mail.)

Posted by tiny daniel at 6:40 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

There was this old asian couple in line with me at the public library today. They were saying something to each other, low and discrete. Then suddenly she looked up at him and said, "I wish I could give you one of my eyes."

Posted by tiny daniel at 12:47 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Sometimes you just don't know what you're getting yourself into until you're there. Sort of like taking a bunch of hallucinogens or something. You're like, "Oh wait, I thought this was gonna be..."

A week or so ago, Rzan asked me if I would come to the old house with her. The lawn needed to be mowed and the house needed to be cleaned. I wasn't living there when she moved out, but we had lived there together for almost two years, so I figured I'd be weasel to say no. So we said I'd come over Saturday and help her.

In true tiny fashion I had remembered that I had offered to help her with something that day, but I couldn't really remember what. I mentioned to Ben that I was going over there on Saturday and he handed me a bag of zip ties.

"Here," he said, "I guess you're going to be hooking up her stereo."

So that overwrote the old RAM in my brain, and that's what I thought I was going over there to do. When I showed up on Saturday she said, "Hey, Jane already mowed the lawn, so we just need to clean the house." Oh yeah, my brain thought.

And strangely enough, it was a little like doing hallucinogenics, walking into that nearly empty house with nothing left in it but memories. We pulled out sponges and buckets and began to wash down every surface. I started in the bathroom. It was nasty and it took a long time. We hadn't thought to being any kind of music (there had always been music there, we didn't even think there wouldn't be, like somehow it would emanate out of the walls). So I just started singing, and all I could think of were wracked songs of broken love. I must have driven Zan crazy, belting them out in the bathroom like a passionate nightmare.

Finally we went for fresh sponges and shower curtain rings and came back for a second shift. After doing most of the kitchen and bathroom we could tell there was a lot of work left. That's when it was most strange, washing all these rooms better than we had ever washed them. Zan felt it too and asked what would be a good mantra for cleaning a house.

So we just started howling mantras, filling up the whole house, even though I was almost constantly out of breath from singing loud and scrubbing thick scuff marks and wax and greasy fingerprints from the doors near the doorknobs and shit that got spilled behind the bookcase in the kitchen pooled and left for dead a long time ago. We scrubbed and sang until our whole heads vibrated.

It was pretty surreal, like I didn't realize what I was going to be doing that day, holding some kind of strange closing ceremony over 11015 27th Ave NE, scrubbing inches worth of child growth off the hallway door and pulling the "H" and the "A" from the old "HAPPY" from above the kitchen, like a message to me from another universe.

Eventually we realized we were wrapping it up and felt like we had made the place ready for the next people who would live there. I hope we did. There was a lot of intense emotion in that house. Also an amazing heart breaking amount of love and cooking and entertaining and naps and dance parties.

My props to Zan for her good sportness. We sat down on the couch and she cried and then we went to get hot food. I wished I could have cried, but somehow there was release anyway. I'm glad I have such a good friend as her, some people you just know you're connected to across time and space.

Posted by tiny daniel at 9:20 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

I took myself out on a date last night. Beth sent me this invite to a performance in a semi-industrial area of Seattle. It was supposed to have something to do with music and sculpture, and those huge truckbed storage containers that Seattle's waterfront industries pull from boat to train day and night on giant cranes.

It was quite a bike ride away, almost on the other end of the city. I got on my bike knowing I might have to ride all the way there and all the way home (about 25 miles in all). Plus, it was raining. I felt grouchy and lonely though, and I didn't feel like a very fun date. I wondered if I could get myself to put out anyway.

Down I wound through Wedgewood, the U District, downtown, Pioneer Square with it's noisy college drunks and rasta wannabe's, SoDo with the noisy Mariner's fans screaming for baseball blood, and finally down near the West Seattle Bridge, feeling warmer, freer, tougher and the rain having finally died down.

The path to West Seattle Bridge crosses many train tracks where automated or partially automated trains run short runs to load up and move those huge storage containers. As I approached the bridge, I saw a train coming. If I would have hurried I might have passed in front of it, but it didn't occur what was happening until too late.

I sat there, got off my bike and peed in the grass, and waited, looking off into the distance to see if I could determine how long the train was. It was long. After a while, it actually stopped, blocking my way for who knows how long. I sat for a long time. There wasn't really any way around it. On the ends of each car were thin, minimalist metal ladders, and a platform leading over.

If I hadn't had my bike, I might have considered just climbing up one side and down the other, but I knew it would even then be a stupid risk to take. I know how easy those wheels slice your damn legs in half. Finally the wheels made a sound like escaping steam, and then a minute or so later the CRUNK CRUNK CRUNK of metal fittings straining against each other began and the train finally moved.

I hustled my way across the bridge and started looking for this performance. Somehow I had the idea that the party somehow occurred in one of those storage containers, but I did eventually find the huge warehouse building where it actually was. It really was big, with huge cranes on the ceiling, and several storage containers scattered around all over it.

I finally got the gist of it. The art and sculpture was the storage containers. There was a big photo of another sculpture a guy had done with storage containers, stacking six of them haphazardly in some desert-like location. But here in the warehouse the main attraction was just one that had been leaned up against another one.

Along the lower third of it, there were all kinds of boards, pieces of sheet metal and wires clamped or otherwise attached to the bottom edge of the freight container. We sat around for awhile and then the emcee came up and told us that the performance was starting. This guy with headphones came out and started wielding these boards and rubbing them against surfaces in the metal. There was another guy with an electronic board messing with the feedback. He pounded on pieces of it with his fists, plucked things, played things with bows, and basically made a bunch of slow, eerie sounds.

It was cool but I kept wanting him to just bang on the side of the storage container himself. He never did. People were putting their heads against the metal to feel the vibrations. It actually reminded me of this CD with a sheet metal case that I bought when I first moved to Seattle called Metal de Metal by Aube.

Then he finished and I was left to schmooze. (Might have actually hooked up another client...we are running out of schedule!)

There was another more bandlike band later called PlanB (what a horrible name for a band!). They were good, and they had this guy projecting these amazing 3-d graphics that pulsed in time with the music. Sort of like racing fuzzy comics.

I asked him what software it was and he told me that he wrote it, using C++ and OpenGL. He's a programmer for Adobe, and he's been doing this in his spare time.

I was hungry like a beast from bike-riding and tried to talk a few people into heading to Chinatown for some kind of sloppy soup, but no takers. I got on my bike and started the insane ride back.

On my way back I encountered another train, this one was stopped by the time I got to it and had no signs of moving. I looked at it for a long time, and then firmly hoisted my bike up onto my shoulder, swung myself up in one movement, and was up and over to the other side of the car in seconds. The train still hadn't started moving as it went out of sight behind me with the wind whooshing in me.

I stopped at Ocean City for a sloppy bowl of soup and some cold soy milk before I began the gnarly-ass bike ride the rest of the way home. It was a good date.

Posted by tiny daniel at 1:22 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

Wtihout my mom's house and satellite TV I would have so much less exposure to Miller High Life and Natassja Kinski. God bless her soul, may she have lucrative TV work and sexy, slightly intelligent B-Movie work for all her days Amen.

The honey harvest is over and went well. This time I did get stung. In the hand. It was a big adrenaline rush but not that much of a big deal. This year's honey crop is fucking magnificent and I pity you terrible bastards who don't qualify for a jar. You may email me and apply for an application if you wish.

I started a secret blog but I can't tell anyone I know about it. Hence no one reads it. Hence it's boring to write in it. (But that won't stop me entirely) Hence, I'm stuck with the tinyblog. How sweet it is. You know this is my 700th post?

And in several years I have not changed my design at all. I've had ideas, but I simply can't think of anything that's quite as cool as my photos of Aidan Fay.

You know, speaking of Aidan, I ran into his mommy the other day at the Vomit Tavern on capitol hill (where they do not serve frosty mugs of Miller High Life for one solitary dollar like the Rockview...it's practically like drinking for free!).

We had a good time talking and I finally got to introduce her to Beth, which was cool. I always thought they'd get along in a weird way. Aidan is like 12 now, so that picture is like, so dated. He was 5. That means I'm practically old.

Okay, love you all, but I really need to get back to Natassja.

Posted by tiny daniel at 10:33 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

Please do not vote for George Bush.

I know that his confident leadership seems very important in such a hellish time. He seems to send such a confident, common-sense, one-pointed message.

Really though, it's a message of being confidently willing to murder and torture tens of thousands of people to protect the interests of he, his family and his direct constituency.

I know that John Kerry represents a much less surefooted path. We all wish there was a strong, compassionate, realistic leader with vision and grace to lead us.

You may complain that we only have two choices, and that they both seem so similar. But in this situation, by selecting one of them you are sending a message about how the next to choices need to position themselves.

John Kerry saw firsthand what it was like to be involved in the business of killing and fear for money. He's trying to sell his heroism, but frankly I wish he could sell his inner conflict. I wish he could talk about why he threw his medals (ribbons, whatever).

I'd rather see America enter into a less confident negotiation with the world, and would be willing to accept a decreased standard of living if it means that my tax money would have less blood on it.

To my friends in Rockford, I ask you to reconsider your position.

George Bush being president is physically harmful to the people of the world and I think that John Kerry and his conflicted standpoints are less harmful.

I endorse John Kerry for president.

Posted by tiny daniel at 11:42 PM | Permalink | Comments (8)

Don't know how I manage to do bleary eyed hacking on my friend's top secret pet project after coding all day some days is beyond me. Makes me tired but volunteer work keeps me sane.

I taught a little web development class at a cool little place called the QCafe, and I'm doing another one in late September. If you live in Seattle and want to learn a little web development from step zero, you should come. Lemme know.

Posted by tiny daniel at 2:43 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

While unpacking, I just came across a note card in my handwriting that I have no memory of writing.

Posted by tiny daniel at 11:50 PM | Permalink

Best Email subject line ever!

Monsieur Arthritis actually sounds like a good band name.

I'm doing fine, just spending a lot of time on computer projects for other people and wandering about like a lost soul. Often I don't know what I'd say here.

Posted by tiny daniel at 3:29 PM | Permalink

To those who suggested I use wire for my mala...

I did actually mention that in my post. The problem is that although wire doesn't break, it doesn't knot reliably, and crimps seem to get worried free. I think the solution is just lighter beads, that don't have such sharp, string-wearing surfaces.

In any case, I lost at least half of my lapis beads, and a strand of them is pretty expensive. I'm also just ready for any kinds of changes in my life. I feel really willing to just try totally new things that have been in my head for awhile.

Posted by tiny daniel at 11:11 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Tonight as I was walking home from the grocery store, with a backpack full of movies, canned goods and stupid things like sponges, tape and toothpicks that a new household needs, and a grocery bag with bread and zucchini, I had a really strange experience. I heard a sound like falling pebbles, and looked down. There were pebbles on the ground and it was like they were jumping around at my feet or something. It died down a little as I looked.

I thought maybe I had been kicking them as I had been walking, and I started walking again, kicking the ground a little extra, but no noise. It was like someone had dropped the pebbles, or thrown them softly at me. I looked all around and didn't see anyone. I couldn't think of any explanation and it was a little disturbing and I felt kind of stupid. A few last pebbles clackered.

I walked on, trying to put it together, and then I heard a few more clacks, and finally the rest of my broken mala fell at my feet. I was a little sad, but I laughed. I haven't had such good luck with malas...with wearing anything really.

A mala is a string of 108 beads. It's sort of like a rosary, in fact rosary is one translation. I learned how to pray the rosary back in the day, and I knew my mom respected it a lot. I still know the Lord's Prayer, and the Hail Mary. I thought it was a little silly, but let me tell you, you feel different after you say 108 prayers, even if you don't think you're going to. Both a rosary and a mala have a larger bead on one end. On the mala it's called the lama bead, and when you reach it, you turn around and go the other way.

My lama gave me my first mala...made out of lotus seeds. They're these pitted white spheres, usually about a centimeter across. I like them. They're light, and when you say a lot of mantras, it picks up the oils in your fingers and gets kind of golden brown, like a white clay Meerschaum pipe.

But I'm hard on jewelry. I've never been able to wear a watch. I leave them about and drop them. Rings, bracelets, necklaces, I've never been able to wear them. But when I got that first mala I wore it. I wore it and I slept in it. I didn't think it was uncomfortable. I did a lot of mantras and it got a warm brown. But it also started to break down and the beads cracked under the rough treatment I tend to give to all inanimate objects in my care. Especially a tool like a mala.

First I replaced beads, but then finally I just had to give up and get a new mala, and only use a few beads from the old one. I went through several. Everyone else seemed to be able to keep theirs together.

Then I started getting stone ones...quartz crystal mostly I think. They were sturdier, but unfortunately harder on the string. They are heavy and have sharp edges that rub against strings and wear them out quick. I tried a lot of different kinds of nylon string, kite string, everything. Sooner or later they'd get a little tug and go, and I'd be hunting for beads, and usually buying a few new ones.

You can use the superthin plastic-encased stainless steel cord, which is much stronger, but it can't be tied as reliably as string. You can close it with crimps, but the weight of everyday wearing and use just seems to pull apart the knots and loosen the crimps.

When I met my friend Jesse at a Medicine Buddha retreat, he pulled out this Lapis mala and really blew me away. The iconic color of the Medicine Buddha is blue like Lapis Lazuli, so it seemed doubly cool. I drooled over it for awhile and a year later he gave it to me all spiffed up with purple tassles and counters and such for my birthday.

Lapis is particularly heavy, and it would weigh down at the bottom and pull my chest hairs. It was worth it, though, it was really beautiful. I ended up taking off the tassels and just using the lapis beads. It was already fancy enough that way. Whenever I had a girlfriend I would sleep naked and put it by the bedside, but when I'm alone I sleep in my clothes and leave the mala on.

That Lapis mala broke several times when I was with Roseanne, but always when we could recover most of the beads, and she, bless her heart, restrung my mala every time. It broke a month or two before I left, and I hadn't restrung it. It was missing a bead or two (lapis beads are are to get in singles, and expensive!) I had replaced them, and it had been sitting in a bowl for weeks.

When I left the house I fixed Roseanne's computer and she restrung my mala one last time. It was so appreciated.

This time I think I must have lost at least half the beads, and I think it's time to think of a lighter material. I've been thinking maybe I would try something like bone or polished wood. I had a bone one once before...I think wood would be nice. I hope I can find some nice smooth wooden beads.

Posted by tiny daniel at 1:38 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

I'm going to sleep so late every night.

I'm in between worlds.

I'm defending the weblog over at Meeting of the Minds.

I'm drinking less coffee than usual.

I'm not as hungry as usual.

I'm tired and wired and inspired.

Oh crap...my ride's truck is not currently in a state to drive to Illlinois. Will talk to the mechanic tomorrow. I hope I don't have to buy a damn plane ticket after all. I gotta get the hell out of Seattle for a little while.

Posted by tiny daniel at 2:25 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

I was really feelin’ the freedom the first few nights. Wow, I thought, I can do whatever I want. I went out and stayed out late with friends, and rented all kinds of weird movies that only I would like.

I went to several parties, including a sarong party. I went to a Balinese import shop and bought a pretty sarong, and had the lady show me how to wear it. I looked pretty foxy and I walked wild all over Cap Hill, causing whatever trouble I could manage to get into.

Then, on the third of July, I went over to a friend’s housewarming party and stepped off a curb wrong and twisted my foot. It immediately felt like the party was over. I stayed home by myself of July 4th, and nursed my foot and iced it and did some billable work and watched movies. I felt really lonely and I missed fireworks, which I have always loved.

It made me feel extra mortal, and really feel the hard work I have to do in rebuilding my life and slowly finding this new vision.

Then today, I went over to Roseanne’s house to expedite some car moving. I saw Sam, Roseanne’s kid there. I’ve seen him a couple of times, but didn’t know how to say goodbye to him or how to say…anything to him. But I was really moved and so I asked him to come sit out on the couch with me.

“Sam”, I said, “I’m really sad that I’m not going to be able to see you around as much. I’d kinda gotten used to it.” I stalled for a long time.

“Does it feel weird?” I asked.

He stuck half his hand in his mouth, “Yes.”

“How come?”

“I don’t know, it just feels wierd.”

“Is your mom sad?”

He thought about it for awhile, and removed all but one finger. “Yeah.”

“I…I’m sorry I can’t explain this to you a little better.”

“I’m sorry too.”

That kind of threw me for a loop. “You mean…sorry I can’t explain it to you better?”

“Yeah.”

“I just want you to know that I really love you. You know the rocket we were building?”

“Yeah.”

“Tell your mom to set it aside and I will come build it with you and we’ll shoot it off.”

“Cool.” He thought for awhile, then pointed to a big vase sitting in the front garden, “You see that vase? I filled it with water while I was watering the garden.”

“That’s cool.”

I’m so sorry I can’t explain it to you better, Sam. If I could, I would just tell you the whole story. But I can’t. And there’s nothing but the whole story that would come close to an explanation. I’ll miss you, kiddo. I can’t wait until we can shoot off that four foot florescent pink rocket.

Posted by tiny daniel at 1:46 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Alright, for the Rockford people, I am leaving Seattle on probably the 9th, putting me in Rockford by the 12th or 13th. I plan to be there for a week before I head back to Seattle. (Maybe leaving the 20th? 21st?)

I will be reachable by anyone by cel or Email for the entire month, even though my physical situation will be fairly far-flung. So if you have my cel number you can still expect to reach me just fine. And my email works just fine.

Posted by tiny daniel at 2:28 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

A few changes around here...

Multi-Authors

Roseanne has always been an occaisional guest blogger around here, but with a$$hole guest-posting as well, it has officially become a multi-user blog. For that reason it seemed important to have some kind of clear identifier of who was writing a specific post. So now you'll see, up in the upper-left hand corner of each post, below the title...a small icon and name of the Author.

Roseanne's posts are a little harder to find...here's her eye picture.

Gmail

I finally got a Gmail account. I have my own server-maintained email addresses, but I don't like to point all my public web stuff at them. I've been pointing them all at my hotmail account for years, but I finally decided to abandon that damn thing and point everything at danieltalsky@gmail.com.

Posted by tiny daniel at 3:57 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Posted by tiny daniel at 10:37 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

I'm scratching a daughter out of myself
one smooth daughter thick in the tush
with one sock on and lots of habits
bitch is creative and has sparkly toes.
She's covered in felt,
and mystery laced crimes
she has mucho talent in the BEWARE department.

I'm scratching her out so she'll listen this time
or forget to cover me with habits
and shouting at just the wrong person.

I'm scratching her out
but don't worry.

I'll take care of her.

Posted by tiny daniel at 11:42 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Didn't post in a long time again. Neither did Zan, but at least she offered an explanation. Well, her explanation goes for me too.

Partially, I guess I really just liked having my 666th entry up there for a while.

Also it kinda threw me for a loop that my Berkeley database got corrupted. I may have to convert the tinyblog to postgres. In my spare time.

Posted by tiny daniel at 4:44 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Looks like all the comments for the tinyplace sites are back up, but I did lose a handful of them. So sad. Man, I guess I'm gonna have to drop Berkely DB (the only option when MT first came out) and move to a postgres or mysql database, which I would have a much better chance of fixing or maintaining myself.

Luckily, my man Michal, at my very kind host, Cornerhost, at least knows enough to fix some corrupted tables. Thanks Michal, and if you're considering a webhost for your personal site and blogging needs, I really have never experienced better customer service.

Posted by tiny daniel at 6:32 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Roseanne told me this morning that the tinyblog was down. I rebuilt, which brought it back up, but now my comments are not publishing to the site.

They are there on the back end... I can view and edit them in Movable Type, but I can't get them to show up on the site.

I have a comment into the support forum but it's been as of yet ignored.

So in the meantime...no comments, or they will disappear into the ether. Please just email me: daniel@danieltalsky.com

Posted by tiny daniel at 5:17 PM | Permalink

I do a lot of weeding. We have a garden. We planted garlic when it was still all cold, and now it's getting really tall. We have herbs and flowers. There's almost always something happening in the garden year round. I'm also starting to learn what all the weeds are and their root patterns and such. I'm starting to walk down the street and think about what the names for all the plants are. I'm a little less likely to destroy plants idly as I'm walking around in the forest. Oooh...so druidic!

I wrote a poem about domestic tranquility, but I'm not quite ready to release it yet.

Feels normal now to wake up in the morning when Ben comes over and shuffle groggily in, check blogs, and then be a Robotic Cat for awhile. We have clients, and we're courting more. We find people who might be interested in our services who have the money to pay for them at a steady trickle. Once we get all the details worked out, this is going to start to make us a pretty decent living.

A couple of our closest friends broke up recently. We went on countless trips and dinners and hikes and movies and game nights with them. Now they're not a couple anymore and there's bitterness and loyalty issues and bad behaviour on everyone's part (definately myself included). I thought it would be at least medium cool, but it really sucked and affected every part of my life. Even professionally.

I'm getting married in July, then the situation will be as it should, with Roseanne and I as husband and wife. It's so sweet and stressful. We kind of wish we had the money to go see a counselor or something, because we hear it's a really good idea for people to do before they get married. But man, to go see someone it's hundreds of dollars, and it's hard to prioritize that before car insurance. Plus, we're really working hard to communicate, and pull together, and compromise, and all that. I think we'll be okay.

Roseanne got a job at the SJCC doing massage two days a week. How cool. Her first two days filled up right away. Her arms are gonna get strong.

Sam's doing good. He cracks me up, he can read at probably the 2nd or 3rd grade level at least (he's 6) but he doesn't know the alphabet. Freaky progressive education. He's into Legos and really likes to garden with us.

My good friend Cara came up from New Jersey at the tracker school and had her birthday party at our house, then Sunday Suki had a wicked BBQ and I got to see my awesome NYC friend Shiela Joon. She's just a powerhouse of love and innocence and sexuality and friendship and pathos. I heart both of them bigtime, and it's precious to see them since they live all the way across the country now.

Been really grokking Prefuse 73... what an awesome DJ! Seems like it's a lot harder to get music off the internet these days. I think all those lawsuits really did have a chilling effect. I'd really like to expand out a little and hear some new stuff. We listen to music a lot. That Bob Dylan guy's pretty damn good, too.

Other than that, I've just been being a good Neo-Hippie.

Hmn...I think that's it. Now when people ask me, "so daniel, what's up witchu?", I can credibly refer them to my blog, like a good blogger.

Posted by tiny daniel at 12:31 PM | Permalink | Comments (10)

If you would like to be considered for a wedding invite, please Email me your street address. (daniel@danieltalsky.com). For many many reasons we have to limit the amount of people we're inviting, but it's safe to say all my old Illinois friends are invited (Bill, I already have your address.)

This is basically a call for people who aren't sure if I have their address...or people who really would like to come, but I might not have thought of due to limited wedding brain space.

Also, someone requested the link to our wedding registry.

Posted by tiny daniel at 4:17 PM | Permalink | Comments (9)

GodDAMN taxes hurt me this year. I made some money in unemployment, some money as an independant contractor, and some money as a partnership.

All those years I did massage trades for someone to do my stupid 1040EZ. Now I'm doing it myself and I filled out seven tax forms..no shit. A 1040, a schedule C for the business, a schedule E, a 1065, and a schedule K-1 for the partnership, and then a schedule SE for the self-employment tax, and then one more form to beg for payments since I don't happen to have 3 large just laying around.

Man, I hid my head in the sand this year. I knew it was going to hurt, and it did.

Posted by tiny daniel at 10:52 AM | Permalink | Comments (11)

Sometimes the way I operate works.

If I'm mad at someone, or think their behavior was not good, even by the person's own standards, I often try to give them the opportunity to defend themselves, and explain why they acted the way they did.

What's good about this is that a lot of times I learn what the person's rationale was, or I learn some factors that I didn't know about. Then instead of having harbored resentment for a long time, I know what the score really is, and the person feels like I dealt with them squarely...without a twist.

Or they just apologize, or say that they just didn't consider it that way and that they appreciate the insight.

Sometimes it doesn't work.

I end up sounding self-righteous and like I'm "pointing out the speck in someone else's eye before romoving the plank from my own".

The person gets defensive, and I realize what a jerk I was, I and I end up ruining that person's trust in me.

As I've gotten older, I think I've gotten a little more wise. I actually do try to let people make their own mistakes, and only say something when they have broken some kind of committment, or crossed some kind of boundary with me personally...then I feel a little more like I have a leg to stand on.

But what do you do when you can hardly look at a friend, because you feel so much animosity about the way they've treated other people? Should you bite it down and just let your friendship drift away? Try to generate some kind of understanding?

When do you say, "Look, you're my friend, and the way you treated someone else, and the way you're operating seems really odious to me, and as your friend I just want to give you some feedback and a chance to explain yourself."

I guess anything can be said if it's said properly, but sometimes if something's really stuck in my craw, it's tough for me to keep my cool in the heat of the moment. So there I am...not trusting myself enough to say something for fear of lashing out, and feeling really grouchy at the person and not knowing how to feel close to them again without communicating.

It's a bitch!

Posted by tiny daniel at 10:58 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

Going out tonight to hear some Amon Tobin wit my mans Ben and Nate. Tha Girls are having Girls Art Nite. No doubt we will get some pics of the art tomorrow on Loverzan.

Who is Amon Tobin and why am I bothering to see him? He's a producer Deejay guy who writes interesting music with beats (ie. not the same damn beat for 8 minutes with a pause where some bombastic black lady sings "Gonna shake yo asssss off").

His signature style is to pick some audio sample from some cheesy movie, and build a sonic vibe around it. Maybe tomorrow I'll drop some empeethrees up here for those who have never heard 'em.

But not tonight...I can't even wait for the upload. I gotta go.

Posted by tiny daniel at 5:39 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

If you're not an old-school computer person, you may not realize that a hard drive was not always something that came with a home computer.

When you turned on a Commadore 64, or a TRS-80, it just loaded up the entire operating system into RAM, and there you were, faced with a fresh system that looked exactly like it looked the last time you turned it on...no matter what you had done with it last time. I think my phone has more memory than my first computer.

I typed many many many basic programs into the computer for literally hours, watched their 10 seconds of output (OMIGOD! IT'S A CRUDE PICTURE OF THE SPACE SHUTTLE! AND IT ONLY TOOK ME 14 HOURS TO TYPE FROM RUN MAGAZINE!), and then they were gone forever when I turned them off.

Even having removable storage, like a disk drive, where one could SAVE programs for later was considered an incredible luxury to most home computer users.

But, the earliest computers had a way to read and write data: sound. You could shoot a program out the speaker jack, and read a program via the mic jack. Meaning you could store programs on...cassette.

Yes, cassette. I had games like the insanely hard (and really quite spooky) text adventure BEDLAM. The TRS-80 also had cartridges too...not sure about the C64.

So it's no surprise that some bands in the late 70's and early 80's got fascinated with the streams of clicks and beeps (most people know this well as the sound of connecting via dial-up), and the possibility of including them on an album, and making the data itself part of the album.

Suddenly, artists no longer had to be satisfied by including satanic messages backwards in the background...now they could encode computer programs that displayed things like this on the screen:

(Code in the song 'Thank You' on Scottish band Urusei Yatsura's 'Everybody Loves Urusei Yatsura' album, released on their own Oni records.)

And how did one get it on their computer? You had to tape the track on cassette and then figure out how to load it.

Anyway, this whole blog entry is really a neophyte's introduction to Kempa's really astoundingly cool and well researched post about computer programs on vinyl. By the way, I think I should say it's via Xblog.

Posted by tiny daniel at 1:39 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

Coming from northern Illinois, I got used to the fruits of a large Italian community. Inexpensive, hearty, warm, loud pizza joints. As much as I bitch about the politics of my old Rockford friends, I sure miss going to get $5.00 large sausage pizzas at Pino's where they cut it into squares, and inhaling it over Dungeons and Dragons and Dr. Pepper.

Pizza. Pizza that has a lot of cheese, and isn't paper thin, and doesn't come with sun-dried tomatoes. It isn't that easy to find in Seattle. I was beginning to think there wasn't a regular old pizza and pasta place in the whole city until I moved a mile away from one.

In a city where it's easy to spend almost $30 on one large frou-frou pizza with several toppings, it's nice to get a real pizza for $20 instead. They don't deliver...but if ya can't get off your lazy ass and go 8 blocks, I guess ya deserve Pagliacci's.

The place is called Santorini's Pizza and Pasta. Gino runs the place, and obviously knows half the people who come there by name. His son and daughter work there, too. Both, good looking kids.

They don't have a website. Go figure. I wanted to order ahead one day and I didn't have their menu, so I tried to look it up on the web. I had a hard time even finding their phone number.

So that day, when we were there waiting for our pizza, I asked Gino son they'd ever thought about a website. "Nah," he said, "we're not computer guys."

"Well, I'm a computer guy, that's why there is computer guys," I said.

"We might be moving anyway...we don't need a website."

So I went home, but I thought, 'Hey, I'd like a website just so I knew the pizza menu...maybe I'll offer to throw up something simple for them for free...they don't have to do anything but say it's okay.'

So next time I came back I asked the son, figuring maybe I could talk some sense into him. I offered, but he refused. "I got a wedding coming up," he says, "I'm too busy for anything extra. Plus, we might be moving."

"That's the nice thing about websites," I say, hardly ever knowing when to shut up, "you can change it easy."

Finally he got a little sick of me. "We don't need a website," he says, gesturing to the restaurant, "We got our own people!"

I figured they were both sick of me, but then when Gino saw me at the gas station he hailed me heartily, as only an old Italian guy can, "Hey! The website guy!" He asked me how business was and slapped me on the back. It reminds me that even if I'm a web application developer and an interface designer and and and information architect...I'm still The Website Guy to an old Italian guy. It made me proud to be the website guy.

He told me that they might be losing the property, and that they'd been there for, like, 20 years. They weren't even sure if they were going to open another place before they had to move. For some reason the thought of no Santorini's on the corner of 35th and 110th really bummed me out. Not just cause I'd miss the pizza.

I hadn't been by in a while but I went to Santorini's tonight, after an argument and a vicious craving for tortellini. It was late on St. Patricks day and there were a couple of small groups of old italian guys...old hardened Italians who said motherfucker a lot.

They walked out, and Gino gave me a nod. "How's business!?" he yelled across the restaurant. "Good!" I yelled back. I smiled. It had been awhile, but that man is in the business of recognizing faces.

Suddenly it really bummed me out...seeing them there...thinking of what that place meant to me. I was forcing down the last few bites of my tortellini (stomach says stop, mouth says go!) when the waitress lays a glass of chianti at my table. "It's from my dad," she says, as she probably has one thousand times before.

I drank the wine, took the pen from the check, and started to write this blog entry on my bookmark. When I left, I waited for Gino to come out the back room. I said hi, but wasn't sure what to say. I asked him about the move and he seemed real heavy about it right away.

"I dunno. They want to build here. We might have to leave...October....November. I don't know. "

He paused.

"I got a feeling. Something good gonna happen."

Posted by tiny daniel at 10:41 PM | Permalink | Comments (13)

There's a lot of talk about an organization I'm sure many are familiar with, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, or PETA at Frizzen Sparks.

Bill, the freaky semi-libertarian author of Frizzen Sparks (who's actually been one of my best friends since like 1987, and still lives lives in my hometown in the enlightened bible belt state of Illinois) complains that the very premises of PETA are completely hypocritical. He is quite fond of dissecting their idiotic comments out of context a-la Rush Limbaugh (minus the oxycontin) and calling them (along with other liberals) 'moonbats'.

That's why I decided to write this short essay entitled, Why I'm glad PETA exists:

The fundamental idea of PETA, is that animals are sentient beings that should be afforded the same rights as human beings. In fact, from the PETA website:

PETA believes that animals deserve the most basic rights—consideration of their own best interests regardless of whether they are useful to humans. Like you, they are capable of suffering and have interests in leading their own lives; therefore, they are not ours to use—for food, clothing, entertainment, or experimentation, or for any other reason.

So clearly, this is a pretty extreme view, that is perhaps a little more than 3 inches to the left of reality. But in my opinion, it is to our benefit that such a view exists.

Currently, the idea of ethical conduct towards animals is something that is pretty well scoffed at in most industries that stand to profit of animals. The meat industries view animals as basically inconvenient blocks of meat, and are really biding their time until they can have what they really want, which is basically tank grown boneless cubes of meat that fit precisely into their slicing equipment.

But they don't have that yet, and animals fight and get deseases and such. So they pump them up with chemicals, feed them each other, and basically do their best to produce the cheapest possible meat without animals actually getting Mad Cow.

Does this benefit the consumer? No. I don't need to go into what the industrial attitude towards food creates...Upton Sinclair and Eric Schlosser have covered the topic pretty well.

The point I'm making, is that the extreme of profit is one extreme, and there has to be the other extreme to balance it out.

It's sort of like the ACLU putting incredible time and resources into making sure that neo-nazis can say all kinds of fucked up things. It's not that I'm glad the ACLU is there so that innocent Nazi's can be defended...it's because I'm glad someone's there vociferously protecting the erosion of free speech.

So PETA is the extreme voice that keeps industries having to do with animal production (barely) from going to the extreme of profit, and being able to endlessly bilk the public about it with their bottomless PR dollars. This is a good thing.

Would even Frizzen Sparks disagree?

Posted by tiny daniel at 4:14 PM | Permalink | Comments (10)

Other Doodles on the tinyblog:

My Math Notes
The Peas Arch
The Plesenarch
My Fav Sketches

Posted by tiny daniel at 8:40 PM | Permalink

the thanksgiving double header was beautiful

I stand up.

I fall down.

Posted by tiny daniel at 2:05 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

Halloween recap, for those remote or absent:

Rowan Robin:

Is that a peacock, or a peahen?

Silver foxiness:

Pippi serves dinner:

Dishes with an attitude.

BEWARE THE TIME CAT!

Posted by tiny daniel at 12:12 PM | Permalink | Comments (5)

front...

...and back

>

Posted by tiny daniel at 8:33 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

Wulfram II is a free networked game (that I haven't quite been able to play through the firewall) . I thought thier log of players they'd kicked off their network was amusing.

Posted by tiny daniel at 1:54 AM | Permalink

Thanks honey, for the sharp eye.

Posted by tiny daniel at 12:23 AM | Permalink

My girl who loves to sleep in, got herself a job where she has to get up early in the morning and landscape her little butt off.

I can't help it, I'm so proud of her.

She comes home with big mossy hunks of wood covered in moss and ferns saying, "Can I keep it?"

"Sure," I say, as long as you can find a place for it.

Posted by tiny daniel at 9:39 AM | Permalink

When I got here Jason was packing his stuff. She took him to an undisclosed location a few hours south of the city, and was going to meet me at a Georgetown bar called the nine-pound hammer, around 2200hrs.

They told me the best Mexican food restaurant in the neighborhood and Jason said I could just ride his bike and not have to drive. They headed out at about 1800hrs and I retired upstairs to play EV : Nova before I left.

The Mexican food restaurant? Nice lady, good guacamole. Soggy Chili Rellenos though. I ate until I was stuffed to the gills and almost finished the combo. I put Jason's too-tight bike shoes back on, and proceeded to the hammer.

A pool game and a couple of drinks and 2230hrs. No Beth. Sweet lonely Georgetown...I headed home. The hammer is about the only mellow place in Georgetown.

Beth called me on the way home. Dear girl, she was just heading home now and lost one of her contact lenses. Poor thing, had to put up with Jason's antidisestablishmentarianism for the last few months; I bet she's still sad to see him go. Hope she gets home okay with a missing contact.

Had fun but missn'my girl.

Posted by tiny daniel at 11:34 PM | Permalink

For those who don't live with me and are curious how the whole business thing is going, it seems to be going rather well. If everyone who had contacted us in the past 2 weeks about our services were to say they wanted to hire us, then we'd probably have to either turn some work down or hire someone.

It's cool. But it's still the interim phase where I'm going to have to work my ass off a little before there's actual cash flow resulting from all this interest. But damn, I think we're rollin' like a real business. I have a feeling that our first year of business might end up being profitable.

Posted by tiny daniel at 5:30 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

Dear Friends and Family,

(if you don't care about all the hairy details, just skip to the last paragraph)

You see, I've never been very good at remembering numbers and dates. It seems to slip from my brain in elusive ways. I've been...untimely about my own mother's birthday too many times. God knows it's not that I just don't care...I really do care about people's birthdays and phone numbers.

I was really happy when I first got a cel phone and realized I never had to remember anyone's phone number ever again. Technology had saved me.

Well, at some point in my web development career, I realized that technology could help me again. For a long time I've wanted to write a little application to remind me about dates I needed to remember via Email in a way I could completely configure and scale. Just recently that became a little more technically feasable for me.

So, because I really do care, and I know people like it when they get aknowledged for their birthdays, (and because I finally finished up some of the web development work I was heatedly working on) I've decided to go ahead and make myself this tool. I'm sending this to everyone I can think of, (even to people who I actually know their birthdays!) and posting it to my blog...so if this message reaches you, and you'd like to be aknowledged on your birthday (or some other date) please send me your complete name and date of birth, and your mailing address if you don't mind (I lost a lot of this info in a sad computer crash about a year back). Thanks so much for your help in my being a grown-up.

Love,
Daniel Talsky

Posted by tiny daniel at 6:53 PM | Permalink | Comments (7)

Rzan has an innovative method of making the bed. If she's already up, she gets back into bed, gently pulls the covers up around her, and then slides out. Voila!

Posted by tiny daniel at 11:27 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

I've been really fascinated lately with the idea of workflow. More and more I'm starting to think about how creating (and sometimes documenting) workflow is a really important part of any job.

I'm doing some work for the Stroum Jewish Community School, and I have to be able to show them how to do what I'm doing next time. So I'm making little workflow descriptions for each task. More and more I'm seeing how valuable good workflow is.

For instance, the workflow for washing the dishes starts with putting away all the dishes that are in the rack. The workflow for creating a new website starts with making a list of all the information and ideas that the website is going to be a container for. More and more I see that establishing an efficient workflow is what allows a person to make money with their time.

Indeed workflow is an industry in and of itself. PERT Charts, Flowcharts, The Workflow Management Coalition.

I'm getting kind of curious...what is your workflow like? What workflows have you established that are valuable to you? What workflows have you developed that help you make a living?

Posted by tiny daniel at 9:49 PM | Permalink | Comments (8)

It's awfully useful to have at least read the ACLU's Bust Card.

Posted by tiny daniel at 10:48 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Well, we got one rat. It went for the bait on the second day. We took in to a wilderness area in Seattle and let it go. Last night we heard another one in the walls. The trap has been reset.

Wish I woulda taken a picture. It was kinda cute.

Update: Last night a rat tripped the trap but managed to avoid being in it. Little bugger. Plus someone ransacked our cars but really didn't take anything. Guess they didn't like our groovy cassettes. Hehehehe.

Posted by tiny daniel at 4:03 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

!

Posted by tiny daniel at 11:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

Ben: But that's in the log files isn't it?

Daniel: Yeah, it's HTTP-Referrer.

Jessica: I'm going outside.

Daniel: You made Jessica go away!

Ben: Man, computers suck. They make girls go away.

Posted by tiny daniel at 12:50 PM | Permalink | Comments (5)

I finally got back my pictures of Wappingers Falls themselves...I wonder if my sister has seen it yet.

I like that big rusty aquduct thing. I really like to take photos of the harmony of junk and nature.

Posted by tiny daniel at 4:50 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

Posted by tiny daniel at 8:57 PM | Permalink | Comments (6)

I'm back from my week at Kagyu Thubten Choling. It was some good mixture of fun and poignant. I even got to go see a movie with my sister (X2, which was surprisingly good.)

Posted by tiny daniel at 9:34 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Thanks to Wappingers Falls' Grinell Public Library for helping my bring you this special tinyblog post from New York.

After a brief amount of time at JFK airport, I was transported to the magical land of upstate New York.

It's pretty here, first of all. It's just spring here, and the land is so green and hilly, kind of like I remember Tenessee being, only more...rocky I guess. There's a cool little health food store that's a lot like a PCC in Seattle, so I don't have to worry about being able to get good coffee or soap.

Wappingers Falls is actually quite a nice place. There is a little suburbian strip with gas stations, mini-malls, and K-Mart, but there's also a rustic part of town that has a bunch of pretty little shops and such. (People who know me know how I feel about pretty little shops.) My sister drove me through town when I arrived so I'd know where everything was.

People who know my sister often ask how she's doing, and I could never really answer. "Good, I guess," I'd say, since she never really gives such a succinct statement in her letters to me. But now I can say she is doing good. She's living a life I think a lot of people wish they could live. Or maybe without the consecutive hours of chanting in Tibetan.

The land is right on a river, and it's spacious and lovely. The main building where she stays has rooms, a kitchen and a dining room downstairs. Then, upstairs, is a big pretty shrine room that gets a lot of use. Most people don't know how elaborate Tibetans like to do their shrines. They are usually of the opinion that More Buddha Stuff = More Blessings. So it's not this austere zen sort of thing. Really vivid colors and many many buddha statues. They cover the upper walls in rows of glass cabinets.

The statues are called rupas. There must be about 100 or so 6" Buddha rupas, and then about 18 8" Tara rupas. Then there's a Guru Rinpoche one that's about 4 feet tall, and then there's a large buddha statue that's about...well...a little bigger than life size.

Every morning, there is a morning chant that starts at 6am and lasts a little over two hours. They chant into Tibetan so fast I can't even read the transliteration (the English pronunciation of the Tibetan, which I can actually read pretty well). The morning prayers are over 100 pages long. I'm used to doing only silent meditation on retreat, but really in Tibetan monestaries they don't do much silent meditation. I asked my Lama why once, he said, "Tibetans would just go to sleep."

During the chanting, one person is the chopon. They have a bunch of ritual jobs they do during the puja (chant), so they are always getting up and filling water bowls and lighting butter lamps and setting up little sybolic representations of the universe to offer to all the Buddhas and bodhisattvas. All this activity happens every day...seems like for about an average of 5 or 6 hours a day, and that's why they're all there.

About 15 people stay there, and they are all really nice. However there is the telltale neurosis of strangers living communally. There's a certain finicky low-grade tension about all the chores and things. Many of the people work a part-time job (like my sister) but some are able to make it work on almost no income. Some of them do seem very spiritually mature, and they are all there for the sole reason of practicing diligently and growing spiritually in a very humble way and so it all holds together very well.

I love my sister, and she really was not happy living in Seattle and trying to be some kind of worldly success at something or another. So even though I really miss her living near me, I'm really glad she's in a situation where she feels like her time is not wasted. And of course I myself know to some extant what it feels like...the blessing of practicing dharma in one's life is very noticeable. So I think it's healthy and sweet for her to be here.

Well, I guess I'll walk back to the monastary now. It's so pretty here in town, but I think it's time I went back and did some dharma practice myself.

I think I probably will come back and post again before I leave. Oh, a poem I wrote at the airport...this is mostly for Josh and Yoni, so someone tell them it's here:

JFK

I want to record all these people who sound so
New York Ish
I ordered a Kosher meal on the plane
To get in the spirit of things in New York
It was a corned beef and pastrami sandwich.
What, is this some kind of joke?

I couldn't resist, though...
milk in my coffee.

Posted by tiny daniel at 11:17 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Think it's been a long time since I posted? Well it's going to be even longer, cause I'm going to New York to visit my sister in New York...

...but when I come back, we're going to have a bonfire birthday party!

If it's at all possible, please do come.

Posted by tiny daniel at 7:23 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Some very useful advice that is not funny at all.

Some advice that is slightly less useful, but funnier.

Ok, I'm curious? Which did you read first?

Posted by tiny daniel at 10:38 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

Scanning slides for an artist I'm doing a website for. Scan. Scan. Scanscanscan.

I wish I could show you some, because they're really cool...but I can't because she only wants them on her own website of course, but as soon as it's up I'll link to it.

I'm already sick of warring. It just becomes more and more obvious to everyone that it was a dumb idea. Way to blow several billion dollars slaughtering a bunch of people that were running the show in whatever semi-brutal but at least marginally effective way they saw fit to run it.

I think the argument that this was a good idea has to be stretched thinner every day.

I guess I should probably post again...no one's probably around anymore. Well, there's always Loverzan for the complete story. By the way, she just posted a cool post about our walk through the Arboretum.

Posted by tiny daniel at 5:00 PM | Permalink

"Naturally the common people don't want war: Neither in Russia, nor in England, nor for that matter in Germany. That is understood. But, after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy, or a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship."

"Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the peacemakers for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country."

- Hermann Goering at the Nuremberg trials, 1946

Posted by tiny daniel at 6:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Oh tender girl...

...you're so sincere and pretty.

I love you honey.

Posted by tiny daniel at 5:11 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

View The Notes (includes another fascinating quote from my math teacher)
Warning, the image is 71k

Posted by tiny daniel at 2:55 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Posted by tiny daniel at 2:52 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Oh yeah, and I've been meaning to post a couple of recent entries to the mirror project:

Daniel and Rzan
Daniel is Insane

Posted by tiny daniel at 11:26 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

Courtesy of Ben Sodenkamp, a FreeBSD firewall, Speakeasy, Covad, and the mighty evil empire: Qwest.

Who knew I would have to sell my soul so many times just to get some bandwidth.

Posted by tiny daniel at 9:11 PM | Permalink | Comments (6)

The last few days (and probably the next few) have been like those feel-good 80's teen movies.

You know the ones I'm talking about..."hey guys, we can make this work if we all just pitch in and fix up this old abandoned warehouse!" Then there's a musical montage to Neutron Dance or something, and everyone looks all cute while they make funny mistakes and move in fast motion.

Then at the end the warehouse is all cleaned up and everyone is standing in a big group wiping their brows and saying, "We did it, guys!"

We're not quite to the brow wiping part...but it's getting pretty close. The place looks better every day and it just about looks like a place where we can get some serious work done.

Posted by tiny daniel at 8:32 PM | Permalink | Comments (5)

(in the school's computer lab)

Me: Hey, are you using the scanner?

Him: No.

Me: Well, I'm going to need that computer in a minute, you might want to use another one.

Him: (pointing next to him) Use that one.

Me: The one you're sitting at is the only one with a scanner.

Him: So you want to use my seat?

Me: (losing patience and pointing to the sign next to him) See that big orange sign there that says (enunciating clearly) "Students needing to use the scanner have priority use of this computer."

Him: [Some lame excuse about there not being other seats (there were several) ].

Me: Look, I'm just trying to save you the trouble of having to get into something and then move in five minutes when I'm done with my sandwich!

By now several Asian girls were trying to get him to move to the seat next to him, and finally...at long last...he does.

He's in my Business class with me (we both went to it after the lab), and I knew that it had really bummed him out cause he looked really grouchy all through the class. I knew I should apologize to him.

He got out the door too fast, but then I saw him accidentally at the bookstore. I went up to him and apologized. I just said, "I think we caught each other at a bad moment," and said I hadn't meant to come off so harsh. He looked as relieved as I felt.

I just wanted to advocate for minor apologies, that's all.

Posted by tiny daniel at 1:42 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

I remember the day when I first moved in with a girlfriend. I did a signifigant amount of it on the bus. I was dragging a huge bag full of stuff behind me and this paint-covered construction worker type said to me, "Hey, you moving?"

"Yeah," I puffed, "I'm moving in with my girlfriend."

"Heheh," he said...in a way that was both knowing and scandalous, "That's the move I like the best."

For some reason it was kind of memorable. He seemed to be saying that he loved it that some woman was sucker enough to let him move in, and it was all easy couch living until she kicked him out, but maybe I'm reading into it. That seemed to be the tone.

I thought of that for some reason when I moved in with the only other girlfriend I ever lived with, and it just occurred to me now, as I sit at my house packing everything but my computer...preparing to move into Rzan's house.

Of course I don't see it quite the same way as that guy. I have never thought of it as a relaxing idea (not since the first time anyway). It's the beginning of having to negotiate so much of your space and personal existance with another person. And to this move is added the astounding feeling of realizing that I don't intend to move again without her.

But this is different than the other two times. It's not under any kind of duress, coercion, or just old-fashioned foolhardiness...I've been around her and Sam quite a bit in the past several months. This month I've practically lived there. But next month, I will officially live there. And I couldn't think of a nicer girl to officially live with.

I'm doing pretty good at packing. I guess it's something you get better at as you get older.

Posted by tiny daniel at 1:16 PM | Permalink | Comments (5)

My roommate Terra promised to pose for a photo of her cleavage for the tinyblog...slathered with her delicious fresh basil egg salad.

It might happen.

Posted by tiny daniel at 10:58 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Man, I sure liked going to school at night a lot better. In between classes the stairwells are clogged with hordes of asian teens talking on cel phones that cost more than my coat. Plus, there's that whole thing where I'm trying to function and think about SQL queries at 9am. Lame!

I'm glad to be in the classes though, and my Technical Writing instructor is an actual technical writer. I'll bet I can learn a lot from her. I'm not really looking forward to dealing with Algebra again though. It's been a long time, and I really don't remember it being all that much fun.

Posted by tiny daniel at 10:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

When I was in Chicago I visited my Dad:

I really wanted a real Chicago style hot dog which you can't really get done right anywhere else. A it's a Vienna beef dog:

On a steamed poppy seed bun, with bright green relish, mustard, diced onion, tomato slices, pickle slices, sport peppers, and ideally celery salt on top. Sounds gross, I know, but really it's an ideal combination of sweet, spicy, and succulent salty flavors. It's one of my favorite foods of all times.

We went out to get one. It was pretty good, but the dog itself was a little mushy, and no poppy seed bun. Guess I'll just have to wait until next year when I'll get another crack at it.

Posted by tiny daniel at 3:27 PM | Permalink | Comments (6)

My dear friend Terra took this picture of the dishwasher at the Omega Institute. As a dishwasher/prep cook myself once, I deeply understood.

Posted by tiny daniel at 3:21 PM | Permalink

People in Seattle often comment on how the social network seems so small since you always seem to meet the same people randomly, or find out that people you've known for awhile know each other. Plus, when you are in one hood in Seattle, you only need look up to see some other neighborhood - but a hilltop away. In Chicago, though, in each of the four directions you see only the street you're on going off infinately into the horizon.

It is a serious city. It's a city that swollows me up whole and makes me instantly anonymous. Always the brand new structures are towering among the crumbling monuments of history. Its people tend to be a bit grim. No one thanks the bus driver. There's no Fremont.

There's no network of smaller lakes, just one big lake, Lake Michigan. It's a huge wall bordering the whole eastern border of the city. It's one of the great lakes. It's almost like an ocean, a body of water that you can't see land on the other side, but the water is freshwater.

Seattle has only one token ethnic neighborhood, but in Chicago, huge stretches of road throughout the city are devoted to Thai or Vietnamese or Korean owned shops. Whole stretches where I can't read a single sign. Tough Korean old men who stay in their own community...living forever in the wilds of the freshwater city. And I just a white Seattle boy among them.

Posted by tiny daniel at 11:04 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Amazing.

I'm writing this post in Chicago, Illinois where I'm visiting my Dad. Sometimes I don't know who's more of a spazz, me or him. It's been nice to see him, though, even though we have always ended up locking horns.

We went to Edwardos and had about the yummiest spinach stuffed pizza you can get. Plus, a few days ago I hung out with my friend Bill Hada and had another great local pie at a little pizzeria. I'm in pizza hog heaven. Maybe I'll even end up getting a Chicago-style hotdog before I leave.

I made it into Illinois a few days ago on Christmas Eve, just in time for the Holiday Madness to begin. I'm staying at my mom's house in Rockford for most of the time I'm here. We had Christmas with my mom's boyfriend Art, Art's son Dan, and Art's mom and aunt.

Art's mom Astrud is starting to get fairly senile, but man, does she like to party. She's the fiestiest 89 year old I've ever met. She mainly drank whisky sours and playfully came on to me as I sat next to her on the couch. "They say you should watch out for me," she'd say, winking and poking me in the ribs with her elbow, "They're right!"

Her sister was even more forgetful, and deaf in one ear. She kept forgetting some very vital information. "I think I forgot where I live," she said to Art.

"Don't worry," he assured her, "I'll get you to the right place."

"Do I have two dogs?" She started to worry about how long she had been gone, and whether her dogs would be okay.

She was mostly deaf and had a very croaky vaice because she had been a chronic smoker her entire life, had developed throat cancer and had radiation therapy in order to treat it...none of which she remembered. She chain smoked in my mother's living room (my mom suspends the rule about smoking in the house for little old senile ladies) and told us she wasn't sure she wanted to spend $500 on a hearing aid when she thought that her across the street neighbors were into the occult and were cursing her.

It was actually very funny and very sad at the same time. My sister was so concerned for her that she ended up slipping her a little picture of White Tara (a Buddhist compassion and long life diety) and told her it would protect her from any evil occult powers. For some reason that made me feel greatly better.

It's been stressful, but last night my mom couldn't sleep so she came out on the couch and passed out there with her legs on my lap. I just read and said mantras for a long time because it was so nice to just be there with her quietly on the couch.

I just gave my Dad a massage before he passed out and now I sit here on his housemate's ancient compaq hacking away into the wee hours. His computer was set to 256 color and I changed it to 24-bit color...he probably didn't even know about that. I wonder if he'll notice. Hehehehe, I love being the beneficient computer gremlin. My god, this is turning into the post from hell.

My mom doesn't have a computer at her house so I've gone into browser withdrawal. If I don't spend a certain amount of time typing into a textbox, I get a little jittery.

Posted by tiny daniel at 12:15 AM | Permalink | Comments (4)

"What a stupid world."
- Calvin of Calvin and Hobbes

Samadhi, Rzan's son, has a love for comics, especially TinTin and Calvin and Hobbes. So lately he's been emulating Calvin by expressing his disdain the Calvin way.

Sam: I want that pecan pie for dessert after dinner.
Mom: Are you sure?
Sam: Are there any cupcakes left?
Mom: No.
Sam: Stupid cupcakes.

His Mom: You have to eat your your dinner if you want any dessert.
Sam: Stupid dessert. Stupid dinner.

Posted by tiny daniel at 12:40 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

I'm going back to Illinois for Christmas.

I did finally ending up getting some sleep, and most of my christmas shopping done.

Posted by tiny daniel at 8:45 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

I'm starting to get the christmas sweats. I am woefully underprepared and broke. But like it or not it's time to make lists and gather addresses. Goddamnit I'm gonna do it right this year!

Posted by tiny daniel at 12:57 PM | Permalink | Comments (7)

My sister met a man named Ariel Broido at the dharma center she lives at in New York. He was looking for a place to stay in Seattle in a few months, and my sister suggested he contact me.

So now the teachings are happening here in Seattle, and Ariel is staying at my house. He shared with me some of his photos, like of this woman at losar. Nice.

Posted by tiny daniel at 3:33 PM | Permalink

- still unemployed

- monster.com doesn't help much

- lots of time + very little money = fiction

- sleeping 'til 11am

- I know, I know, being unemployed has been SO blogged, but it's new to me.

- babysitting can be meditative

- hi mom!

Posted by tiny daniel at 6:19 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

I parked two bikes in the front yard and they got stolen yesterday. I don't know why I think that's not going to happen, despite plenty of personal experience to the contrary.

That's so ass. One was my friend Cara's bike (crappy bike, but with an expensive seat on it), and the other was Rzan's (it was a Lotus brand bike...with a basket...I liked it!). I couldn't possibly afford to replace them and so I just feel shitty.

Posted by tiny daniel at 2:09 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

My mom bought a lot of books while she was here in Seattle. I was taking a bath and really wanted something to read, so I picked up a book she had bought at a bookstore in Chinatown. It was Waiting, by Ha Jin.

Ha Jin came to the US to study for a few years, and then Tiananmen Square went down and he decided not to go back to China. He couldn't get a teaching job at the time in the States, and decided to start writing in English.

When I was done reading Waiting, I picked up The Bridegroom, a book of short stories, and now I'm almost finished with Ocean of Words. Damn near all of them have won awards; Waiting won the National Book Award. I think he deserves them all.

For some reason these stories have sort of infected me. This guy's wit and spare, sharp little english seem like nothing else I've ever read. It's like being able to hear about what the Cultural Revolution was like, without having to learn Chinese. I doubt there's anything like it. The short stories are particularly amazing.

For the first time in a long time, I want to write him a letter or communicate with him somehow. I'm just not sure exactly what I would say. Does anyone else get the urge to do this? I'm actually kind of tempted since it's not like he's a super celebrity or something. Unlike a fan letter to Britney Spears, it might actually get read.

Anyway, just now I finally looked online to see what's up...here's an interview with powells.com, an interview with the Yale Review of Books, a chapter from his new novel and the link to his books.

Posted by tiny daniel at 12:51 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

The joy of unemployment is...well, not being required to show up for work every day. The pain of unemployment is a little more complicated:

Being required to show up for random 'job search orientations' for unemployment.

Feeling like I really don't have what it takes to be successful in the world cause I look at my resume and know that there's a lot of other unemployed people who are way more qualified than me.

Always feeling like I could be doing a little more to look for a job.

What the hell is a resume really supposed to look like anyway? What's the magic formula?

Is it worth it to take work that doesn't pay much more than unemployment?

Etc. Jeez. The not having to show up for work is pretty good though. On the whole it balances out pretty well.

Daniel

Posted by tiny daniel at 4:25 PM | Permalink | Comments (5)

I was beginning to think there was something wrong with me. After two years of nearly every one of my friends living in a state of constant unemployment, I was still working. In the Internet industry no less. I was beginning to think I was abnormal!

Well, I am abnormal, but now I'm abnormal and unemployed. LXIS Networks' primary client (and the one I did the most work for) finally dropped us, saying they thought they could find a development crew that was based near them in Dallas, and could develop a little faster. I wasn't a part of much of the last few years relationship LXIS had with the client, RCI Utilities, but I guess I was there at the end.

I'm sure there's still work to do at LXIS, but not nearly enough to pay my paycheck, and so for the first time in many years I find myself putting together fresh resumes and cover letters, and crossing my fingers that some of these positions are actually available and don't have, like, 20 other overqualified web developers resumes on file.

Just a hope. In the meantime, I think I might do a little landscaping work for my friend Cara. Perhaps that would be a nice change.

Posted by tiny daniel at 9:32 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

I went to the hour long meditation at the Seattle Shambhala Center, cause it's near my work, and around the time I finish up.

That's where I first went, originally when I was interested in Buddhism. It makes me feel like I did when I first started going, some five years ago now. Sort of raw and glad. I went last Thursday and then again tonight. It's not too entertaining, but a little more satisfying.

Posted by tiny daniel at 8:38 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

My mom came from Illinois and so we had a momma party. Five mommas of 2 generations came and ate and listened to music. We were pretty bawdy for a momma party, and lots of momma based discussions came up.

Like: If your mom (or your kid) were helping you move, is there anything you'd hide so they wouldn't come across it? Me and my mom couldn't think of anything, but for my friend Cara, it was less than hypothetical. She had an entire box of things she had to dig out of her stuff to have hidden when her mom did recently come to help her move.

Posted by tiny daniel at 4:52 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

My beautiful friends Josh and Jesse (who unfortunately I have no digital pictures of) just got back from getting married on the East Coast, and then spending their honeymoon raking Blackberries in Maine.

Jesse's family insisted they have the wedding out there, and then Jesse's grandmother sobbed the entire time (and not in a heppy way). Evidently Josh is not worthy. Well, I personally couldn't think of anyone wortheir.

They drew their wedding invitations...how sweet is that? I liked the little imprint on the back side of the card:

Posted by tiny daniel at 2:37 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Posted by tiny daniel at 8:09 PM | Permalink | Comments (5)

Somebody said that Mercury was in retrograde, an astrological event generally said to bring about daily obstacles and communication difficulties, so I checked, and sure enough, Mercury is in retrograde from September 15, 2002 - October 7, 2002.

I suppose that would explain a lot, because some difficult thing has happened in just about every aspect of my life. It helps a little when I can think about it as part of a cycle that must come around and then, happily, pass.

Posted by tiny daniel at 5:20 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

When I first got out of retreat, we stopped for lunch in a small town on Salt Spring Island, and I about choked when I saw this photo (this is just a detail) on the front page of the Times-Colonist, Victoria BC's local paper.

The headline: Doggone it, That's Wet!

The story? About a day in the local pool where people can bring their dogs. Only in Canada, yo.

Posted by tiny daniel at 4:51 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

I am baybeesitting. This means I sit on the babies. Actually no. It is more like I am their slaves. They can't cook so if they really need something to eat I have to cook it for them.

I like them though. They are good babies. Well, really they are not babies anymore. They are 4 and 6, but I don't really get to sit on them so it's kind of a moot point anyway.

It's always weird trying to enforce two people being respectful to each other (and the cats). How do parents do it? It's a mystery.

Posted by tiny daniel at 6:08 PM | Permalink

Oh. Did I mention I'm back?

Rzan, honey, thank you so much for such a rockin' series of posts.

I've got a few posts in queue but I keep forgetting to oupload the files when I'm home. Soon enough. I had a good retreat.

- Daniel

Posted by tiny daniel at 8:34 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

I just looked and saw that my last post was my 500th post. That's a lot of posts.

I'm going on retreat until September 1st and Rzan will be manning the helm here at the tinyblog until then...I hand it over to her...

Posted by tiny daniel at 1:14 PM | Permalink

Again I go on retreat for a week or so. Anyone interested in guest curating the tinyblog whilst I'm gone so as to keep it interesting? And give me something to read when I get back? Rzan? Gina?

I'm gone from the 26th through the 1st.

Posted by tiny daniel at 3:18 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

I thought that, like pool, my skill in bowling was destined to remain the same no matter how often I played. I think that my bowling is actually improved though, since I again shattered my previous all time high score (of two days ago) with an astounding 154.

I know, I know, two bowling related posts in one week. Hell, two times bowling in one week. But it was really good clean fun and pretty good physical therapy for my healing arm.

And really, a 154 is not too shabby!

Posted by tiny daniel at 3:15 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Isn't it about time you came out to Seattle, mom?

Posted by tiny daniel at 2:27 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Posted by tiny daniel at 3:21 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Some people may have noticed that I have some links to photos of me (and others) on my sidebar. There used to be different ones I was hosting on another server and it crashed, and those scans were lost.

Little did I know that little Samadhi liked to look at them all every day. Well, when the photos went down I made my pretty new 'fotographia' pages, and picked a whole new set of photos.

Well, it turns out that the old photos have been long missed, and so I finally got around to digging them out, rescanning them, and putting them up...at Sam's request:

Sam's Request Part I
Sam's Request Part II

Posted by tiny daniel at 1:35 AM | Permalink | Comments (4)

Last night I had a bike party. Micheal, my boss, called me and asked me if I wanted to get on bikes with a few of his friends and ride around the city and downtown to see what kind of fun we could find.

It was a delicious warm night and so of course I said yes, and we cruised to my friend Hudson's massive house party. My god. I mean seriously, like you could hardly move during the peak times, and I heard that people were still arriving at 3am. We rushed into the crush of people and danced and said hi to people we unexpectedly saw for the first time in years. We smoked and drank a bit until the claustrophobia set in and we were back on a bike again.

It was colder now and the wind rushed past us as we cruised at maximum speed down Capitol Hill in Seattle. Micheal said, "The rule is, you don't stop at an intersection unless you know you're going to get hit by a car." This seemed like a pretty foolhardy rule to me, but in the warm magic of the Seattle summer evening, it was somehow completely perfect, and no red light could contain us.

By the time we got downtown it was 2:30am and nowhere was still serving liquor. There were a couple of bars still open for people to dance at, but none of them looked attractive. We bought sausages from street vendors near The Bohemian, and wolfed them down hot. Then we were off again.

We cruised the nearly dead streets, and down one secluded street I saw a group of people, one of them singing some old Sam Cooke song (cupid, draw back your bow-ow, and let, your arrow go, straight to my lovers heart for me). They were already past it, and I started to speak up to say I wanted to go back, when they already started turning around.

It seems Micheal and Alison knew them. At the heart of the congregation was a penny taxi...a cart that rides behind a bicycle, and Micheal's first job in Seattle had been driving one. Alison was a cab driver and knew him as well. We went down to meet them and it was a merry group.

Some were sitting drunkenly in the penny taxi, and the rest were standing around, smoking and listening to this guy sing and just generally bullshitting jovially. We joined them and soon I was making requests (do you know any al green, can you sing any otis redding?) and we were enjoying a smoke with the penny taxi driver.

We caroused for a little while and then it was back on bikes as we rode to Alison's apartment, above a local club called The Graceland, to settle in for some tea. From a nearby apartment I heard the wafting strains of a guitar. Mellow and watery and beautiful, it sounded a little like Funkadelic's early mellow grooves, or perhaps some Hendrix a la Castles Made of Sand.

"What are they playing?" I said, "It sounds like Funkadelic but I don't think I've ever heard that song."

"Oh," they replied, "those are our friends. That's live, they're in the studio playing right now."

Entranced, I walked down the hallway into, sure enough, a little recording studio, where they were sitting in dimly lit corners twisting away at their instruments.

"Hey," I said, "That's really beautiful...it sounds like Funkadelic!"

"Thanks," said the man nearest the door, in what I could only discern as a completely fake british accent.

"Who is it?" said one of the players who was a little deeper into the studio, in an accent almost as fake.

"It's someone who was listening to us from across the hall and thought it was groooouvy," and when he said groovy he drew it out, making the accent even more rediculous.

So I sat and listened for awhile until I decided it was awfully early in the morning, and decided to ride my way up the hill and return the bike to it's home so I was free to go wherever I liked. It was a hard ride all the way back up Capitol Hill, but very satisfying.

Posted by tiny daniel at 10:27 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

You see, I used to work a job where I had about 6 uninterrupted hours in front of a computer screen. Games were blocked, chat was blocked by the firewall, and so my only method of communication with the outside world was Email and the bloggy. I could just sit and think about what I was going to blog about for a few hours, and then have an hour or so to actually write the post and teak it a little bit as the morning got a little busier and people started to file in looking bleary eyed.

Now most of the time I'm in front of a computer I have writing and web work to do that I'm actually being paid for, and I'm being paid pretty well, so I really feel this responsibility to actually work when I'm at work, so I'm really having to think about actually *gasp* setting aside some of my own personal time in order to blog.

In other news. I got laid. Yummy.

Posted by tiny daniel at 6:04 PM | Permalink

I worked for Spacelabs Medical for almost three years. Longer than any other job.

I am writing this post in the last hour of my employment here.

I've been working part time at my new job, and Monday morning will be my first day of full time there.

Here's a shot of me and my new boss, Micheal, talking some business:

May the force be with me. Hehehehe.

Posted by tiny daniel at 5:57 AM | Permalink | Comments (7)

When I was a kid I used to love Italian Ice. I don't know how Italian it really is, but it was the midwest's version of gelato, and came in two flavors, strawberry and lemon-lime. The lemon-lime was the best.

I walked into the grocery store near my house one day and found these lime popsicles that taste exactly like the Italian Ice I used to eat as a kid. My god they are good.

As I was preparing to go to work, leisurely strolling around in front of my door, I saw my neighbor lounging around on her couch watching a movie and thought perhaps she would like one of the best popsicles in the world.

I knocked on her door, "Do you want a popsicle?"

She did look a little puzzled, "I uhh, I just brushed my teeth."

"Oh." I said, lamely, and then trying to explain, "I was just walking by, thinking how good my popsicle was, and I thought maybe you'd want one."

"Okay, I guess I will have one then."

"Let me go get one."

I ran into my apartment to get her a popsicle. I returned with it and she took a tentative lick.

"Oh wow. It is good," she looked at the popsicle for a moment and then asked me, "Do you want me to give you some money?"

In retrospect I should have said straight-faced, "Yes. It will be twenty-three dollars." But, shocked and mildly insulted I could only sputter out, "No!"

Posted by tiny daniel at 12:13 AM | Permalink | Comments (9)

This article about scientists who are studying the meaning of 'um', 'uh', 'like', 'y'know' and other language placeholders, was really fascinating to me.

I sometimes use uhhh and umm in the ways described in the article (to signal an upcoming pause in the narrative flow), but often I have the very disconcerting (to some people, like my sister) habit of not using these words.

When I'm telling a story, I often like to structure it in some coherent, meaningful way. On the tinyblog I can simply wait however long it takes for the words to come, and then write them.

When I do this in conversation though, people seem to find it pretty disconcerting. If someone asks me a question, I'm putting all my mental resources towards answering it, and often don't reserve a little attention to indicating that I am not simply ignoring them. The same thing happens when I am telling a story and stop to consider the structure of the next portion.

Even worse is when i do it at work. People call me on the phone and when they ask for information, I simply start looking for the information wordlessly.

An annoyed "hello?!" is sometimes my reward.

I guess I'd better start cultivating my ummmmms.

[ Link via the bleublog. ]

Posted by tiny daniel at 4:41 AM | Permalink | Comments (7)

I work an eight hour shift in the middle of the night and have to stay in the same room pretty much the whole time. Lack of cooking facilities, storage, or any way to go run and get something make for some...creative mealtimes.

I'd like to share with you my latest culinary invention, that, to all intents and purposes, should have been completely inedible, but, on the contrary, it was so good I had to eat every last bite before I could even begin typing this post.

I will share with you now the recipe:

warm sloppy cream of greens soup

you will need:

1 small block of firm tofu
2 tbsp canned mustard greens (preferably seasoned southern style)
2 tbsp whole milk plain yogurt

Chop the tofu into small cubes and place in a bowl. Add several spoonfuls of canned collard greens, including some of the juice. Microwave for 30 seconds or until sort of warmish. Add a big dollop of yogurt and mix it all in. Eat with a spoon.

I'm not kidding. It's really, really good. Like so good that I'm probably going to make it again. I'd probably even make it for a guest.

What do you make that should be absolutely disgusting but is actually incredibly good?

Posted by tiny daniel at 5:57 AM | Permalink | Comments (12)

A couple of people mentioned me in their surveys as a "she", so I just thought I'd clarify:

I'm a "he".

Posted by tiny daniel at 5:03 PM | Permalink | Comments (5)

And now the winner of the Blogger Pride! The Blogger Survey Bonus Question: Do You Fear The Booge?

There were no losers, especially since I didn't tell anyone there was a contest. And the winner is:

Fellow Heather B. Hamilton fan, grillboy with:
"Well, if it is true that we fear the unknown, then I would say yes."

honorable mention:
Banalities, with
"I fear the boogy. White girl ain't got no rhythm."

Your prize? These dandy customized oversized banners that you may admire, post, or send to /dev/null (that's like the recycling bin, for those who are not unix-savvy).

Thank you so much to everyone who answered. You so rock the house. There were some really well-thought-out answers and I got some fantastic links to try.

Posted by tiny daniel at 2:18 AM | Permalink | Comments (7)

I found this in a Cycle magazine in my friends bathroom. Does anyone get this joke?

Posted by tiny daniel at 3:16 PM | Permalink | Comments (8)

My own answers to Blogger Pride! The blogger survey. Thanks so much to everyone who's gone to the trouble to take the survey.

Ethics/Personal Life:

Has a blog post ever got you into trouble?
Well, when I wrote about my dad he got pretty pissed off and demanded I remove it. Things I knew would cause trouble with specific people I simply left out. I am trying to toe the line between being completely open about my own life, and not hurting anyone.

How many people do you know face-to-face who read your weblog?
Almost everyone I know who gets online has probably seen it at least once when I turned on their computer, opened up a browser window, and bookmarked it. My sister used to read every single post until she (yesterday) moved to Wappinger Falls, New York to practice Buddhism full time. My mom reads, I just found out one of my childhood friends reads...I think about 20 people I know in person check on a semi regular basis.

Have you met any of your regional (or even remote) bloggers?
I have met almost everyone on my Seattle blogger list on the Linklove page. I have also met Jish(happy birthday!), Mena of Dollarshort, and Ben. Some of my absolute closest weblogging buddies live very far away, so I actually went out of my way to make nice with people in my area, and I did not regret it. It hearkens back to the old dial-up BBS days when I use to meet local folks for ice cream and pizza nights, when everyone I met online was local.

Do you modify or delete posts? How often? Why?
I work a post when I first publish that, but after that I'd rather work on a new post than edit an old one. It's not the New York Times for chrissakes.

How much is your weblog a part of your personal identity? Do you feel like people who don't know about your blog don't really know you?
I think it's a fair part of my identity. I have such an exhaustive set of my autobiographical stories on the tinyblog, that people who read it definately know a lot more about my personal history than those who don't. Plus, it's been sort of my foray into branding myself. It was quite a fun experience to pick fonts and colors and visual ideas that I felt reflected what I wanted to express in my writing.

How has blogging changed your life?
I think it's honed my writing. I think I've had a chance to write and explore a lot of autobiographical details. I've made a very cool network of online friends. I learned how to code, partially because of blogging, and had a playground to test my skills, which actually led to paying code work.

Technical/Design:

Do you know how to code at all? Did you learn how to code by blogging?
I'm relatively proficient in HTML, CSS, PHP, and MySQL. Blogging definately dug me into it. Then I took some classes. Then I got a job doing it. It's very cool.

What weblogging tool do you use and why?
I use Movable Type for many reasons. I was a part of the general conversation when the very idea of making it more than just a tool Ben wrote to manage Mena's weblog into a real application everyone could use. I was one of the alpha testers of MT, and I think I just might have been the first person besides Mena and Ben to install it on a server (with Mena and Ben over my shoulder in AIM).

Other than that, it is an extremely stable, flexible, and good-looking application. I had no idea that it would grow to include the massive feature set that it now does. There are so many things that can be done with it that I will probably never do. God I hope it develops into a serious and profitable career for the two of them.

Does the design seem like something that is just something that has to be dispensed with in order to be able to write publicly, or is your design an integral part of your writing and presentation?
Someone pointed out that this was a pretty convoluted question. I have seen plenty or pretty darn good blogs that use an only slightly modified Movable Type template, but the template itself is pretty damn good. A good design adds to my goodwill and feeling of a site and increases my chances of reading it.

How many times have you changed your weblog design entirely (or nearly so)?
I've changed the external design 3 times, and the code structure twice. The current design works pretty well, and I've stuck with it for quite a long time. I do have an idea and images for a redesign, but I think that's a little while away still.

Readership/Motivation:

How many people would you guess (educated guess based on hit counts/logfiles) read your weblog on a weekly basis at least?
I think it fluctuates, and is really hard to guess. Almost no one who answered the survey actually did guess, most of them just recorded their daily hits which means almost nothing. My best educated guess is 30-50 people, which is astoundingly cool.

What have you done to get more people to look at your site?
Trying to write the best stuff I can, and not post when I have nothing to say. When I do my series' that seems to be a draw. I do post in others comments, and generally develop relationships with other bloggers, but I do that mostly because I like other people and like to communicate with them. It does have the side effect of some traffic though. Regular readers are really more important to me than a high number of one-timers, and perhaps even more important than comments and feedback.

Why do I even care? Well, it just increases the value to me personally of writing if there's a reasonable audience to interact with it. If I didn't want people to read it I could have easily used Word or something. The purpose of publishing is readership. It richens the environment, and inspires me to find new stories and tell them with some punch.

What one or two characteristics make a blog really popular? Are there things that you could do to have more people read your weblog that you conciously do not do? Why?
Consistancy, good design, and community involvement. Yes I know that's three. I should have said three. Feel free to add one more if you answered this question and only included two.

What really popular weblog do you think most deserves it...and/or least deserves it?
I can't believe how badly people wussed out on this question. I think Mena, Shauna and Meg have really worked hard for their readership. I personally thought that Wil Wheaton's blog was pretty damn funny back when I read it, and I think the cult-of-personality that formed around him was pretty funny, but I guess I have to still say he's pretty much the least deserving. The Bloggies this year were just pathetic.

How do you feel about your readership? What makes for a quality readership to you?
I am SO appreciative of people who read the tinyblog. I feel like it's a sign of respect, for one thing, and with literally hundreds of thousands of people doing this, for someone to spend a little time each week here is really just an honor. A quality readership is one that reads intelligently. Sometimes that means comments and sometimes it doesn't. Some people have even gone back and read some signifigant quantity of my archives, which always blows me away. That's goddamn quality. Hehehe.

By the way, if you're here for the first time, and never saw the tinyblog before, and this is damn near the only post on the page, the best way to get to know the tinyblog is to have a look at the posts in my favorite, or series' catagories.

Influence of Other Bloggers:

What other blogger is most responsible for you starting your own weblog.
Shauna. I found her weblog and read it before I got hooked into the whole blogging situation in general, and she really planted the seeds of it. Plus, she provided hosting space quite early on, making me her sweeet, sweeet bitch. I am still an honorary bitch to this day.

Who was the first other blogger (that you know of) who put you on their sidebar, and how did you feel? How did it influence your blogging?
It was Pat, who is incredibly supportive to both new bloggers and to the blogging community in general. I was getting ready to quit posting, about a month into it, when Pat put me on his sidebar. I remember thinking...oh, I'm on someone's sidebar...I can't quit posting now.

What other blogger do you most admire for her writing skills?
Some people have suggested it was sexist to use the feminine pronoun here. Perhaps they might also think it is sexist that it is considered grammatically correct to use the masculine pronoun when the gender is unspecific in the english language and is used this way in publications of all types for centuries. So, I don't think it's so sexist.

I thought Dooce is tremendously funny and talented, and was quite crestfallen when she stopped writing under her own name (or anywhere I could find her). There's many others, but I'd like to mention the not-so-often mentioned saigonsam's: The Airman's Mess and dirty chele's: A Small Victory for sheer honest, gritty, true-to-life goodness. I, Asshole used to be a fav, but she's gone now.

What other blogger do you most admire for her design skills?
Actually, it's probably Tom Working. He just has a very cool visual language that I really like. The inline graphic headers in his blog are really just a scream.

Who is a blogger that you think is really good but doesn't get nearly the attention they are worthy of?
Well, Kat over at The Sagbottom Home for Wayward Girls for one, and the Brainlog, which always seems to have something interesting to say.

Do you feel obligated to have people on your link lists/sidebars that you never read?
I guess I should have known that no one would ever admit to this.

What one or two characteristics define a really quality blog (in your humble opinion, of course)?
Consistently doing whatever it does best. I tend to like honesty and a little research as well. Plus pretty pictures.

Bonus Question:

Do you fear The Booge?
Don't be silly. He's just a harmless, mild-mannered little genetic scientist who lives in Canada, with a pretty wife and a young boy who he takes snapshots of. What's to be afraid of? Surely all is as it appears!

Posted by tiny daniel at 2:55 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

By the time I got to work I was so tired I couldn't even think about doing my job. Just a general weariness so strong it bordered on paralyzation. I'm finally getting paid to do what I want, which is develop in PHP, and between that and my actual full time job, my brain is on overload. I wasn't sure what to do, I just tried to find some ways to gently rouse myself from the torpor.

I laid down on the floor for a moment on my back, and then I remembered that in yoga that's shivasana or the corpse pose, and it's a resting pose. I needed a restorative pose. I did what I think is called the crocodile pose, lying on my stomach, with my head resting against my folded forearms. In a little while I did start to feel about 5% or 10%...well...restored.

I did a few push-ups, which was a revelation since I haven't been able to do them since I broke my elbow. I did 5 or 6, and felt like such a stud. My friend Josh does like 50 or 100 every morning, which is both silly and impressive.

My blood was flowing a bit and I realized that physical activity was the way to go. I put on my sneakers and sweatshirt and ran around the corporate building in the cool, damp night air.

I've been a computer geek for too long now, and I was seriously done by the time I got around the building, but I felt better for it. Felt like I was healing, felt like I might not be a total cripple the rest of my life, a brain in a jar hooked up to a keyboard or something. There's hope for my body yet. Oooh, only 2 more months, honey.

Posted by tiny daniel at 5:47 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

I raise my glass to Beth, my beloved friend who seems to know so well how to enjoy life and be an honest and forthright friend. May she experience ecstacy until the end of time.

(Yes, Beth, I scanned your photos and you can have them back now.)

(Yes, Beth, I want to load up the whole crew and go to Folklife on Saturday.)

Posted by tiny daniel at 11:35 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

Well...guess it wasn't so hard after all. Maybe I should have included just a little less of the finger.

Mental Note: Fun little games garner more comments than poetry.

Posted by tiny daniel at 12:53 AM | Permalink | Comments (5)

My new favorite HTML editor and freeware program is now HTML-Kit. I haven't seen Homesite 5.0, but this definately trumps 4.5. So many cool features and it's really easy to write plug-ins for. Plus, it's free!

Posted by tiny daniel at 12:10 AM | Permalink

Can you guess what this is?

Posted by tiny daniel at 11:56 PM | Permalink | Comments (10)

A few photos for you to enjoy of rzan, at my mom's request.

Thanks for the scanner, mom!

Someday I might post as many photos as the booge. Well... probably not. He posts a lot of photos.

You can do so much more with photos when you have them in a digital format, yo. With a print you can only show a few people, but if it's digital then my sweet aussie friend can see it.

Posted by tiny daniel at 6:25 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

Shakespeare in the park really rocks these days.

Yeah, so does Bruce Lee's grave.

Do you think you can call God on your cel phone?

We should go to that pay phone up there and dial 1-800 information and ask them for a listing for The Lord.

Why would we go to the payphone?

So we don't waste cel phone minutes.

Dude, it's the weekend and the cel phone minutes are flowing like pussy.

Oh. Well it's more poetic to call The Lord on a payphone.

(long pause)

I'll never think about pussy or cel phone minutes in the same way again, you bastard.

Posted by tiny daniel at 1:25 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

Now back to our regularly scheduled blogging I guess, it's been so long!

My birthday party was crazy mad fun, and I got a new scanner (lucky YOU!) and some wine, and some dharma books, and some dishwashing liquid and sponges, and just massive, massive TLC from all corners of the globe. Possibly the best birthday ever. Everything just came together.

Now it's back to work. I have as much contract work as I can do with lxis.net, and I've just been digging in with great gusto. I'm learning MySQL, and a bunch of UNIX administration stuff.

I have a lot of time to read on the bus, and I'm reading The Earth Store Bodhisattva, Barrell Fever, The Places That Scare You, Adobe InDesign 2.0, PHP/MySQL For Web Development, and an anthology of short, short poems called Eight Lines and Under.

It would be nice to have a little laptop cause then I, like meg, could write my blog posts on public transportation.

Posted by tiny daniel at 12:23 AM | Permalink

It's a guest post by, guess who...my mom:

I am sitting here reminiscing about your birth. It was a classic labor with contractions by the clock just like the book said. Unlike my other births, your water didn't break until well into labor.

At that point, your head was down far enough to act as a cork, trapping the water inside with you. And then you were born and as your head cleared the water came rushing out like a big wave. I always said you surfed out, ready to take on the world.

You were eight and a half pounds and born with a lot of energy. You were never shy about being held by strangers. Bubby Glor's favorite thing to say about you when you were an infant was "He's so smart, look how he scrutinizes everything." You were born shortly after midnight so you just made it on the 9th.

The doc came and stayed at our house that night and I made molasses sweet bread while I was in labor so that I could have it with a cup of tea after you were born.

You were a good looking baby with lots of dark hair and very alert right from the start. Well, that's all, but being pregnant with you and birthing you was a very good time and I thank you for your presence in my life.

Posted by tiny daniel at 6:44 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

Happy mother's day to my mom, and all the other moms out there.

Some excellent tinyblog guest posts written by my mom:
tinymom at spanish camp
sex education
dad: per mom

Enjoy.

Posted by tiny daniel at 12:15 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Tomorrow (the 9th) is my 27th birthday!

I shave my beard every year on my birthday, so this year I'm having people take before and after photos. Plus, I just got a new color scanner in the mail for my birthday, so hopefully I will be able to show you in short order my newly shorn birthday face.

Also, Friday the 10th is my birthday party. If you live in the Seattle area and/or think you can get here and somehow didn't get an invite, email me and I will get you one in short order.

Have money burning a hole in your pocket? I don't have an Amazon wishlist, but if you want to make a tax-deductible donation to Amnesty International, that is my charity of choice. I think spending money on keeping people from being tortured and killed is a good idea.

Me and the tinyblog thank you for your support.

Posted by tiny daniel at 4:48 PM | Permalink | Comments (9)

Okay, that's it for the Back to the Metro Bus Series, which can now be found on the sidebar with the other series'.

Posted by tiny daniel at 4:39 PM | Permalink

In Textism's Twenty Faces, Dean Allen writes about twenty book typefaces including Perpetua, the primary display font here at Tinyplace.org and the tinyblog.

Adobe's info says about perpetua, "Perpetua’s clean chiselled look recalls Gill’s stonecutting work and makes it an excellent text typeface, giving sparkle to long passages of text;".

and oh yes...via JerryKindall.com

Posted by tiny daniel at 6:47 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

I was talking with the rzanimal and nateward yesterday over dinner about our earliest experiences of self awareness. Nateward told us about a time when he was growing up in Tunisia and he was a small child of about two or three. He said he just suddenly had this awareness that he was a person in a room...that the tables and chairs and things were seperate from him, and it made him feel very small.

I couldn't remember my first moment of self-awareness, but I did remember being in my front yard once when I was about age ten. I was just walking and just sort of thinking of what I had been hearing in Catholic church about God's omniscience.

So...God knew exactly what I was going to do in the next second, even if I didn't. I took a step forward and God had known I was going to do that. Suddenly, without planning it, I veered off to the right, and wondered if God had forseen that I was going to do that. Probably. My little brow set in determination.

I started walking, then sort of veered to the left, then immediately veered to the right, walking as spontaneously and unpredictably as I could manage. I was in essence trying to juke God...to zig when He thought I was going to zag. After a bit of this I realized that God had probably forseen my whole little existential crisis and everything that came with it, and resigned myself to a future that I didn't know anything about, but God probably did.

I wonder if He knew I was going to become a Buddhist and not believe in a omniscient sentient creator of the universe anymore?

Posted by tiny daniel at 5:06 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

About 3:30pm Friday afternoon my last remaining Gramma/Step-Gramma died. She never got to teach me her unbelievable spaghetti sauce/homemade ravioli recipe. I didn't get to talk to her but I told my Dad to tell her in her ear that I loved her and was glad she was my gramma and thank you for feeding me.

She used to say "Monge Monge Tastadooda" which is my transcription from memory and means "Eat! Eat, hardhead!" in Italian.

Posted by tiny daniel at 6:39 PM | Permalink | Comments (8)

I thought I might have forgotten someone and of course I did, a sweet boy in the UK with a really sweet blog. He's one of the only people I've ever met who thinks I'm "old" at age 26. I guess I should get used to it though...only an increasing amount of people are going to think I'm old in the future I guess. Hehehehe. 26 though...sheesh, what a little whippersnapper. He even made Shauna's Midnight Brownies. He highly recommends them (with photos!).

And of course, I forgot Nate-o-potato, who is my rock-solid dharma and dinner cooking companion.

Posted by tiny daniel at 1:11 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

I'm really feeling like I did something right in my life this morning. I just made a mental scan of all the people I know and realized that most of them hook me up with some pretty good love!

My relatives, like my mom and my sister and my dad (spastic, but loving), my stepdad, my grandma (who's dying), my cousin Brina (I'm going to a vegan potluck at her house today!) are all so good to me and seem to go out of their way to make my life pleasant. I'd get together with all of them for a holiday meal any day.

My online friends, like Shauna (who's the online friend to end all online friends...if she didn't live so fucking far away we would be offline friends as well, like, last year) J (who's weblog I designed and who makes fantastic use of it), Julie (who may actually move here to Seattle someday), Pat (who said I have a place on his futon couch in Canada anytime), Mena (who might be my most famous online friend and still treats me like gold), Meg (who also might be my most famous online friends and who, goddamnit I need to go say hi to!), Shelly (who really needs to fly to Seattle and cook for me), Andrea (who actually called me from Hong Kong to hear a song...that rhymes!), Tom Working (who really knows how to have a seriously interesting IM session and make me burn my damn food every time), Paula (who gives good chat to the point where I shouldn't even say "hi" unless I have an hour free). They've hooked me up with a totally new kind of friendship. It's too bad I can't give them all a hug.

Then there's the combination online/offline friends, who I know pretty well both online and offline: Ariel (who's thinking about moving out of town...bah! But whatever you need to get a job, honey.), Buster (who is probably one of the coolest male friends I've ever had), SJ (who may think she's not my friend just cause she's not speaking to me, but she's so wrong), Jessamyn (who's house I may go over to soon to get my favorite hat and scarf now that it's nearly spring), Morgan (who writes the funniest blog written by a 15 year old ever), and Rebecca (who needs to invite me over for dinner and to use her scanner like...yesterday).

Then there's my mostly offline friends: Rachel (it's worth watching her play pool to see her wicked dancer's bum in action), Maggie (my sweet amiable darling friend), Beth (I think I'd take a bullet for her), Hudson (so sweet, so smart, so incomprehensible), Cara (how could I miss someone more?), and Rzan (who actually made me originally think to write this post by filling my whole life with love and humbling me with the awesome fucking force of her love).

With each and every one of those people I feel some real genuine expression of love, and that's no bullshit. I don't have any enemies. It's really only the people I love that can actually piss me off, I suspect.

I think those people are the bulk of the readers of the tinyblog as well, and so the tinyblog is just all about love today. Yum.

Hey, are you not on here and you think that's an oversight? It probably is...or, you could be my friend if you wanted to...I'm not that discriminate, and yet I end up associating with some of the most high quiality human beings ever. I wonder how that works.

Posted by tiny daniel at 6:45 AM | Permalink | Comments (9)

Wish me luck, I'm going under the knife.

An old friend I thought I'd never hear from again found the tinyblog and emailed me with a photo from my past...before I could braid my hair. Weird.

Posted by tiny daniel at 7:32 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

I've always liked to sleep with girls. I'm talking about actually sleeping here. Some snuggling, sure, but no nookie. I don't think many guys can pull this off, but in the years I've been in Seattle, I've always had a few female friends with whom we were mutually welcome in each other's beds from time to time.

There's been a variety of different scenarios. Sometimes it's a girl I would've gladly have sex with, but she wasn't gonna go there with me. Sometimes it's someone who totally has the hots for me but I know better than to get into something with them. Sometimes there's a really low-level sexual tension that's fun but we just both know anything more is out of the question. Sometimes we're totally hot for each other but we both know better than to get into something with each other. Sometimes (amazingly enough) the whole sexual thing is just not an issue.

I call it bed company. As in, "You're good bed company! Can I make you some pancakes?"

Of course, even when it's not sexual, bed company usually has to stop if I have an exclusive girlfriend, cause most exclusive girlfriends also like to have exclusive bed company rights, and I wouldn't begrudge them that. But when there's no girlfriend, I find great solace in bed company.

"Wow," some people say, "doesn't that cause some...uhh...boundary issues?"

And I say, "Damn you and your boundary issues!"

Of course it has caused some problems, but I think my record is excellent, and there definately haven't been enough problems to warrant an end to bed company. The problems have mainly stemmed from getting a little cavalier about the strength of my own willpower. Recall, if you will, one specific notable disaster.

Since my celibacy, bed company has really been a sticky wicket. Some of my friends have been really chaste bed company for a long time, and it seems almost a crime to give up my long time bed company pals. And really, bed company is just too good for me to be ready to give it up. It's just so...healing! However, a couple of times, bed company has really been at odds with celibacy.

The first time I tried a year of celibacy, some really sexy long-term bed company proved to be my undoing, and so I am double wary now in this, my second attempt at a solid year. So far it seems to be working out pretty well, the weeks blend into months, and it feels like I've been celibate for a long time, and still have a long time to go. Bed company helps make it bearable.

One last note on bed company. Have I ever had boys for bed company? Yeah, a couple of times, but it really takes the extraordinary guy to be able to deal with that, and it hasn't happened often. Besides, guys don't have boobies, which is really a big plus for bed company. Besides...boys are hairy and smelly.

Posted by tiny daniel at 5:09 AM | Permalink | Comments (5)

I work the graveyard shift, and I fought hard to get it. If they tried to make me work the day shift in the same place I work I would quit, and I'm so serious about that.

Unlike dooce, I had a pre-emptive policy about my weblog and work. I just told everyone I work with to go read my website, and gave them the URL. Now I know that none of them will ever read it. Even if they did...I have a really hard time believing they'd fire me for it. A write-up maybe...but we've been through that already.

So I'm not afraid to say that the influential women (all women, even my boss, her boss, and her boss, the VP of communications) in my department are some seriously dysfunctional ladies. I just can't tell you how beautiful it is not to have to deal with them all on a daily basis. I find that not seeing them has the pleasant effect of actually developing some real affection and understanding for them, which I have no doubt would melt away in days if I had to work with them for several hours a day again.

My main contact with them is group Email. Group Email like, "Someone is using my country crock from the fridge. I would like whoever it is to buy me a new tub of country crock since I am poor and cannot afford amenities like extra country crock."

For those not in the know, Country Crock is one of the many whipped and artificially flavored vegetable oils that comes in a tub. I think it's yucky, and I'm really a butter-only kind of person. I have butter here at work and I use it. I'd rather smear monkey-poop on my toast than Country Crock. I'll bet the Australians have some wierd comparable brand called SlipperyTub or something. They have wierd brand names.

You know I'm going to get to the point soon and I certainly hope I do.

I was teasing an early morning co-worker about it when she looked at me quite seriously and said, "You know they think it's you, don't you?"

I about blew a gasket. What?! They think I nick their undefended spread? Their Country Crock? Why that's madness!

I didn't use your damn Country Crock!

Posted by tiny daniel at 2:49 AM | Permalink | Comments (6)

A couple more fotographia offerings:

My friend rzan's son, Samadhi, and her mom Blackbird. I know what you're thinking...ok yes, she is kind of a hippie...but in the best possible way. No pictures of rzan yet. I still have to develop a recent roll of film.

Oh, and by the way, these are the only pictures on my sidebar that weren't taken by me. The credit goes to his dad, Jonathan Cameron:

samadhi
samadhi and his gramma bb

I'm suddenly feeling a little like The Booge.

Posted by tiny daniel at 3:04 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

In the interest of restoring my sidebar to its former glory, I put up some photos again.

New photos! Fancier page!

me, in the sky, with barbed wire
me at school
momma in the vines
my sister over at my house

Posted by tiny daniel at 7:27 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

When I stopped posting, a few people wrote me to let me know that they missed reading me write and that was really nice. Of course sometimes I get caught up and wish I could be a superstar or something. That's not why I started writing a weblog though, and it would be silly to start now.

I don't think I'd even be a very good web superstar, and I don't think I'm willing to put the amount of consistant effort into it that it requires. I know how much it stresses Mena out being a superstar (and yes I think she is).

Plus, I have to remember that it would never satisfy me. There's always someone else to compare yourself to. Even if I was Kottke, then I would still have someone to compare myself to. It still wouldn't be good enough, and plus, my writing would be really dull and self-congratulatory then. (snicker...sorry, I couldn't resist.)

Anyway, my point is that not as many people read me as Shauna, but probably more than the sea of blogspot blogs, some of which are super yummy. So no matter how many people, there would still be some blogs with more and some with less.

So I know I'm coming at this the long way, but I just kind of came to appreciate the people who do read the tinyblog, and that there's actually at least one person who's read damn near every post. How many writers throughout history have been able to say even that. So nothing I wrote has been a waste because at least one person read it.

Oh I know, I know. I should just write for myself. I did that. I have a box full of notebooks in my closet. Now I feel like it's more important to write as a way to communicate with other people, and so it's nice to have some people to communicate with.

I hope this isn't too tiresome of a blog subject...I just came to some peace about it and wanted to share.

Posted by tiny daniel at 2:20 AM | Permalink | Comments (4)

How do you ever get the courage to love again? How do you get the courage to make commitments to each other knowing the fickleness of the human heart? By God, how on Earth can you make a baby?

In one of the most painful situations I've ever been peripherally involved in, two of my friends who have lived together and raised their young son together are breaking up, and all the messy nasty insane manipulative stained cruelty that that entails.

It always seems so nice at first. They're so sexy...they teach you things you never knew about before...they fuck you in a new and exciting way you've never been fucked before and say all kinds of sweet things you've never heard before.

Finally, you say to yourself. Someone really has faith in me. Someone sees the best in me. Someone loves me.

It's like having a best friend, but a sexy best friend. They feel like a new part of your family. They meet your family. You hold them in your arms like a baby and if you're not too much of a jaded bastard you tell them you want to be with them forever. And goddamn it you mean it.

You make plans. You move in. You intertwine lives.

Then one day you're getting your friends to write depositions stating for the record what a bastard they are, and trying to calm your poor young son when he freaks out on the living room floor over some unrelated thing, and you know he's really freaking out because everything he thought was stable in his little universe is shattered forever and he can't do a goddamn thing about it.

But you can't give up. So you give those depositions to your lawyer and try not to turn into the demon that they have become. You pick up the pieces and try to hold it together.

I don't understand how you even think to try it again. Forgetfulness perhaps.

Posted by tiny daniel at 6:57 AM | Permalink | Comments (4)

Ahhh, new sidebar dots. Done with the help of the fabulous and free Text-Image.

Does it work on your browser/platform? If someone can test it in Netscape 4.x or anything on the Mac, I'd sure appreciate it. Seems to work fine in IE5+ and Mozilla on the PC.

Too bad Text-Image only generates pure HTML and no CSS. It would take me a fair amount of work to make it change colors on mouse rollover...a project for another day, unless someone has an efficient idea.

The sidebar photos are definately down. I've got some new ones I've been meaning to put up anyway, as soon as I can get access to a good scanner.

Posted by tiny daniel at 1:32 AM | Permalink | Comments (5)

Friday night I went to see the Wu-Tang Clan with Beth for her birthday. We had a parking miracle and found free street parking across the street from the venue itself (right next to completely full parking lots charging $8 for the evening). It was meant to be.

It's her birthday, rzan's birthday, Lynne's birthday, Carrie's birthday...all these Pisces!

After the Wu-Tang I went over to Buster and Rachel's house, and we all hogpiled on the bed and wrestled and pounded and farted on each other. Then we got a sudden craving for Hostess Cupcakes. It was a deep and abiding craving, but the nearest store that was open was 7 blocks away.

We each in turn tried to bully each other into going, and then finally we just called their downstairs neighbors on the phone (at 3am) and tried to bully them into going, "There's an emergency up here...we are in dire need of cupcakes...no time to explain...bye."

We were despondant. None of our attempts at cupcakes had met with success...until suddenly there was a knock on the door. Rob, one of the downstairs neighbors came trodding up the steps, "It's a good thing I don't have anything better to do. Were you going to give me money?"

We hastily paid him off and cackled with glee as he walked down to the store. What had we done to have such good fortune and such a selfless sucke...neighbor?

Finally he returned, and we rejoiced and gorged ourselves with cupcakes.

Oh by the way, the reasons I wasn't posting were because for one thing, my dad was really unhappy about my posts about him and really gave it to me in email. I had to put the posts on hold while I thought about it and that sure didn't make me want to write. Plus, I screwed up my sidebar (soon to be fixed) and the tinyblog dots didn't work right anymore. Also, f2s, where I was hosting my sidebar pictures, crashed bigtime and none of the pictures are working. So things just weren't feeling right with the tinyblog and I couldn't bring myself to write. Thanks to everyone who checked to make sure I was okay.

Mmmm. Good to be back. Mmmmm. Cupcakes.

Posted by tiny daniel at 11:33 PM | Permalink | Comments (7)

I think once a year it's worth running Rob's Amazing Poem Generator on the tinyblog. I'm convinced there's something eerily briliant about this tool. My three favorite poems it generated:

I

the doctor. just and now
I . have pretty sharp.
I saw
a couple of Buddha in January.
I saw it was
a
haircut, maybe.

II

the German
version of
their archives
that makes this will
be found. Update: I went over
to see a bad case of
her post she links
to remember who posted at
him. to
school, or haphazardly
posted something similar,
I could see
a pleasant surprise to the world. In flash! comic about
2am, and in your server, and it Hi
Rose. up? Let fly.

III

the image, but
not him to see the only remember
who posted something about the
Gummi Bears Theme Song for it
have been bosom ha! buddies lately.
She promptly posted. Notice that move
me * with paragraph after sitting by being forced to
Oh, and hit me
with a scan of buddha
Sakyamuni accompanied by
5am
I Asshole DogHead
Journal A painting I thought
mine were moved by it,
and in January. I somehow managed to the
laziest band name is basically about, debugging. It using CSS.

Last years effort was pretty funny.

Posted by tiny daniel at 5:52 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

I spent way too long tonight finally doing a little php mailform for my sidebar. It's like I somehow managed to forget, at one point or another everything I've ever learned about programming though. I re-remembered it all though, by being forced to remember everything I knew about debugging.

It looks pretty simple, but the email I get looks pretty sharp. I wish you could see it. What you can do though, is send an Email, and then 'view source' to see a couple of little confirmation HTML comments.

Anyway, put it to good use, and hit me with an Email...it's easier than ever before. Just fill in your favorite fields and let fly. You don't even have to leave the page.

If you like it, have PHP running on your server, and would like something similar, I can probably hook you up. Let me know.

Posted by tiny daniel at 3:51 AM | Permalink