jrsmith.net

Dad called this morning and said he was diagnosed with severe chronic obstructive pulmonary disease.

I’m sad for him. I’m angry at him. I’m angry at myself.

I’m sad for him because he’s staring death right in the face. I don’t believe in an afterlife. When he’s gone, he’s gone forever.

I’m angry at him because this is entirely his own fault. I’ve begged him for years to stop smoking. He always dismissed me. I knew this was going to fucking happen.

I’m angry at myself for all of the wasted time.

I’ve read that if he stops smoking and they’re able to clear some of the obstructions then he has a good chance for survival, but is he doesn’t stop smoking…

Anyone who knows my dad will know how unlikely that is.

I’m digging up hypnotherapists for him to help him quit. Hopefully, this is enough of a wake-up call that he’ll take it seriously.

I had the weirdest dream last night:

I came home, presumably from work, and one of my windows was slightly open, and the blinds were all fucked up. Obviously, someone had broken in. I ran inside and looked around… TV, game consoles, even my coffee table was gone. I went into the kitchen and noticed that whoever had broken in had written notes all over the whiteboard, then on the wall around it when they ran out of room. Then I noticed that the walls of the dining room and living room were also covered in notes addressed to me. I spent the rest of the dream reading them. The notes were all very critical and personal. The thief was my subconscious, and it was speaking directly to me, which is what made it so weird. I won’t share any of the messages here. They were far too embarrassing, and I don’t remember most of them verbatim anyway.

After a while I thought I should call the cops. Then someone pulled int my driveway. I went outside to find a middle aged woman and her daughter getting out of a car and walking towards me. They had the wrong address. End of dream.

I’ve switched my hosting provider from dreamhost to slicehost, and I’m pretty happy with it. I’d been with dreamhost for 2 years. In the last year or so, they’ve been fucking up. That last one is a doozy.

Still, I’ve been willing to put up with shitty performance, random outages and cumbersome account configurations, because the benefits outweighed those issues. They oversell to the point of insanity, so I get insane amounts of (theoretical) disk space and bandwidth. I’ve been basically using my account there as a remote backup system, since, as of today, my disk space allotment is 310.37 gigs. And that grows 2 gigs every week. For $10 a month, I may just keep that account and use it for storage.

But I’m rambling. The impetus for switching to a new host was the fact that php was completely fucked on their servers for about 4 hours on Tuesday. Normally, I wouldn’t have noticed, since php is shit and I don’t use it. But I’m using a small php script to gzip all of my css and javascript files dynamically, and when php went bye-bye, ALL OF MY SITES STOPPED WORKING! That’s because I was using the .htaccess commands “php_value” and “php_flag” to make everything work magically (as described here).

Needless to say, I was a little pissed. I sent them a support request explaining what was happening. Then I proceeded to go through all of my domains and comment out those lines, so that things would start working again. Let me say right now that I have a LOT of .htaccess files, so this was no fucking fun.

A few minutes later, I try to log into phpMyAdmin, and I find that the php problem affects even their own applications. They maintain those phpMyAdmin installations, not me. So I send another support request letting them know.

3 hours later, I get a response:

“I apologize for the problem with your website this afternoon. It appears that one of our admins prematurely removed some php support for all domains on our apache servers. The admin is correcting this on all apache services as I write this, but it may take about an hour for ever system to get updated.”

Amazing.

The gravity of this problem lies in the fact that when php can’t be executed properly, it just prints out its source. So, let’s say you’ve spent several months working on the Next Big Thing^TM, and you’ve written it in php for some reason. Suddenly, dreamhost screws up, and the source to your application is available to anyone who bothers to just visit your site.

That was the last straw for me.

I’d read about slicehost a while ago. I was interested, but the hassle of moving all of my sites to a new host prevented me from giving it serious thought. They’re a Virtual Private Server host, which basically means that you rent a virtual machine on their servers. You get full control over the virtual server. You can install several different flavors of Linux, format and reinstall as you see fit, and you can fine-tune memory settings. It’s far superior to shared hosting, where you’re basically just a low-level user on a server, and you have to beg and plead to get anything fixed/changed/added.

Normally VPS hosts are somewhat expensive, but slicehost is cheap. After the dreamhost fuck-up, I was sold.

All of my sites are noticeably faster. I have tighter control over databases, cron jobs, apache performance and programming language installations. I don’t have to jump through hoops just to install new python libraries anymore, and web frameworks like ruby on rails and django work without a hitch. I can force SFTP or FTPS connections instead of vanilla FTP.

It’s pretty sweet.

It’s been kind of a pain to sync up all that data, but I think I’ve mostly done by this point. The only site left to fix is Floris’s blog and image gallery. He had a gig of images uploaded. I’ve almost got him talked into getting his own hosting, though.

I’ve dropped the ball on my “daily drawings” things. I just haven’t had the time. Work has been kicking my ass. Weekends are spent with Jenn. On top of that, I’ve been trying to cook, so that’s more time spent at home doing mundane things.

I’m lying. I sort of enjoy it. It’s weird seeing how much random cooking knowledge bubbles up to the surface. I guess I’ve retained more from watching the Food Network than I ever realized. Thank you, Good Eats.

And thank you, Joanna, for buying me a George Foreman grill 3 years ago. I finally used it.

Sandra is pregnant. This is significant for several reasons:

• It takes the pressure off of me to spawn. Mom wants grandkids badly. Dad says I need to carry on the family name, as if there aren’t enough Smiths in the world. I can barely take care of myself. Kids are out of the questions until I’m 30, if ever.
• She supposedly couldn’t get pregnant. I don’t know why, but that’s what I was told, so it’s a “miracle baby”. I put that in quotes because… well, we don’t need to get into that. Sufficed to say, I’ve heard that before.
• Of my three siblings, she’s the only one in a position to have babies. I’m fucking irresponsible, and unstable as hell. My life is a ridiculous caricature of bachelorhood. Molly is 16. Crystal… heh. Sandra’s been living with Larry for however many years. They seem stable. She’s calmed down a lot. She’s really the only option.

I guess three counts as several.

So, anyway, keep your fingers crossed.

Things with Jenn are still going strong. It’s been three months and she hasn’t gotten sick of me or cheated on me with some douche bag from Florida yet, which is a good sign. She’s started talking about meeting her parents now, which fills me with terror. I guess it’s something that needs to happen, though, since I’d like to keep her around. I just make such horrible first impressions…

I haven’t really seen any movies worth mentioning. I haven’t read any books or found any new music since my last catch-up post. Like I said, I’ve been busy. I’m looking forward to Iron Man coming out in a couple weeks, as well as GTA IV. I’ve been playing Super Smash Brothers Brawl a lot lately, mostly at Jady’s house.

Rob and Big ended this week, and I’m giving serious thought to canceling my cable. It was the best show on TV right now, and now it’s gone, so what’s the point?

I have a lot of projects going on right now, outside of work.

• abillionthings.com - I bought this domain years ago with the intent of building a catch-all listing service. It would be free-form, so you could just create lists of whatever you want - to-do lists, favorite movies lists, shopping lists, wish lists, whatever. I love lists, and all listing systems I’ve used have been inadequate. I’ve started this project many times in many different languages and frameworks, and none have stuck. Recently, when Google App Engine started accepting beta developers, I got in and my interest was rekindled. I’ve been working on it little by little, and have a working version running locally using the SDK, but I haven’t had time to upload it and get it running.
• jennerwin.com - It’s mostly done. Jenn just needs to fill out the remaining bits. The backend works and the very, very minimalistic design is done.
• jrsmith.info - Needs to be done before June. I need screenshots, and I need to write a resume. I’ve never done that before. It’s kind of an intimidating task, since creating this is tantamount to admitting that I may be out of work soon in my mind. If I keep pushing it off, I’ll be safe. That doesn’t make any sense.
• overheardinhamptonroads.com - I just randomly registered this domain and whipped up something very, very quickly on tumblr the other day. Then I went through the entire internet and bookmarked 54 other sites that provide a similar service. My idea was to combine these bookmarks and Google Maps to add geolocation data to all of those sites, since the majority of them are focused around certain locations.
• new front page - This is an extension of the sidebar that used to be on the blog, but more advanced. It will replace the blog on the front page and work very much like FriendFeed, except it’s far more customizable. I basically set up a series of pipes on yahoo pipes to collect, categorize and normalize RSS feeds from my accounts on all of the different sites that one normally associates with “web two point ohhh”, plus a few non-standard ones. Periodically, that pipe is tapped and the output is stored in a database. Then a very simple python script allows browsing of those items by date and category (and eventually, tags). I think it’s pretty sweet. I’ve actually done this several different ways as well. Originally it was completely javascript-based, usng jQuery, and had lots of complicated transitions. I realized, though, that doing it that way would prevent search engine spidering, and that’s unacceptable, so I scrapped it. Anyway, it will be the default page for jrsmith.net soon, and it’ll make stalking me so much easier.
• recipe generator - Since I’m going to be cooking for myself in the foreseeable future, I wanted a way to take the pressure out of picking out feed to cook. I want to make a site that will maintain an inventory of my groceries (possibly synced from the ipod touch, which I use to make shopping lists). The site will have several recipe templates and will be able to produce random recipes based on available ingredients. It could then be scheduled to produce these recipes at convenient times, to take into account thawing times for meat, or whatever. It should be a simple thing to create. It could also generate shopping lists each week, which is a big bonus.

Those are just the web-related things. Jenn wants me to participate in some of the art projects she’s created or joined, one of which is the Five Five Project. Then there’s one that involves a wooden block and news clippings.

So, as I said… I’ve been busy.

Also, it makes me sad that I haven’t bought any t-shirts in so long.

Sigh.

Back to work.

I’m tired of all the death. Seriously.

Here are some doodles:

I’ll catch up on Friday, probably. Not that it matters.

I’ve been slacking, not that anyone seems to have noticed, save Jenn.

Why doesn’t Chik-Fil-A have a spicy chicken sandwich?

And here’s one for tomorrow, while I’m at it:

“have fun in that self-fulfilling pit of despair you call your life”

Also:

“life will be shitty for you once again because that’s how it goes for you.”

Fun stuff.

Now the ending to every story is most enchanting
Now whether its heaven or hell I wear it well
Please forgive me for rambling
I just wanted ya’ll to know
That I don’t know it all
So when that big o’l smile ends up being just a disguise

Don’t be surprised

Another crappy quick sketch, because I didn’t get home until 7:30, and between eating and sleeping for an hour because I haven’t slept much the past two days and was exhausted, I didn’t have much time.

But anyway, I drink your milkshake! I drink it up!

We’re off to an auspicious start, aren’t we?

I spent maybe 30 minutes on this before photoshop decided that I didn’t need to be able to save anymore, and then crashed. So this is what you get to launch my daily drawing experiment: a half-assed doodle. I’d put somewhat heavy detail into the cat and the jarred brain before it crashed. I’m pretty pissed about that.

I was commanded to update my blog, so here’s an update.

Things with Jenn are still going very well. She’s fantastic. My only worries at this point are that she’s going to snap out of it soon and realize she can do way better than me, and her inevitable departure for graduate school in another state.

I won’t get to see her this weekend or next, though, so anyone who might have been cursing me to themselves for not being available on weekends anymore, now’s your chance to get in some quality JR time. My phone is readied for the avalanche of calls that are no doubt coming.

I was watching TV earlier while enjoying my delicious Get Up And Goji smoothie, and I saw a lame commercial for KFC, advertising some kind of wrap, or something. It was unremarkable, until they showed this wrap being “grilled”:

The grill marks on the wrap are diagonal, while the grill itself is vertical. That amused me.

My Crystal boycott continues.

I may or may not have to look for a job in the not-so-near future. Maybe. I’m not sure. Either way, I’m putting together a resume/portfolio at jrsmith.info, just in case.

Speaking of websites, I’m working on one for Jenn to showcase her art. It’s very simple and no-frills, as per her instruction, but the backend is interesting. It’s entirely fed by her flickr account using the flickr api. It divides them up based on the sets she’s created in flickr. It only displays the images she’s tagged in a certain way. It uses Lightview for lightbox-ish image galleries, and it picks up the title and description from flickr. It also gets the post date and shows an icon on the gallery and image thumbnails to indicate new content. I think it’s pretty cool.

I thought There Will Be Blood should have won Best Picture.

I still need a new car.

I haven’t yet decided whether I want to get another roommate.

I’m thinking about forcing myself into being artistic again. I know of a few other art bloggers that post a drawing or sketch every day. That might be worth looking into. What do you think?

I’m also thinking of changing the structure of this site around again. It’s progressing more and more towards a miniblog, with the use of the sidebar listing all (well, not all) of the things that I do in other places. I’d like to make these blog posts and comments just another item in that list. I’d turn the main page into kind of a magnifying glass on the current day when you first visit, with the ability to browse forward or backward as you wish.

I just need time to do it.

Pop culture: I haven’t read any books in a while. I normally read on the weekends, and my weekends have been pleasantly occupied lately. I’ve been reading Bluebeard by Kurt Vonnegut when I have time. I’ve been watching The Wire and Breaking Bad, along with an embarrassing number of horrible reality shows like Rock of Love, at the request of my beloved Jenn. I’m listening to the Herbie Hancock CD that won best album at the Grammys, River: The Joni Letters. I’m also listening to the new Z-Trip CD Shifting Gears and the leaked Gnarls Barkley CD The Odd Couple. Movie-wise, I’ve seen Fool’s Gold (ugh), The Other Boleyn Girl (uggh), and CJ and I are supposed to see Be Kind, Rewind at some point. I’ve watched There Will Be Blood, Run Fat Boy Run, The Golden Compass, In The Valley Of Elah, Lars and the Real Girl, Beowulf, Michael Clayton, Elizabeth - The Golden Age, We Own The Night, The Assassination of Jesse James REALLY LONG TITLE, Hitman, Rendition, Juno, Atonement, The Bucket List, The Kite Runner, and Charlie Wilson’s War.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to look up instructions for making resin jewelry for the girl that owns my heart.

Another awesome weekend, come and gone. There was one glaring blemish, though:

Over the many, many years that I’ve had to put up with this person, I’ve learned to mostly ignore her. Yes, occasionally, when I’m feeling short-tempered for whatever reason and she starts her bullshit, I’ll get pissed. I’m generally more pissed at myself for giving her the reaction she wants than I actually am at her, since it’s her nature to be a bitch, and she can’t really be blamed for that. You are who you are, and most people don’t have the ability, desire or motivation to change themselves.

This weekend, however, she went a little too far.

Saturday was my mom’s birthday. I brought Jenn to meet everyone. Two days prior, Crystal made it clear that she was going to be extra bitchy for just that reason. I tried to prepare myself and Jenn for this, but no one ever believes me when I tell them how she can be.

I did my best to ignore her. I didn’t make eye contact. I ignored her when she tried to get my attention so she could do whatever she could to irritate me. I tried not to react. But she just kept going.

Eventually I decided to fire back. I’ve found that lately, the quickest way to shut her up is to highlight how much of a mooching deadbeat she is. She’ll get defensive and foul-mouthed when I do this, but then she just gets pissed off and retreats to her cellphone, presumably to txt one of her friends and complain about how much of an asshole I am, desperate for someone to agree with her and reassure her that she’s a decent person.

That’s more or less what happened Saturday, but to a greater degree, with much fouler language, and in front of Jenn, who felt awkward the rest of the night because of it. And I’m more than a little upset because of that.

She does this on purpose. There’s no doubt about that. She intentionally and blatantly does whatever she knows will get on my nerves. I’m not really sure why she does it. Maybe she’s stuck in some kind of self-perpetuating cycle of believing I’m a dick, which justifies her offensive behavior towards me, which in turn sometimes prompts me to be a dick to her. Maybe she honestly believes that her little comments are funny, and everyone thinks she’s really clever and witty, and I’m just mad that I have to bear the brunt of her oh-so-entertaining routine. Maybe she acts out to cover up her insecurities over how her life is progressing, and since I’m arguably the more successful of her siblings, I get to be the target of those outbursts. Maybe she’s just a fucking sadist who can dish it out, but can’t take it. I have no idea, and I have no interest in finding out, because it isn’t worth the effort. She’s so over-the-top defensive that any and every bit of constructive criticism is met with sarcasm, denial, foul language and a temper tantrum. You can’t talk to her. There’s no discussion to be had here.

So, I’ve decided to boycott Crystal.

I will not be attending any family function that includes her. I won’t be going to dinner if she’s invited. I won’t be coming to the house if she’s home. Of course, certain types of events can’t be avoided, like birthdays or Christmas, and I’d rather not miss out on those things. Time spent there will be at an absolute minimum. I’ll be dropping off presents, eating a little food, and gone before she has time to open her hateful mouth.

This is a painful thing for me to do. In recent years, I’ve realized how important it is to spend time with family. It’s become a pretty big part of my life. I just don’t see any other way to open her eyes to how much of a bitch she can be.