Ugh, I think I'm going to have to do what I've been dreading and post a damn email address. Or put up a message-board. God, which is worse? If I post the email address then I'm going to be stuck sifting through tons of porno spam for the rest of my vile existence. Oh, all right, it's volume 22 at email dot com. Bite me, each and every one of you.

I don't typically become involved with politics, but occasionally something happens that so outrages me that I'm forced into action. I'm going to try my best to get someone in the North Carolina General Assembly to introduce legislation that, if signed into law, will result in repealing the driver's license of every single human being living in North Carolina. Yes, I know it's harsh, but they've been getting away with too much for far too long.

I live on the Virginia side of the Virginia/North Carolina state line and I get to observe North Carolinians in their natural habitat on an almost daily basis; these people do not understand speed limits, traffic lights, or turn signals. I've noticed that North Carolinians drive really, really fast when leaving North Carolina, but drive really, really slow when returning. It's almost like they can't wait to get out and want to prolong returning as much as possible. (And it's not like there's anything great on this side of the state line to want to come to anyway.)

This morning I was stuck behind a North Carolina driver who drove ten miles under the speed limit and then came to a dead stop at a green light. I don't know much if anything about driving in other countries, but in the U.S., a green light means "go" and a red light light means "stop". The yellow light is the transitional light between green and red that signals the driver to slow down because the light's about to change to red. The system's almost foolproof, almost. So, the only solution I see is to take away all the driver's licenses in North Carolina. Wish me luck.

I've been keeping a lookout for blogs written by people that are clearly insane, but I haven't found exactly what I'm looking for. A few minutes ago I stumbled onto Germanguy, who would fit the bill nicely if the blog wasn't so obviously a joke. Or at least I think it's a joke. Please tell me it's a joke.

I've noticed a lot of blogs have things on the side bars that list what the author's reading, listening to, etc. Maybe I should include this type of information so people can finally know the real me (and the idea of people being privy to such sensitive information kinda gives me the creeps). OK, what am I reading? [Long pause.] Nothing. I don't read books that much anymore. After years and years of consuming tons of literary novels, biographies, and essays, I've retired. What was the last novel I read? I know I read one not too long ago... What was it called? Oh, yeah... David Markson's This is not a novel. God, that was months ago. What am I currently listening to? The noisy-ass fans inside my PC. What MUSIC am I listening to? Does Wire's Pink Flag count? That's just about all I listen to these days. What was the last movie I watched? I seem to recall watching Beetlejuice (of all things) a month or so back. I don't watch movies that much anymore. What the hell do I do all day? I haven't the faintest idea.

The day after Thanksgiving is considered to be the first shopping day of Christmas. Stores have sales that begin at bizarre, inhuman times like 5 AM and everything's crowded beyond comprehension. Why people let themselves be manipulated into taking part in this orchestrated, almost ritualistic, lunacy escapes me. The day after Thanksgiving I make it a rule to never even leave the house if I don't have to. I went to the mailbox this morning, but that's it.

Having your blog listed in Blogger's "Fresh Blogs" list doesn't seem to do my site a bit of good. I've seen it listed there twice and no one hit my blog either time. Am I the only person who makes it a habit of prowling the list for something interesting (or Icelandic)? I'm always on the lookout for a diamond in the dungheap.

The sudden cold weather and encroaching holiday horror have been giving me flashbacks to last Christmas and the frigid weeks following it. Last year I didn't have a decent computer; I was using this thing, this abomination from the mid-90's I picked up at a thriftstore for $36 last November. No internet connection. My sister came into town for Christmas and loaded my junk shop PC with a version of Windows 95 of dubious legality. So my main memory of last Christmas, or rather last winter, is sitting in this room endlessly fiddling with that stupid computer while absolutely freezing my ass off.

In winter you could store meat in this room. Most of the time it isn't that bad, but when it gets cold it's intolerable. It's about 64°F in here now, which outside wouldn't be bad, but when I'm sitting in front of my computer in my pajamas I want it a bit warmer. And believe it or not, it gets even colder in here sometimes.

Turkeyday's over, but the leftovers remain.

I don't how long it'll be before I get the links list up. I pasted the early version of the list in a copy of my page, but when I looked at it in a browser everything was kind of screwed up. Back to the drawing board. My enthusiasm has waned considerably.

I hate big holidays. It's going to take me hours to recover from lunch because I ate my weight in turkey and mashed potatoes. And by the time I've digested the remains of the dead bird parts, it'll be time for dinner. I'm so bloated I didn't even have room for cake, and I live for cake.

I've been working on my links list a little and I've been having a hard time trying to decide what to put on it. I don't want a really long list like you see on some blogs because that's just overwhelming. There's only a handful of blogs I visit on a regular basis, and does anyone even give a rat's ass what blogs I read? One thing I don't want to do is link to the same damn high-traffic blogs every other bloghead links to. But I like some of those high-traffic blogs. Maybe I should just link to my favorite porn sites and be done with it, but I don't even have any favorite porn sites unless Robb's Celebs counts.

I never need to come up with excuses not to write; it's always too hot or too cold, the chair isn't comfortable, my head hurts, I'm too depressed, I'm too keyed up, I can't think of anything to write about, I don't have enough time, there's something on TV I'd rather watch, etc. Whereas years ago I thought nothing of staying up as late as I wanted, savoring some pointless subject on the page and absolutely enjoying it. Somewhere along the line navel-gazing and self-flagellation lost most of their appeal.

I don't think I'm coming down with a cold; it was just a false alarm. During the winter it gets so cold down here in this dungeon it's miraculous I've never gotten pneumonia.

To make matters worse, my computer flaked out on me while I was composing the entry below. I kept typing and then I noticed the mouse no longer worked. This happens on occasion with this wretched, buggy version of Linux and the only remedy I know of is to kill Xfree86 and reboot. Garbage! I managed to post the entry before I rebooted. Kill me now.

That's it for me with the really long posts. This thing was a nightmare to post and then edit. If I ever do anymore really long posts they're going to be broken up in separate files. And if there's any typos in the North Korea ramble they're going to have to stand; I'm not wrestling with it anymore.

Holiday Nostalgia for Communism

For years I've had an obsession with North Korea. I don't have the typical American-style North Korea obsession, which revolves around annihilating it because it's an evil commie menace, etc. No, what I have more bizarre. Even though I consider North Korea to be one of the most vicious states on earth (far, far worse than North Dakota), in a way I almost like it. Well, I don't like it, that's not the right word; I'm fascinated by it. To me it would be an absolute dream to tour North Korea. A communist Disneyland on a nationwide scale, imagine it! And since the North Koreans are so cash-strapped they should take advantage of what they have and turn it into a tourist Mecca: Commieland! I can think of a slogan: "Come to the Democratic People's Republic of Korea, it's like no place on earth." But, no, they wouldn't do that, they have other methods of raising cash which I'll mention below.

I've listened to shortwave radio for over twenty years, and my obsession with North Korea comes from listening to English language broadcasts from Radio Pyongyang in my formative years. How can I describe a broadcast from Radio Pyongyang? Most people just dismiss it by saying that it's nothing but a bunch of dreary, heavy-handed, stiff propaganda, and they would be right, but there's an added element of the bizarre that kept me coming back. These programs were like picking up a transmission from Neptune because they had so little connection to what was happening on planet earth. If Western Europe mysteriously vanished overnight, Radio Pyongyang's main story would have something to do with the Great Leader President Kim Il Sung, despite the fact that the bastard has been dead for years. Imagine a broadcast so completely devoid of humor, irony, joy, or any recognizable human feelings and you might have an inkling of what Radio Pyongyang is like. Even during the Cold War Radio Moscow was downright goofy compared to what the North Koreans had to offer. Lots and lots of talk about things that didn't make any sense, poems about how great is to be living in the Democratic People's Republic of Korea, patriotic songs from the Women's Choir of Tractor Building Plant No. 14, etc.

Below are few of the more interesting North Korea-related links I could dig up.

A journalist/travel writer named Simon Bone has a site that's a long account of his travels in North Korea. I don't typically like reading long stretches of prose online, but Bone's writing is fascinating stuff that didn't bore me in the least.

The North Koreans have started an online casino in a dotty scheme to raise money. (In his coffin, Karl Marx is spinning like a lathe.) (And, naturally, the site only displays properly if you use Internet Explorer.)

The North Koreans are also selling stuff like books and videos to raise money. They offer a cartoon entitled "Thermometer Seen By Pig" I'd love to see.

I've come to the horrible conclusion that I'm coming down with a cold. Just the thing I need during a holiday.

The warts and all North Korea piece is ready for launch.

I've been working on a big entry about my bizarre, long-running, obsession with North Korea. I hope to post it sometime later today if I can get this rambling monstrosity knocked into proper shape.

I give up on the damn font size thing. I hate this stupid big font, but it seems I'm stuck with it. Bastards!

I'd love to take advantage of all the extra buttons available to IE users while I'm here at school wasting time when I should be working on my desktop publishing homework, but I don't have a damn thing to say. But despite my total lack of inspiration, at least I can put something in italics for once. Or boldface. Hmmm... I've never tried this before, it seems to just automatically put in a few HTML tags which I can do manually without much difficulty. I can even link to something pointless like this. OK, I'll stop; even I have a limit to just how much stupidity I can dish out.

I have the next five days off because of the Thanksgiving holiday. I have to go back to school today for a couple of hours to do some work in the computer lab, but after that I'm free. Then what will I do? Will I get all that work done I need to do, or will I just goof off the the whole time? I don't even have to tell you the answer, do I?

Ever have one of those days where nothing works? (This one's been going on for about thirty-three years.) First I have all that trouble getting (and staying) online, then Blogger loses one of my posts during upload, and then I decide to retype the entry in AbiWord which crashed after I started typing. Please kill me.

I know you'd rather read a wacky entry, but I'm not exactly in a wacky mood these days. One thing you have to look forward to is a list of links that will go down the side of the page, where you'll find all my favorite blogs and other oddities (like maybe that site I found this morning which featured dead serious gay erotic short-stories about the characters on Dukes of Hazzard). I should be done with the links list sometime in the middle of next year, and I'm sure to have all kinds of trouble installing it since I have the IQ of garden snail.

I know you'd rather read a wacky entry than yet another dull one, but I'm not in the wackiest of moods these days. One thing you can look forward to is a list of links going down the left side of the page. I started on it last night and should be done with it next year probably. And then when I finish it I'll have tons of trouble installing it because I have the IQ of garden snail.

I'm so sick of my dial-up internet connection. I've never gotten speeds anywhere near 56k, and I get knocked off line all the time because of the noisy semi-rural phone-lines. (It happened four times this morning in a five minute period.) I have no broadband options other than a satellite dish and I can't afford one of those since I already have one for TV. I hate living in Hick Town, USA.

I love looking at blogs, they can be completely absorbing. Where else can I read about the day to day life of an Isreali S&M enthusiast? Or a transgender computer programmer living in California? What's great about it is I can read about lives that aren't remotely like my own, but still find enough common ground to identify with their life experiences.

Why did the font in my entries get larger when I installed the Extreme tracker thingamajig? The font in my archives is the smaller one I started out with. Yesterday I went through the HTML (or XHTML, or XML, or whatever the hell it is) of both my regular page and archive page trying to find the smoking gun. I didn't find it. I think I'm going to be stuck with this bigger font I hate.

Recently I've been paying more attention to those ads (or whatever you call them) people put on their sites where they're basically begging for money by asking for Amazon gift certificates or monetary donations through PayPal. I should put up one of those things so that I can see how much money I can raise for a copy of Windows XP. I hate Microsoft, but if Bill Gates or Steve Ballmer came to my house and gave me a copy of XP I'd use it in a second (although I'm quite positive it'd take a lot longer to install). I have another idea. I love Linux and the Open Source movement, but Microsoft hates them. If Microsoft wants to make converts, à la Apple's "switch" ads, they should give away free copies of their software to people who don't use any of it, like me. I'd abandon Linux and Open Source completely if Microsoft would give me full legal copies of Windows XP and Office XP. I'd even do a commercial for them denouncing Linux as evil, communistic, and downright un-American. What do you say, Microsoft? Is it a deal?

It sucks trying to sell out when no one's buying.

I'm jealous of those fancy blogs that use Moveable Type, they always look so slick and sophisticated. (I said they "looked" sophisticated, not that they were sophisticated; most of them reveal their shabbiness after you read a few words.) Most other blogs look primitive compared to those done with MT, although I have seen a couple of ratty-looking ones that might as well have been done with a text editor and an eight year old how-to book on HTML. But I don't know why I bother moaning about such stuff, I can't use Moveable Type anyway because there's no version for Linux and I don't feel like taking out a bank loan to buy a version of Windows.

Doing entries in a wordprocessor is pretty convenient, or at least it's better than doing them in the browser where I don't have all the functionality I'd have if I were using IE. (God, I'm so boring.)

For me the best part of the weekend is Friday around three or four o'clock because I've just finished the regular week and have the next two days to look forward to. Once I wake up Saturday morning I can feel the weekend sliding away from me at a rapid pace. I'm one of those people who always sees the glass as half full even when it's filled to overflowing.

What do I do on Saturdays? I watch EastEnders and reruns of Beverly Hills 90210 (yeah, I said it). The rest of the day is spent sitting in front of my computer endlessly looking at random web pages. Exciting stuff, huh? What I do on Sundays is even less interesting.

Over the past few days I've been disappointed no one had stumbled across my blog by typing some kind of insane garbage in a search engine, like "spanking grannies" or "cabbage+erotic+william shatner" or whatever. And not only were there no insane search engine results, there were no search engine results at all. That is until today. Someone from Iceland went to Google and did a search on "icelandic+blog" and my site was ninth in line. I can't imagine what the poor bastard thought when he/she actually read a few lines of it.

I always knew that sooner or later that if I kept ranting about Icelandic blogs actual Icelandic people would eventually find the page. It's kind of like that Kevin Costner movie I've never seen where a ghost, zombie, or some damn thing tells him, "If you build it they will come." And like the Vikings of yore the Icelandic people have finally come! Now if only I could think of something to do with them.

I haven't felt like writing much today because there wasn't anything that sparked my interest. Well, after cleaning the spam out of my stupid Hotmail account, I suddenly felt the deft hand of the Muse upon me! I hate Hotmail. I hate Microsoft. I don't get much email and don't really want that much because it's a pain to go through, and I'm pretty much a misanthrope who'd rather be left to my own devices (whatever that means). For reasons that are still a mystery, right after I signed up for my Hotmail account, I began getting spam. I have several email accounts, but I don't get much if any spam in my other accounts, even the Yahoo one which I use when shopping online. So why am I getting all this spam in my Hotmail account? Well, obviously Microsoft sells the email addresses of the people who sign up for free accounts. What other answer is there? And what I can't figure out is why Microsoft would want to generate cash in such a low-rent nickel and dime fashion. Isn't Bill Gates, one of the richest people on the planet, getting enough money twisting the arms of working stiffs so they'll buy overpriced software they don't need?

The junk email I get is even more interesting, uncanny even. Most of it can be divided into several groups: porn, low interest mortgages, job offers, sex manuals, and penis enlargement. What are the chances of total strangers just guessing that I like porn, have no money, no job, can't please a woman in bed, and have a small penis? Have they bugged my home? Are they spying on me? (One of my goals in life is to get a genuine business-related email that contains both the words "mortgage" and "penis" in the subject-line.) My personal favorites are the vague porn spam, in fact it's so vague you can't even tell it's porn until you click on the link they so thoughtfully enclosed, and then there's a veritable porno-avalanche (which in its proper context can be interesting, even useful, but not in my inbox). These emails include bizarre messages at the bottom that are presumably put there to trick spam filters into passing this garbage as legitimate business-related email. These messages, while written in English, make absolutely no sense: "We exist to seamlessly pursue professional intellectual capital in order to professionally facilitate mission-critical intellectual capital in order to solve business problems." Huh? Wha..? Or: "We continually exist to quickly integrate high-payoff solutions and professionally disseminate low-risk high-yield leadership skills for 100% customer satisfaction." Sure. Why not. I'll take two.

I also got a couple of half-amusing, half-demented emails from what's presumably some sort of mail-order bride racket in mainland China. The same "girl" (robot) wrote me twice: "I am Kaxi who is girl and twenty-one from China-Zhejiang-Lishui. Nice to meet you. My email is worker@ls88.com & Telephone is +86-578-2274383 My hobby is chat with stranger. Would you call me with telephone?" No, Kaxi, I'm going to call you with vacuum-cleaner.

Blah, that previous entry was a new low. Next I'll be droning on about my shoes or how I only like wearing shirts with button-down collars.

Maybe I should start translating my entries into Korean with Babelfish then translate them back into English. You can get some really good gibberish that way. I love gibberish.

It's so irritating having to condense my entries like this; it's like trying to compose on a single notecard. Actually the space I have is even smaller than a notecard.

I just found an Icelandic blog entitled, "no digging holes you english pig dog!" I think I speak for everyone when I say, "Huh?" See it yourself at le-bla.blogspot.com. (I wish I could easily insert links like all of you Windows using people do so effortlessly. I need to get off my well worn backside and at least get a decent version of Linux instead of using this crappy, buggy version I hate.)

Well, I solved another mystery thanks to the email I got from Byawoman today. I signed up for the Bloghop thingamajig over the weekend and then forgot about it like a big doofus. She saw Volume 22 listed on the Bloghop site as a new blog. About fifteen minutes ago, after a herculean effort, I managed to get the Bloghop thing installed properly. So now everyone reading this (yes, both of you) can tell me my blog's is kinda so-so.

And, yes, I know I've gone back on my promise not to write about blogs today.

And as long as I'm writing about blogs, in my site data I've seen that a person, or persons, with an ISP address ending in gov.uk has been looking at my blog. I'm glad to see British government employees wasting valuable work time here. Naughty, naughty. But wouldn't you rather look at porn? I know I would.

I have a bad habit of becoming obsessed with the trivial, so today I'm going to try and write entries that don't have anything to with blogs, my site traffic data, whoever's reading this, etc.

And of course I can't think of a thing to write about.

Well, I've solved one the mysteries of why my site traffic has gone up: someone is linking to my blog. A couple of hours after I installed the Extreme tracker thingamajig, I visited my blog with a school computer before my desktop publishing class started, and tried out the new tracker. Listed in the data was this url: www.byawoman.blogspot.com. I visited said blog, and there on the left side of the page was Volume 22 listed in the blog links. My natural reaction was, "AAAAAAAHHHHHH!!!!" My second reaction was, "Why the hell would anyone link to me? My blog's only ten days old, AND IT SUCKS!" [Damn Caps Lock key keeps getting stuck.]

Maybe people in the UK and Europe (where most of my hits seem to come from) just love reading about a lunatic's completely pointless obsession with Icelandic blogs. Or maybe they're waiting for the detailed instructions on how I make the tinfoil hat I wear so the CIA can't listen to my brain waves. (The secret's in the soon-to-be-patented triple-layer design.)

I don't know what happened to my blog. I installed the Extreme tracking thingy so I can see what kind of bizarre search engine querries led people to my sad blog, and now the font is larger. I didn't mess with the font size, all I did was paste in a bit of HTML. I'll check into this later. Maybe. It's not like I have no life or anything. OK, I lied; I have no life.

Ack! I'm on Google! I just did a search on "volume 22"+iceland and this blog was first in line. And of course I immediately noticed a goddamn typo.

Obviously these people that have been hitting my blog have found it looking up weird junk on search engines, but I've been trying to find my own site on various search engines since last week and haven't been successful. And if they haven't found it through search engines, then I don't know how they found it. Simply put, it's a mystery.

How many CD's do I own? A couple hundred? But yet I always end up with one CD I play over and over and over, while mostly ignoring the rest. For the past two months I've been trying my best to wear out a copy of Wire's Pink Flag. Amazing stuff.

I need to put a longer entry up that doesn't have anything to do with my bewilderment at evidence that people are actually visiting this blog, and something that doesn't mention the word "Iceland".

People have been coming to my blog at odd hours. How in the hell do they know it exists? This is a brand new blog. No one links to me; I don't exist. I can understand people hitting the link that might pop up in the 10 most recently published list on Blogger's site right after I post something, but what about people hitting my site when I'm asleep? How did they find it? Strange.

I finally saw my blog in the 10 most recently published blogs list; I was third in a list headed (naturally) by an Icelandic blog.

Today I found my first evidence that I have readers other than myself. I was poking through the Site Meter data [fascinating stuff, by the way] and saw several unfamiliar ISP's listed. One was from Columbia and another was from somewhere in Europe. I can't even imagine how disappointed they were: "Lei non potrebbe neanche fare lo spazzino!"

God, why do I keep looking at blogs? Since last Sunday, I've looked at a few dozen blogs a day. I can look at this stuff until my eyes literally ache. (My monitor's 10 years old and came from a thrift store. That couldn't be the problem, could it? Naaah.)

Last night I signed up for an email account for this site. I'll put it up eventually, then 14 year olds can tell me how much I suck. But then again, I don't know why I should bother since I'm well aware of how much I suck.

I know this is cheesy, but I think the Site Meter thing is neat as hell. I don't know why I never paid any attention to these things before. I'm such a moron.

I think I've underestimated the appeal of writing in all lowercase letters: "one of the first things that drug me too him was that he doesnt use caps or other stretch your finger punctuation marks that dont add anything to readability" or so said some guy I stole this quote from. Personally I find prose with no caps virtually unreadable.

AAARRGGHH!!! All I wanted to do is put a stupid counter on my blog and I ended up having to reinvent the wheel. The Site Meter people make it easy enough, all you have to do is type in a few things and they do everything else. Well, they do everything for you if your browser's compatible. Originally I was just going to paste the code in, but after I saw that I could have it done automatically, I decided that was a safer option. And then the horror started. It didn't work with Galeon. I tried it twice. It didn't work with Mozilla. And it didn't work with Opera. By this time I was begging to be killed. So I just gave up and pasted it in from a text editor. Naturally this solution worked flawlessly as far as I can tell.

And don't even ask me why I want some counter on my site; it's not like I think I have lots of traffic. But I suppose it would nice to know if someone has blundered across this page.

On Saturday afternoons I always spend two and half tortuous hours watching EastEnders on the goddamn useless BBC America channel. Why those morons won't run EastEnders normally so that watching it isn't an endurance contest I'll never know. I truly hate BBC America. They're only interested in showing home improvement junk over and over and over. I don't know why they have any viewers left at all. Maybe they're trying to wreck the channel. Maybe it's like The Producers, where Zero Mostel and Gene Wilder were trying to make a guaranteed Broadway flop. Well BBC America has definitely succeeded in making a flop. And I fully expect them to cancel EastEnders at the end of the year, leaving me only the hour-long block of three year old episodes my local PBS channel has shown for years on Sunday nights. A pox on BBC America!

Update 9/28/03: If you've come here by way of a Google search looking for information on BBC America's cancellation of EastEnders, I've written a far longer rambling diatribe. Go to my front page and read the Sunday September 28, 2003 entry.

The current blogging situation isn't even remotely ideal because I have to pay attention to length. I can't do like I did with my notebooks and go into a long riff on some random subject. Maybe that's a good thing. The small composition area may make me more succinct, but still it's frustrating. On the upside, with the current system, the readers (those mysterious hypothetical beings bloggers fantasize about) are spared the suicidal drones and self-flagellation that make up large portions of the 4,000-5,000 pages in that crate under my bed. But on the downside, I also miss out on doing something more interesting than bleating out tight little vomit packets about Icelandic blogs , dumb drivers, and my problems trying to post stuff with non-IE browsers.

There's a title: Vomit Packets.

I forgot to mention it, but I found a blog in Farsi with the URL adolfhitler.blogspot.com. Huh? Is this person a nazi or an Islamic extremist? Both? Neither? Maybe he's (she's?) just somebody with a very peculiar sense of humor.

Maybe I should change my blog's name to something distinctive, but even more boring like "The World of Turnips" or "My Soil Erosion Diary".

Well, couldn't I just put the links in my entries manually? Edit the HTML myself? Yes, I can do that. I can also bash my head between two chunks of cinder-block, but I won't. And couldn't I just list the names of some sites and let the readers go to them on their own? Uh, yeah. But first off, I have no readers, and second, I haven't seen anything I want to waste a hypothetical reader's time with.

I know what my blog needs, lots and lots and lots of flahing, spinny crap. I can't believe I didn't take into consideration the universal appeal of lots and lots and lots of flashing, spinny crap.

Don't hold your breath for links. There will be no links in my entries until I get IE. And I may never get IE.

I spoke too soon. After I posted the rubbish below, I found another Icelandic blog. This is like stamp collecting. No, it's not. Trainspotting? No.

Galeon has been getting hung up in a loop when I try to publish stuff now. Why all of a sudden? I'll try Mozilla and see how that works.

I haven't found any Icelandic blogs today. I'm kind of disappointed. It's sort of like my life is suddenly devoid of meaning. No, that's no true; my life has always been devoid of meaning.

Why don't people use turn signals anymore? Hell, forget about turn signals, why don't they use their brains when driving? Everyday it seems I have a close call with some goddamn moron.

I truly hate people.

Trying to do this blogging thing in a non-IE browser is frustrating at best. In IE, what I'm using right now, you have this nice area to write in that goes all the way across the page, and it'll scroll down so you can compose a really huge entry. In Netscape, Mozilla, and Mozilla-based browsers like Galeon (or at least in the older versions I use), you have an area to write in that's about two by five inches, maybe smaller. And if your entry is longer than what will fit in such a small space, a scroll bar will suddenly appear on the right, but the Post and Post & Publish buttons inexplicably disappear. So basically you can write a really long entry, you just can't post it. Lovely. In Opera the area to write in is tiny. And other features are missing, like the sign out button. So mostly I just limit myself to what I can post. If I want to compose something longer I write it and spell-check it in Star Office, save it as a text file, then paste it into Blogger using Opera and a text editor with wordwrap turned off. Tiresome, to put it mildly. And typing this in the computer lab school sucks too because I keep expecting some jackass to look over my shoulder and scream, "Hey, this dude's got a blog! Lame!"

I don't know much about Icelandic, but on closer inspection this stuff I pasted in looks about as carelessly written as anything in an English-language blog; I don't see any uppercase letters at all. So much for my fantasies about the educational system in Iceland.

Below is something I copied and pasted from the third Icelandic blog I've found this morning. It's about Brad Pitt. I think. This whole Iceland thing is really starting to creep me out.

jæja það var nú, myndin sem ég setti hérna fyrir neðan vill ekki birtast & ég get ekki einu sinni lagað hana :-( þannig að þið notið bara hugmyndaflugið, en þetta tengist brad pitt á 100 bradpitts-seðli, mjög sætur. ;-) *newsflash* mér tókst að laga þetta en myndin fyrir neðan er ennþá e-ð biluð en myndin hér fyrir ofan er rétta, fallega myndin. :-)

Ah, it simply wouldn't be a day in my life if I didn't stumble onto yet another Icelandic blog. What the hell is this? Iceland must have the largest ratio of bloggers to non-bloggers in the world.

I can't stop looking at other blogs. A few minutes ago I actually saw one that was red on red. Red text on a red background. I'm not kidding. People have been stoned to death for lesser crimes.

Sometimes I fantasize about two-thirds of the world's population dying off in a plague.

What's worse, really bad blogs or semi-literate morons swarming a messageboard? I'd have to say it's the messageboard. There really should be a manditory PC interface that blocks posts if your IQ is below a certain level. The messageboards at FuckedCompany are, well...fucked.

I've found a lot of blogs in different languages over the past week: Icelandic, Danish, Portuguese, French, Spanish, German, Chinese, Arabic, and one in what I think was Tagalog. But of the non-English language blogs, most were in Icelandic and Portuguese.

I know this Iceland thing is quickly becoming an obsession, but it just strikes me as distinctly odd that I've found all these Icelandic blogs by accident. I found two more today. Is there a blogging craze going on in Iceland, or do Icelandic folk simply write more? Very odd. At least people from Iceland seem to know what shift keys are for.

Why don't people use uppercase letters? I've just been looking at bunch more Blogger sites and the majority of them were written by people with a deep prejudice toward their shift keys, unless they have a point to make and then EVERY LETTER IS CAPITALIZED. Wankers.

I went back to one of those Icelandic blogs and poked around. It struck me as pitiful that no one had been posting coments about this person's deepest intimate thoughts, so I posted, "I wish I knew Icelandic", or something equally stupid. And now the bastards have my email address! What was I thinking? They'll mete out retribution like mighty Odin!

OK, I changed the title bar color from red to blue, does that count as customizing? No? I didn't think so.

God, I'm bored.

I changed the damn template again. After I'd looked at about four different blogs with my template I was sick of it. I'm going to have to customize the colors in HTML so it doesn't look so freeze-dried and assembly line. Or maybe I should just write something interesting and stop being so neurotic. Nah...

Earlier I was looking at some of the other blogs hosted by Blogger, trying to find someone who had the same template as I do and had done a lot of modifications to it. (I wanted to have a look at their HTML.) I had a heck of a time finding a blog with the same template, but eventually I did. Unfortunately the blog was being done by some religious hump with even less imagination than I have. I also confirmed my suspicion that most blogs suck. All of the blogs I read on a daily basis are done by people who have an audience of larger than two, and, more importantly, actually know how to write. Is it me or do people simply not use uppercase letters anymore? Do they even teach grammar in school anymore? Since I'm taking classes again and have daily experience with recent high school graduates, I have serious doubts anything is taught in grade school these days. I'm no genius myself; I can't spell and have a questionable grasp of basic grammar, but at least I make an attempt to have the words spelled right. (I just spell-checked this entry and found out I'd misspelled "grammar".)

Also while slogging through the blogs, I found two that were in Icelandic. There's only about 272,000 people in Iceland, so what are the chances of accidentally finding two sites in Icelandic in the space of twenty minutes or so?

Last night I changed my blog's template. This blue, grey, and white scheme is far more aesthetically pleasing to me than that ugly-ass brown and olive monstrocity I had.

Gripping stuff, no? No.

Or maybe blogging doesn't blow. I'll get the hang of it eventually and maybe I'll even dig up a version of Windows so I can take advantage of Blogger's IE-dependent functionality. Or I can just post at the public library like a wino.

Samuel Pepys I'm not.

Why is the previous post formated oddly? Maybe because I pasted it in from a text editor with wordwrap on. I wish Blogger's site worked better with non-IE browsers; kinda leaves Linux folks out in the cold.

So far this whole blogging thing blows. What else's new?

Another blog? I hate blogs, don't I?

The name? Well, for fifteen years I kept journals/diaries/whatever in notebooks
and have 21 volumes of the stupid things in a crate under my bed. They started
as a 12th grade English assignment and I just never stopped doing it. Well, I
didn't stop doing it until a month or so back when the entries started being a
month or more apart. I actually miss doing it, but I was burned out on the
form. Maybe a blog will kick me into gear or maybe it'll just be another in a
long line of boring, self-indulgent junk. At least I don't have pets to post
pictures of. (But if I get a cat all bets are off.)