>> I may be left alone in my office tomorrow -- normally there's another guy who works in my office with me who knows all the ins and outs of the place, but he's sick and may not come in. So God help me, I may have to run the room myself. Ack. (It'll most likely be very easy indeed, and he might come in anyway. And I am starting to get a pretty firm grip on things. But still, stressful.)

Beyond that... uh, what's to say? I finally saw The Gates this weekend, and I certainly didn't have a transporting experience doing so, but that might've been because of all the mud and slow people and loud children. The photographic evidence is up on Flickr. Also, despite my getting my first paycheck (which was slightly thinner than I'd expected -- NY takes a huge chunk out of you, compared to FL where there's no state income tax), I feel like I've been continuously bleeding money for the last few weeks, so I'm hoping to dial things back for a short period of relative austerity. I stocked up on 2 for $15 CDs from Virgin beforehand, though, so don't worry about me!

I'm still adjusting to having a daily grind, after months and months of grinding daily boredom. Bear with me, please.

>> So I've built this gigantic, well-honed, humming and oiled weblogging machine here, and I've got nothing to put into it. With the exception of the Kottke announcement, the Internet's been really goddamn boring for the last few days. It's a shame, really. I could be more aggressive in working to combat this drought of interesting content, but instead, I'm going to go get the eight hours of sleep I've been promising myself since Monday.

Believe me, it's better than me nattering on about my gadget lust, which is pretty much the only thing I can think of to talk about (Obviously, it's been triggered by my new-job paycheck calculations -- hopefully, I'll get my first one tomorrow -- and then exacerbated by the iPod revisions. Woe, woe is me and my rapidly-obsolescing tech).

(And woe, woe to Keanu Reeves. I just typed "Whoa, whoa is me" up there before I caught it. Ugh. And I suppose I should write a little something about Constantine, eh? Maybe later.)

>> So I'm apparently the only blogger in the world who hasn't sounded off on Jason Kottke's decision to quit his job and blog full-time, sponsored by the voluntary financial "patronage" of his readers. All I'm going to say is you go, Jason. You can bitch and moan about sour grapes all you want, but at the end of the day, a lot of people, myself included, get a lot of value out of Kottke's weblog -- he consistently posts entertaining stuff, he's got great design and ideas (I'd never have considered doing an integrated linkslog without seeing his beautifully functional implementation of the concept, which I wish I could steal outright), and he's a pretty charming personality too -- plus, he plans to do it all without involving any kind of third-party advertising, which is an admirable economic and ethical experiment. As soon as my first paycheck hits the bank, I'm going to become a kottke.org "micropatron" myself, and anybody who complains about his unoriginality or undeserved fame can kiss my dweeby ass. I've gotten $30 of enjoyment out of his site over the years, and I'm willing to tell him so. (And the MeFi thread in which somebody posted the lyrics to Morrissey's "We Hate It When Our Friends Become Successful" was particularly apt, I felt.)

>> Things fixed tonight:

• Problems in MSIE with content on the bio and Archives pages being shunted down the page;
• Permalinks were broken, and now they're not;
• A problem with the RSS feed link;
• The comments preview functionality was broken, and now it isn't;
• The comments-spawning-new-windows bug that a few of you reported. Unfortunately, this now means that the comment author URLs no longer open in new windows (I was using a blanket window target command on all the links), since I can't figure out a way to make them do so (you seemingly can't add the generic target="_blank" to the Movable Type tag for MTCommentAuthorLink). Anybody know how to do this?

I'm still working on more stuff, so bear with me over the next couple of days. I'm exhausted from my enjoyable but unrelaxing long weekend, however, so I might be done for tonight; but we'll see how refreshed I feel after a few more minutes of totally slobbing out.

>> So yes, here's the new design, which is not really finished. The Links and Music pages are closed pending further repair and revamping, but I'm sure you'll survive. I was just tired of not being able to blog until it was done, so I've put up just enough of it to allow the site to basically function. There's lots left to do -- the archives aren't 100% the way I want them, though they work fine; the aforementioned two sections need to be coded; and I'd like to do something slightly more interesting with the graphic at the top. But all of those problems can be addressed later. The point is, I can blog again. I don't know if I will, but I can.

Major incompatibility issues and complaints in the comments, please. It's been tested on Firefox, Safari, and MSIE for Mac OS X, and Firefox and MSIE 6 for Windows XP, but not on anything else -- I'd be curious to receive comments and screenshots from anybody using different browsers / platforms.

>> I didn't mean to leave the victory post up there for so long, my apologies. But it's unlikely that I'll be blogging much more this weekend -- for starters, I'll be spending most of Saturday helping Josh move apartments (pray for us, we are weak of body), but I'm also trying to rush-prep my sitewide redesign in time for launch before I start my job (since the copious amounts of free time I've enjoyed up until now vanish completely as of 10AM Monday). I may or may not make it, and I may have to cut a corner or two to do it, so don't get your hopes up (Don't get your hopes up anyway, it's just a slight redesign and some functionality changes).

Re: the job, at this point my feet are back on the ground and I'm just shit-scared that I won't be able to deal with the daily grind and the overwhelming newness of the experience. Hopefully it'll all work out...

UPDATE, 02.14.2005: Well, I was only off by one Monday. You should now look for the new design around President's Day, rather than Valentine's Day. I probably won't post here until then too, though who knows, maybe I'll get a chance to knock the thing out before then. I won't be mad if you don't check back until next week. (I'll try to at least keep the Flickr stream going.)

And yes, I'm sure you're curious about my first day. Well, it was pretty great, actually. I'm finding it hard to believe that I suddenly work for a company this cool, with people this nice and funny, in a job that seems very doable indeed. Is this really my life?

>> I got it.

I start Monday.

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHH.

>> I am officially really tired of the frequency (and the volume, for that matter) with which my (female) next-door neighbor has sex.

This message brought to you by somebody who's not getting laid enough. (Certainly if her standard is to be applied, anyway.)

>> Should've posted about this sooner, but the M.I.A. show at Knitting Factory on Saturday night was great fun, all told. There were some pre-recorded vocals, yes, but she was definitely rapping live as well, and the whole thing sounded great and danceable, though of course we couldn't dance because the place was fucking packed. Sigh. I really do hate it when venues oversell dance shows. That said, it only made me crave her album, Arular, even more (I've been holding off listening to it even though it's all over the intarweb), and I'll be picking it up on the very day it comes out (i.e. February 22nd). I love how every so often some musical act comes along that it is everything you never knew you always wanted (to quote the trailer for Hitch, which I saw for what I think was the tenth fucking time in front of In Good Company last night). In late 2003 it was the Scissor Sisters with their 70s-AM-radio-meets-electroclash thing, and in late 2004 it was M.I.A. with her pirated-world-music-meets-Missy-Elliott thing. Somewhere, in some dark basement, a band is perfecting their fusion of country-western and trance techno for my delight come October or November.

Oh, and the important scoop that you're not getting from the other bloggers, because they're too hip or too straight to say it: Diplo is hot. And I mean hawt. Both as a DJ ("Tipsy" vs. "The Lovecats" vs. "Drop It Like It's Hot" = Chris freaking out and shaking his ass) and as a lump of hot manflesh. (Too bad that he, too, is straight, and connected to M.I.A.)

Also, hello again if you're reading to Sarika and Ryan, former classmates of mine that I ran into at the show. It was nice to compare notes with some of my fellow grads and be reassured that they're not dead (and to be reassured that they're not kicking my ass in the life-success sweepstakes. That's petty but ah well). And hello to Mike who I met briefly, and, uh, to the other people whose names I forgot. (Cough.)

Other people's thoughts on the show: Fluxblog (he's got the setlist), Brooklyn Vegan, More In The Monitor.

>> Holy crap, finally. On the day before my birthday (March 22), Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds are finally releasing their B-Sides And Rarities collection -- and it's three discs long! Pretty much everything that wasn't on an album is on there. And Nick Cave writes some magnificent b-sides. I'm assuming it's going to be UK import only, but I can deal with that. Uhhhhhh so good. (Yeep. Sorry about the unclosed tag earlier.)

>> Holy shit. For some reason it hasn't been turning up on the major news sites, but the New York Supreme Court approved same-sex marriage today. The ruling doesn't take effect for thirty days, in order to allow the state time to appeal, though it's not known yet if they will. It's worth it to watch the Salon.com premercial in order to see some more details and quotes from Judge Doris Ling-Cohan's ruling (That link will only be active today). I will say it's about time, but I'm also eternally glad to live in a state that has its wits about it when it comes to the rights of its citizens. Hurrah!

>> OK, that's officially insane. Gmail just gave me (and a lot of other people, apparently) fifty invites to give out. (So much for the elitist streak.) So if you read this blog and you still don't have a Gmail account, then I'm here to hook you up -- just leave your name, and the e-mail addy I should send the invite to, in the comments (But I'll only be honoring the ones left in the next 48 hours, to reward diligent readers and to discourage people coming in on a search for "Gmail invites"). Wahoo.

Oh, and hopefully I'll have more to say about The Big Job next week, though at the moment, it still looks pretty good.

>> Well, I had my interview this morning, and I think it went all right. Any time I do one of these things I always spend the entire subway ride home thinking about all the things I should've said, but I suppose that's pretty universal. I think it went better than some of the other interviews I've had. If there's one thing I'm worried about, it's that I came across as too wooden and not sufficiently excited by the job or the company, but I was trying not to come across like a total dweeb about their business. Maybe I struck the right balance, maybe I didn't. Sigh. So if anybody from Human Resources or the department I'm applying for comes across this page (all you've gotta do is Google, after all), then let it be said that I am completely, totally, 1000% interested in the job, the company, and the industry, and I am in fact trying my best not to flip out over the fact that I even got a chance to interview with you. So far I'm doing OK, and I promise to control myself in the future as well. And you were all lovely people and your office was awesome.

The job itself involves handling a lot of organizational work, including tracking artwork through the various states of production and making sure it gets to wherever it needs to go, be that via FedEx or internal movement or whatever. It pays hourly, and it probably doesn't pay all that much, but it's the sort of thing I'm completely comfortable doing (having spent my internships engaged in similar tasks), and it's in a field, and for a company, that I could not be more interested in, and excited about, working for. Gleep. Happily, I will know for certain if I got it (or, if they opt to do another round of interviews etc., if I'm still in the running) by Monday, so I don't have to agonize for too too terribly long. In the meantime I guess I should keep applying for other stuff, though I don't want to -- this, out of all the jobs I've applied for since coming back to New York, is unquestionably the one I want the most. Please please please please please please please.

And yes, you'll note that I haven't said who it was with. To find out, click on today's Flickr photo -- I don't know their company policy on weblogging, and therefore I decided I'd keep myself divorced from them in the eyes of Google. Probably an unnecessary bit of restraint, but it can't hurt.